SAP Australia invites experienced sales professionals to join
Sydney, Australia — SAP today launched the ‘SAP Business One Sales Academy,’ an SAP led initiative to attract, train and deploy SAP Business One qualified sales professionals into its ecosystem of Australian channel partners.
SAP hopes to recruit up to 20 new sales professionals before the end of the year. The new recruits are required to help SAP and its partners meet demand in Australia for the SAP Business One solution, which is aimed at small enterprises with between 10 and 200 employees.
SAP has experienced exceptional demand for the SAP Business One solution, since its launch in late 2003. In partnership with channel partners, SAP today has more than 700 SAP Business One customers in Australia and more than 15,000 globally.
SAP Business One provides small and midsize enterprises with a strategic business platform to support organisational growth objectives. Paskal Australia, a leading fabrics wholesales, worked with SAP partner Inecom to implement the solution. Managing director, David Clota, explained the impact that the technology has had on his organisation.
“SAP Business One has fundamentally changed my entire business,” said Clota. We are now a professional organisation with industry best practice business processes and controls. Our previous application, MYOB, was good for when mum and dad started the business, but SAP Business One will take us into the future and beyond”.
The SAP philosophy of recruiting high quality and specialised channel partners has been a significant contributing factor to the success of SAP Business One. The company is experiencing compound annual customer growth rates in the region of 25 percent in this segment of the market.
Small and midsize enterprises represent a major focus for SAP as it works towards it 2010 growth targets; competitors have taken more than ten years to secure a comparable number of small and midsize customers.
“Recruitment is a major distraction for our community of channel partners. Their primary focus is on meeting customer demand for SAP technology and delivering projects. This initiative removes the burden of recruitment,” said Michael Reidy, general manager – Small and Midsize Enterprises, SAP Australia and New Zealand. “There is a significant requirement for ambitious and skilled sales professionals within this area of our indirect channel. Ultimately, we’ll provide the relevant partners with new sales professionals that are able to hit the ground running.”
SAP has commissioned Michael Page Recruitment to help it source sales professionals with between three and five years experience in the information and communications technology sector or in customer facing telesales roles. The successful candidates will participate in a four day SAP Business One sales and product training boot camp, which is fully funded by SAP.
Terry Morton, director of Evolution Software Services, one of the participating Australian partners, said, “The SAP Business One Sales Academy concept is an innovative approach that will add great value to our business. This shows that SAP understands the issues that small businesses like Evolution face in recruiting, training and retaining good people.”
The boot camp will cover sales processes, sales scenario training and conclude with an SAP certification exam. The four day agenda is designed to ensure rapid sales enablement, skills and knowledge transfer. Candidates will be employed by one of six SAP channel partners in full-time sales roles on completion of the boot camp.
“SAP recognises the importance of quality within its ecosystem of reseller partners and takes an innovative and collaborative approach to channel enablement,” continued Reidy. “The SAP PartnerEdge program provides a range of support services and incentives for our partner community. This initiative is reflective of the way that we seek to partner with the channel to achieve mutually beneficial goals and support their commercial objectives.”
This is the first time that SAP has provided direct recruitment and training assistance to channel partners. The Australian program represents a pilot for SAP, which may extend similar programs across its SAP All-in-One channel partners in Australia. The company is also considering rolling out the Sales Academy concept across the Asia-Pacific region.
Interested parties are invited to contact Ben Forte at Michael Page Recruitment on 03 9607 5682 or by email ben.forte@michaelpage.com.au
