Carpe Diem Consulting - Improving Partner Sales & Marketing Effectiveness

CPLS Sales Training

Recently Carpe Diem developed and delivered a 1 day workshop throughout Australia, to improve the sales skills of CPLS Partners to take advantage of the Microsoft NextGen product releases.

The following Slideshare file provides an audio visual overview of the contents of the session, together with the key observations of the instructors:

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The following is illustrative of the type of feedback received since the session:

Put simply, I was very, very impressed with the day as a whole.  To take all of my sales team off the floor for 1 hour is sometimes difficult for me to do, but to commit them for a full day (together) I must admit I have rarely ever done.  But every minute was extremely valuable...

Bruce's training style and delivery was brilliant - he had a lot of insightful thoughts and ideas which challenged my people to think outside of what they normally would.  The course content was 100% relevant, and I have absolutely no doubt that our MOC revenues will increase as a direct result of this initiative put forward by yourself to the CPLS network.  If there is ever the opportunity to participate in further events like this, count me in!

Thomas Pollock, Manager, New Horizons, Brisbane

Hello Janet,

It’s been a few weeks and I wanted to drop you a line to say thanks. Since the training, the team has been working on how to overcome PoPs and making more sales. I’m not sure if you remember but 1 of our team members was sharing in the class about his lost opportunity with a ... company. Well, I’m pleased to say that since then, he has been able to ‘revive’ it and is now in the midst of working out ‘training dates’ with the organisation.

Liz Fu, Managing Director, Hands On Computer Training International, Perth

Fantastic as the content was real world & fantastic instructor

Dana Walton, Excom Melbourne

Eye opening

Kris, Excom Canberra

Excellent experience

Renee, DLLS Adelaide

To view Carpe Diem's sales and marketing blog for Microsoft Partners, click here.

Improving Pipeline Management - hot topic for Partners!

We were pleased to recently be invited to provide a number of presentations at the Microsoft Partner Conferences in both Australia and New Zealand.

Whilst we spoke on a number of topics - including developing a marketing plan, best practice in planning and executing events - the session with the most outstanding feedback was entitled Improving Pipeline Management.

Here is an extract from the session with accompanying voice over - do let us know your feedback!

So how did Partners respond?  On a 9 point satisfaction scale, the average rating received was 8.2 out of 9 - the only presentation during the conference that rated over 8.  Good session - important topic - genuine need!!!

1hr session for Partners - Services Marketing

We are all keenly aware of the need to demonstrate to Partners how to obtain maximum services revenues packed around Microsoft technology solutions.   

But often Partners don't maximise their services revenues due to a poor understanding of how to package and promote their services products.  This in turn diminishes Partner satisfaction in delivering a Microsoft based solution. 

To assist in this regard we have developed a 1hr workshop for Partners entitled Maximising Profitability By Effectively Packaging and Promoting Partner Services.  Key topics covered include: 

• the differences between products and services - and what this means for the Partner Marketer 
• how customers reduce their risk when purchasing IT services 
• top 10 criteria customers use when evaluating IT services 
• checklist for effectively promoting IT services 
• case studies of effective - and "less effective" - IT services promotion.

We have run this workshop in association with Ingram Micro, and have received enormously good feedback. 

The workshop content is also included as a feature in our 1 day course Action Oriented Marketing Planning for Microsoft Partners. 

We are building a structure to make the workshop materials available to different subsidiaries based on a very modest licensing fee, including tele-training for Microsoft nominated facilitators of appropriate background.  Do let us know if this is of interest.

Partner preferences - sales and marketing courses

Recently we undertook a survey of over 50 Australian Partners, obtaining feedback relating to their preferences relating to sales and marketing readiness training. 

This graph is interesting, showing their levels of interest in different courses in reducing order - but also showing their perceived level of competence. 

 

Some interesting points: 

• solution based selling skills rated the most important 
• the ability to create and convert leads in relation to the IO Campaigns is rated lowest for Partner competence 
• time management is rated the highest in competence(!) 
• high interest in understanding the business value arguments relating to new MS releases.

Do let us know if you'd like to see other results from the survey - we also have information on: 

• differences in perceptions based on the type of Partners (eg ISV, SI etc), and also the organisation level of the respondent (eg CEO, sales resource etc) 
• preferred time of year to undertake instructor led training 
• preferences for mode of training (eg face to face, online etc) 
• feedback on willingness to pay for different types of courses.

We'd also be more than happy to run the survey in any region worldwide!

Welcome!

 

Welcome to Carpe Diem's blog - to share information amongst our contacts in Microsoft who are involved in assisting Partners improve their sales and marketing effectiveness.  We want to use this blog to share work with you that we are undertaking in different areas, hopefully to help you avoid reinventing the wheel!

We also want to write a number of small articles about various aspects of improving Partners' sales and marketing efforts - and we'll bring to your attention articles written by others that we think are interesting and useful.

You will also find that we'll be publishing results from ongoing Partner research that we have already started undertaking - hopefully informing us all to provide more relevant help to Partners.

Please do leave comments - and feel absolutely free to recommend this blog to your colleagues!