Make Your SaaS Partnerships More Strategic or Get Dropped

As SaaS adoption grows among buyer organizations of all sizes, industries and geographies, service providers are investing in building and strengthening their practices to meet the growing demand. However, service providers cannot adopt the opportunistic approach of yesteryear, when they could rapidly build a practice and staff it with a sizeable number of certified engineers and consultants, to make some quick cash from a growth market. Today, they need to make a more strategic investment and commitment to support a particular platform. As SaaS vendors increasingly view services around their platforms as an extension of their brand, quality of providers’ services is an increasingly important consideration. Service partners are expected to ensure deployments meet more stringent quality checks by the software vendor to boot.

SaaS vendors are upping the ante and increasingly want to work with service partners who have a deep understanding of their product roadmap and vision, and can put this into context to provide meaningful, valuable business outcome focused services to clients. For example:

• Workday carefully selects the service providers that can enter its exclusive services ecosystem, based on client demand for specific types of services or geography coverage requirements.  Workday project managers work closely with service partner teams to ensure that the latter adheres to proposed implementation methodologies and Workday also endeavors to solve any client issues directly. One buyer told us that while their services partner managed the engagement, Workday representatives were present at all governance meetings.
• At its recent Influencer Summit for analysts in San Francisco (see Predictive Analytics, Outcomes And Scalability: Keys For SuccessFactors), SuccessFactors announced its ambition to standardize on the quality of service provider implementations. SuccessFactors has many more service partners than Workday, but its proposed stringent quality measures could lead to a reduction. SuccessFactors has not yet outlined the details of its quality control program, but it does intend to more closely monitor the success of all deployments, although it admits that it needs to invest in tools and personnel to manage this process.
• As one of the earliest and most established SaaS products in the market, Salesforce has a vast partner ecosystem. While a close monitoring of all deployments is practically impossible, Salesforce does provide a lot of information on its partner site for individual partner capabilities, deployment numbers and client satisfaction scores for clients to peruse for project short list candidates.

Service providers have to carefully select the SaaS platforms they want to support, as they will be subject to these measurement and quality checks, especially as some of the statistics are/could be easily accessible by current and prospect clients. We’ve known for a while that it’s no longer purely about the numbers – of certified consultants, of the countries the service provider operates in, and so on. Yes, these signify some level of scale and capability. But the focus is increasingly on the genuine capability and strategic commitment of service providers to support a client’s experience with a particular SaaS platform. Service providers who are able to grasp this and make the necessary, targeted investments will be the ultimate winners in the SaaS services space.