Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: Email | RSS | More

A Top Microsoft Partner CEO Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

If you want to learn what the best Microsoft Partners do better than the rest, join me for this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering®. Quisitive has been on a tear and highly differentiated itself by partnering with Microsoft and providing its customers with various services and capabilities. Mike Reinhart, their CEO, and I discuss how this leading Microsoft Cloud Partner harnesses the partnership to drive success.

Quisitive has focused on creating long-term partnerships with its customers, helping them on the transformation journey toward adopting and integrating cloud technologies to achieve successful business outcomes. He believes that partnerships play a critical role in creating a competitive advantage in enabling organizations to achieve their greatest results.

In Mike’s Words

Mike Reinhart founded Quisitive in 2016 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer and Board Director. With more than 25 years of experience leading national Microsoft IT services firms, Mike has a strong reputation with Microsoft leadership and a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry.

Well known for his acumen in IT strategy, professional services, management, software as a service and business intelligence, Mike has built a culture within Quisitive to always drive value for customers and partners. He has been able to grow the company quickly, focusing on geographic scale through organic growth and strategic acquisitions, industry services and solutions, and the development of first-party SaaS solutions.

What You’ll Learn

• How Mike started in the Microsoft Ecosystem? (2:11)
• How the shift to the cloud influenced the way Microsoft engaged partners (4:28)
• His decision process in acquiring companies. (9:03)
• Why do customers choose Quisitive? (13:20)
• What are the best opportunities in the cloud? (18:06)
• The Importance of understanding how your partner gets paid? (26:39)
• Career Journey, Dinner Party, and Advice for 2023 (31:22)

Creating Ultimate Partnerships

Let’s face it, we all have seen partnerships that look good on paper but never live up to their expected results. There are many reasons why partnerships fail, and at Ultimate Partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and frameworks. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website.

A Great Masterclass Episode, Partnering with Microsoft

Other Links from this Episode

Quisitive LLC

https://podfollow.com/ultimate-guide-to-partnering

FREE OFFER from PartnerTap

Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Typos

Our Sponsors

• Learn more about PartnerTap
• Athletic Greens Free Offer for you!

Resources

• Find Ultimate Guide to Partnering Episodes
• Subscribe Apple, Spotify,  Google,  Audible, CastBox, Stitcher, Player FM most other platforms.
• Rate & Review – please, this helps more listeners find us!
• Follow LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Facebook.
• Drop a line vincem@ultimate-partnerships.com.

We are so excited to welcome Athletic Greens as our latest sponsor. My daily ritual has included a “green drink” supplement for over 20 years ago. AG1 is packed with 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens. If you’d like to join me, give AG1 a try. Athletic Greens is giving away a free one-year supply of Vitamin D and Five Travel Packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athleticgreens.com/vincem

PartnerTap is the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine.

Transcription – by Otter.ai –

Expect Plenty of Typos & Grammatical Errors

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

microsoft, business, partnering, organization, customers, partnerships, building, partner, services, create, partners, helping, kinds, cloud, journey, azure, mindset, technology, industry, mike

SPEAKERS

Announcer, Mike Reinhart, Vince Menzione

00:00

One Microsoft Partner harnesses the power of the cloud to achieve successful business outcomes. My next guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering is the CEO of a Microsoft partner who intuitively understands the power of partnerships in building a successful publicly traded company.

Announcer  00:19

This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Menzione, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host Vince Menzione.

00:39

Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to bartering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host, and today I will. Mike Reinhardt is the Chairman and CEO of Quisitive , Quisitive  has been on a tear and is able to highly differentiate itself by partnering with Microsoft and providing a range of services and capabilities to its customers. Mike and I discuss how the shift to the cloud has been a game changer in the technology industry and is required a change in mindset for many organizations, Quisitive  has focused on creating long term partnerships with its customers helping them on the transformation journey toward adopting and integrating cloud technologies to achieve successful business outcomes. He believes that partnerships play a critical role in creating a competitive advantage and enabling organizations to achieve their greatest results. I hope you enjoy this episode. As much as I enjoyed welcoming Mike Reinhardt. Mike, welcome to

01:44

the podcast. Thanks, Vince. Great to be here.

01:47

I am so excited to welcome you as guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. You’re the chairman and CEO of acquisitive and we met way back when I was an executive at Microsoft. So welcome. Thanks. So Quizlet live has been on a growth chair. You’re a publicly traded company. But for our listeners who do not know you in the company, I was hoping you could describe yourself and your organization.

Mike Reinhart  02:11

Yeah, I’m a longtime technologist. 30 plus years working in around technology and helping use that technology to create business outcomes. Fortunate to start my career Early on in the male health clinic chain working in hospitals. But really my what I described as my developmental years was at Medtronic, a large biomedical device manufacturer and fortunate enough to travel the world with them, really learning how to use technology as they grew from about a $300 million business when I started to about five or 6 billion when I left, I won’t take too much credit for any of that growth. But what it was was an incredible growing and learning experience for me. And now for the last 26 years I’ve been leading in Building Technology Services partners partnering with Microsoft that do that for many enterprises, rather than inside the four walls of one and along the way, have learned a lot about working with Microsoft and placed a bet on them back in the late 90s. Before they really were an enterprise player and understanding that I saw an opportunity to really become a differentiated partner and have been doing that for a long time and launched Quisitive  in 2016 really centered around this fundamental shift happening in the cloud and and how it was going to change the way customers consume technology within from Microsoft and the shape of partners that they might need to do that. And so been building this version of this company over the last now six plus years and growing.

03:35

So tell us about that shift a little bit, right? You went from a big healthcare technology company Medtronic, or at least it became a big company, that shift to working in the Microsoft ecosystem. Why did that

Announcer  03:47

happen? Yeah.

Mike Reinhart  03:47

So I had this entrepreneurial spirit within me had the chain, achieved my master’s degree and really want to think about how do I lead the business, I actually had an opportunity at Medtronic to move into the sales side of the organization, but was a technologist at heart. And so felt like being able to learn how to take that and build a business and do that. So started working in that space, trying to understand how do you first and foremost, bring a set of services and capabilities to customers that allow you to help them create the outcome. That’s what I learned at Medtronic was how technology was changing everything from not only how you think about the business and what they’re trying to accomplish, but how technology was really going to be a disrupter to accelerate things. And in their case, it was everything from doing what we think of as back office systems for finance and other kinds of things. But more importantly, working with engineering on building embedded pacemaker technology using very fundamental C code and things like that to build products that literally save lives, as well as things like regulatory compliance tracking every device and so it created this whole kind of universal understanding and it was, for me, that whole idea about how do you go do that for customers to use this incredible Kate set of capabilities He’s, and then looking at Microsoft and where they were at that time saying, Look, they’re early stage and I can go differentiated in that space and really become a different kind of preferred partner in that model if I do it right. And I was fortunate to connect with some pretty interesting folks at that time, Chris Webber and Phil Sorge. And and folks that were back in Dallas in their early stage careers, young guys like me back then. And really started to formulate partnerships with them and taking that and go into market together. And, but a crazy fun ride ever since

05:30

some great names there. both Chris and Phil. Phil has been a guest here on the podcast, in fact, and still is a friend today. And I know you have a both a personal and professional relationship with Phil, you took and you built an incredible organization. And then you decided on Quisitive  and you made several acquisitions, or at least a few strategic acquisitions over a period of time here. What’s the rationale behind these acquisitions? Was it market expansion? Was it IP was our acquisition? What drove your decision process?

Mike Reinhart  05:59

All of those are Yes. But are we talking about why the fundamental shift and we’ve all as partners been hearing Microsoft talk about some of the different ways that they’re looking for the partner ecosystem to evolve. And this idea about bringing IP to life and having expertise in recurring managed services and things like that, but there was a bigger fundamental shift that I saw twofold. One was from a Microsoft lens, if you think about how they engaged with customers in the past, they sold an EA, essentially shrink wrap software, that was under a three and then we were all of us, as partners would run around and follow those motions and say, Well, you just bought a bunch of SharePoint, let me help you activate it. And that was interesting. It was a great business model, it was valuable to us value to Microsoft and valuable to the partner. But when you think about the shift to the cloud, there was this really dramatic change for Microsoft. First of all, how revenue is recognized, you didn’t get to close the deal on the last day of the year and get all the revenue recognition, it was all about this mechanism where you had to consume the service to create revenue. And the reality of it is the day somebody signs an agreement with Microsoft on using Azure as incidents, they only make a small amount of money, it’s not until you start to activate workloads. So that was the kind of the fundamental shift number one about changing the way Microsoft needed their partners, to be able to not only help them win the platform, but more importantly, activate all of the needed consumption. The second lens, and everything I do is lead from a customer lens. As I talked to more and more of the senior executives that the customers we were working with, there was one fundamental thing that they talked about, when I worked with Microsoft partners, I need five or six partners to enable what I’m trying to do. And that was fine. Again, when you pick somebody to do SharePoint, and you pick somebody to do your applications or your infrastructure, whatever that might be, the fundamental shift was this idea of digital transformation. And it’s no longer about projects. It’s about an engagement journey. And that journey, they began saying, I need a partner that can take the on that journey. And if it’s about leveraging dynamics as an enabler for my finance, or my Salesforce or marketing organization, or if it’s about using Azure, and other kinds of things. To enable it, I need one throat to choke, if you will. And it didn’t exist, we were all of us were interesting, but not relevant in the eyes of Microsoft, or in the eyes of the customer, because we couldn’t do it at scale. So as the fundamental brought to say, building and scaling, an organization that has all the things you talked about in terms of IP, and managed services, capabilities, and industry acumen, but really all that coming from the eyes of the customer, Microsoft and how they needed a different partner to emerge.

08:36

I’d love what you had to say here. First of all, I used to refer to it as backing up the truck and dumping off the EAA with all the products on it, and leaving it to all our great partners that then go implement that over a period of time, by the way, it didn’t happen overnight. And then the conversation about being more relevant, having the one throat to choke, it was very difficult for the customer to point to anybody except Microsoft at that point and say, who’s going to be accountable for the success of this project? And it sounds like that’s what you’re accomplishing here.

Mike Reinhart  09:06

Yeah, no question. And if you think about the really big global systems integrators do that, for that top tier of customers provide that kind of organization or large enterprises have their own internal IT group that are capable of orchestrating that, but you think about mid market, and lower level enterprise where all the real whitespaces in the in the world, they don’t have that capability. And we’re looking for somebody that can step in and bring that thought leadership and execution across many dimensions. So you

09:33

work with other organizations as well, not just the ones you’ve acquired, but other organizations to pull that complete solution. And for a customer we do

Mike Reinhart  09:41

where we don’t have the depth and breadth and many times the companies I end up acquiring are those that we partnered with and got to know better, right? So as you think about the journey, we started in 2016. So we’re a relatively young company, but we’ve got over 850 people around the world including full offshore capabilities, we built out a set of services Both in managed services through acquisitions that we are able to bring into the process, some really unique IP in healthcare, and manufacturing and public sector that were companies that built some really great product. But they didn’t have an engine to commercialize it. So that’s the other thing we bring is this commercialization engine around sales, marketing and our partnership with Microsoft to really amplify things that they created as great assets, but really couldn’t realize the benefit. Many of these smaller partners who built a product, they’re trading off the guys and gals that are building the product with the ones servicing the customer, they don’t usually have a sales engine and marketing engine to go do it. And that’s what we’re cohesively putting together and bringing that to market to help enable those companies to benefit from what we offer them as part of that merger acquisition process.

10:47

850 is a significant number. And you’re dealing with large enterprise organizations, many of which are heterogeneous in terms of their technology stacks today, right? This hybrid cloud and heterogeneous cloud approach that we see in a lot of these organizations. But you’ve stated your Microsoft shop, how do you rationalize that? What do you say to these organizations about your decision process and where you play in helping them with their solution set?

Mike Reinhart  11:12

Yeah, it starts with a few things. One is many organizations other than the really big guys, there’s a lot of smaller guys that say they do all that. And my argument would be, and I was one of these guys in the past, I didn’t do any of it really well, I did it all, okay. And what I want to be is really good at the things we bring to our customers. And so that’s the discussion we have with our customers, and many of our large enterprises who have a multi cloud strategy, we talked to them about, you need to specialist within the Microsoft domain of your multi cloud strategy, you should go pick the Google specialist, you should pick that and then we’ll help you organize that across, but we’re going to be the ones that know and make sure that the your Azure instance or other components of what you do are absolutely best in class in terms of how it participates in and against that. The second thing is, when they’re doing workloads that are specific to Azure deployment or other kinds of things, especially on application and data and other kinds of things. As part of that, you want the experts that know and understand how to do that in the best way. And in many, many cases, they that they embrace that model, there’s certainly some of the really big customers that are going to take a different approach on that. And that’s okay, we don’t have to have every customer be our customer, there’s a vast market opportunity to be able to focus on those that can value and appreciate that approach.

12:28

So Mike, I want to peel back a little bit on something you said earlier, a lot of these organizations that you focused in on, you know, they had a specific value set solution set that they brought to a market. And then you talked about a few of the vertical markets that you’ve acquired IP, and we’ll talk about healthcare public sector is two examples very both near and dear to my heart as you lean forward into 2023. And you’re leaning forward future years, how are you thinking about what drives that investment decision

Mike Reinhart  12:55

industry led is a big, big piece of our strategy. And there’s really kind of three layers to that. So again, you go back to what does the customer need? Again, Microsoft is certainly a voice. But at the end of the day, all that matters to me is are we serving our customers well. And if we look at what they need, and this, again, journey that they’re undertaking, they need first and foremost, somebody that can do the horizontal services that we talked about. And again, many good partners can do that. And we’re certainly capable of all that. But more importantly, what they need are industry leaders. So we first start with subject matter experts in industry, in healthcare, we got people or former CIOs of hospital chains, we’ve got these leaders in technology and business, across those different industries that are first able to engage in what’s the business outcome discussion, because it all leads from that in my mind. And then we have a set of products that we have today that are solving some of those problems. In most cases, Microsoft doesn’t have industry solutions. They’re reliant on the partner ecosystem to do that in the context of their cloud footprint. And that’s what we’ve done is built out specific provider health care products and things in process manufacturing, that are the way that we help accelerate the path to that business outcome. But then it’s got to all be supported by a layered model of very sophisticated systems integration and development services with scale using offshore. Those are all the elements that have to come together. So as we go to market, that’s what we’re bringing. And as we look to acquire additional companies, it’ll be looking across each of those, in some cases, it’s about that industry acumen that helps us certainly complemented by any IP and in within the context of those verticals that we’re going after. And then sometimes it’s just about scale and execution. Some of the acquisitions we did early on, were about giving us access to that offshore capability that we didn’t have, rather than trying to go build it and I’ve seen so many fail at it. It wasn’t my I hadn’t didn’t have a history of doing that. Go find somebody who was expert at that. We acquire that bring that in, and then integrate it into our process. So that’s the approach and the philosophy we take on bringing these together. So you

15:05

go across this Microsoft ecosystem like 450,000, I don’t know the numbers go between 420 to 450. Right? And then you’re have a decent size. I mean, 850 is nothing to squawk about. But you also are competing against some of the really big global essays out there. How do you differentiate? And why do customers choose to work with Quisitive ?

Mike Reinhart  15:25

Yeah, it goes back to first of all, that really close understanding of the Microsoft ecosystem, a lot of those bigger guys operate, it starts with the partnering with Microsoft, they know we’re gonna win or lose with them, they’re willing to bring us in and work with us in a very early stage motion, not when an opportunity is identified. But more importantly, when when they’re talking about whitespace and territory, and all the things that have to happen to create value in the sales motion, they trust us completely, that I’m not gonna go flip them to Google or Amazon or something else. So that’s one of the things that’s really a first step that allows us access in a unique way. But the second piece with customers going back to that, again, is we do have, we’re one of the very few partners that can do everything across the dynamics ecosystem within Azure, both infrastructure as a service platform as a service data and the things there, as well as then Microsoft 365, on a project basis, on a managed services basis. And again, be able to provide comprehensive services, there’s a very small ecosystem of those 450,000 partners or whatever, that can even approach doing those for a larger enterprise environment. Yeah, I’d

Vince Menzione  16:34

say it’s a very small number. Candidly, you also brought up trust. And I want to hone in here a little bit about the whole trust conversation, because I think it’s so fundamental to success. With partnering, we’re going to talk about partnering a little bit more. But when trust isn’t in the room, I feel like oxygen isn’t in the room in a partnership. Do you agree?

Mike Reinhart  16:50

Absolutely. You’re not trusting everybody’s hiding stuff. And when you’re hiding stuff, there are surprises and then surprises lead to bad relationships. It’s no different in personal relationships or whatever. Right? When there’s not trust and transparency in the process, things will go weird along the way. And I believe that’s true of partnerships in in the business environment as well.

17:10

So we have been living through interesting times flip a coin right now and how the economy is gonna go in 2023. Right. But you and I had some conversations a little while ago, about what we both been seeing some of these conferences, we’re seeing, like huge turnout, right? We won’t mention any names. You were you were in one at one conference in particular was very well attended. There was another conference going on, I think the week earlier that was really well attended. And it feels like we’re both very kin to Microsoft in the work that we both do. But it feels like there’s been some contracting on spend and expenses in anticipation of a downturn. What would you say to organizations out there maybe even to Microsoft right now about what the right approach should be during this time in our economy?

Mike Reinhart  17:54

Yes, certainly, like anything you always have. There’s always tightness in the marketplace. Even if you go back to early stages of the pandemic, there were those that were spending like crazy just to be great remote work, but there were others that were struggling. And so you have to look at at the market and have a good lens on it through your processes, qualification and all those kinds of things. So that’s step one is just making sure you understand where are their stress points, and try to make sure that you’re focusing your engine from a sales marketing execution perspective in the right space. And, and again, that goes back to that open dialogue with Microsoft, what are they seeing? What are we seeing, and how do we together identify where our best opportunities are. So that’s one. But the other piece though, is we are seeing significant demand across many different dimensions. And for different reasons. In some cases, it’s because they can’t hire but they still got work to get done, right. And that’s where we’ll often talk about IT services as a footprint is being recession resistant, in part because of that, because there’s a tightening that does occur in terms of the labor market for the enterprise and corporate environment and have to rely more. The second is with all the disruption of supply chain and the globalization to nationalization and other kinds of things like that, that are actually driving meaningful investments and disruptive change to their business to be able to position them better for the future. And obviously, if you got the right set of services, the right alignment to that you’re seeing great demand. The other place is helping customers figure out sometimes they don’t know that there’s significant savings to be had. There’s some that have made this journey to the cloud, whether it’s Microsoft or others, but didn’t do it. Right. They did the classic I’m just gonna move everything to the cloud. And it turns out their op X expense as a result is triple and going in and providing them some basic services to help them understand and assess can create opportunity for us as a partner with them to reduce costs that can free up dollars to then do other kinds of interesting discretionary projects and things like that. So that’s the other thing is to look at some of that universe that might be stressed in that way and help them unlock hidden dollars. To create efficiencies that will actually help fund other initiatives, and you again become a trusted partner for them that you’re helping them think about how to save money. Sometimes I’ll give Microsoft credit for the first time. They’ve kind of taken that lens before it was like, make sure they spend and consume as much as possible. They’re recognizing they’ve got to have a good relationship with their customers. And they’re actually doing some things under their optimization banner to talk about how do I make sure the customer is optimized and how they are using it again to free up and have confidence that they’ll use more of it in the future.

20:33

I’m so excited to welcome athletic greens as the latest sponsor, to ultimate guide to partnering friends who know me well know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for over 20 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about five years ago, I added athletic greens. And now their product ag one has become my go to green drink supplement. I take this literally every single day. Ag one is packed with 75, high quality vitamins, minerals, Whole Foods source superfoods, probiotics and antigens. It literally is replaced every vitamin in my cabinet,

Vince Menzione  21:18

I take it at the start of the day, and often have a second serving on days when I really need it. If you’d like to give ag one a try athletic greens is giving away a free one year supply of vitamin D, and five travel packs with every new purchase. Check them out at athletic greens.com forward slash Vince M. A you said something I want to drive in on a little bit here. You mentioned the fact that a few years ago there was in fact COVID accelerated this right I’ll call it the lift and shift to the cloud. But customers missed organizations missed the opportunity to do transfer real transformation at that time. Part of the reason why what for that was they were maybe they were shutting down a data center. Maybe the hybrid work environment was a cause and in fact to accelerate the move. But what you’re thinking I’m hearing you say besides just the cost savings is this. And this is why I’m I’m such an optimist about the future, we live in the most transformative time, right? Every organization is going to become a tech organization in one form or fashion. We’re seeing that across every industry in every geography, I’m in agreement with you hear about this really great optimism, I think for the future for organizations like yours, Microsoft, and the whole cloud experience the whole cloud world that

Mike Reinhart  22:40

we live in. Yeah. And the whole move to the cloud on infrastructure and all those things is fantastic. But it’s a classic bell curve, right? There’s, once you get there, the real really exciting part is what we call innovation using the cloud, right? And all the new capabilities about how do you build applications different start to reason on data in whole new ways. And, and leverage the power of that, that I think I use the analogy, I think we’re in the first inning of a nine inning game here. And that’s really the core DNA of what we’re trying to build it because, yes, we got to help you make sure you have a great environment. It’s got to be optimized and managed and economically valuable to you. But more importantly, how can you use all this capability to really create innovation for your business in a way that makes sense. And that’s the fun part. And we’re seeing companies embrace that even in these difficult times that we’re in today. There’s so

23:29

much horsepower under the hood with that Azure capability. I mean, think about Azure AI is an example. We haven’t even touched the surface of where we can go in the next couple of years. Yeah, agree. So we both been around this world of partnering for quite some time. What attributes Mike Do you believe make for a great partnership. And obviously, you’ve been living these?

Mike Reinhart  23:49

Yeah, I touched on a couple of them earlier, really this idea about trust and transparency, right and an open dialogue. And there have been different over the years with Microsoft different times where that was effective and not effective. And that kind of goes with the territory. But I talked to a lot of people about partnering and you’ll go to some companies websites, and they’ll have 45 partner logos on there, I’ll argue most of those are partnerships of convenience that will go and if it works out here, great, we’ll do something together. And whether there’s some economic sharing, or whatever, or lead, sharing whatever it is great, but those to me, you gotta have some of those, that’s all fine. But strategic partners are different, you really can’t have very many of them, because it becomes very difficult to truly be be a strategic partner without creating conflicts of interest, intention. And so for me, that partnering kind of attributes centers around this I’m in I’m all in and my philosophy on that and why we think that to the partner model that we use is been very effective and we’re fortunate in it is they know and trust that I’m going to win or lose with them every time that changes things. Now in that partnering model, there’s all kinds of things that happen I’ve talked before it inspired others events about This is Microsoft in a partnering motion with them, you got to remember partnership is to way too many partners. Think about it. What do I get from the Microsoft partnership? How do they give me something, versus you got to remember you got to give, and Microsoft’s got all kinds of things that they put up as I call them hoops and hurdles, you got to jump through and go over. And you got to know which ones matter because they don’t all matter to you. They might matter to others, right? And it’s knowing and understanding in your motion with them, which are the most important ones, and how do you make sure you hit every one of those. And secondly, as part of that, partnering with them is knowing that some of what they asked you to do is for their benefit way more than yours. But over time that investment in that partnership yields the return where you get the great win or the great opportunity they included you in or the programmatic motion they asked you to be the beta partner in it’s that give take and too often I see partners not willing to put the all in investment to do those things Figo, well, this doesn’t have all this work adds no value to me. And that’s meant you can’t measure the micro you have to measure the macro. The macro is about that portfolio approach with them. So to me, that’s the key thing that’s very difficult sometimes to get people that are had around took me a few years, I’ll be honest, I’ll give Phil Sargent a lot of credit to giving me a lot of coaching and guidance about remember, why does it matter to Microsoft,

26:21

you brought up a couple of things, or you reminded me of a few things here because I got the chance to work with your organization, one of the organizations that you acquired way back in the past when I was at Microsoft, and your organization would show up with a book for about one of those days it was printed out today I know a digital version of the book. And literally we’d start the meeting, we do our annual business review at usually and inspire and open up page 26. There’ll be my public sector business, there’ll be my scorecard, and your team would highlight how they helped me hit my scorecard number. Now if people don’t know Microsoft, everybody had lives and dies by a scorecard at the executive level, teams get paid on revenue. But executives get paid on scorecard metrics to make that point as blunt as I can like you came in and it resonated for me how I needed to partner with you more because again, the trust the assurance that you were gonna help me make my targets each year.

Mike Reinhart  27:14

Yeah, we still do the same thing today full digital workbook that we create that the team our marketing, and sales and leadership team put together around every industry. And we cascade that down. One of the things we talked to all of our sellers, about the first question you asked, or if it’s part of our pre sales function with the solutions teams or whatever is make sure you understand how your partner on the other side of the table, how do they get paid? And understand what that measure is? And how do you help impact that. And again, it can’t be all you’re thinking of again, it’s got to go back, everybody’s got to put the customer first, both OS and Microsoft. And sometimes you have to remind everybody in the model that that’s that is the first and foremost thing. But then if you backed into it to talk about, if I help this partner at Microsoft, or hit this scorecard metric, that’s good for Microsoft, if we put we actually align our KPIs to match to that we put compensation around it, and all those kinds of things to create sort of that healthy sort of environment where shared influence I mean, get go back to, you want to see what people focus on, figure out how they’re paid, and you’re probably likely going to align quite well to it.

28:20

Well, you’ve given other organizations here, some really good nuggets about how they needed to think differently about their Microsoft relationship. What have you seen from the organizations that have failed? Is it just the antithesis of what we just discussed, it’s

Mike Reinhart  28:32

there’s different things, sometimes it is resistance to sort of that really leaning in, they won’t go all the way in. But the other piece is Microsoft does have a tendency to change things used to be a annually and sometimes quarterly. And so it’s knowing and understanding their rhythm of the business. That concept is, again, another one that we’ve embraced we have, we mirror the rhythm of the business very carefully and learning a lot from Microsoft in that regard. But in that motion is understanding what are programmatic things that you need to participate in that are for this quarter, or for this fiscal, versus things that are long running. And it’s really important because and you got to know there are some programs in the past that were brought in were Microsoft, I gotta move everything to this scorecard to do these things. And companies, a lot of partners would go invest a lot of money in building these things based on a three year return cycle and two years into it, Microsoft, chopped your knees off and eliminated it, you got to be really careful about knowing what is this program, what’s the relevant investment, there’s very few things that you can think about with Microsoft that you could expect them to last more than two or three years in that partner model especially where there’s whether it’s funding programs or other kinds of things, even CSP, for example, there’s no like 10 year commitment to that revenue stream. Now, again, if you do the right thing with the customer, things will happen. But there you don’t get these contractual things and that’s sometimes people struggle with you got to always be very aware of the lifecycle and the rhythm of the business of those programmatic things. because that will frustrate you really fast, and in fact, could really damage your company. If you over bet on something that Microsoft views as a short term thing to meet some targets, versus a change in how they engage in the marketplace point as

Vince Menzione  30:14

well. I think it’s discerning what those things are that are short term. And I’ll just say it here, like building those great relationships internally and understanding within the four walls of the organization, what is the short term metric that we’re trying to achieve against? And what’s the long term objective, right? So moving to Azure teams, I could think of the few that are long term objectives and you either get on the bus or you don’t get on the bus. And it’s going to impact how successful you are with Microsoft.

Mike Reinhart  30:41

And back to your point, it’s, it’s connecting at different levels, you got to have your sales team connecting your marketing teams connecting, you got to have your thought leadership folks connecting, and then you have have to have executive relationships, and you’re constantly validating sort of those priorities. Because at some levels, it’s very tactical, it’s about the quarter, it’s about the next two quarters, or whatever that they’re trying to really kind of bring together. But if you have the right executive relationships, they’ll give you insight to here’s more the strategic vision that we’re creating. And, again, that’s something we try to invest a lot of time and energy with many, many touch points at all levels in the organization. And thankfully, I’ve invested enough over the years that we have the right to have that access to do those discussions

Vince Menzione  31:22

on it sounds like you’re doing an incredible job there. Mike, thanks. We’re very proud of the team. It’s a terrific team. And I know some of the people on your team. In fact, I know several people on the team from my, my former life and current life, and you have an amazing team there. So I would love to pivot right now, as you might know, I’m fascinated with career journey. I got this then quite a bit of time helping people earlier in their career when I was at Microsoft. And today, the podcast actually serves as an opportunity for people that are a little bit earlier in their career to learn from amazing leaders like you. And so was there a spark? Was there something that set you off on the path to this successful career as a tech business leader?

Mike Reinhart  32:02

Yeah, it stems back from my early days. And I was at Medtronic about 10 years. And this whole idea, I was a technologist, right, and a developer in my early career. But really, this idea that while technology is cool, the business doesn’t care how cool it is. And there’s a lot that Take That mistake to talk about the most eloquent or whatever, it’s really about the thing that can derive business value in the most efficient and effective way. And sometimes the cool thing is the the shiny object, but it was really the learning that and understanding that and again, that I was very blessed inside the organization. There’s this whole cultural mindset about serving the business. And in fact that they ran the business as a chargeback center to their business side. So it behaved like a consulting organization inside. And it taught me about you had to justify everything you did a lot of times corporate IT people inside the world, they’re not ever required to justify if it’s going to take a week, a month, a year, whatever, right? Within reason, it was everything hourly charged back back to the business. And I’m like a 26 year old kid meeting with senior VPs in the business talking about why is this costing me this much. And like it gave me this incredible insight to the value of the services we are providing, but also the burden placed on the business in context of other important things like selling and marketing and delivering products and whatever those things were. So that was really the catalyst for me in that world to really understand that there. There’s a high need for this technical service mindset that’s about creating business value and having that always be the driver

33:41

technical service mindset. That’s a new one for me. I like that. Was there a mentor that helped guide that journey? Yeah, Tom

Mike Reinhart  33:48

Warren was the CIO at Medtronic at the time. And Tom is somebody that thinks the world of he came from back then it was the big six. So he came into the from that consulting universe mindset and brought that into corporate America. And I was very fortunate that that was where I landed, and he took me under his wing and helped guide me, I always use the analogy. It’s like when you take your kids to the bowling alley, and they put the bumper guards up so you can throw the thing down there but you’d never go into the gutter. He did that for me early in my career. He let me go take on tough challenges, protect me from being getting myself and him in trouble was senior leaders in the organization. It was really helpful where he would talk about, hey, had I not blocked this here. You’d have been in the ditch. Here’s why I made the decision. So great leader, but he had that mindset about, again, this service mindset within a corporation, which was very different.

34:42

And it sounds like he helped you build confidence in your capability. Very much. So I love the bumper analogy to it’s fun. This is a bit of fun conversation all along. But this is like my favorite question. I love to ask this question of our guests. You are hosting an amazing dinner party and you can host it As party anywhere in the world you’d like to host it. Maybe it’s in Texas, maybe it’s in Wisconsin, maybe it’s someplace else. And you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past to this party, whom would you invite? And why?

Mike Reinhart  35:14

I’ll start with again, a very impression time for me, Bill. George was the CEO of Medtronic for most of my tenure there, and an incredible thought leader, again, developed people I would meet with us when I first became a manager there, sat down and had lunch with me talked about philosophy and really instilled in this mindset about that he’s continued to be a leader in the industry, if you follow him on LinkedIn, he’s a Harvard professor in leadership and does a lot of great things. So anyways, Bill George, an amazing thought leader that I was able to be a few degrees removed from would love to spend some time at dinner with him and and dig into the journey that I was part of that it was a benefactor of under his leadership. The second is actually Satya Satya Nadella. The I’ve been fortunate I’ve been with Microsoft, I’ve had the opportunity to meet one on one with all three CEOs of Microsoft and Satya not too long ago, I spent some time with him. But what he did in transforming the culture at Microsoft, changing the mindset of that company was fascinating. And being so close an observer to it, I had a chance to talk to him a little bit about that in the short time I had with him. But I would love to spend some more time really exploring that part of it, because I do think it is such a fundamental change that he did there. And last is a little different one, it’s switch, Kay, Mike Chesky. I’m a basketball junkie. And in fact, in my early career, I played basketball in college. And right after I had my computer science degree, I was offered a job that I had done, I was an assistant varsity high school basketball coach for a little while, and was offered a job to go be a coach in college to be a recruiter and start that path. And it was one of my visions is to potentially become a college coach. But then I had this other opportunity to work at the mental health clinic. And it turns out that paid $22,000 A year versus 10,000, and that $22,000 a year journey one but anyways, Coach case, somebody that I’ve followed, and if you think about the way he developed young men, his leadership, how you approach not only the X’s and O’s, but more importantly, all the other things. I recently saw him speak at a conference. And he talked about one of his biggest challenges was the US Olympic team, after they had struggled so much. And he was brought in to bring leadership to a group of very successful men, but that had bring them together as a team. So it was would love to spend time and learn about his thoughts, and basketball and all those kinds of things. So that that would be my dinner for three,

37:40

I’d love to come along, maybe I’ll maybe I’ll come bring a beverage or something. First of all, Bill, George, I don’t know, I’m going to look him up. But uh, Satya Lee had my survey on as a guest. And we talked about the room and coming in and helping Microsoft on that growth mindset journey. And I talked about this all the time about how important fundamental mindset is, I know you also believe in this as well. And then Coach K. I know that story, because that was the dream team originally, but then they got a little complacent. And I recall that he brought them to West Point, which is where he got his start. And he got them in front of the veterans, he they learn what their Why was, which I think was so fundamental to them continuing their success, right? They didn’t have a

Mike Reinhart  38:21

clear why at that point. Yep. And the whole idea about playing for country and why that mattered and instilled in him and to your point bringing veteran and so talk about why they fought for our country. And Sony was really at mindset about impacting both dimensions, you think about doing that in the context of professional athletes, but the same thing is 17 and 18 year olds, and bringing them into your world into this high profile basketball and helping them develop as men, the kind of people and character that he both recruited in, and the players that he created. That was very impressive,

38:56

such an amazing individual. So Mike, you have truly been an amazing guest and outstanding guests that would say, so we’re kicking off 2023 Now, what advice would you have for our listeners to help them optimize their success? And 2023?

Mike Reinhart  39:11

Yeah, I think you got to be mindful of what is happening in the outside world and continue to monitor at the same time, don’t allow it to paralyze you is sometimes you get I hear people start to get a fearful and my my whole view is that we can navigate through it. So keep your focus, understand your strategy, understand where your areas of excellence are, shore up some of those weaknesses that you have. We all have them and make sure that you don’t just complain about him that you actually invest in and go and shore them up to strengthen your business. Stay focused on that and hold yourself accountable along the way and to be flexible to adapt. I mean, the one thing that I know for certain is it’s going to change, whether it’s the recession, whether it’s going to be some sort of technological change. That’s both the strength and the weakness of this industry changes is ever happening, right. And the great news about that is if you’re flexible and adapt with it, you can become a leader to do it. So I think at the end of the day, I’m a big believer in build a plan to manage the plan, but be aware of your surroundings and adjust and adapt as you go.

40:16

Great advice for our listeners, Mike, it has been such a pleasure to have you as a guest. And I wish you all the best as we continue in 2023. Thanks for joining today.

40:25

Thank you appreciate it.

40:27

So there you have it. Another amazing guest joins Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Odds are if you’re a technology partner, executive, and hearing my voice, chances are you too, are looking to accelerate your success through partnerships. I mean, let’s face it, we all have seen partnerships that look good on paper, but never live up to their expected results. There are a lot of reasons why partnerships fail, and at ultimate partnerships, we help you get it right by applying a proven set of best practices and framework that’s used by leading partners working with Microsoft, and other technology giants. If you want to learn more, follow the link in the show notes, or visit our website at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com.

Announcer  41:20

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering with your host Vince Menzione online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com and facebook.com/ultimate Guide to partner. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering