At Beyond The Black in London, I had the opportunity to talk to Joshua May, Director of Solutions Advisory, EMEA, at BlackLine. He was previously the Partner Enablement Director at BlackLine. We spoke about the BlackLine partnership strategy.
May revealed that BlackLine has had a lot of success with partners. They bring customers to BlackLine, and BlackLine helps with training. In his previous role, May was training partners about best practices around implementation and how to configure, and subsequently push the boundary on what automation and AI can do. He said, “They’ve been really well engaged. We’re very lucky to have this global partner network.”
Who are the partners
BlackLine has several different types of partners. It has resellers and those who want to get more involved. Some partners, like the big four and slightly smaller consultancies, all focus on implementation, resale, and ongoing management. Some partners offer reconciliation services out of India with large service centres in a BPO model.
There are new revenue angles emerging as well. May commented, “We’ve now got this platform called Studio 360, a workflow tool where I’ve actively encouraged them to get involved in the creation of best practice templates. They can then resell those templates and connectors through the platform, which enables them to monetise a piece of work they’ve done once, again and again and again.”
May revealed that BlackLine had gone through a consolidation process with its partners. It decided to focus on partners that engaged effectively and that had gone through the certification process. He justified this, quite rightly, by saying that there was no point in bringing in the business if they could not implement the solution themselves.
BlackLine now has a small select group of partners, which May revealed was once described as the baker’s dozen. So what about new partners?
“(it) doesn’t mean we won’t take ones that show significant desire to get involved, and can really get involved in the process. I’d say those who come to us with a clear excitement energy, they see the value. They want to, they actually want to help their customers and drive new business.”
Partner Journey
What does a new BlackLine partner journey look like? Initially, there is a lot of training as well as a comprehensive certification process across all BlackLine modules. Sometimes partners focus on specific ones, but this is usually customer-driven.
May explained, “Customers will have no handle on their reconciliation process. The balance sheet is all awry, so they’ll focus on that first and then Transaction Matching. Often, they’re excited to do that because it’s a little bit more involved and technical. Then they’ve got longer-term projects like journals. Longer-term projects involve more people, more chargeable time, and they do grow in the medium long term.
Those courses involve both sales and pre-sales teams. They also explain where BlackLine sits in relation to the ERP solutions it works with. May explained why, saying, “There are a lot of occasions when we step back where we directly conflict with SAP products. We always, in that instance, say no, it’s up to you, because we don’t want to get into a conflict with SAP.”
Partner Retention
To retain partners, May sees the relationship as bidirectional. It is a close relationship where BlackLine puts business in their direction, and they have regular catch-ups about opportunities and the market. The partners also have an input into the product roadmap.
Partners that do not engage and feed new revenues tend to get weeded out. May also shared that partners are also measured on how customers measure success, such as shortening of month-end, the percentage of reconciliations completed and automated journal entries.
May summarised, adding, “What levels of success are they bringing? Can they implement this more quickly? How quickly are they ramped up and ready to go? What sort of volume of business are they pushing our way? From the customer perspective, are they going above and beyond what a direct BlackLine relationship would look like?”
May has his own experience, having implemented BlackLine himself and with support from BlackLine directly, he got BlackLine up and running quickly. Perhaps given more time, he might have focused on whether they had the best processes in place. At the time, the project had a deadline to complete before the next audit.
Other benefits a partner can deliver are getting the shortest close cycle with reconciliations and journals signed off in line with the company rules and regulations. He added, “Partners bring the industry best practice and have the industry knowledge, and in most cases, have more staff available to focus solely on this than we do if we do it directly, and the customers see that benefit.”
How does BlackLine ensure consistent quality and customer satisfaction across implementations delivered by the ecosystem?
May answered, “Our own in-house professional services team is tracking and monitoring that, not only are we having regular catch-up calls with them, but also with customers. Everything is ultimately tested in the platform. The professional services team has insight into that, to ensure that standards are adhered to.
“There is a regular reoccurring training update that happens as well, which is quite rigorous, but quite nice, actually, for the people in the team. Because it includes a lot of CPD in there, rather than having to go away and pay for it out of their own pockets.”
The growing influence of Agentic AI
Agentic AI is changing what BlackLine delivers to customers, and it is also changing how consulting firms will need to work in the future. BlackLine is working on, like other vendors, agents that will assist with the integration of data sources. It will save time and consultancy fees for customers on ingesting that data.
It also opens up new possibilities, with more data sources available, BlackLine will be able to surface more and better insights.
There is another influence on professional services. Agentic AI can also automate the creation and application of procedure notes, another process that consultants often carry out. In effect, it is likely that partners will need to lean into their industry expertise and the best practices they have observed and can share with clients.
