Cloud Champions II - Business is better with Office 365 – view on demand and access resources
In today’s Cloud Champions II webinar we heard from Caroline Stanford how to grow your business with Office 365. If you missed the webinar or want to review the content you can access it on demand.
THE BLOG BELOW IS POSTED ON BEHALF OF CAROLINE STANFORD – SENIOR PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER – OFFICE 365, MICROSOFT CORPORATION
Thank you again for your time today to discuss Office 365 and the opportunity it offers you and your customers. As you can probably tell by now, we are incredibly excited by what Office 365 is doing in the market – the customer scenarios it unlocks and the success it can mean for partners. We are seeing fantastic momentum with the product both in Australia and more broadly, and we thank you for everything you have done to help drive that growth.
There is still work to be done, however, to make sure current and potential customers understand what the product is and what it can really do within their organizations. In our session today we covered some of the most common misconceptions we hear, as well as some core value attributes for you to land as you introduce customers to Microsoft’s cloud and Office 365 more specifically. We also talked through the key selling scenarios you should prepare for with your selling teams. One thing we often hear in contrast to some of our competitors is that our line-up of products is too complicated, and navigating “what to sell” too difficult for our partners. We’d encourage you instead to look at the opportunity to customize a solution for your customer’s specific needs, while focusing your attention and sales training most heavily on the key hero offers. Our experience with top performing partners has shown that the vast majority of selling situations fall into the three big categories we covered (customers coming to you for Office, customers looking for email solutions, and customers who want to “move to the Cloud” in a more holistic sense), and simple frameworks can help you quickly identify the right solution to pitch.
Microsoft offers different business models to our resellers because we want to enable you to sell Office 365 in a way that best suits your business model and P&L. Each program offers its own benefits, and we’d encourage you to work with the local team and your other channel partners to decide which model or models will work best for you.
In closing, I want to leave you with our commitment to continue delivering on the promise of the cloud – which we demonstrate everyday through our commitment to product innovation. Over the past few months alone we have shipped dozens of updates and improvements to the product, rolling out expanded feature sets, deeper IT controls, and even new apps for additional platforms – all at no additional cost to our subscribers. We have also continued to invest in tools and capabilities that help our partners sell and manage their customer base. We want to empower you to sell on this mindset – an Office 365 subscription provides ever increasing value to your customers, and opportunities for you as partners to grow your revenue and customer loyalty by building on the platform.
Thank you as always for your time, commitment, and partnership. We look forward to working together to bring cloud productivity to more and more customers. Happy selling!
Caroline Stanford
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
Below are some useful resources following today’s session:
- Register for Office 365 Summit March 30th to 31st in Sydney
- Watch the video on Making Money and building a business with Office 365
- Learn how to stay across the latest Office 365 service updates
- Build your Learning Path for the Cloud Productivity Competency