commercetools ❤️ Partners – Recap of 2022 EMEA/APAC Partner Summit in Croatia
Kelly Goetsch
Chief Strategy Officer at commercetools / MACH Alliance Co-founder / 4x O'Reilly Author
We invest so much in our partners because our business wouldn’t exist without them. Most of our revenue is sourced through partners. 100% of our implementations are done in-house or more commonly through our implementation partners. Out of > 650 employees, we have five employed in professional services and they’re there largely to support/guide our partners and customers, not to do hands-on implementation work. Growing and scaling a services business is hard and an entirely different problem from growing and scaling a product company. Many of our competitors take a shortsighted approach and do their own implementations to get revenue in early days, but that just turns partners into adversaries. Some also resort to doing their implementations because their products don’t work…one of the many benefits we have of being product-first.
As we continue to substantially grow our revenue year over year, we’re looking to our partners to generate an even higher percentage of our revenue. A key part of being partner-led is enabling our partners. Our global VP of Channel & Alliances, Dirk Weckerlei, kicked off the event with a keynote on the history and future of the commercetools partner ecosystem.
Our founder and CEO, Dirk Hoerig, then led a session on the overall economy and why we’re exceptionally bullish about the future. Our market-leading fundamentals have us in a great spot to capitalize on this downturn by hiring the best talent in the market. Nobody wants to work for a shaky startup whose equity is now worthless. The exuberant days of 2021 are now firmly over. Dirk then went on to analyze the commerce vendor landscape and why it’s in the early stages of a once-in-a-generation shakeup.
The below slide that Dirk presented kept coming up over and over in side discussions:
These are the new priorities we see out in the market and we're making numerous investments to be the best to deliver on them.
I then went on stage to present our overall company strategy. I talked about our portfolio strategy, the new products we’re bringing to market, a (maybe too) detailed list of the areas we will / may / won’t invest in, our full embrace of the term “commodity,” our view on offering opinionated vs. unopinionated (you can do both!), and examples of how implementation partners have found various niches in our ecosystem. Andrea Stubbe then explained how we roadmap, how to influence our roadmap, and offered a more detailed roadmap.
Our embrace of MACH continues to be a key pillar of how we will go to market. I asked the audience during my talk how many work for companies who belong to the MACH Alliance and at least 90% of hands went up. It was quite humbling.
We then had customer and partner sessions all day long with breakout meetings across the island. Big thanks to our customers for making the trek over to explain what they like to see from their implementation partners. Our partners appreciated having our customers coach them, and our customers liked having a larger, more empowered, partner ecosystem to work with.
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We finished the day with a sunset drinks event sponsored by Google Cloud and Worldpay (thank you!). To say it was picture perfect is an understatement.
Following sunset, we had our award ceremony where we recognized outstanding achievements by our implementation and infrastructure partners.
Big congrats to all of the winners! They are:
Note: It’s really hard to pick winners. We have so many partners who do excellent work. Our > 100% net retention rate, and ~100% gross retention rate are a testament to how happy our customers are with their implementations. If you didn’t win this year, keep up the good work and you’ll be up again next year.
On behalf of commercetools, I’d also like to thank our many sponsors for making this event possible, including:
The business relationships forged and strengthened over the years at events like this turn into personal relationships that will last a lifetime.
Our Americas partner event is coming up on November 1st and 2nd in Austin, TX. It’ll be even bigger than the EMEA/APAC event in Croatia. While it’s not a private island, you’ll leave with new and sharpened relationships, along with the knowledge you need to be successful out in the market with commercetools. Register today!
Partnerships | MACH Alliance | CX | Cloud | AI | Data
2yGreat recap Kelly Goetsch and thank you to all of the team commercetools for organising such an amazing partner summit.
Intelligently Automating Communications & Branding with AI - Builder of Brands in Tech
2yThis partner strategy is the only way commercetools can continue its high speed scaling - wonderful community!
Web3 Marketing | ULAM LABS | Syncra
2yThe population of Dirk's took over the stage for sure ;) Very insightful keynotes, great people and excellent organization (plus the Obonjan Island!) made it a perfect partner summit. 💪
Global Procurement & Process Lead | ex Vice President Professional Services | ex startup founder | ex Accenture | freelance Consultant
2yI fully agree with your statements, Kelly Goetsch and can confirm: commercetools' Professional Services is collaborating with the partners. Your enablement is our most important goal. We want you to build great ecommerce solutions. We strive for a win-win-win for commercetools, our customers and our partners. Our common goal is a great ecommerce experiene for our customers' customers.
CEO & Co-Founder at Alokai, Frontend as a Service for Composable Commerce, advocating for Frontend-First strategy.
2yA fantastic event and awesome people made this a very memorable experience! 🚀