Odoo Partnership Program: How to build a strong offer

good afternoon everybody my name is edis van hove i'm an account manager at odoo and today i'll be presenting you how to build a strong offer the reason of this webinar is because we as account managers we see a lot of offers of our partners and from time to time we see some room for improvement so that's what we're going to discuss in the session of today what's on the agenda first of all how do you come to an offer and we're going to zoom in on the sales cycle to stress the importance of the

offer in order to sign a new customer secondly of course we're going to discuss how you build the offer and what needs to be in there what are the do's and don'ts while creating an offer thirdly we're going to show you an example on the via the partner knowledge base and then last but not least we'll have a q a session if you have any questions during the presentation there are so colleagues of mine who are in the chat so feel free to already ask your questions in the live chat okay without further ado let's

start looking at the at the sales cycle a typical sales cycle how does it look like well as presented here on screen and you start with the leads and he becomes an opportunity an opportunity will qualify once you've done a proper qualification you can do a demo at the customer and it can be more demos than one if it's if it's a more complex project once the demo is done and the customer is still still wants to move forward it's time to do an analysis an roi analysis is what we call it once the analysis

is done the customer needs to validate this analysis before you as a partner you can create your offer once your offer is signed the customer purchases the licenses you can start your implementation and then of course you also have the after sales maintenance and support now why do i show you the full sales cycle it's to stress the importance of the offer because as you've seen there's a lot of steps that come before the offer and the validation the analysis the demo the qualification and the lead you could compare this to fishing i don't know

if we have any fish fisher enthusiasts within our partner network but um you could compare it in an analogy with phishing why in fishing you have a pond or a sea full of fish in this case companies what's the goal of fishing it's to get the fish on your hook and to get them to bite and to bring them in now in this analogy the fish or the companies you first need to lure them to your hook how do you do that by using the right bait and the bait that we use here are marketing

initiatives it could be mouth-to-mouth communication between your customers there's a lot of things you can do in order to attract the right the right fish to your hook now once they're swerving around your hook or swimming around your hook you want them to bite and what we typically see is that in the older sales cycle the demo is the key point where the fish bites why because we have a really amazing product which is which is really cool to demo but of course in order to give the right demo you also need to do a

proper qualification now assuming that the fish has bitten you have the fish on the hook the only thing that stands between you and having the fish on the barbecue at night is having a proper analysis of what is the fish what is my strategy to bring it in but also making the right offer in this case and this really stresses the importance of the offer how will you how will you get the fish back to shore because there's a lot of steps that happen before and a lot of time invested from your site in order

to get the customer or get the fish almost on land so you want to make sure that the offer gets signed and think about it yourself how many times did you speak to prospects did you do a qualification a demo do you did you think that you had them on the hook but while bringing them in they got lost either they didn't respond to you after you've sent them the offer they all of a sudden chose another solution so imagine or think about what's your conversion rate of sending out offers and actually having the customer

signing that offer zooming in on the offer itself what are the best practices and guidelines in order to make sure that your conversion rates of sending out offers and getting the customer to sign goes up first of all there are some general guidelines on layout and format make it easy to read and be as visual as possible why well this this offer should be one of my colleagues called it yesterday a piece of art for you as a partner and you're your selling point so you want the customer to read through the full proposal and

in order for the customer to read through it it needs to be easy to read and it needs to be visual you don't want the customer to skip immediately to the pricing section and see what you'll charge for your for your services add numbers add numbers where you need to speak if we're talking about pricing in the pricing section don't write through sentences make tables make it clear and use use numbers where needed and last but not least is create your own brand identity and this is not only in the offer it is more broader

than that what is the brand identity it's more than having a beautiful logo and a beautiful website a brand identity is at every touch point you have with your customer make sure that the customer that your customer recognizes your company how can you do that use certain teams user you always use the same fonts and always use those in every document every presentation every offer that you ever send out to your customers you'll see that we at odoo we do the same yeah our powerpoints like i'm presenting here today are always with the same colors

same funds same teams that will make your proposal or your offer look way more professional than using a more general words word proposal or word template so general guidelines of the offer there are several sections to include first of all the introduction any introduction it can be a short text where you describe the situation as is where is the customer now why did the customer reach out to us why did how did they hear about odoo um and why why did they come to us not necessarily that doesn't need to be really long but it's

just less i said situation as is and the points you discussed you can also mention there which meetings you already had and what time etc then you need to and then you need to introduce yourself produce your company as a partner what's the goal of that the goal is to build trust in your company as a partner how do you do that first of all sharing some general information company history expertise your partner level if you have a certification you can mention it and also references now an important point here and that's not only here

but basically in every section is keep it relevant make it as relevant as possible for your customer and also know your audience what do i mean with keep it relevant well for example speaking about references if you have 10 references make sure that you can you can list all the 10 references that you have but make sure that to highlight and point out references that are relevant to the customer relevance could be in the same sector or same business processes that are business process more or less similar and so make it relevant be concise as

well don't make it too long this kind of maximum b1 a4 and also for example your company history don't make it don't make it too long and i don't think a customer needs to know everything about your cost your company history but it's interesting to know how long you exist why you became an older partner etc but you don't necessarily need to have a year by year explanation of of the of the company what you need to avoid here in describing yourself as a partner is sales language and you want to build trust in your

company and you don't do that by overselling yourself what do i mean with that is try to avoid superlatives like um where the best part or the customer or customer satisfaction is the highest of all partners no just describe yourself as you are and let your expertise certifications and partner level speak for itself the second part or the third part apologies is introducing odoo and so you've introduced yourself as a part and now you introduce odu again you give some background information on they'll do you'll list what some of the key selling points are for

udu again making it relevant for the customer if you if you if you've heard in previous conversation that the customer mentioned that the the pricing of odoo is really interesting make sure that you that you put it here as a key selling point you can add some key figures and it's always always good to know for a customer that odoo is a growing company and that we're doing quite well you can add some some reference as well again keeping it relevant what's important here is also to to mention what the relationship is between odoo and

our partners and how we work together for example explaining that you're not reseller of the product no you're seen as a partner of udu and you work together with odoo what you need to avoid speaking about the odoo as a company is an overkill of info and you there's odo has been doing quite well over the last few years so there's a lot of a lot to tell but there's no need to to um to explain to a customer uh for example and that's it's it's nice to know for a customer that we have offices

worldwide but you information all the detailed information about the mexican office for example is not relevant for a belgium company so now you've introduced yourself and you've introduced odoo so now it's time to present the projects in the project presentation that's basically the scoping of the full projects what's what you put there its description of the customer needs the legacy cost the legacy systems of the customer and also which legacy systems they will keep on using moving forward which bottlenecks you've incurred during your analysis that you've done with the customer the customer's expectations and also

what are the must-haves for the customer and what are nice to haves important here to know is that the scope of this project is based on the analysis or the roi analysis you've done with the customer so always keep the roi analysis in the back of your minds when drawing up the project presentation also important is as you scope the project here it's important to notify the customer and to have it in written that if the customer wants it does it wants to change requests or just so wants to change the scope of the project

that this can and most likely will impact either the timeline or the timeline and or the price and so that's important to notify the customer of this it's also important is that you have a differentiation between what is what of the needs can be covered by solutions that are in the standards and which are covered by solutions that are that need to be developed what's also important here is azure will list all the needs of the customer is that for every specific need they have you you offer a specific solution so don't make for example

a list of all the requirements a customer has for let's say the inventory app and then just say underneath all these requirements are covered by the auto inventory app no if there's a specific needs you you need to be specific in the solution as well so say for example this need can be resolved by let's say the reordering rules within the inventory app of odoo okay so now the project is is scoped and it's clear what's in the scope and what not an important part of course of the of the full scope of the project

is also what type of hosting the customer will go for and here it's important that you as a partner based again on the roi analysis and previous conversations you've had you've had with the customer is that you choose the best solution for the customer so you offer one solution in your offering don't let the customer choice don't choose don't say oh you can choose the sas or you can choose osh or you can choose on-premise and the price will depend on your choice no you are a partner you have the expertise you've had several conversations

with the customer so it's up to you to decide what is best for the customer of course you also need to defend defend that choice and so you you need to explain the benefits and in some cases also the limit limitations for example if out of your investigation or your analysis it's clear that the best the best solution for the customer is the on-premise and you also or is the sas for example you also need to say okay for now this is the best solution but over time let's say in six months if you would

want to do some development you need to move over to osage or on-premise so that needs to be clear as well here when describing the hosting platform you can also put some technical details there but again try to keep it relevant and a high level here okay for example there are specific questions that always come back what is the uptime what are the backups um what's the backup strategy of the hosting etc that you need you can incorporate in the in the offer here don't do an overkill of technical specifications if it's not requested now

it could be that you have a bigger project where one of the stakeholders at the customer is for example the cto and you had several conversations with him where he asked a lot about the technical specifications then of course you could add more than you would do in in your normal templates or in your normal offer that you would send to other customers okay um we've scoped the project so we know oh you know what you have to do um you know what hosting it will be so now it's of course time to talk about

how you will implement it and which methodology you will use here we've put here in the presentation it's put as the agreed methodology why at this point in time the methodology should not be a surprise anymore to the customer and you've done an roi analysis you've done qualifications you've done demos so you should have at least mentioned the way you work as a partner so therefore that if you put it here in your offer it's not a surprise for the customer what methodology you use okay so it's the agreed methodology but of course hey you

can still put why you choose this methodology um and why you believe it's the best for this project um what does what what do you need to incorporate here of course the methodology guidelines we need to define the goals what are the goals of using this methodology and what are certain milestones that you put and um you need to um to mention what is the expected collaboration with the clients so for example it could be that in your methodology you say we want regular inputs of our customer on a weekly basis put it in your

put it in your agreed methodology so that it's clear for the customer that once a week they will need to report to the to you as a partner in order to get the project moving forward so as the do's make sure that you include all relevant aspects a recommendation we always do is to go for phased approach we we don't like the big bang because we believe that uh with a phase approach or more agile and this is only beneficial for the project because the customer can start quicker and and it's easier to do the

implementation a a certain don't is don't change your methodology for every customer as a partner of course for a starting partner it's different and for starting partner you have your first project and every project you learn some new things and you will readjust your methodology however at one point in time you need to stick by one methodology and we strongly recommend the audio implementation methodology which you'll find on the partner knowledge base but you need to stick with one methodology and perfected that's the key in order to have a proper implementation strategy for you as

a partner okay after the green methodology or what you also need to incorporate there is you need to explain what the different roles are in the implementation so you have the project leader you have the spoc yeah so which is the the single point of contact not only at the customer but also for you at the partner and they need to have one single point of contact if there's a problem someone that they know that they can reach out to will there be any experts involved in this project some an accounting expert perhaps a nodal

consultant via a success pack a trainer who will provide the training and then you have the two roles at odu you have on the one hand you have the account manager and also you have the customer success manager so i don't think i need to explain to you what the audio account manager's role is but it's listed below but what's also important here is to mention the customer success manager because i've i've had several cases where i signed a customer together with the partner of course and reached out to the to the to the customer

to tell them okay now i'm going to hand over you you to my colleague xyz who is the customer success manager and the par the customers are always pleased with this it's they're always happy to know that they will have that they remain to have a single point of contact at odoo while at other companies and the feedback i got from the customers at other companies from time to time when they when they get sold something they never hear from the company ever again so important here stress the role of the customer success manager as

well and that the customer customer would only not only have a spock at your site at the partner but also at ogu here make sure that it's clearly defined who will do what what is expected from the partner and what is expected from the client okay now that the project is scoped and we know how we will tackle the projects it's time of course to make the planning what what do we need to do there i need to define the implementation periods you need to explain explain timings a breakdown of the different phases and remember

we recommend to go for phase approach not a big bang approach so if you go for different phases make sure that you break break them down and identify which stakeholder is needed at what time during the implementation why is that important for example after the implementation is done and training needs to be happen needs to happen well the customer needs to know that he needs to have his resources available to get trained for example if the accounting application is implemented well it takes some time to to train an accountant to fully know how od works

so that means that they will need to free up some time from the day-to-day tasks in order to get trained so the customer needs to be aware of that what are some do's and don'ts in the in the planning section make sure that your that the license of the customer is purchased at the start of the implementation and not that they go live why i've seen several partners work the way where they say okay you only purchase the license at the go live dates but that's that's not that's not what we recommend and i'll tell

you why because if you do that first of all the customer will will always wait until he's fully 100 satisfied with what you as a partner have offered before going live well if you go for what we reckon what we strongly recommend meaning that you purchase the license at the beginning of the implementation the the customer is more committed and they've purchased the license they want to make use of the license so they're more committed and you will see this together with the phase approach will make sure that the implementation will go way faster than

if you would do it the other way around if in your planning certain phases or certain things for example developments take a longer time explain to the customer why it takes that much time a customer doesn't always have the expertise of knowledge of will do that you have so for them it's sometimes they don't know or they don't exactly can estimate how long a certain thing will take if we if you take the example of developments if you say this will take us three weeks try to explain why it is so complicated and why it

will take that amount of time okay after the planning section comes the pricing section now what determines the price of your offer first of all the hosting type the auto enterprise license the implementing services that you will offer but also the maintenance upgrades and support costs those four aspects will make sure will make the pricing for the customer what are some do's and don'ts for the pricing first of all work time and material based and that's how we work at odoo and that's what we would recommend every partner to do make sure you don't do

fixed projects and make sure that you only work time and material based why and you'll see in the don'ts it says it again don't do fixed projects why first of all because the scope of a project although you have it here in an offer is almost never fixed while doing an implementation there will always be change requests there will always be things that a customer would want to have different or some things that you don't have an influence on for example that during the implementation period an important stakeholder the customer leaves the customer and someone

who takes his place who has different ids if you don't if you work on a fixed price that means that every time there's a change request you will need to renegotiate for every adjustment that you do to the scope which makes it only more complex another thing to make to make sure of in the pricing is to break down the costs don't put one line in the orders in the in the operating implementation cost or project management it will take us 20 hours break it down why or developments is a good example developments don't say

it will take 20 days of development know what development take we will take how much days and then you can refer back to what we discussed in the project introduction and so in the project scope you can refer back by saying um look at needs in sec on page 7 2.1 where the customer needs the specific developments in order to to have it working like they would want it to include the license costs yeah so ideally and that's all again what we strongly recommend is that you involve your account manager from the beginning of the

sales cycle why so at the points that you make your offer the account manager already had his conversations his conversation conversation with the customer in order to discuss the different license types in a monthly yearly or multi-year and with with the discounts with the amount of users that will be starting um type of hosting what apps are needed so that you can include the license cost immediately in your offer so that the customer has the full scope link to that is include expected upsells again referring back to the phase approach if you go for phased

approach that could mean that after six months the customer would add crm and sales in a phase two well make sure that you you point that out in your pricing as well so that the customer can plan for that and that's within six months they're not surprised that there's an upsell which they need to pay for regarding your your pricing and your hourly rates if the the customer is really price sensitive and has a low budget or a budget that doesn't cover cover the initial offer that you had stand your grounds on your hourly rates

but try to try to minimize minimalize the scope so why your hourly rate is what you ask for your service and the price that you ask reflects your value so if you start discounting your own price for your hourly rate that means that you're actually discounting the value that you offer to the customer imagine a situation where you have one partner asking 120 euros for for an hour and for an implementation and then you have another partner asking 60 euros who would you as a customer trust most i think i would go for the one

who is asking 120 euros because they i i have more confidence in in their value that they will that they will deliver so if you can't or if you don't want to change your hourly rate that much but the budget doesn't cover the full scope from the beginning try to narrow the scope or work even more in a phased approach so that the the budget needed for the at the customer is is lower than initially planned here another thing and that's again in in line with having the full scope in your pricing is include maintenance

and support costs as well it's an important part which i've seen that that's that there's a lot of partners who don't do that but make sure to have it there as well explain what type of support you deliver is it by a certain pack of hours that you sell is it a monthly rate is it yearly do you work with slas and make sure that you have you have it all there in your pricing pricing don'ts well i mentioned before don't go for fixed pricing projects don't undervalue your work again don't discount for example your

hourly rate avoids having two sales cycles links back to the license so um that's what is it what does it mean exactly is you want to avoid that you have you created your offer and the customer agrees with the offer and that at that point they still need to negotiate with the account manager what type of contract they will go for no make sure as told in the previous slide to encoura to to include your account manager earlier on in the sales cycle so that as soon as the customer signs your offer here they they

can also sign the the license and you can start your implementation because remember in the planning always try to push your customer to buy the license from the beginning of the implementation the last point in the don'ts and that's also a point i've seen several times is don't discount without a reason if you discount your service it must be with a reason odoo we give a discount on a tree and a five-year contract that's where the reason why we want to we want to make sure that the customer stays longer with us the customer pays

it up front so we are willing to decrease our price but if you as a partner you send out your offer and by default you put a 10 discount because you believe psychology wise the customer the customer will think it's a better deal because there's a discount that's not a good way of working present the offer as it is you've you've already invested a lot of time in doing the qualification doing the demo doing the roi analysis so you have a great understanding of what the customer is expecting and you've translated that in this proposal

so why should you automatically discount that proposal only discount if you have a particular reason once you've covered the pricing you have the section terms and conditions um i've put here as a link to odo enterprise agreements why because that's a good example of a great terms and conditions which is simple and fair easy to reuse very clear you see there's this it's written in normal english so it's not uh with a lot of legal words uh which which a normal citizen can understand it's um it's really easy and we use it for all our

customers so that's don't don't try to or don't negotiate different terms for every customer it might happen that's from time to time you have a you have a customer that might be an exception to which you need to tweak your ne your your terms and that could be possible but don't do it for every customer but ever because every every time that will be in no negotiation and it will be time spent which you would better be spending on on implementation or on services and then last but not least once you've sent the offer a

really important step is of course to follow up on the offer now following up on the offer you need to take control of this when you send the offer make sure that you don't just send an email with the offer and one week later you give them a call no send out the offer and immediately try to plan a meeting with the customer to explain and go over the offer step by step you could do that just by going through the offer or it might might be interesting as well is to make a presentation where

you where you highlight the most important parts of the offer once you've you've explained how the offer works in a meeting immediately try to to set up a follow-up meeting it could be one or two weeks later you can ask the customer how long do you do you think it will take to make your decision they say one week or two week already plan a follow-up meeting within one or two weeks to make sure that that you can get their feedback and or perhaps already their signature don't it's better to do it this way than

be too pushy and just send out the offer and call them uh call them every three or four days asking them have you already signed and that's that's that's too aggressive it's better to plan the meetings so that they know that that's they need to have that they need to make that decision now as an example um there's this exam there are two examples here first the first one is an example of an actual offer of odoo which you can find back on the partner knowledge base and the second example is an offer template for

a presentation so if you want to present your offer in a way in in in in a powerpoint or in a slideshow you can use this template and this is of course an older template again try to try to perhaps copy it more or less but with your own brand identity now i'll briefly go to the presentation here the offer that you have on the partner knowledge base this is the wrong one yes this is the offer template so you'll see here the first powerpoint i've opened is an actual powerpoint to 55 slides i don't

know why it's why it's black but you'll find it back on the partner knowledge base and then the second one is an actual downloadable template and you can you can download it as a word template of course again try to try to try to create this with your own brand identity but this will give you a good idea of how uh how a certain offer can look like and with a nice logo in the front you have the the contact persons and then in the summary and the table of content you'll see all the different

sections that we've discussed today one last point here on which we've not covered in the in the presentation is you can have an appendis why could this be useful for example to describe certain odo apps that could be interesting if you know that this offer is going out to people who are not involved in the sales cycle okay for example if there's a decision committee and certain people in the committee haven't seen the demo and haven't been participating in the roi analysis then you could add some extra information independence here for them in order to

to be up to speeds so that was it on the presentation we'll now move over to the q a are there any questions highlighted i see that my colleagues already already were really eager in answering most of the questions what if you're in i see a question of of brahm what if you're in a lowest price goes environment different pricing tactic well in the pricing section we've discussed it never undervalue your own pricing so if you're in a project where you've phased it out as much as possible to make the initial cost for the customer

as low as possible and you've valued your own um your own service or your hourly rates on let's say 100 euros and they still want you to discount that or go below that i think you need to pass up that project why because is that even a project that you want to take on a project where they don't value your your expertise as a partner and they are not willing to make the investments for proper implementation okay i don't see any other questions highlighted thank you all for listening and for attending if [Music] if i

can help with anything you have my email address in the last slides the webinar will will be will be available on youtube soon and i hope to speak to you later thank you everybody you