9 Spokes and Microsoft NZ announce co-sell partnership
9 Spokes, a NZ-based marketplace and insights provider for small businesses, has entered into and launched a channel partner agreement with Microsoft's One Commercial Partner programme.
As part of the One Commercial Partner program, Microsoft's sales teams are incentivised to co-sell the 9 Spokes platform into key global banking communities.
The model is designed to help approved partners like 9 Spokes enter new markets, and scale quickly using the customer relationships and technical expertise of Microsoft's enterprise sales teams around the world.
"We're helping our partners get to the same space as we are, and where our customers are. We want to help our partners build intellectual property that creates demand in the market, either by bridging a technology gap or serving a customer need," says Microsoft New Zealand country manager Barrie Sheers.
"We have a strong go-to-market team which provides advice to our channel partners and demonstrates how they can embrace digital and scale up their marketing efforts. We are a platform company and we bring value to our partners and customers through the ability to build IP on top. Therefore, we co-sell with our partners to provide our channel with scale as part of the Microsoft sales engine, spanning enterprise, mid-market and small business. When a partner solution has been built, tested, proven and credentialed, we can take this offering to markets across the world by tapping directly into our global customer base.
The agreement will also see 9 Spokes listed on the Microsoft AppSource Marketplace, providing a channel to grow its own platform base of small business users.
Microsoft AppSource, is an online cloud marketplace offering line-of-business solutions.
"Microsoft has identified the challenges that new and innovative technology companies like 9 Spokes experience when selling services into large global banks," says 9 Spokes CEO Adrian Grant.
"The joint-selling partnership with Microsoft also completes our strategy to align with Microsoft, following our move to the Microsoft Azure infrastructure in late 2018. Our new Microsoft Azure infrastructure provides us with capability and flexibility to deploy the 9 Spokes platform to new banking customers faster. It also enables us to leverage the extensive range of services in the Azure platform, like AI - machine learning, to build greater depth in our product offering for banks and small businesses.
"One of the attractions of Microsoft is the fact that we have established credentials with key banking clients in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Australia - New Zealand that prove our business model. We're moving quickly with Microsoft to capitalise on our partnership, and the first deals under this arrangement are already in the system and being worked on jointly.
