The Partner Channel Magazine Fall 2016

HEADQUARTERS
Minneapolis, Minnesota
EMAIL
Jim.sheehan@powerobjects.com
ESTABLISHED
1993
Our world completely revolves around that product. As
Microsoft has evolved, we’ve been along for the ride, but it still
comes back to core CRM technology.
TPC: How do you split your resources across the organization?
JS: We’ve made sales and marketing a mindset and muscle
throughout the whole organization. Our VP of sales says, “If
you’re not selling, you’re unselling.”
Half of our investment goes to customers, the other half
goes to Microsoft. They’re our only business partner, and it’s so
important for them to know what we’re doing and how we’re
doing it.
From a people standpoint, our marketing team has 16 people,
which is five percent of our organization. The sales team makes
up 12 to 15 percent of our organization. Operations is the
smallest group.
The other philosophy we employ on marketing is give until
it hurts. We always have to come to a point of experience and
driving value by knowing our audience and how to tell our story.
TPC: I’ve noticed that about your marketing for quite a while.
Your “Joe CRM” produces an enormous amount of content
throughout the year. That just doesn’t happen without a pretty
substantial effort.
JS: Exactly. You can’t just write “Here are the top 10 reasons why
XYZ”; people figure out blog posts that are just thinly veiled
advertisements. Those posts don’t get picked up, they don’t get
indexed, and they really aren’t what people are looking for.
The easiest number for me to track is that we have 10,000
visitors to our website every day. That does not happen
overnight; you have to be in it for the long run. It’s a marathon,
and you have to be doing it for the right reasons.
TPC: Ten thousand a day? That is an unbelievable amount
of traffic! How has your marketing changed now that
Convergence has given way to Envision?
JS: This year we’re going to focus a bunch of our effort around
North America-based CRMUG® events.
I want to see Microsoft get their act back together with Envision.
I don’t know if the powers that be know how bad they messed it up,
at least from a Microsoft Dynamics Partner standpoint, but I know
there’s a broader vision, and it will be interesting to see who stands up
to support that.
TPC: That’s a fair assessment. What’s your gut reaction to
Dynamics 365?
JS: I was a little surprised because I didn’t have any heads-up on
it. Being the largest CRM Partner in the world for them, I felt
that was a little bit of a disconnect.
Microsoft has to continue to remember how big the Partner
ecosystem is – especially when it comes to business apps – and that
you can’t roll out something major and be caught flat-footed. We
spent a majority of the Partner Advisory Council (PAC) meeting
prior to WPC talking about it and what they’re going to do. It will
be interesting as we find out more about the pricing and licensing.
I feel that marketing got ahead of where engineering is, but
what they’re doing with the combined data layer and creating
interfaces is a true differentiator in the market.
TPC: What was your take on WPC this year?
JS: The best thing that came out of WPC was involvement on the
main keynote stage from Satya (Nadella) and the other execs. It’s
what we’ve wanted forever – for Microsoft Dynamics to truly be
mainstream – and now the innovation is happening faster than
it’s ever happened.
For example, just the service enhancements – field service and
Unified Service Desk – alone will propel PowerObjects to the
next level.
TPC: What’s your take on how Dynamics 365 will affect the
Partner community?
JS: I’m not as close to ERP, but Dynamics 365 is definitely based
on the Microsoft Dynamics AX product set. I believe there will
be an opportunity to apply ERP talent in the cloud for Partners.
The other place that CRM and ERP Partners will have to
stretch is in the SMB space with Madeira. That product, at
least based on what was announced, seems to have very basic
financials and CRM capabilities. There will be opportunities for
us to add value there and implement that as well.
I’ve been looking more at Microsoft Dynamics AX and
wondering if I should start leveraging the Microsoft Dynamics
AX consultants in HCL, our parent company, and seeing how
that might come together.
We don’t have to figure that out yet, but I’m not sure what I
would be thinking about right now if I was 100 percent Microsoft
Dynamics GP focused.
However, I need to remember that we were one of the biggest
SPLA Partners as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online went to
market. We moved with it, and everything was fine.
TPC: That’s great perspective. I noticed that you have quite
a few apps listed on AppSource already. Did you develop
anything new for that marketplace or were those existing
apps?
JS: Those were all existing pieces of IP that we imported.
Microsoft wanted apps that had packaged IP with a click/try
option, and those are the ones that fit the bill.
We’ve been creating apps on our own for five to six years,
and we were on the inside track to tell Microsoft about our
experiences with AppSource, including what they should be
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