The SAP partner ecosystem has a revenue quality problem. Here is one way out.

One argument, two vantage points:
the adviser who sees hundreds of firms, and the practitioner who prices the work.

For decades, consulting firms have grown by selling expert capacity. Smart people, organised into projects and teams, monetised by the hour or day. It has been an extraordinarily successful model, and in the SAP ecosystem it still generates most of the revenue: implementation teams staffed against transformation programmes, application management contracts, day rates and utilisation targets.

However, we increasingly see the same challenge across these consultancies: difficulty winning new clients and building a predictable revenue pipeline without compromising on pricing, or stretching resources thin by continually customising pitches and project delivery.

This challenge is not temporary, and no type of consultancy is immune to it. It comes from a combination of pressures that have built up as the industry has evolved.

To be clear: it may not be possible to walk away entirely from the capacity-selling model, nor would I advise any consulting firm to do so. But it is worth rebalancing it with value-led work. That protects existing revenue while making scaling, pricing and the pipeline healthier.

1. The AI double squeeze. Many firms built a revenue stream of small, ad hoc work. In an SAP practice that looks like configuration documentation, test scripts, data migration mapping, ticket triage, quick-turn assessments ahead of steering committees. Traditionally a pyramid of juniors delivered this under senior supervision. AI and automation are moving exactly this work in-house, so firms cut the junior roles that handled it, and what remains gets pushed onto senior experts and sometimes partners. The squeeze is double: revenue pressure from the decline of small order-taker work, and cost pressure because higher-cost specialists are dragged into work that used to be leveraged.

2. Commercial sameness. Consulting firms increasingly look and sound alike, and AI has made it worse: every consultancy can now produce polished messaging, thought leadership, capability descriptions and proposals at unprecedented speed. The narrative looks impressive while the market fills up with more of the same. SAP partners sit under the same capability roofs, hold the same certifications and use the same language, giving buyers too little reason to understand why one firm is particularly relevant to their situation. That sameness creates a huge differentiation urgency. (I mapped the four commercial positions behind it in the first piece of this pair.)

3. Buyer hesitation. Client hesitation is the silent deal-breaker of consulting proposals. Leaders tell us the same story again and again: a prospect shows genuine interest, asks thoughtful questions, even agrees to a proposal, and then nothing. Calls are not returned; deals drift into limbo, not because the offer was wrong but because the buyer could not decide. In the SAP market this runs deeper than most, because an ERP decision is among the most consequential a leadership team takes. The prospect’s fear of choosing wrong, not the competition, is what stalls momentum.

4. Budget pressure. Consulting budgets face greater scrutiny, and transformation budgets most of all. Buyers must justify expenditure on external partners and demonstrate business impact. Loosely defined work becomes harder to defend when buyers need a stronger economic case. They are not looking for a firm that can “help with digital transformation using cutting-edge technologies”. They are looking for high-impact, measurable outcomes against meaningful business problems. The pressure is less about the budgets and more about tangible, demonstrable value.

Because these pressures bear down on revenue, we believe consulting firms need to shift a larger share of it from capacity-led to value-led work. The design principle: start with the value the firm wants to create, then design the business backwards from there. We call this The Shift. It rests on eight foundations: deliberate value focus; evidence from your best work; codified expertise and intellectual capital; specific, high-stakes propositions; repeatable client value creation; systematic proof; a commercial system built around value; and economics that reward repeatability. If utilisation is the only number on the dashboard, the firm is still selling capacity.

The natural question is what value-led work looks like in practice, on a real SAP account, with a real backlog. My co-author has been building exactly that, and I will let him describe it.

Every SAP customer I know carries the same quiet backlog: change requests the business wants, that IT has no capacity to build. They queue, and the value they would create decays while they wait. Classic consulting answers that backlog by selling effort: day rates, utilisation, a price that has nothing to do with what the change is worth. Procurement fights the rate, nobody is accountable for the outcome, and Luk’s four pressures do the rest.

Value-linked delivery turns the logic around. In the model I work with, the fee is derived from the value of the change, and it is paid on acceptance.

It runs in five steps.

1. Establish the value first. Before anything is priced, the business states what the change is worth and puts a named owner behind that number. We structure and pressure-test it into a one-page value case; IT co-signs that the change is feasible. The baseline always belongs to the business, never to the consultant. What cannot be confirmed stays marked as unknown.

2. Size the effort honestly. The delivery cost is estimated from a defined scope, as the floor under the fee, not as its justification.

3. Derive the fee from the value, conservatively. The fee is a modest share of the value all three parties have confirmed. If the calculation is in doubt, the low end of the range counts. And if even that number does not hold, there is a veto: the change request goes to classic delivery instead. A change that does not carry its value is disqualified, never priced up.

4. Build at risk, get paid on acceptance. Nothing is paid up front. Half of the fee is due when the MVP is accepted against a written definition, the other half at go-live against agreed criteria. The customer never pays for a promise; the provider finances the delivery and carries the risk. That risk is what the margin buys.

5. Run it across the backlog. Applied to a whole queue of change requests, the same method produces something most IT organisations do not have: a ranked portfolio of changes by confirmed value against effort. The high-value cases get built first. The queue stops being a grievance and becomes a plan.

Three signatures keep it honest: the business owns the value baseline, IT owns feasibility and the go-live gate, the provider owns the effort and the fee. Each of the three can veto. That is the whole governance, and it is enough.

The business

owns the value baseline · can veto a number it does not believe

IT

owns feasibility and the go-live gate · can veto a change that endangers the platform

The provider

owns the effort and the fee · can veto a case that does not carry itself

This is not a theory. It is how I price and deliver change requests today, and it is the most direct translation of Luk’s shift I know: the proposition is specific, the value is established before the work, the proof is systematic because acceptance is the payment trigger, and the economics reward repeatability instead of hours.

The question for the leadership agenda

The shift will be progressive; capacity revenue and value-linked revenue will coexist for years. But the direction matters, and the first step is small: take one change request from the backlog, establish its value with a named business owner, and ask what you would charge if the fee had to be earned on acceptance.

One question deserves a place on every SAP partner’s leadership agenda:

“How much future growth should continue to come from adding billable heads, and how much can come from getting better at monetising the expertise your best programmes have already built?”

Andreas has done what I ask every consulting leader to do: he has taken the shift out of the language of strategy and put it into the mechanics of an order form. Value-linked delivery is one way of building value-led revenue, and it will not be the only one. But look at what it contains: a specific proposition, value established before the work, proof built into the payment trigger, and economics that reward repeatability rather than headcount. Those are the foundations I find missing in most of the firms we review. The firms that build them will not escape the four pressures. They will simply stop being priced by them.

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Luk Smeyers has spent more than 20 years in the consulting business: European CHRO of Nielsen Consulting, founder of the analytics consultancy iNostix (acquired by Deloitte in 2016, where he led the analytics practice through its earn-out), and since 2019 founder of The Visible Authority, where he advises consulting firms on commercial performance. He writes The Authority newsletter; his Consulting Proposition Design Book is coming in 2026 (join the waitlist). More from Luk at The Visible Authority and on LinkedIn.

Andreas BORN is the publisher of sapperment and writes Executive Clarity. The delivery model described in part 2 is one the author operates commercially, outside sapperment; sapperment does not sell it.

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