Transcript

Alyssa Fitzpatrick:  The Microsoft ecosystem, those closest to us, they’ve evolved into a cloud-first mobile-first strategy. In the sense that we have shifted our cloud mix, our partner business to almost over 60% of our business is coming through the cloud. It is cloud-first business through our partners. Now this is a massive, massive change when you rewind five years ago when it was a lot of on-prem and we were looking how do we move to the cloud. Where we’ve really moved a large portion of our business to the cloud and we’re driving that business for our partners and for our customers.

Announcer:      Welcome to the Software Channel Partner Podcast where you’ll hear leaders of partner programs talk about their greatest challenges and most successful solutions. And now your host Louis Gudema, the president of revenue & associates.

Louis Gudema:  Welcome to the Software Channel Partner Podcast where we talk with leaders in software partner programs to learn about what’s working today. I’m Louis Gudema, the president of revenue & associates where we help companies grow faster by enabling their channel partners to market better and grow faster. Today, I’m talking with Alyssa Fitzpatrick, who for the past three years has been General Manager for Worldwide Partner Sales at Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft, Alyssa held senior channel and alliance positions at CA Technologies, Intel, Informatica, and Oracle and has won more industry awards than we have time to list. Alyssa, welcome to the podcast.

Alyssa:  Thank you so much. That’s quite an introduction. I appreciate that.

Louis:    Well, and thanks for coming on so quickly after your conference. I know those are so huge. A little recovery time is warranted. Your conference just ended a few days ago, so we’ll get to that in a few minutes. I saw on your Twitter account you have a beautiful shot of a sailboat, so I take it that you love sailing.

Alyssa:  Mmm, I do. I’ve been captaining sailboats for almost 30 years. It was one of those things early in my life where I realized I really wanted to sail a boat and I had to rely on other people and other folks that had taken that on as their skill. And so I was in my early twenties and decided I wanted to be able to pilot just about anything you can. So I got my captain’s license in my early twenties. I started racing cars, almost to the point of getting my pilot’s license and flying. But definitely sailing is a passion and largely because when you’re on the water and you’re sailing, you don’t really think about anything else. You think about the wind, you think about what you’re doing, where you’re going. And it is so freeing to be on the helm and on open water. It is. That’s the source of my peace, so I love sailing.

Louis:    No, it is wonderful. Yeah, I mean the water just being on the water in general, but sailing is wonderful. Have you seen the documentary “Maiden”?

Alyssa:  No, I haven’t.

Louis:    Oh, you’ll have to check it out. It just came out. it’s about an event that happened 30 years ago where a woman who was sort of in her early twenties as you were just describing, put together an all-women’s crew for an around the world sailing race.

Alyssa:  Wow.

Louis:    It’s really good. It’s really good.

Alyssa:  It sounds like one to watch.

Louis:    Yeh. Yeah. Check it out. All right. So in college you had the wisdom or foresight to study both computer science and finance. I can hardly imagine a better education for a future tech leader. And some of your CS work was in AI, which was a bit different then. So please tell us about your career path since then and what brought you to where you are today in terms of your work in the channel.

Alyssa:  You know, they always talk about being at the right place at the right time, and I couldn’t agree with that more. Obviously you’ve got to be prepared when that right place and right time comes. But when I was going to school, I went to school to get a finance degree. I figured I wanted a business degree and that would help me throughout in any way, shape or form. And as part of that business degree, I had to take some information sciences class and that’s where I learned that I was a really good coder. It just made a lot of sense to the way my brain functions. And that’s what led me to doing a double focus in college and doing computer science and finance. And as I went down the computer science route, what was really fascinating to me at the time, and this is 25-plus years ago, was object-oriented programming. Really learning how to create something and make it reusable many, many times. And that is so true today in everything that we do. Why create something twice? Create something and reuse it. And it was the same concept in code.

And that’s what led me to AI because as you build components that were reusable, they could get smarter and smarter along the way. And then you could build these different widgets or different things that could learn. And that’s what really took me down the path of AI.

So what I studied many, many years ago is nothing like what AI is today, but it was really the first frontier of what was possible and where you could go with it. And then as I started my career my focus really was on coding. I started out of the gates coding in C++. I also coded in many other of the older languages like COBOL and FORTRAN and really moved through the coding element of my career, the very beginning days. And as that evolved, I was sent to a project in Menlo Park. I was working for Anderson Consulting at the time, now Accenture, and they sent me out to a project in The Valley and there was a small company of about 13 people and they asked me to code C++ for the company. But also really get to understand the business model and what they were trying to achieve and spend some time with the CEO and learn what they were doing. And this was a new venture for Accenture at the time. They didn’t necessarily invest in smaller companies.

And what we ended up doing was the very first Accenture equity investment in the company. And the company at the time was called Siebel Systems. And so this was the very first true tech relationship between Accenture and Siebel. And I was at the heart of it that made it happen. And we brokered the original investment. I was on the core team leading that juncture and then I built out something called Siebel University, which was at the time we trained about 500 Andersen consultants to configure the Siebel product for implementation. So it was a post-sale configuration implementation.

And so in that process I realized what one large SI could do for one very small 13-person company. And that was really the birth of my career in partnering. And from that point on, everything that I did was around how two companies can come together and propel their sales and propel their destiny really by becoming closer and leveraging each other’s best practices, routes to market, marketing, all kinds of things.

And what I realized was there was so much opportunity in this space, in this tech space of aligning not just giants, but aligning everyone to really capitalize on what each other was building. And that’s really how my career kind of took me through from Accenture, I moved into Oracle, and I spent six years at Oracle, three in Redwood City, learning the business. And then I spent three years over in Europe, really understanding what is it like to work in a global economy. I hadn’t done that before, and so I had 39 countries in my region, which gave me a huge exposure to what other cultures are like, what it’s like doing business across borders, but also really taking me away from my American roots and letting me learn what it was like to do business in the world.

And then when I came back to the States, that’s when I jumped into Informatica, where I spent 10 years going from a 50 million company to a 500 million company. And really learning what it’s like to be in a startup and grow up and perform in a startup. And then that took me to Intel where I was able to see the merger of a large company like Intel combining with the company McAfee. And really merging those two ecosystems and seeing what it’s like to leverage a company that is a hardware firm and what that ecosystem looks like and how that business would really adopt a security business. And so that was a fascinating way to see how two companies come together or don’t come together.

And then ultimately I landed at Microsoft several years ago and this has just been an incredible journey to be able to come here at Microsoft at this time, when partnering has taken a completely new headline and it is so critical to everyone’s success. And so it’s just been really fun to watch what partnering does in this industry, watch the evolution of the technology in the industry, and what companies have done as they’ve consolidated and grown and partnered — build, buy or partner — you know is a common strategy throughout the last 30 years. It’s been a fun ride.

Louis:    So that really became your philosophy: How much more companies could do together than going off individually. Microsoft’s perfect partnering and the channel has always been keyed to Microsoft’s whole go to market strategy.

Alyssa:  Exactly. I think the thing that that’s been so critical with Microsoft is it’s always been a theme of how they’ve sold. And what’s been interesting is how the last five years, the evolution of that partnering model has had to take form. We can’t partner the way we used to partner in the past. And so Microsoft has had to lead the way in evolving the partnering motion. And I got to land here right at the heart of that, when that’s happening and be a part of it. So it’s being in a company that puts their money where their mouth is, and getting to actually change an industry at the same time.

Louis:    Yeah. So I want to follow up on everything that you just said in just a moment, but I first just want to ask two questions. One is tell people what the General Manager of Worldwide Partner Sales, what that role is at Microsoft, what that means.

Alyssa:  Okay. So what that means is within Microsoft we have a partnering organization called One Commercial Partner. And that’s where we have all of our partnering motions sit in one organization  Which means that we manage our partners through that organization. We have a very large marketing arm called our go to market team that takes the solutions that we build with our partners, the authors, the practices, the focus. And then we go to market with them together with Microsoft. And then there is the sales arm. So we build with our partners and manage our partners and we take our partners to market and then we sell with our partners. And those are three different motions so that we can have purity to our customers. So that the people that are building with our partners aren’t the people that are selling to our customers. That we have a matching that happens. We can build and stay pure to focus on our partner’s performance. But then our sellers can then work with any partner and sell to our customer according to the customer’s needs and wants and timeframe.

And so my team is the team that sells. And so we work with all of the partner managers, understanding the solutions. Work with the marketing team to make sure that we have the right demand generation and we have the right solutions that we’re taking to market. And our team is where the rubber meets the road. It’s where partnering intersects with selling. And so we work very closely with the Microsoft sellers, the account executives and their whole team, and partner closely with them to ensure that every single thing that they’re doing has a partner orientation.

And then we work with the partner organization to ensure that every single customer has some kind of a partner orientation, and that partners have the opportunity to work with our teams. We manage that intersection and so we also work with the business groups to make sure that we’ve got the right partners, that our business group can understand which solutions are going to market better Azure, which solutions are going to market better Modern Workplace. And that we have the right partners going to our customers at all times. And so we’re that orchestration, but we are also the sales arm for partnering. And when you think about Microsoft, all sales, almost all sales go through partners. That’s all going through the partner sales team within One Commercial Partner.

Louis:    So the figure that I’ve heard in the past, you kind of were alluding to it just now, is that 95% of Microsoft revenue is generated by partners.

Alyssa:  That’s very close to accurate. I don’t have the exact number because our business on the direct side is starting to grow. And so when we look at our direct business, which is our marketplace, we see that as both direct and partner, because it is our partners that are on our marketplace. And so when we look at that 95% that was a very pure number in the past where we can say, Yes, all of this revenue went through partner. Today it’s a little bit blended because we’re looking at what our marketplace is driving and that on our marketplace, you can select first and third party in the same order. And so that’s allowing our customers to have a hybrid order. And when we look at how our sales is, we don’t have a specific lens that says 95% of our sales are going through partners because our marketplace is now capturing sales for our partner in addition to us.

Louis:    Okay. Got it. It’s still a huge, huge percentage it sounds like. So how many partners does Microsoft now have?

Alyssa:  Louis that’s a loaded question. How many partners does Microsoft have, that changes on a daily basis and there’s a couple of reasons for that. First of all, we do have a population of partners that we manage with personnel. So as I mentioned before we have a group of partner managers that service our partners in a human-to-human basis. And that’s a very small population of partners. It’s usually the partners that are generating in a 60, 70% of the revenue for a specific area. And we’ll have people that are managing those partnerships on a day-to-day basis. But in addition to that, we have a full digitally-managed group of partnerships that go through our digitally-managed process and we sell with them the same way that we sell with our managed partners. And there is really not a difference in that experience except for that they’re working with us digitally rather than with a human being. And then in addition to that, we have our entire marketplace that for any partner that achieves co-sell ready status, they are a partner on our marketplace. Whether they choose a digitally managed or a personal managed path or no path of management, they are partners.

So that number does change on a day-to-day basis as partners are born or partners choose to leave us. That is absolutely an ever-rotating door but we are looking at how do we bring in a much larger, more inclusive marketplace to make sure that all of our partners find the way that they want to sell to their customers through Microsoft. Whether it’s personally managed, digitally managed or through the marketplace, we’ve got a home for them all. The number changes daily, but it is in the many, many thousands.

Louis:    I mean I had heard in the past like hundreds of thousands.

Alyssa:  Yes, yes. Hundreds of thousands.

Louis:    Okay.

Alyssa:  And there’s small guys that are growing up every day, new people that start companies and they can join today and be a partner. So there’s a huge open door for any kind of partner out there.

Louis:    You alluded to something a few minutes ago when you were talking about how much the partner program has changed in the last five years, which coincidentally is how long Satya Nadella has been the CEO of Microsoft. And he, a few years back announced a new strategy for Microsoft, which was Mobile-First Cloud-First. Even before we were talking today — I thought that had to, a major strategic change like that had to have a huge impact on your partner program. So how has that strategy affected the partner program and how has your partner program changed over the last five years?

Alyssa:  You know, you’re absolutely right. Some of the things that Satya has put in place several years ago are coming to fruition today. And I think that’s why Microsoft is on such an incredible trajectory right now. We’ve made the hard changes and we’ve done the hard work and we’re reaping the benefits. I joined three years ago, it was actually three years ago, several days ago, I just hit my three-year mark. And the reason that really brought me to Microsoft is because I saw the changes that Satya was making. And it is incredible what one person can do to really change the path of a company. And by coming forward with a Mobile-First Cloud-First strategy, but as well an inclusive strategy, looking at all operating systems and looking at all technologies and looking to blend how we are going to market together with our partners and with the other technologies out there rather than try to say it’s Microsoft only.

And so with that open mind and looking at where the industry is going, it did change how we partnered. And we looked at our partners and thought, how do we get our partners to take on a mobile-first cloud-first strategy. And years ago, four years ago, three years ago, we started really driving the cloud adoption and we changed our incentives. We changed the way we talked to our partners. We changed our technology readiness. We changed the way that we were building our marketing strategies, all of that surrounded the cloud-first mobile-first mentality. So that we were really driving our partnerships as well as our own technology adoption towards customers that were taking on cloud. And so as we were building solutions, we weren’t building any more on-prem solutions with our partners. We were building migration solutions, and solutions in the cloud.

And so over the last four, five years, we’ve evolved the Microsoft ecosystem, those closest to us, they’ve evolved into a cloud-first mobile-first strategy. In the sense that we have shifted our cloud mix of our partner business to almost over 60% of our business is coming through the cloud. It is cloud-first business through our partners. Now this is a massive, massive change when you rewind five years ago when it was a lot of on-prem and we were looking how do we move to the cloud. Where we’ve really moved a large portion of our business to the cloud and we’re driving that business for our partners and for our customers. That’s changed the way we develop together. And it’s really changed the relationship that our partners have with our engineering. It’s given a lot closer of a relationship to our partners because the way that they’re building is not building for resell. They’re building for solutions that our customers can adopt, and they’re building for service-based solutions for customers.

So it’s really morphed the ecosystem as well as how we work with our partners as a company driven this cloud adoption and brought our partners together with us. And also really looked at some of those partners that are leading us through this and jumped on the train with them.

Louis:    So you talked before about having some partners where you had personally managed relationships and these were, you know, driving a large portion of the partner revenue. On the podcast when I’ve interviewed people at other companies, they’ve talked about how a lot of their partners that had been around for a longer time were very comfortable in the on-premise world, not so comfortable in the cloud, not so comfortable with SaaS moving from sales to subscription and everything that that moved from on-premise to cloud involved. So how did you, and how are you helping your partners at Microsoft make that transition since that’s so central to your strategy now?

Alyssa:  You know it is central and it is something that is a painful transition moving from that on-prem world, go through a disruption in the company, in your company from a financial perspective as you move from an on-prem world to the cloud. And it is challenging for all sizes of companies, small, medium, large. And so what we have seen within Microsoft is as we are driving from a resell model where we had strong incentives around partners reselling our technology into a cloud world where we don’t have the same kind of margin availability in the cloud. And that really changes the form of their business. Rather than making margins on a resell to a customer and being finished with that transaction and moving on. Today that is the start of the engagement with our customers, is a transaction is the point in which we get a tighter engagement. So that our partners and Microsoft stay much closer to the customer as they deploy and start to consume and use the technology in the cloud, and we support them in that process.

And so moving from a one-time moment-in-time revenue moment to a continuum of engagement with customer driving a monthly revenue stream changes the model of a company. It is a completely different business. And so as our partners go through this transition, we’re supporting them in that process. And we’re helping them by understanding what their challenges are and sitting down and doing business planning with our partners. And when there are times and places in which we need to co-invest to help get over the bridge that goes from on-prem to cloud and sometimes we need to help each other in doing that, we’re sitting down and making sure that we have business plans together with our partners to get across that chasm. So that we can all join in that cloud world and drive our business into the future.

But that process has been going on for probably the last 10 years, as companies transition from on-prem to cloud, and it will continue to go on for many more years. And so it is a, it’s a process that companies have to make a decision and they have to be very thoughtful and planful in their steps as they transition from on-prem to cloud, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to identify where it’s changing your financial model so drastically that the bigger partners that you work with may have the ability to give you that helping hand. And there’s also other partners in the industry — and we are working really closely on driving a partner-to-partner engagement motion — where we’re seeing smaller companies work with larger companies, whether they’re distribution companies or SI’s to help them go through this transition.

And so I look to the ecosystem and say, Guys, don’t be afraid to talk to each other or talk to us so that we can understand how you’re going through this process and help you. We want to all get through this transition together, but we’re going to have to help each other.

Louis:    Yeah. I’m sure that for some companies that partner-to-partner relationship can be, you know, a little challenging or a new kind of way of doing business too.

When you talk about getting these partners up to speed on cloud and mobile and moving away from on-premise and working with them on business plans and educating them: Can you do that with both the partners that you have that personal relationship with and the ones that you have that more automated relationship with?

Alyssa:  Yeah, so with the digitally engaged we do put some more onus on the partner to really develop their business plan and bring that to us. It really comes down to how are they driving their business and then we can plug in and support them. When it is a managed partner, it does give us the ability to sit down and person to person do that co-planning together. In the digitally managed that does mean that there’s a ton of opportunity for those digitally managed partners. We do not keep opportunity only for the managed partners, and keeping in mind that it is a small group of partners that are managed partners. The bulk of our partners and the bulk of our opportunity are really in the digitally managed and that’s where we focus a lot of our time and energy. Because we know that is where the larger population of our partners are. So the most success that a partner will yield coming out of a Microsoft engagement is when the partner really understands their business, their strategy, and how Microsoft can help them. And so partners that do their homework are typically the partners that are the most successful with Microsoft. And so we do look at a handshake in working together, but we also rely on our partners to know their business and run their business and sell their business and we want to support them in doing so.

Louis:    Well I’ve heard also that there’s something like $9 of revenue for the partner for every dollar of Microsoft revenue when they’re implementing your solutions and creating new solutions along the way. So that’s a pretty huge carrot to have.

Alyssa:  It is. And obviously that is an average across the solutions that we have. But there is a huge opportunity when there’s a Microsoft solution being implemented by a customer, there is a large amount of services and a large amount of cross-sell and upsell opportunities there. And so when a partner gets engaged, the $1 of Microsoft license revenue does translate to a large amount of revenue for a partner for implementation, for migration, for hosting and management of the service, but also for driving additional services to the customer. Really the goal of the partner is to work with a customer and understand what their strategy is, what their journey is, and help them along that path. And stay close to that customer along the journey. It’s not, as I said before, it’s not a revenue moment. It is a revenue run rate that we’re looking for as we go forward together.

Louis:    You’ve talked about Partner First at Microsoft. So what does that mean for you? What does that mean for partners? How do you execute on that?

Alyssa:  You know this is something that I actually talked about last week at Inspire, when we were talking about how we’ve always said that Microsoft is a partner led, partner first company. Even myself throughout the years that I’ve been working in the industry, I have seen always a Microsoft theme that partners come first and that we lead with partners.

Where I see the difference today is that we’re really putting our money there. We’re really making the statement, not just saying partners first. We understand the fact that today more than any other day in the past, our success is relying on our partner’s success. We will not succeed without our partners succeeding. And that shift in the industry has given a lot of power to our partners. And the news last week would show you how much power our partners have. But how much Microsoft listens and values and respects our partners. When we made some announcements to changes to our program, right before Inspire, a few days before Inspire, we got a lot of pretty negative feedback on the changes that were being made. And as an organization and as a leadership team, we sat down and discussed those changes. And we read all of the feedback from our partners and realized, We’ve got to make a change here.

And so we pulled back on those significant changes that we were landing for this fiscal year as a result of our partner feedback, because we know that our partners’ success equals our success. That was not necessarily the case in the past to the degree that it is today. If our partners do not succeed, if we do not figure out how to drive a much faster success and a much-accelerated trajectory in their business, we will not succeed. We are completely tied to our partner’s success. And that’s why everything that we’re doing as we build with our partners and take them to market specifically around marketing support and driving them to build that demand from our customers and then executing sales together with them. We have built this organization and this structure so that we can harness our partner’s success, because we are reliant on that 100%.

So that’s really the shift that’s happened at Microsoft. It’s not just a partner-led business. It is a partner business and we must be successful with our partners in order to actually win in the cloud.

Louis:    So that sounds like a very agile relationship that you know, as you got the feedback to the program, you were able to, or you’re going to be making some changes to it along the way. A couple of years ago, just one year into your time as general manager, you consolidated and simplified over 150 partner programs down to just six.

Alyssa:  Yes.

Louis:    How smoothly did that go? Did you run into a lot of issues rolling that out or how did that go? Because that sounds like a massive change to try to undertake.

Alyssa:  It was, and I actually, it’s funny because when I look back on that, two years ago, and how fundamental and impactful those changes were as we consolidated and really drove simplicity and clarity in the partner program. As we rolled that out, that was so well received.

So the genesis behind that massive restructuring that we did two years ago was really, number one, to drive the simplicity and clarity, but number two, we had many, many different elements of partnering across Microsoft. Partnering was happening in our business groups. Partnering was happening in our segment teams. Partnering was happening obviously in our areas, in our subsidiaries, all in a unique way. So our partner experience was diversified across the organization and across the globe. And our partners were getting to the point where you know they got one answer from one person, they’d call another person at Microsoft, get another answer and call another person and get another answer.

And we had no coordination in our partner programs, in the sense that as we were funding our partners, we weren’t aware of other funding that they may be getting. Or we weren’t aware of how they were engaging with one business group versus the other to really capture the power of the relationship that they had with Microsoft.

So by consolidating everything into One Commercial Partner program that gave us visibility into our partner’s performance and how we were building our relationship with them. It gave us visibility into what our partners were driving, truly driving for Microsoft. And then it also allowed our business groups to understand what our partner programs were, how we were driving our partners forward, and what mattered to them from a technology perspective. That’s allowed us to really look at how do we go across all three Microsoft clouds? How do we look at our partnering and not just Here’s our Modern Workplace partners, here’s our Azure partners. But how do we open up the opportunity to our partners across all three clouds?

So by bringing all of these partner programs and the organizations together into one team, two years ago, it gave us a whole new way to work with our partners. Now, two years later, as that model has matured and we’ve gone through the typical bumps and bruises that you have along the way with a new program and a new structure to the organization, we’ve learned a lot and we’ve really smoothed out a lot of those road bumps along the way.

And what we’ve learned in how the organization is landing, we’ve learned what really works in the field and what doesn’t. So we’ve taken a lot of feedback from our areas and from our field leadership that has told us, Okay, this is working and this is not.

So I believe that today where we are two years post the major restructuring is we’ve learned a lot and I think we’re at the place where we’re really starting to make things happen with our partners and push the pedal down and really hit top speed. I think that there’ve been a lot of challenges through the execution of this. But I am absolutely floored with what we’ve been able to do over the last two years as we’ve gone through the changes that we’ve landed.

This year, there were much fewer changes that came through the Inspire conference to our partners for this fiscal than we’ve seen in the last two years. So a lot of it is business as usual. Let’s keep going, let’s keep doing what you’re doing and doing more of that. And so that’s a lot of the message that we had this year was Figure out what you’ve been doing really good and do it great. And we’re going to do the same with you. So not a lot of huge changes because we wanted to keep consistency and predictability to our partner base as we go through this year.

Louis:    Yeah, well it’s not surprising it would take a little time to kind of work out a bit and perfect what you rolled out two years ago it’s such a huge change, you don’t turn an ocean liner overnight. But you’ve mentioned your Inspire conference a few times now and it was just last week. So why don’t you tell people what that is and what are your goals for holding that?

Alyssa:  So we have a conference, our partner conference, once a year and it happens the third week of July every year. And the last several years it’s been in Las Vegas. And we bring together all of our partners from around the world. And the intent is to share with our partners what is our new fiscal year strategy and what are the new incentives, what are the new programs, how are we going to market, how do they need to align with us, and what do they need to know to execute for the next 12 months? We combined that with our internal sales kickoff called Ready. And so the two conferences happened at the exact same time, so that we’re arming our fields at the same time we arm our partners with how are we going forward for our next fiscal year.

And so we don’t differentiate in the sense that the timing is exactly the same. Our internal staff gets the same message at the same time as our partners. We had about 16,000 I believe partners in Las Vegas last week, and we talked to them a lot about what is the new co-selling motion for Microsoft. What is the evolution in how we’re co-selling together. What do you need to know around our product evolution and where are we going from a product and technology perspective. As well as what does our marketing arm look like. How are we going to market, what are the offers that are available to you globally and in market so that you can adopt and really drive your in-market performance.

And so we sit down with our partners for three full days. It was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of last week. And actually it ended up being many days on the front end and many days on the back end. But we sit with our partners and really work on how are we going to execute for the next fiscal year. And then at the same time we share a lot of best practices. I was on stage with them at least 12 partners last week in different facets, whether it was a panel or a main stage presentation, talking about the things that they did over the last 12 months that other partners can learn from. And how we are going forward for the next 12 months and the types of programs that are going to help really drive their business and where we as Microsoft are focusing our time and energy for our customers.

And so this conference really does shed light on everything that partners need to know. But they also spend time together. A lot of what I was talking about last week in addressing the partners was to ask partners to look around the room in the room that they were in and start to build relationship with those partners. And start to pull Microsoft out of the middle of the ecosystem and put our customers in the middle. And figure out how do we look at all the partners that are selling to that customer we’re selling to and unify our strategies. Really come together with all of our friends in the industry so that we can support our customers in a better way, and look at Microsoft as one of those vendors in that ecosystem. Because if we can look at our customers as the focal point and build our relationships and our go-to market strategies together, then we have an unbeatable approach.

And so really Inspire to me was all about partners coming together, Microsoft coming together with our partners and looking at how are we going to align forces for the next 12 months.

Louis:    Okay. So you’ve said something, I’ve heard you say it before. I actually haven’t heard this term before, but you talk about motions a lot. And what exactly do you mean by that? Because when I Googled business motion, I got something about the House of Parliament.

Alyssa: [laughs]

Louis:  And how they had motions to bring something to the floor. So what do you mean when you talk about motions?

Alyssa:  You know, that very much could be a Microsoft term. I’ve definitely adopted the Microsoft vocabulary. But when we talk about motions at Microsoft, it really, it comes down to a sales motion. When I use the term motion and I actually think that there’s three sales motions with Microsoft and our partners. Three motions that we can sell to our customers. And the first motion is what we call a co-sell motion. And co-selling with Microsoft happens when there’s a Microsoft seller and a partner engaged together selling to a customer. The customer in this case would be one of our managed customers. And Microsoft only manages about 45,000 customers in the world. And so every other customer we consider digitally managed. This is the same kind of paradigm we have with our partners, where we manage our top-performing partners with our customers. We manage our top-performing customers with account managers. And there’s an opportunity to co-sell with our account manager teams and our partners. And that’s only for our managed customers. Any other customer would be a selling with Microsoft motion.

And so selling with Microsoft can happen in two flavors. So there is one sales motion with a seller and that’s called co-sell. And then there’s two other sales motions. One is through other partners, we consider partner to partner to be a sales motion with Microsoft, where Microsoft will help support one partner engaging with another partner selling to a customer. This can be with or without Microsoft, running on a Microsoft cloud. So for example, when there is an ISV with a great solution running on Azure, they sell to a customer and an SI joins that sales cycle to do the implementation, that is a partner-to-partner play where Microsoft is actually not engaged in the sales cycle, but it is ultimately running on a Microsoft cloud on Azure. And therefore we capture that as a partner to partner sales motion.

And then the final sales motion is on our marketplace, where we consider that self-service to our customers. So a customer can self-serve on the marketplace and as I was mentioning earlier, a customer can go to our marketplace, they can choose first-party Microsoft solutions and combine that with third-party partner solutions, whether it’s an ISV or an SI or a reseller. So they would be able to bring all of that together in one bill so that they have one order with Microsoft on the marketplace. And so that’s a self-service motion. Granted that is a partner motion where our partners produce the solutions that are hosted on our marketplace and the right kind of links between other partners so that a customer can go to our marketplace, select Microsoft solutions, partner solutions and partner services and have one solution that they can self-procure themselves.

So self-service, co-sell or partner to partner. Those are three sales motions that we work with at Microsoft and we look to our partners in the way that they are executing to align in one of those three ways and that’s how we support them.

Louis:    All right, great. This has been terrific and I appreciate you taking the time especially so shortly after the conference because I’m sure there’s plenty of rest that you’ll be wanting to get. But what should I have asked you about that I didn’t? What keeps you up at night?

Alyssa:  You know what really keeps me up at night is the industry cultural shift that has to happen. Because I’m working tirelessly at Microsoft to really build that partner mentality in our sales organization. Because when I talk about the three motions, the hardest motion is you can imagine is that co-sell motion. The partner to partner, there are so many partners out there that want to engage with each other and can see the road to faster success and bigger success by combining forces. We also realize that if you build it, they will come. So we know we have to be in the marketplace. We know we’ve got to present ourselves in a differentiated way so that customers can discover us and procure us in a marketplace.

So those two motions we understand and we have some control over that. It’s the co-sell motion that gives me a lot of sleepless nights. Because it’s not just trying to shift the mindset of the Microsoft sellers. It’s the mindset of every other technology seller out there, because we all have to work together. If I win in getting every Microsoft seller to not open their eyes without partnering, I have to do the same thing with the sellers that they need to work with. So I look to the industry and say, while I’m working at this, I hope you all are doing the same thing. We’ve all got to work with our sellers. We’ve got to work with our sales organizations in our companies and propel that shift, that mindset change for sellers to understand that they shouldn’t show up to a knife fight alone. They need to bring all their friends.

Sellers can sell so much more when they show up with a unified strategy to their customers. They build their friendship network before they show up to the customer. They understand what the customer’s journey is. Who are the partners they’re buying from? How do we align our strategies together? When we win, that will be when a seller wakes up and thinks, Before I call my customer, I need to make sure that I’ve got all of my partners, all of the inputs that that customer may feel, they’re all saying the same story.

That’s what keeps me up at night is changing that mindset of those sellers. And so I’m working very hard. I’m building it from the bottom up and from the top down within Microsoft as an internal cultural shift, an inclusive partner mentality that can only be successful if the sellers that the Microsoft sellers engage with have that same mentality.

And so I ask everyone in the ecosystem, let’s all do this together because we’ve all been trying for years and years and years in a partner organization to change the way our sellers think. This is the year to do it, this year, next year, the year after. This is the time that we have to change the mindset of our sellers and become an inclusive sales mentality and sell together, that’s how we’re going to win.

Louis:    Alyssa, how can people contact you and learn more about the Microsoft partner program? LinkedIn, email?

Alyssa:  Absolutely. So LinkedIn you’ll find me at @alysfitz, I use that a lot. It’s the first four letters of my first name, and the first four of my last name. So alysfitz, that’s where you’ll find me on LinkedIn. You’ll find me there on Twitter and that is my email address, alysfitz at microsoft.com. So that’s where you’re going to find me. And I’m on LinkedIn a lot. I tweet a lot, within Microsoft, feel free to reach out to me directly. We’ll route your question. And we absolutely want to help our partners move into this changed mentality of our ecosystem, but also really build this unified strategy together. And so every partner matters. If you’ve got questions, you’ve got comments, you’ve got just suggestions or feedback, we are here to listen and learn.

Louis:    All right, terrific. And I’ll put those into the show notes at revenueassociates.biz. So thank you for joining us today, Alyssa. This was terrific. I really appreciate it. I’ll be sending you a copy of my Bullseye Marketing book as I do all guests in appreciation.

Alyssa:  Awesome. Thank you.

Louis:    And if you are listening to this on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or another app, and you found this conversation with Alyssa as interesting and fascinating as I did, please leave a review. That will help other people learn about the podcast too. Thank you for listening to the Software Channel Partner Podcast. And please subscribe and listen to future episodes.