Paul Flannery, Epicor Software
Paul Flannery is VP channel sales, international at Epicor Software Corporation. He joined Epicor Software in 2018 as the vice president of international channel sales. He brings with him 35 years' experience across various direct and indirect sales leadership roles within the technology sector, including roles at Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems.
Throughout his career, Flannery has gained extensive enterprise solutions experience and has been highly successful in developing channel and sales programmes across the EMEA, North America, and APAC regions. At Epicor, Flannery's goal is to drive international growth through the channel and ensure strong participation with partners to execute on their journey to the cloud and to deliver profitable annuity streams with partners.
Flannery has a Bachelor of Science (BSc) for Mathematics, Statistics, and Computing Science from the University of Glasgow, and enjoys international travel, CrossFit training and amateur cooking.
Number of years in current role:
5
Number of years in current company:
5
Number of years involved in indirect/channel sales:
35
Reports to:
Andy Coussins, EVP International
Number of employees in channel organisation:
19
What percentage of overall sales come through the channel?
45 per cent
What is your personal channel philosophy?
Channel partners are an equal and key component of our go-to-market strategy. We treat them as an extension of our teams and part of the Epicor family with open, transparent discussions on how we jointly develop sustainable and profitable growth together.
Key to this is investing in enablement, engagement, and execution, with a focus on equipping people with the best competency and capability skills (not only in product and solutions, but also sales, marketing, and negotiation techniques) to ensure they can compete to improve their win-rates in the markets that they serve. If partners don't grow, we don't grow.
What were your biggest personal channel accomplishments over the past year?
We enhanced our partner programme to accelerate cloud adoption and sales of our additional standalone platforms. Achieved through development of a strong enablement framework: online and in-person, both on product/solution side and sales methodology, which has been rolled-out to the international partner community, delivering a 39 per cent increase in the SaaS/cloud mix.
What were your organisation's biggest channel accomplishments over the past year?
We have continued to develop and evolve our partner model and programme to ensure we are fully aligned to our strategic objectives on increasing and improving mindshare, market share, and wallet share with our partners in both new business, as well as their customer base, to deliver quantifiable and measurable business outcomes for our customers.
Significant investment has gone into resources, taking time and effort to educate and enable the Partner community on our customer value, as well investing in go-to-marke funding to ensure that they engage and execute with customers in their chosen markets, delivering almost 35x ROI on pipeline to:
- Enable partners to accelerate their profitable pivot to cloud, with the Top 30 Partners all increasing cloud mix YoY by 39 per cent.
- Increase the number of partners delivering 'Premium Partner' level numbers by over 60 per cent year-on-year to support continued investment and scale in our go-to-market model across each of our five regions.
- Introduce a specialisation model and what partners want to become known with an aggressive uptake in both industry vertical specialisation, as well as platform/solution specialisation across our broad make, move, and sell portfolio, delivering many wins in solution and vertical areas.
What areas would you like to see your channel partners invest in in 2024?
Key investment areas for channel partners in 2024 to better support their own profitable growth include:
- People skills to enable them to compete and win even more successfully with the solutions/platforms that we have.
- Enablement on how to deliver more value and a lifecycle experience for customer in the Cloud through a land, adopt, expand, and renew approach.
- Understand and execute on the market opportunity that DaaS (data as a service) provides to the make, move, and sell economy for BI and predictive analytics to support C-suite decision making.
What are the biggest challenges facing your partners in 2024?
Given both geo-political challenges and economic headwinds of inflation etc, partners will need to address several key areas of their business:
- How to retain and/or attract best staff within their cost structures.
- Investing in people skills to ensure managing the entire customer experience throughout the lifecycle.
- Keeping up to speed with the significant technology advancements on cloud, AI, ML, etc and translate these into great customer outcomes and experiences.
- Managing cash flow tightly.
Describe how your use of market development funds (MDF) is changing this year?
The marketing development fund drives channel generated pipeline and brand awareness, that aligns to the overall business goals. The programme prioritises the marketing funding available in a cohesive manner and focuses spend to grow channel revenue from the highest growth partners.
In 2024, we will be investing more in our key partners, as we have seen that when we co-market together with a plan that is aligned to the partner's strategic objectives, we can achieve great results. We will continue to encourage our partners to specialise in their key verticals and use their MDF successfully for this purpose.
What are your biggest channel priorities in 2024?
Migrate partners to cloud solutions, improve partner sales skills and increase the amount of recurring revenue going through partners.