If you've been keeping up with our previous posts, we're here for the final attribute of what it means to be an Investible Partner with Microsoft.
This is about knowing the game you’re in.
With a focused uniqueness and winning playbook supporting a growing, profitable business, Investible Partner’s need to turn the mystery of Microsoft into a clear and deliberate method of partnership. This is done by understanding Microsoft economics, mechanics, and intuition.
How do we do that?
Understand Microsoft's local Economic Scorecard
To be a valuable and profitable investable partner, you must relentlessly gather intel on Microsoft’s Local Economic Scorecard, so your success always tightly aligned to their financial outcomes.
Go-to-solution partners don’t just know what Microsoft’s economic scorecard looks like, they are measuring their own business metrics against it, too. Being tightly aligned to their financial outcomes means your business grows with theirs, and your value increases. Gathering this key intel, managing, and measuring it on a regular basis will show Microsoft you are a valuable and profitable Investible Partner.
Know your key influencers
To be a well-connected investable partner, you must know how Microsoft organises locally and who sits in key influencer roles, so you become an active contributor to positive scorecard results and the preferred choice for future challenges/opportunities.
Microsoft’s internal roles are aligned to their commercials. Before approaching the Microsoft seller, Technical Lead, PDM, GTM Lead, Inside Sales, or any other partner-focused role within Microsoft, Partner’s need to intimately know their customer, size, segment, product, industry, commercials, and impact on Microsoft’s bottom line. With this information, the challenge is knowing who to talk to, and how quickly they can move the conversation towards the opportunities that the business is looking for, while understanding how the business and Microsoft partner into the future - in a mutually beneficial way.
Be a values source of critical information
To hold a competitive advantage as a truly, locally aligned investible partner, you must be acutely tuned in to subtleties and unspoken nuances that really matter to Microsoft. This will give you currency as a valued source of critical contribution.
Partner’s need to keep their finger on the pulse. To be a locally-aligned Investible Partner, you must understand the subsidiary program or portfolio performance across reporting periods (H1 & H2), so you have insights into the focus and energy – and predict which way they will run. Microsoft’s programs satisfy their competitive requirements in the market, so understanding their pivot points and being able to be decisive with them will show that you’re aware and empathetic to helping them achieve their goals.
If you'd like to understand more about knowing the game you're in, or the other two key outcomes of an Investible Partner business, download our eBook.
We talk about how to get your business from obscurity to prioritised in the eyes of Microsoft, and also how you can take your business from operating aimlessly, to on-blueprint.
