Top Gun 51 Profile: Alyssa Fitzpatrick on Expanding Co-Sell Through Microsoft Partner Center Rollout
… all of the rights and attributes, whether it is an industry-focused solution, specific to a geography, specific to a deployment model, etc. And customers can come and find you in the marketplace. You can do a marketplace transaction directly with the customer, or together with another partner. So those are all the co-selling paths. Co-sell with a seller, with another partner, or on our marketplace. Partner Center supports all three in the sense that you share a lead in Partner Center. That’s your front door.
CF: What about the new Microsoft Teams device-as-a-service marketplace launched this month?
AF: We’re working on bringing in the devices into the co-sell motion. We have started with our our resellers, our ISVs and our SIs. Our device partners is the next element of our co-sell motion and making sure that it’s a holistic approach. It’s on our road map.
CF: Obviously, the Partner Center migration is a big initiative for you. What else is on your plate?
AF: What I’m really focusing on now is the partner-engaged motion, so that partners have the opportunity to really scale together. And that’s when you’re seeing a services partner work together with an ISV, or an ISV with an MSP, and seeing these partners come together in a line of business and actually do demand generation together. We’re starting to build processes and programs so that we can help partners who naturally align anyway with customers to come together upstream and build demand-generation campaigns with us, that we can support and then really drive that opportunity together with those two partners, or in a multi-partner approach.
We’re piloting some efforts right now in some areas where we’re bringing these partners together. And we’re putting some resources into trying to build an engine so that we can see what we can grow incrementally to what the seller-engaged motion can do. the marketplace can do and what can we do if we stimulate our partners together.
CF: Is that not working?
AF: For example, let’s say I manage Accenture and someone else manages Citrix. There isn’t a person that says, what about the Citrix-Accenture-Microsoft relationship? Because there isn’t anyone that actually brings us together. And so that’s an effort that I’m trying to drive by determining what it looks like when there’s a person who is looking at the success of the three-way partnership and how we can build that.
What I’m really working on this year is, No. 1, how do these partners discover each other in local markets and how do they find who they should be building these three-way partnerships with? No. 2, what are the resources we can provide to help them build plans and campaigns together? And No. 3, how do we execute it so that we can measure the performance and build on that? I believe that is the scale that will really drive us in the future because if we keep Microsoft at the center, we can …