At the just wrapped Intuit conference the company announced their channel size as 556 active partners (no word on how that's defined) with an intent on capping the channel at 700 total.
They claim that 70% of new vars sell two new license deals in the first month. There's no word on whether that's all they sell or if they continue to sell new licenses after what I refer to as the "lay downs". Most VARS these days primarily go into new reselling arrangements when they have a client opportunity or two that they can sell -- so this statistic while impressive is not entirely unexpected. There's no indication here on exactly what products these partners handle -- whether it's just QuickBooks or if it's also QuickBooks Enterprise.45% of all Intuit telesales leads are sent to their partner channel. Most of the leads sent to the channel are too complex to sell direct - mostly companies that have a stronger industry specific need. There's no indication of what percent of those leads result in consulting revenue for the VAR.
They also announced their Accountants Pro Advisors program has 56,000 members and they've created a new pilot program called Accountant Work Exchange which matches the 556 VARS with 56,000 Pro Advisors for mutual cross referrals of work. Intuit's software will now be available via two distributors - Ingram and Blue Star. Noted briefly at the end of the market is a comment from Intuit that QuickBase is the VARS' secret weapon. QuickBase is an online database (pricing is expensive though and starts at $249/mo) which can be customized and presumably linked up to many of Intuit's products.
Full story:
Wayne Schulz is a Sage Business Partner handling MAS 90 and MAS 200 accounting software. Therefore any comments in this post that are not excerpts of the orginal story from Channel Insider cannot be considered as independent and we make no claim that they are.
Wayne Schulz
Schulz Consulting, LLC
