TruNorth Dynamics CEO: Partnerships Extend Solution Capabilities, Business Opportunities

‘It doesn’t actually matter what it is–your clients need these things. It does affect you,’ TruNorth Dynamics CEO Ole Gjerde says.

Solution providers who find themselves frequently telling clients they can’t help with particular hardware or software needs might be letting go of a new revenue opportunity or opening themselves up to someone else stealing a client or a new additional partner doing shoddy work.

Partnering with fellow solution providers, new suppliers and software developers can help the solution provider go beyond their core capabilities, make more money in a revenue-share deal on a project or recurring business, Ole Gjerde, CEO of Castle Rock, Colo.-based Microsoft Dynamics solution provider TruNorth Dynamics, told channel partner business executives gathered this week at the 2025 XChange NexGen conference hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

Another benefit–by introducing the client to a trusted, vetted partner, the solution provider avoids low-quality products or services getting introduced into the client for the solution provider to clean up later,

“You have to stop saying no,” he said. “It doesn’t actually matter what it is–your clients need these things. It does affect you. So put in place a simple process to catch those things, to make sure they don’t go talk to random people, and you can make some extra money.”

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TruNorth Dynamics

Diana Giles, president of Edmond, Okla.-based Skyline IT Management, told CRN in an interview that she has seen Gjerde’s advice work. She landed one of her largest, favorite clients by agreeing to help with a custom application that had been built by non-developers even though the work wasn’t necessarily in her wheelhouse. She partnered with another company to help the customer move to Microsoft’s Azure cloud product.

“My main takeaway … was to have it (a partnering plan) ready,” she said. “To already know so that when you are on the phone, you can go, ‘Oh, yeah, we do have something for that.’”

Partner-to-partner (P2P) sales have been coming up in talks by Microsoft executives and Microsoft partner associations as a co-selling motion especially applicable to the ecosystem where Microsoft solution providers can build very specific practices that don’t compete with other partners.

For example, one Microsoft solution provider might have a business built around productivity applications such as Excel and Outlook, a second solution provider might have a security tools practice with Defender and Sentinel and other Microsoft products, a third partner might have a business built around Dynamics and Power Platform and business apps and a fourth could focus on devices such as Surface or Teams Rooms peripherals–with none of these solution providers actually competing with each other.

Microsoft’s Partner Center portal even allows partners to create a deal, invite other partners in the co-sell ecosystem to collaborate and invite a Microsoft sales representative to help close any deal. This portal function is available for services engagements and intellectual property (IP) ones, according to Microsoft.

The P2P strategy also extends to non-Microsoft products, with opportunities for Google partners to work with Microsoft ones, for example, and services and software partners to team up with ones offering copiers and security cameras and other physical devices.

Gjerde positions his company, TruNorth, as a partner for solution providers looking to expand their capabilities into Microsoft Dynamics, which is seeing plenty of use cases this year from clients who outgrow their existing accounting tools or seek more customization. Dynamics is also seeing migrations from legacy offers by Microsoft and other vendors, the CEO said.

Microsoft has introduced a variety of new incentives this fiscal year for Dynamics partners, including a 7.5 percent Growth Accelerator that applies to all growth within strategic workloads not only in Dynamics, but the Microsoft 365 productivity apps suite and Azure, according to an article by IT distributor Crayon.

The 7.5 percent growth accelerator rewards partners for year-over-year monthly revenue increases in business applications licensing. Dynamics growth is rewarded even if M365 or Azure see declines, according to Crayon. Microsoft did drop a previous 20 percent incentive solution providers received by activating Dynamics 365 for a net-new customer.

Solution providers can become a holistic technology adviser for clients with a Rolodex of partners ready to help with work the solution provider can't handle alone.

“It’s about the relationship with the client, being their guiding force around technology,” he said.