Mission Control has launched a new partner program. The new program is more mature and includes certifications on the Mission Control PSA product. The aim, one suspects, is to help accelerate the growth of a company that has bootstrapped itself so far. When we spoke to Colin Johnson at Dreamforce last month, that seemed unlikely to change.
Jaret Manuel, Global Alliances Director, who joined in February 2023, is the driving force behind this new program. He commented, “With this elevated program, we endeavour to foster enduring and mutually beneficial relationships that drive unparalleled success for our partners and their customers alike. Mission Control has enjoyed spectacular growth over the past couple of years. The new partner program will support our continued expansion by having key partners in major cities and geographic markets.”
The new partner program has been well thought out by the Mission Control team. It contains what one might usually expect from a much larger company. Unusually, but refreshingly, Mission Control has delivered a significant amount of detail around what each of the four tiers of partnership offer. Notably about the financial benefits of being a partner. The company has new training courses and videos that both individuals and partner employees can take to improve their knowledge of Mission Control. The two certifications are Implementation Specialist and Product Expert.
Colin Johnson, Aprika CEO & Co-Founder, highlighted, “Joining our Partner Program will allow our Partners to deepen their customer relationships and improve their customer’s utilization of, and investment in, Mission Control as well as Salesforce. I’m looking forward to our new Partner Program enabling, incentivizing and supporting our Partners with a sophisticated, yet free and simple to use platform, that will help enable their business and help their customer’s businesses thrive.”
Getting a head start
The Find a Partner search portal already consists of around 90 existing partners. These are currently listed as bronze partners. The assumption is that this will evolve, with some partners dropping down a level to referral partners and others. Then once certifications are achieved, climbing to silver or gold partner level. The search and filtering system is currently cumbersome, but that will no doubt improve over time.
The different levels of partners gain increasing benefits and have some fairly simple requirements. The top level, gold, only requires 6+ referrals each year; one assumes this is signed-up clients and 3 certifications. The benefits include a revenue share, which starts at 5% ACV for the 1st year of a referral and climbs as the partner rises through the ranks of bronze (10%), silver (15%) and gold (20%). However, it is only for the first year of a client. The challenge for partners is that they will either need to find maintenance services for clients or continuously find new clients. Mission Control may need to rethink this as it could inhibit partner growth over time.
Other benefits include an entry in the partner search access to resources and a 50% discount on the use of Mission Control for their use. This would be attractive for any company looking to use Mission Control themselves. The higher tiers include marketing support and a free demo license with silver and above, also providing a partner manager to support the relationship. Gold partners will also receive professional services referrals.
Enhanced training options
Mission control now has two types of training courses: persona courses and fundamental courses. The persona courses are targeted at people who use Mission Control rather than partners.
The two available courses are:
The Fundamental courses help build the expertise that is required for the two certifications, Implementation Specialist and Product Expert.
These courses include:
- Resource Management
- Project Initiation
- Project Management
- Project Financials
- Program Management
- Project Collaboration
A new generation of partner program
The new partner program should help formalise and standardise the existing Mission Control partner relationships. Adam Troughear, Founder of current Mission Control partner, Skie Solutions, notes, “We are a Mission Control partner and user, primarily because it’s Salesforce native, which basically means that we can solve our client challenges all with a simple, integrated tool suite – we can provide visibility, we can connect disjointed processes because their business is connected across a single system and we can find the gaps in their workflow to increase efficiency, among others.
“Mission Control is our first port of call because we use the platform ourselves and know what it can do, because the level of support is fantastic, because they are super responsive to product feedback and they iterate and deliver changes really quickly and finally because it’s a polished, feature-rich tool.”
Mission Control will hope to add partners from across the Salesforce ecosystem. In the US, Abstrakt Marketing Group, an existing partner, noted, “We’ve worked with Mission Control in the past and you’re one of our go-to solutions for project management and PSA. Our dealings with Mission Control have always been very positive, with a great, supportive team. Interestingly, we’ve had product enhancement suggestions which serendipitously have shown up in future releases. While we’re not sure if that’s directly due to our feedback, it’s great to see that those suggestions end up landing on the platform.”
Abstrakt points out one thing that is missing from the partner program, and that is a partner council that would share feedback insights to Mission Control about the program and product.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Mission Control will hope to quickly move partners to the correct level of partnership. If it has over 90 active partners, that will be impressive and see them grow very quickly. It seems more likely that most listed partners will become referral partners, and a few will rise to silver or gold. It may, over time, need to reconsider some of the benefits, but the beauty of the program is that it is very transparent and shows clear benefits to those partners joining. There is also a very low barrier to entry to bronze. Those organisations looking to increase revenue from a project management and PSA solution on the Salesforce platform will find it relatively easy to climb up the tiers, especially as the training and certification programs appear to be free and self-service.
There are some other entry-level requirements, though. The new Partner Program is only open to Salesforce Implementation and Technology Consultancies who are Salesforce experienced and keen to work on Mission Control implementation projects and win ongoing professional service referrals (gold level only).
