Wednesday, June 6, 2018
With the introduction of the GDPR, your customers’ businesses have already undergone many changes. But it’s also a great sales opportunity for you. And we can help you seize the moment, for free, with the 1ClickFactory upgrade assessment!
The hottest topics of today – the GDPR and Dynamics 365 Business Central
I won’t surprise anyone by saying there are two topics all Dynamics partners talk about nowadays: the first is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and everything, related to this upgrade. For example, how to prepare yourself to upgrade to Business Central, how to develop extensions, how to develop an App, etc.
And the second is the GDPR. In this case, partners are concerned not only with their own process preparations to comply with the GDPR rules, but are also investigating on how they can help their customers meet the requirements to protect their users’ privacy.
Identifying sales opportunities in a time of change
We can provide partners with direct support by training them on the skills they need to prepare themselves for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as we have the complete Ready to Go program in place. But usually, when I discuss with partners about Microsoft Dynamics Business Central or GDPR related questions, I like to encourage them to see a broader picture. There is a huge sales opportunity right in front of them, that is related to both of these very demanding topics. I am talking about selling NAV 2018 upgrades. We estimate the demand will be huge.
It might seem that whenever Microsoft releases a new version, there is always an opportunity to sell more upgrades. It’s true, a new release provides Partners with an opportunity to engage with their customers, to present new functionality, show attention and so on.
However, from the things happening in the market we see that not too many partners have a strategic view on selling the upgrades. They upgrade 1-2 customers/year on average, but that’s about it. Sometimes they don’t offer their customers to upgrade because of the lack of resources. Sometimes, it’s because of the lack of knowledge, but in most cases because selling upgrades is not easy.
70% of NAV customers are running on older versions, which means upgrading a customer to a new version means a completely new project. And the cost for such an upgrade very often is similar to the cost of new deployment. Which further means it’s harder to convince a customer that such an investment is needed.
Upgrading to NAV 2018 is a completely different story
First, NAV 2018 is the version you can start building your extensions on and the customer can get prepared for MS Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Second, some of the GDPR related updates (like discovering what kind of personal user data available and where it is stored, managing how the personal user data is used and accessed, protecting user data by establishing security controls, reporting and executing on user data requests, ensuring timely reports) are already included in this version.
So, if usually it was more a partner trying to convince a customer it is beneficial for him to move to a new version, in this case we estimate to see a completely different situation: customers requesting for this upgrade.
Not only this is the version that can help them be compliant with the new regulations, but also this is the first step to get ready for Business Central when it is ready for their market. As with all sales opportunities, you have to grab them. And the moment is NOW.
It’s time to take advantage of the free upgrade assessment opportunity!
We are ready to help partners grab the opportunity for free. We’ll analyze the customer’s solutions on behalf of our partners, and provide partners with an upgrade assessment which is a detailed analysis report of our findings.
How? All you need to do is go to the 1ClickFactory portal, submit a new project, and in approximately a week’s time we will provide them with a report on how customized their customer solution is, how many add-ons or other solutions we found, how much time we estimate the upgrade to last, etc.
On top of this, we can provide a fixed price 1ClickFactory upgrade proposal to keep our partners’ risk to a minimum. In case the partner doesn’t have enough resources to upgrade all their customers, all they need to do is evaluate their additional services, put a price on top of 1ClickFactory proposal and present this proposal to a customer. Analyzing customer solutions and building offers can be extremely challenging and time consuming, so this offer from 1ClickFactory is an absolute time-saver.
Why would 1ClickFactory provide a free upgrade assessment?
You may wonder why 1ClickFactory would do this for free. First, we do this because we can. You know, originally 1Clickfactory was established as an Upgrade Center, so we know everything about upgrades: how to make them efficient, how to optimize them, how to manage the risks, etc. And we have the tools to do it in a fraction of time and with many more options than most partners can do.
Second, we do this because the only way for us to win is to help our partners win. In the end, the fact is, the more upgrade deals our partners win, the more their profitability will increase, whether they choose to do upgrades themselves or outsource to 1ClickFactory.
You can also see the value our partner gets with the 1ClickFactory report. We have recently released a NAV upgrade proposal example that can better explain the value our partners get with our report. You are welcome to download the document by clicking the image below. To protect the prices and your margins, we will need to verify you as a Microsoft Partner.
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About the author
For more than 15 years Inga Sartauskaitė has been supporting partners in sales and marketing activities, delivering various sales trainings, building business cases for the clients and coaching salespeople. As 1ClickFactory's Northeastern Europe market managing director, she helps Dynamics Partners increase their productivity and scalability as well as accelerate demand from their existing customers with a special focus on upgrades and solutions deployment on Microsoft Azure.