Tips & Resources for Selling Celigo Fulfilled by Acumatica

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s session where we’re going to cover our new enablement for all Acumatica partners as part of our brand new relationship or enhanced relationship, as I like to say, with Acumatica, which will allow US partners to purchase Celigo’s iPaaS platform via the Acumatica price book. Pleasure today to not only be here myself. I’m Jordan Fladell, the vice president of Alliances of Channel, but also here with Laura Dougherty, who heads up our relationship with Acumatica and our Strategic Business Development Initiative, and Sarah Cole, who’s our partner sales enablement manager. So glad to have everybody here, and appreciate you taking time to join us today. So agenda, just to go quickly. We’ll give a quick overview of Celigo for those who aren’t familiar with what Celigo is all about. We’ll talk about how Celigo is fulfilled by Acumatica, how you can participate, how subscription sales work, overview of service options for you with you and your customers, and then how do you get certified or go through the partner success journey. And then, finally, we’ll have a formal Q&A at the end. But of course, please feel free to submit your questions in the chatbox or your questions, and I’ll be glad to get to them throughout the journey. So just a brief overview and introduction into Celigo. Celigo is headquartered in San Mateo, California. We have about approximately 430 employees. And the reason why I say approximately is we’re growing every day. We’ve hired about 180 folks this year, just to give you an idea of the rapid growth that we’re experiencing. We’re a global company. And so those of us who are participating from other geographic regions, whether it be the APAC region, EMEA, or here in North America, we’ve got you covered as you can see all the way, ranging from Manila in the Philippines all the way down back to our California headquarters. One thing I always like to talk about when you talk about Celigo, and that is the ability to handle scale. And you can see here that our platform’s seeking over six billion records per month. And we’ve automated over 40,000 processes with over 4,000 customers on board. So quite a bit of scale to support you as you grow. Why is this partnership important? And for those who didn’t get a chance to attend yesterday’s kickoff session where John Roscoe and I, as well as Jan Arendtsz our CEO, and a few partners and customers got together, the purpose of this partnership in enhanced investment is to really help Acumatica customers on the journey to become the digital enterprise, right. Or as John likes to call it that digital journey as many in the industry call it digital transformation. And what we’re talking about here is the integration of an automation of business processes through many different applications that essentially all get connected to Acumatica, the hub or the ERP. And so that covers everything from shipping and fulfillment to e-commerce to omnichannel to CRM to service to procurement product data. And the key here is when you have more complex integrations than just a single endpoint, you’re now providing your customers with a complete integration solution that allows them to manage these integrations after you as the partner has built them for them and got them deployed. So how does the platform work? We’re going to give you an opportunity to learn much more about this as you become tighter to us as a partner. But, essentially, there are three essential levels within the platform. The first level is really what I call the user experience, where you interact with a series of pre-built integrations, connectors, the ability to build custom integrations, build your own services. Essentially, this is the UI, essentially where you’re going to go build that experience. Then you’re going to have what’s most important from the standpoint of operations. And these things are elements that I think are super valuable to you and your customers, such as error management. Having grown up in this business and doing this now for 30 years, error management in the API management world is almost post-integration one of most difficult things to deal with, right, because once you’ve built a custom integration and it breaks, you don’t get– you don’t know about that. So in this case with our platform, you’re going to receive automatic emails that let you know what’s– what’s coming, what’s going. And the beauty of it is, is we’re constantly learning from the platforms. So we’re using artificial intelligence. Think about what other tools we can do to make your building experience better so that you can continue to deliver integrations, but of course, do that in a more cost effective way for your customers and of course, to increase your margin as a business. And then the final piece in partnering with Celigo, you should feel comfortable that security and governments frameworks there. We have almost every certification on the planet in place, and that covers everything from your soft tube to your GDR– sorry, GPR and all the different regulations that are out there that we all have to keep, ensure that we’re protecting our privacy. So, just to give you a quick overview, for those who aren’t familiar with Celigo, we have a concept called pre-built templates. They’re really designed to help you accelerate integrations. You can see here we’ve made a significant investment into the Acumatica ecosystem to try and provide what we think are excellent templates for you to leverage. You don’t have to leverage them, but these templates essentially help you accelerate your deployment. Also, really valuable when you look to light up your business analysts who may have technical expertise and help them with the integration. So, you can see here that are most of the common applications that are out there, from Salesforce to Shopify to Slack to SAP Concur. And you’ll continue to see more and more of these as we evolve the business. And as you get closer to us as a partner, maybe even some opportunities for both– for you to build some of your own. So, and this is my final before I transition and introduce Laura. It’s most important to know that what matters most is that customers are the ones who speak the loudest and customers are the ones who love our platform. And you can see here we’re highly rated by both Gartner– well, we’re inside the Salesforce App Exchange, we have all five stars. We’re in the Magic Quadrant for G2 and named their best software for 2021. Even software advice is recommended. So, it’s– it’s all great to have analysts give you great coverage. But, what’s really important is that users who live in the platform every day are the ones who are speaking the loudest. So with that, I’m going to turn off my camera and welcome in Laura, and she can take you through the rest of the journey. Great, thanks, Jordan, appreciate that. All right, so let’s talk about Celigo Fulfilled by Acumatica. Now we had the background on Celigo, for anyone new to Celigo here. So, why is this relationship important? One of the first things we did was work with Acumatica to come up with new SKUs, actually, that we have. So, like the Celigo SKUs where there’s different editions or standard, professional, premium, etcetera, we have those for Acumatica now with an additional endpoint. So, Acumatica endpoint is actually free on top of the endpoints that you get with those additions. So what that means for you and for your client is they’re actually getting a whole extra endpoint and saving quite a bit of money on these subscriptions. So that’s huge and it’s something special and unique only to Acumatica and their price book. Second, we– it really streamline– streamlines the sales and renewal processes. And now Billing can be co-termed with their Acumatica subscription. Customers prefer this. So whether it’s annual or monthly or whatnot, it’s all going to be co-termed and– and match whatever’s going on billing wise with Acumatica, which is really good for customers? Obviously, you’re going to get recurring revenue from this, which is fantastic. Not all of you who are partnered with Celigo today get recurring revenue, so this is definitely a shift. And then also, thanks to Acumatica giving quite a relief for ISP partner sales that are in the price book, you also get quota relief for these sales. So, these are all great benefits to you. It’ll provide a lot of value to you and your clients. So, how do you participate in this so basically, what we want you to do is actually partner with Celigo and Certify. iPaaS is not easy to sell. It’s not a simple cookie-cutter little integration that’s really, really simple, like just sending a customer from here to there. There’s a lot that can happen. There’s a lot of customization and different things that make iPaaS unique and more complex than other types of software sales. So we want you to be set up for success. So partner, you can go ahead and do that and then Certify. There’s different ways to certify. We want you to sell, well, for certification be level two certified. That’s going to give you a really good background to our platform, what it can do, how it functions. And you get a demo account that’s coming in with that. So it’s going to really allow you to also demo if you want to do your own demos. And then if you’re a level four certified, it’s going to really give you not only the ability to sell and even better with confidence, but also to implement. And with level four comes a whole– that’s our partner success program kicks in. At that point, Laura is going to tell you all about that later. It’s amazing. In fact, that’s legendary, as the level four course right here. So there’s all of that. And then on top of that, there’s a comprehensive overview scoping course. It’s not a certification, it’s just the basically educational course that talks about what’s an end-point, what are different various terms that we use? There’s so much in there that little video snippets that you can quickly learn and then pass that communication on to your customers when you’re on sales calls. So really great courses, great resources here. So talking about subscription sales, I want to first talk about when you sell Celigo, there’s lots of different great solutions out there and Acumatica has so many good solutions built-in already. But there are times when people need iPaaS. And first and foremost, if there’s no native solution or the native solution needs to be customized. Maybe the requirements don’t meet the client’s requirements. So in those cases, iPaaS is really flexible and can allow those integrations to be built. And then also, they might have a whole bunch of integrations like any e-com business, who need their e-com, their returns, they’re shipping everything all to be integrated. In that case, that’s a really good solution, too. And it’s not just for the e-com department, it’s maybe they have a lot more. Maybe finance wants to do some integrations like Jordan was showing on that map earlier. Maybe human resources has some integrations that they want to do. So it really opens up the playing field for what your clients can do to save time. And then second, if the customer has a lot of high volume transactions, especially true for those Amazon, Shopify, things like that, or they’re out there doing an amazing amount of sales, they want to be able to streamline and avoid errors, and we can really help with that. So that’s a great place where you’d want to sell Celigo. If data is mission-critical, iPaaS is great. We basically store the data. We have error alerts. There’s a lot going on there, so they don’t lose critical information. And then another instance they might want control over the integration. So maybe they want to– They’re constantly changing their mapping or require their requirements. So it’s like, “Hey, we want to make a quick mass mapping change then we want to add another workflow and we can we want to be able to do this ourselves because we fired someone technical.” That’s a great situation to go ahead and use iPaaS as well. And then another case basically is if the client is growing or they’re just mature and iPaaS is basically the natural next step in their digital transformation journey. That’s a great case where they really just want to integrate as many departments as possible so that data isn’t siloed between departments. When to say no? Yes, there is a time to say no if it’s sub-second times are needed, like at the shopping cart level where waiting six seconds for data doesn’t work, don’t sell Celigo in that case because it’s not a good opportunity there. You won’t be able to meet their needs. Well, let’s talk about the sales process that’s shifting from– so for those of you who’ve done sales with Celigo today, it looks a little bit differently this way, as you know. So presales, you’re going to want to register, obviously, the opportunity with Acumatica, then you’re going to use Celigo sales resources and service resources – we’re going to go into that in a moment here – to help sell the opportunity. And then if the deal moves forward, we want the client to create an integrator.io account in advance with a generic username. And this will help with processing and provisioning later. When you enter the sale, use the Acumatica price book SKU that’s based on the number of endpoints, the number of flows – we’ll talk about that in a moment – and then also enter the client’s integrator.io user name and contact for that because in post-sale, next step here, once we receive their order from Acumatica, we’re going to go ahead and provision that integrator.io license based on the information that you put into the sale. So basically, from there, Acumatica is going to be paying your commission instead of Celigo, and then you, if you have renewals, you and Acumatica will renew as you always do. And if there’s any subscription changes, you’ll make upgrades and downgrades any direction there from Acumatica in the price book. So the SKUs look a little bit different here, some mostly familiar, but. So you’ll see here that the standard professional premium and enterprise SKUs come with their 3, 5, or 10, 20 endpoints plus the Acumatica endpoint. So that is the difference, and that’s where the extra value is in each of those. What’s an endpoint? An endpoint, for those of you who don’t know, is Acumatica, it is Amazon, Shopify, ShipStation, Pacejet. Any of those are considered an endpoint. A flow is actually a sales order going from Amazon to Acumatica, shipment going from Acumatica back to Amazon. Those are all integration workflows, and sometimes people need an extra pack of workflows because if they’re especially for e-commerce, they want to integrate everything under the sun, and they can go ahead and do that with extra packs of integration flows. And then, of course, we have extra FTP accounts if they’re doing a lot of trading partner activity and then sandboxes. So for sales resources, we have– and we’re going to be sending a link out after the webinar, and also this is going to be added to the Acumatica SKU. We have a lot of resources that’ll be coming your way and they’re already created. So first of all, you can have a limited edition demo account right now, starting today, even if you’re not certified. Sign up for an integrator.io account, and there is a process of how to go ahead and we can share titles with you so that you don’t have to invent integrations from the start. We’ll go ahead and help you out with that so you can demo right away. We’ve got a how-to demo video and a script to help you with that so you can go ahead and do your own demos. Sales deck is coming. We have case studies, datasheets, on-demand webinars, and we have scoped docs that are coming too that outline some templated integration flows. Lots of resources there that will be at your fingertips. And for service options, basically, there’s four different options that you have. If you’re a bar and you’re level four certified, you’ll get support from Celigo Partner Success Program. Sarah will be talking about, so that’s one option for services, all of these services, no services come with a subscription, obviously just the subscription itself. So this is an additional part of your sale. So you need to recognize what service options are you going to provide for your client. So there’s that level four certified bar. You can also be a bar and purchase a Celigo Advisory Services. Advisory services are where we basically consult you and walk you through how to build the integration. But we don’t do it, we don’t manage it, we don’t do the whole project. We’re basically just consulting you as you’re doing it. So not necessarily recommend for somebody new. But if you’ve been working with Celigo a little bit that’s a great way to go. And then Celigo Managed Services are the white-glove treatment from Celigo. That’s where we go ahead and take on the project ourselves, and we work with you and our client. We need you at important times to gather requirements, to do UAT, make sure everything’s working right, gather input from you all the way. And then after the managed service after Go Live, we also train the client and continue support for two weeks to make sure they’re up and running there before we hand off to our own support department. So basically, that is the white-glove treatment with Celigo. And then the fourth option is a Celigo certified service partner. That could be as you negotiate with that partner, it might be a completely managed project or it could be more of a consulting. All depends on how you establish the relationship with the certified partner. So this is the service resource page that I was just talking about that will be sending the link out. So you can see here we walk through, here’s all the different ways. Here’s how to contact Celigo to set up a project. Here’s how to get certified documentation and a lot of tools and materials that are available to you from the service perspective. So from here, I’m going to pass over to Sarah to talk about basically Celigo certification and partner success. Thank you so much, Laura, and thank you, Jordan. It’s a hard act to follow, but I will try to do my due justice. Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah. I am the partner success manager here at Celigo. Really excited to be here today and tell you a little bit more about our Partner Success Program as we’ve been getting it started and rolling it out. So, Laura, if you can go to the next slide, we can kind of outline those level two benefits. So the program is really in place to provide that end-to-end support. When you partner with Celigo, it is a partnership and we have and shared that mutual customer experience, that mutual journey. So we want to make sure that we are here to support you throughout the process, no matter what type of partnership you pursue as you go through those different sales opportunities. So with level two, the biggest benefit here is you get a free, unrestricted partner account for live testing, proof of concept, demos, and development. We have a script and we also have a video to help you through some of those things, so you can kind of hit the ground running when you’re ready. You also have shared access to pre-built integration template demo tiles. This is going to be a really great access for you because you get to see what tiles and demos are out there, get in and really experience. We all know it’s really getting in and showing the customer what it can do, that’s going to help you land the sale. And then you can sell Celigo through Acumatica now, which is a really big benefit to you. Is that increased revenue and that ease in speed to get it out the door into your customer. And it’s only a six-hour commitment for level one and two certification to be able to sell Celigo solution through Acumatica. Level four, though, is where the big benefits really kind of come in with the partner success team. So for only 12 hours of work, you get that extra oomph. You get partner management to really help you through the technical certification process, help identify videos that might help or refresh anything that you might need. You also get implementation support and monitoring and escalation through the partner management piece of the program. And you also get onboarding and enablement. We are here to help provide those tools to make that selling process even easier along with implementing the solution along with it. So you get that one-two punch. And then with level four, we also have office hours available. This is one-on-one 30-minute support with an implementation consultant that you can sign up for to get that one-on-one time with somebody who lives and breathes it every single day. So the next question might be, how do you get in and get certified? Of course, you need that integrator.io account. So don’t forget to go in and sign up. We do have links, and the links will be provided in the partner page that we will send out after this. But you’ll want to navigate to integrator.io, and you’ll want to go to Celigo University, which is that first orange box right there. From there, you’ll navigate to the content library. And then finally, you can click on certifications, and you can get certified for level one, two, three, and four. Great. Okay. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Passing– Yes. And so– –to George to see if there’s question. Yes. So we had one question come up from David in the chat. And so I’m sure this is on everyone’s mind. The question is, if I’m already an Acumatica partner, do I have to also become a Celigo partner? And the answer to that question is yes. All those wonderful resources that Sarah brought up during her conversation are available to you through that partner gateway, and that will give you access to partner success. Once you get certified, it will give you different pathways as you’re working on your customers’ projects. So please, when you do register for that form, just note that you are coming through the Acumatica– interested from the Acumatica direct channel so we know how to route the right way. David, I think you have another question. Do you want me to take you off mute, or you want to type in the chat? All right. Maybe David doesn’t have– let me see if there’s another question in the questions. Okay. Well, that’s all the questions we have for today. Again, I would encourage you to reach out to us. You can reach out to either myself or to Laura Dougherty, and we will gladly get you signed up and rolling. If you have any different questions related to the program, I’m sure you’ll be hearing from your Acumatica partner manager in the coming days as well as Acumatica related to this as we kick this off. We want to thank you for taking a valuable half-hour of your day to spend time with us, learn more about the program. These resources will be made available to you as well. I’m sure a follow-up email– we’ll send out a copy of this presentation. So again, thank you, Laura. Thank you, Sarah, for jumping in today and providing valuable content to all the Acumatica VARs. And thank you for all the VARs who joined us and attended today. Everybody have a great rest of their day and a good rest of their week.