Microsoft global channel chief Allison Watson says there's never been a more important time for business intelligence. Knowing your business and ensuring your customers' satisfaction will be critical to surviving the recession, she says.What is going to carry the tech community through this recession?
Will it be better and more innovative products?
Will it be managed and hosted services?
Or will it be something more intangible, such as customer relationships and satisfaction?
The answer is a
little of all three. The one that stands out, though, is customer
satisfaction. Ensuring your customer has the best experience with the
solutions and services you deliver is paramount to ensuring that the
next time they decided to part with a precious dollar, that greenback
will land in your pocket.
Microsoft started
talking about customer satisfaction last summer at its Worldwide
Partner Conference in Houston. It’s in the process of revamping parts
of its partner program to base solution provider ratings on customers’
satisfaction. The idea is simple: a happy customer will not only spend
more money with a solution provider but is less likely to spend it on
other vendors’ products.
Understanding
customer needs and ensuring higher satisfaction levels is the stuff of
business intelligence—taking bits and bytes of unstructured and often
subjective data and turning it into actionable directives.
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“Winners in a recession focus on great salesmanship. Winners have an extreme focus on the numbers they need to hit and they leverage assets to make sales better.”
Allison Watson
Corporate Vice President
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group |
“Never has there been
a more important time for business intelligence,” says Allison Watson,
corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Group in a
recent interview with Channel Insider. “How do we help customers make a
choice on cutting costs or making investments is what makes business
intelligence extremely important.”
Watson knows what
she’s talking about. For more than two years, she’s been out on the
stump evangelizing to solution providers the need to adopt an
analytical approach to their businesses, examining the numbers that
flow through their businesses and converting raw data into new business.
Business intelligence
isn’t reserved for the Fortune 500, Watson says, and she’s right. Every
business from ExxonMobil to the corner drycleaner uses IT systems that
produce copious data about customer activity, revenue flows and
profitability. Businesses on every level can measure their efficiencies
(or inefficiencies), divine corrective action or determine best bets
for strategic investment.
For solution
providers, business intelligence—the mining of data from your customer
records and CRM applications—will uncover sales opportunities. Solution
providers delivering managed services, for instance, have deep hooks
into their customers’ operations and have the ability to see with
tremendous transparency failing infrastructure, unused capacity or
gross inefficiencies that can lead to sales opportunities. Business
intelligence, says Watson, offers the tools to attack the marketplace
with a laser focus and win more often than losing.
“Winners in a
recession focus on great salesmanship,” says Watson. “Winners have an
extreme focus on the numbers they need to hit and they leverage assets
to make sales better.”
And business
intelligence isn’t just an externally focused exercise; Watson says
solution providers need to understand their own business operations and
have a deep understanding of their efficiencies. “It’s important to be
modeling, so you know the cost and profit and the numbers you need to
hit.”
All this sounds good
in theory; putting this into practice is much more difficult. Microsoft
has invested heavily in devising metrics templates and key performance
indicators that help solution providers run their businesses better.
Microsoft is one of the few vendors that has taken the time and
invested the money into the business operations of their partners
because they recognize that not every solution provider has a team of
MBAs plotting their business’ course. Solution providers that have
adopted these metrics and methodologies swear by the benefits.
Metrics are only good
if there’s sales activity around them. Microsoft is stepping up its
services and support for solution providers, ensuring that they and
their customers understand the benefits of their technologies and
integrated solutions–from the new hosted services to improved versions
of Dynamics CRM applications and the ForeFront security suite to the
recent release of Windows Server 2008.
Helping to connect
end users to the Microsoft partner community is PinPoint, a partner
locator that enables solution providers to publish their offerings.
Watson says Microsoft delivered more than 82,000 leads from PinPoint to
its partner community this year.
Why invest in these
services and support? Watson says that Microsoft is practicing what it
preaches. By giving solution providers the tools and support they
need—especially in a down economy—the higher their satisfaction. And
that makes them more likely to push more Microsoft product and less
likely to defect to another vendor.
Watson is correct
when she says that this recession is going to reshape the entire
marketplace and recast how we do business. What won’t change is the
need to listen to customers’ needs and desire, and deliver on them. She
says Microsoft is doing that with its customers—you the solution
provider—and hopes the channel community will do the same with its
customers.
Lawrence M. Walsh is vice president
and group publisher of Channel Insider.
You can reach him at lawrence.walsh@ziffdavisenterprise.com.
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