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An Ultimate Guide to Partnering Exclusive with Thomas Abel

Thomas Abel, the Microsoft 365 Business GTM Director, joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering for this exclusive interview following Microsoft’s massive announcements, coming to you live from Microsoft Studios in Redmond, WA.

Thomas spearheads the expansion of Microsoft 365 Business, focusing on suites and premium value within the CSP channel. A collaborative team player, he crafts compelling partner narratives and strategies. Thomas drives partner profitability by strategically promoting upsells and attachments of Business Premium, Windows 365, and innovative premium offerings. His approach includes customizing formulas for strategic partners through incentives, promotions, and targeted programs.

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What You’ll Learn

I am thrilled to welcome you into a world of unparalleled insights, best practices, and essential information designed to unlock your full potential as a partner and propel you towards your most ambitious goals.

Our journey began nearly seven years ago with a vision to empower partners in the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Today, Ultimate Partner is a beacon dedicated to revolutionizing your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and fostering ecosystem-led growth through this experience platform, including digital and live events, advisory services, and much more.

In an era defined by tectonic shifts, such as the global pandemic, economic headwinds, and the rise of AI, the role of hyperscalers has become increasingly critical. With investments of billions of dollars in ecosystems, technology, and customer acquisition costs, they have secured over $200 billion in customer commitments to durable cloud budgets. We stand on the precipice of a marketplace moment where simplifying and streamlining economic models associated with co-selling and ecosystem-led growth will shape the decade ahead.

Yet, as vendors and organizations demand more from us while resources diminish, we ask, “Where do we go? How do we navigate these seismic shifts? How do we thrive during this decade of the ecosystem?”

If you’re a partner, you’re likely grappling with these questions. The watering holes of the past no longer offer the guidance required to transform into a Cloud GTM and embrace ecosystem-led growth. That’s why Ultimate Partner exists – to be your trusted compass amidst the noise.

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Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

copilot, partners, microsoft, co pilot, customers, organisations, people, medium businesses, data, product, ai, talk, meetings, csp, started, pilot, enterprise, teams, ag, shared

Vince Menzione 0:02

Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione. I’m your host. And my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And I’m so excited to be back at Microsoft Studios, where we have an amazing guest today and an amazing announcement. Thomas Abel is the director of Microsoft’s 365 business go to market. So great to welcome you today, Thomas.

Thomas Abel 0:25

Thanks, Vince, great to spend time with you today.

Vince Menzione 0:28

So we’re in the middle of the fiscal year. All right, beginning of h2. And you’ve got some exciting announcements that you just shared publicly. And now you this is the first interview you’ve done. That’s

Thomas Abel 0:40

right. This is kind of the first time getting to talk about this in a super public setting. But I think in many ways people knew this was coming. It was just a matter of time. But you know, it’s been it’s been an exciting journey. Certainly an exciting week for us. I bet. I bet. Tell us more about it. Yeah. So if you didn’t see the news, earlier this week, we announced three big changes for Microsoft 365, and co pilot for Microsoft 365. You know, we announced this product back in March of 2023. It has been a very fast nine months, in a very fast moving space with artificial intelligence. Back in November, we announced enterprise availability. And I’ll be honest, I’ve heard probably from many of your listeners, different messages and emails and items about where is CSP availability, exactly Where’s availability for small and medium businesses. And all I can say is, thank you. We always appreciate the advocacy, it is so important that we get that feedback. At the same time, we were always it was always in the plan. It just took a little bit of time to get there. And so we moved very quickly. We had teams working all over the holidays. And we’re really excited to share kind of three big changes. The first is that co pilot for Microsoft 365 is now available in the CSP channel. Wow. So the second that we’re expanding availability to more Microsoft 365 skews, so customers that are on Business Standard, or Business Premium, or customers that are on Office 365 e three, or you five or Microsoft 365, e three or E five, can now add Copilot to their subscription. Very nice. And finally, the big one, the one that took probably the most work is we’ve removed the seat minimums. And that means that customers of any size can start with any number of licences. Even me,

Vince Menzione 2:36

even though I’ve been sitting here the haves and the have nots. I’m on all these calls with Microsoft executives, and everybody is powering through copilot. And I’m sitting there going well, I have to flip over to Chad GBT, if I want to do anything on AI, but this is you’ve removed all the roadblocks. That’s

Thomas Abel 2:52

exactly right. You know, it’s, it was something we always wanted to have happen. We didn’t honestly think we could get this far this quickly. We pulled out all of the stops to make this happen. And it was really a question of, are we ready or not? And we said, Well, we think we’re ready. Let’s do it. Let’s do it big.

Vince Menzione 3:09

This is big for the 400,000 Plus Microsoft partners in the ecosystem. And in fact, many of which are SMB organisations. So their ability to utilise the technology to become proper evangelists hasn’t been there before.

Thomas Abel 3:24

It’s exactly I love the way you said that. Like, we often repeat this that many of our partners are small and medium businesses themselves. That’s right. And that means first that they have an amazing view into the needs of their customers. But then also, we need to respect them and help them as small medium businesses. And so you know, this is a win win on both accounts, I hope many partners will say hey, I can get value in copilot for myself, but also they’ll see the value in delivering it to their customers. And 

Vince Menzione 3:53

I think about like the next neck Netflix as an example. Right? So organisations that may grow into the the next unicorns that are out there that weren’t able to utilise this technology up until now. Yeah,

Thomas Abel 4:05

I mean, we’ve we’ve had a really great learning experience with co pilot. It has been very fast, as I said before, but we started back in September with a small group of small and medium businesses that we gave co pilot to. We didn’t make a huge deal about this because we knew that people would be hounding us to get in on it. Exactly. But it’s really been impressive to see how these customers have evolved in using it. And I think small medium businesses actually are going to realise more value out of something like copilot than the large enterprises simply because their primary competency isn’t being the finance person or being you know, the marketer. It’s doing whatever their business is about. Yes. And this gives them more time to do that.

Vince Menzione 4:52

So let’s double click here and what this really truly means for me as a partner,

Thomas Abel 4:57

yeah, so a couple of different pieces. is. The first is that it’s now available to transact. We shared before that it’s a $30 per user per month SKU. Of course, through the CSP channel, partners can resell that product to their own customers. Just a great classic CSP opportunity for for our Microsoft partners. That’s kind of the first step. But one of the things that I think is so cool about co pilot on top of Microsoft 365, is that it builds on all of the things partners are already doing in selling Microsoft 365 is, of course, that means you need to sell Business Standard or Business Premium into your customer. But one of the things around co pilot and AI is security, how are you ensuring that with this new tool, you’re also securing your infrastructure, and co pilot respects all of the security rules that are already in place for Microsoft 365. So if you’re a partner that already knows how to sell Business Premium, or how to deploy security, managed services, or endpoint protection, these are all things that only get turbocharged when your customers are asking, Hey, what do I need to do before I deploy AI solutions? In my environment? Clearly, partners

Vince Menzione 6:12

are super important to what you’re doing, you’ve got to spend a lot of time with them. Were there any aha moments from that?

Thomas Abel 6:18

Yeah, I think there’s a couple different pieces to it. One is, you know, the opportunity is very clearly there. We have some data that we talk with a lot of customers, and they say about 87% of businesses today are looking for AI to help them with a competitive advantage. And when I take that stat, and I combine it with what I hear from partners, which is every single renewal conversation they’re having their customers are saying, What’s my AI strategy? What should it be, like, this is an opportunity, you have customer demand, you have this moment, and now you have a product to serve it. And so putting those all together is just a Ha, we had, you know, we were tracking the the kind of first purchases that were taking place. And there was a partner that had standing orders from their customers that as soon as you can hit Buy, I want to buy, they were small. They were they were it was a me five customer, a Business Standard customer, a Business Premium customer, a couple of different customers. And they were all small, about 10 seats each. But it was the start, it was each of those customers saying hey, I want to start with a pilot. I want to experience this. I’m going to deploy it out to a department and I’m going to see the learnings. And what’s great about copilot it’ll tell you we have copilot dashboard in the product. They’ll tell you the time savings that your employees are experiencing. As a partner, you can go show that dashboard. And it’ll sell itself at that point.

Vince Menzione 7:42

It’s the same sentiment we’ve been seeing in the enterprise as well. Everybody wants to utilise the technology and they want to bring it to life in their own organisations. What are you doing now? What are you building to help partners be more successful here,

Thomas Abel 7:56

I mentioned copilot dashboard, which is a great resource of customers that have started using co pilot for Microsoft 365, we can show those data insights and say how it’s helping them. But for partners specifically, we did something about three years ago I think is a little unique. We took product engineers and tasked them with figuring out how to help partners. Wow. Which Yeah, it’s a little bit differently, we took this team and the net result is a thing called Microsoft 365 Lighthouse lighthouse. That is our multi tenant management solution. It integrates with other third party multi tenant management vendors as well. But it gives partners the ability to manage the security of their tenants across all of them. We recently added one more thing to it, which we’re calling sales advisor. And what I love about this is it’s taking a step beyond just tenant management to helping partners sell to customers. And so last week, in addition to announcing the product, we also launched recommendations for propensity to buy co pilot for Microsoft 365.

Vince Menzione 9:00

Wow. So it’s like giving me it’s like candy to me as a partner. The number

Thomas Abel 9:04

one thing I hear from from partners is I’d like some leads, please. And this is my attempt to help here we we delivered a bit over 150,000 Customer propensity signals through Microsoft 365 Lighthouse sales advisor. So if you’re a partner, you can log in right now and you should be able to see your customers and which ones are most likely to buy copilot based off of our signals that we use for all of our direct enterprise sellers as well. It’s

Vince Menzione 9:34

walking the talk right Microsoft has got the largest ecosystem than a the organization’s in our marketplace in our technology world. And it’s walking the talk in terms of how you’re helping partners be more successful.

Thomas Abel 9:46

You know, I appreciate that quite a bit. We’ve worked on this quite hard. We really think that partners are foundational to our success. It’s why we build the products the way we do. It’s why we build so much surface area in the products we do we think about products like Business Premium, and how much there is there that partners can help with in terms of security policies and endpoint management. You know, we’re really committed to the channel, I love

Vince Menzione 10:12

it. And Ultimate Guide to partnering, we’re excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Friends who know me well, including those of you who listen to this podcast. Know, I’ve made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for over 22 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being. About seven years ago, I made ag one part of my morning ritual and protocol. I take ag one the first thing every morning, it covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health, and is a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one, you’ll get a free one year supply of vitamin D, and five travel packs with your first purchase, go to drink ag one.com, forward slash Vin Sam, that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vince M. So Thomas, I was hoping you could double click with us on the difference between Microsoft co pilot and co pilot for Microsoft 365.

Thomas Abel 11:21

Yes, a little bit of confusing branding. There’s a lot of CO pilots going around both at Microsoft and it seems like just in the ecosystem,

Vince Menzione 11:28

I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Thomas Abel 11:32

We certainly started with just Microsoft co pilot. And you know, that is a large language model, empowered with internet data, publicly accessible internet data and a chat based experience that was previously known as being chat or being chat enterprise. And you know, you can go to copilot.microsoft.com today, and go test it out pretty cool experiences that you can go have. When we talk about co pilot for Microsoft 365. We’re changing that a little bit, we’re supercharging some aspects of it. The first is about security and data protection. With Microsoft co pilot, if you sign in with an inter ID account, we give you what we call business grade data protection. Okay? Essentially what we mean by that is Microsoft will not have eyes on access to your prompts or the responses that are being generated. Got it. So your data is secured. Right? When we talk about Microsoft co pilot for Microsoft 365. We upgrade that to what we call enterprise date grade, enterprise grade data protection. And what we really mean by that is respecting all of the policies that are already in place for Microsoft 365. From the user level, where you have user level permissions on files, all the way up to the tenant level. If you have data residency policies in place, we’ll follow all of those same policies with where we’re processing your request, or your queries and the responses through our large language models with copilot.

Vince Menzione 13:02

And what that means to me as in layman’s terms is that you might have sensitive information that is only shared with let’s say, the executive team or a certain sector of your business that may have been available to everyone else universally within your organisation and you have the segmentation. does pop privacy policies apply across the business? Exactly

Thomas Abel 13:22

right. I’ll give you an example. You know, this is this is inside baseball. But as we were getting ready for this announce, we we started the blog post writing the blog post of what Nicole was going to share Nicole diesen, the head of our global partner solutions organisation was going to write in the blog. And we put that on a SharePoint site like you would normally and we are collaborating on it. It turns out people at Microsoft are very excited about availability and the CSP channel. And there are a couple of people that every morning, the first thing they would do is log into copilot and ask it when is copilot launching in the CSP channel? Oh my god, of course, as we’re writing this blog, all sudden copilot, very diligently starts answering. And they’re paying us like, Hey, did you hear the news? And we’re like, How in the world? Do you know this? Well, it turns out this is kind of classic shift of the SharePoint site. This was a SharePoint site that was used for one purpose. And over time, it had added more and more people to it. And so you know, it was just out of date user permissions that too many people had access to that draft document. And co pilot was just following the rules. Yeah, it’s just doing his job. Exactly. And so we went back in and we’ve set the right restrictions and and when in about 15 minutes, those same people were asking him ask again, and all of a sudden COPPA was saying, Hey, I don’t I can’t answer that. I’m sorry. And it’s a great example of co pilot really following all of the things we’ve already put in place with Microsoft 365.

Vince Menzione 14:53

You know, we talk about industries quite a bit and I was just thinking about two very sensitive industries, financial services and healthcare. and HIPAA compliance in healthcare and financial services, certainly very sensitive banking gate and things like that. So those organisations have those privacy policies with copilot Exactly.

Thomas Abel 15:10

And this kind of connects to the second big difference between co pilot and co pilot for Microsoft 365, which is we are enriching we are what we call grounding your responses and prompts with your company’s data, meaning that we understand the context of the questions you’re asking, and can use that context and the answers we’re giving. So exactly as you’re calling out of having sensitive data. Yeah, that exposes, in some cases, poorly structured data silos. At the same time, if you structure that correctly, especially as a partner, this is an opportunity for partners, then your customers and your employees can take advantage of that. Yes. And they can use that graph data to better get responses from the large language models.

Vince Menzione 15:55

Talk about partner opportunity, SMB space, 150 million SMBs. globally. What does this mean for our partners?

Thomas Abel 16:06

Yeah, well, I’ll give you another number, because we like to talk about users as well, about one, slightly over a billion users in commercial, small and medium businesses around the world now have access what they need to start with Microsoft 365. But certainly we’d like to get there.

Vince Menzione 16:26

I think about this as a seminal point, in much the same way I think about AI generally is a seminal point for organisations that are looking to transform. Now turning into Microsoft saying, we really want you to be part of this transformational journey. I know that at the enterprise side, that’s been the case. I think it’s the same in SMB, would you agree?

Thomas Abel 16:46

Certainly, you know, the most exciting thing for me is, this is going to change how small and medium businesses work. If we talk about what copilot really does, it is integrated into the Microsoft 365 apps that people are using day in and day out, Word, Excel, PowerPoint teams outlook. And so the power of like co pilot for Microsoft uses in Excel to take a small business that maybe today doesn’t have an accountant, or it doesn’t have a CFO, but being able or a finance department being able to use copilot as kind of like a finance intern to help you spend less time analysing your data, and more time going back to whatever your core businesses, that’s going to be such an accelerator for small businesses that they’ve never had access to before,

Vince Menzione 17:36

and creating dashboards and all the tools and keep it my favourite

Thomas Abel 17:39

demo I do. I downloaded a spreadsheet from the US Department of Agriculture just about fruit prices. And you can give it to co pilot and co pilot will look at all the data and they’ll say, hey, there’s a couple of outliers here of fruits that are way more, you can charge more for them relative to their weight and relative to their serving size. And like it’s a classic example of a small business maybe won’t be looking closely at that data. We have teams of people at Microsoft that pour over this type of data, but being able to ask copilot, hey, which products are better for me to sell. And it’s saying, hey, looking at your company data, these things are better to sell, they make more money for you. They’re their higher priced pets an insight that you can turn into action.

Vince Menzione 18:23

I love it. And you’ve gotten to work with partners quite a bit during this process, right and your role. And then this rollout, talk to me a little bit what your experience has been working with these partners. And the excitement in this sort of, I’ll call it a pilot for lack of a better term that you had here.

Thomas Abel 18:39

Yeah, we started with a very small group of partner early access SMB customers and a few partners that were in that as well, really just saying, Hey, we don’t know what we don’t know, here with how the world is going to change with artificial intelligence. But let’s give you copilot for a month or two. And let’s see what you do with it. When I think about how partners learn from it, the number one thing is, this is a totally new interaction model between humans and computers, right. And that’s going to take time for people to learn. And so just like the move from on prem to cloud, there is a massive change management curve that that partners are going to have to help their customers through. The funniest thing for me is a couple of partners. They created one pagers of like, how to do co pilot how to use it, what prompts to use, and they printed them out and they laminated them and this to me is so 2000s of like classic 1990 Yeah, laminate the cheat sheet, and they handed it out to every single one of their users. And it works like this is this is back to the basics of learning how to use artificial intelligence and changing your daily routine to accommodate it. One of the things that I’ve started doing is I’ll ask copilot once a week. So hey, what are my most important meetings next week? And which day? Should I come into the office? And it’ll look at my calendar, and it’ll say, Hey, these are the meetings that I think are most important. And it looks like Wednesday is the best day if you were to only come in on one day, come in on Wednesday, because your manager is going to be in as well. And you have a meeting with these other people that they said they wanted to whiteboard. Yeah.

Vince Menzione 20:22

Wow, that’s a great use case. The other one I heard about was teams. And that when you’re having meetings in teams, the summarization, the Go dues, and the summarization of the meeting taking place.

Thomas Abel 20:35

Exactly. You know, teams is probably the very first feature that everyone starts using and doesn’t stop using teams followed by outlook, I would say it’s just the those kind of core you use those so much, that it’s very easy to start leveraging copilot. Copilot recaps in meetings are very powerful. One of the things that I think is so obvious, but also a little tricky to do is, you know, when you have a meeting with someone, we want the AI to summarise the action items. I don’t want the AI to respond with my action items different from what you think your action items are. So let’s make sure that the action items are the same when we both ask the AI, what’s going on.

Vince Menzione 21:16

I love that. And I love that. So many times we misinterpret what our intentions for meetings are, what our Go dues are. So Thomas, for our partners that are watching us today, or listening to the podcast, what do they need to go do now?

Thomas Abel 21:30

Yeah, it’s gonna be a learning curve. So I would say first off, start playing with these tools. In order to be able to tell customers the value, you’re gonna have to realise the value yourself. I think that’s an easy one. We’re also publishing an immense amount of content to help partners and to help them create their strategies for how to sell them to their customers, you can start by going to our landing page where we’re hosting all of this content aka.ms/csp, copilot, we’ll keep updating that if you haven’t started transacting, or if you have that customer that’s paying on your door, you should check out the Microsoft Partner centre where we published how to transact because we know this was kind of a non standard launch middle of the month. But we also knew is important, we wanted CSP partners to be able to transact on day one. And

Vince Menzione 22:20

I believe there might be some incentives that are being driven into this too. Can you talk to us more about what what partners should anticipate coming? Yeah, so

Thomas Abel 22:29

one of the things we’re doing to kind of make sure everyone sees the opportunity with co pilot is we’re including co pilot for Microsoft 365 and the strategic product accelerator. So partners that qualify for our incentives, we’ll be able to earn up to 7% incentive on top of copilots sales, which is of course a great opportunity. It’s not a cheap SKU. So there’s a lot of money there as well. That’s

Vince Menzione 22:55

fantastic. Thomas, I feel so privileged that you chose Ultimate Guide to partnering to tell this story today. I want to thank you for joining us. I want to thank our viewers and listeners for joining us today. Thanks so much.