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Become a qualified partner
We offer to consulting groups and IT experts an
attractive technology that is easily integrated in their portfolio, allowing them to increase differentiation, revenues and client satisfaction.
In addition, Lokad brings you
not only the technology, but leads as well, as our leads are accessible to our
qualified partners directly through
leads.lokad.com.
We are interested in talking to you. Contact us at
.
Benefits for your clients
Half of of the surveyed online shoppers find products to be out-of-stock 25% of the time. 57% of these customers typically go to a competitors’ websites or retail locations to find the products they seek. The Online Inventory Impact Survey, May 2007, BetweenMarkets
Less cost. Imagine the money your clients can save if they know more accurately how much and when they will sell. Less inventory, less stock obsolescence, or less staff.
More revenue. Imagine how much more revenue your clients can generate if they know better how much they could sell. No shortages, no loss of loyalty, or no idle employees.
Less time invested but increased forecast accuracy. Imagine how much of your clients’ time is saved when the forecasting is done in fully automated way, as frequently as forecasts are needed.
Our forecasting technology is typically deployed while maintaining a
positive cash flow: by the time your client receives their first Lokad's invoice, the benefits brought by our forecasts have already paid for the setup costs.
Yet, in order to get the most of our forecasts, we need experts, such as consultants and data integrators, who can assists our prospects to tune their business operations to closely fit the expected demand. If you are able to do that, then you're most likely eligible to become a qualified partner.
Your benefits
Tap into our lead flow as provided through
leads.lokad.com. We not only provide the forecasting technology, but we provide leads as well, that is to say, we provide contact information of companies that have expressed their interest in using Lokad and getting some extra help from partners. Our qualified partners help us to take over those leads.
Differentiate as forecasting is one of the very few business optimization that can increase the profitability of a company without any significant upfront investment. Instead of going straight for a tough sell that involve a business re-organization, prove your value first with a low hanging fruit such as Lokad.
Increase revenue through consulting and integration missions as qualified partners typically charge our clients to help them getting started with our forecasting technology. Then, we also offer
revenue sharing as well, which will provide additional recurrent revenues.
How Lokad.Leads works
Although it's up to qualified partners to propose Lokad to their existing clients, we provide a dedicated lead flow through our Lokad.Leads portal available at
leads.lokad.com.
At registration time on
app.lokad.com, we ask prospects if they are interested in getting extra support to get started with our forecasting technology through a qualified partner. If the prospect agrees, then we re-post the anonymized company information on Lokad.Leads.
Qualified partners can apply for those leads. After a short period, typically 1 or 2 business days, the Lokad team assign leads based on criteria such as:
- The expertise.
- The location.
- Past performance.
Although we are very open to give their chance to new partners, we naturally reward high performing partners who have high success rates with our leads. Your success is our success too.
Once you are elected by Lokad to take over a lead, you will be handy over the nominative contact information of the prospect. Each lead get assigned to a single qualified partner.
Unless specified otherwise, Lokad has not initiated any direct contact with the prospect. It's up to the partner to proceed and to confirm the interest and to help the prospect to get started with Lokad.
We expect the partner to make an situation assessment and a business proposal for free, but then, it's up to the partner to decide the fine grained details of the mission to assist the company, and how much must be charged for that.
We provide ongoing technical support for our partners to carry on with their clients through the public forums
ask.lokad.com where partners can post questions. Since we do not charge partners for technical assistance, we prefer to address technical questions publicly. Obviously, if questions are sensitive, they can be addressed to
support@lokad.com too.
Through Lokad.Leads, partners can update the status of their assigned leads, indicating
- if the prospect is still interested,
- if the integration is in-progress,
- if the lead has been converted or lost,
- ...
We expect our partners to update their leads (it's just a few clicks) about once a week - eventually once a month if project is postponed.
Keeping our leads updated is not a requirement, but it will considerably increase your chances to be assigned more leads in the future.
Non Disclosure Agreement
In order to become a
qualified Lokad, the
Parternship Agreement must be signed by the applicant and returned to Lokad (a scan send by email to
is perfect, don't forget to sign each page of the document).
The agreement is first and foremost a
Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) between your company and Lokad. Indeed, as our prospects have entrusted Lokad with their contact information, we are strongly committed in enforcing their rights to
privacy and the confidentiality of their data. Hence, we don't hand over any nominative information without both the consent of the prospect and a NDA signed by the partner. Then, the agreement states that the prospect information and data must be treated as
strictly confidential by default, that is to say that unless explicitly stated otherwise, all prospect information and data should be treated as confidential.
Code of Conduct
Beyond confidentiality, we expect our partners to follow a
code of conduct while contacting prospects: prospects have expressed a consent to get assistance to get started with Lokad,
and with Lokad only.
Contacts established with the prospects must be solely focused on providing relevant and complementary services to Lokad. The partnership comes with an
obligation of focus. In particular, if the prospect is not more interested in the Lokad services, then, the lead itself should be reported as
lost by the partner (using Lokad.Leads), and
no more commercial solicitations should be take toward the prospect (unless the prospect takes the initiative to re-express an interest for either Lokad or the partner services).
If the prospect engages a contractual relationship with the qualified partner, then the partner is
relieved from the obligation of focus. The prospect has become a client of the partner, and Lokad somehow steps back from the relationship (although, we hopefully delivers forecasts to the client).
In other words, the establishment of the relationship must be grounded on the initial prospect will, which is to get extra support to get started with Lokad, not on unrelated product or services. Then, once the contractual relationship is established between the partner and the prospect turned client, we see no ground to enforce any more such obligation (but the partner must still enforce the Non Disclosure Agreement nonetheless).
How to apply
In order to apply to Lokad, just drop an email to
with
- relevant business information (company name, address, ...),
- your website URL,
- a email address to be used for lead notification (*).
- a few words about your specific interest for Lokad.
We don't accept applications from companies that do not have a public website. The website must exposes your
business coordinates, and carry relevant information concerning your business expertise.
We do not accept shared domain name for the email address such hotmail.com, gmail.com or yahoo.com. The domain name of the email address must be owned by the applicant.
(*) A word of caution: this email address may later be used by Lokad to send to confidential information to the partner. Once the NDA is signed, it is the duty of the partner to ensure that the email box is secured, and that employees, who have an access, have signed a NDA as well.
Later on, the email address used for notification can be changed at any time upon written request send to Lokad by the partner. Please grant us one business week to confirm the validity of the proposed change and update the email in the Lokad.Leads database.
Program fees
There is no fee associated with the Lokad.Leads partnership.
Misc Tips
In order to stay updated early on about new leads being posted, you can use the
RSS feed of Lokad.Leads. To learn more about Web Feeds, check the
Wikipedia article. If you need a free feed reader, we suggest to try the
Google Reader.
As soon as a lead has been assigned to you in Lokad.Leads, we suggest
to bookmark the lead status page, and eventually to record the corresponding URL in your CRM (if you have one). This bookmark will facilitate you getting back to the lead, and update its status later on (hint: as a partner, we expect you to update on your assigned leads on a regular basis, until the lead is converted or lost).