We’re all for clarity – we can bring you assistance, acceleration, and exposure to our customer base, but you need to decide whether that aligns with your business plan.
Nico Roux is Director of Alliances and Business Development EMEA for Bullhorn – I talked to him in the London Bullhorn offices about running the Bullhorn Marketplace, artificial intelligence, GDPR among other subjects.
Steve: What would you say is the number one mistake that people make when trying to get into the Bullhorn Marketplace?
Nico: Not having a plan. If you don’t have a plan, you will have misaligned foundations.
We’re all for clarity – we can bring you assistance, acceleration, and exposure to our customer base, but you need to decide whether that aligns with your business plan.
Without one, you won’t know whether it would be a good decision for you to enter our program or not. The number of companies we talk to on a yearly basis versus the number of companies that make it through our program shows you how many are not prepared, or just not a good fit.
Steve: Can you give us some stats about that?
Nico: It’s probably between 5-7% of the companies we interview that make it on a yearly basis to our marketplace program. In the Developer Program… I think our ratio is more around the 25-30%. That means that a good 60-70% of the companies we talk to don’t know exactly why they’re contacting us, or they don’t have a plan, or they’re not ready.
We speak to a lot of startups that are on to something really good, but don’t necessarily have the capacity to scale or to support our customer base at the expected rates. The reality of it is if you’re successful and you’re on to something good, more of our clients will want that.
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Steve: Have you got any minimum KPIs for assessing whether a startup has reached the threshold that you’ll accept them into the marketplace?
Nico: You need to have overlapping customers; it’s one of our key criteria. Our programs are very demanding on the partner; you need to be able to build an integration that will be validated by Bullhorn. If you’re a startup, do you want to focus your resources on building a third party app or do you want to focus on your roadmap? Do you really want to invest all that time into development, when, before you go through round A, you’re probably still looking at growing your team and hiring more people?
The reality of it is that sometimes they see us as a channel partner, but because we don’t necessarily resell our partners solution, that’s a misconception. If you’re asking “Can we OEM our product into your system so that we just focus on development and recoding?” then actually, no, you need to have a sales team. You need to have a support team that’s going to be able to pick up all that code, a professional services team that’s going to able to implement and customize your product and a product team that can work a roadmap and build an integration to us.
Sometimes people don’t realize that they have to go through all that before they can be ready for our program. I think if you’re keen to accelerate and you want to invest into a very cool product within the recruitment industry, Bullhorn is an obvious call. We are leading the charge, and people obviously benefit from it when they’re following our slipstream, so it’s easy to get excited about the fact that “Wow, if we’re with Bullhorn, then our business is really going to go places.”
But you need your business to be at a certain level, and know that you will be able to sustain the amount of business Bullhorn can send your way. That’s probably why so many don’t make it in the first place.
Nico Roux (@TheRealMonsieur) is Director of Alliances and Business Development EMEA for Bullhorn
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