Partnership Details

Building successful partnerships hinges on work done on both sides of the vendor/VAR river. If you ever wonder how some people seem to love working with companies that may have left you with a bad taste, it’s probably because some people get better treatment than the others. But is that a matter of random luck or actual partnerships?

Yesterday I sent a very generic email invitation to our whole partner base. Here is what it looked like:

Fairly vague, right? In fact, intentionally so. If you haven’t read our newsletters, Facebook, Twitter or seen us at an event this year – this would make no sense to you and you’d hit delete and walk away.

Which is exactly what we want you to do if you aren’t paying attention!

Bunch of people didn’t quite figure out what was happening so they took a moment to email me their outrage that I didn’t share the details, didn’t serve it up on a platter to them and didn’t make it completely easy to figure out whether or not this is worth their precious time. Sigh.

In my 20’s I probably would have posted their emails, comments and broken them down point by point. I probably would have even responded to their emails generating tons of back-and-forth traffic that would not have done any good for anyone. These days I neither have the time nor am I concerned because.. well.. people who aren’t interested in the details tend not to stay in business. That’s the harsh reality.

Clients affect the product as much as they buy it

Here is another harsh truth: We make far more money, worldwide, off people who barely ever talk to us. Many of whom I’ve never met and never had the pleasure of thanking them for all their money.

Here is the bitch: It’s the guys that work with us every month that make the most profit. Far more than random folks that subscribe their clients to stuff just because someone recommended it.

How the hell is that possible?

Well, when you experience the products for yourself and talk about them with me or one of my VPs that spend nearly all day long on the phone with our partners, you don’t just get my opinion but the opinion of everyone we work with. That happens to be the difference: You’re not just building your business on top of what some IT flunkie decides is the best practice, you’re actively promoting it in a way that very few people are. It’s kind of how the first movers in the MSP space went on to generate the biggest revenues and the folks afterwards barely made it outside of their zip code. Timing matters, message matters and effort to understand the details matters.

The rest is retail.

Success in business, at least the personal one that we all happen to deliver in IT, hinges on being able to close large profitable deals – not a crapload of little, low-margin, low-profit ones.

I don’t live day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter. Most successful businesses don’t. That’s the problem with VC, if you have to justify everything to your daddy and dress the numbers and the product up all the time by investing very little then you have to cater to the lowest common denominator of the client base.

Long term success in business is about the details, about the execution, about resolving problems and about looking at the long term. This is why the few smaller players will continue to be more successful over time than the few bright flashes in the pan looking for an exit strategy.

As much as that may reveal vendors standing – it also self-identifies VARs and MSPs – if you’re not willing to work with the vendors and actually build a solution then are you really that much better than the end user and even worse, why would that end user even need you down the line?

Food for thought. Know what kind of business you run and where you focus needs to be.