Enterprise Software Sales and the Wacky (but profitable) World of System Integrator Partnerships

Leverage: the action of a lever or the mechanical advantage gained by it

I spent the final seven years of my professional life leading teams to improve enterprise software sales by partnering with Global System Integrators. This should have been easy! What a way to end the career! With their tentacles into almost every aspect of IT departments, this should have been a no-brainer I thought. Schmooze some executives, create global go-to-market campaigns, and watch the revenue come in. As an old clothing shop's tag-line went, "an educated consumer is our best customer". And the Global System Integrators are certainly educated. Finally, I thought, we have a channel where true force multiplication of sales efforts will come to fruition.

Not so fast. Not so simple.

These are massive companies that derive their revenue from contracting their people to customers for the purpose of designing, developing, implementing, and maintaining an IT project. Sometimes they participate in all of the above; other times they are hired for a specific piece of the project lifecycle. These companies have global reach and IT Services revenue of low to high 10’s of millions of dollars per year. Some are part of larger auditing corporations, and some are purely IT Services firms. They have names like Accenture, Deloitte, Wipro, Infosys, Tech Mahindra. Some operate as sort of franchise models, where country teams are largely independent from the mother ship. Some have a more centralized model and rely on offshore talent and offering development. Most are a mixture of both. These consulting firms, or SI’s (Systems Integrators) for short, can, and often do, take on the entire IT operations of a customer.

Talk to a CIO of a major corporation in almost any industry and they will have a list of the SI’s they work with. Some are small and local; but almost always there is at least one SI with a Global footprint from whom the CIO contracts different aspects of their IT domain.

What we’ll cover going forward:

• The top Global System Integrators and a rough stratification of their value propositions.

• Challenges of Enterprise Software sales where leveraging business partners is valuable.

• Channel Sales, Business Development, and Channel Marketing at Enterprise Software Companies

• Building a Channel Plan around Routes to Market and the GSI route specifically.

• GSI execution: The expectation

• GSI execution: The reality

• How to think about leveraging GSI’s for your Enterprise Software Business.

Throughout there will be anecdotes that you will find amusing, concerning, and enlightening.