Positioning Microsoft Office SharePoint - Part 1
Hi All,
It is a great experience to sell SharePoint products & services for the past 4 years till now, let's dive deep on how we can position Office SharePoint Server in a presales scenario.
Where & How:
Where and how you would come across this product, based on my experience you would come across MOSS when there is a following requirement in an organization
• Collaboration & Social Computing
• Enterprise Search
• Portal (Intranet / Extranet)
• Document Management
• Knowledge Management
• Business Intelligence
• Content Management
• Business Forms & Process
• Workflow
The above all are features of MOSS which are leveraged by many organization to address a specific or more business pain points.
To know more about MOSS features visit this link http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/capabilities/default.mspx
Understand the Need:
As a presales consultant all we do first is to understand the need of the customer or main business pain point in hand and in turn analyze whether the product /s can address the same during the initial discussion with the client.
Understand the Environment:
For any successful sale / ROI we as presales consultant should understand the customer environment. Understanding customer environment would help us to derive a successful proposal / discussion & solution which has positive customer buy in. So what are key environment factors which can influence a SharePoint buy in. Let’s have a look, as you know that Microsoft Office Suites (Word, Excel, PPT, InfoPath..) is a widely used desktop productivity tool and obviously Office works only on a Windows platform. This one of key environment factor which can push a customer to go with SharePoint and I preferably use the term “You can potentially use the existing investment, if you leverage the features of MOSS because MOSS goes well with Office Suites & Windows Environment” to my client’s . You may have questions about non Microsoft portal products even they can work on Microsoft Platforms & Suites, but not as better as MOSS. Understanding the environment is not just good for MOSS it is for every presales scenario.
Understanding the User Base:
As we are one or the other ways related to the term / category Information Worker (To know what information worker is visit http://blogs.msdn.com/bowerm/archive/2005/01/06/347803.aspx) we are the major consumers of collaboration products. So a user friendly collaboration tool is always a first choice from the IT team, because collaboration is for every information worker not just for geeks. So understand who would be the end customer in your customer organization. MOSS is very user friendly tool which is basically designed to have pleasing and simple tools for the end users. The UI is familiar to the Information Workers who has just seen Microsoft Prods and I believe most them has seen. Simple self administration tools enable users to actively participate and play around the product.
to be continued in part 2......
Cheers....Britto
