Positioning Yourself

Who Are You As A Company

We live in the times where society has defined the structure for all of us to follow. If you want to play safe, be a good boy, we can keep following the model like school, school and companies, and survive. Hence, we don’t often ask “who we are” really. Maybe it’s true or false, but we don’t need to get into a topic this deep. You can anytime choose to meditate on this in a cave as per your convenience.

What we need from you here at least is to define the role and expertise of your company. Relationships are about understanding others well. While we have talked about Frappe, its scope and offering, let’s talk about how you as a Frappe Partner can establish your identity within the Frappe’s ecosystem.

Strategy For Your Success

After lots of travelling and meeting Frappe Partners, their teammates, we understood their journey as a company a lot better. The broad overlap in each founder’s journey is:

• Love for Frappe and its products

• Founder’s ability to drive business around Frappe  

• Capability to build a team

• Deliver Frappe to customers

• Desire to address common industry pain points

This generates good enough hunger in the founding and management team to create a wonderful company surviving ERPNext to their customers. However, the initial phase of the journey includes testing times, where you can try some paying customers. For you as a founder, winning their trust and getting a contract from them is a highest priority.

With a lot of of resilience and sacrifice, you survive this phase. You already have 30+ customers who have availed your implementation services and awarded you with more references, which is getting you more customers. Now, you have beaten the thread of survival, and are looking at growing your business. 

But how does one grow their business? There is no straight-forward answer to this question. What we observed most partners does it is:

• Acquire more sales expert to generate leads

• Make more demos increase the conversion rate

• Hire more functional and developers to deliver more projects

• Look at overall turn-over and compare with the last year

This sounds logical to acquire more customers, and we would love partners to do that. But the above approach is missing critical aspects like identification of target customers, region and customer’s size you are ready to deal with. Let us explain with an example.

NeuroIT Consultancy has done overall 20 ERPNext implementations. Out of 20 customers, 8 belong to the pharma industry. Rest 12 companies are from furniture manufacturing, electronics distribution etc. Now, even though NeuroIT Consultancy has a replicable template to repeat their success better and faster into the pharma industry, they are still serving customers from other industries and domains as well. Their expertise on Frappe does allow them to deliver these unique projects, however, the unit economics of these projects aren’t great. They can deliver a successful vanilla ERPNext implementation in a pharma company in about 15 days. For a similar scale of implementation, with the same value proposition, but a new industry (like paper manufacturing), they will take 2 months for a vanilla implementation.

At times, it might get tedious to cater to the customer development requirements pertaining to different domains. You might have to engage adequate resources to understand nitty gritties while building customer apps/features. However, if you are already focusing on a specific domain(s), then you can leverage the developments done in the past in the chosen domain(s) and do required modifications. This approach will help optimise your bandwidth utilisation with the help of reusable development pieces. 

Just think if NeuroIT chooses to walk from a very unique implementation, rather pursue more customers from the Pharma industry. How would their unit economics and per project profitability look? 

With this strategy, NeuroIT can do:

• Targeted sales in pharma (and related industries)

• Much faster acquisition of customers

• Faster implementation cycle

• Efficient custom development due to reusable components

• More profitability in each project, with smaller team

• Repeat business from Pharma domain

Conclusively, to be able to become more efficient in terms of delivery, team size and overall profitability, picking a battle in terms of domain and region can be really helpful. Following are some of our suggestions which you must follow as an organisation, so that you can ensure creating efficient business around Frappe apps.

Identify Your Strengths

The goal of this exercise is to help partners leverage on the strength they have acquired over the years. We would love to have you answer some of these fundamental questions for your company.

Pick Your Battle (Domain or Industry)

ERP in totality can be compared easily with an ocean. It’s a concept and way too broad. When it comes to making space for yourself within ERP space, it’s important you develop some expertise within the ERP space. Instead of becoming a Jack of all trades, wouldn’t you like to become a master of few? 

Though ERPNext can be implemented in a wide range of domains, you can choose a few domains to focus on. This will help you create and maintain your uniqueness based on the domain expertise possessed by you.  You can also expect to pull more opportunities from other entities.

Pick A Market (SMB or Enterprise)

There are abundant opportunities in each target market. However, each domain responds very differently to the matrix like budget, time available, current processes and so on. Being able to serve an enterprise customer also requires you to reflect internally, and assess if you tick the checkboxes generally enterprise customers would look for? If not, no point in wasting your time there.

All you have to do is to identify your target customer and curate your business strategies accordingly. Depending on whether you are targeting startups, mid size organisations or huge enterprises, your sales pitches, negotiations on commercial proposals, project plan may vary. Here are some of the actions you can think of to categorise yourself correctly.

Categorise Customers (SMB or Enterprise)

There are several parameters through which you can gauge if a prospect in question is Enterprise or SMB. Here are some of the suggestions.

Onboarding As A Partner

Before we initiate a checklist for your company in various departments, ensure that you have received the following from Frappe during a partner onboarding session.