SELA Canada is striking out in a new direction. The company, currently best known as a service provider and learning partner with a Microsoft Gold competency in Application Development, is becoming an ISV.
With our new offering, called Bubbles, we knew we’d need a completely different way of going to market. We also knew we’d need different kinds of partnerships to succeed.
Bubbles is an Azure-based B2B and B2C solution that sparks new conversations in social media and generates leads. It’s a personal social media “smart agent” that helps marketing and sales professionals find audiences and keep them engaged.
SELA is now preparing to take Bubbles to market. We know success is not going to come by forcing a new product into an existing channel. The partners that would best fit this new product are marketing companies and advertising agencies that have the Microsoft Digital Marketing competency. However, SELA has only limited relationships with these types of partners today. Therefore, we want to start by gaining a better understanding of their needs.
Meeting the P2P Maturity Model
It took us a while, but we eventually realized that the P2P Maturity Model would give us an excellent way to gain clarity on our new focus. It took us a while, because our first encounter with the model, at a P2P Maturity Model Pilot Workshop in Toronto, was depressing. It highlighted that SELA was not at a dynamic maturity stage in as many of the important partnership business functions as we originally thought.
However, it did show us what would be required to launch Bubbles and what it would take to form a new and different partner channel.
The P2P Maturity Model also showed us the need to adjust how we thinks about our competitors. We come from an environment where it is unheard of for competitors to work together. P2P has us now thinking of competitors as potential partners.
Shifting to Services and Product
What do we hope to get out of the P2P Journey? We want to be fully prepared to have strong partnership discussions with companies that are new to us. Selling a product means completely different selling and marketing approaches, pricing models and processes. While SELA has lots of experiences selling services, being an ISV requires a whole new business plan. We want to maximize conversations with potential partners and be ready to talk about how we will win together. Being super-prepared is important to us, and to the partners with whom SELA wants to work.
SELA now plans to forge digital marketing partnerships first in Canada and then the United States. Our immediate next step will be to conduct a full P2P Assessment from the perspective of this new ISV business. The results of that assessment will help us determine where to focus our resources and attention. Upward and onward !