This is one more important lesson I’ve learned in the journey of BizTalk360. This is mainly applicable to start-up’s entering the enterprise world. Everything going online these days, where you pretty much buy right from your grocery to your expensive television online, eliminating the need for middleman. But unfortunately things are bit old school even these days in enterprise software world.
For lot of enterprise customers, they do not procure the software directly from the vendor. One main reason is, they don’t want to maintain relationship with 100 different vendors, instead they prefer to deal with handful of software resellers. The role of the software reseller is purely to act like a middleman. The resellers probably won’t understand anything about the product. We have seen cases where a customer actually asked them to procure licenses for “Microsoft BizTalk Server”, but they came to us to get a quote for “BizTalk360”.
Customers typically pay a fee for the service they are getting from the resellers, but as any middleman business, reseller wants to maximize their profit and would love to take a cut from both sides. Ideally the vendor doesn’t need to pay anything for the resellers, but in order to keep things smooth (avoid any delays in sale) we offered them a small slice, typically 2%. Most of the time they won’t be happy and bargain for higher percentage. You actually don’t need to worry too much about the resellers, because by the time they come to you, the customer has already instructed them to procure the software. It’s not going to make any difference in sale closure, whether you are giving 2% or 5%, it’s all going to be pocketed by the reseller.
I also learned they apply 2 techniques to maximize their profit
This is one of the common statement we hear from the resellers.
The customer is on very tight project budget and they are looking for a discount to close this sale soon
This is an absolute lie, in fact we offered some ridiculous discounts like 10-15% in the beginning without knowing the trick. These guys pocket such a huge margin for doing absolutely nothing. We just learned this scam with one of our own experience. We were working with this customer for nearly 4 months doing some demos, POC’s, lot of email conversations and finally we even decided on a price by giving a discount on free training. The customer request came through a reseller and we heard this same statement. But this time we know that can’t be true. I told them clearly we cannot give any discount apart from our standard 2% discount, within 30 minutes we received the purchase order. How can such a big budget problem in an enterprise world got sorted in 30 minutes!!
This is another trick from some of the bigger resellers. They will ask you for crazy payment terms like 60-90 days. Even after that term period you’ll not get the money, one of our admin staff needs to send numerous emails and telephone calls and finally they will send a check. The problem with international check is it takes minimum 6 weeks to clear. In some cases if there is any problem in the name, or signature etc. it can go up to 3-4 months. Basically interest free money (cash flow which is very important to run a business) for 6 months. More than that, it just adds lot of admin work on reconciling those amount.
It’s all about how strong you are. In 99% of the case resellers do not have any influence. When they come to you, the customer has already instructed for the purchase. Resellers are just the procurement vehicle. Define your own terms, we give 2% to keep the conversation smooth and we see it more as admin charges for working with resellers. In the same way define you own payment terms and stick to it. We also started charging 5% surcharge for people who wanted to pay by check, to discourage users who wants to go down that route.