Incentives

CF: What kind of changes in terms of incentives will partners see as a program rolls out?

EF: If you’re going to transact an order, whether it’s a renewal, new business, transition from renewal to cloud, whatever that may be, there’s a baseline 5%. We will look at the partners that have the capabilities to best serve customers together. We are making the deep investments to make sure they get the return that warrants the continuation of those investments. We built into the program an accelerator for our GSIs and our platinum partners. The platinum partners are going to be our top partners globally. They earn 10% or 8%, respectively, of additional discount on any new business, or transitionary business that they do with us. It’s automatically applied. So stackable on top of that 5%.

And then the next piece is the deal reg. For all customer accounts, whether they’re enterprise or commercial, if they have the deal registration on an opportunity, there’s an additional 8% front end discount, regardless of customer type. When you move down to the bottom tier, these are for commercial accounts only, but they’re stackable in addition to the discounts above. All of the discounts above continue to apply. And then additionally, for new business there’s an automatic 10% of additional discount applied to all partner new business — for all partner types working in a commercial account.

We really wanted to make sure that the partners that are heavily engaged in an account that are doing the work with us in an account are rewarded for that and limiting competition between partners. We want healthy competition in terms of driving value; we don’t want competition within an account to erode profitability or erode the customer experience. So there’s an additional 8% for deal reg, for commercial. That’s a total of 16% for commercial partners.

CF: How will you be providing these incentives?

EF: In the past, when we’ve tried to roll up promos or incentives, sometimes we were a little slow to be able to execute based on systems challenges, and so forth. We’ve actually built in a component in the system with the new program, where essentially at the flip of a switch, we can turn on a new incentive for whatever the behaviors we’re trying to drive, whether it’s deals of a certain ilk, specific product set, license type, whatever that may be, we can hit that systemically and provide an additional discount within the parameters of that promotion.

The secondary piece is we focus tremendously on transactional activity as an industry, growing up as a as a salesperson — nine times out of 10 times that’s how you’re getting paid, you have to close the deal. That’s a little bit of the DNA that most of us have in the system. But I think one thing that’s lost in that transactional activity is what’s being done to support the customer, and support the customer success, because if that customer is not having a great experience, they’re not coming back for the next set of new business and expanding their licenses.

Over the last several years, we’ve put a lot of effort around what we call our PCSM program. That stands for partner customer success manager. We have a specific rebate designed to incentivize those partners. We have a pool of partners who are part of this program that continues to grow, and it’s become very well established. They are able to earn the rebate incentive is based on customer utilization. So, if their customer utilizes 60%, or more of their license for three consecutive months, and they’re using the product, to us that indicates success. And we’re rewarding those PCSM partners specifically for that, especially in the commercial customer segment. For the vast majority of our customer base, that’s where those folks are focused today.