Blue Link Guns for Accpac Share
Channel Business
By Rob Blackstien
March 30, 2001
Armed with a new channel program, business, accounting and e-commerce software vendor Blue Link Associates Ltd. is hoping to steal market share from its largest competitors - Accpac and BusinessVision.
Central to the company's strategy, says Grant Waldman, channel manager of the Concord, Ont.-based company, is the offering of competitive upgrades to Accpac, Business Vision, Integrated Office Accounting and Abacus customers. "We're going after the competition," he says. "I've been speaking to Accpac VARs. By showing them what we can do for them," he hopes to lure some into Blue Link's fold.
Part of the company's move to expand market reach is a national advertising campaign to build brand awareness. Waldman says the main advantage Blue Link offers is price point. The company has been able to prove to customers "that we can meet their needs at basically half the price." This, he claims, is in sharp contrast to Accpac, a company with designs on swimming upstream, whose "pricing is heading more and more towards [that of] Great Plains" at the enterprise level.
The Blue Link Channel Program is a three-tiered offering that ranges from targeting Referral Partners (accounting firms, consultants, etc., that pass leads to Blue Link) to Sales Partners to Solutions Partners (those engaging in sales, implementation or even development). The company's flagship offering, Blue Link Solutions, is a Microsoft Access-based integrated business and accounting product that offers customization capabilities for its more enterprising partners, says Waldman.
For the Solutions Partner tier, he's seeking firms with accounting systems integration knowledge plus training and support staff. And because its product is Access-based, partners with MCSEs on staff are very welcome, Waldman says. Solutions Partners get access to source code to build customized solutions for their partners.
At the middle and top tiers, Blue Link has a three-day certification program, offering both sales and technical training.
Referral partners receive a 10 per cent finders' fee, while Sales Partners get 30 points of margin on product sales, plus an opportunity to make money performing needs analyses for their customers, something Waldman says "we're really pushing today." At the Solutions Partners level, Blue Link offers 40 points of margin plus great opportunities for services revenue in training, consulting, support, data conversion and implementation.
Partners get: marketing materials; not-for-resale copies of product; lead referrals; up-front sales support on the first couple of sales; implementation support; customization support; training support; a quarterly newsletter; and a password-protected intranet featuring newsgroups, knowledge database, customization library; and marketing and sales materials. "We want to show that we're really going to bat for the channel," he says.
Blue Link currently pushes 30 to 40 per cent of revenues through the channel, but Waldman hopes to pump that to a two-thirds model by the end of next year. Currently, he has about a dozen "decent" partners and his goal for year-end is to have a stable of 25 partners at the top two levels. By then end of 2002, Waldman says, he's aiming to double that again to reach 50 partners across the country. CBIZ
Blue Link Associates Limited
156 Corstate Ave #3
Concord, ON
L4K 4K2
905-660-0599
905-660-8793
www.bluelink.ca
