Infor Channel Partners: Helping Sustain Relationships with 70,000+ Customers

As companies grow in size, they often lose the personal connection to customers that made them a success in the first place. Over the past several years, Infor has faced this situation as we grew from a relatively small company to the leading provider of business applications for growth-oriented companies.

Our success has come from the collaborative relationships that we foster with our customers. This has always been what differentiated Infor from our competitors, and it is not something we were willing to sacrifice as our company underwent exponential growth.

So how do we do it? How does the leading provider of business applications for the mid-market maintain hands-on relationships with our customer base when that base is more than 70,000 strong?

Our approach was to build a world-class channel partner program that would leverage partners with deep industry-specific experience and extensive knowledge of enterprise applications. We sought to recruit partners that would function as an extension of our direct sales team and professional services organization.

We take great pride in our partners that review and evaluate the specific needs of each perspective customer to recommend the right solutions to manage their operations now and into the future, just like our salesforce. These partners provide unrivaled ongoing support and professional services to be sure that customers are getting the most out of their software investment and achieving the lowest possible cost of ownership.

Attracting more of the right channel partners is critical to our strategy. We continue to undergo a recruitment drive, and have been achieving great success while focusing on quality over quantity. This is easier said than done, of course, but we are attracting the partners we want because of five main principles:

• Our strategy works, and this is why we have grown to become the leading provider of business software for the mid-market in less than 10 years.
• Our customers are happy, and they tell us this personally and by renewing their maintenance contracts at a leading level.
• Our organization listens and works in tandem with our Channel Advisory Council to develop programs that boost channel performance.
• Our partners are armed with the tools and support they need from Infor to succeed.
• Our software is innovative and is best equipped to solve the pain points that mid-market companies face.

Recently we issued a press release that quotes IDC Analyst Albert Pang on how our channel strategy and commitment to our partners is the right approach to driving innovation for our customers’ organizations. Our Chief Strategy Officer, Bruce Richardson, will hold a webinar on April 29th that delves further into the relationship between Infor and its partners. I encourage you to register to attend and offer us your feedback on our program and our strategy here.

Posted By Dennis Michalis, Corporate Senior Vice President