Technology Reseller - v25

01732 759725 SOFTWARE 40 and consulting skills. “It is really encouraging to see that happening in Europe. During our partner days at Momentum, a lot of resellers were networking with consulting partners, wanting to team up on CLM and DocuSign Agreement Cloud deployments so that they can offer the full range of solutions,” he said “In February, we are going to be introducing a tiered partner programme – a revision to the existing partner programme – to support resellers and channel partners that are either partnering with implementation partners or have their own implementation skills, particularly around CLM and our Intelligent Insights offering. eSign will continue to be available to all resellers via our distributors and tier one providers, but for our higher value solutions that are more implementation and adoption-centric we’ll have a programme that specifically supports that type of partner.” Cultural change In the meantime, DocuSign is continuing to invest to help drive uptake of its solutions, from simple e-signing, which provides a cost-saving of £27 per document, to broader contract lifecycle management solutions. “This a cultural change and cultural change does take time,” explained Register. “The opportunity we’ve got is to continue to lead that change. I first learnt about DocuSign when I used it in a couple of property transactions and I never want to go back. It becomes part of what you do and what you expect. I expect to be able to review and sign partner agreements on the train going to work in the morning; I expect to be able to sign an agreement for a licence deal on a United flight when travelling to the US or Australia. I now expect that; it has become part of my business culture. “It takes time to get that level of certainty, but we have made massive investments in our security and our datacentres and that confidence has led to 537,000 plus customers using DocuSign as part of their everyday life. The good news for us and the market in general is that this is a big, big market. The e-sign market is estimated at $25 billion alone; then, with the broader DocuSign Agreement Cloud, the addressable market doubles to $50 billion. Our opportunity is to accelerate that culture change because we have the strength, the partner eco- system and the solutions to do that.” https://www.docusign.com/products/ agreement-cloud more important in the future “DocuSign grew up as a direct business, but over the last four years we have been on a journey to identify opportunities and capture opportunities where partners can help broaden what we do and broaden our reach. Now we are a business that fully embraces partnerships around the world to help us get broader reach into customers,” he said. Land and expand The reseller partners DocuSign is particularly interested in are ones that have a ‘land and expand’ mentality, which Register says is essential for success when selling cloud solutions. “In the world of on-premise software, a deal is done, the seller moves on and perhaps an account manager is assigned to re-engage with the customer three months before a maintenance renewal is due. But, essentially, the deal is done. In the world of cloud, getting a footprint in a customer is only the start of the journey, and the expansion of that footprint is based on adoption. “We are very fortunate that the solutions we have, particularly the e-signature solution, are very easy to adopt and to implement. The challenge with channel is to encourage them not just to sell that first solution, that footprint, into HR, into legal, into finance, but to go back to the customer and constantly work with them to look for new use cases and to encourage them to think broadly.” For Register, this is not just a question of extending Sign from one department to another, from HR to finance, but of moving a customer on to some of the broader enterprise products in the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, such as DocuSign Gen for Salesforce and Salesforce Negotiate. “Partners who focus on that are going to be very successful,” he said. “The e-signature element will be at the heart of what we do, because it is the point of coming to agreement, but we do see an increasingly large number of deployments happening in the contract lifecycle management (CLM) space, which is becoming a great opportunity for customers to broaden what they are doing with DocuSign Agreement Cloud. That is where we are seeing great new opportunities for our partners.” Tiered programme So that all partners can generate demand for CLM and share in the profits, Register is encouraging resellers that are primarily focused on a resale motion to partner up with integrators that have implementation Insider... Amazon has undoubtedly been one of the sensations of the last decade. Founder Jeff Bezos started the company in 1994 with $300K of funding from his father and is predicted to become the world’s first ‘trillionaire’ as a result of Amazon’s dominance. In the last five years, it has generated $742bn of business, with sales of $232.9bn (+31% CAGR) in 2018 alone. Staggering! Yet I wonder how much you know about Alibaba. Launched in 1999, the Chinese giant reported sales of circa $54bn in its last financial year and is growing exponentially. During its one-day sales spectacular on 11/11 it sold an incredible $38.4bn of merchandise in a single day! Its offering is very different to that of Amazon. Alibaba is all about rich content: using spectacular TV shows with amazing production, live streaming with celebrities and stadium-based shows to stir up huge volumes of spontaneous purchases, allied to phone-based applications that drive purchases with super-clever analytics platforms sitting behind them. Like a digital QVC on steroids! This model will inevitably make its way to our shores. As devices become ever more powerful and 5G rolls out, giving us super-fast data on the move, the way we buy will change again, with buyers becoming more educated than ever. The big Four – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple – will become the big 5 as Alibaba expands and becomes part of our daily language and application usage. With so much changing, it’s vital we all change too and continue to adapt our product offers and adopt new practices. Is there an idea of yours festering away unactioned that can differentiate you from your closest competitor? Perhaps now is the time to give it some fuel. See you out there. Phil Jones MBE , Managing Director, Brother UK @philjones40 ...continued