What do you stand for?

Recently, someone shared the video on LinkedIN of Steve Jobs launching the famous ‘Think Different’ campaign from Apple. His introduction to this talks about how marketing is ‘noisy’ and that ‘speeds and feeds’ are not of interest to today’s buyers. This was back in 1997 and yet what he said is as relevant as ever today.

Jobs said ‘Your customers want to know: what do you stand for?’

At Sage we support business builders. We’re very clear that our role is to help entrepreneurs run and grow their businesses, and we’ve spent nearly 40 years doing that.

Now, my own role at Sage is just one piece of that puzzle, but an important one (of course, I would say that!). I head up the Partner Marketing team and we spent some time recently together in Atlanta deciding what we stand for. And it was clear to us, that we had a room full of people who are passionate about partners. We all chose to work in the channel because we love working with partners, and want to help them succeed.

Partners are absolutely essential to the success of Sage. Over half our revenue comes from partners and they are at the heart of our business. So as a partner marketing team, we’re putting partners first. We want to serve them better, help them grow and highlight them as beacons of success. To that end, we’re building out a series of ‘partner heroes’ videos and photography that we’ll be using in our own campaigns, and to help us attract more of these partners. We want ambitious, growing and innovative partners who can help us take the Sage Business Cloud message out to customers, and support those customers in the adoption and implementation of our own cloud solutions, and those of our wider partner ecosystem.

Listening to IDC share their insight with us yesterday about how the channel is changing and developing and how Sage partners are seeing this process, it’s clear that digital transformation (DX) is the way forwards. The clear delineation between partner types is becoming blurred. More VARs are developing and building their own IP and solutions. More ISVs are merging with SIs. There is more jargon than ever before!

But at the heart of all this is our partner channel who are also business builders. They are entreprenuers in their own right, growing and developing their businesses and trusting in Sage as a powerful software brand to help them do that.

So, watch out for more from the Sage partner family. We’re supporting business builders and we’re doing it by putting #partnersfirst.

If you want to remind yourself of the Steve Jobs video, it’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keCwRdbwNQY