Bull's Eye Awards: Americas Channel Executives of the Year - CONTENDER
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Cynthia Bates
Training hundreds of thousands of partners on Microsoft Windows 7 in
time for the October launch was no small task. But Cynthia “Cindy”
Bates, vice president of Microsoft’s U.S. partner strategy, marketing
and programs group, rose to the challenge.
A
nine-year channel veteran at Microsoft, Bates and her team trained more
than 150,000 individual partners from July through October this year,
positioning them to best sell and implement Windows 7 solutions and
lock in trusted advisor status with their customers. Along the way and
in typical fashion, Bates listened and reacted to partner feedback.
When partners told her that delivering customer demos of the OS was too
complex, for example, Bates and her team developed an online demo site
with live hosted virtual machine images, self-running streaming videos
and click-through demos for partners to take directly to their
customers.
It’s that kind of responsiveness and effective follow-through that
has earned Bates accolades among Microsoft’s U.S.-based partners and a
Bull’s Eye Award as Contender for Americas Channel Chief of the Year.
Bates has taken a holistic approach to enabling partners, arming
them with the appropriate technical training and tools to go to market,
then supporting their efforts with appropriate marketing air cover. She
launched the BizSpark and WebsiteSpark programs, an on-ramping
initiative that provides free software, support and marketing exposure
to startup ISVs and Web agencies. She also conceived the Front Runner
program, which provides ISVs with free technical tools and support to
build on or upgrade their applications to Windows 7, Windows Server
2008 R2 and the Windows Azure Platform, and then marketing support to
help them drive customer leads.
She is a major proponent of P2P networking and has championed the
Microsoft Community Connections initiative whereby partners can
leverage Microsoft contacts nationwide to team with both other partners
plus industry and business associations. Four thousand partners availed
themselves of this networking opportunity last year.
Partner-readiness was a major goal for Bates this year, as Microsoft
got set to release an onslaught of new products. Partners will tell you
she’s succeeded.
