Every Partner Demos Well: The Questions That Actually Separate Them
Choosing a Business Central implementation partner comes down to the questions you ask before you sign. Here's how the Top BC Partners Discovery Wizard turns your requirements into a shortlist — and into a checklist of questions to put to every partner on it.
Every Partner Demos Well: The Questions That Actually Separate Them
Sit through four Business Central partner demos in a week and a strange thing happens: they all look the same. Everyone shows a clean sales order flowing through to a posted invoice. Everyone's dashboards are colourful. Everyone has "deep manufacturing experience." Everyone says yes.
The demo is not where partners differ. The demo is a rehearsed forty minutes on a partner's own demo company, with their own tidy data, avoiding every part of the product that would be awkward for them. Where partners actually differ is in the answers they give when you ask a specific question they weren't expecting — and in whether you asked all of them the same one.
That's the whole thesis behind the Discovery Wizard, and behind this post.
The real problem isn't finding partners — it's comparing them
Most buyers we talk to don't have a shortage of options. They have a Microsoft partner finder page, a few LinkedIn conversations, and a referral from someone in their industry association. What they don't have is a way to hold those options next to each other.
So the comparison defaults to whatever is easiest to compare: the price on the last page of the proposal, and how much they liked the salesperson. Both are terrible predictors of how the project goes. The price moves the moment scope is clarified. The salesperson usually isn't on the delivery team.
A useful comparison needs two things the average buying process never produces:
, stable enough that you show the same thing to every partner.
A written statement of what you actually need
A fixed set of questions, asked of everyone, where the differences in the answers are the signal.
The Discovery Wizard exists to produce both in about five minutes.
What the wizard asks, and why each answer matters
It's five steps, and none of them are there for our benefit.
Your organization — industry, company size, and the region you need support in. Region matters more than most buyers expect. A partner three time zones away can absolutely deliver a good project, but "who do we reach at 6am on month-end close" has a different answer when nobody is awake.
Your BC project — new implementation, an upgrade from NAV/GP/AX, adding modules to an existing BC tenant, or support only. This single answer changes the entire risk profile. If you're on Dynamics GP, there is no in-place upgrade path to Business Central: it's a re-implementation with a data migration running alongside it. Buyers who don't know that shop for an upgrade quote and get blindsided by a re-implementation invoice.
Functional requirements — finance, supply chain, manufacturing, warehousing, projects, HR, eCommerce, BI, multi-entity. Pick the areas that matter and the questions you get back are keyed to them.
Timeline and budget — optional, but honest answers here get you honest answers back about whether your date is realistic.
Then you get your matches.
You don't have to hand over your email to see them
This is worth being blunt about, because it's unusual. The results are not gated. You complete the wizard, you see your ranked matches. No name, no email, no "we'll send your results shortly."
We ask for contact details in exactly two places, both of which are things you chose to do: when you click Connect with this partner, because a partner can't reply to a person with no email address; and when you ask us to email you a copy of your requirements pack, because that's an email. Nowhere else.
Gating results is the industry default and it's backwards. It trains buyers to enter throwaway addresses, and it sells your interest to a partner before you've decided you're interested in them.
Ranking is on fit — paid tiers are shown separately
The second thing worth being blunt about: tier plays no part in the fit ranking.
It used to. Gold and Verified partners carried a substantial ranking bonus, large enough that a Gold partner with no matching services and no presence in your region could outrank a Member partner who fit your requirements precisely. That was a directory ranking its advertisers, not its data, and we removed it.
Fit is now scored on what you told us: whether a partner's services cover the work you need, whether they cover the functional areas you selected, and whether they operate where you need support. Region and requested services carry the most weight; functional-area overlap refines the order.
Gold and Verified partners who pay for placement still appear — in a clearly separated Featured Partners block, under a note stating plainly that they did not make your top five on fit alone. Paid placement is a real part of how this site is funded. It just doesn't get to masquerade as a recommendation.
The part that actually matters: the questions
Every completed session produces a Requirements Pack — a one-page summary of what you told us, followed by a set of questions tailored to it. You can print it, or email it to yourself, and it is deliberately not specific to any partner on your list.
Its opening instruction is the argument of this entire post:
Ask all of them the same questions, the differences in their answers are where the real comparison lives.
Generic ERP question lists are useless because they're generic. Yours is assembled from your answers. A few examples of what that produces:
If you selected Supply Chain & Inventory, you'll be asked to ask: which costing method are you recommending — FIFO, Average, Standard — and why? Costing method is set per item and is genuinely difficult to change once you have transaction history behind it. This is a five-minute conversation in month one and a very expensive one in year two.
If you selected Manufacturing, the pack tells you to confirm in writing that the quote covers Premium, not Essentials. Manufacturing and Service Order Management sit in the Premium plan, and a user licensed for Essentials cannot sign in to a company running Premium. This is a documented Microsoft licensing boundary, and it is a routine source of surprise invoices.
If you're coming from NAV, the questions target customization: which of your existing C/AL customizations get rebuilt as AL extensions, which get replaced by standard functionality or an AppSource app, and which get dropped. And the one people forget to enjoy asking — how much of what you paid to customize years ago is now standard functionality you no longer need to maintain?
If you selected HR & Payroll, you'll ask which payroll product they're proposing. Business Central doesn't include payroll in most regions; it's designed to import posted payroll transactions from an external provider. The right question isn't "does it do payroll," it's "who builds and owns that integration long-term."
If you selected System Integration, the framing is release cadence: Business Central ships two major updates a year, so every integration is something that can break twice a year. Who tests yours against each release, and is that included or billed?
Four groups appear no matter what you selected, because they're where projects actually fail:
Licensing and running cost. Not the licence price, the all-in year-one number, and what year two looks like once implementation is done and you're just running the system.
The team who will actually do the work. Names, roles, percentage of their time, employees or subcontractors, and whether the people in the meeting are the people who deliver.
Support and life after go-live. What hypercare covers, for how long, what support costs when it ends, and written SLAs by severity.
Commercials, contract and exit. What's explicitly out of scope, what triggers a change order, whether you own your data and customizations, and whether another firm could pick up your AL extensions in three years.
Every price-bearing question in the pack is phrased as something to confirm with the partner rather than a number we assert, because your numbers depend on your scope, your region and your user counts. We're not going to guess them for you. We're going to make sure you ask.
Ask the exit questions while they're still selling to you. The answers are never as good later.
Five minutes, no email required
If you're at the start of a Business Central selection — or three demos in and quietly unable to tell the partners apart — run the Discovery Wizard. You'll get a ranked shortlist based on fit, and a printable set of questions built from your own requirements.
Even if you never contact a single partner through us, take the question pack into your next meeting. The list is the point.
Top BC Partners is an independent directory of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation partners. We are not affiliated with Microsoft Corporation. Paid tiers buy visibility, never ranking or review outcomes.