Transcription Provided By Otter.ai – There will be typos and grammatical errors.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
partners, microsoft, business, customer, seller, drive, industry, field, year, azure, cosell, area, listeners, bit, selling, superpower, team, partnership, engagement, leads
SPEAKERS
Announcer, Vince Menzione, Brent Combest
Announcer 00:00
Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to partnering in this podcast Vince Menzione. a proven industry sales and partner executive brings together technology leaders to discuss transformational trends and to deconstruct successful strategies to thrive and survive in the rapid age of cloud transformation. And now, your host, Vince Menzione.
Vince Menzione 00:23
Welcome to or Welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering, where technology leaders come to optimize results through successful partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host and my mission is to help leaders like you unlock the leadership principles and learnings of the best in the business. To get partnerships right. optimize for success and deliver your greatest results. I find that most technology partners working with Microsoft still struggled to get their co selling right. If you and your organization want to get better driving results and revenue with Microsoft, then you won’t want to miss this episode. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Brent calm best, Microsoft’s General Manager for national and local partners, and a three time guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. Brian has been a vocal advocate for Microsoft partners. And in this episode, he shares some really sound advice to help you decipher and drive higher performance. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed welcoming back. Brent comm best. So before we dive into this interview, I want to take a moment and just say thank you, I am so blessed to have so many incredible listeners like you come like share, follow and listen to Ultimate Guide to partnering. And I’m so grateful for your support as we bring the best in the business to share leadership principles, learnings, and help leaders like you achieve your greatest results. So stay tuned. As halfway through this interview. I’m going to share a couple of shout outs to some of you. And thank you for your amazing support. Brent, welcome back to the podcast. Hey, thanks
Brent Combest 02:05
for having me. It’s great to be back.
Vince Menzione 02:06
I am so excited to welcome you back here at Ultimate Guide to partnering. Hey, this is your third visit Delta MCI to partnering. And I’m so excited. It’s an exciting time of year, Microsoft is coming out of what I’ll call Microsoft summers, I like to refer to it. And so I’m really excited for this conversation today. We have a lot of ground to cover. So welcome.
Brent Combest 02:29
I appreciate that. Thanks for having me.
Vince Menzione 02:31
So you’re the general manager of national and local partners. That hasn’t changed as it since we spoke last?
Brent Combest 02:38
No, this is one of the first years where my role is staying constant for a change.
Vince Menzione 02:42
I’m glad to hear that. And so for our folks still deciphering Microsoft, can you briefly tell our listeners about you, your team and your mission?
Brent Combest 02:53
Yeah, definitely. So I’ll try to keep this nice and condensed. I’ve been at Microsoft for 16 years. But before that I was in the dynamics channel. And everything I’ve done has always been around partner, I have really just a persistent passion for the channel, the team that I lead now consists of about 45 partner development managers that look after our top performing s eyes and msps cheer in the US. And we really have a strong commitment to helping these partners create sustainable, profitable growth over the long term. And you know, use the term national and local and I don’t think I asked you this last time, like what distinguishes those two categories? Yeah, we’ve got some partners that have a true national presence, meaning if you go across all of our operating units, whether that’s the corporate space, or the enterprise space, they’re going to have a deep physical presence in each one of those territories, versus partners that maybe exist and thrive and one of those territories being more local in nature. And so we think about the engagement model and how we drive connection into our field teams a little bit differently depending on depending on the complexion of the business.
Vince Menzione 04:06
And do you scale differently. For those two partner types
Brent Combest 04:09
we do we think about first and foremost, the partners core competency, and strength. And we really emphasize that. And for some of our partners, being a dominant player in an industry or solution area, within a region makes complete sense. And there’s enough target addressable market for them to thrive for an extended period of time and no real need to go beyond that. For some of the companies out there that have grown over the years, either through organic growth or through mergers and acquisitions that have that presence, we have to think a little bit differently about the operating model of how we connect them to feel sellers across different account teams and specialist teams and across different segments. And that is just a little bit different nuance to how the operating model works. But yeah, we definitely have to be smart about how we drive engagement to make the most of the partnership.
Vince Menzione 04:59
Yeah, and we’re going to provide links here because we’ve interviewed some of your colleagues in the business that cover other partner types, or in the case of like Lonnie handled the coordination between the partner and the field selling organization. And so we’ll provide some links to help our listeners better understand how those pieces work and interact. But I’m really interested and inspire we came out of it seems like it’s 100 years now ago. But it was just a short period of time ago that inspire happened, and launched Microsoft’s new fiscal year. In fact, we started this conversation by saying Happy New Year, which is sort of inherent to us who work in this Microsoft ecosystem. So I’d like to start here, what were the key takeaways that our listeners need to know about coming out of inspire? You know,
Brent Combest 05:47
I’d say I think this was my 17th, inspire and all the names that had before worldwide partner conference, and so on. And I think this might have been the busiest one in terms of announcements. And things happen even though that we were in a remote environment, there were so much activity around it for partners to digest. But for me, what I walked away from it, I really boiled it down to three things. The first was the thematic that Judson shared during his keynote around this concept of digital optimism. And to me, what I really took from that was, for all of us, this last 12 to 18 months has been an unprecedented time, it’s been difficult. It’s been challenging in so many ways in a personal and a business level and the resilience of our channel and their ability to meet the challenges of what needed to be done to support our joint customers and drive innovation to solve immediate pressing life or death kind of challenges was inspiring, it was truly something to watch take place and the stories that he shared there in the stories that I heard through my partner meetings of how they were leveraging technology, like the Azure health bot, as an example, was just truly inspiring to see how they reacted with empathy, and met the challenge that was in front of us. The second big area that caught my attention was the emphasis around industry. Earlier this year, we announced a selection of industry specific cloud offerings. And those really bring together the capabilities that partners and customers need to go out and drive further innovation. To me, this is something that really critical as you think about your business strategy. From a partner standpoint, something I’ve been telling our partners in my meetings with them is back in 2010 or 2011. Steve Ballmer stood on stage and he said, we’re all in on cloud. And that was a really critical inflection point, a moment that was incredibly significant for people to understand what it’s going to mean for their business, and how to evolve and adapt. And what I think is a little bit understated here is this concept of being industry specific, has the same level of importance and criticality of being all in on cloud was a decade ago. It’s that important right now, we’re that committed in that focus to it. So as you think about your strategy now over the next 1224 to 36 months, it’s got to have an industry bent on it, because we’re going there really quickly. And then the third area for us was just this rapid level of innovation with our solutions and the rapidly expanding partner opportunity that goes alongside of that, think about Windows 365. And the monetization opportunities that exist there. What we’re doing to transform employee experience through Viva, how we’re lining up new users with teams integration into dynamics, or leveraging Azure ark to manage hybrid environments. It’s just an incredible unprecedented time, in terms of what partner profitability and partner opportunity has in front of us right now.
Vince Menzione 08:47
So exciting. And I just want to unpack a little bit here for you with you. Right, we talked, we’ve been talking about this on the podcast quite a bit, as I’ve interviewed leaders like you and others, about meeting the challenges, right, like what are the things we saw differently this past year, and this has been a year like no other seven years of transformation in a year. And it was really great to see that spotlighted in Jetsons work. And then this emphasis on industry, like I came at a public sector, remember, and we had healthcare, education, state, local government and federal. And we were like early to the dance, I would say in industry, but to see the company pivot here. And we’ve had Jim Leon, as you know, from Microsoft consulting service, talk about this as well. I think this is I think this is a game changer in a lot of ways. I don’t think people really fully comprehend or see where that’s going, as you said, we need to get on board with that. And then the just the innovation across the platforms, I was just having a conversation, my wife and she mentioned the word zoom. And I said zoom is irrelevant. Now. It’s not even a it’s not even a thought in my mind. Microsoft is doing so much around the team’s platform around all the platforms around the enterprise. Would you agree?
Brent Combest 09:59
I would agree The zoo really took off in terms of its usage in the early days of the pandemic. But what we’ve seen is incredible acceleration for teams. But to your point, it’s not just about calling and collaboration simple features, it does so much more than that it is a real life platform that is revolutionizing the way that people do their day to day jobs. For me, personally, it means a lot, my email is decreased by between 60 and 80%, as the conversations have moved into a more collaborative engaging format, but we’re also starting to see that platform concept come in where even internally we’re using bots and Power BI and other kind of ISV type solutions embedded inside of teams. And it’s changing the way I scale through my team and even beyond that. So I think partners and customers for that matter, have to really understand and recognize the breadth of what it can do and not let it be compared to zoom. Because that’s not a an apples to apples comparison,
Vince Menzione 10:59
not not by any stretch of the imagination. And there, there was one other one for me, and I don’t know if it was as strong for you or not. But I want to hear what you think about this. I thought the emphasis on marketplaces was also really strong coming out of romney’s announcement, and pour it was implied that, hey, we really want you to come build with us. What did you think about that?
Brent Combest 11:17
I completely agree for those of you that may have missed it, we reduced our marketplace transaction fees from 20%, down to 3%. And the intent here is to what you mentioned there is which is to inspire everybody to build on this platform. And the overall opportunity out there to build things whether that’s on teams, or it’s an extension of a dynamics product, or anything that you can imagine basically limitless on Azure is really where so many of the solutions are going as we’ve seen, the it decision making framework and the budget, move largely more towards a collaborative decision making contract with the business decision makers out there that sit in the functional areas of these companies, they’re looking for faster time to value, they want more finished products, they want for these solutions to come ready to work for them. And so that’s why we’ve seen ISVs, or even services partners that are now building their own IP really take off and flourish with this concept. And in some cases, yes, it’s a fully finished product. But in many cases, it’s a solution that’s 40 or 50% of the way there, that’s repeatable in that sense. And then they do a little bit of bespoke work on top of it to make it exactly relevant for that end customer. There’s all different flavors across the board. But at the end of the day, this desire from Microsoft is not one that’s driven by a financial desire, it’s to meet what customers are asking for.
Vince Menzione 12:42
Yeah. And we could actually go into a whole nother direction with this conversation today if we wanted to on marketplaces. And what that means, I do think it becomes a conduit for more partner to partner work as well, it faces the customer in a good way. But it also makes the job of partnering better.
Brent Combest 12:59
Absolutely. And we already seen that many of the ISVs that exist in the ecosystem that have strong presence are working closely with the services partners that said, in our portfolio. And I would say when we go out and engage engage our field teams, oftentimes as we’re promoting a solution that an ISV has, we’re bringing along the top three to five services partners that deliver that solution, because of the need for them to do that type of work, and to really marry those two parties together, because that’s ultimately what is needed to make it real for the customer.
Vince Menzione 13:31
So much excitement out here. out, it’s palatable, palatable to me as well. I would love to spend a little bit of time here though, you recently posted a blog. And I just love this blog, by the way, it’s about partner co selling and positioning your company for success. And it’s a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart, as I know it is for you. And so I was hoping you could spend a little time with our listeners, I want to dive in on some of these five key points you covered in this blog post.
Brent Combest 14:01
Yeah, happy happy to do it. And thank you very much. It’s a topic that comes up in virtually every partner meeting that I’m in. And we’re also in that season where we’re doing planning with our partners right now and thinking about what’s the pipeline capacity that we need to be able to meet our goals. So it’s, it’s very much top of mind. Hey, Ultimate Guide to partnering listeners.
Vince Menzione 14:22
This week, shout out goes to Nestor Noriega, who gave us a five star review on Apple and writes, keep up the great work. You and your guests are inspiring Vince, the more I listen and learn from you and them, the more I realize how much I still have to learn, but also it shows me how much I’ve learned as a partner account executive. Keep up the great work. Thank you so much Nestor for your support. And thank you so much for being such an avid listener, Ultimate Guide to partnering. Now back to our episode. So let’s dive in. Right First of all, you start off you have Five, which I think is great, I love having five, I think is a really good number. But you covered some really great ground here. And you started off with establishing your superpowers. And we talk on this podcast, Ultimate Guide to partnering about partners to get it right. And partners that fail. So tell us first about like partners that have gotten this right, and what did they do? And then what are examples that you think that partners maybe fell short here?
Brent Combest 15:25
Sure. And the ones that get it right, there’s a pretty common thematic to this, it’s really all about, what are they amazing at not good at not great at amazing at where they can elevate their stature to the very top of what is a crowded ecosystem out there. Remember, there’s 30,000 plus partners in the US and I would venture to guess that most all of them want to co sell in some capacity with a vendor like Microsoft. But at the end of the day, there’s only so much room with our field sellers from a mental capacity standpoint, to be able to engage with a select number of partners that have true strength in an area. And the partners that have really done this well of defining their superpower. They oftentimes blend two areas together, they come in with a true expertise around us sales play are a solution area, married with an industry set of expertise, meaning they can go into a business decision maker at a bank, and be able to talk about the business outcomes, the challenges, whether it’s compliance or process flow, that need to be sold, and then clearly articulate what they’re going to do with our products and platforms to be able to make that real, that’s something that our teams are so hungry for in the field as somebody that can go that deep that kind of inverse of that. And to your point around, where do I see the shortcomings and mistakes take place is when partners come in, and they say, Hey, we do the whole Microsoft stack, we can do whatever you need, just send it over to us and we’ll figure it out. But we’ll fillers don’t have time or temperament for that. And there’s no real proof that you’re solid, or you’re experienced when you come at it with a generalist viewpoint I find because I use this term being a shiny quarter and a bucket full of shiny quarters. And that’s how its partners need to stand out.
Vince Menzione 17:12
And you mentioned So you mentioned taking the set of competencies, I would say. And then also looking at it from an industry precision, I guess is a word that I would like to use here maybe in saying we can specifically go deep in this area with this set of capabilities. Is that how you see it?
Brent Combest 17:29
It is it’s precisely how I see it. And just unravel that just a little bit more. If you think about Microsoft, we’re a company that’s been around for decades, co selling is something that we’ve been doing for a very long time. And what that means is there are incredibly well placed to position incumbents that already have long standing relationships have proven value propositions I’ve been at this for a long time. And for a new partner that’s coming in, or one that’s really trying to accelerate their coastal impact. You have to have the mindset of what we do. We are so good at that we can displace an incumbent in the the joke I always make the partners is hey, I love all of our partners. But the reality is in this industry in this sales area, I already have Derek Jeter playing shortstop, you got to beat Derek Jeter out to take that partner over. And if you come in with that mindset, you got to change. I
Vince Menzione 18:18
love it. And I know you have a big house in baseball and your pedigree and your family pedigrees. I love the Derek Jeter analogy. So let’s talk about number two here we’ve got show proven success with advanced specializations and customer stories. So take me through it.
Brent Combest 18:35
Yeah, this is the way that you can empirically proven one of the very first questions that a seller or a channel manager is going to ask you, once you talk about your superpower, and your experience is going to be Tell me about where you’ve already found success. And the quickest way to prove that is through the advanced specializations. Because that’s got a set of criteria. And an audit that happens with it, you don’t just immediately become anointed with an advanced specialization, it is a high hurdle and it is one that is has a high brand recognition with our field. It’s also a conduit for certain programs that we invest in. So the field sellers know that a part of that carries that Bray likely has access to investment funds that are going to help to close deals with customers. And then the customer story side, this is where you can bring it to life citing real examples of how you’ve gone in over and over again, and really landed what you’re going to deliver for that in a previous fashion. And so the three that you’re saying, I’m gonna hit repeat on this button, I’m already going to do what I’ve done before something very close to it. It just elicits confidence in your ability to go and do it.
Vince Menzione 19:45
And I guess that’s really so important for our sellers, right because you have limited amount of bandwidth to bring a partner and you got to make sure you bring the right partner to the dance or the table and just knowing that is true and it’s been proven and Successful I guess is key, right?
Brent Combest 20:02
Yeah, it really is. The field sellers are like any quarter bearing individual out there that want to do whatever they can to really help the customer but at the same time, retire their number. And they’re going to want to feel that sense of confidence before they can bring a partner in.
Vince Menzione 20:19
Which brings us to the third one. So building trust through repeatable win formulas. Now, take me through that a little bit. That’s, that was really interesting. When I read that,
Brent Combest 20:28
yes, it’s a newer concept. And I can’t take credit for it. I’ve got a really smart guy on my team named Alex Sessoms that kind of conceptualize this. And we’ve made it more of a common tool or approach that we use now across the entire portfolio that my team manages. And really, if you think about the superpower, that’s the why I should care why I should be interested in engaging with a partner, the wind formula is the expression of how you’re going to go out and acquire and drive consumption and revenue with a customer and usage as well. So really, what this is we took the most common way that we define a winning formula is we took the Microsoft sales process. And we said at each stage of that sales process, what do you do as a partner to pro progress that lead through the funnel all the way to a win. And what we’re trying to solve for here is empirical evidence with the seller that we have a high close rate, we have strong deal velocity, and our time to consumption and usage is very slow ours very quick, I should say. Because at the end of the day, if you’re a field seller, you’re talking in the vernacular of a field seller, they want to know the deal is going to close fast, you’re going to win a lot. And then you’re immediately going to drive consumption because it’s not until that meter starts to turn that their quota starts to get retired. And so that winning formula is a proven methodology, or a recipe for success that you can run over and over again. And it’s a blend of how you take the programs and investments that we have pays for Azure and Azure everywhere in PI funds, and marry that with what you do things like assessments, proof of concepts change, adoption management workflows that you drive with customers, how do you bring those two things together into a linear process that goes from first touch of an account of a prospective account all the way through to raving fan and raving customer?
Vince Menzione 22:20
So you measure? are you measuring ratios? at each step in the process? Are you saying okay, you’re close your ratio from getting from stage to stage five to stage four to stage three to stage two to stage one? Do you look at those individually? Do you look at close win ratios? How do you measure those? Yeah, that’s
Brent Combest 22:37
exactly right. And and I’ve gone as far with my team this year to start to help them understand they all go through with a managed partner. This process we call partner business planning, sometimes we use three letter acronyms all the time, a PDP, and what my ask of each of the partner development managers was, for each scorecard metric that we have, I want for you to start with a metric and work your way backwards. And so for example, let’s take Azure consumed revenue. Okay, what is the breakdown of baseline revenue that needs to be maintained meaning baseline is the revenue that we’re just not letting churn is revenue we’ve assigned in the past that continues to drive the same level of consumption, then what net new revenue, incremental revenue needs to be driven this year? That’s the difference between baseline and new, then we break the new revenue down into customer acquisition and additional projects with existing customers. And from that, the next question we ask is, okay, tell me what’s the average deal size across these two new and additional projects you’ve typically see. And then we start to understand how many deals Do we have to have, what percentage are going to come from marketing activities that you drive versus Marketing Leads that Microsoft shares for you, and we have that balance, right. And then we get into the funnel, okay, if you go from event to assessment, to proof of concept to close, then we start to look at the percentages inside of that. So that’s exactly how we go through that journey.
Vince Menzione 24:02
Very interesting. Very interesting. And so you do this formula for each one of the partners for the partner business planning is new
Brent Combest 24:09
this year. So you if you’re a managed partner, you’re listening to this here in the US, you’re probably seeing this in fits and starts a little bit, but but it’s something that we’re trying to become more disciplined about. Because as we’ve gone through the years, Microsoft for compliance reasons, has moved more and more towards we require for investment and engagement and certain programs for you to have proven through consumption and usage and revenue attribution, that you’ve actually driven that so it’s no more that we just bet on partners without seeing in the data that they’ve had that level of impact, we have to be able to tie our investments to say the top 30 performing partners have a certain sales play as an example. And so what I’m trying to do with my team is Lana methodology that it helps the partners to ensure that they’re going to have optimized output have the highest level so that they have the best potential to be engaged and brought into certain programs and investments that
Vince Menzione 25:06
we’re making as a company. You know, it seems pretty implied here that you’re make putting the optics on have a chief revenue officer on the business and not just a partner development manager. Is that the case?
Brent Combest 25:18
That’s so funny that you mentioned that, you know, I’ve talked in the past, historically, I had three kind of functions of a PDM, they were the Agile board member, they were an investment maker, because they had to help partners to understand how to think through their strategies and where to invest time and access to resources. And they were a pioneer, because frankly, in my experience here, if you rest on what was your competitive advantage, and probably 24 to 36 months, it won’t be employed this healthy state of paranoia to continue to evolve and drive ongoing transformation in a really strong way. But this year, we’re doing exactly what you mentioned there. But it’s we’re bringing in this concept of the CRL mindset of the PDMS to help not only set this up right in the plan, but to also go out and drive the right level of rigor, discipline hygiene with our pipeline.
Vince Menzione 26:08
So important, I refer to as my maniacal focus. And it’s really important that the partnership is much more than just a Kumbaya meeting. So you’re getting down really to the business execution here, which is fabulous.
Brent Combest 26:20
You really are. And if I’ll be playful here for a minute, but if you treat your PDM like a gopher this this reactor that chases issues that you have, you’re missing the total point of where they can add value, they need to be seen as a strategic arm for your business and challenge them to have this kind of a conversation with you. Because when you go down this journey of having this rich conversation on how do we actually set plans the right way and then drive accountability in both ways against it. That’s when we meet our mutual goals. And I think you’ll see the acceleration of the partnership really take off
Vince Menzione 26:50
so important here. So we’re gonna shift gears to number four, which was nurture the seller customer relationship. Tell us more?
Brent Combest 26:58
Yeah, I think the most common mistake when I’m talking to a part of that’s just getting into co selling, what they’ll say to me is, hey, we did x y&z When does the lead spigot turn off because I’m ready for it. And the myth there is that you do something and all of a sudden with a straight bag of leads comes down your way, that’s not really how it works. At the end of the day, this co selling engagement is a partnership where we’re mutually adding value to each other within a particular account. And what happens most commonly in these Cosell engagements is the seller will want to work with you to help fill the holes on the relationships that they have across the company, especially in the larger accounts, you take a huge fortune 500 account as an example, you as a partner may be working with a totally different business unit or group than our field sellers are. And that’s an immediate set of value bi directionally, where you can introduce them into stakeholders and help them to support you on certain projects. And they can draw you into areas that they’re working on as well. That’s the real mental model for co selling, it’s not, hey, we’ll nurture something to 20% and then we’ll shoot a bunch of leads over the fence and off you go. It’s very different from that.
Vince Menzione 28:10
I love this And to your point about just this expectation that things are just gonna happen by themselves. And they’re gonna happen exactly where I want them to happen and not with any without any concern about where they’re going to happen for the partner. So number five, maintain discipline Cosell practices. What does this look like?
Brent Combest 28:30
This was a bit of a challenge at times, and I completely respect the partner blockages here, you think about something as simple as maintaining pipeline hygiene. And health really means that a partner probably has a CRM system internally that they’re managing. And now they’ve got to go into partner center and update the needs in a secondary place. And some of our partners have gone as far as to integrate these two solutions together to make that process really simple, but many habits and so it does create duplicative work. But the reality is, though, one of the things that we look at whenever we’re choosing partners to engage in certain programs, and maybe a 90 day sprint around a sales play that we want to drive some incremental revenue out of, or the field team is saying, Okay, what partners have a lot of longer term Cosell potential we’re going to go in and we’re going to look at the data. And we’re going to look at the volume of leads that have been shared inbound from the partner to Microsoft. We’re going to look at the quality of those leads and what historically has happened. We’re going to look at things like as the pipeline progressing, are they moving the deals from stage one to 234, and on to close and so on, we’re going to look at how they maintain that Cosell discipline because the last thing a field seller wants is to say I really like your story. I really like your winning formula. Hey, I see you on some of my accounts. Let me go ahead and engage you in 10 or 12 more of my accounts, and then nothing happens simply because we don’t see any discipline around it and then it becomes a black box, and that just frustrates the seller so they are really keen on making sure that process is maintained and is healthy and in a very durable way in both directions. And it’s on us to do that for you. As we’re engaged with those accounts, we want to make sure that we’re providing the updates back
Vince Menzione 30:10
to partners in the same regard. And what’s interesting On the flip side, and really important on the flip side of this is partners that do this, well get the attention, it becomes a megaphone, if you will, for your success working with Microsoft, because you become known as a partner that is responsive is demonstrating the results. Like if I’m reporting back to you on the results that I’m achieving working with you. That’s exactly
Brent Combest 30:32
right. At the end of the day, there’s really two words that go into this one hyphenated, but Cosell partnership, and that emphasis is on partnership. And it has to be driven in both directions in the right way. And I look, I hold our field tellers accountable to treat partners and adjust and fairway and to make sure that they’re treating them in the same kind of conditions of satisfaction. But as long as we can maintain the health of both sides, that way, we’re just in a better position to create sustainable kind of engagement over the long term, Brendan,
Vince Menzione 31:01
I really appreciate you sharing these best practices, we are going to provide a link to your post your blog post in our show notes for listeners who want we gave the abbreviated version, but you have more details specifically. So for our partners listening today, any other advice going into fiscal year 22 that you want to impart on them?
Brent Combest 31:21
You know, I think it’s a great question. It’s very timely right here at the beginning of the fiscal year. I think that’s I think it’s in two areas. If I were to think about strategic and tactical, let me start with strategic. The first is just create operational discipline, to scale, right constantly be looking for ways that you can improve your approach to people process and technology so that you’re thinking about that longer term. At the end of the day, when you think about, okay, I want Microsoft to Cosell with me, I want them to continue to invest in me, we’re aggressively going out and trying to take what is an ever growing target addressable market. And we need our top partners and our entire portfolio of partners to have a relentless passion for growing and creating scale. That’s how we that’s how we live our mission, right. That’s how we truly empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And we simply can’t do that by staying static in the capacity of sales and delivery that we have today. So we got to think about how we grow that. I think the second major strategic bias that I would have, if I were in a partnership would be to challenge yourself to shift toward being industry focused. And you can start by having an industry veneer, it can be architecture, but over time, I would really stress to become better and bolder and stronger at having true industry differentiation. And the way that you do that kind of leads me to the third strategic area would be have a persistent curiosity about your customers future direction, where are they going? What do they need, to the degree that you can stay ahead of this, it’s going to open doors for advanced workloads, bigger margin project and managed services and potentially even IP for you that can be created. But if you continue to stay behind the curve a little bit, you risk getting into some of the commoditized workloads that four or five years ago, we were seeing healthy margins on. And frankly, we’re not anymore. So the partners that stay ahead of that curve are generally the best in terms of overall profitability, and you can partner to accomplish that. Or you can add a net new practice to your business and really align that to your superpowers as an extension of what you already do today. So that’s the strategic side. I think there’s three things tactically speaking, I get really good at the one is what we just talked about a minute ago, which is really understand how to drive that Cosell engagement in the right way, and have realistic expectations and how to approach it with that challenge or mindset that, hey, if I’m not already really deep in this, but I want to be I’ve got to deploy displace an incumbent, I’ve got to be really strong. I would say the second piece and I work with partners on this a lot, it seems to be a big challenge at times, mainly because partners haven’t digested in a lot of cases, the importance of this, but be relentless about attribution. And for those of you that aren’t familiar with that term attribution is associating yourself to the revenue consumption, and usage that you drive. This is the first element that we use when we met partners impact and our desire to reinvest. And then whether it be co selling PDM assignment, technical engagement, programming, involvement, all those kinds of things. And that’s where you want to understand partner admin link for Azure customer partner record or see pour on on some of the other seat based products really understand those CSP, understand those deeply and understand how to make sure you’re attributed to every single customer and every single dollar that you’re driving. And then the last piece is to understand the investments that Microsoft makes and how to leverage them and then get them into your win formula. Make sure that they’re a complete part of how you’re dissecting and defining the Your go to market strategy within that, that could be pi, advanced specializations, PI’s of partner investment engine, things like Azure everywhere as an example or pays for peace events. Think about and understand our incentives where we’re funding assessments, proof of concepts, there is a lot more money this year in those areas that we’ve had in the past hundreds of millions more, so make sure that you’re taking full advantage of it, because it’s no secret. In my portfolio of the top partners here in the US, the ones that use these dollars the most every single year are the biggest growth partners that we have.
Vince Menzione 35:34
Yeah, they understand how to work within Microsoft’s boundaries, all say, in a way, in a good way. And understanding why it’s so important to attribute yourself to the accounts that you’re working on. And then also, that the uncovering the gold, if you will, there is great gold there, but understanding how to get to it. Absolutely.
Brent Combest 35:52
I couldn’t agree more. And we’ve, in a lot of ways, we’ve balanced our investment portfolio where it used to be more on the incentives as a reward for selling, we still have a lot of that there. But we all know, we’ve also learned over the years that if we fund the right activities in the pre sale side, like assessments of proof of concepts, we see incredible results on the backside of that we learned that through Azure. And now we’re starting to do that a lot inside of dynamics and even the monitor worksite. and security. That’s a recipe that we’re starting to invest in more heavily in the other areas because of Azure success.
Vince Menzione 36:28
Such great takeaways, Brent, I really appreciate you sharing those, we’re gonna provide a summary of these in our show notes. I want to thank you again, I know what a busy time of year this is, with planning and launching the new fiscal year, you are always such an amazing guest, You are such an amazing, bright light to our partner ecosystem. For our listeners who want to reach out to you what’s the best way for them to do Sure, I
Brent Combest 36:50
think the easiest and fastest way is through LinkedIn. I share a lot there, whether it’s blogs, or videos or other assets that we make available. And I check it every day. So if there’s a LinkedIn message that comes across, I’ll reply to it. I’m happy to
Vince Menzione 37:06
help us as I can. Thanks again for being back. We’re gonna have you again, at the end of the year, I want to do a round up again with you. So thanks again for being an incredible guest on Ultimate Guide to partner.
Brent Combest 37:16
Oh, it’s my honor and privilege. I’m greatly appreciative of it. As with each of my episodes, I
Vince Menzione 37:22
appreciate your support. Please subscribe on your favorite platform, like comment, tell your friends about Ultimate Guide to partnering and where they can find us and i’d love your feedback. Please like the podcast and provide comments or reach out to me at Vince Menzione on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also like and follow Ultimate Guide to partnering on our Facebook page, or drop me a line at Vin Sam at ultimate dash partnerships.com this episode of the podcast is sponsored by ultimate partnerships. Ultimate partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships, get partnerships right, optimize for success, deliver results, and for more information, go to ultimate dash partnerships.com
Announcer 38:13
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 calm and facebook.com slash Ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partnering