Volker Lafrenz, CEO for Infor Latam, shares his insights on the ever-changing landscape of channel partnerships. He dives into the vital role channel partners play in expanding market reach, discusses the challenges they face in keeping up with rapid technological advancements, and elaborates on Infor Latam’s unique approach to training and upskilling their partners.
How do you see the role of channel partners evolving in the next few years?
It’s a very important role because I would say the next three maybe five years will see everyone going to the cloud.
Channel partners are very often detailed specialists in a specific area. To give you an example, we have a very large channel partner who is working in the warehousing sector and specifically for distribution (logistics) companies. Most of their employees have worked in these warehouses so they have a very deep detailed business understanding of this sector.
It wouldn’t be possible for our own salesforce to cover the whole market so that’s why I’m a big fan of channel partners.
What are the current challenges in channel partnerships?
I believe the challenge is keeping up to date with all the newest technology, especially for the smaller companies. Take, for example, AI and process automation. We’re helping channel partners to adopt and implement these technologies, but it takes a while because the cycle of innovation is going faster and faster. Although there is a trend to have more new partners, you need a long-term strategy and the partners themselves need to have enough resources to keep up to speed.
Three or four years ago, our cloud solutions were ready and available. However, the channel partners weren’t really excelling in explaining all the business benefits to the customers. So, they often sold an on-Prem solution to a company because this is what they’ve done for the last 20 to 40 years. It took us a while to understand that we needed to help them to explain the value proposition and the benefits of going into the cloud direction.
Inside Infor, we see a channel partner as part of the family. It’s about working together. That is why we have enablement teams who are working together with the channel partner to address how they can grow into these capabilities and set the foundation to keep up with this pace. So if a channel partner needs to do a presentation to a customer, for example, on Artificial Intelligence, our pre-sales team is ready to support them. We also help them with marketing and education events, so it’s a real partnership.
Channel partners are extremely important for our growth. There are so many customers out there and we can only connect with a certain amount of them with our own salespeople. Channel partners help us connect with more business across all Latin America.
How does your company approach training and upskilling channel partners?
There are different concepts here and they all fit together. On the one side, we have what we call Infor U, our corporate university, through which channel partners have access to not only the products they sell, but also other solutions as well.
The access to Infor U is free of charge to our channel partners and for us, it’s like passing your driving test. You probably want someone with you the first time you drive, explaining all the things you need to do and how everything works, before you have full autonomy to drive by yourself.
Another differentiated program we have, is directed customers working with one of our channel partners. The customers can ask Infor to check what a partner is proposing to do. This means the customer has someone who will take an overview and add suggestions. Our experts bring in a lot of best practices from years of experience to add to the value our channel partners already bring. There are not a lot of customers choosing this option, because there is an extra cost, considering the high-profile vertical experts that are involved, but there are cases in which the customer see the value in this service. Recently, we had a case that a company was happy with the partner, but they realised they hadn’t worked in many ‘engineer to order’ projects, so they wanted to make sure that the partner was recommending the best practice in the industry.
With the Infor program, the customer had access to an industry expert in ‘engineer to order’, who checked during the implementation if it was being carried out the right way, giving them a high level of certainty that the implementation was on the right track.
Another key part of our offer to channel partners is pre-defined processes. For example, to discrete manufacturers, our software has more than 900 pre-defined processes. Ourselves and our partners evaluate these processes with the customer upfront to identify the ones that are the best fit to the customers need. The partner is getting guidance on what the best practice is for 900 processes only in one industry.
The result is a faster time-to-value and increased customer satisfaction.
What advice would you give to companies looking to become a channel partner with your organisation?
Potential partners need to ask upfront: Do I have a company that will be really supportive? How does the enablement work? What happens if the company brings in new software? How will I get trained on this? If I need help, would I get charged for it? Once they have all these questions answered, they can make the decision about becoming a channel partner. It’s important that these factors are clarified upfront.
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