2019 has been a good year for Walpole Partnership. We’ve delivered projects for new and existing customers, created more business partnerships in countries where we havent worked before and we have definitely enjoyed working with the latest CPQ products.
We’ve welcomed Stuart Wymant, Gemma Wade and more recently Divya Patel to our team, however, one of the biggest changes for us came about when our Director and COO Lisa Zevi stepped away from her operational duties to focus on her own coaching business REAL Business Builders. Lisa remains active as a director and helps us steer our way through many decisions and its a tribute to the quality of the systems and processes she established that we’ve been able to continue without her holding the reins on a day-to-day basis. There are plans afoot to expand our team further in 2020 and well share that news as soon as we are able.
In January of this year, we took the time to consider our goals for 2019 and we’ve tracked our progress on these throughout the year. Let’s take a look at how weve done.
Focus on CPQ
Our reputation as the go-to CPQ experts has developed further in 2019. We’ve created a lot of well-respected content this year including the ebook ‘What CPQ Can Really Do For You’ which was published by Oracle, and we also began to offer free initial consultations to help people get started with CPQ. We’ve delivered webinars to help people take advantage of functionality and we pride ourselves on our wide range of expertise in the field of CPQ. Our Marketing Manager, Alexandra Yates, has been pivotal in developing these assets and approaches, using the knowledge of the technical experts in Pradeep Agrawal‘s delivery team to bring our focus to life what Pradeep and his team doesnt know about CPQ probably isn’t worth knowing! We put time and effort into the relationships that we have with our CPQ vendor partners, making sure our messages are aligned and our content is widely and well received, and it always really pays off.
Having this as a number one goal for several years has a flywheel like effect. Every year that we have this as our primary goal we go deeper into the knowledge, gain more experience and work with more effectively with clients and vendors. Its almost harder to stop learning now.
Grow even faster
We’ve certainly continued our growth well in 2019, in terms of revenue, clients and our team too. We’ve also looked to develop our skills in integrations with CPQ, plugging in to adjacent systems to broaden the reach of our projects and deliver more value for our clients, whoever the vendor. As the world of CPQ becomes increasingly developed, our reach into CPQ projects of all sizes has increased too, and this has helped fuel our growth.
Some more recent news is that weve developed a fledgling practice in the specialised area of Planning and Budgeting software with the excellent Netsuite PBCS product. Here were able to leverage our expertise as an agile and responsive partner with high quality processes to deliver solutions for other areas of the business too. We’ve dedicated a team to this to ensure our core focus of CPQ isn’t diluted and kept it aligned with the rest of our business by putting under the watchful eyes of Stuart Wymant, our Customer Success Manager. It’s an exciting new venture, and one that we will update you on in the coming months.
Build team spirit
Our team is tighter than it has ever been. The friendship and trust that is forged in the heat of delivering a project on time, in budget and to the client’s satisfaction is amazing, and as we grow together those bonds just get tighter. The focus that Ian Jenkins has brought through leading our project team this year and keeping everyone on track makes for an environment where accountability is high and standards are higher. The results make everyone proud and that itself has increased our team spirit. Admittedly hes done his best to undo all his good work by displaying the same desire to succeed and winning every event and each team bonding session. He is now the unified Walpole Champion at mini-golf and bowling. Let’s hope that some other team members get a look in in 2020 to keep the spirit alive!
Celebrate our clients success
We were very proud to enable two of our wonderful clients, Somfy and Sauermann Group, to be celebrated as case studies by Oracle Corporation. The success that they have found with our implementations of Oracle CPQ Cloud can be seen on video here (Somfy) and here (Sauermann Group) and we have a detailed write up of the Somfy story here. The relentless focus (and tireless travels) of Ingmar Hermans has enabled us to bring these clients to such a successful point that their story can be broadcast from the rooftops and we are very proud to do so.
Support Charities
Sadly, this year the charity that our MD Andy Pieroux was a trustee of (Kids in Sport) closed down due to the ill health of its founder. Over the course of 10 years the charity made more that £420,000 in grants to help children take part in sport who otherwise would not have been able to. We were an active supporter and donor to Kids In Sport. Our giving does not stop there though, and we have continued to make donations in support of Cancer Research and Shelter.
So overall, we can consider 2019 a successful year. As we take stock over the holidays well be renewing some commitments, increasing others and perhaps adding some new ones into the mix for the new decade, but until then, well sit back with a large glass of something and consider 2019 a job pretty well done.
Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays) to you and yours and all the very best for 2020!
