SAP has launched a new Partner Success organization to help its ecosystem and channel partners improve profitability and expand growth, according to a blog post from the company’s chief partner officer Karl Fahrbach.
The new Partner Success organization aims to drive more proactive engagement from SAP’s partner experience managers through working with partners on their business plans and priorities, Fahrbach said in the post. "We continue to collect and act on partner feedback for our RISE with SAP offering while focusing on improving partner profitability in migrating customers to the cloud," he said.
SAP Enhances Partner Success Organization
SAP is also introducing a new commercial offer and enhancing existing offerings to help partners drive customer success in the post-pandemic business landscape, Fahrbach said, including a new SAP PartnerEdge Cloud Choice, flex model, scheduled to be available at the beginning of the third quarter 2021. This offering, for large enterprise and mid market partners, is a new revenue share and go-to-market model; a two-stage life cycle model that incentivizes partners both for winning new cloud customers and for driving customer adoption, engagement and support, according to the post. Fahrbach said SAP also is improving partner cash flow by paying upfront commissions for sales activities and increasing commission rates on renewals.
A new Partner Finder tool with a visual search function will provide greater partner exposure, he said; customers can identify the right partner for a specific business or industry without needing an in-depth knowledge of SAP technology or the ecosystem. This tool is expected by the third quarter of 2021, also.
Expanded Training, Price Reductions and New Dashboards
SAP also is investing in training and education for partner consultants and developers around its SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to drive development of cloud offerings, integration services, industry content, accelerators and industry reference architectures, according to the post. More affordable and accessible training will also be available when new cloud updates and solutions are released, and Fahrbach said SAP is also aiming to help partners increase the number of SAP-certified consultants within the SAP ecosystem to 150,000 by the end of 2021.
Fahrbach said SAP is expanding access to its SAP Partner Demo Environment, to help them continue to expedite sales conversations. SAP now offers more than 50 live scenarios to date, including SAP BTP, RISE with SAP and industry cloud, and via the expanded SAP Demo Store, partners can access more than 430 demo scenarios.
SAP is also offering partners further price reductions for additional core cloud solutions, Fahrbach said. Since January 2021, SAP has offered reduced subscription fees for dedicated test, demo and development systems of RISE with SAP, SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions, and the the database and data management and HR and people management portfolios. Reduced pricing on other cloud solutions is planned for later this year.
Finally, SAP for Me dashboards and functionality have been expanded for SAP PartnerEdge program members, including dynamic cards that sales professionals can use to facilitate end-to-end deal execution and that partner contacts can use to have a partner-level view of SAP certifications and partnership insights, according to the blog post. Before the end of the year, Fahrbach said, partners will have access to additional insights, such as customer project information, a partner solutions dashboard, and cloud product adoption and renewals. This will give partners a complete overview of their customers’ information and relationship with SAP.
