Microsoft partner success with Dynamics 365 Business Central: Building a high volume sales engine

This spring saw the long-awaited release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and with that probably the biggest change to our channel in twenty years. Combining that with the Power platform and the expected release of Business Central on-premises in late 2018, the learning curve for partners has never been bigger. As partners, the first thing we think about in times of change is identifying the technology that we need to understand - but that is not all that matters in this case.

With Business Central's cloud-centric approach, the partner business model changes dramatically. It will impact not only our sales approach and go-to-market, but also the size and margins of deals. There will be less money on the initial signing of the deal, but over time the secured revenue on a recurring basis will increase the value of your company. For an example of recurring revenue as one of the drivers of company value and stock prices - see Microsoft's stock price.

In essence, this means that any Microsoft partner will need to build a new kind of high volume sales engine. In the trainings that QBS is delivering to traditional Dynamics resellers, this shift in business model is an integral part of the change any partner needs to go through to become cloud-ready.

In this article I would like to give you some pointers and out-of-the-box ideas to setup such a high-volume sales engine.

1. New type of sales person

The person successfully selling any standardized cloud solutions is different in all aspects from the traditional enterprise software sales person. Probably ...