When I joined Frappe, I had little understanding of the open-source, community-first approach that Frappe is adopting to grow. So, I compared Frappe’s partnership model with others companies like Odoo, SAP, Zoho and others. I noticed that these partnerships work because of a widely known brand and incentives.

Although Frappe is a strong brand (among the people who have used our products) with a product-led growth engine, we don’t have big, bold marketing budgets yet. We also don’t have huge recurring commissions for partners, given our pricing model is not inflated with hefty ‘per user’ pricing. Being 100% open-source, anyone can resell Frappe products without being a partner. Our trainings and support are accessible to everyone. So, why should partners join our partner program?

In the last two years, I got the opportunity to speak to many Frappe partners and that helped me understand that partners are joining us because they love our products and want to be associated with us. They have a deep sense of gratitude for our products, using which they have solved their customer’s problems and built a sustainable business, without a huge capital investment or entry barrier. The association and listing also helps build credibility with the end customers. They join the movement that Frappe is, not just the partnership.

But association alone isn’t enough. Great partnership models are designed to help partners build a sustainable and growing business. If not hefty marketing and incentives (that conventional partnerships offer), how are we enabling our partners in their growth goals?

Why we believe in quality-led growth

Over the years, Frappe’s growth strategy has been simple — deliver consistent quality of products and services, and the growth will follow. This meant delivering consistently delightful experiences to our customers, be it trainings and support, or sales and marketing.

Guess what? Doing this is harder than we thought. For instance a McDonalds outlet in any corner of the world, has the same vibe, service and quality. This was our pursuit. Build processes such that every time a customer reaches out, they get the same experience rooted in honesty and competency. With this pursuit, we started investing in building standardised processes. Processes that define step by step actions to follow for each function — sales, marketing, delivery, support, customer success, operations, infra, engineering and more. Defining a standard process was the first step, but consistency required acting inline with these processes, measuring them and continuously monitoring and improving. We made sure to report important metrics in each weekly all-hands meeting. These practices were reinforced during our journey of ISO 9001 certification, a key milestone for Frappe, which was led by Michelle. This worked! At first, we saw improvements in our quality metrics (eg. lead to conversion %, go-live rate, customer feedback scores, uptime etc), which later translated to revenue growth. The goal isn’t fully achieved and our pursuit of building excellent internal processes continues.

Frappe stepped out of the direct ERP services to double down on building products, hosting and partnerships back in 2023. As of today, our partners run the show. They manage everything, from sales to support to success. Since then, our end customer experience is primarily driven by our partners. So, it boiled down to whether our partners are process-driven? Are they offering consistent quality services?

Real challenges that partners face

A typical journey of our partner starts with a few successful implementations, all thanks to their functional and technical knowledge. Overtime, as the projects grow both in count and scale, they run into challenges such as project overruns, bleeding profits, inconsistent sales, adhoc trainings, lack of marketing, lack of hiring processes and culture. The real problem boils down to two root causes, a pattern we see across:

• The founder becomes the bottleneck
• Lack of processes, leading to lack of consistent and quality services

Our partners clearly needed help here. An idea that seemed obvious was - why don't we extend our quality playbooks to partners? Doing so will not only make them grow sustainably, but also offer our end customers with a consistent experience when they work with any authorised partners. This made perfect sense!

Our evolving partnership philosophy: Enable partners to build quality-led growth

Since 2023, our partnership model is evolving into something unique. Unlike typical channel sales engagement, we don’t see partnerships as just a means to an end (revenue), we don't just focus on building and closing sales pipelines, we don't keep it transactional by just passing leads, we want to be a contributor in shaping their long term growth journey.

As far as sales and lead generation is concerned, we want to help them build and convert their own lead-flow self-reliantly. As the saying goes, feed a man with a fish, you feed them once; but teaching him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Here’s how we are doing this:

Implementation and support excellence

The Partner Maturity Model (PMM) was initiated by Umair and Pushkar, and rolled out to partners in 2023. The key tenets included helping and auditing partner’s foundational processes such as,

• Delivery process: Maintaining project plan, share it with the customer and regularly monitor milestones.
• Support process: Track post implementation issues on a ticketing system.
• Customer feedback: Ask for feedback and improve their processes.

Based on whether or not partners follow these practices, we assigned them a PMM level which is also made visible on partner’s public profile.

Sales and marketing excellence

This year, we moved our focus to sales and marketing. The sales process for an ERP is complex, it lasts for up to 3 months and hinges on competency and quality throughout the sales cycle, from the first call made by a salesperson, to the demo tailored to their needs, to the right pricing, negotiation and closure. Each step makes a huge difference and can make or break the deal.

Our teams are working with our partners to build excellence in their sales and marketing experience. This includes,

• Sales process: Setting up standard sales processes, with continuous monitoring and improvement. This includes having simple and trackable processes to ensure customers are replied on time (with SLAs), feedback on product demos, faster and helpful follow-ups, better estimation of pricing and so on.
• Demo and pitch: Ensuring partners are able to make competent sales pitch and product demos for all Frappe products. Ensuring they're able to handle all kinds of objections from diverse customers.
• Marketing: Enabling them in building a marketing playbook to build self-reliant lead generation. This includes basic digital presence, followed by help in building 2-3 strong marketing channels like SEO, paid ads, events, strategic partnerships, social media and more. The goal is to build a consistent lead-gen engine for at least 10 leads a month.
• Customer success: Customer success process to support the growth of existing customers. This includes, setting up a process to reach out to existing enterprises, building strong relations and continue to grow business by solving newer problems for the same company, which is essential for partners dealing with enterprise.

Strategic clarity

Many partners are trying to do it all. They are trying to cater to both SMBs and Enterprises, offering both products and services, juggling with multiple regions with its own unique complexity, and the list continues. All of this boils the ocean, diverts attention away from things that are working. That's where we come in. We help partners define clear focus areas and hold them accountable to it.

Trainings

Since last year, we increased the number of sales, implementation and product trainings for all the new partners joining our ecosystem. An initiative led by Asif, Arushi and Dipen from the Frappe team. This included intensive trainings on Frappe recommended best practices. The participation and feedback from partners was a clear indicator that partners needed and valued this help. Here are some glimpses of some of the sales trainings conducted.

New partners training held in Mumbai

Sales and marketing training at Nairobi for African partners

Online Sales bootcamp for global partners

We’ve only just scratched the surface, there’s more coming

Doing this right requires a lot more than what we have just started with. Our own team needs to shift the mindset from sales to consulting and coaching partners. We’re in the process of drafting and publishing partnership SOPs, which will contain an opinionated set of must-haves that we expect our partners to implement. We have built a scoring mechanism (which is planned to be added to the PMM criteria) which will hold partners accountable to progress. Additionally, we need to have trainings, consulting-sessions and audits planned. Since most of our quality playbook is inspired by the ISO methodology, we’ve recently explored the idea unifying ISO 9001 certification as part of the PMM-level 5 category.

The ripple effects of quality if we play our part

If every partner commits to this journey, we will see the positive ripple effects impacting the entire ecosystem. If all our authorised partners start delivering consistent quality services to customers, we will have hundreds of satisfied customers and I firmly believe that happy customers is the best marketing. We, at Frappe, are playing the long game, which means nothing happens overnight and quickly. The goal is that Frappe and our ecosystem will rise up to the quality standards and when the time is right we would not have to chase growth (but the other way around).