Dear Partners,

A new year and for some of you it might mean new strategies. Therefore, one important topic that might be interesting is our reseller versus integrator approach. Probably you already heard about the two approaches but perhaps not well communicated (and I take fault in that) is that each Ready partner should explicitly chose one strategy if you like to be profitable. Let me elaborate:

Reseller (Quickstart: sell OpenERP out-of-the-box)

Small deals and thus in order to be profitable you need to close a lot of deals per month. It’s a fast pace sales cycle: one qualification call, one demo (maybe one other meeting after that), sign contract, implementation/configuration (1 to 4 consultancy days). => for this approach you need 3 (functional) sales

Integrator (customization and development)

Big deals, so less amount (you will have a few during the year). => you need at least 1 Project Manager, 1 Developer and 1 Sales

Important to realize is that you can’t do both. You need to chose based on how your company is structured. The reason why you can’t do both is because there’s a mismatch. A reseller with 3 sales guys can’t do any integration projects because they don’t have a PM or developer. And an integrator can’t do Quickstart projects because he has too few Sales guys and expensive PM and Developer doing nothing.

Note: there’s a difference between configuration (everything you can do under the standard OpenERP) and customization/development (not possible in standard OpenERP).