Top Gun 51 Profile: Alyssa Fitzpatrick on Expanding Co-Sell Through Microsoft Partner Center Rollout

Microsoft wants to remove the complexity of partner co-selling efforts with the rollout of its new Microsoft Partner Center.

Partner Center went live last year last year, and some partners have migrated to it from Partner Sales Connect. Alyssa Fitzpatrick, general manager for Microsoft’s worldwide partner co-sell program, has championed the benefits of migrating from Partner Sales Connect to Partner Center. Fitzpatrick, who joined Microsoft in 2016, is a veteran channel exec of companies including CA, Informatica and Intel Security (now McAfee).

Co-selling is a key priority for Microsoft worldwide channel chief Gavriella Schuster. Fitzpatrick is a key driver of that initiative, which is why she was named to this year’s Top Gun 51 list and identified as a Rising Star. Channel Futures spoke with Fitzpatrick about the migration to Partner Center and other key priorities to accelerate co-selling.

Channel Futures: Last month, you wrote a post about sharing how co-selling with MPN [the Microsoft Partner Network] is now migrating to Partner Center. Can you share the status of that and why it’s important?

Microsoft’s Alyssa Fitzpatrick

Alyssa Fitzpatrick: About five years ago, just before I came to Microsoft, we built Partner Sales Connect, which allowed partners to share and co-sell with Microsoft. We’ve been evolving it over the last four years and have built another system behind Partner Sales Connect that we’re now actively migrating our partners to. The new system allows for a much more seamless integration with our systems. We run our business on our own CRM products, Dynamics. What we built was a product that integrates with our Dynamics sales system. Microsoft sellers do all of their planning, manage sales cycles and run all of our transactions in that system. We built Partner Center, which integrates into that system, so that we can share leads and opportunities directly from our CRM into partner CRM and vice versa.

CF: How does that work?

AF: We give partners our API where they can share leads with us directly into our CRM systems. It eliminates the need for multiple data entry and potential data error. But it also provides seamless integration so that a seller at Microsoft and a partner seller can work seamlessly on an opportunity by sharing the same data in the same record. It is automatically and bidirectionally updating our systems together through that API. It is really helping us create a much smoother sales cycle and a tighter engagement with our sellers.

CF: Where do things stand with regard to migrating partners to Partner Center?

AF: We’ve been migrating partners now for about a year. We’ve been migrating cohorts of partners, or pockets of partners where we white-glove and handhold them in the process of moving from the old system, Partner Connect, into the new system. As we migrate partner after partner, we learn more and more around that experience, because each partner is unique. Each partner goes through their own challenges as they’re migrating.

CF: How many partners have completely migrated so far?

AF: We’ve migrated a large population. But we have an even larger population to migrate as we really transition everyone through the balance of our fiscal year, with the goal of …

… having everyone migrated by next summer.

CF: Have you found that partners who have migrated are sharing more leads with other partners than before?

AF: We’ve gotten much smarter in our lead routing. And that’s actually created a much higher degree of satisfaction in our partners, because they’re getting leads that matter to them.

CF: What do you base that on?

AF: When I look back two years ago, in one fiscal year we shared 50,000 leads – outbound to partners – and 50,000 leads came in. During the first six months of this year, we’ve shared 75,000 outbound and 75,000 inbound. And we haven’t even hit the [third and fourth fiscal quarters], which is when it really gets heavy. The business is absolutely accelerating, as we’re sharing our leads together.

CF: How did the pandemic impact your rollout of Partner Center?

AF: Well, we slowed down a lot of the rollout of Partner Center. Our goal now is to have a full migration next June. We had hoped we would drive our partners to adopt Partner Center as we led up to this past summer’s Inspire. But because of the pandemic, we pulled back and we didn’t drive as hard and as fast with our partners’ migration, because they have to put energy into that migration. We were very cognizant of what was going on and decided to give partners the time to migrate on their schedule. So we pulled back and gave more space and time for our partners because of the pandemic. It really pushed our timeline out by a year.

CF: What is involved in doing the migration for a partner?

AF: There’s a step-by-step procedure where they have to make sure that they can connect through our API to their CRM system, and map the appropriate fields. It requires some engineering in order to connect the systems. But we do have a white-glove path, or a self-service path that partners can go through to do that.

CF: How long does it take?

AF: Partners are migrating anywhere from one week to three weeks or four weeks; it just depends on how complex their system is. I do know that some partners can do it very, very quickly. And then some of the other partners have found it a bit harder, especially if they had created a custom approach in engaging with Microsoft. For them to recreate that, it’s a little bit more work.

CF: Where do Microsoft marketplaces such as AppSource fit into the new Partner Center?

AF: For co-sell, there are three ways to go. You can work with our sellers on any of our 50,000 accounts and co-sell there. And you can work with other partners. We have created that motion for demand generation for selling together, as well as getting credit together for collaborative sales. And that can happen with any customer, anywhere in the world, whether it’s a managed customer or not. Then finally, you can publish in our marketplaces, our commercial marketplace, which is the Azure Marketplace or AppSource. And you’re actually decorating your solution with …

… 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 …

… only grow as much as our 50,000 accounts that our sellers can grow.

CF: Where are you in that process of that at this point?

AF: We’re part way through. We started building the plans at the beginning of this fiscal year (July 2020), so we’re about six months in, and we’ll be rolling out our pilots through the next six months. Once we get into the new fiscal year, we should have a vetted program that we can roll out at Inspire. What we will be doing over the next six months is in various pockets around the globe. We’re testing our programs in order to drive that as a global plan.

CF: How do you envision that manifesting itself?

AF: What I’m hoping we can create is in markets around the world, a place where partners not only discover each other, and we can support them, but then in each of the core areas, to build proactive plans, where we’re bringing partners together and driving specific account plans and targets for the year. While I see a portion of my business coming through partner-to-partner engagement, my expectation is to double or triple that next year through the programs that we’re building so that partners have the ability to find each other and grow their business, because we are helping them find, discover and drive those campaigns.

CF: Will that be integrated into Partner Center?

AF: Yes.

CF: Are there any areas, either on the technology side or vertical side where you’re seeing more willingness or interest or efforts to get for partners to partner with others?

AF: When we bring partners together with an industry focus, we definitely see that it’s a much easier and a much more natural alignment. When I was talking about Citrix and Accenture, bringing them to a financial services account or a manufacturing customer, they’re speaking the same language. And now we have a perspective of what the use case is for the customer that we’re trying to drive. And that is a repeatable use case in those industry plays.

CF: Is it more pronounced in any specific industries?

AF: We’ve seen a lot of innovation and creativity coming out of retail this year, as well as manufacturing, where companies in those industries realize they need to become more creative in their approaches, as the business is changing. They’re trying to adjust to the changes and think about what to do when the world comes back from the pandemic. In retail, especially, they’ve had to make a lot of adjustments this year to turn themselves into more virtual places. And we’re seeing many, many different kinds of case studies in manufacturing pop up. And we’ve done some work to bring together our ISV solutions, and show some of these key areas in manufacturing, where partners are bringing solutions that support growth in new requirements that have come from this pandemic.

Partners can find each other in the areas that they’re focusing on now because a lot has changed over the last six, eight months, and people are looking at how can technology help them in a way that that they weren’t looking at it last year.