The Partner Channel Magazine Fall 2016

INTERVIEWEE
Jim Sheehan, Senior Vice President
WEBSITE
www.powerobjects.com
VAR PROFILE
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE 2016 MICROSOFT DYNAMICS GLOBAL RESELLER OF THE YEAR:
POWEROBJECTS
PowerObjects, an HCL Company, is reaping the rewards of an intent focus and some magical timing. After making the
decision in 2008 to focus solely on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the company has grown from 35 to 300 (and counting)
employees while watching their revenues climb at an exponential rate. We sat down with Jim Sheehan, senior vice president of
PowerObjects, to talk about the initial gamble on this focus.
The Partner Channel (TPC): Walk me
through the decision to solely focus on
Microsoft Dynamics CRM. What did your
business look like then?
Jim Sheehan (JS): Prior to focusing on
Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we worked on
a bunch of technologies. 2008 was when we
made the strategic decision to work on one
CRM technology, and we had a lot on the table
to choose from.
In hindsight, of course we should have
picked Microsoft Dynamics CRM, but at the
time that was a very scary decision because we
had only done $200,000 in that product the year before – which
was less than 10 percent of our revenue – and we decided to
stop everything we were doing overnight and focus 100 percent
on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And remember, this was the 3.0
timeframe, so the product was not as sexy as it is today.
TPC: That was a huge bet back then!
JS: It was. But we aligned with Microsoft because they had
strong financials already, believed in the partnering model, and
let us do business applications in a whole new way.
Jim Sheehan
The “a-ha” that we didn’t realize at the time was
that we were aligning ourselves with a product
that had Microsoft sales reps out there selling, but
they couldn’t implement. That meant we didn’t
have to go out there and find every single sale.
TPC: That’s certainly a bonus. Was there
anything in particular that was helpful to
you as you took off in this new direction?
JS: We employed a business management EOS
(entrepreneurial operating system) which had
prescribed core fundamentals around how to
manage and grow a business. There weren’t
any secrets, but it gives you a roadmap of when and how to take
certain steps.
It also forced us to answer three questions:
» How do you make money? What’s your economic denominator?
» What are you passionate about?
» What can we be best at?
Our passion was leveraging technology to write business
solutions, and once we decided that we wanted to be the best
at Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we just took off, and we haven’t
looked back.
42 FALL 2016 | THEPARTNERCHANNEL.COM