Partnering done right

Resellers are ambulance chasers!

They came into the deal after I had already sold the product to the customer and wanted to make money from my hard work, I’m the vendor sale rep, I know what the customer needed and I sold it!

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve heard words to that effect or worse a partner has lost out financially because the sales rep decided that they would go direct and sell to the customer, the reasons?

• I would have lost margin?
• The partner isn’t strategic?
• The Partner would have recommended another product if I hadn’t gone direct?

There is obviously a difference between a strategic partner and a real ambulance chaser, but in many cases using the “ambulance chaser’ line is simply a way to validate the reasoning behind going direct and removing guilt from the decision.

How many partners are seriously looking to build business on chasing deals? These are one offs and I’d go as far as to say that the deal after an ‘ambulance chase’ would be much more strategic and considered anyway.

What does a good partner do for a customer and a vendor:

• Firstly they provide suggestions to the customer about what solutions will work for them.
• A partner is often a strategic resource for a customer, the partner goes beyond a product sale and can provide a broader world view to the customer understanding how a product fits into the end to end solution.
• Partners have relationships in a customer site that you as a direct rep do not have, they will have insights and contacts that you don’t have. They know people that you don’t know.
• Partners will be at the customer's site and have the ear of the buyers when they are next looking for a solution to fix a problem
• Partners often provide the resourcing to implement solutions for end customers as the customer often doesn’t have the expertise to deliver without.

Every time a direct salesperson sells direct over top of partner who was an incumbent at a customer, a small baby cries …... an emotional and piercing scream that wakes new parents up at night!

What does selling a against a partner do for you as a direct sales rep? Firstly it builds a level of mistrust between you and that partner org. Next time you see them and need to use their expertise they are going to be wary, we are human and we don’t forget easily.

Secondly, it may remove the opportunity for a future sell into a customer. You sold product x, customer is now looking for product y and you won’t even know about it.

What does a partner want from a vendor?

• Clear and concise messaging, they have potentially 10s of vendors they work with. Messages need to be succinct and catchy
• Partners need to understand what it is that a vendor can do for them? Is it new markets, is it Professional services revenue?, is it licensing?
• Trust, most importantly being able to trust that a vendor is there for them.

Simple stuff really but extremely complex for some. We all have the desire to make the most from every opportunity but is it really the best choice longer term?

The above is why partner managers exist, we work with both sides of an opportunity to ensure that the outcome is fair for all involved parties, when there are issues we try to ensure that we can resolve the conflict without harm to either business party. We also ensure that our partners have the right solutions available to them to be able to sell. Making sure they have the expertise and ensuring that we can support them when they go and install our vendor solutions.

The Trouble with SharePoint today

The history of SharePoint has brought the corporate world to its latest emergency in the IT data centre.

Firstly, SharePoint sites proliferated because they could be run on a desktop with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), SharePoint server released in 2001 through to SharePoint 2013/2016 and SharePoint Online (an optional component of Office 365) often without IT oversight and the promise of a ‘free’ platform for collaboration was too attractive to turn away.

I have a saying ‘ Nothing Free is Easy and Nothing Easy is Free’ which holds true here.

The second ‘trouble’ with SharePoint has always been the ‘blank’ canvas approach to what ‘it’ is, e.g. Admin department comes to IT and asks for a document repository? SharePoint can do that? Legal department comes to IT and asks for a search engine for legal files? Sharepoint can do that too?

You get the picture here, Sharepoint can do so much for so many businesses but to get the most out of it requires strong in house SharePoint knowledge and skills which leads into the third problem with SharePoint,......

Third, SharePoint can do so much that its set up and configured for many departments and subsequently doesn’t end up being used for 20-40% of these departments, often because the initial design wasn’t good enough to attract users and so they stayed with their legacy approach etc, file system, email folders etc.

And so this great collaboration platform moves around the organisation penetrating each and every business unit, some parts of the business use it and some won’t.

Some business units will go outside the IT department and build their own SharePoint instance without IT guidance, meaning that the day that the hard drive fails it becomes IT’s problem for not backing up the service, when IT never knew about the problem in the first place! as being in IT means we must have a sixth sense to these ‘islands’ of information outside of IT’s control.

Now we find todays biggest push is to the ‘Cloud’, if you’re well seasoned in IT then you understand that the ‘Cloud’ is not anything new or different to what we had before, but now it has a sexy name! this aside, IT managers are being asked by the Executive for a ‘cloud’ first strategy, ensuring IT again have additional work on their plates to get the company to the cloud as rapidly as possible without additional people or budget.

This is where SharePoint pops up again, IT asks the question ‘how do we migrate our on-premise SharePoint instances to Office 365?, where do we start?’.

Dell Software helps many customers across Australia and New Zealand migrate their SharePoint data to Office 365 or even a modern SharePoint On premise environment and can help your organization complete a SharePoint migration successfully and affordably.

The Dell Software methodology for SharePoint consolidation/migration benefits the organisation by:

• Reducing infrastructure costs by minimising and removing Legacy hardware
• Reducing Storage utilisation by removing/archiving unused SharePoint data
• Reducing the licensing costs of maintaining SQL server, SharePoint server, backup Agents etc
• Centralising SharePoint infrastructure by removing the legacy organic growth that occurred when SharePoint was initially implemented
• Minimizing user effort and minimizing end user outages during the migration

The 4 step to consolidating SharePoint with Dell Software:

• Assess the existing SharePoint sites, farms, servers and understand their usage. Complete assessment will aid your organisation to successfully migrate to Office 365 in a rapid and successful manner.
• Are discovered SharePoint sites all being used?
• Which sites are a candidate for archiving and storing offsite
• Which users and groups have rights to Sharepoint data that shouldn’t?
• How much data is being stored that isn’t in use?  
• What web apps run on your SharePoint sites and which will run after migration?
• What sites have code or other logic that may not be suitable for migration?
• Migrate the SharePoint sites to the new target.
• Pre-stage the data migration to test and confirm the resulting SharePoint performance and look/feel
• Schedule the migration for out of business hours to minimise impact to end users
• Consolidate Document libraries, lists etc based on best practise and business requirements automatically
• Remap user permissions if needed
• Co-existence with the source SharePoint infrastructure during migration
• Changes made to the internal SharePoint sites should be updated to the target SharePoint sites automatically
• Switching from the legacy SharePoint infrastructure to the new target should be seamless  
• Manage the resulting Office 365 tenant
• Manage SharePoint Online from a central console
• Manage Office 365 Mailboxes and administer users
• Management reporting and auditing of the target Office 365 platform.

This methodology is well tested and proven across many 10’s of thousands of successful migrations with Dell Software.

Dell Software is the number 1 migration vendor worldwide, we can ensure your organisation is successful in moving SharePoint On-premise to SharePoint Online.

Safeworlds Patent Publication number WO1998057285 A1

Data processing system for integrated tracking and management of commerce related activities on a public access network 

WO 1998057285 A1

ABSTRACT

A data processing system manages transaction-related information generated on a network of interconnected public or private access computers, including monitoring purchases and providing referral fee accounting based thereon. The integrated software package establishes a platform for Merchants (40) and Site Owners (20) for managing the negotiation of promotional and commercial contracts, the implementation of resulting promotional and commerical efforts, and final accounting in accordance with pre-established criteria. The present invention thus enables network users (10) to take advantage of a retail sales channel on public or private electronic networks.

My comments:
The above Patent appears to have been lodged in 1998, in 1998 the above platform would have been applicable because as the patent application states there were no systems in place to offer payment processing and transactional security.

Now in 2016 the internet has developed into a huge commerce and retail ecosystem, there were some breakthrough technologies that were founded and productized fast enough to take advantage of the internet. Its also human nature to want choice from vendors and transaction methods.

Payment Processing
Paypal, founded in 1998, in 2000 decided to focus on monetary transactions. Paypal was IPO'd and went public in 2002. Subsequently Paypal was purchased by eBay for US$1.5 billion in July 2002.
In 2015 Paypal had revenues of US$9.24 billion, whats important here is that the period of time from deciding on payment processing to IPO is 2 years. Paypal does the heavy lifting of the financial transactions similar to part of the Patent above.


Fortunately for the public the Paypal transaction process is completely safe and it exists on the World Wide Web.

E commerce

eBay, founded in 1995, first president in 1996 and major growth had commenced by early 1997. In 1997 eBay had its first VC funding round of $6.7 million. In September 1998, eBay went public. The time between inception and IPO is 3 years.
eBay in 2015 has revenues of US$8.59 billion and provides a very significant volume of e commerce sales across the world.

Add to the list Amazon, Alibaba etc and the world has a system that works today very well. Its not to say that a platform like Safeworlds won't succeed but at present how can a platform that is hidden from the masses if they can find the URL, won't even run on Google Chrome (the number one browser world wide) as of the 27/5/2016.

The time required to take a company from inception to IPO is critical to its success, a company must make revenue and have customer growth to successfully IPO. If I'm wrong please leave me a comment and explain.

Safeworlds TV $.010 shares?

Safeworlds TV and Alan Metcalfe

After a hiatus from posting details about this scam, I have had recent information that corroborates my initial concerns around what Alan says he was trying to do. Therefore I have decided that I can not leave this any longer and I will post what I have found out recently.

I have emails from two sources who assure me that Alan Metcalfe is selling shares at $0.10 to select persons where the public is still paying $1.00 per share. 

Email #1:

"Thru a friend of mine who let me know Metcalfe is now selling 10 cent shares to a select few shareholders, whilst still taking money from other investors at $1.

I contacted Alan last week and asked if he was in fact selling shares at 10 cents and could i have an application form. He emailed back and said he was, but it was not a general offer to everyone, hence i still got no application form.

I emailed him again telling him that to not include everyone in the offer and to be still selling shares at $1 at the same time is not only unethical and not morally right but also misleading.

After several emails back and forward he offered me  to purchase 250,000 shares at 10 cents, $25,000 .

Possibly to keep me quiet." 

Email #2:

"The guy I rang last night is still convinced that Alan has the secret of AI and that they are going to make a fortune!! I asked him if he was offered shares at 10 centa a share and his answer was “yes”."

So if you are prepared to buy more shares from in a scam, you can now purchase them for $0.10.

Now, before any investor becomes upset at this blog post around $0.10 shares, Alan Metcalfe still wishes to sell shares at more than a $1.00 to large investors and others who don't know of this secret offer???? 

This is completely unethical, some investors have received equity of Safeworlds IP at 1/10th of others because they are friends with Alan?? let expand that question and ask who has received these sorts of deals in the past? and possibly even better deals?