The SMAs and Epicor Software - meet the contenders

We speak to Epicor about its achievements in the last year and what it means to be nominated for the SMAs 2023

The CRN Sales and Marketing Awards 2023 are this week, and as we prepare to find out the winners at this year's ceremony on Thursday 29 June at Leonardo Royal Hotel, Tower Bridge, we meet some of the contenders.

Today we speak to Paul Flannery, vice president channel sales, international at Epicor Software.

He joined the company in 2018, bringing 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.

Epicor Software are nominated for the award of Best Partner Event at this year's SMAs.

Why do you think awards like the SMAs matter?

They recognise the work that the team does and promotes a positive experience of the brand with the partner community.

What would winning this award mean to your company?

It would recognise our ability to adapt and to continue to be innovative in the way that we enable and engage our partners to support them to win in the market and grow their companies successfully.

Momentum is an annual event that so many loyal partners attend and to be able to say that it is award winning would be something that we would be incredibly proud of.

What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

Supporting our partners through commercial, technical and operational innovation to enable them to successfully pivot to a cloud based SaaS model for their businesses.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2023 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

Through significant M&A, we have acquired several additional platforms and a challenge has been to enable our partners to add more value to our customer digital transformation journey.

Enabling them through series of innovative ‘Fit for the Future' webinar sessions with outstanding support from our product, sales and marketing teams has been critical to imparting the knowledge, competencies, and capabilities that our partners require to be able become the customer Trusted Advisor.

How do you think the channel has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

The channel has become much more focussed on what they want to become ‘Famous for..' rather than generic/horizontal plays.

Expect more partners to become more focussed to drive repeatable solutions that deliver more positive outcomes for the customer and profitable business for them (as a write once, monetise many approach.

Some of the changes will be about mindset (focus on industry/platform and double-down) and culture to enable that to happen.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the channel in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

We see opportunity everywhere - both in our existing customer base as well as new logo acquisition, due to the breadth and depth of our portfolio.

We are doubling down on what our partners want to become ‘Famous for…' whether that be Industry specific knowledge and expertise, or in the product/platform/solution area such as CPQ that they can address across their base. We will continue to enable, engage, and execute on their campaigns to drive mutual success.