Revamping the Business Catalyst Partner Program

[pChirita]

Hi guys,

We would like to make the benefits of the BC franchise / partnership program more visible and more attractive to our customers. This entails a number of changes across the entire product - and before implementing them, we would like to get your early feedback on our line of thought.

At a high level, the changes can be summarized as follows:

(a) We increase the value of the Free Partnership Plan by (1) giving 10% commission on all new paid sites, and (2) giving away a fully fledged partner site as soon as users have upgraded a trial site to paid.

(b) We no longer sell Standard and Premium Partnerships through the BC.COM site - existing users continue on their current plans, new users can only purchase the Standard and Premium plans via BC Support. Sites will be transferable to / from Free Partners as well.

(c) New users are first brought into the Partner Portal where we introduce them to both (1) the benefits of BC as an online business platform, and (2) the power of the BC partnership program. Significantly more emphasis is put on the BC community across the Partner Portal pages (e.g., gallery, template providers, tutorial providers, etc.).

(d) The BC.COM site is updated to put more focus on the BC Franchise / Partnership Program, and so do the emails sent when new users sign-up.

(e) The AdminConsole home page gets a minor optimization as well.

The new user experience will be along the following lines. Upon arriving into the Partner Portal, users are greeted with an introductory video about BC, and then they reach the screen sketched below, with two closable pods at the top: One pod with links to BC training materials, with a mini site gallery, and with materials about the BC value proposition, and One pod with materials about selling BC, with a mini partner gallery, and with links to various BC community resources.

Partners with 1+ paid sites get to see their Recent Sites open by default, as in this drawing:

The Create New Site workflow remains the same, except that we will put more emphasis on the ability to import external sites into Business Catalyst.

Claiming your agency site will allow you to deploy an already designed and implemented site as your partner site. Some of the back-end features of this site will be initially disabled (domain setup, email), and as soon as the new partner has upgraded a trial site to paid this will become a fully-fledged site. Finally, this partner site will be bound to be used only for the business of the partner, as an agency site, enforced through an updated Terms of Use, as well as through disclosing partner specific information in the AdminConsole of the partner site (e.g., commissions, list of customers, etc.).

Most pages from the Partner Portal will get minor updates to support the new plans:

(a) Re-branding and Consolidated Billing remains visible only for old Paid Partners

(b) System Announcements, Weekly Messages, Site Templates, Newsletter Templates, Gallery and Portfolio become visible for all partners

(c) The Resources section is revamped to highlight Top BC community content and partners: Template Providers, App Store, Tutorial Providers, Help and Support, Community, Sales Resources.

And so will the AdminConsole, but I will come back with details on how we envision to change that in a separate email.

Please let us know how this feels, as well as where and how you would change it.

Sincerely,

The BC Team.

[Brett_-Pretty_Pollution]

Hi guys

My thoughts:

We really think getting more partners onboard is a great thing to focus on. We support that wholeheartedly.

However getting the right partners on board is fundamental. We feel BC focus too much on the entry level customer, that will never bring much revenue, only loads of support requests and headaches.

New potential customers call me these days and say they've learned of BC, "it's a system where you install templates and customise them". NO, that's not correct. BC is a hosted CMS that comes packed with all the important modules and features most businesses would need to run a digital presence - Ecomm | Emarketing | DNS | Events | SecureZones | Reporting | Email Hosting etc etc etc

Theres nothing like that on the market - but there are other WIX and WORDPRESSes, so play to your niche rather than try to be like the others. That's your best strategy.

It feels like Adobe have increasingly removed the incentive for the bigger partners. The partners that bring the most value.

-No more partners points         

-All the Premium partner tools are all now offered free.

-Commissions are now offered to free partners

-Free partner site to anyone that pays for 1 hosting

-What's hurt the most is we used to get loads of referals from BC. This has really dried up to nothing now. What has happens to leads these days. I'm really interested to know the process now????

In fact the proposed changes would only further work against existing partners in this thread.

With the above changes, SBO's will now decide they want to have their own partner portal and be independant of partners like Pretty. And Stand Alone SBO's going direct to Adobe for support to me, don't sound like a good solution. If it was me I'd make it minimum of 3 sites and you elegible for a free parter portal. Also, as discussed, as soon as this goes live I will probably start setting every website up and separate site and claiming a Free site. Buy one get one free.

I say all this but I'm really onboard about bringing on more Partners. And I'm not apposed to what you're suggesting above, but I am concerned about the strategy you are taking to acheive growth, and the market you are targetting.

My STRONG VIEW is that there isn't much like BC on the market, you have a niche. Removing the TEMPLATE SHIT and and turnkey mentality and you're left with a CMS that stands out, with a real Point of Difference on the compeititors. BIG TICK.

What lets BC down and why do people leave the system ?????

• It's the CORE CMS bugs and limitations.
• It's the way events only JUST works unless you implement a bunch of workarounds.
• It's the way eccomerce has problems with shipping, tax, and loads of other small things
• It's the way when you log into secure zones you're limited and you have to apply hack after hack after hack to get it to do what you need.
• It's becuase the CRM has so many quirks and limits.

There's a whole TRELLO board on how to make BC an AWESOME CMS that will have proper creative agencies flocking to the system. A couple of these items were ticked off this year. THANKYOU SO MUCH.

However I truely have never felt that BC understands really what modules they need the work on and exactly what to do. You're two steps removed from the SBO so that's understandable. Even as a partner it's difficult to understand the website owners needs. That's why when you ask a partner what they need from BC they tell you the obvious things (templates, support, training blah blah). But what they really have difficulty getting across is what's really needed. CORE CMS fixes and module updates.

My view is. Tread the path that your treading. Open Platform > Liquid > REST APIs > but also expedite CORE CMS fixes in between,. Every month. People will flock to the system once it works. Don't waste time on anything else until these core things are fixed. And please don't keep bringing it down-market until you've fixed the system more. It doesn't need to go down market. It needs to go upmarket if anything. It needs to attract web agencies,  not get rich quick marketers and shit designers that think they can also code.

Hope our input helps. We REALLY do think you're getting there. We acknowledge a lot has been acheived in the last 6 months.

Could you please add an Email Marketing package bigger than 190,000. We need one in there for about 400,000 please.

The Pretty Team

www.prettypollution.com.au

[Liam Dilley]

I would like to see another avenue explored as well.

How do you get new developers or people coming into the web interested in BC over wordpress etc - The next generation.

The recent hike of BC knowledge few Muse is not a great method, People come to the Muse roadblocks and then have no where to turn and run into the fundemental problem of such point and click sollutions that they dont truely know the web can not do the things they need to. And then when someone comes to explain to them about Adding CSS here to fix it, you need a bit of script for that, even if you give then the snippets of code to use it - They got no idea what to do with it.

IF you look to offer some form of College / Uni  Offering, Work with some Around the globe in which you could do a deal with these to use BC as the primary tool for teaching CSS/HTML / Javascript. It needs no server coding so its a great platform to offer some feature based sites developed and for them to have their courses teach them good coding.

From there they get a feel for BC, aware of it and could very well freelance or explore it further and go into building sites for people and increasing the pool of BC developers out in the wild.

You could then lease with these and local partners to teach them about BC and how to use it to teach these fundementals in Web design and development. Adobe always has elements on teaching in industry so this would be a great Adobe marketing tool as a whole.. showing adobe training the next generation for the modern and future web.

With what Brett mentioned what it means to be a core partner has pretty much demnitioned and other then Beta access where we are help test things for BC, there is not much else that a free partner does not also have access too.

IF this is the way of things then something else for big partners or potential partners need to explore better options.

Creative and Digital agencies use Adobe products. Many use photoshop and illustrator for print and graphic work etc. Some agencies use BC in a basic sense or through Muse and many agencies web arm is really just "We need a website too".

Pretty handles a lot of sites of that nature and take them or re-do them to what they need to be.

Using BC as the base, fixing up the core issues and offering it up as a real robust, all in one proper sollution to digital agencies, driving them away from wordpress is a very achievable goal.

The insetives for that and "Package" Needs to entice them.

I think with liquid, the JSON work and apps going forward and marketing these features, especially at Max with some Labs (Pretty puts their hands up to do some of these) You can entice current developers to the platform away from Wordpress. They still got good flexibility but they do not have to do as much mundane back end coding.

For people really invested into the platform, Maybe there are things to offfer. The Enterprise edition at cost offers extra features and dedicated servers etc but maybe core partners who do API work etc are offered cheap/discounted API hosting or where like with Apps currently they are offered a secured environemnt as a setup to their partner portal for both storage and ability to run .net/java/php code to use as means to form those API sollutions and neatly and controlled tie ins with apps etc.

Being "Close to home" Would speed these applications up and posibilities from a BC perspective to explore closer API ties to improve such services.

There was once the ability to request custom Report options at a cost, Maybe things like this for higher partners could be brought back.

These sorts of higher end requests appeal to such partners.

Through this and what Brett said Adobe and BC, since they are already hitting the low end with templates and Muse cover more ground and can really engange in a scope of pushing the platform forward into the market in all areas and generate a greater appeal, scope and visitbility within the industry and a great and effective manner.

[mikesallander]

In general I share the thoughts of Bret and Liam in the previous comments but want to highlight a few things specifically:

•   I don’t think enough attention is paid to helping larger agencies grow with the platform, or similarly, attract larger or established agencies to BC

•   I am very concerned about the 1 paid site “barrier”. This is seriously a joke. It is basically saying “Adobe does not want to ONLY deliver through the partner channel, but we don’t want to upset the partners (because they are who helped get us here), so we will give SBO’s an easy backdoor and hope that partners don’t notice.” Please understand that I do not personally feel that these are your intentions, however, I think you can understand how a partner may come to this conclusion. I like Bret’s suggestion of 3 sites or possibly even 5 sites.

I think most of the things about the announcement of the the new partner plan are positive, but I would hope that you at least consider the above points.

[pChirita]

Hi guys,

Let me try to respond to some of the questions in this thread, as we're getting closer to the release and I would like your support on it.

You are correct, we are lowering the adoption barriers for BC. However, our target customers remain small web agencies and freelancers, but we don't want to go after new customer segments such as Muse designers. We simply want to get more agencies on board in order to expand the reach of BC, create a larger ecosystem, which in time will lay the foundation for a more powerful and more popular product. Going after larger agencies will require a different go to market (with a direct sales force) that we don't have at our disposal today.

Regarding your concerns about people abusing the system to get (partner) sites for free, we will work out the free partner site in such a way that it cannot be given to third parties. For now, besides the terms of use of the site, we will make it clear in the AdminConsole of the site that it is FREE. In time, as the partner site is designed for the partner, we will expose a lot of useful information to the partner that are not to be disclosed to an admin user: total commissions earned, the list of SBO customers, etc. - thus making sure that only partner users are the ones logging in to the partner site.

Finally, we have invested the majority of our recent efforts into the Open Platform and we plan to use that as the foundation for fixing core workflows, either directly by the BC team, or through the app developers. BC is a very comprehensive product and only by leveraging the community will we be able to actually fix and/or improve a large number of its core limitations.

Sincerely,

The BC Team.

[Liam Dilley]

Hi thanks for the reply.

The free site, is not about giving it to free parties, you just would get them to set it up. Make them a partner, get them a free site. OR they realise they can do this and not bother going to existing partners to pay for it.

This could become a big concern for partners and they could easily loose jobs if a company does a bit of research and realises they dont need an existing partner to get started.

A few of these elements seem to create issues for existing partners to try and increase partner numbers.

It may be just us who have posted here but I still do not really see what a small agency would be attracked to here. When we mentioned Agencies, I was not even thinking large, I was thinking small to medium. I Actually just see people on Muse for example just adopting to use these features to get a fully fledged free site and more options etc.

For me, this feels like giving more to the low end.

[alexandru_costin]

Hi Liam & folks,

It is very important to understand that our go to market will remain focused to Partners, and not DYI small business owners. And not only we won't reach out to small business owners, but BC is not designed to be used by a small business owner (it's too complicated to set up)

There are tons of other solutions out there that you should be worrying about, not BC - WIX, Squarespace, they are the ones that are getting small business owners to do their own websites.

Our goal is to make partners successful, and as we'll evolve we'll try to enable you to sell workflows and capabilities to small business owners that can't be achieved on a wix like websites. Helping you help your customer be successful online (conversion, seo, lead generation) should differentiate you enough to give you a lucrative business to run.

Alexandru

[Liam Dilley]

I suprised you could even say Wix Alexandru, I hate those dam adverts with such a passion!

[Brett_-Pretty_Pollution]

I will say this again becuase it's really important

"IF YOU TARGET BC AT ENTRY LEVEL PRINT DESIGNERS TRYING THEIR HAND AT WEB, THEN THAT IS ALL YOU'LL GET"

Effectively you turn off ANY creative agencies that would bring REAL value to BC and you just end up with pain in the arse clients paying you nothing and wanting everything.

BC is better than that and the market doesn't know how good BC is becuase you won't tell them. You tell them "BC is a CMS for designers that don't want to code" That is a sham. It's not true.

HOWEVER    :   "IF YOU TARGET BC HIGHER, THEN THE LOW END WILL COME. ENSPIRED TO BE LIKE THE OTHERS"

You need to really think about this Alexandru. The mentality that WIX is the future of web is not correct. Sure it's huge with those entry level $9 pm clients. But believe me when I say that most SBO businesses value a proper website and good Digital Marketing and SEO. When they fall into the hands of WIX due to fancy talking web designers, they are usually disappointed in what those systems can deliver.

NOTE : PRETTY are on board with the development plans. We fully support you in this since recent talks. We agree with you that the steps your taking in development are sound, and they're good for BC and the future of partners like pretty as well as smaller entry level partners..

BUT we still don't see eye to eye on the Go To Market strategy. This needs work. And in 24 months when BC is fully functional again your go to market should be as I've outlined.

I think you're doing a good job though. And I applaud your hard work.

Brett

On another note - Could you please add an Email Marketing package bigger than 190,000 for me. We need one in there for about 400,000 email credits please.