The Agency Moat: Why Service Partners Own the Customer with Ivan Stegic
By Sebastian Hoelzl,
Service partners hold the trust that SaaS vendors can’t buy. Ivan Stegic of TEN7 explains why open source is the only honest foundation for that trust — and how it turns an agency relationship into an enterprise distribution moat.
The agency that already holds a client’s trust doesn’t need to win a pitch — it just needs to be worth keeping. In an era when SaaS vendors are scrambling to recruit service partners to unlock enterprise accounts they can’t reach alone, the real leverage isn’t in the software stack. It sits with the agencies that have spent years inside the client’s organisation, navigating internal politics, recommending vendors without a referral fee, and measuring success in outcomes rather than licenses. That’s the argument Ivan Stegic, founder and CEO of TEN7, makes with quiet conviction. And he makes it from experience: nearly two decades running a values-driven Drupal agency in Minneapolis, watching the industry cycle through platform hype, SaaS consolidation, and now an AI wave that he thinks is being systematically oversold.
Chapters
- Why the agency’s role in a SaaS partner ecosystem is not to sell software but to act as an unbiased trusted advisor — and why that position is commercially more powerful than any reseller arrangement.
- How open source technology, specifically Drupal, creates a structural cost and flexibility advantage that proprietary all-in-one suites (Adobe, Sitecore) cannot match — and how to make that case to a non-technical CEO.
- The mechanics of a co-sell win: how TEN7 and Pantheon jointly replatformed a health system client, transferring trust from agency to hosting partner and closing a deal neither could have won alone.
- Why Ivan is sceptical of agentic AI at scale, and why he believes open source will dominate the digital experience market by 2030 — including what that means for how agencies and SaaS companies should be hiring right now.
- How a values-driven partner selection process — built on shared mission and ethics, not commercial incentives alone — produces stronger, more resilient client relationships and higher NRR.
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