Microsoft UK ISV Kick-off 2007 - "Partnering for Success"
Thank you to all those partners who attended the ISV kick-off event at TVP and made it such a success. My team work hard to pull together the agenda and we hope we made the day valuable for all of you.
My main theme for the day was to explain a little about how we came to arrive at our business priorities for FY08. I explained a little about the Global Relationship Survey [which many of your will have received by email on the 13th Sept]. In last years survey the main feedback was in the area of:
- Complexity of MS Licensing Programmes
- Tenure, Skill & Experience of PAMs
- PAM : Partner Ratio
- Sales Engagement in Enterprise Account
- Navigation of MS Partner Programme Benefits & Portal
- More Leads Generation/Co-Marketing
Having developed strategies to address each of these areas, I then explained a little about the ISV Partner Advisory Board and it's role in helping refine our thinking and piloting some of the initiatives before we make them available to the wider audience.
In summary, these are some of the changes we've implemented as a direct consequence of your feedback and the input from my board:
- Reduced Licensing Programme from 108 to 26
- Built a PAM Business Academy with a leading external Business School
- Added Resource to Improve PAM : Partner Ratio
- Added Further Resource to Support PAMs with an internal telephone resource
- Created an Industry Partner role in Enterprise Business to Help with Sales Engagement
- Created a more structure approach to linking “Incubation” with our Enterprise team
- Redesigned every piece of content on the Portal and deployed a PartnerBot to help find relevant content [add partnerbot@hotmail.com as a contact to your instant messenger]
- Built new Marketing and Business Development resource
I then talked a little about some of the things we think we're doing right. I used some research from IDC where ISV organisations partnering with Microsoft outperformed ISV partners with other organisation in 10 out of 11 performance areas.
I then went on to outline the 4 key business strategies we'll be focused on through the remainder of FY08:
- Ensure we having high quality Partner business planning discussions with all of our managed partners
- As part of this agree and document tangible “Conditions of Satisfaction” CoS.
- Engage more ISV Partners in co-marketing campaigns
- Moneterize EVERY ISV Partnership
- Build an Influenced Revenue Models
- Drive ISV Royalty Programme
- Evangelise the ISV Licensing Pilot [Trustmarque]
- Build joint pipeline & Win/Loss Reporting
- Launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008
In closing my session, there were a couple of points I wanted to make.
- Communicating with the broad ISV community is an ongoing challenge. I will continue to invest more time in this blog as a way of reaching you and updating you on our thinking, strategies and programmes throughout the year. If you have specific feedback for me, please email me directly steve.morrow@microsoft.com
- Providing our ISV community with a voice aligns well with one of our key community initiatives this year - Voices for Innovation. If you're interested in knowing more about this - review my earlier Blog posting on this subject of go to:
http://www.voicesforinnovation.org - it's free to join!
All the sessions were videoed and the slides and video will be available on the main partner website following editing at: www.microsoft.com/uk/partner/isvresources
I then introduced each of our speakers of the remainder of the morning session. Rather than write a summary of each of their session I've provided a link to their company information and contact details.
Telemarketing Service
Kathryn Cowan talked us through the ISV telemarkeing service we launched last year and will continue to grow through FY08. She opened with the cartoon I've attached which I'm sure captured many people's thoughts of outsourced telemarketing/telesales campaigns.
We're now in our second year of working with Kathryn and have seems some amazing results.
Steve Reynolds, CEO of TBS Mobility provided his personal experience and learning from working with The Telemarketing Company on a campaign earlier this year.
The Telemarketing company in conjunction with Microsoft have 2 offerings available:
- Prospect List Identification and Validation
Cost £2,800 ♦ 80 calling hours ♦ average of 150-250 decision maker contacts ♦ option to extend campaign - Lead Generation Programme
Cost £4,800 to £9,600 [core and core+ offerings] ♦ 160 to 320 calling hours ♦ contact with 1,000 to 2,500 qualified contacts.
Steve Reylonds was able to point to £300K of closed business from his initial campaign plus a healthy pipeline of opportunities that his sales team are continuing to drive. Microsoft can part fund this programme for our managed partners at 25% to 50% of the overall cost.
To find out more about this service, please contact:
Kathryn Cowan
Business Development Manager
The Telemarketing Company
http://www.ttmc.co.uk/default.aspx
kathryn.cowan@ttmc.co.uk
+44 1273 765012
ISV Royalty
Tony Young provided an overview of the ISV Royalty licensing programme which enable ISV to embed Microsoft products such as SQL Server, SharePoint Server and MS CRM with their applications. As well as enabling ISV to provide a total solution, ensuring licensing compliance, the programme also provides ISV with an opportunity to make some additional margin on each deal.
www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/isv/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000124
Tony Young
v-tonyou@microsoft.com
+44 1189 09 5343
For the first 2 attendees who sign a new ISV Royalty Agreement, with the ISV Competency and have a Partner Sales Plan [PSP] for their unified solution. We'll be offering a fully funded core Telemarketing Campaign with the Telemarketing Company worth £4,800 as described above.
ISV Licensing Pilot with Trustmarque
One of the key initiatives for FY08 is to better understand the value created by each of our ISV partnerships with a longer term goal of understanding the overall contribution made by the ISV community.
Working with Trustmarque, we've developed a service where any of our ISV partners will have free access to the licensing expertise at Trustmarque. As part of the service, where an end customer licenses Microsoft software through Trustmarque, they will report back the influenced revenue to the ISV and Microsoft. This will enable us to recognise the efforts of our ISV partners who are driving Microsoft license sales. Going forward, this information will be invaluable to securing increased investment in our ISV business for all partners.
We're piloting with Trustmarque because their business model is built around selling solely licenses - they have no Services or Hardware business.
Trustmarque can help with all licensing queries around any license types - including Hosting license proposition - SPLA.
For further information, please contact Trustmarque at:
LicensingAdvice@trustmarque.com
+44 1904 333333
Are you Partner Ready? - Caroline Egan, Giant Step Ltd
We concluded the day with a series of 3 facilitated discussions.
Caroline Egan of Giant Step led a session discussing:
- Where to start in identifying effective channel development strategies
- How to articulate your value proposition
- Implementing a successful joint partner propositions with Microsoft
- How to uncover project and revenue opportunities
I spoke to a number of people after the session who really appreciated the brief session that Caroline ran. Over the past 12 months, Caroline has assisted a number of highly successful ISVs form much stronger business generative relationships with Microsoft UK. If you'd like to make contact for find out more information:
http://www.giant-step.co.uk/
Caroline Egan
+44 (0)7795 830611
enquiries@giant-step.co.uk
