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Microsoft’s Heather Deggans Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
Join Vince Menzione in a captivating conversation with Heather Deggans, VP of Microsoft Partner Go-to-Market for the Americas. Learn about Microsoft’s FY24 priorities, AI focus, SMB opportunities, and the importance of partnerships. Discover the co-pilot program’s benefits, insights on differentiation, and ecosystem growth strategies. Don’t miss this deep dive into the tech industry’s evolving landscape with a seasoned leader at the forefront of innovation.
What You’ll Learn
- Microsoft’s FY 24 priorities and organizational changes with Heather Daggens. (0:02)
- Microsoft’s priorities for AI, marketplaces, and SMB/SMC opportunities. (3:45)
- AI, partnerships, and customer needs in the tech industry. (7:00)
- Microsoft’s co-pilot program and its benefits for partners and customers. (13:54)
- Partnering with Microsoft, differentiation, and ecosystem growth. (22:59
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Announcing Ultimate Partner Experience
I am thrilled to welcome you into a world that delivers unparalleled insights, best practices, and essential information to unlock your potential as a partner and propel you towards your most ambitious goals. This is a world crafted for partners like you.
Our journey began seven years ago with a vision to empower partners in the complex world of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and AWS. It started with a podcast.
Today, Ultimate Partner’s mission is clear and bold, “empower every individual, organization, and partner to achieve more through successful partnering.
As an Ultimate Partner Experience Member, you will unlock a growing treasure trove of resources. Dive into recordings of our events, exclusive podcast episodes, and a wealth of unique content, all designed to enhance your Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and ecosystem growth. We are in our early days and expect much more to come.
As an innovator, being part of this experience is more than joining a community; it’s about integrating into an ecosystem brimming with innovation and collaboration. Here, shared experiences and insights are your gateway to progress, offering connections with peers and resources to elevate your Cloud GTM strategy. This is your platform to engage, seek support, and contribute to our collective growth.
I’m thrilled to welcome you to this journey. Let’s navigate, thrive, and redefine success in the tech partnership landscape together.
Welcome to the future,
Vince Menzione
CEO, Ultimate Partner
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Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
partners, customers, ai, microsoft, organisation, opportunity, smb, market, co pilot, business, talked, great, marketplace, segments, offerings, year, copilot, doubling, supported, big
Vince Menzione 0:02
Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Manzi on your host, and I’m excited to be back here at Microsoft Studios in Redmond, Washington with Heather Dagens, the VP of go to market of Microsoft’s America’s partner, organisation, GPS. So excited to be back here with you today, Heather,
Heather Deggans 0:21
thank you so much, man. It’s it’s great to see you. And thank you for having me. Well,
Vince Menzione 0:24
it’s great to have this podcast in person, you were a podcast guest a couple of years ago. And then we got to spend some time recently in Dallas, Texas, at our live events. So so great to be in the studio here with you
Heather Deggans 0:36
what a great event that was, I made so many great connections with partners and customers there, and I’m keeping up the connections on LinkedIn and other avenues. So thank you for hosting the event. Well,
Vince Menzione 0:47
it was it was a pleasure and an honour to have you at the event. And we wanted to deep dive with you today here after that event, because we have so much exciting things to talk about today. But first, I wanted to spend a moment with about your career journey. I was just on LinkedIn. And I noticed you have an anniversary coming up at Microsoft. Tell us more about that.
Heather Deggans 1:07
Yes. So it’s a milestone anniversary, it will be 25 years in March, which is quite the accomplishment. You were 10 at the time, yes, exactly. I was about to say I literally grew up here before I even knew my husband or had kids. So I’ve been blessed to be here with all three CEOs and see the transformation that Microsoft has been through. And through that time, I’ve been in a variety of roles. So back in House chief of staff roles, product rolls around modern work and such marketing is my third tour and marketing partner has always been at the core of what I did, and across many of the customer segments. So it’s been great. I
Vince Menzione 1:45
love that because you have a 360 view, I’ve always said this about you and your experience, that you make it real because you’ve been on all sides of the business from Chief of Staff for the for the overall business, to marketing to the partner business now and back in the partner business again. So lots of excitement around partners, right, we talked about the excitement, the enthusiasm, the thirst from the partners coming from the event. And these fiscal year priorities. A big shift this last fiscal year, which started in July are still in we’re at the halfway point of 2024. I thought we would ground a little bit about the priorities. There’s three big ones, we could talk more about that and then all also the big changes that happen to the GPS organisation. In fact, this year,
Heather Deggans 2:30
yeah, that’s great. So in July, we announced that the company was creating three regions, so AMEA, Asia, and Americas. So that was the first big change that we encountered in July, bringing together the US Canada and Law Team, which I think has afforded us so much opportunity sharing best practices collaborating, most importantly, making it easier for partners, as they oftentimes go across borders and had to work with separate teams within the different regions. So we’re very excited. We’re still landing the Americas, but we’re seeing a tonne of benefit from the best practice sharing across the board. And
Vince Menzione 3:06
quite a big challenge, I think, bring everybody together too. Right? So you’re bringing lots of different culturals together different cultures together? Yes,
Heather Deggans 3:15
but it’s been great. A lot of learning. And, you know, although the US is this huge market, Canada looks a lot like the US last him as so many complexities to culture as you hit, but also in the way that our partners work in those different Latin American countries. So the consistency and the collaboration and the learning, sharing has been a core tenet that we’ve tried to drive. We’re lucky that the FY 24 priorities stayed largely the same year over year, which was great. The one main change we made in our focus area. And the way that we manage partners is we added in a channels division to basically look at routes to market, right. So if I start from ISPs and digital natives, which we’ve worked with for many, many years, that’s really around delivering the platform capability, and really leveraging marketplace as an area which we’ll talk a little bit more about. When we look at services partners that’s really around unlocking the cloud transformation, and helping our customers imagine what’s possible. And then as I mentioned, channels, it’s really around the routes to market and enabling SMC cloud expansion. It’s a tremendous tam or total addressable market for us in our SMB and SMCC. segments and wild channels focuses on all segments are so there’s a primary focus there as well. And then we can’t forget devices, devices are huge. Winning with Windows and creating experiences that can power AI and our productivity and security solutions is top of mind as well.
Vince Menzione 4:46
It feels like you’ve doubled down right the ISP businesses so critical, important Azure success. The selling partners, I’ll call them right, the transactional partners LSPs the channels to market and then also the sighs and building the competencies and practices, and of course, Windows and the devices business. Yes. You know, this year has been, we started off the year talking about marketplace moments. And then also AI has come to the forefront in such a big way. It’s been such an exciting time at Microsoft, I thought you could land with us those three priorities around the those three things that we talked about AI marketplaces, and this SMC opportunity.
Heather Deggans 5:27
Absolutely. So there’s just tremendous opportunity. When we think about marketplace, this is the future of how businesses are looking to transact. We’re working on creating new technology or giving access to that new technology. And then us is Microsoft creating demand gen for greater opportunity for cosell. That’s an area that we want to double down in, and we’re putting our money where our mouth is, this year in FY 24 marketplace, build sales is a part of the Microsoft sellers comp, which that as you know, compensation drives behaviour. And so that’s a very exciting piece. It’s not necessarily just a GPS or partner led motion, but our sellers care deeply about marketplace. The second one you hit on was AI, I’d almost put ai plus security, I think it’s a huge opportunity to connect with our customers. Ai conversation. I don’t know about you, but in every conversation I have with customers and partners is coming up. It opens the door to the boardroom. They’re wanting to know how that they can use AI. We’re looking at, you know, how do we engage our partners to help lead in this journey. We’ve had a lot of conversations around AI with our partners. And the feedback that we’re hearing from them is first, it’s exciting, but terrifying. The innovation is coming out so quick partners are struggling to keep up. And so we’re really doubling down on the enablement around AI. Second is responsible AI, US laws and frameworks are just now starting to come about our partners and customers are looking at how do I enable responsible AI? Another areas internal process. So each of our customers are wondering how can I use AI to streamline process data, all of that to better serve their customers? When we look at you know, another insight from partners, they’re asking their customers are asking them for skilling. So the partners have to be at the tip of the spear and how they are driving customer Skilling and guidance to to them as well. And then finally, because you know, I’m in marketing, as you mentioned, marketing, so AI and marketing, how do we know our customers? How do we anticipate their needs? How can we get in front of that, and really help you know, our customers capture the market opportunity that’s out there? There were some exciting announcements about co pilot, I heard Yeah, which I know we’ll go through a bit more. But when we start to talk about AI insecurity, you know, I think if you pull those together, you really deliver the best solution to the end customer for all solution areas. And then the third area, which you mentioned, is SMC so small and medium corporate business. As I mentioned before, Tam is huge with our mid market customers. SMCC, which is our corporate mid market and SMB Are we really view as partner led segments, their partner led very strongly supported by Microsoft. And there’s so much opportunity out there. And this is where we want the partners to take the lead. We obviously need partners in enterprise as well, that doesn’t mean that we don’t, but we think about the total addressable market and being able to tap into these hundreds of 1000s of customers in actually millions of customers. When we start to pull on SMB, we think about that CSP and the motion that we have there. There’s just a tonne of opportunity.
Vince Menzione 8:45
I agree. I call it the acre of diamonds in fact, and a lot of organisations don’t understand SMC feels like SMB only. And people missed that opportunity that the corporate account space is managed. And there’s huge opportunities. And these are fairly significant organisations. It’s just that Microsoft segments them a little bit differently than what other organisations do.
Heather Deggans 9:06
Absolutely. And we’re not going to ask our partners to segment exactly like we do. So we’re going to try to the we’re trying to put more focus on that mid market and SMB, we haven’t supported our partners as much holistically and trying to look at you know, how do we make it easier and break down barriers where you don’t have to talk to a separate group. For it’s something we qualify as mid market versus SMB
Vince Menzione 9:30
in a talked about AI and it has been the year of AI. It’s been the marketplace, but it’s really been the year of AI and obviously, Satya getting the recognition he’s gotten this past year for all the changes in the growth at Microsoft. But I also what I keep hearing from people is that we’re having different conversations now. We are in the C suite and their transformation conversations. I thought maybe we touch a bit a bit on that and the importance of partners leading with AI because those conversations are so relevant to partner growth. as well,
Heather Deggans 10:00
absolutely. And that’s a bigger we’re trying to focus is innovation is coming out so fast. And so how do we actually look at enabling our partners to go and have those conversations? How are we priming the market with the customers as well, to enable opportunities? We’re doing a lot of you imagining what AI can do for your business. We’re also looking at AI from an industry perspective, what are the top use case scenarios for financial services or healthcare, and making sure that, you know, we’re outlining that to give our partners a place to start the conversation? Because oftentimes, the customers are coming to us and say, you know, I hear AI, I hear there’s a lot of potential opportunities, but I don’t know how to use it. And we don’t want to expect our customers and partners to have to learn that on their own. Yeah,
Vince Menzione 10:47
there’s a lot of learning here, we talked about learning, and you’re providing a lot of learning for the partners there as well. But this is a time to transformation, right? We often brace it. Heather, I can’t believe we’re in 2024. Already. Of course, Microsoft’s been in 2024. Since July, exactly. And you’ve turned the corner and h2. But let’s talk about h1 and what you learned and what you’ve learned with partners here specifically?
Heather Deggans 11:09
Absolutely. So there is so much learning from the first half of the year, especially as we went through an immense amount of change back in July. You know, it really took us a quarter to land that change. But now we’ve got some, I think, strong learnings out of it. So I’ll rattle off a few. It’s obviously not completely comprehensive. But one of the pieces that we’re looking at is how do we focus on customers through the entire lifecycle. So we have an M CEM sales stage lifecycle, which is a Microsoft way that we’re looking at how we pull customers through from that interest piece all the way to deployment. And so we’re looking at how do we make sure that partners are tied in for that entire lifecycle, obviously, new innovation, there’s so much new innovation, it’s so exciting, but making sure that we’re providing simplicity and clarity attached to that. I mentioned it earlier, industry provides relevance. So that is a place in the Americas that we are doubling down, both from a go to market perspective, but also from a PDM, a partner development management perspective. That’s where we we speak our customers language, and it provides that relevance, opportunity and all segments, as I mentioned. So enterprise is very, very important to us, as well as mid market as well as SMB, with the opportunity. And the way that we engage is a bit different, but they’re all very important. So we’re learning about what’s the best way to engage in all those. If I pivot, and I look on solution areas, modern work and security together, partner so well. And that enables us to deliver that end to end solution for our customers. All customers are concerned about security. These days, all customers are concerned about productivity and collaboration. So again, that’s very relevant. When we think about business apps. You’re we’re looking at business apps, really accelerating the migration of our on prem customers, with the support of offerings that we can provide partners and customers alike aim, if you’ve heard of that. And it’s an a push to modernise their business applications to enhance their AI readiness. Azure is really the foundation of everything that we’re doing. Generative AI is driving a huge wave of intelligent applications and insights from a massive amount of data in the cloud. So one of the Go dues we’re asking customers is get their data state in order to be able to really leverage the power of AI. Your marketplace, as we mentioned before, AI based solutions through Azure Marketplace to millions of customers is our aspiration and making sure that we have that. We talked a lot about the SMC opportunity. That’s a big CSP motion. I hope there’s lots of CSP partners that are watching this today. Because we have some exciting announcements around AI and copilot that will be relevant.
Vince Menzione 13:54
We’ll be talking about that. Yeah. I’m so excited to continue to partner with ag one. Many of you know I made taking a green drink supplement, part of my health ritual for 21 years now. And it has made all the difference to my health and well being about six years ago. Athletic Greens and now their product ag one became my go to supplement. Ag one is the first thing I take every morning to power my day. It covers all of my nutritional bases, supports my gut health gives a boost to my immunity and energy levels. If you want to take ownership of your health, try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Go to drink ag one.com forward slash Vince M That’s drink a G one.com. Forward slash Vince M check them out. You know you mentioned em Sam. I wanted to double click on this because we did a session at the big event on MCM. And I was sort of hesitant to do it. I was like, What is this emsam thing, but it’s being able to speak Microsoft’s language with a Microsoft seller. And it’s so critical for CO selling, that partners understand the process, the sales methodology that Microsoft follows with MSM. And so I thought, I think for people that haven’t listened or watched that interview, that segment, we should probably have them go back and do that. But anything else you want to say about MCM,
Heather Deggans 15:29
I will say we’re trying to put more structure around how we engage with partners and customers. So if you’ll see, hopefully, our partners are noticing, we’re aligning the incentives to M Sam sales stage cycle. So if we’re in listening consults at the very beginning of the sales stage, we have these offerings in these incentives to be able to really empower our partners and customers there. And then as we go along the emsam stages, we’re looking at which offerings and incentives should we deploy, it’s not black or white, there’s some fluidity in it, but at least some guidance in a win formula of what we should be doing, when that makes the most sense with our customers and partners.
Vince Menzione 16:12
So it’s an exciting announcements. AI has been exciting all along. But even more excitement now around, I was hoping you could cover off on some of the things that just happened.
Heather Deggans 16:21
Yes, so very recent announcement. So this is a very timely discussion that we’re having. We had some great announcements around co pilot, there, we see it as an amazing opportunity for our CSP partner ecosystem is massive opportunity. It’s unique to Microsoft. When we think about co pilot, there’s really three pillars and the way that we’re looking at it, cloud innovation, go to market scale, and differentiation. So I’ll kind of dive into each of those a little bit more. For cloud innovation, we believe Microsoft has the most comprehensive and trusted cloud. We’re the only cloud that supports everything an organisation needs in today’s hybrid world of work. When we think about Microsoft 365, and teams offerings, Microsoft invest literally billions of dollars every year in r&d in this area. The second is our go to market scale. So through commercial marketplace combined with our go to market offerings, we are aspiring to help our partners with both depth and breadth to serve their customers. In every segment, as I mentioned, through marketplace, we can reach 95% of the world’s businesses, and we can connect you our partners with over with other partners in over 200 countries. The third area that I discussed was differentiation. So helping our partners differentiate with one of the largest technology ecosystems in the world. From low code, no code business applications, we started to look at the most comprehensive way that we’re looking at the enterprise portfolio. Tech Tools, devices solutions provide limitless opportunities for you to help your customers on their transformation journey is we’re seeing customers at all different areas of the transformation journey. And what we’re trying to do is have offerings for every segment. There is immense growth, as I mentioned, across all the segments, and so we’re trying to create customised offerings to fit the needs of those customers so that you and the partners can leverage those. And the announcements that we’ve made is further evidence of all of this and it’s a further opportunity for our CSP partners.
Vince Menzione 18:29
You know, I hear parity, right? So small organisations, I’m an SMB, I run a small business, I didn’t have access to co pilot and some of the amazing technology that large enterprises like Microsoft have been utilising since since day one, and then also this democratisation. You know, Microsoft has always done such a great job of democratising technology and AI now for the masses, I guess, is what I would say the ability that every organisation and then every partner could use it internally, right. So the evangelism comes when we use the technology so partners as evangelists carrying forward to the millions of organisations What 150 million SMB organisations across the globe? Yes.
Heather Deggans 19:10
There’s just such immense opportunity. I’m so excited about the announcements that we made any opportunity. You know, I speak to customers and partners every single day and co pilot, you know, the resounding feedback as a co pilot is defining our future and transforming our businesses together. Partners have given us some very pointed feedback, and they’ve asked some tough questions. We know our partner community is not shy, and I love that. So the first thing that I always get asked is when will it launch and CSP? Well, we heard you, as of January 16, copilot is no longer just available in EA, but it’s available through EA CSP and our direct customer self serve channel, which is huge when you think about opening up the opportunity. The second question I get is when are we going to expand the skews so more customers can take advantage of copilot for Microsoft 365 Hello again, we heard you, customers who are on Business Standard, Business Premium and office 365, e three and a five now also meet the prerequisites to buy a co pilot for Microsoft 365. So we’ve really opened it up, copilot will now work with Office 365 e three e five is designed with Microsoft 360 in mind, so it will leverage security and management features which are important for a secure AI rollout. And it gives customers a choice, some customers are going to want to start with co pilot for the AI benefits and then move to more of the security and management offerings. Some customers want to do the exact opposite security management and then I’ll dabble in AI. Some want to do it simultaneously. So this really frees up all of those boundaries that we had before. And the third area, as you mentioned as an SMB is when we when will you reduce the seat minimum so SMB customers can purchase. So customers can trial with a smaller subset of users versus having to get it for their entire organisation. There’s a theme here, we heard you were excited to share that we removed the threshold and the minimum seat requirement that customers can end customers can now purchase a quantity one. So we know that that’s a possibility. But we also advise that they purchase for a department to test and learn. In our early adopter programmes. We found that we’re department is using copilot where they’re experimenting where they’re sharing their experiences, they get a tremendous amount of value out of co pilot in a shorter time. So in essence, we’re listening, we hope we hit the mark. We’re excited about these changes. But I would implore this partner community to keep the feedback coming as it’s helping us to deliver better products and services for you and your customers. Just
Vince Menzione 21:46
when we thought it couldn’t get more exciting. Yeah. So this is the ultimate guide to partnering. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you, what do you see from the best partners that you work with?
Heather Deggans 21:57
There are so many great partners out there across all of those partner types that I talked to you about. But you know, if I were to sum it up to the top things is collaboration. So collaboration within their own organisation back to Microsoft and with other partners in the ecosystem learning and coming together in a partner to partner value prop. That leads me to second one differentiated value prop. So we in the go to market team work with partners quite a bit to help them you realise what their differentiated value proposition is, so that they can differentiate in the market and we can support them as we go to market. Great customer engagement goes without saying, you know, making sure that as the you the partners have customer engagement, we’re surfacing case studies that we can use, whether it’s by industry, or solutionary, or customer segment, running pilots and supporting our partners through that. And then as I mentioned before, really supporting our customers through the whole customer journey and making sure that, you know, we’re supporting them from beginning to end,
Vince Menzione 22:59
you talked about two things that struck me. One is the differentiation, I always talk about being the shiny quarter in the bucket full of shiny quarters, because partner has tried to be all things to all customers sometimes or to the Microsoft organisation and saying we could do it all versus focusing in on your superpowers and being very clear about what you bring to the table that’s different unique than anyone else. And then you talked about one of my favourite topics, which we’ve been calling partner to partner for so long, which I like to refer to now as ecosystem lead growth. Yes, and this is where I believe marketplace really sets the stage right with multi party offers. The ability for the customer is not just buying one solution, they’re they’re cobbling together multiple solutions, they might have security that they’re implementing, they might have different use cases, different solutions, ISV solutions, and they’re bringing that together with a licencing partner as an example. And bringing that all together with multi party offers. We can do that all now with one click.
Heather Deggans 23:55
Yes, it’s very exciting. And the piece that you hit on in the beginning, we don’t want partners to do be all to all customers. It’s It’s too hard. You know, we’re very blessed at Microsoft that we have such a breadth of offerings, but that’s a lot for even our sellers to know where there’s no expectations that partners have to do everything. Well we want to be able to do is help our partners figure out where they shine, whether that shiny quarter, and then really go to market with them, and help align them to the right customers. And then as you mentioned marketplace is just phenomenal opportunities and that partner to partner or what did you call it? A partner? Ecosystem lead growth. I like that even better.
Vince Menzione 24:33
Well, I love partner to partner but it’s not just two partners any long. Yeah, it feels like it’s a whole roomful of partners coming together exactly this ecosystem approach. So for the 1000s of listeners watching us or hearing us on the podcast today, what can they best do to align for success in h2?
Heather Deggans 24:54
So there’s so much opportunity out there as we talked about with the innovation and so there’s there’s a lot that we We want to bring you along on with the journey and enablement. So I would say take advantage of all of that, whether you’re an ISV channels or services partner, whichever solution you focus on or industry. But if I were to take it to more of a micro level, macro level, the ISPs, we want to get your transactable offers in marketplace, as we talked about, that is an area that we’re doubling and tripling down at Microsoft. And so we want to make sure that our ISVs have offers in there, and we will commit to do a better job of driving demand to marketplace with our customers. The second is, you know, for our services partners, as we talked about, they’re really focused on the opportunity on AI and all of our cloud offerings. And so really looking at how do we open up the door to those boardrooms, where you know, it’s not traditionally been a great, easy path for Microsoft to get into. But our services partners can help us. And that’s really going to be AI and all those downstream opportunities, and channels, with his unique focus that we’ve put on our channel partners starting this year, it’s really around scale, and activating CSP is one avenue, but really looking at that new customer and your new customer opportunity and delivering that value prop there. And then the other thing is, we know that there’s a lot of innovation offerings out there, and sometimes it can be hard to keep up. So we would invite you all to join our partner LinkedIn group. On this LinkedIn group, we announce and provide monthly information for our partners in real time as it comes out. We have monthly insider calls that we would love for you to all participate in. We even have quarterly virtual partner summits. So making sure that we are we’re bringing the latest and greatest to our most treasured partners that we have. And then also looking at blogs and social updates, we’ve got a lot of ways to get you the information. What we’re trying to do is simplify the avenues in which we can connect with you all. So
Vince Menzione 26:56
many great go dues for our partners. I’ve been on those monthly calls. Yes, I’ve actually spoken to you. I was I think I’m coming up soon, I think maybe in a couple of months from now. But I want to thank you, Heather, for joining us today in the studio. Thank you for and I want to thank you for your commitment to partners. It is it is heartfelt. And it is known and recognised for the way that you have supported this community. So thank you so much. Thank
Heather Deggans 27:21
you. There’s a reason I keep coming back to partner through my career Microsoft. Thank you. So
Vince Menzione 27:26
great. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for watching and listening. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering online at Ultimate Guide to partnering.com or the ultimate partner.com. If you liked this episode, I’d be thrilled if you left us up to a five star review on either Apple or Spotify. And please subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate partner. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering