What are the things that Microsoft should stop doing?

I am preparing several sessions for several IAMCP chapters in the US and Emea to talk about my book on how to work with Microsoft.

In chapter 12 on Best Practices & Challenges in working with Microsoft we asked the following questions to our survey participants.

-     What are the things that Microsoft should stop doing?

-     What are the things that Microsoft should continue doing?

-     What are the things that Microsoft should start doing?

-     Could you share any best practices from your personal experience?

-     Could you share lessons learned from ′bad′ practices that will help other Partners?

Below you can read a subset of what our participants answered to the first question, what are the things that Microsoft should stop doing?

Microsoft should stop:

-     asking partners to build useless plans.

-     making so many sweeping changes every year! Changes need to be more gradual and measured for a company of their size.

-     to support product related sellers who do not know the customer's business.

-     to look at partners as a one-way street.

-     raising competitive offering both on services and products when the bid is partner initiated and the customer is faithful to regular partner.

-     creating slide decks, they put everyone to sleep. Kill me now.

-     throwing too many things at partners in the hope that something will stick. Sometimes it's better to spend a little bit more time to prepare and deepen a topic than to adopt the 'fail fast' principle.

-     to launch incentive programs that don’t deliver the intended benefits.

-     thinking and acting short term. A shift in this direction is probable and there are signs of this.

-     competing with partners. - e.g. their internal data scientist team competing (for free) on client engagements against paid data scientists from partner companies.

-     confusing sales people with competing incentives - e.g. CSP was a mess till they recently (kind of) fixed it.

-     being so insular about who specifically to connect with regarding partnering. Notably, which people in the Microsoft organization are compensated on helping partners. For example, if a partner builds a solution for Retail ... who do they talk to at Microsoft?

-     changing every fiscal year. Now nearly every year end the whole Microsoft organization goes into hibernation and when they start-up again the world and their focus could be completely changed. Building a successful partner relationship and joint market access is not done overnight, so creating a sustainable partner growth plan that will run multiple years and where the key responsibilities of both partners stay clear during this journey would help.

-     being inconsistent with Partners

-     changing the partner engagement personal every year - need longevity - when we have it - it is useful.

-     to continually describe the value to partners only in terms of value to end clients.

-     hiring employees from their partners.

-     to continuously rebrand the products in the Dynamics space.

-     messing up with the partner web sites. Those are the worst in the industry.

-     preferring some partners just because they have worked for a long time with Microsoft

-     measuring Global Partners in the same way they measure Regional and Small Partners

-     complicating their Solutions. They just cannot keep it simple

-     being too internally focused and using internal reorgs as an excuse.

-     the too obvious teaming with the 'usual suspects' and give room to some of the rest of their partner ecosystem.

-     making your sellers so short-term focused.

-     stop being so complicated and prioritize your partner programs. If I have a solution that helps with O365, Azure and Windows 10 deployment, it's on you to rationalize the back-end budgets and programs. Today, I must apply to three programs with different criteria, timelines, etc. It's not worth it to me. 

-     changing rebate margins - affects business predictability

-     the inconsistency of how the field engages with partners. The engagement model literally varies by employee

-     running partner events if their sales teams don't want to engage with smaller partners. We attended a load of meetings but not one account exec chose to engage with us after our follow up. 

If you want to buy the book you can on Amazon (Refresh the Road Ahead) or here.