Five top G-Cloud suppliers reveal their formula for success

Five resellers and MSPs that did over £1m in business through G-Cloud last year open up on their top tips and bugbears

The UK's top resellers and MSPs generated over £100m of sales though G-Cloud last year as the government framework surged past £5bn in total sales.

Launched in 2012 with the aim of giving smaller tech providers greater access to government business, G-Cloud is now a big money spinner for many firms in the CRN VAR 350, including the five firms interviewed in this article. Applications for the twelfth iteration of the framework opened on 3 March.

Looking at the latest G-Cloud spending data (which goes up to January 2020), by our calculations some 65 (or 19 per cent) of the VAR 350 made at least one sale via the cloudy framework in calendar 2019. Some 54 generated G-Cloud sales of over £100,000 last year, with 29 racking up sales of over £1m and eight over £5m.

CRN's upcoming Top G-Cloud Suppliers, available exclusively to CRN Essential subscribers, ranks the top G-Cloud providers in our market by sales, both for calendar 2019, and all-time.

Ahead of the launch of the report, below we have published Q&As we conducted with four of the 29 G-Cloud suppliers included in the VAR 350 with revenues last year of £1m-plus, as well as with a fifth firm - Microsoft partner Core Technology - which is not in VAR 350 due to it not reporting revenue but which is nevertheless one of the most successful VARs/MSPs on G-Cloud.

This quintet of firms have powerful insights to share on how they've built lucrative revenue streams around G-Cloud, where they've gone wrong, and what advice they would have for budding suppliers looking to get a toehold on the framework.

We count them down here in ascending order.

Risual

2019 G-Cloud sales: £1.26m (26th in VAR 350)
All-time G-Cloud sales: £4.57m
All-time G-Cloud ranking: 239th overall (28th in VAR 350)
Largest G-Cloud client: Highways England (£914,000)
Representative: Alun Rogers, founder

Where have you had the most success on G Cloud?
Primarily across data and cloud migrations.

What was your formula for success on G-Cloud last year? We put a lot of work into refining our portfolio. A few years ago, GDS looked at all the tech roles across government and standardised them. We took them and mapped that to our own consulting roles to make sure we're able to use DDAT [digital, data and technology] as a descriptor, because when clients go out through G-Cloud they may be looking for DDAT-compliant roles.

Has G-Cloud achieved its original aims?

It's been very successful in terms of opening up the market and introducing competition. But it's now at a point where it's probably less useful. It's no longer a list of premium suppliers who are capable of meeting a bar.
The smarter suppliers like us got on early and have done well. But now when you go for things there can be 100 people there. Your qualification needs to be really good now in terms of making sure you don't go for everything.

How could G-Cloud be improved?
Through some kind of grading or tiering, to make it clear to customers which suppliers put the most effort in.

We've started to apply to go into all the frameworks. One we've got on, NHS SBS, offers a lower commission than the commission CCS take on G-Cloud. And it's a more difficult qualification process. There were only 24 people awarded on it. It's a more discerning framework, and the clients can direct award and run mini competitions. So it becomes a better framework for them. The moral of the story might be the G-Cloud is good to cut your teeth and then once you mature - a bit like we did - you start to move into the traditional frameworks where they are a bit harder to get onto.

What is your top tip to start winning business on G-Cloud?
There are two routes. It's about making sure your offer is differentiated, but also offering something that people are looking for. Think about the search terms. Use an information service such as Global Data to understand what people are buying, and then make sure you are building portfolio and search items that match what the market is currently doing. That's something we put a lot of effort into. Because we're on G-Cloud, and DOS, we look on a daily basis and see what people are buying. And then make sure you've got some uniqueness about it.

The other thing is that it's not a build-it-and-they-will-come - you still need to go and sell it.

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Five top G-Cloud suppliers reveal their formula for success

Five resellers and MSPs that did over £1m in business through G-Cloud last year open up on their top tips and bugbears

Fordway

2019 G-Cloud sales: £2.5m (18th in VAR 350)
All-time G-Cloud sales: £18.8m
All-time G-Cloud ranking: 71st overall (8th in VAR 350)
Largest G-Cloud client: Chief Executive of Skills Funding (£6.7m)
Representative: Richard Blanford, CEO

Where have you had the most success on G-Cloud?
Predominantly secure hosting and cloud management, and we've got a service which is going pretty well into central government called Desktop as a Service. We have a few anchor customers that give us good steady revenue. Now that you can extend for up to four years we recently renewed a contract which gives us another four years with a major customer. We've got good referenceability with them and other customers - they'll happily recommend us to others.

What's been your formula for success?

Keeping talking to people and finding out what they're about. And making sure we keep our services descriptions up to date and that we actively tell potential customers that G-Cloud is a purchasing procurement route.

We also have good references. Anything we go and talk to a potential new customer about, we can back that up because we can point to people who are using it and like what we're doing.

Has G-Cloud achieved its original aims?
I think it has in part. Certainly it has helped smaller companies like ourselves get access to parts of government that historically we didn't think we could reach - particularly central government. When G-Cloud came along, we'd never dealt with any central government entities. And now it's about 40 per cent of our revenues.

What are your biggest gripes about G-Cloud?
I'd make the bar to get in slightly higher - but then, I'm biased.

The process now between the different versions is actually pretty slick. Where before reapplying for G-Cloud meant starting from scratch, now you can migrate services across and update them. The lack of pricing flexibility can be an issue but it's really up to you to get your pricing right in the first place. As an organisation we're benefiting from being on it. We get about one decent-looking enquiry a week, which is really good.

What's the biggest change from G-Cloud 11 to 12?
Because they only opened it [at the start of this month], I haven't looked at the documentation. But the changes they did between 9 and 10, where they changed the Lot structure, actually simplified it and made it a bit easier. From 10 to 11 there weren't a huge amount of changes. We're certainly were not expecting anything massively fundamental.

Do you feel that most public sector buyers are now aware of G-Cloud?
I think so. I do think there are quite a lot of buyers that are a little wary of it. There are some contractual terms inside it that I'm not sure buyers as well as some supplies like too much. If you're looking for a bespoke deal, then G-Cloud is not the way to find it - I'd move you towards Technology Services 2. If you're looking for a pretty standardised, repeatable cloud service, then G-Cloud's there.

What's your top tip for budding G-Cloud suppliers?
Firstly, making customers are aware that it's a route available to them to buy things. Secondly, properly define your services. Several enquiries have come in because we've got pretty well defined services and we spent quite a lot of time and effort making our service descriptions are correct, useful and pertinent. Get your documentation properly sorted and make it look good.

What's been your biggest mistake?
Certainly in the early days of G Cloud, and this wasn't necessarily a mistake, one of the biggest issues was the fixed two-year term. That did cause a lot of issues. We had one customer which took us a year to migrate, and then a year later they were having to redo the contract. And, it was absolutely painful for all of us. That's now gone. We've got the two plus two, which makes it much better. The second thing is, if you are doing a migrate-then-run contract, my best advice is to separate it into two agreements. The mistake we made - I think in G-Cloud 3 - was trying to put a customer in the same agreement. And then two years later, we had to redo it and the services had only been running for 12 months.

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Five top G-Cloud suppliers reveal their formula for success

Five resellers and MSPs that did over £1m in business through G-Cloud last year open up on their top tips and bugbears

Core Technology Systems

2019 G-Cloud sales: £2.6m (VAR 350 ranking NA)
All-time G-Cloud sales: £11.7m
All-time G-Cloud ranking: 117th overall
Largest G-Cloud client: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (£5.44m)
Representatives: Rye Austin (left), sales and marketing director; Paul Saer (right), head of public sector

Where have you had most success on G-Cloud?
RA: We've had the most success in the central government space. Our larger engagements in central government tend to go through the G-Cloud framework. Whereas smaller deals in the LRG space tend to go to other frameworks.

PS: I think central government is fairly comfortable with G Cloud and how it works. And they like to use the framework. When we step outside of the central government space, although most local government customers are aware that G-Cloud exists, not all like using it. So while we've had good success with customers in other areas of the public sector, most of the G-cloud spend we do is with central government agencies.

How has a relatively small firm like Core punched above its weight on G-Cloud?

RA: We have a lot of focus on the public sector- Paul heads a team of three people and we pride ourselves on creating some great solutions. I don't see G-Cloud as what's made that success. It's been a part of it and it's a great way for our [public sector] customers to engage with us.

PS: We've actually been at the forefront of a lot of cloud adoption. We did one of the very first migrations of a government department into Office 365. It was a particularly challenging one because they had people working in a global capacity, sometimes in unfriendly nation states. They wanted to work with a partner who understood the technology and how to secure it, and how to deliver something that was a little unusual. Core put forward the best story and ended up working with that customer, who's still with us now, seven, nearly eight years later. We were able to deliver a solution that matched the capabilities and service delivery of all the global SIs, while also adding a layer of complexity that those businesses aren't geared up for.

The one advantage smaller providers like Core have is the ability to be flexible. When you look at your large global SIs - the likes of Capgemini, IBM, DXC - because they're chasing volume business they have to be generic in the way they approach with opportunities. So if a customer's requirements are a little bit left of field, they're not necessarily a good fit.

Has G-Cloud achieved its original aims?

RA: It's definitely helped SMEs and startups engage with the public sector. It has taken the cost of sale right down. So it has massively helped. It set some quite ambitious targets and they're making progress on those. If I think back to around 2013, when all started out, for the three or four years that followed there was quite a lot of progress in growth towards SMEs. I'm not sure it's quite maintained that traction.

PS: One of the good things about G-Cloud from a supplier point of view is it enables us to shorten the sales cycle. But as Rye said, there are a lot of large providers on G-Cloud. I think the feeling was that probably this would be a stomping ground more for SME providers than for the larger providers, but if you look at the top ten suppliers, they are pretty much all global SIs.

What's your biggest G-Cloud bugbear?
RA: Normally, we wouldn't want to publicise in so much detail about what we do and how we do it. I do get that that's by design, and it has its benefits. But if you've got an interesting new solution you've built, it can be tricky to share that secret sauce quite as much as we have to.

PS: We have no issue being transparent with customers that want to buy the services. But that information is not just visible to the customers. That can be a challenge.

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Five top G-Cloud suppliers reveal their formula for success

Five resellers and MSPs that did over £1m in business through G-Cloud last year open up on their top tips and bugbears

SCC

2019 G-Cloud sales: £6.33m (4th in VAR 350)
All-time G-Cloud sales: £45.43m
All-time G-Cloud ranking: 25th overall (1st in VAR 350)
Largest G-Cloud client: Highways England (£19.53m)
Representative: Adam Clark, national sales director

Do you think G-Cloud has achieved its original aims?
We believe it has achieved and surpassed its original aims - and that the innovators within GDS should be proud of what they have achieved. What was initially launched as a disruptive framework has now become a key route to market for suppliers, proven by the £7.6bn that has been transacted since its launch in 2012.

What's your top tip for budding G-Cloud suppliers?

Don't rely on G-Cloud as a lead generation tool. Invest in producing comprehensive service descriptions and a G-Cloud savvy sales team. G-Cloud has revolutionised the procurement of IT related products and services but, ultimately, it is down to suppliers engaging with customers to understand their requirements and matching these to ‘off-the-shelf' services.

What is your biggest G-Cloud bugbear?
Pre-sales engagement is expensive and time consuming and can be compromised by the current search-driven procurement process. We understand the logic behind this, but it does increase the risk of no return on the investment in pre-sales activities.

Ahead of the imminent launch of G-Cloud 12, how could G-Cloud be improved?
The feedback from our customers is that serious consideration has to be given to how uniqueness is rewarded. There are far too many duplicate services, many of which are simply rebadged OEM propositions. This makes the search experience and shortlisting process onerous for the buyer.

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Five top G-Cloud suppliers reveal their formula for success

Five resellers and MSPs that did over £1m in business through G-Cloud last year open up on their top tips and bugbears

SBL

2019 G-Cloud sales: £6.7m (1st in VAR 350)
All-time G-Cloud sales: £9.93m
All-time G-Cloud ranking: 135th overall (17th in VAR 350)
Largest G-Cloud client: MoD (£6.14m)
Representative: Joel Berwitz, digital solutions director

SBL was the top G-Cloud provider in our market last year, with revenues topping £6m. Would that surprise some people?
Outside of our customer base we've not done a great job of telling people how credible we are in our market. We have over 30 years of heritage in delivering technology expertise to public sector organisations and have outstanding capability in driving transformative services into some of the largest government departments in the UK. That's why we're the number 1 in the market for G-Cloud.

Do you think G-Cloud has achieved its original aims?
In most senses it's been a success. There is now a path to market for innovative, smaller partners who previously would have found it difficult to get on the radar. We believe that outside of Central Government there is more to do in order educate in the wider sectors - it's our role as suppliers on the framework to help those organisations understand the benefits of procurement in this way.

What's your top tip for budding G-Cloud suppliers?
Our approach, not just with G-Cloud but in general, is to keep things as simple as possible. There can be a tendency to want to cover as much information and detail as possible in the submissions. However, we're certain that the more succinct and concise you are with all benefits and features your organisation is trying to convey, the more engagement you will get from a potential buyer - especially with the increasing amounts of suppliers/services to choose from.

What is your biggest G-Cloud bugbear?
More people don't use it! I think there is a lot more we can do on the whole to educate buyers in the market around the benefits of G-Cloud - that can be said of all the stakeholders in the process. Whilst the numbers are growing, we have a real sense that there could be so much more advantage if more buyers were aware of the benefits.

Applications to G-Cloud 12 opened on 3 March. From a supplier standpoint, what's the biggest change from G-Cloud 11?
Service description documents have been made mandatory, including detailed descriptions, the disaster recovery involved, onboarding and offboarding, and technical specifications. This makes good sense as customers are a lot more inclined and confident in purchasing a service if a supplier has a service description. It also makes the procurement process quicker and more efficient, as buyers get the clarity on what they are buying from the supplier rather than a service description which is centrally mandated.

How could G-Cloud be improved?
As we move into the next decade, the responsibility of suppliers to government will increase around social and environmental factors. SBL are in the process of becoming a Certified B Corporation, ensuring that we drive these responsibilities into the core of our business. I'm sure that future iterations of G-Cloud will have mandatory requirements to ensure that the delivery of solutions and services stands up to these measures.