You have joined the largest partner program in the world to help grow your business — and it is possible.
But being in this ecosystem also means knowing how to stand out. That means refining your uniqueness and creating a spotlight so your customer niche knows who you are, what you do, and why they should choose you.
This is how you move from obscurity to being prioritised. It starts with what we call Focused Uniqueness.
But how do you do that?
To stand out from the crowd and differentiate from your competition, you must occupy a specialist niche.
To occupy a greater share of your target customer’s mindset, you need to clearly articulate the niche you focus on. Instead of being a commoditised generalist, partners need to decide what they want their business to be.
Microsoft’s priorities are always changing, so partners who focus on their specialised niche — and find ways to grow and evolve their skills and capability in line with their customers, markets, and industry requirements — will step into the spotlight.
To maximise the results you get for the time, money, and energy you put into your business, you should deliberately engineer the shortest and most direct pathway possible to achieving meaningful outcomes.
While many partners have a separate marketing function within the business, many have not truly coupled this activity with the requirements for achieving business goals. Setting clear goals, milestones, and accountabilities for deliberate activities across the sales, marketing, and operations team is not negotiable.
To succeed with go-to-market, there needs to be a disciplined focus on being in market with the right things. It requires laser focus on the business scorecard, along with a regular optimisation cadence and a forum to discuss when you are off track.
To deliver business growth, you must have a connected process that repeatably streamlines sales and marketing performance and helps elevate awareness of your unique offers.
Even if business units are operating in line with business goals, there is much more to go-to-market than picking an offer from the Marketing Resources Hub and sending it to the contacts in your CRM, or advertising on Google or LinkedIn.
Go-to-market is not a case of “set it and forget it.” Successful partners have a proven process around how they use their core capability to define an offer aligned to their ideal client and take it to their target market.
They evolve their messaging often and create their proven pathway by measuring success at every stage of the funnel.
If you'd like to understand more about Focused Uniqueness, or the other two key outcomes of an Investible Partner business, download our eBook.
We talk about how to get your business from operating aimlessly to on-blueprint, and also how you can change the mystery of Microsoft into a method in your business.