Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

Brandon Lee, Founder of Fist Bump and Co-Host of Mastering Modern Marketing, shares insights on modern selling, LinkedIn strategies, B2B marketing approaches, and digital marketing for businesses. The discussion delves into the evolving landscape of marketing and sales, leveraging platforms like LinkedIn, and the importance of trust in the selling process.

Yvonne Muench discusses the power of Microsoft's marketplace for partners, highlighting AI adoption benefits, rewards for ISVs, strategic alignment, and marketplace growth. Learn about marketplace success, partner planning, and collaborations with Microsoft in the evolving ecosystem.

Six Timer – Jay McBain Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® We are thrilled to welcome special guest Jay McBain, industry analyst, as he joins our host Vince Menzione for an enlightening discussion. Together, they navigate the ever-evolving landscape of the technology industry, covering diverse topics such as changing market dynamics, the transformative influence of generative AI, and the digital-first mindset adopted by millennial buyers. Join us as we uncover invaluable insights into business strategies, partnership dynamics, and marketplace trends. Whether you’re a CEO, industry professional, or tech enthusiast, this discussion promises to be intellectually stimulating and enlightening. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of why every CEO needs to be a Partnership Ecosystem Leader. What You’ll Learn  1. Why CEOs should prioritize channel leadership with industry analyst Jay McBain. (0:00) 2. The changing nature of buying and decision-making in the digital age. (0:53) 3. Market trends and the role of partnerships in 2024. (5:52) 4. Platform companies and their success factors. (9:49) 5. Tech industry growth and marketplace fees. (13:31) 6. AI and its impact on the tech industry. (17:43) 7. Partner opportunities in the mid-market. (22:36) LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Watch on YouTube 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. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Now on YouTube Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos partner, year, microsoft, marketplace, company, buyer, market, top, partnerships, customer, people, big, platform, leader, opportunity, point, ai, channel, world, organisations Vince Menzione 0:00 I just finished an amazing episode with Jay McBain in our new South Florida studio. Jay is Principal Analyst at Canalis, a global technology analyst firm with a distinct channel focus. We had such an incredible discussion on why every CEO needs to be a channel leader. We’re here in South Florida at our new Boca Raton facility. When did you hit the big toe? It’s time to uplevel the game apart is the this is Ultimate. This is the ultimate partnering Ultimate Guide to partnering and ultimate ultimate partner. So live from Florida. Yep. And you are our very first guest in our new facility here. They’re nice courtesy of media zones, our partner and just excited to be here in person with you. Absolutely. Sort of that we talked about this Florida, this connection. We’re all the channel chiefs are coming to Florida. What do you think about that? Jay McBain 0:53 Yeah, all the celebrities are coming here. And we’ve got a good group of channel chiefs. It’s the southern southern Florida mafia for for the channel. Vince Menzione 1:00 I love it. I love it. Of course, with my Italian heritage, you had to say mafia. So Well, I’m excited to spend more time with you. You know, we it’s just two weeks ago that we were in person in Miami. We both had keynote presentations at the partner conference. And it was a really terrific event. And I really loved your session. So I was hoping today we could spend a little bit of time recounting some of that session. The five reasons why the next generation of CEOs will be partnership leaders warms my heart to know that as a partner, leader and former chief revenue officer as well. So I thought maybe we’d start here. I wanted to deep dive. But you had some very insightful comments, I thought maybe you can maybe summarise the five steps, and then we can deep dive into them. Jay McBain 1:48 Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So you know, for years now, we’ve been making these future predictions. You know, this is what’s going to happen to marketplaces. This is what’s happening to the new buyer. This is what’s happening to the economics of partnering and they were all a David Letterman top 10 list of you know, trends, yes, somewhat interconnected. But at some point coming to an inflection point. And 2024 happens to be the year of that inflection point, where number one, the new buyer is actually here. By the end of the year, a millennial will lead the majority of tech and telco purchasing over $5 trillion. And that’s both by number of millennials, as well as by budget. Number two, this platform economy, not just in the hyperscalers, not just in SAS companies, but taking hold and security. But outside of tech. You know, we always got confused that the biggest automotive companies and pharmaceuticals and banks wanted to become tech companies, every company was going to become a tech company, where we were confused as they actually want to become platform companies. And what that means yes, and that drives a whole different set of economics with the way partnering has worked for over 40 years down here in Boca Raton with August 12 1981. And that first IBM PC with the first IBM programme with Microsoft and others. But now we’re looking at a very different thing. And this is the year that it all changes. And then generative AI and other things that come into it. So again, inflection point all into one time. Vince Menzione 3:14 Yeah, I thought we would deep dive on these it was really great and insightful conversation. Let’s talk about the millennials first, right? Because we’ve been talking about the tectonic shifts. And this new generation of buyers, right, the different buying persona used to clicking three times on my my phone and a box shows up right and, and maybe they don’t want to speak to as many salespeople they want to make their own decision. They go through their own process. You’ve talked about this, and how the decision making process has changed. Can you spend a minute there on that specifically? Yeah, Jay McBain 3:47 so in a different psychology, different behaviours, different journey that they’re on. But suffice it to say they’re either Digital First, or digital only. Right. And when you said, you know, maybe I don’t want to talk to a human, the latest research says it’s 75% of them would actually like to get to end of job and this is to buy a million dollars worth of software. This is to buy a car, I’d like to get to end of job at a very important big decision. Digital only. Yeah, and so that’s 75%. So this is a different way to treat those first 28 moments before they make that decision. So that’s one thing. Second is their subscription and consumption friendly. You know, growing up on Netflix growing up on Spotify, yes, they’re okay to pay $1 a month for the rest of their life for a toothbrush that just gets replenished and they understand that they’re in it for life. And this goes again across technology, but it goes into every industry. Absolutely. And the way they bank the way they buy insurance the way they you know buy manufactured goods or you know pharmaceuticals it’s okay to buy be in these subscription or consumption models. And that leads to marketplace. Yes, there okay buy in seven layers to solve a problem. No one wants to buy this all you can eat you know best in class. To end to end platform, I’m okay building layers to my outcome. And I’m okay, building it as a team sport. So in the older generations, you and I generation, you know, we kind of looked for a single throat to choke somebody that was our trusted adviser, somebody that could really orchestrate it for us, right? The new generation, it’s okay to build a team. And it’s not going to be a team of the seven, seven, same seven people. It’s going to be a team of different types of people that have expertise in my industry that have expertise in my geography, expertise in the sector segment that I’m in the compliance and governance that I’m under all of the different angles, I want to build a team and I go back to sports, I don’t need seven quarterbacks that are 11 quarterbacks on the field. I need, you know, 11 different players, but I need them to each do their job of No, Bella Chuck. Well, you know, we Vince Menzione 5:52 talked about partner to partner for years now Microsoft parlance was around partner party, we’ve been talking about the decade of the ecosystem. I don’t know who coined that phrase, maybe someone we know, personally. But this is this is really about ecosystem. This is really, when I think about the, I call it the marketplace moment, in fact, we’re taking we’re digitally buying, right? There’s a lot of things that come with along with that, right the ability to consume against these large cloud commitments, but also the opportunities you say, to stitch together the solution that best supports your requirements. And this is where we get into multi party offers, in fact, where you can, in fact, layer several solutions together, bring it serve it up to a customer already, he’s made $100 million commitment to a Microsoft, Amazon or Google and say this is exactly what we need. Right. So it’s exactly what you’re talking Jay McBain 6:41 about. Yeah. And that’s the final piece of research on this new buyer is integration. First integration. First of all the things you’d write into an RFP, that’s important to you, you know, the price is important your service, your support, things like your brand reputation, you know, all these things would have criteria around how I’m going to make my decision. Number one criteria now is how you work in my environment. This is both as a personal story as well as a professional one, where Apple got on stage last year and said 79% of people won’t buy a car. Unless it is Apple CarPlay. Yeah, they neglected to mention Android Auto. But the fact of the matter is, you know, here’s an industry that’s $4 trillion in size, you may be, you know, taking over a dealership from your great grandparents. And all of a sudden, you’re going to lose four fifths of your buyers, because there’s not a technology integration in place. It’s amazing. And so watching this, and then, you know, feeding that into all the other parts of life, I’ll buy a product that’s 80% as good as the competitor, if it works better in my environment. So how do we feed in integration first buyer, a digital first or only buy or a subscription consumption marketplace friendly buyer. This is a complete reconstruction of how we do marketing, how we do selling, and how we do long term customer success. Vince Menzione 7:54 It’s fantastic. So the next thing you talked about was the death of the cookie, you brought this up before as a big factor, right? And really why partnering is so important right now. And again, with my experience in partnering and as a CRO for formally, what would you say about the old acquisition models and new models? Jay McBain 8:14 Yeah, so we talk about 2024 as an inflection point. And this end of the cookie, if you happen to be in marketing has been coming for years. It’s actually three years ago that on the iPhone, you could say I don’t want to be followed, I no longer want to be the product on the internet. And back then, you know, Facebook was publicly saying this could put us out of business. We rely on this, you think of Google whose half their company relies on this business model of selling our personal data in those first 28 moments. And obviously, there’s active buyers. So this is the third party data system. Were a couple of weeks ago to start off 2024 Google updates Chrome and Android to actually stop limiting cookies. They also made a declaration by the end of 2024. The cookie will be dead. Yeah. So in a world that moves from third party data, you remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And remember, you know, the billions of dollars which is created trillion dollar valuations for these companies and third party data selling our private data is now moving to second party, the channel partners ecosystem alliances are who owned these first 28 moments, the ebooks, the podcasts like this one, all the things that happen in these 28 moments, now becomes a second party data problem. And CMOS need to shift from third party to second party. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear and on finding this buyer intent. And this is just a remarkable thing happening along with everything else. Vince Menzione 9:47 But it’s what we’ve been saying for so many years now. Right. I mean, many years ago, I went through a course by Miller Heiman strategic selling, and the whole idea was to find out as much situational analysis or awareness of your client. And the best way to do that is other people that are talking to your client who wants talks to your client than you, the seven or eight seats at the table, they might be competitors, they might be potential partners, they might just be friendlies. And be able to have those conversations. And now what you’re saying around this is, that’s why it’s so important that we have this new data intelligence. And we find new ways to approach the customer because we don’t have cookies. Jay McBain 10:23 And so you know, a story around Microsoft, for example, you know, they did a better job of surrounding the buyer. Yes, they didn’t have a better price than than AWS, they didn’t have better product. They didn’t have better Superbowl ads. What they did is had better coverage of the seven people that surrounded every buyer. They had more Microsoft endorsements sitting at the table. And that sat in the ebooks, at the events, it sat in the podcast, it sat in all the different moments that the customer was friendlier to that solution versus that one. And that’s one example. But that’s the future of selling is a surround strategy of these seven trusted people, and how you get them to influence that buyer. In those first 28 moments. Vince Menzione 11:11 It feels like the rest of the world is going to start speaking our language. This Jay McBain 11:15 was part of the why the next CEO should you know have partnerships in their resume or be a partnership leader. Yeah. Vince Menzione 11:23 So you this this year of the platform, but I wanted to dive in here a little bit, right, because this is this is somewhat new, you know, he talked about every company wanting to be a tech company. And now this year, the platform is a little bit of a different twist on this. Spend a little time with us on this one. Yeah, Jay McBain 11:40 so it started the year with we did a paper with HubSpot, one of these leading platforms, along with partnership leaders and others that put together a study of the top 50 platforms in the world. Let’s look at companies like Salesforce. Let’s look at companies like ServiceNow and workday and Marketo and NetSuite, HubSpot, but the top 50 platforms in the world and ask questions, you know, how did they? Did they do this at scale? How do they create these integrations at the scale? How do they surround the buyer? How do they deploy the resources, the people, the the processes, the programmes, the underlying technology? How does this all work? And what makes these companies obviously the the highest valued companies in the world, right? They make up the highest valuations. And if you start at the fortune 500, at the top moving downwards, they’re the most valuable companies in the world. So this is where I said every company is looking in to become a platform company. Yes. And the the riches that come with that. You’ve got to learn though the basic underpinnings the foundation of what it means to be a platform, and how you run a platform. It just doesn’t come by accident. No, you have to put things in place. And it takes many, many years to make sure that you can build it’s like a universe. It’s like a sun that has planets and gravity and everybody getting pulled in. Because you’re not going to go out and sign up everybody to be part of your platform. Your platform has to be its own flywheel that kicks out a lot of multiplier of opportunity, and want people to come in. And we’re breaking down now, which is a little bit of the magic, the decoder ring, of what makes that happen. What kind of people do we need? What kind of programmes do we need? What kind of technology should we be running? How do we go to market? Again, another reason why maybe the CEO should be a partnership leader, if you’re looking to be a platform in any industry. Yeah. And Vince Menzione 13:32 this ties into the whole marketplace conversation in such a great way as well. I mean, we’ve discussed the 45 billion that you had predicted by the end of 2026. I think it was originally 2025 2520 25. And now you said that that’s under call, then, potentially this year, what are we saying? Jay McBain 13:51 So I mean, at Wall Street, now we’ve got not only the Big Three hyperscalers. But we’ve got now with the bigger marketplace, SAS companies and others, starting to show what their future commits are. And it’s one of these again, to get these high valuations. You know, investors love to know how much money you’ve got committed to you. And just the top three have over $340 billion committed rounding. And then somebody at some point has to figure out how to put that into product skews and put that together into seven layer stacks. But that 45 billion which was a hockey stick, it’s an 86% compounded annual growth. We think it might be doubling every single year, and we don’t see it stopping after 2025. This is just a trend that continues feeding this new buyer. Vince Menzione 14:35 In fact, the number went from 300 billion to 340 billion in one quarter correct. So we’ll see what the what it’s expanding. Jay McBain 14:41 We’ve also got in the last 30 or 60 days, we’ve got four press releases now. I’ll use AWS Marketplace as an example. CrowdStrike snowflake Palo Alto and Splunk have all issued press releases that they’re running a billion dollar business on one marketplace. And one of the predictions we made Alongside the 45 billion, which we also under called, is that AWS, as a leading marketplace, would join the likes of TD cynics and Ingram as a top 10 distributor by 2025. Again, under called it, they’re already there, they’re there. Now you have to get to about 5 billion to overtake dnh. An exclusive networks. And they’re already there. Yeah. So this is an area where they may have achieved, you know, $5 billion as one marketplace. But their sites are on the 60 billion at TD cynics and 50 billion at Ingram. The numbers are astounding. And when you’re doubling every single year, it doesn’t take you long to get there. Vince Menzione 15:38 So what does this do to the channel and to distribution? Jay McBain 15:41 Well, the blow up with this is the channel from decades ago, was at the point of sale, all the economics worked at the point of sale. And partners were only measured at that point of sale. Yeah, how much do you sell? Well, the fact of the matter is money is changing hands in a very different way. And one thing that happened and Microsoft led this, and everybody soon followed is Microsoft declared that a marketplace fee shouldn’t be 20%, or shouldn’t be 35%, which has apple in court with epic and 45% of what they’re trying to chose the New York Times. But Microsoft, like we’re not going to make money off our ecosystem. It costs us about 3% of the fee to run a marketplace. So much like a MasterCard or Visa swipe and consumer, it’s about 3% of the deal. Architect The movement of money, which is complicated, it’s, you know, we’ve got to move the money, we’ve got to take on the risk that the customer doesn’t pay, we’ve got to wait for the time value of money, net, 30, net, 60. Net 90. And in the end of all that we have to hire Biff to break knees when that customer doesn’t pay. But for forever, we thought in the 1980s, that that was worth 40% margin, then it was 30, then it was 20. And, you know, we’re all kind of deciding what that’s worth. But it’s now been declared and Google followed Microsoft, and just a few months ago, AWS is finally on board. Yes, but everybody’s at the point now and all the end users know that the whole value add of taking my money on behalf of a vendor is worth three. So let’s talk about where the other 17% of the gross two nets are. And a partner would tell you Well, I guess I do free consulting, I do free design and architecture. I do free implementations. And it’s great. I’ve always always got paid at one point. And a lot of the other stuff that maybe other partners like a system integrator would charge for, I’ve ended up giving for free. And and now in marketplace model, I could still go get the other 17% on a private offer or some sort of multi partner offer. And I might be willing to give up the 3% because that’s a part of the business. I’m not all that interested in. Vince Menzione 17:43 Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it’s changing the entire value chain equation is what I would say there. If you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I built growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organisations that are resistant to change part of the communities special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers builders ISV sellers, s eyes MSPs and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is it’s noisy. I don’t know whom to listen to, and where to go. There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard. We’re getting ready to open the doors early to pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder and innovator or a leader, visit our website. So we can’t have a talk in 2024 or even 2023 For that matter without bringing up AI generative AI. I did an interview with Microsoft’s leading reseller and Google’s leading reseller that earlier this week and we had this discussion about what’s happened this past year. I mean, Satya Nadella recognise the CEO of the Year gave us all a masterclass this past year, right about partnerships. In fact, he had been working on the Gen AI partnership for five years or so. And it came to fruition and everyone was caught on their back heels. I mean, Google was caught in the backfield. So they responded accordingly. But it’s changing the game now, right? It’s changing the valuation of those organisations quite a bit from 2023 to this year. What would you say about Gen AI? Yeah, Jay McBain 19:50 and I think you know, Microsoft’s a good story where, you know, he will be crowned you know, with a Jack Welch award as the leader of the decade if not leader the century so far because, you know, overachieving Apple a couple of weeks ago in valuation, yeah, was a big testament to all the moves that have been made, not just the channel and partner moves, but the moves into generative AI. But there’s also he’s also confused the market, he’s come out and said it’s a $4 trillion opportunity. And in a world economy, that’s 105 trillion in GDP. That’s material. And so partners, you know, kind of look at that and go, I think I believe him. But Can somebody break it down? For me what that really means to me? Where in the cycle is this? What can I charge for? What’s my opportunity? How fastest growing? What kind of skills and competencies do I need to build? Now listen, I run a small business over here. And can somebody break down that 4 trillion for me, and, you know, at an analyst firm it Canalis. I mean, that’s what we’ve been doing. You know, here’s the $15 billion connected to that bigger number that happened last year, here’s the 150 8 billion, that’s going to happen within the next four years, a 59% growth rate. But very specifically, here’s the type of business model, here’s the kind of skills, here’s the kind of products you need to sell services you need to sell, to go take advantage of this. And it’s somewhat time delayed, you know, if you’re a VAR MSP, you know, there’s not a laundry list of things that you’re going to go and double or triple your business in 2024 around, unless you’re doing deep consulting on language models, and tuning and training, and, you know, connecting the dots between the 85% of the world’s business data in these large language models sitting out at open AI and sitting with Google. Unless you’re in these deep business conversations with the board and C suite at the biggest of companies. There’s not a lot to do this year. And, you know, our recommendation is perhaps go back and look at the cybersecurity industry growing by double digits. Yeah, look at managed services growing by double digits, look at the things you can control today. And perhaps don’t get too excited about changing everything shutting down your current business, and going all in. Vince Menzione 22:00 Yeah, no, I would add to that. I do think I don’t know where the $4 trillion number comes from how you break out, it sounds like we’re obviously not there now. But I do think that there is an immediate opportunity, Microsoft put some layered in some significant investments in incentives on their co pilot products. And I do think for some of the MSPs. What I’m hearing now is that every CEO, wants is having a conversation about Gen AI, right? How do I how do I take advantage? How do I execute against it? In fact, I heard a quote this week from somebody from Microsoft, that the CEO is now the new CIO. I love that quote, I’m going to reuse that. But I think I think they’re making transform transformation decisions that were normally made further down in the organisation, what would you say? Yeah, Jay McBain 22:45 so we went and asked, you know, Microsoft’s current 400,000 partners, what they think, and a third of them are very sceptical. And they’re happy to take a laggard or late majority play. The next third, are on the fence. And they’re not going to play early majority, or even early adopter. And then 1/3, and this was a comparison to when we asked them 2018 about AI, one thirds, a little bit more excited on the front end. So a highly sceptical, balanced audience, because guess what, they’ve lived through emerging tech hype cycles before, yes, 10 years ago, when IoT was going to take over the world. Last year when Metaverse is going to change everything. So you know, whether it’s quantum computing or Northern robotics, or self driving cars, or 3d printers, I mean, this is a sceptical audience to say that, you know, we’ll take a little bit of a wait and see. And certain partner types that are connected to certain customer segments are going to see a huge opportunity up front. And, you know, it’s wise that, you know, somebody breaks down that number. And make sure that over the course of five years, you know, ahead of time when to start to engage and, and get into these conversations, that technology lifecycle adoption curve, right. And I know the $4 trillion. I mean, when you break it against the world’s economy and 27 industries across 193 countries, and you start to, you know, augment resources and replace resources. And when you rethink your marketing and sales and customer success, your invoicing, your billing your finance, and operations and HR, every part of your company changes that adds up to 4 trillion pretty fast. Yes, it does. The fact of the matter, though, is that’s world economy talk. What services can I sell next Tuesday? And how do I skew them up? And what kind of people do I need to train to go and delight the customer? Is the conversations we should be having in partnerships. Again, another reason why, you know, senior in your company, you should have, you know, people that can understand how this is all going to work. Vince Menzione 24:51 So you and I have talked about the mid market quite a bit, and I spent quite a bit of time analysing this market. I did an event where we feel Richard, some of the leaders from Microsoft and talked about the big market opportunity. In fact, one of those leaders is doubling down on partner attach because it’s I think it’s an under penetrated, I believe you will agree with me here under penetrated market, I wanted to get your viewpoint on this as well. Because I do think it’s a huge opportunity for partners in general, that are both kind of clustered to the top to the enterprise. I’ll call it 11,000 enterprise organisations. Jay McBain 25:26 Yeah, so I happen to run mid market for years and years at IBM and Lenovo. So I know, it’s kind of the mushy middle, companies can quite easily have a top down strategy, the top 11,000, you know how to put out your resources, how to, you know, cover, have the capacity have the capabilities to cover that market. And then you know, the SMB is a little bit less known. It’s a bottoms up, it’s a community led, grassroots led, you’ve got to influence the influencers, which is a big part of the channel, this is where your channel strategies really form in SMB? Yeah, because you need an army to help you to surround those customers. And mid market is probably the least understood, because that’s where the two things meet. And there’s not a lot of expertise, there’s not a list of partners, you can just download that, you know, have mid market as their only target. There’s not a, you know, just an easy go to market routes to market that you can check the box, oh, I need to sign up these distributors, I need to sign up these partners, I need to go do this. And then we’re gonna go get our fair share mid market. So the leaders, you know, are under invested in their own companies. You know, there’s not an understanding either below or above them in their companies of what this is. So, you know, I’m glad that you’re taking this on, to figure out what this mushy middle is, and how to take action. I Vince Menzione 26:44 think it’s a digital, I think it’s it’s marketplace driven. And it’s combining all of the partners, all the seats at the table to accomplish what we need to do. To your point, it is the mushy middle. And the organisations that the top aren’t paying attention. The ones at the bottom are paying attention the way they need to, right. So Jay McBain 27:01 some need to scale up some need to scale downs, right. And it’s a massive market. Huge, it’s a huge market. And, you know, for for companies, there’s billions of dollars of opportunity, that doesn’t take that level of investment. Vince Menzione 27:12 I mean, I’ll quote out of school here, Microsoft alone has somewhere between 75 plus billion dollars of business in that market. So that’s a pretty significant market for partners. So I’d love to having you here today. And next time, we’re going to have a longer session we’re going to have we’re going to host you here and maybe even have some partners in the room. But we’re on a tight timeline today. So for our viewers, listeners, what are they need to be thinking about and doing differently now that we’re in 2024 in a big way. Jay McBain 27:43 I mean, the first thing in this is not a surprise to anyone is continued to be obsessed about your customer. get obsessed about the people they trust, get obsessed about what they read, where they go, who they follow, get obsessed about a journey that isn’t about the point of sale. It’s about the 28th moments before that, yeah, it’s at the point of sale, regardless of how money changes hands. So getting the customer to the dance, getting them on the dance floor. And now with every company, keeping them dancing all night long, every 30 days forever. You know, one company a couple of weeks ago became the most valuable company in the world. By telling Wall Street we’d be the most sticky, predictable, reliable, repeatable and scalable revenue. not reliant on a September launch of a product every year. Yes. And the market responded. And so, you know, we can talk about a $3 trillion company or we can talk about a startup. The same thing is, if you get obsessed about your customer, when you move outwards from your customer, you’re gonna find that there’s partnerships everywhere, in the integrations, in the go to market, in the routes to market in all the influence. All the things you need to do around your customer, are really partner driven at this point. And that’s why I think your leadership should have much better skills and partnerships. Vince Menzione 29:00 I love what you have to say. Jay, I want to thank you. This is your sixth appearance. The robe is coming. It’s the Saturday Night Live Saturday. I live Rob is coming, except it’s gonna have the five timer and then we’re gonna have the stripes at time you come. Yeah, a lot of them both. I want to thank you for joining us today live from South Florida. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Guide to partnering.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. This helps us to continue to feature amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partners

Dee Burger & Tony Safoian Join Ultimate Guide to Partnering® In this episode, I’m joined by two remarkable leaders and friends. Dee Burger is the President of Insight North America, and Tony Safoian is the CEO of SADA Systems, a Google Partner of the Year for many years. Both Dee and Tony have been guests before on Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Tony was one of our first guests seven years ago and was an inspiration to start the podcast. He is also one of only two six-timers on this podcast. Listen as Dee and Tony share the story of their first encounter and why they came together. We also discuss this incredible transformation: AI, Marketplace, Security, and the power of Microsoft and Google’s services. Plus, gain exclusive insights into partnering with the tech giants and other partners. What You’ll Learn  1. Tech industry transformation and partnership strategies. (0:02) 2. Business growth and culture alignment. (2:03) 3. The merger of Insight and SADA. (4:06) 4. Transforming the reseller industry with a new business model. (11:56) 5. AI-driven commerce and marketplaces. (21:15) 6. AI, security, and Google’s services. (25:35)7. Partnering with Google Cloud and Insight. (29:53) LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Watch on YouTube 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. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Now on YouTube Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos SUMMARY KEYWORDS Summary Keywords customers, years, partner, google, insight, work, microsoft, market, technology, ai, organisations, great, biggest, incredible, strategy, talk, marketplace, ag1 Vince Menzione 0:02  Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince menzi own and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through a successful partner. I have the great privilege of being here on site in Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re inside enterprises is hosting amplify 2020 for its annual sales and partner conference for an incredible interview with two amazing leaders and friends. D Berger is North American president of insight and a previous guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering and Tony Savoy in the CEO of sada and insight company, and a five timer on this podcast, inside acquired sought on December 1 of 2023. A move de and Tony say turn their combined capabilities into a multi cloud powerhouse, as Insight has long been a top provider of Microsoft Solutions, while sada is the global Google Cloud Partner of the Year, multiple years. Gentlemen, I’m so excited about our discussion today. Dee Burger 1:02 Thanks for having us. Thanks Vince Menzione 1:03 for having us. Excited to spend time with both of you. I have a long history working with both of your organization’s going back to my days at Microsoft, in fact, a lot of time here in Scottsdale, and Tempe within sight, and of course many years working with SATA back in my earliest days. So I’m so excited to exclusively feature you here for this conversation today. Appreciate that. So first, we’ve seen this incredible transformation in our $5 trillion tech industry for more than a decade. First, the transformation to the cloud. And then the acceleration we’ve seen these last few years. I call it the tectonic shifts, both of your firm’s were on the forefront inside has been the most transformative of the large partners working with Microsoft. And SATA has been referred to as both a born in the cloud partner back in the days when I worked with you, Tony, and has pivoted the business to become the most successful partner in the Google ecosystem. I was wondering if you could share your perspectives on what we’ve been seeing in these last few years. Tony Safoian 2:02 First of all, I want to say being a five timer. Kinda like on Saturday Night Live. I expect the jacket it’s in the mail with a firearm or jacket on it, because I know it’s quite a privilege. Vince, thank you. This is the sixth time Tony it is so like we’re just gonna get racking up the numbers until we’re gonna put all the jacket bars on. Yeah, I mean, it’s an incredible next chapter for us. Obviously, everything I’ve done for the last 23 and a half years has been creating best in class best in breed, I’ve been very focused on uneven in the playing field that every opportunity that you can grab, because like who wants to compete on an even playing field, like you know, who wants to be generic? I think speciality niches, scale, customer incumbency, being on the forefront is just so much more fun. And coming together in a way that was almost serendipitous is an incredible thing for our customers, and an incredible thing for our partners. And I have to say these my new boss. And he’s he’s awesome. I don’t have to say that I say that because it’s true. And the culture is what really matters as Joyce reminds us all the time d reminds us all the time. And you know, that is going to be the foundation of what allows us to make the most of this opportunity. And, you know, everything that I was hoping for, you know, prior to coming together is even more true now that being on the inside, but not just the DEA and the Joyce level. The executive team but everyone we’ve met hear the hundreds of people we’ve met at at amplify our first amplify it’s the same at every level. So this is a great launchpad for 2024 and beyond. And Tony Safoian 4:05 our vantage point you watching the market change, you know tech 2023 was a tough year for the industry. There was there’s a lot of absorption from overbuying, and 21 and 2022. And a lot of different segments. But technology keeps firing away. Right technology is marching forward. Gen AI is changing a lot of things. But all the things we were talking about just a year ago, cloud cybersecurity data, they’re all there. And our job is to help customers take all that and take advantage of it. Like so their businesses are better, as we kind of thought through what what led us here today. You have to be multicloud to succeed in that world. You know, we’d love the partnership with Microsoft and Microsoft is right there on the leading edge taking the world forward to so as Google and if we start with the idea, we’ve got to be great for our customers. We felt we had to be multicloud Absolutely Vince Menzione 5:00 brilliant move strategically. So I’ve been chronicling this rising dominance of the hyper scalars. And I think a lot of people don’t recognise the level of dominance, right? If you look at the data centres, the chips and the data centres, and the infrastructure and the go to market strategies, right, and securing large commitments from organisations at the C suite level, right, buyers are making decisions in the lines of business. But the C suite is where these large commitments are happening. And they’re estimating now that they’re about $340 billion in durable cloud budgets amongst the top three, was this a consideration for the move going forward? Tony Safoian 5:41 I like how he says it, and I don’t want to steal his thunder. So I’ll let him describe the strategy because I think it’s he says it really well. Well, Dee Burger 5:47 I think, no doubt, right, no doubt. So if you look at the investment, people are making the hyper scalars. Now, who would have thought, you know, 10 years ago that three companies were going to own a such a significant part of the infrastructure of the whole world. Everything happens in the cloud. Everything happens in the cloud. And again, back to our job is to be great for our customers, and whatever they need to do. We have to be relevant in those areas. Yeah. Vince Menzione 6:14 So let’s talk about the merger. How did this all come together? Dee Burger 6:19 We had to separate we had two separate pathways, don’t you start with your pathway, I’ll add mine will tell you how they came together. A couple of years ago, it became apparent to us that we need we needed to do something seismic, to continue to be able to grow at the level of trajectory and capacity and evolution that our customers and the market was demanding of us. Every one of our peers had done things way, way, way earlier in their journey than we had. And we were getting to a point where, you know, being broad and deep in this ecosystem, in itself was not, you know, sufficient to serve the needs of our customers and a evolving strategy of more customer centricity customers are asking us to be in more markets, that was very hard to do organically, they were asking us to be more comprehensive, which is hard for us to do organically, like, oh, we wish you could do the Microsoft stuff or wish you could do the, you know, the 50,000 store location work that we want, like, what we just couldn’t do that. So we looked at tonnes of options, kiss a lot of frogs looked at, you know, private equity and all this, you know, just essentially every option, including every strategic option. And it wasn’t really up until I started seeing Insite kind of show up at the big Google Events. And I was like, insights here that it even came sort of to the forefront of my mindset that this could be a potential destination. But as we started looking at it closer and closer, I was like, Oh, my God, they’re, they’re just like us. You know, they believe in the magic of products and services and solutions coming together. They are on their own transformational journey. They have the best incumbency of any potential strategic partner that we could ever dream of. And they are amazing people. Tony Safoian 8:18 Tell him the restaurant where the name of the restaurant where you got the whole thing started. verse, verse, Dee Burger 8:24 yeah, so So this is an interesting story. I know. It’ll be where the thing culminates. So different for me, you know? So I came to Insight summer of 2022. And we talked a lot about m&a. Joyce’s new into the CEO role, we talked about the different things we needed to build over the course of time. The fundamental idea is we touch a lot of customers. And we need to do more and more for those customers. Our mission is to do more and more, be more and more valuable doing more and more things. And started down the path of what are the most we historically have been close to infrastructure? So what are the infrastructure adjacent sorts of things, businesses to get in, we came up with a list. Being multicloud was the first thing we really wanted to do. And so I called a good friend of mine at Google, who will remain nameless, but senior guy at Google and said, We gotta get into Google. We’ve got to figure out a way to do a job there who is out there to buy and it took three seconds SATA. And so we started down this path. We then were contacted through Tony’s banker on Project verse happens to be the same name of the restaurant that they they got started in. We’ve met a bunch we had Tony out to Arizona with with his full team, we sell very much same thing like a fit. It doesn’t help to buy a company that is strategically aligned. That just won’t work. It just doesn’t work in your culture and insights gotta very culture really comes first. It had to fit. We saw the fit together. Tony and I talk because actually at one of these events, Tony, I had a call with Tony, I went out to the lobby, it was at our event called mastery that we do for our technology, or most technical professionals. And we talked and said, let’s figure out how to do this. And we spent three months we worked it out. And then the closing dinner, going back to verse was at the very restaurant that Tony got started November 30, the night before December 1 with Tony and his family and his team. It was really a great event. Vince Menzione 10:26 That is fantastic. What a great story. You know, this reminds me of this conversation, I think about both of your organization’s is really being categories of one. Alright. And Tony, and I’ve had a lot of conversations about his strategy. I know it very well. I feel like insights been the other company as well, that has thought about this holistically. And you know, it’s interesting, because I spent almost 10 years in the Microsoft world, right? And I know that Microsoft and the others as well. Like to fit you into buckets, right? You’re either an ISP, or you’re an SI, or you’re a large scale partner. But it seems that you are redefining your category. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Dee Burger 11:10 Yeah, I’ll start. It was great. We just had Danica Patrick out. And she actually gave the answer. I’m going to quote for this, which was good. You know, they asked her if she had idols when she was going up. And she said, No, she wanted, she wanted to be the best her very much the way we think about it, you know, we are trying to build a business that we don’t believe currently exists. You know, when you think about a client and how hard it is, with a vast array of technology out there, how do you choose? How do you purchase? How do you implement? How do you manage? How do you transform that that whole cycle, we think we’re better positioned to help our customers do that, against the fastest evolving technology industry we’ve ever seen. And it’s only going to get faster. Tony Safoian 11:56 No, it’s completely right. I mean, we’ve been talking to anybody who would listen and you’re an expert in this area, but it’s like you’ve covered channels, partnerships, ecosystems, you’ve worked in it, you’ve covered it for years, you know, like the traditional tendency to put us in like little buckets, right? Like, oh, like, they’re a reseller. And though they’re an SI and they’re no, they’re an RSI, no, they’re NSP? No, they’re an LSP. It’s like just make up random acronyms and pigeonhole. Listen to, you know, traditionally, the one thing we’ve done well, well, you know, I think cloud has changed what customers need us to do, and has forced us to change our own business models, because like, you can’t just like buy a bunch of software from you know, vendor A, and then hire vendor bcde and hope that they implemented well, it just doesn’t work for customers, and it doesn’t work for us in our business model. So and we were both built that way. And we’re on these independent journeys, bring it together just supercharged charges at all we can think of a good name inside had had. So we’re just using there’s like we are the leading solutions integrator, and creating new categories is hard. So you know, Noreen, and Hillary are gonna have a hell of a time making it roll off of everyone’s tongue over the next two years. But that’s what we expect a new category, our own quadrant, we are one of one of solutions integrator, Vince Menzione 13:20 I love solutions integrator, I think it speaks volumes for what’s been missing, right. And we’ve, I’ve had these conversations, you have independent software vendors that do one thing, you have transactional partners that do another thing you have SI is that come and build on top of it. And if you’re lucky, they’re not si ‘s that are going to basically want to be there forever, right? You want to you want to get to the end result. And I think that’s exactly clearly what you’re saying, stating, you’re doing here for customer with the customer in mind and customer focus. Dee Burger 13:47 Absolutely. So I think about it, you know, from the standpoint that the the reseller industry was ultimately set up as a way to sell salespeople to partners. Right, the history was set up that way, he had all kinds of OEMs somebody figured out, Hey, we should consolidate the supply chain. Somebody else said, All right, it’s really hard for all these people to get to all these customers. So the reseller industry came about, and economics worked that way. The emphasis ultimately worked that way. We’re starting in an entirely different place. So there are a whole position in the way we’re going to transform is you start with the customer. And you become very valuable to your partners by virtue of the value that you have for customers. So it’s a it’s a big flip. Okay, Tony Safoian 14:36 it’s all about business model, incentive alignment, right? If you’re just selling, you care about selling as much as the customer will buy. If you’re just servicing. You want to be as slow as possible to implement the salvages before you get fired. You basically are aiming for a c plus, that’s right, right. But if you own the whole value chain, you want to you want them to buy X exactly what’s gonna solve their problem. And you want to implement it as efficiently as possible. So you can point to that value. And then when the next project and the next workload and the next, you know, strategic implementation, we want to be there forever, for different reasons, right? Not because we want, we’re going as slow as possible, we want to be there by earning the right to be there over and over again. And that’s kind of how we built our business from day one. I remember like managed services, which is a great endpoint for where we want all of our solutions to end up for the right reasons. But the reason we won in like 2000 to 2003 is like, we had an agreement you can get out of in 30 days. And I think that just creates a different culture. It does. And again, the customer knowing with comfort, at the end of the day, that they’re, you’re gonna wrap your arms around them. And this way, I see Dee Burger 15:46 Yeah, and we’re not successful unless we can point to business outcomes. So this level of incentive alignment, as a business model just really has not existed. So we’re going to just maximise that and lean on that. And the market will realise, you know, the trades will realise, but most importantly, our customers will just understand that, like, just working with insight is is a different experience. Vince Menzione 16:11 So what an incredible event you’re hosting here, right? You’ve had some of the leaders in the industry here. I mean, we could talk about some of the names. We we had Kevin Pisgah, on stage, who was co hosting my event been a podcast guest as well, Michael Clark Tony Safoian 16:25 got some good dance moves. Vince Menzione 16:26 He is He is a low energy. He’s incredible. And Michael Clark as well. Yeah, from Google, to people that I admire and have worked with over the years. How should each of these tech giants think differently? And what unique value are you ultimately delivering as a solutions integrator to the market, but more importantly, to the customer? Tony Safoian 16:46 Michael Clark said it best I think Google strategy is clearly a partner attached to every opportunity, every customer, every pursuit, every workload, 100% partner attach, it is paramount in our strategy, because, again, consumption economics, this stuff doesn’t just like light up itself. And I think that’s an important realisation and an important benefit to the channel. An enterprise is different, and I think it took Google maybe a few years to figure it out. But, you know, I don’t care if you have the best technology in the world. Unless you have a channel, you have partners, you have a strategy that includes them. The last mile is where the value is. So I think that multi year transformation, Google’s realise, going from a consumer mindset to an enterprise mindset, again, plays completely to our strengths. And no partner in the world can provide more parts of the value chain of how the best Google technology lands and produces outcomes for customers than this combination. And so I think, again, we’ve created an uneven playing field, it looks really good on paper. Now we get to go execute it post amplify, which is the big Launchpad of, of really sada and Google landing and insight and sort of a TEDx sort of way. So we got to go execute now and and prove it out. Dee Burger 18:13 And I think that’s very much the case, you know, back to the question of how they should be thinking about us. It is about execution. So the, of course, Microsoft and Google are phenomenal partners. But we got many more partners, and amplify attendees we had, I had a slide on this represent roughly a third of the value of all the businesses in the United States. That’s our that’s our partner crew. They’re making unbelievable technology. Our job is to make it work for customers to be in there to drive value with customers and then to work backwards to what how do you assemble the right the right set of things, that that’s what we’ve got to do. Vince Menzione 18:50 I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 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 Vinson that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson, check them out. No, you had Kevin on stage and I’ve been talking to him about this SMC business that he manages at Microsoft. I mean, the numbers are astounding. People don’t realise that mid market is really, you know, everybody clusters towards the top to the enterprise, but this mid market is really untapped. Up to under Services underserved. And being able to again, I think your model is really effective in that mid market, which, by the way, it’s it’s $100 billion opportunity for even a Microsoft. So I just think that what you’re doing there specifically, it really hits home in terms of the market penetration. Dee Burger 20:18 No question. So so if you think about the numbers we are, in our calculation, we do work with about 70% of all the businesses in United States that have $100 million in revenue or more, we do at least $1. Right. So it’s kind of a I’ve been in the system integrator world for a very long time before coming here. Those models are heavy. And you can you can land that model and about 500 customers. We can we can land our model at a much broader we have 29 That actually was sought, I haven’t done a recount. First of all, the 70% held Prasad his base, which was interesting about 70% of thought his base, and so it was already working with, but another 1000. So let’s just say we’re at 30,000 customers now, there’s a lot of things you can Vince Menzione 21:00 do. Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s 11,000, I’m going to use my what I know, I think around 11,000 enterprise, and maybe it’s 38 or 35,000, mid market customers, and just sort of that you see the market pet potential is enormous. I mean, look, Tony Safoian 21:15 we have a total of what 230 field people Yeah, like, we’d love to use our two to 3000, to be able to get to these customers. And by the way, the E commerce platform, we’ve never been able to be transactional how customers start, especially at scale. So we’re going to work with Rob and everybody else on the Google side with the API integration. We want customers to be able to buy and start however they want. And, you know, I love the ambition of creating also the best commerce experience on the website. And Google has never been able to deliver their products like that through through any channel, right on their own website, you can kind of try and buy in that kind of stuff. But that opportunity to reach 1000s of more customers globally through the commerce platform is something we’re going to definitely worked to integrate starting this year. But again, their reach is phenomenal. And we could never get that URL. Vince Menzione 22:12 Glad you talked about law call ecommerce, we’ll call that transaction marketplaces, in fact, is the terminology we’ve been using to talk about what’s going on again, the three hyperscalers. Leaning in here, Microsoft just leaned in a big way this year, AWS was sort of in lead role before that Google’s also doing some significant moves into marketplace, huge opportunity. Canalis says, we’ll do $45 billion by the end of this year 80% through the hyperscalers through marketplaces, that the experience the buying experience is happening now the millennial generation not wanting to talk to salespeople, they want to go online, they want to click three times and have a box show up. Right. That’s the way we’ve gotten we’ve gotten indoctrinated this way. What do you think now about marketplaces in their role? And how are you addressing that? Tony Safoian 23:00 I think all 80% of all enterprise software will be bought this way in about three years. So and it’s not only a you know, millennial procurement, I don’t want to talk to people construct as is even more drivers in that there’s there’s legal, there’s commercial, there’s contracting, there’s the economic benefits that are just too powerful, you know, everybody’s biggest contract is their main hyper scalar, contract, one or two or three, of course, I’m gonna push as much as I can, right and to get those benefits. So we play a critical role to add value to those transactions to package those things a little differently. And, you know, Adobe, Cisco, you know, Teradata, like with like, all these companies, right, like, we are going to be that last mile for them to, and I think onus is on us to create, you know, a value beyond just a transaction there. But Google realises, you know, this the work that dyes is doing to resell enable every part of this value chain. We’re gonna play a bigger role than ever before, in a weird way, but it’s true. Vince Menzione 24:06 Any anything else you’d like to add? Dee Burger 24:07 Totally, totally agree. I mean, we are looking at it as sort of a fact of life the way it’s gonna go. And we’re building our business around around that outcome. I Vince Menzione 24:14 think it’s brilliant. I think it’s a brilliant strategy. You talked about AI a little bit you touched on AI, and we can’t have a conversation today in 2024. Without really diving in here, right? Last year was was in credibly insightful say, right, Microsoft comes in with their partnership. Google responds, right, both organisations, you look at market valuations, pretty significant growth for both companies this year. I think a lot of it was attributed to AI, I would say, What are your thoughts on delivering on the AI promise? I Dee Burger 24:46 mean, I think the first part is the tools blow you away every time you see him. And even if you look once a week, they’ve moved so far, so we’re so so early. Everybody’s experimenting with it. Not that many people are finding direct value other than in the wild, that stunning sort of thing. You can get great pictures and things. Our job is to ultimately drive that value. Our job is to create the connection between. It’s almost, you know, I started my career, long time ago when I wrote a dinosaur to work and we focused on reengineering. Right? It was a big reengineering as don’t automate, obliterate and whoever the guy is that did reengineering. We’re going to enter a new era of AI driven, reengineering. And it comes down to how do you orient the business differently to use these tools? Vince Menzione 25:35 You have me thinking the Flintstones there for a second? Tony Safoian 25:39 pedal power? Battle power? Yeah. I mean, look, we saw Jensen on stage, we saw Pat on stage, Google with Gemini, Microsoft with copilot and, you know, the opening I partnership, etc. I mean, is there is there a more comprehensive destination for your AI execution strategy, whether you’re, you know, building models, you need a bunch of computing power or processing power the chips, or, you know, you’re deploying them through the, you know, the best prebuilt multimodal models on the planet like inside, literally has, has all of it, which is incredible. And that optionality for the base of customers is great. The bet the biggest gift to Google was the launch of Chad GPT. It unleashed the giant that has invented literally invented transformers and a lot of this technology that’s running, you know, the foundational technology for everything that’s going on. So Gemini, you know, one, Gemini 1.5. Microsoft’s not stopping, they’re not stopping. So, you know, I’m actually very, very optimistic that I think that this is going to create way more jobs and it changes. And I believe in humans plus AI, and, you know, listened to, you know, a lot of various podcasts, I think we’re going to enter a decade of the biggest economic growth in history. And I think there’s certain markets that are at an advantage to this, North America is certainly one of them, and there are others. But I think it’s our decade, and thank God for, you know, this huge leap in evolution at a time where we feel like we needed the most, right, like, so. Thank you. Thanks, open AI. Thanks, everybody. And we’re in a tremendous position to help our customers do exactly that. Vince Menzione 27:35 And as we talked about the importance of the hyper scalars, layering in this AI component makes it even more critical, right? Yeah, it’s incredible. So another topic that’s on everyone’s minds these days is security. Right? We have we’ve all experienced in one form or another, I’m sure you’ve had many clients. It’s a real issue. And it continues to be an issue. And I know insight is focused incredibly well in the security space. Wanted to spend a moment here with you d to explain your position. And what insight is doing uniquely here? Well, Dee Burger 28:09 we’re doing a few things. Again, American keep it in the same thing. We are really driving it through incident response. How do you help customers prevent it? But then how do you how do you respond to it, one of the very unique things about insight is our technical depth. We’ve been able to help multiple clients, in case studies you can never use when they’re in a very bad position. By being able to bring the level of expertise and programme management to get them out of it. We’ve got all the normal security businesses and sell security software. And we do you know, some of the pentesting there’s different types of things. But our real focus on that is to get really good at helping clients when they’re in hot water. Back to the start with client value. Go help a client be valuable forever. No transact Dee Burger 28:58 security is one of the fastest growing parts of what we do in services, both professional and soon to be managed services. Google with chronicle with beyond Corp with reCAPTCHA with their general security posture across GCP. Google workspace identity, I think Google has one of the strongest security stories on the planet. Mandiant acquisition obviously put an exclamation point on that. In 2020, for many, it essentially is being rolled into Google proper. So again, by being an insight customer, you have access to all of that. And we’re going to leverage your scale your sock operations to bring that Google layer Google services Google capabilities to to all of our joint customers as well. And it is not it’s one of the areas that has, you know, experienced zero budget cuts in terms of customer investment. Vince Menzione 29:53 So this is the ultimate guide to partnering. We talk about partnering and obviously you are a pinnacle partner and both of you are Pinnacle partners in Europe. On right, and now together just this massive power, power force for our industry, but you also work with other organisations, right? We talk about customers, and we talk about other partners. So is hoping for our listeners and viewers, what is your perspective? And what would you say to them now to optimise for success working with your organisation, Dee Burger 30:21 you know, we are, again, we’re gonna be customer first, right? And we’re gonna be really, really valuable to our customers, sorry, to our partners, because we understand our customers context. And we can help position their solutions and their technologies and wages going to be valuable. Going way past the idea of let’s just tell them everything we can make it useful, make it valuable, make it long term. And so the partnerships that are going to work best for us are people that can work with us to ultimately contextualise their technology to make it useful to make it valuable. And that’ll be our continued focus. Vince Menzione 30:59 Tony, from your perspective, working with other partners?  Tony Safoian 31:02 Look, I think, again, you know, two years ago, we were you know, we only sold what Google sold. And now we have 4050 plus marketplace enabled ISVs that really round out the ceiling of the solution set inside has 6000 others that we are figuring out and merging in some strategies and you know, going sort of focused in other strategies to this point, and you know, Sandy coming in as our CRO year and a half ago, really reoriented, again, exactly the way that he talks about a Joyce talks about it. We got to lead in our customers. Sandy has a slide she showed this week to our own team said when I first came in, I was interviewing customers are like, their response was like, What do you think it’s not, you know, how they’re like SAT is extremely accessible and responsive. But not top of mind. You know, and I think that’s a problem, right? So we got to all orient ourselves such that we become indispensable to our customers that they think of insight, insight, SATA, SATA all the time, because we’re in there, and we’re adding value, we’re part of their strategic planning, we’re part of their budget planning, we’re part of their security strategy planning, were part of their, you know, helping them prep for board meetings, like we just got to be in there. And, and the PullThru will come and the customer relationship will grow. We were both challenged with and again, varying degrees of success and different customers. But the likes to say like, you know, we do $1 with, you know, X percent of customers, but many of them is just $1. And for us to it’s like we have some of the biggest customers biggest companies in the world for which we do one thing. And that’s terrible, right? Because that’s how they think of us and the only way they think of us. So we’ve got a lot of work to do jointly to change that. Obviously, this coming together helps. We want we want a significant amount of their love attention, mindshare, wallet share, but in a way that earns it every day. I Vince Menzione 33:12 know you both work with ISPs, independent software vendors, I think about you both as being superhighways to the customer for those organisations in many respects. For partners that want to lean in with you, what should they do next? Tony Safoian 33:26 I think new partnerships, to that degree are are hard. Insight has a great platform for onboarding those, I think we’re going to adapt that platform. But I think it’s about solving a unique problem that fits into a solution pillar. And is hopefully if not marketplace enabled today, let us help you do that we do great. We have great services around marketplace enablement for new ISPs that are not on those marketplaces. And then you have to, you know, make the economics work, which isn’t, which isn’t that hard, and then bring customers with you. I mean, that always helps. You know, Tony Safoian 34:04 it’s simple. You want to do it. Let’s talk about a customer. Vince Menzione 34:09 Well, I want to thank you both. This has been a real privilege to be in the room with both of you and hear the story about how you came together two amazing individuals and friends. And I want to thank you for spending time with our viewers and listeners. Any closing thoughts going into 2024? Through 2024, that you’d like to share with this group of listeners and viewers? Tony Safoian 34:29 Well, first and foremost, thank you. So great to be back on talking about, you know, completely different trajectory. I think last time we spoke this is not on the table at all. And and you know, I don’t want to, you know, overstate this at all, but I don’t think I can like, honestly think this combination is it’s the biggest thing to have happened to Google Cloud, probably in the history of Google Cloud as far as partnerships go. Inside. It just made the biggest investment anyone’s ever made in entering the Google Cloud ecosystem that’s a compliment to Google a compliment to sada but also, of course, you know, insights vision, and it’s one of the biggest things have happened in the ecosystem period when you know, when a when a 40 year old company says, you know, I want to start a new practice they don’t say like that I’m typically say, I want to be number one tomorrow. And, you know, that’s what insights done. But thank you for this platform vents, keep doing what you’re doing a really an important part of our community. Vince Menzione 35:28 You know, I think about executive commitment and closing, and this was extreme executive commitment. On behalf of both organisations coming together. I want to thank our viewers and listeners for joining Ultimate Guide to partnering to amazing leaders, D Berger, Tony Sivan, and the insight team. So great to have you both. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Vince. Thank you. Vince Menzione 35:53 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Guide to partnering.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. This helps us to continue to feed your amazing guests. Also, please check out subscribe to our new YouTube channel, ultimate Bart? We’ll catch you next time on The Ultimate Guide to partner

Discover the keys to achieving 'Pinnacle Partner Success' in the ever-changing partnership landscape. Uncover the power of growth mindset, leadership principles, and executing a winning partner strategy. Learn about partner success with Microsoft, branding essentials, and the crucial role of agility in staying ahead in the industry.

Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Special Interview Join Vince Menzione in this special episode of The Ultimate Guide to Partnering, where he shares insights from an exclusive interview conducted on the Partnerships Unraveled podcast hosted by Rick van den Bosch. Explore the intricate realm of tech partnerships and ecosystems, delving into Microsoft’s dynamic partner ecosystem, mid-market focus, and AI investments. Discover invaluable perspectives on Microsoft’s channel strategy and growth opportunities alongside expert advice on leveraging marketplace opportunities when partnering with Microsoft. Uncover the crucial role of partners in Microsoft’s AI strategy and explore potential opportunities in this burgeoning field. Don’t miss out on this enriching episode packed with actionable insights and expert guidance. What You’ll Learn  Partnering and ecosystems in the tech industry. (0:02) Microsoft’s partner ecosystem and event. (4:26) Microsoft’s mid-market focus and AI investments. (9:34) Microsoft’s channel strategy and growth opportunities. (15:29) Partnering with Microsoft and leveraging marketplace opportunities. (19:37) Microsoft’s AI strategy and partner opportunities. (25:50) LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Watch on YouTube 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 Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Now on YouTube Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos SUMMARY KEYWORDS microsoft, partner, organisations, ai, marketplace, channel, customers, ecosystem, market, selling, work, recognise, model, bit, big, company, created, opportunity, partnership, cloud Rick van den Bosch 0:02 Vince, how are you doing today? Vince Menzione 0:03 Rick, it is so such a pleasure and an honour to be here with you today. Thank you so much for hosting me. Likewise, Rick van den Bosch 0:10 we actually recorded the podcast earlier together, but then it was on Ultimate Guide to partnering. So I’m very excited to continue the conversation today and the dive even further in the world of ecosystems on the channel today. Vince Menzione 0:25 You know, I love I love unravelled because I think it’s a great way to decode and talk about what we’re experiencing in our world in our lives today. So excited for this conversation. Rick van den Bosch 0:34 Likewise, I’m super curious. Also, for our listeners, Finns, who might not know you yet, could you elaborate a bit more on how you got acquainted with partnerships, and you’ve had an impressive career there. So I think it’s definitely interesting to learn a bit more there. So Vince Menzione 0:51 Rick, as you mentioned, I’m the CEO of ultimate partner and the host of The Ultimate Guide to partnering podcast over 200 episodes. Now we’re in the 200 range now, which is kind of crazy. I started my career in the early days of wireless computing describe this careers for successful business transformations. I’m on number five now. And I started off carrying a bag as a salesperson company that was in the early days of wireless computing before Wi Fi. We were pioneers in that technology. We I use partners to build an influence strategy to help us grow our market share. We went public on the Toronto exchange, we had a successful exit that companies now Zebra Technologies, I followed one of the leaders to go to a turnaround company that was at the brink of bankruptcy. And Golden Gate capital had spun us out. And I built a new business. And that’s where I started into the partnership role to really fully I was asked to build the government business. We were Panasonic’s largest competitor, Panasonic was the market leader in selling into public safety and military. And we had a product that was equally as good. I built the channel strategy, I went down to Washington, DC, I aligned with several the largest technology partnership organisations and I build that business incrementally X. Just we had, we had tremendous success. I was the growth engine, we sold the company to another company, General Dynamics large defence contractor, it was at that point that Microsoft recruited me. And for almost a decade I ran Microsoft’s we didn’t call it ecosystem at the time yet we call the partner strategy. But I ran the ecosystem for $4.6 billion business within Microsoft for almost 10 years. And I learned quite a bit about partnering and ecosystems and all the different types of partnerships and, and what that meant to building a successful strategy for a large tech giant like Microsoft. I left at the end of 2016. And I was convicted more than ever. That organisation struggled, I saw the partners that got it right. I realise a lot of organisations still struggle to the 400,000 Microsoft partners in that ecosystem, which is the same ecosystem that all the big tech giants really care about. It’s really one ecosystem. And I started this podcast Ultimate Guide to partnering, I started doing consulting work for those organisations. I went back inside for two years to the largest software company nonprofit. And I recognise that the C suite level, there was still a lack of understanding and alignment of our partnerships. And so when I left during COVID, I was convicted more than ever, that we needed to solve for this. And so I’ve made it my mission now, to help organisations achieve their greatest results through successful partnering individuals and organisations, I want to empower the world of partnering. And it’s I’m on a 10 year journey, a 10 year mission to help solve for that with ultimate partner. And we’ve expanded now from just being a podcast, to doing digital and live events. We’re going to be building a collective of organisations we want, we want to invite everybody that is that cares about the hyper scalar ecosystem to be part of that collective, because we feel that they need to have a stronger voice, working with the big hyper scalars. So that’s where I’m a mission to help solve. I won’t stop until the chief partner officer is that equal footing with the CRO, the CFO and the CMO and the organisation at the C suite. And that’s that’s where we hope to get to. Rick van den Bosch 4:23 I love that. And that’s super impressive Korean partnerships. And I’m very curious what you think I can totally imagine in the back in the days already at Microsoft probably it wasn’t called ecosystem yet. But I can imagine Microsoft is always the front runner and everything partner related. Really were a lot of things that were actually already ecosystem, even though we were mentioning it like that yet. Like, could you maybe give some examples what you see right now what are very hot topics. I mean, the market which actually maybe Microsoft was already starting to work or really laid the foundations for at that time. Vince Menzione 4:58 In fact, we can Hold the network back then. But I’m going to back I’m going to back up, because I feel like Microsoft created it at the very beginning. We might you and I talked about this once before. But when Bill Gates came down here to Florida to Boca Raton, to meet with IBM when they created the PC, and they were going to buy his operating system, he said, I’m not going to sell it to you. I’m going to licence it to you. And they also agreed to licence the hardware components that sparked an ecosystem that created trillions and trillions of dollars of new incremental revenue in our industry. And it created Michael Dell started building PCs in his dorm room, and Compaq computer got started. An organisation large reseller organisations in the United States CD W and some of these others started marketing started delivering magazines and doing direct marketing to sell you PCs and networking bars were created. The whole ecosystem was really spawned from that moment in time back in like 1981. Microsoft recognise that and they nurtured that they realised they couldn’t sell direct, they realise their where their strengths were. And they didn’t want to have 100,000 salespeople out there, they realised the leverage and the value of the partner network that they call it back in the day. And they also started to divide and conquer, like, okay, these parts they, they bucket ties partners into specialisations, they recognise that there were MSPs, and si guys, and ISVs, and GSI, guys, and so on, and learning partners and all like, and they started nurturing and building a whole partner, organisation around it. And they’ve done a better job than anybody at aligning that and aligning salespeople to the success of the partner ecosystem rather than dividing it up and siloing it. And Microsoft is probably the most, I think it’s either Gartner or McKinsey that says Microsoft’s the most complex hybrid organisation in the world. But they’ve figured out a way to make this all work and integrate it so that people a salesperson cares about selling a partner, there’s partner people supporting it, there’s partner development managers, and they have a division of labour. And then the organisation I think, is very unique in supporting that ecosystem. And then the Microsoft inspire Conference, which used to be the worldwide partner conference was the the seminal event that everybody went to every year. You know, I know that I know that you have some family members that participated in that I know they came, they came over to the US to go to that conference every year. It was it was the happening. And then COVID changed all this right. Now we went virtual, we went digital. And it’s a shame in some respects, that that ecosystem hasn’t gotten the nurturing and love that it needed before, which is where we came in, we came in and helped support that we just hosted a live event in person. We called it ultimate partner live spark the ecosystem because we felt like that nurturing needed to happen. And it was an overwhelming success. I mean, I’m still getting people reaching out to me, telling me how amazing they thought the event was. Yeah, Rick van den Bosch 8:06 absolutely. Like, I can only tell from my perspective, but everyone who is interested in Microsoft in my network knew about the event. And I also saw it everywhere throughout LinkedIn. And I’m actually super curious. And I think that’s actually so interesting to share with our listeners as well. I just said it already. But Microsoft is always the front runner, when you’re in general, when you’re embarking ecosystem, we are always looking at how is Microsoft doing it? Because we know that they have already tried and tested so many things. And if they launch it to the big public, then that’s also where they are all in and moving forward there. And I was super curious about that. Since would you like to share a bit more about the event, both in terms of how it was but also definitely what are the top priorities right now of Microsoft leadership? Because I think we can learn a lot from that in when we’re building a channel or partner ecosystem. Yeah, I’m Vince Menzione 8:59 so happy to share. You know, I’ve described this time we’ve been living through is the tectonic shifts right. We’ve been seeing in our world or lives geopolitically, all the things have been going on COVID accelerated transformation. Organisations invest invested heavy, but then we had the economic headwinds, and they backed off. We’ve seen, you know, tremendous layoffs in the last 18 months or so in the tech sector, which also has precipitated doing more with less. So I now do the job of three people. Microsoft did that too. By the way. They said like, well, we need to do this. So we came in and we said, You know what, you’re not doing a live event. I had reached out one of the I’ve been blessed to have some several leaders from Microsoft participate in Ultimate Guide to partnering. We’ve been privileged to have some of Microsoft’s top partner executives come use our platform is the place to tell the story. announce the new programmes and things like that. So I was able to get some of those leaders in a room and it was it was two days. 30 speakers 16 sessions by both, you know, both keynotes, fireside chats and panel discussions, workshop type discussions, where we took an align to the three major priorities Microsoft announced at their inspire conference. Of course, AI was priority number one, right? I mean, Microsoft’s investments in open AI and what they’re doing with Chet, which at GBT and copilot. I mean, they’re, they’re leading the way. Sati has been visionary in this respect. And they really, it’s making a difference you just see in the stock price these days, the other big announcement they made, I mean, AI is going to infuse into every product and every technology, and they want everybody to build with them. The second one was around marketplaces. And we’ve been talking about this year as sort of the marketplace moment. AWS was out of the gate a little bit early investing in marketplace, selling, of course, coming from their retail background. And Microsoft is playing fast catch up. And this year, they made announcements and said, If you want to do co selling with us, by the way, Microsoft between Microsoft, Google and Amazon, they’re about $300 billion in durable cloud budgets. That means that those three hyperscalers have went to gone to the enterprise customers and mid market customers and said, Buy these agreements for our cloud. And so they own those budgets. And they allow those clients to burn down those agreements by buying software from their marketplaces. So they’ve created a new channel. This channel with marketplaces is a new way for ISVs. And SI is to sell their solutions to Microsoft, Google and Amazon customers. So we we focused in on that marketplace moment. We had the leader of the marketplace organisation Anthony jofa, Joseph Joseph in the room, and we did a fireside chat talking about the benefits of marketplace. So organisations are really it’s still new. For a lot of them. I feel like it was where we were 10 or 12 years ago with the cloud. People were kind of resisting the change. But the change is happening. And in fact, Canalis did a study. Jim, our friend Jay McBain was part of that organisation. They said $45 billion will flow through marketplaces by the end of 2025. They under call that Jay said they under call that it’s going to be more like 50. And then tackle IO, which is one of the big marketplace software companies is predicting. By the end of 2026, we will see $100 billion in sales and transactions flow through these marketplaces between the big three. So we need to get out you need to get on the bus or get on the train. Because it’s taking off and you have to we have to embrace that, right. That’s the agility component of great partnerships and organisations. And then the third area of focus is really around the mid market. And I was privileged that the president of Microsoft small, medium and corporate accounts, which is essentially its Midmark, its mid market and SMB business. He was he was my keynote, he came in in a big way and supported the event, and really sparked the conversations and that mid market opportunity is huge. I know our friend Jay was talking about Jay again. But our friend Jay and Canalis did some study and some studies on the mid market opportunity and it’s in the trillions of dollars. And Microsoft alone. They do about $75 billion dollars a year in that mid market. And it’s only 40% penetrated for partners. So there’s a huge I’m calling it the acre diamonds like partners that are a lot we know this right? A lot of organisations only want to focus on the very big organisations, those organisations get saturated at some point, right, everybody’s calling on this mid market opportunity is huge. So it’s the third it’s the third pillar for Microsoft this year. And we brought in the leadership to speak to partners about how to be more successful selling into that market. So we recovered all three all the sessions revolved around those three pillars with Microsoft. I’m so excited to continue our partnership with ag one. Many of you know I’ve made taking a green drink supplement part of my health ritual for over 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 Vinson that’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vinson, check them out. Rick van den Bosch 14:46 I think that’s super interesting and also very similar to conversation. I hear from a lot of vendors that we speak to regularly in terms of what everyone is talking about and we know we need to do something with it and that’s why I would love to dive a bit deeper into the specific three key points. And I’m actually going backwards from the one you ended with. Like I think that’s so interesting right now maybe first question, some clarification on mid market. So is that do they call it mid market? But is it is it a combination of SMB and mid market and you should companies together? And secondly, why do you think that area of SMB is so important than why some a company like Microsoft is so heavily investing in that area? Well, Vince Menzione 15:29 like I said, the top of the the top of the pyramid, the enterprise organisations, which represents about 11,000, top organisations, you know, the big tech, the big organisations, the Coca Cola is of the world, the General Motors, all those big organisations. Like I said, they’re dominated by big GSI is global systems integrators, big projects, long sales cycles, it’s hard to move through those hard to navigate, and it’s crowded, it’s crowded at the top, in this bid market segment. I’ll do Microsoft’s numbers here. They have about 38,000, I’ll round it up. 38,000 accounts. Right, that’s, that’s a bigger, that’s a bigger chunk. Yeah, they just and they haven’t been good before at being focused in this area. Microsoft, used Microsoft as the example. I think everybody’s the same. And in terms of tech giants, they they had a different operating model for each of the their, what they call operating units. So if you went to the lat tam region, or you went to AIPAC, or you came over to a mesa where you are, you find a different engagement model it there wasn’t any universal Tality it was hard to navigate. And it was hard to work with the teams and those teams were not as partner centric. They were just worried about selling licences and selling what they had in the in their bag. Were enterprise knew it, they had to work with partners. They have they’ve changed the model. Now they’ve centralised all the resources. So in the Microsoft world, they’ve taken the 6000 employees across every industry in every geography at Microsoft healthcare name, all the industries enable the geographies. And now they report directly into this one individual Kevin P skirt. And they have a regional model. They they have three regions, the Americas, EMEA and the APAC region. And those three models. They also have a corporate vice president structured, but they’re centralising. They’re creating a methodology across. And they’re also welcoming and partners more, and they recognise that they had a gap here. And so they’re investing heavily. In fact, Microsoft 75% Of all the channel incentives for Microsoft this year, are going into that into that business 75%. So it tells you, they’ve made a huge commitment here. And like I said, there’s 38,000. And then at the SMB level, there’s 150 million customers at the SMB level worldwide. So huge opportunity for growth, and Microsoft’s not going to touch those SMB customers at all directly. So the huge opportunity for the channel to go. Again, this acre of diamonds and great opportunities for growth. Think about taking an organisation, any organisation of any size, and implementing AI, or all these other rich technologies, helping other helping ISVs and other SAS software companies get to reach to those customers and stitching it all together. Like we like to talk about the fact that customer doesn’t just buy one, one vendor, they put together a solution, they’re solving a business problem. And it requires multiple organisations to come together to do that. So there’s this huge opportunity in the work that you and I do to help solve for that, I think I think I mean, it’s it’s such a great opportunity for growth for all of us, Rick. Yeah, Rick van den Bosch 18:56 100%. And I think very impressive in terms of putting your money where your mouth is like aligning 75% of your incentives to that part of the market. I think that that’s a really big move. And something that we all in partnership should be aware of, because Microsoft like search, in my opinion, is the most brilliant strategic mind out there. So he won’t be doing that without some very thorough thought behind making such a move. Like I’m interested in the piece there like so we have mid market and SMB. And then I can imagine mid market is probably large enough that some of the direct sales of Mark, Microsoft’s can work on that but they’ll do a park assist play, but from what I understand SMB will be a pure channel play. So both the selling and the implementation and everything needs to be done by the channel. Vince Menzione 19:42 What they’ve done in the mid market is they call it corporate accounts. So these corporate accounts, these 38,000 customers, they have they have a one to many, so they have a direct sales rep. They have a swarm basically they’ve created a pod around those customers. So there’s technical resources, they’re selling resources, and there’s partnering resources supporting a group of customers. And the ratio, we’re in enterprises, maybe like one to five, one to seven, you know, one, one rep for seven customers, it’s more like a one to 25, or one to 50 model, depending on the market, and the specificity of the customer. So they are directly supported. But again, if you’re, if you’re calling on 50 accounts, and in the course of a year, and you have a big book of business to drive, you’re not going to do that yourself. You need transactional partners that are going to help sell the software and the licences, you’re going to need systems integrators to help implement support, project management, do all those things. And you’re going to need ISVs that are going to bring bring now they’re going to bring their marketplace transactable offers. So think about all of the SAS software companies, you want to get into that marketplace, because you want the sellers over here to say, Oh, you have a backup and recovery solution. This is the one you should use. And they are by the way, they’re starting to use AI internally, to be able to track the vendors and who’s being the most successful and who has the best customer SAT scores and the like. So I as a seller now have at my disposal a whole toolkit and also, you know, pane of glass that tells me who I need to bring in and who can best support me on those sales. So again, this whole partnering strategy is just critical to success. Yeah, Rick van den Bosch 21:28 it’s all super connected to each other. I think what also in the tying is a bit more to the marketplace point, which is also very interesting. One of the words that struck me was like a little bit of reluctance, see which I also really know this in the channel because we’re all a bit scared because what Amazon of course did in the retail sector was cut off the middlemen and go direct to customer. Yes, so I can imagine some of the reluctance is coming from that angle from specifically the channel. But what how do you see that the channel is being because from an ISV perspective, it makes a lot of sense immediately marketplace like you can bundle it, it’s easier to buy from a customer perspective with how do you see them tying in the channel? And also, what do you think like, for companies looking at that, and also trying to get their channel involved there as an ISP to skill operations? What like, what are a bit of the arguments why it’s also very relevant for the channel actually to to collaborate there? Vince Menzione 22:24 Yeah. Well, you know, the channels. I mean, we talked about the, the Boca Raton moment, the channel has had to evolve, right? Because if you’re following the big tech giant, you know, your models have changed, right? He’s there used to be all of the incentives, I was very close to Microsoft’s channel incentives programme. So I know the numbers about what we spent every year. And it was in the trillions of dollars. It was it was it was the it was the I’m sorry, it was in the billions of dollars, not the trillions of dollars, it was it was the one of the largest line items, in fact, in terms of channel incentives. And that shifted, though, it’s still there. But it shifted, it shifted to driving the right behaviours. And Microsoft will continue to do that. Right as, as we talked about with these channel incentives. Marketplace, if you’re if you’re in the channel, and you’re used to a model that was different, and you were making more money doing something else, and all of a sudden Microsoft or someone else imposes this new thing. You’re a little bit reluctant, right? But there’s other opportunities for growth, right? So you have to look at and say, I might make a little bit less here, but I can make more here. And you’re starting to see this evolution of the channel. Some of them, one of them here in the United States insight is, you know, I would say they’re on their forward leaning in terms of what they’ve been doing. They’ve been evolving their business to compete, they’ll do the transaction work, they’ll provide all the other services and resale and everything. But they are leaning more into the Accenture’s and GSI world a little bit more. And in fact, they made a major purchase just recently, of Google’s largest reseller and system integrator partner SADA Systems. So you see that you see that world evolving to right, where they’re morphing their business models, and they’re embracing marketplace. Some of these organisations again, you mentioned, the reluctance, working with Amazon looking saying, hey, you know, we know how Amazon operates in the retail world, are they going to do the same thing here? And I would say proceed with caution. I would say Microsoft will continue to be the Microsoft of old in terms of embracing their partners. But they are creating this value chain that says we are creating we’re creating value here because we have signed up these customers already. We’re working at the C suite level, by the way, those Mac agreements and cloud agreements that they the three hold. Those are negotiated at the CFO level these organisations they’re not in the line of business, but it makes it easier now to take removes a lot Under the friction from the process, so you don’t have to go find budget to go buy your software, you just have to find a customer that likes your software, and has access to a Mac agreement. So it changes the whole model up. And hopefully it will drive, it’ll drive better behaviour. And the channel organisations are going to evolve accordingly the same way, the same way the world evolved 12 years ago with the cloud, right? Everybody was selling Dell computers and targets bags back in those days, they still do. But nobody was selling cloud, they were like, What is this cloud thing? And it looks like it’s a direct a direct model, and you’re gonna buy directly from the hyper scalar? Well, that’s changed as well, we we’ve all recognised that that’s created more value for these organisations to not only sell the cloud, but also wraparound services around that. And I think we’ll see the same thing with marketplace. Yeah, 100%, Rick van den Bosch 25:49 I think we could do a full extra episode on the consumption based model. And indeed, how it works with actually the hyperscalers getting in at the sea level, having huge contracts where you can highly benefit as an ISV. Because it’s almost like Microsoft or Amazon is gonna pay you for the contract. But it’s with credits that the customer builds up, etc. It’s super, super interesting, right? And Vince Menzione 26:11 it won’t Yeah, and I want to just note here too, because we talked about the channel, right? It’s not going to replace the channel, the model today, at least not in the near term, it becomes another channel, right? It becomes another channel to the customer and the customer by various ways. And you just have to be agile enough to recognise that. Yeah, Rick van den Bosch 26:32 absolutely. I think one last question around the marketplaces like the examples and deeds of, of insight, for example, like joining the marketplace, and working more around that those are almost what I would call like the GSI, sort of really big Fars, or the DMR, almost direct market resellers. But for the SMB channel partner, do you also see a role there for that marketplace or less, so? Vince Menzione 26:56 No, just as much. So I mean, maybe maybe at a smaller scale, but these organisations are going to provide professional services, and support customers, uniquely and more locally, right. And there’s still that need, like if I’m a company in a certain geography, I have local relationships. And you know, I’d like to go back to the five or seven seats at the table, to say, who is influencing my decision process. And it may not be one of the big DM ours that we talked about, it might be a local systems integrator that you’re comfortable working with, they now have the ability to bring to you everything you need. Right? So it’s enabling them more, in fact, to go do this through marketplaces, because now they have, they have the full access to that marketplace. And customers aren’t going to do this by themselves. We know that right? This is technology, especially smaller organisations are more challenged, they don’t have the IT staff to go do it themselves. So I’m going to rely on my local and trusted vendor to support me in doing that. Rick van den Bosch 28:01 Yeah, absolutely. And I think any SMB channel partner, you might lose a little bit of margin when doing it in such a way, but you win it back as well, because everything is in one invoice. It’s very easy to manage, like everything you would use to do with a distributor in the past now is can be managed with a marketplace or hyper scalar as well. That’s right. That’s right. I love that then then we get to the final point of AI, of course. And first of all, I want to say like Microsoft, all in on AI, big investment. They had some tumultuous weeks, but I want to do a shout out to such because that is true partnership. Some album Back at the rings of open AI definitely not what I expected the author, it just happened. But then you can see like if you have a very strong partner, and they have your back, while in effect that’s going to happen. I think it’s the best decision for open AI and for the AI continuation of innovation and progress there in general. So big shout out there. I’m also super curious to learn in the like what the you see there in terms of the AI like, of course, we know why AI is so important. But I’m also super curious, what role does Microsoft see there for their partners in terms of bringing that AI to the market? They’ve done the big investments, they’ve worked insanely hard. I’m super impressed in integrating AI and all their products and in being in office in teams in every were in Azure like but what then now it’s I think up to the channel to bring it to market. Like what what’s their strategy there and what do you think that are some of the roadblocks they might see there? Vince Menzione 29:40 Well, first of all the call out this idea there right? That was a masterclass and strategy like what he did with with Sam. First, first of all, he was blindsided, right that I mean the board didn’t even let him know until minutes before they announced it, which is crazy. And then he He took the he took the high road. And he said, Well, how do I best support this? I want to support Sam, I want to support open AI. He brings Sam on board on a Sunday. Right, Sam, Sam, he sets up a new business unit. By the way, almost all the employees said they were going to leave. So he knew that like, if open AI isn’t going to do it, they’re all going to be Microsoft employees. And then he positions it. So Sam can run back into the CEO, or get back into the CEO slot, which was just incredible. Now on the product side, what you’re seeing, I mean, Microsoft has been the Productivity Suite, right, and we go back, I mean, let’s let’s look at offices is just a crowning example, and M 365. Now, and all of your productivity offerings and sweet. Everything is infused now with AI is getting infused with AI, it’s, there were big announcements and releases in early November, we’re continuing to see things they had their big Ignite conference, the ability to infuse all this technology, they’re all the partner stays pretty much the same in that regard, right? Because these are saying these are organisations that need to embrace and deploy these technologies, they will do that. The role, there’ll be addition, there are additional roles for GSIs and s eyes of any size and shape, to take advantage of the toolkits that are available in Azure AI. And you can go on with the list of Microsoft acronyms and names. But being able to take that technology and deploy it locally, people will want secure GP TS they’ll want they want the ability to do their own and not be in the public domain. So the ability to implement those is going to be huge opportunity in the ISP and SAS world community. Well, I mean, I want it I want to infuse this technology into my my offerings, right? So there’s the opportunity for those partners to go do that. And then to implement that. So it’s creating more opportunity for partners of all types to take and infuse that, that stack into into organisations. Right. And it’s we’re just at the beginning. So I can’t even predict where it’s going to go. But we are people are talking about this. As even probably the biggest thing that’s happened in the last 40 years, right, since the maybe 50 years since the chip. Right? Yeah, we went through the PC era, we went to the client server, we went to the internet error. We got to mobile computing, we got to cloud and now we’re in AI and it’s man, it’s going to be it’s going to be a wild ride these next 10 years. Yeah, Rick van den Bosch 32:25 it’s incredible. Really ended like the pace at which everything is progressing. I’m very curious to see where that’s where that’s going. And a question that comes to mind immediately we meet it’s such a new technology like we need to the left, but also it’s progressing so quickly. And that will keep the same pace priority or only grow exponentially from an innovation side. What strategy does Microsoft have in place to actually make sure that their partners, both the ISVs, and the channel can actually easily message that and take that message of AI but also the implementation etc. to the market? Do you see any potential blockers there are challenges for for Microsoft, Microsoft Vince Menzione 33:08 is putting out a lot in fact, once once we have the content live, I’d love people to come see like the videos and some of the things that Microsoft showed at our event. But I mean, they they want the partner world to embrace it. What I would say in terms of blocker, I would say one thing I will say about Microsoft, even as a former employee, I’m still people like Brad Smith, who’s president of Microsoft, there’s an ethical level within Microsoft that you don’t see in most, if not any other technology company that they will do the right thing they will do. They’ve always professed the cloud for good. People like Brad Brad wrote a book called tools and weapons and he sits at the forefront of Microsoft’s aim to ensure that we do this in the right way. Right. And Microsoft again, being a partner led partner, they took the word AI if you know this, they changed the name of the partner programme in July. In fact, we had Julie Smith, Julie Sanford, come on to the podcasts and talk about this. They change the name of the programme from the Microsoft cloud partner programme to the Microsoft AI cloud partner programme. So they’ve infused AI into everything including the name of the partner programme for the 400,000 partners, which tells me and the channel incentives and everything that they’re doing, that they’re leaning in have more heavily. They are, I know for a fact that they are quintupling the size of the technology groups supporting AI. They had a team of black belts as an example, here in the United States. That was a fairly small ragtag team, maybe 20 people they have, they are going five times the size of that organisation just to support customers here. And they’re doing the same things around apart they Microsoft’s view is we bring we bring the technology in We bring the partner and the customer together, and we go solve for it together, which has been always been their approach. Rick van den Bosch 35:06 I love this. Yeah, it just you can really see that Microsoft is always one step ahead of where they should, or multiple steps ahead, let’s say like that of where they want to go and where they are going. And that’s what you can clearly see with this as well. And again, also with things like that, I can also highly advise that to our listeners, like if you launch something, launch it back, like look at Microsoft, such an enormous company, but when they launch AI, they implement it everywhere. So everyone will know in their ecosystem, how important that’s gonna be for the upcoming five to 10 years or, and there are this case, Vince Menzione 35:40 and even their executives. Kevin, Pisco, when he spoke at our event says I spent at least a half hour every morning studying what’s what we’re doing on AI practising it, implementing it getting to know the product better. This is the president of a $75 billion division of Microsoft, he’s spending time there, which tells you the whole company is focused on this. And to your point, too, I think they caught a lot of others were caught flat footed. I think that there was a there were a lot of people in other places in Silicon Valley in particular, that were going and getting into the rooms and going, what do we do now? What’s our strategy going to look like? What you know, they were just so caught off guard by Microsoft’s announcements. It’s an amazing Rick van den Bosch 36:23 Yeah, absolutely. Awesome fans. I think this really was a pure masterclass early on where the partner ecosystem and channel is going, we spoken about how important SMB and mid market there’s going to be if you want to keep your growth rates that you had in the past as a tech company, because the enterprise market is getting saturated. So you need to really get that opportunity. We talked about how to really work together with hyper scalars and the opportunity with marketplaces and AI How can you best implement it? How can you leverage the AI that Microsoft is working with? I think it was super valuable. I definitely want to get you back later fence. And thank you so much for sharing this with our listeners. And to our listeners. See you next week. Vince Menzione 37:10 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ultimate guide to partner, online and Ultimate Guide to partnering.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. 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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 LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP 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 Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP 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

Ultimate Guide to Partnering Exclusive with Sharon Schoenborn Unlock the secrets of successful partnerships with Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Americas SMC, Sharon Schoenborn, on Ultimate Guide to Partnering®. Join us as she shares strategic insights into SMC business segments, AI investments, growth strategies, and leadership tips. With over 20 years of global experience, Sharon empowers businesses to transform and thrive in the Microsoft ecosystem digitally. LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP What You’ll Learn 1. Partnering strategies with Microsoft corporate vice president. (0:04) 2. SMC business segments and partnership opportunities. (1:08) 3. AI investments and partner success in the Microsoft ecosystem. (6:27) 4. Partnering with Microsoft, growth strategies, and differentiation. (12:40) 5. Leadership, change management, and personal growth. (17:53) Why Ultimate Partner? 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. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos SUMMARY KEYWORDS partners, customers, microsoft, smc, organisations, business, smb, market, capabilities, conversation, differentiating, leaning, ai, talk, sharon, corporate, drive, solution, vince, sellers Vince Menzione 0:02 This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast Vince Minzy own a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione.  Vince Menzione 0:28 Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering for a special session shot here at reven at Microsoft Studios. I’m excited and delighted to be joined by Sharon Schoen born Microsoft’s corporate vice president for the Americas SMC small, medium and corporate business. Sharon, so excited to have you here today. Sharon Schoenborn 0:46 It’s wonderful to be here. Good to see you. Vince Menzione 0:48 So good to see you again. You know, it seems just like yesterday, but it’s been a couple of months since we were together in Dallas, Texas, for our live event, which we co hosted alongside your town hall. So much excitement in the room from partners. I was hoping we could sort of ground here for now and talk a little bit more about that excitement and what you’ve been seeing Sharon Schoenborn 1:08 you bet. Well, first of all, Vince, thank you for your time in Dallas and also the standing room only event that you ran with us. Yes. You know, it’s SMC is really one of the main growth engines for Microsoft. And it’s such a diverse and dynamic segment. And I have the pleasure of leading our America’s business and partners are really at the core to our success in the way that we deliver growth and we help to realise the value of their investment with our customers. Vince Menzione 1:32 You know, I’ve been talking about this acre of diamonds, my own quote, but Russell Conwell, who was a minister and founder at Temple University coined this phrase many, many years ago. But I believe the SMC businesses may be misunderstood, in many respects, or were helping to help partners better understand it right. A lot of these organisations tend to cluster towards the large enterprise and SMC sounds like SMB to a lot of folks. And then also the organisation of that was sort of it’s evolving, right, it was hoping you could help our viewers and listeners better understand how it’s Sharon Schoenborn 2:11 evolved. Yeah, it’s a great question, because we have changed a lot over times. And I must admit, we can become complex as well. The best way to really think about SMC is the fact that it’s two distinct segments. Okay. So yes, as you say, the true kind of core SMB business, which very much is part of why we say about 80% of our revenue for the SMB business, typically customers, 300 employees or lower is really what we consider SMB. And then above that corporate is everything under the top enterprise, commercial and public sector customers. So within the Americas, we have roughly around 14,000 managed corporate customers in the millions, obviously within the SMB space, Sharon, Vince Menzione 2:55 such a massive amount of business within the SMC sectors, the two sectors, I was hoping maybe we could double click on the two segments and how you go to market and each of them? Yes Sharon Schoenborn 3:06 we’ll do well, I always start with the corporate business. And over the last number of years, we’ve really standardised the way that we engage with our corporate or manage customers across the globe. You might recall from your days back at Microsoft, it was probably sometimes a bit unique by country and some of the things that we’ve done in our corporate business is to structure our sales team in pods. So typically, a pod would have around 300 customers within it. And what we do is we we rally our account executives, and our specialist and technical sellers to align to that set a 300 customers per pod. And with that it gives us it gives us a centre of gravity to engage into team and especially to be able to make sure that we’re optimising the, the platform opportunity with each of our customers. And what we do now also is having standard marketing strategies and solution plays. So when we think about each of our clouds across Azure monomeric, and business applications, we have standard solution plays that we go to market on. And that really is the standard socket that we want our partners to snap into right in terms of their offerings and go to market strategy. So we have, we have go to marketplace for those across corporates, and the ability to then drive Account Based Marketing interests within those then catch by our field sellers. And obviously, together with our partners, Vince Menzione 4:27 you know, strikes me as you’re talking here is thinking about the conversations we had at your town hall and our event. And just this massive opportunity and the opportunity for your teams to double click in fact, I believe I heard you say to your team, you can’t get to the customer alone. You need to work directly with a work very closely with the partners. I was hoping, you know, we talked about the opportunity and doubling down and double clicking with partners this year. Can you talk more about your commitment within the SMC business to partners? Sharon Schoenborn 4:58 Yeah, boy. I could go on here for a little while, Vince, I think if I, if I go back to the corporate segment for just a moment, and then I’ll speak to SMB, because they’re their two unique operating models, I would say in the corporate business, you know, I really do see our channel as an extension of our sales force. Right? And so, but the art is, how do we best align to be able to optimise an engagement with each other? Because that can be a really hard thing? And you know, there’s far more sellers in the channel than I have within my team. And then how do we how do we get that interconnect at the right point in time, I think a couple things, one, going back to the solution plays, that becomes a really critical alignment point for how our sellers are going to market and when we’re looking for really highly specialised partners to be able to help drive that demand and ultimately realise value for customers. I would also say that the the opportunity for us to align on acquisition, and upsell within the within the the base boy, our upsell, opportunity is massive acquisition is huge. upsell is massive, especially in markets, like the US or even Canada, where we have a high penetration across the business. So we really need our partners, oftentimes, our CSP partners who are leading those engagements with customers to be thinking about, how are we operationalizing, the customer lifecycle management cycle within the existing base of customers to be able to help realise the value across the platform? Yeah, Vince Menzione 6:27 and there’s a huge opportunity here for these partners to double down here, and we’ll talk a little bit more about some of the announcements that have been coming around AI and other areas. But as I think about it, it’s moving away from just the transaction, and you say, UPS upselling, into the organisation, but adding additional capabilities to drive that. And yes, and what I think your I hear you saying to the partners is, it’s time to double down yourselves, build your competencies aligned to our solution areas, specifically. And then also, when you’re working with your account teams better identify where you make a difference. Yes, Sharon Schoenborn 7:04 you know, if I had a magic formula with our partners, and especially when we’re investing as businesses, in alignment with those solution plays, obviously, starting with deep skilling, and that’s an area that we’re investing in quite significantly, but really asking our partners to drive those certifications and the advanced certifications in differentiating themselves, then with a differentiated go to market offering, as it relates to that, ultimately, our channel incentives are probably one of the areas that we invest the most to be able to help recognise our partners and be able to invest in their businesses and be able to then help optimise what that transformation can look like, within our partner organisations, we realise that’s a big shift. It’s a big shift for us. You know, it really has been five years ago, Vince, we could have been sitting here and you know, would have been a very different conversation about the go to market solutions. And so our partners have done an amazing job to really lean in. But we need more partners to be able to think about how am I going to differentiate in the market with the specific certifications and specialisation and being great at that. And being great at that. And that’s what I think one of the most critical things of being able to partner really closely is differentiating the market around a, a solutionary that that partner is able to excel in. We’re  Vince Menzione 8:23 at this moment, right? I mean, Satya was just recognised as the CEO of the Year, I mean, just an amazing job that he’s done in his nine or 10 years as CEO of Microsoft. But the investments, these massive investments in AI, right, I mean, this, this last year has been astounding, and what it says to me and to all of us, I remember Kevin being up on stage at our event talking about this, like take the time to learn every day, because it’s changing every day, right AI, is infusing is being infused into all of the Microsoft products and families. And the opportunity is massive for partners. And what I hear now that’s different when I talk to Microsoft sellers, is we’re having different conversations than we’ve ever had with those organisations. We’re now in the C suite. And we’re having transformation conversations. And what I think I hear you saying, in fact, is partners need to lean into this transformation in a big way. What else would you say about that? Yeah, Sharon Schoenborn 9:20 at first, I would reinforce the point about learning. You know, Boy, I’ve been at Microsoft for a little while now. And I would say every day, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning, because if I’m not that I’m falling behind, and I think that’s the same for our partners, right? And so, the opportunity we have is now you know, when you think about what our customers are aiming to achieve, typically it’s around some level of operational efficiency or being able to adapt their business models are really improving their customer engagement strategy. Our customers are leaning into this moment because they also know that if they aren’t thinking strategically about how AI is infused in the way that they operate, they can be left behind Now, one of the things that I’m most excited about is that when we have a platform opportunity at Microsoft, as you say, we’re really infusing AI across our solution set. And I’m especially excited about the fact that we now have co pilot for Microsoft 365, that is going to be available to our CSP partners and through our, to our customers to our CSP partners. But what that means is, it really opens up the ability for our smallest customers in the market, to have access to enterprise grade AI capabilities embedded in the solutions that they use every day. I mean, just think about that for a moment. That’s incredible. And the opportunity that we kind of have to, you know, really increase the productivity of our customers, and help them to innovate in ways they’ve never been able to. It’s incredibly exciting. I just can’t wait to see what our customers do with it. Vince Menzione 10:47 I mean, this is exciting. This, the excitement around this announcement is just I think, well, first of all, I’m an SMB ultimate partner is a small and medium business. And so now I’m able, because I feel like the haves and the have nots, I’ve had all these conversations with Microsoft, people like yourself about all the tools that you’re able to utilise, right that are infused within Microsoft 365. And I’ve been on the outside of that, right I’ve had, I’ve had to use more of the pedestrian tools that haven’t been infused into the platform for me. So as an SMB, I’m excited about that. Also, as a partner partners are also smaller organisations that maybe haven’t been able to take advantage of these capabilities. I think first of all the they become evangelists because become users. And what Microsoft is doing, as well as this democratisation of the technology, right? It’s not only for the very large enterprise organisations no longer Sharon Schoenborn 11:39 it is, I mean, let’s just talk about our small and medium business customers for a moment you’re spot on. And it gives us opportunity to really open up capabilities, that that I hope will will stimulate innovation in the market, over 90% of our customers are small and medium businesses, right. And, you know, our channel would understand this intimately. MSPs really are the IT department for so many of our SMBs, right? Oftentimes, our SMEs do not have internal IT, it’s their partner that are going to market with and looking for guidance. And so I’m really excited about what this opportunity means for our customers, and for our partners to be able to really activate this innovation and you know, but of course, as you say, you know, internalising it and being able to be best practice leaders in the use of AI. So you know, I would say this today, with co pilot for Microsoft 365, I challenge myself every day to try something different and see how I’m getting value out of it, because that’s the best way for us to demo to our customers, right? You Vince Menzione 12:39 talked about partners quite a bit here. And I, I’d be remiss, this is the ultimate guide to partnering. What do you see from the best partners you work with? Sharon Schoenborn 12:48 Well, I think back to the point of creating a differentiated capability and ultimately go to market offer. And being really, really great at that. Because I think that, especially when we talk about the the Manage space, being able to be really precise about how you’re differentiating in the market. Because we need our partners to really lead and drive growth there and not always have to be in hand to hand combat with our sellers, I’ve got a much, much smaller sales force then then the market demands. And so I think differentiating in the market off the back of that leveraging the skilling resources, and then really importantly, leveraging partner centre as a way to connect into Microsoft. And then of course, marketplace, Vince Menzione 13:34 yes, we’d be remiss to if we didn’t bring up marketplace, right, this huge opportunity area. And I, you know, we at that event, we brought all the partners together. So we bought some of the ISVs had been the creators of platforms, as well as the selling partners into the room. And I’ll be candid here and say that some of those selling partners have been kicking and screaming away in a way and saying, you know, they’ve been they’ve been slow to adopt marketplace. But I’ve seen a change, and maybe it’s just in the last couple of months now. I believe a lot of them are now leaning in on marketplace. Would you agree there? Sharon Schoenborn 14:10 I would I think it’s still early days. And I think the ability to have private offers in marketplace is going to be a really important opportunity for our partners to to accelerate growth for sure. Vince Menzione 14:19 And I also think about it you know, Microsoft has always talked about partner to partner. And this accomplishes quite a bit on the partner to partner side because now you are able to take multiple solutions. And I’ll use the term stitching them together, right, because the customer is not buying one thing. In fact, they’re not talking to one organisation and not just talking to Microsoft. They’re not just talking to a partner. They’re looking at several different areas rather than be security or some line of business application or multiple line of business applications. And they have a transactional partner that they’re working with. Marketplace just offers that opportunity that private offer to pull it all together for the customer lead Sharon Schoenborn 14:59 by the amazing capabilities within our channel, right in terms of in terms of making it real through projects, and also activation with each customer. Vince Menzione 15:11 So we are kicking into 2024 in a big way. For Microsoft, it’s the second half, it’s h2, right? I was hoping maybe you could spend a moment here maybe any great advice for these organisations on what they should be doing differently now that we are in the throes of 2024 that we’re in the throes of Microsoft’s h2. What would you say to those partners to do better or differently than we’ve seen before? Sharon Schoenborn 15:38 Well, a few a few areas, one, back to the point of learning, with all the innovation that’s coming to market, really leaning in role modelling that every single day and making sure that across our teams, we’re building the capability to have those differentiated offers, again, I come back to leveraging the partner centre to be able to be the surface area engagement to connect into Microsoft, I would also say, really pressure test, really pressure test your growth strategy. And ask yourself, are we really betting in areas where we can differentiate and be amazing and as we then think about more and more solutions, really make sure that that comes together? In the overall customer value proposition? I think sometimes we can get a little broad. And then then that runs the risk of not not differentiating as much in the market. It’s like those are those are really key areas. But at the same time get energised. Like, I don’t know that that takes much doing these days, because it’s such an incredible moment in our industry. Vince Menzione 16:43 I’m energy. Are you energised, I’m energised. So, you know, you mentioned something to about getting very specific about what your superpower is, I like to talk about the being the shiny quarter in the bucket full of shiny quarters, there are so many Microsoft partners. Some struggle with the differentiation but lean in or niche down to where your real strengths are and focus there versus trying to go broad, right, the partner that tells me, I’ve got 250 competencies and capabilities, I lose focus, I lose, they lose my attention. Yeah, Sharon Schoenborn 17:16 I think it’s I think it’s a an important thing to recalibrate and reinforce. And at the same time, we have some partners who can do it all right, in terms of like us. And so that’s really important thing in terms of looking at the unique partner communities across the market. Because depending on the profile, whether we have global system integrators, national system, integrator, services partners, CSPs, or our MSPs, really, again, it comes down to where we come together and drive the greatest. Good Vince Menzione 17:53 point. Good point. You know, Sharon, I’d love to pivot. I have many listeners and viewers that are earlier in their career in their career journey. So I would love for you to spend a moment here. Was there a spark? Was there a pivot? Was there a mentor, in fact, that helped you get to this? I mean, CVP at Microsoft is a big deal, right, corporate vice president. Tell us a little bit more about that journey. Sharon Schoenborn 18:16 Wow, um, do you know what I’ve been fortunate? I’ve been fortunate to have found myself in tech in the 90s and have am a person who enjoys change, I actually relish in and embrace change. I think if there was one thing that grounded me the most early in my career, I had an opportunity early in my career to work in mergers and acquisitions. But more on the people side, on the integration of acquisitions, and working with leadership teams right after an announcement was made to come together. And I studied and even got my grad degree in leadership development. And the the one skill that I feel has served me throughout my career, especially as I’ve moved on, and leadership is around change leadership. It’s about the EQ side of engaging and leading a business. And ultimately, all of us, as leaders, all of us together with our channel are leading change every single day, not just strategically, but certainly with our people. And so I think, having really gone deep into the principles of change leadership, at an early stage of my career that has been a pivotal asset for me. Ever since that point, and something that I greatly value, I’m still working on it, by the way, but at the end of the day, it’s my job to be a great leader for my people as we lead change and ultimately deliver business results. And I encourage anyone who’s earlier in their career to actually really get curious about the principles of leading change in some of the fundamentals, I think will serve you really well Vince Menzione 19:59 fundamentals. To end principles right before my heart in terms of driving that, in fact, I would love to know if there was a book was it was there a book that has been a favourite of yours on transformation change or principles? Sharon Schoenborn 20:13 Boy, there’s a lot like one that I think is really practical. And what I would definitely recommend to our channel leaders is adaptive leadership, adaptive leadership, it really speaks to the difference between solving technical challenges from adaptive leadership challenges and technical challenges are those that will probably deal with every single day as sales leaders, as business leaders, adapt to challenges are those that are really addressing longer term systemic changes that really require a level of deep and thoughtful stakeholder engagement to really get to an outcome that’s going to deliver meaningful change for the business. And again, so much of it does come back to the softer side around change leadership, but especially in organisations that might be a bit larger that have broader stakeholder groups, it really is more about how do you create that common shared vision, and really find a way to be able to enable that together and making some hard decisions as well. Vince Menzione 21:16 I love everything you’ve said had to say here because we are driving a transformation like no other I believe, during this time. And what an amazing leader to believing that now at Microsoft within this very large segment of the business. I have a fun question, I love to ask every guest. So Sharon, you are hosting a dinner party, and you can host this dinner party in anywhere in the world. But you can only invite three guests to this dinner party from the present, or the past, to this amazing dinner party that you’re going to host. I’d also love to know where you want to host it. We’ll talk about that a little bit more. You’ve lived all around the world. Who would you invite to this party? And why? Sharon Schoenborn 21:56 I love this question so much. Can I Can I take a little bit of liberty with answering how I would do this? Vince Menzione 22:02 You know, it’s early in the day, I’d love? Absolutely, I’d have Sharon Schoenborn 22:07 three dinner parties, three dinner parties. And I’d want to go to their space independently because I feel that each conversation is unique in its own. And I’m probably more of an introvert. So I like the one on one engagement versus so the first I would say is my team would know I’m biggest Peter Gabriel fan. So I love Peter Gabriel think he’s amazing human and I love what he stands for and his music back to the 80s Today, I’ve been known to fly from Sydney to Chicago just for a concert. Wow. Wow. So I think I would love to go to his farm where he has written many of his lyrics and just spend a very casual kind of picnic there having a good conversation with Peter Gabriel to understand a little bit more about what’s driven his mission. Because I think he’s a great human. Secondly, I would say my family came originally, like my great grandparents came from Germany and from Czechoslovakia years ago. And so and they, they landed in the Midwest, you know, ultimately in Minnesota, and had some pretty amazing experience, you know, finding their way and ultimately landing in their spot in northern Minnesota waggon trains, you know, bringing, you know, babies along in the below zero weather. So yeah, staying living in a tent in the middle of winter, while trying to build a very simple house. Like, I would just love to sit with my great grandparents. And listen and learn from what their experience was, I think it’s terribly humbling and inspiring and speaks to incredible level of resilience. And then a third, I would say, I’d love to go to Nepal. And I would love to spend some time with the Sherpas in there, you know, maybe two or three in someone’s home. And, and really I’m just understand a little bit more about what drives their spirit and energy and incredible capability. I think the Sherpas are the heroes of Everest. I think they’re the heroes of any major mountain climbing expedition. And I just think that having a conversation to understand where that spirit and energy and spectacular capability is driven from fascinating, Vince Menzione 24:40 so fascinating. I might follow you around I might have fun. Where’s Peter live? Where’s this farm? Sharon Schoenborn 24:46 Up in England? Yep. Vince Menzione 24:48 All right. Well, the pile sounds fantastic. Yeah. Have you have you? Have you been a climber? Sharon Schoenborn 24:55 Oh God, no, no. Vince Menzione 24:56 We had a guest to climb Mount Everest. So that’s I have a special that is. It’s amazing, especially. Sharon, you have been incredible. Everything that I hope to have you having you here today. Really, I really enjoyed this conversation. Such an incredible leader, such an incredible time in your business for our partners listening and viewing today. Just an incredible time to be working with Microsoft and Sharon’s SMC, America’s business. Again, one last one last time here for our viewers, and for our listeners, any last words of advice? Or maybe not advice, but just go do’s in terms of how we need to think about this year? Great. Sharon Schoenborn 25:34 Well, hey, first, Vince, thanks for having me. It really is a pleasure. And I want to say thank you for all the work that you’re doing with our partners, we really appreciate it again, standing room only event in Dallas a few months back, we really appreciate the the the the effort and the engagement. And for all of our partners, I just want to say huge, thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done. Thanks for all that you will do. Thanks for leaning into this opportunity that we have right now to help service our customers in incredible ways to innovate with this era of AI and look forward to really moving the dial together in the SMC business, not just in the next six months, but certainly in the years to come. So thank you very much, Sharon. Vince Menzione 26:15 Thank you again. Thanks, Vince. 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

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. LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP What You’ll Learn Microsoft’s co-pilot for Microsoft 365 is now available in the CSP channel. 0:02 AI-powered co-pilot for Microsoft 365 and its potential for partners. 4:47 Microsoft’s AI tools for partners and data protection. 9:35 AI-powered Copilot for Microsoft 365 and its benefits for SMBs. 13:22 AI-powered Copilot tool for Microsoft partners. 18:23 Why Ultimate Partner? 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. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP 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.

Microsoft’s Nina Somerville Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering® We are diving into the dynamic world of healthcare technology and partnership ecosystems with Microsoft’s Vice President, Nina Somerville. Explore Microsoft’s significant investments in healthcare, AI applications, and the keys to successful partnerships. Nina shares her extensive leadership experience, emphasizing the importance of transparency, empathy, and a growth mindset in the tech industry. Gain valuable insights on AI adoption, data readiness, and fostering diversity. Join host Vince Menzione and Nina Somerville for a deep conversation on career growth, mentorship, and the critical role of partnerships in the health and life sciences industry. Don’t miss this engaging discussion with a seasoned leader shaping the future of healthcare technology. In Her Own Words Nina Somerville, Vice President, US Health & Life Sciences Nina Somerville is a dynamic sales leader with extensive experience in the technology and public sector industries. As a seasoned VP of Sales, she has spent over 20 years building and leading high-performing teams across various segments, industries, and technologies. Nina has cultivated her skills in leadership, communication, and relationship building with roles in sales, sales management, teaching, and coaching. She recently rejoined Microsoft from Salesforce, where she spent the last four years leading national teams across diverse business segments and industries. Prior to that, she spent over a decade at Microsoft, serving in various roles across Northeast Enterprise, Services, and Public Sector in both the Federal and State & Local divisions. Nina’s multifaceted background and strong leadership skills, along with her deep understanding of Microsoft’s business and her ability to drive results, have been honed through her diverse experiences within the company. Outside of work, Nina is dedicated to positively impacting her community. She serves on the board of a local non-profit that prepares and distributes meals for those who are food insecure. Additionally, she is involved in her local schools and youth sports programs, supporting the growth and development of young people. Nina is a proud Virginia Tech graduate and resides in Vienna, VA, with her husband and their three children. In her free time, she enjoys cheering on her kids from the stands and spending quality time with her family. LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP What You’ll Learn 1. Microsoft’s healthcare investments and leadership insights. (0:00)2. Healthcare investments and AI applications in Microsoft. (1:39)3. AI adoption, data readiness, and partner alignment. (7:46)4. Partner success in the tech industry. (13:47)5. Career growth and mentorship in the tech industry. (17:04)6. Leadership, growth mindset, and diversity in the tech industry. (22:24)7. Partnering and scaling in the health and life sciences industry. (29:46) Why Ultimate Partner? 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. Come Sign Up LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos customer, partners, Microsoft, work, AI, life sciences, team, call, leader, verticals, talking, great, data, health, years, conversations, ag, healthcare, fact, share Vince Menzione 0:00 Do you want to learn about Microsoft’s significant investments and focus in healthcare? An industry that represents 19%? of gross domestic product? Would you like to learn from an incredible business leader who’s made her mark by putting people at the center of her approach to leadership? And are you interested in how you should think about growing your business in 2024? Then you’ve come to the right place. This is the ultimate guide to partnering the top partnership podcast. In this podcast, Vince Manziel, a proven partner sales executive shares his mission to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And now your host, Vince Menzione. Vince Menzione 0:49 Welcome to or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, on your host. And today, I will Nina Somerville 0:57 Nina Somerville is the vice president of the US health and life sciences business at Microsoft nine and I had the opportunity to work together during my decade at Microsoft. And she is both an incredible leader and human. You’ll learn about the US health and life sciences business. It’s an incredible business opportunity for any partner, but also the human side of how this leader engages with partners and our team to drive results. I hope you learn from this discussion. As much as I enjoyed welcoming my friend Nina Summerville Vince Menzione 1:35 Nina, welcome to the podcast. Nina Somerville 1:38 it is so good to see you. It’s good to be here and good to see an old friend and face and I am not commenting on your age just just good to see you. Vince Menzione 1:49 We have known each other for quite some time, I think it’s going on 16 years. Nina Somerville 1:55 Yeah, it might be longer. Vince Menzione 2:01 Well, we had the opportunity to work together at Microsoft. Not only that we had adjoining office spaces. If you recall, back when I first joined the company, so I’m so excited to welcome you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to partnering. It’s great to see you. And your and your rise in your career. You are Microsoft’s Vice President, for the US health and life sciences business, one of the most impactful verticals that I could think of in fact, so kudos to you, my friends, so excited to have you as a guest today. Nina Somerville 2:34 Thank you so much. Now it’s a it’s an honour and even hear you say that it’s a it’s a privilege to represent the group. So thank you Vince Menzione 2:41 quite a bit of an amazing trajectory. And we’re gonna get into that during this conversation today. But for our listeners, maybe the one or two who may not know you, or your role at Microsoft, can you tell us a little bit about that? And your mission? In fact, Nina Somerville 2:58 you bet you bet. So. So again, I’m fortunate enough to lead it’s the it’s the US health and life sciences. So what does that mean are payers providers, med tech devices, pharma, so everything you’ve sort of put in that category, which is, which is a wide array, I think the exciting thing is, in all of those businesses, there’s an ultimate patient outcome, or health outcome, that’s really important. We have everyone from account managers to technical specialists to specific solution area specialists, when you think of the portfolio from, from modern workplace to Azure, to dynamics to surface. And beyond, so specialist there, and then and then customer success, folks who really help the customers deploy and use and find value out of the things they’ve invested in. It’s exciting. Vince Menzione 3:51 It’s exciting, and also to highlight Microsoft’s investments. And I think one of the things that partners don’t always understand when they think about a vertical, and you know, you and I were in public sector back in the day when we weren’t the only verticals, is the level of investment, like you’re basically the CEO of a business within the business, you have people and you can spotlight this to talk about this any way you’d like. But you basically have an entire organisation across sales, marketing, and you know, the customer operations and so on that your your drive and technology that you’re driving against and, and supporting those customers. Is that right? Nina Somerville 4:30 It is I mean, I want to say me, I think I think really important is I lead a field team that touches the customers every day the company invests overall in the industry. So there are health specific focus individuals, everything from former nurses and doctors to deep technical expertise in our engineering team, in our product teams in our global marketing teams. We also have a worldwide health industry team that also touches the US so it’s it’s beyond On the nynas world of things, it is really, health and life sciences as a focus for the company is really broad. And we get the benefit of sort of bringing all those to bear for customers as they need them. Vince Menzione 5:13 You know, this for partners specifically that are looking at this is potentially a new opportunity and those that are in this space, healthcare is roughly 19% of GDP. And we were talking about this earlier, like Microsoft is really invested significantly, you just talked about some of those investment areas, also have made significant dollar investments in technology over the years. Certainly, we will talk a little bit about AI and Microsoft’s announcements there. But also, I was thinking about the acquisition of nuance, which was significant acquisition just about two years ago, I believe. Now, can you tell us more about how Microsoft thinks about investing in healthcare? Nina Somerville 5:52 Yeah, I think I think most importantly, as Microsoft understands the importance, I look every day at our team, and I talk about the opportunity, we have to change the future of healthcare for future generations. I mean, it’s it’s, it sounds cliche, I don’t think it is, I think with AI and fusion with technology with, as you mentioned, nuance, I mean, it amplifies the value that the healthcare domain expertise they bring the AI outcomes they bring paired with the history of Microsoft and the platform. It’s a group of us were talking about it yesterday, I think that the excitement is we can take people from cloud to digital to true AI transformation when you marry that, that portfolio and expertise and, and I know we’re on on your call today. But but we don’t do that without partners, that that does not happen, we have so many things that we can bring, it doesn’t land at the customer, we don’t execute, we don’t scale without our partner ecosystem. Vince Menzione 6:54 Now, it’s just thinking about that. Because there, you know, we can talk about you have the payers, you have the providers, which are a significant portion of the business, you have life sciences. And across each of those verticals within the vertical, you probably have several sets of partners that you and your team work with. Thinking about this now in terms of how you’re layering in and working with partners to support the business. But I want to spend a moment on AI like it’s the elephant in the room. It’s what everybody’s been talking about. And I think about Satya here and in a big way you and I both worked in the early in the bomber days, and now in the Satya days and probably noticeable changes and changes in the way that businesses run. But some big announcements recently on the AI front. What use cases are you and your team? Seeing? Nina Somerville 7:43 Yeah, well, you just mentioned the vast set of customers we have. And so I think I think the answer is it varies dramatically and every customer. What I’ve been finding really interesting and wonderful is we leave conversations, just thinking way beyond all of the art of the possible I think the hard thing for customers, then as we talk to partners, I think this is really important. The help we need is how do we pick those high value low risk use use cases to start for the customers who aren’t already on the journey? Many are? How do you pick something that they can start and figure out? Is my data ready? I always say is your data AI ready? Is my data ready? Things like copilot getting getting in touch and a taste of how AI can be infused in your daily work to start, and then there is a sky’s the limit. You could you could spend way too much time figuring out all the possibilities and not start. And so I think where I’m finding the most exciting partner conversations is really helping those customers start. And and it’s hard because we get excited by the million possibilities. Vince Menzione 8:55 Do you have an area that you recommend they start? I mean, you mentioned getting your data. Right, right. That’s like garbage in garbage out. We all know. So how do you think about that when you have these kinds of customer conversations? Nina Somerville 9:06 I do. I do think there’s a there’s a data component of making sure obviously, that that they’re ready to take full advantage of the capability. I think back to you know, we take responsible AI really seriously, which is, is there. So we’ve actually we’ve we’ve found that our HR teams, our legal teams are talking to legal on the other side to say, hey, here’s how we think about responsible AI. So I think having open conversations about those that have done it, and how did they How did they do it and then back to what I said which is one of those low risk but high value places where you can be sure that the data that’s being accessed is within your environment. And that it is it is something that you can test and implement and watch to to make sure excuse me that it makes sense. Before you go do a massive, massive The project. And so, again, I think I think that the key is it depends on the customer where they are. So I think it’s really personalised, of course, within a given segment, we can say, hey, it happened here. Now we can replicate. And we are seeing some of those. But But I think the help is helping the customer figure out where they can start. Vince Menzione 10:19 Yeah. And you, you reminded me when you were speaking about the attorneys, and HR and all those different groups getting together about HIPAA compliance, right, so that you’re in a regulated industry, there’s a level of security and in fact, risk around sharing data. Sure. So how do you think about that as an example? Nina Somerville 10:38 Yeah, I think, yeah, I think we’re still we have a tonne of mature customers who are very deep into this. And so I’ll make some general statements that don’t apply to all of them. But I do think we still have a lot of fear in the system of what is what is AI? What’s accessible? How will people be, you know, using hallucinations, as fact. And so I think from a compliance standpoint, one is is your data secure? Are you using AI to to search and bring out outcomes from a subset of data that you can keep in a secure way? We’re not talking about public web searches, right. And so So I think it is it is really important and how you set up the data, what AI is accessing, and what the people are accessing. So let’s think of a call centre, a contact centre, you call in a, an agent is doing an AI a search and using AI to bring forth outcomes, but from a subset of content, not everything on the web. So it’s about it’s about that setup and about that protection, but it’s also educating people that it can be done in a safe way. Vince Menzione 11:49 Yeah and Brad Smith, your president and chief legal officer always talks about responsible AI. I mean, that’s that’s built into his talking points and the mantra that he shares. Nina Somerville 12:00 Absolutely. Vince Menzione 12:01 So I love to talk about partners, this is the ultimate guide to partnering and you’ve been around partners, you’ve pretty much your entire career, if I remember correctly. What do you see from the best? Like, what do you see from the best partners you work with in the HLS? Business? Yeah, Nina Somerville 12:16 I think we have to at an exec and a leadership level align on priorities. And we have to look at joint customers and say, How can we do better? I think sometimes where we stall ourselves is where we keep just doing that, when really, we need to get our respective account teams together, the folks on the ground at customer fill in the blank, what’s that account plan at that customer, and then we can level up things that we can repeat across other customers, then we can talk in an exact level. It’s wonderful to know the execs at Microsoft, it’s wonderful to know, leadership, it’s also really important that on the ground, we’re operating in a cohesive way. And so often, that’s my immediate follow up to partner conversations, which is let’s get the teams together and align them because they’re doing the real work. My individual contributors, and my first line managers who are with the customers every single day, they know better than talking to me. And so I think that’s the most important is that we’re aligning at each customer, which is hard, that’s hard to scale, especially depending on the size of your organisation. So I also then think, often, the first place to start when, as a new partner to Microsoft, is where are we already both somewhere? If we’re both there, what are we doing that work insights, because we share together about a customer that we’re both serving and helping? And where can we show up better together? Vince Menzione 13:47 And also speaking the same language, right? I, my eyes were opened actually, just when the event we were talking about the event we just hosted back in November, we did a session on M SEM. And I was hesitant to even do it, like, why are we going to do a session on M SEM. That’s Microsoft sales methodology. It was one of the best sessions we had Elliot Dunlap come from Dallas, and do this session. And it became really clear to me like we’re not always speaking the same language like your team is here, and having a conversation and then all of a sudden a partner comes in. I encourage partners to come back and listen to that session, because you really have to understand Microsoft’s approach and speak the same language Microsoft speaks to about the customer. Nina Somerville 14:31 No, I totally agree. And, and beyond sales methodology, I would actually just call it an orchestration plan. It is it is how we with and I mentioned the various roles and within our teams, there are many, many roles. It’s how do we orchestrate beautifully when we show up at a customer? How do we handoff from the technical person to that customer success person to maybe an implementation partner. If we don’t understand each other, that doesn’t happen and we’re conky in every company calls customer success a different thing or calls a technical specialists a different thing. And so we do have to understand each other. You’re totally right. Vince Menzione 15:08 And we can go, we can go deep on this one. But I think we’ll save that for another session. So what about partners that didn’t get it right? Whether it’s in this role, or various roles that you’ve had at Salesforce, and Microsoft and Oracle, in fact, if I remember going back far enough in your career, what did you see? partners do wrong? I guess is what I would say are where they failed. And you wish you had said to them at the time, like, I just wish you to go do this the right way? Like, what would you expect? Um, then Nina Somerville 15:39 I feel like everyone has wonderful intent. And we all have our personal goals. So one, it’s on both of us to understand each other’s goals, priorities. So that’s on us too. I think. I think sometimes we might have failed together. And I wouldn’t necessarily say that there’s a, there’s a point, I think, easier for us to consume, in our massive scale, is just really understanding what you can deliver to a customer. How do we deeply understand how to partner with you as well. So I think sometimes, there’s a lot of trying to serve us. And know, there’s such deep expertise in that partner. And I think I think it’s it’s more of that true understanding at the field level. But I would also say, back to my statement of, let’s figure out where we both already are. Sometimes the Hey, call me if you need x. Okay, but it’s easier for me to say, hey, we’re both here doing this work, let’s do this together. So I think that gets lost that the pitch of Call me if you need something, I acquainted to this fence, this is a little silly. But when you have a sick neighbour or a relative that needs something, and you say, Call me if you need anything they want, do you just have to show up? And so that’s kind of the way I would put it. Vince Menzione 17:04 So would you put that on both sides, then would you say on your team, as well as the partner team? Nina Somerville 17:08 I would and I think, you know, again, we all get busy in our day jobs. And so I think where we are already both doing work is the easiest place to start and understand each other, then we can go other places together. Vince Menzione 17:20 I agree, going deep together, right, like belly to belly into an account together. Nina Somerville 17:25 And, and I think that’s having hard conversations, and it’s not working. Yeah. Agreed. Again, it’s back to the same as like your native relationship with your neighbour. So stop doing that it makes me mad. We have to have honest conversations, too. Vince Menzione 17:39 I talked about being deliberate or aggressive in a diplomatic way. It’s like having that transparency with empathy, that you go back and say, Look at this isn’t working. And let me explain to you why and what how it could be better and what, what good looks like or what great looks like. Nina Somerville 17:57 Yeah, and I say I talked earlier about the vast resources at the company focused on health and life sciences. There’s the vast partner ecosystem doing great work and other than life sciences. The customers are our collective customer. And so there’s there’s just got to be a mutual respect Vince Menzione 18:15 as well. 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 then Sam. That’s drink ag one.com forward slash Vince M. Vince Menzione 19:21 Nina I’d love to pivot. As you might know, I am fascinated with the career journey. I’ve spent a lot of time mentoring earlier and career professionals. And I’ve got to see your rise. In fact, I don’t know what your title was when we first met if it was director or senior director. But being a VP at Microsoft is a big deal. So I’d love to deep dive a little bit here. Like was there a spark? Was there a pivot? Or was there maybe a mentor that came into the room that helped you propel to this incredible spot in your career? Nina Somerville 19:49 I really say I meandered. I was a teacher, a high school teacher for five years. I think when we met I was a SharePoint SSP in federal, probably not maybe by then I have was doing something else but but you know I think the important thing is try things. I just yesterday ran into someone who it was the first manager job and it was so I take this field sales job or do I take this people manager job and I cared more about helping people and chose that path and those little moments, I think just just help you get places. But I’ve had moments in time where I have a goal, I want to be my boss’s boss’s boss. It’s worked out better when I just look to try experiences and experiences where I think I can make a difference. And, and that meandering along the way has worked out. But again, I don’t think there’s been a specific thing. And I will say I’ve had such a luxury of working for just really good people. And, of course smart, of course, great at their jobs, but but just good people. And so if people always ask me, like, Who do you follow? What do you do? And I said, if you stay around good people, I think that’s the most important. Vince Menzione 21:13 So you make it sound. So like meandering feels so casual. And I don’t see I mean, I don’t see it that way. Right. I think I think you’re incredibly bright. I think you’re, you’ve got passion about what you do. You’re also I’m just gonna share this, like, I think you’re a really great people person, like, I’ve always found you to be that. So is there a superpower there? Like, can I peel back for me a little bit here, because I do think there’s so much more tonight than just me. Nina Somerville 21:44 I think I do think there is put people first, just straight up, put others first and you will rise naturally, by doing that. Other people’s good work that you help facilitate is better than promoting your own. And, and I think that’s what’s probably served me well along the way. And I believe in that wholeheartedly. I always feel like the people that are really out promoting themselves don’t get there. But, but the people that really take stock and all the work that people around them do, it naturally will help you it might be slower, actually, it might be slower. But then I think it’s real. That’s, that’s the most important man and and I really, you know, I think get to know everyone around you how they are in, that’s getting harder, my team is really big. There are a lot of people that work on my team that I don’t know. So also putting good leadership in place. And so that first line leader is the most important job in the company. Because they really take care of that team and know the team and know how they like to be recognised and know what’s going to put them in a place where they’re thriving. And so as I’ve done bigger jobs that that having really good leaders has been one of the most important things. Vince Menzione 23:02 What traits do you look for in a leader? Nina Somerville 23:06 I think there’s balance across the team is really, really important. If if everyone knows the industry really well, it’s okay to bring in someone that’s a really good people leader, but that doesn’t have that background. If everyone knows the data really well, is there someone else who focuses more on people? I think balance and obviously, diversity inclusion is huge, important to any company, especially at Microsoft. But just think that balance across an organisation. And we’re like that I have great leaders that work for me great leaders I work for and I think we balance each other nicely. And that’s really going to just just help everybody’s game. Vince Menzione 23:46 So I’m going to ask another hard question is how do you avoid the unconscious bias of hiring a person who’s just like you? Nina Somerville 23:58 Yeah, well, I think we have to be really intentional. We have some programmes internally that help us have some sort of outside views when we’re looking at hiring to make sure that that it’s not just our, our opinion, but I think you have to have constant looking for a bench of leaders. And you should know a massive network of people that could fill the next job that you might have open. Because if you if you have to act quickly, you’re going to grab that person closest to you that you know the best, that’s probably the easiest. So it’s a long game. It’s actually not about that moment in time. But I also engage other people in your choices so that you aren’t short sighted, we all will all do it. Yeah. Vince Menzione 24:40 So make sure you have almost like a board of directors supporting you in the decision process. So this is a favourite question I have. You are hosting a dinner party, and you can invite any three guests from the present or the past. This amazing dinner party, we can talk about where you want to host it maybe even as a possibility. Who would you invite? And why? Nina Somerville 25:10 Yeah, well, there’s a couple of versions of this. So I have a couple versions. There’s a personal version, which is I wanted to have myself attend myself today and myself at like, 95. Just just wouldn’t it be lovely to know how it’s all gonna turn out and how you know, where it’s all come from. So that there’s there’s a personal version of that current current state and job. I think it would be incredible to have a dinner party right now with all of the future CEO and CO directs past and future of Microsoft. Very cool. Can you imagine just how much has changed in the last 12 months? Can you imagine that, that that looked back to even just 10 years down the road, what what life is going to be? Vince Menzione 26:00 I think it’s just fascinating to get bomber gates and to enter rooms, let alone who’s going to be the leader? 10 years from now, right? Who’s going to be the successor 100%. Nina Somerville 26:10 And you know, you say those three names, and there’s so much different, obviously. But, but I spent a long time at Microsoft and I was gone a little bit and I came back and, and I think the one thing that sticks with me a lot is it says it. And I feel like it’s always been a lived value is that culture drives growth. And I really do believe we keep that in order here. Because you don’t, you don’t just drive for growth’s sake, it’s culture, and that’s a internal as well as the customers and partners. You know, Vince Menzione 26:45 you and I had the opportunity to work with Michael Gervais when he was working with the organ. And we just had him on the podcast, in fact, again, his fourth appearance, and you reminded me the whole growth mindset and what we learned and how we shifted the organisation back in those days, anything that you feel is like, how would you remark on your, your days before and your time back? Now? What is it eight or nine months since you’ve been back? What was the most remarkable moment from that? Like, the biggest takeaway for you? Nina Somerville 27:16 I think it’s constant learning. Really, I think there’s an openness to fail, there’s an openness to share, when you don’t know, we’ve been talking recently about, you know, if you can’t prep for every meeting, and spend time worrying about what other people think, and Michael actually has that I think that’s his, you know, is is new book that’s out is about that fear of what other people think. And you just got to be true to yourself, and be honest with what you know, and Don’t fake it. And it kind of goes back to what you said about leadership and successes along the way. Those are the people I see shine the most when you really they are themselves, obviously in an appropriate and respectful way. But being okay with what you don’t know what you’re good at what you’re not bring people around you who are good at the things you’re not versus trying to be at all.VM Vince Menzione 28:07 I love that advice. That’s great advice for our listeners, nine. So you have been an amazing guest and I just so love getting together with you. And you’re running an incredible business and health and life sciences. For our listeners, some of which may be in the health and life sciences, vertical business or verticals. And some that may be interested in working in your sector. Two things, I guess is what I would ask. One is how can they best engage with your teams? And then how can they line up for success in 2020? Nina Somerville 28:42 For sure, well, I think first, it is a thrilling place to be. So there is not another industry and team where you get to impact patients outcomes wellness across the country, the globe, and an exciting time and technology to be able to influence that again, in a responsible way. It’s it’s thrilling. So one jump in if you’re not in right. To, you know, we’re engaging again, I would I would go back to engaging at the geography or account team or customer level where there’s already been work done. And obviously we can help navigate folks to the right place. But yeah, I couldn’t be more proud. It’s, it’s, it’s, and I will tell you, the folks on our teams have been in this business for years and years. There are a lot of folks who have chosen to stay in health and life sciences at Microsoft, because of that passion for the customer. And so it is one of the best teams I’ve ever been around. Vince Menzione 29:45 I would agree with you. I got to know some of those folks over the years and you have some incredible passionate people around health and life sciences in your organisation. So one more thing on the 2024 piece like and how to how to were you setting up your team to be successful in 2020? For sure. Nina Somerville 30:04 So we are for us, it’s the back half of our fiscal year. So, not a lot will change in our in our next in our next six months. But But I think we are always evolving to say, do we have the right specialists? Do we have the right alignment? Are we serving the market the right way. And again, I’ll go back to, we need partners to help us scale. So what I would say to is, this isn’t about figuring out Microsoft, it’s also about come and share the work you’re doing and the insights you have, we are always learning. And so I just look forward to meeting. You know, so many so many new partners and figuring out how we better touch and help the lives of more. I love it. Vince Menzione 30:44 I love it. We’re gonna have to get you up on stage at one of our upcoming events this coming year nine. Nina Somerville 30:52 It is good to see you. Thanks so much for having me. Vince Menzione 30:55 It’s so great to see you. Thank you so much for making time today for our listeners. Thank you. Bye bye now. Vince Menzione 31:06I want to thank you for listening, or watching this episode of The Ultimate Guide to partnering. I’m so excited to continue to bring you the amazing leaders that we bring to this platform. Now well over 200 episodes. If you’d like to support us in a zero cost way, I would welcome you subscribing to the podcast either on Apple or Spotify, or our new YouTube channel. That’s a zero cost way to support the efforts that we provide and then great content we provide free of charge to you. Also on Apple and Spotify, you can leave us a review up to five stars, I would really welcome and appreciate. 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