1. Smart Partner Marketing Workshops

2. Driving Consumption & Increasing Stickiness with Revenue Marketing

3. How to use these workshops
You will learn concepts and ideas today
We will practice using some of them as well
Don’t stop there. Use the workbooks after the class to take action
Describe workshop event to students
Draw their attention to the workbook
Some worksheets will be used in class
Some will be used on your own off-line
Some will need input from your staff
Class learning & practice
Workbooks after class
All of these workshops in the Smart Partner Marketing series utilize a combination of learning and practice to help you gain the skills and knowledge for you to take action and move forward with your own marketing.
Digital Marketing skills

4. Topics Marketing’s role in revenue generation
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Topics
Marketing’s role in revenue generation
Lifecycle management / optimizing each stage of buyer’s journey
Driving consumption
Increasing stickiness
Marketing tools for bundling, up-selling and cross selling
This session is focused on the role your marketing department or outsourced marketing agency can and should play in generating revenue. We will examine the later stages of the buyer’s journey and how the activities during these stages deliver not just revenues, but strategic accomplishments. We will look at how to drive consumption and increased stickiness. We will discuss how to increase the size of every opportunity with up-selling and cross-selling techniques. We will cover how to create and market new products and solutions, and how to begin launching additional cloud based practices. You may think these are not all typical responsibilities of marketing, but in today's time frame, we think they belong squarely with marketing.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

5. Revenue Marketing Marketing’s role in revenue generation
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Trainer Guidance
Marketing can play a very important role in revenue generation. Sometime in a very direct manner, sometime by providing tools and resources that enable the sellers in your company to sell more, better, and faster.
Revenue Marketing
Marketing’s role in revenue generation
It’s a new world. Sales can’t go it alone. Not without help from marketing. Whereas these two groups often operate in silos and don’t always work together, in today's world they not only should, but must collaborate in order to achieve success. As discussed in other modules of this series, today’s cloud buyer buys differently than in the past (See Foundational Marketing: Cloud Challenges & Opportunities). Prospects engage sales later in the process, making it difficult to establish a beachhead and to convey the reasons why a prospective client should work with a partner’s business.
But this is exactly where marketing’s new role comes into play. Marketing can help open up prospective clients earlier and in ways sales may not be able to do so. Marketing can help position a partner’s business by articulating their unique value propositions and competitive strengths. Marketing can help nurture prospects along their buying journey.
With cloud based solutions, it’s fairly easy for prospects to become clients. Subscribing can be as easy as signing up with a credit card. The downside is that it’s also fairly easy for clients to cancel their subscriptions. Therefore we want to do things to help prevent them from cancelling. Two key concepts with cloud selling are to drive consumption (selling more) and to increase stickiness (increased loyalty). Revenue marketing can help achieve these goals as well as many others.
Let's take a look.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

6. The buyer’s journey Trainer Guidance
On this slide just introduce the buyer’s journey as a lifecycle. The next 2 slides drill down into more details
As covered in detail in Foundational Marketing: The buyer’s journey, IDC Research has identified the stages a cloud buyer goes through in making their buying decisions. Each stage of this journey has unique characteristics. Our goal is to nurture buyers along each stage of this journey using various techniques. In this workshop we will explore those techniques as well as the strategies and tactics for how marketing can be used to drive revenue generation. Let's look each stage.

7. The buyer’s journey: the first 3 stages
Trainer Guidance
Emphasize that the first 3 stages are focused on prospects and turning prospects into clients
The early stages of the buyer’s journey are focused on customer acquisition.
During the Explore stage, prospects are looking for solutions to a business challenge. They may be trying to lower IT costs, increase productivity or perhaps seeking competitive advantages for the organization. As the name implies, during this stage, they are looking for information.
During The Evaluation stage, the prospect has identified some potential solutions and considering each. They are also evaluating different partners. This is usually when demos, product trials, and references come into play
The Purchase stage is as it sounds when prospects become clients.
Marketing has a role to play during each of these stages.
Prospect / client acquisition

8. The buyer’s journey: the later 3 stages
Trainer Guidance
Comment that the later 3 stages are focused on client growth, consumption, and retention
The next 3 phases are focused on what happens once prospects become clients. As in the previous 3 stages, marketing has an important role.
The Expansion stage occurs when your client has purchased and is beginning to use the solutions. Many revenue growth opportunities exist during this stage.
With cloud and other subscription-based solutions there is a Renewal stage. This is a crucial time in that the client may choose to renew and continue the business relationship – or not.
The Advocacy stage is characterized by the client’s satisfaction with the solution and the experience you have provided. This is when they are willing to be an advocate for you.
Client growth, consumption, retention

9. Goal: Optimize every stage of journey
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Goal: Optimize every stage of journey
Trainer Guidance
We want to optimize every stage of the journey. On this slide we focus on high level goals. There are subsequent slides for each stage with more details and tactics
Stage
Goals
Explore
Make sure prospects can find you and your solutions in web searches and all other channels available to you such as social media, Pinpoint / Partner Center, etc.
Evaluate
Make sure that prospects can easily evaluate you, your products, and services
Purchase
Make sure prospects have all the things they need to make the buying decision and to choose to do business with you
Expand
Enable successful adoption, drive consumption, and increase usage & stickiness of the solutions.
Renew
Make sure the client is satisfied with you and the solutions, are ready, willing, and able to renew the subscription and relationship
Advocacy
Make sure happy clients are helping to spread the word and help you get more clients
We want to optimize our chances of success during every stage of the journey. Many of the items mentioned in the next few slides require collaborative efforts between different parts of your partner organization. If you have internal marketing staff, they can help drive the creation and use of these items. If you don’t have an in-house marketing team, others have to create these, but you should use marketing to communicate these elements. Whether you use a part-time resource or a full-service marketing agency, use marketing to optimize every stage of the journey. Let's look at each stage and how they can be optimized.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

10. Explore: Make sure prospects can find you to solve their pain points
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Explore: Make sure prospects can find you to solve their pain points
Trainer Guidance
During the Explore stage we want to get found by prospects that need our solutions to solve their pain
Website with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising
OEM lead generation services such as Microsoft Referrals
Referral programs and referral incentives
Social Media, Community and influencer groups
campaigns
Webinars and Demos
Exhibiting & speaking at conferences & trade shows
Prospects are looking for help to solve their pain points. Can they find you?
You need a lead generation engine that bubbles up high quality leads for sales and for nurturing along the journey. There are a number of techniques that help accomplish this.
Let’s begin with your website. Does it communicate the ways your products, services solve clients’ pains and does it communicate value propositions that will resonate with prospects? Does it communicate your vertical market expertise?
A mixture of inbound and outbound marketing techniques come into play here. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to make sure your website and blog are found in web searches by your target market. You may also use Pay Per Click (PPC) techniques to jumpstart that effort. If prospects you don’t already know can’t find you, how can you sell to them?
You should have a lead referral program that encourages happy clients to provide you with referrals. This should be formalized and communicated to clients. Don’t rely on it happening all by itself. Consider giving coupons to clients for them to give to others as referrals. Incentives to clients for referrals such as small gifts are more fun and more palatable than cash.
For people you already know and those you don’t, you need strong value propositions and thought leadership content that communicates your vertical market and technical expertise.
You can use campaigns, social media, webinars, speaking and exhibiting at industry events and trade shows to get the word out.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

11. Evaluate: Make it easy for prospects to evaluate
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Evaluate: Make it easy for prospects to evaluate
Trainer Guidance
During the Evaluate stage we want them to evaluate our solutions and us as a partner in a positive manner that leads to them choosing us
Make it easy to try your products & solutions
Free trials
Demos
Evaluation guides
Webinars & events
Why they should choose you?
Explain how you can unique solve their business problem
Articulate your unique competitive differentiators
Communicate your on-boarding services
Provide high quality references and customer success stories
Leverage thought leadership articles, whitepapers, case studies
For the Evaluate phase you want prospects to try your products & solutions. Having demos and free trials are the key here, but you also want to guide their evaluation with a guide that points out your solutions competitive advantages.
They are also evaluating you as a potential partner so you also want to leverage your competitive differentiators as a partner. What other services do you provide that your competitor does not? Things such as support services and how you onboard new users are good examples. To learn more about how to identify and articulate these, see the module in this workshop series called Foundational Marketing: Competitive Differentiators.
Other elements that you should use are references and case studies from happy clients, thought leadership content, articles, and whitepapers, that highlight your expertise and ability to deliver an excellent client experience. Prospects are influenced by client success stories. To learn more about these see the module in this workshop series called Foundational Marketing: Advocacy.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

12. Purchase: What do prospects need to buy?
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Purchase: What do prospects need to buy?
Trainer Guidance
We want to optimize the Purchase stage by making it easy for buyers to justify the purchase, and to make it easy for them to buy from us
Use return on investment (ROI) tools
Make it easy for sales to quote and close
Create pre-bundled solution packages (see the examples later in this presentation)
Have pre-written product descriptions
Request For Information (RFI) and Request For Proposal (RFP) templates help influence the specifications
Have pre-written sales contracts
Client success stories
Illustrate how other clients have achieved success with similar solutions
To help nurture prospects through the Purchase stage, you want to address the potential barriers for them to complete the purchase.
You may think that once a prospect is ready to buy, the effort can stop. Nothing is further from the truth. It’s estimated that at least 10-20% of all “commitments to buy” don’t in fact complete the purchase. There are many reasons why this happens. Sometimes the prospect doesn’t have the authority to make the purchase. Sometimes they get “cold feet” and sometimes a competitor may swoop in with an offer they can’t refuse. Sometimes a higher up may decline to approve the purchase because they don’t understand the value.
It’s up to your sales contact to understand the purchase approval process of the prospect’s organization, but there are a number of techniques that can – and should be used to help avoid these disappointing events.
Having tools such as a return on investment (ROI) calculator can help the prospect – and others in the purchase approval chain - have the confidence that your solution will deliver the value they seek.
You can help your sales team’s effectiveness and efficiency with pre-bundled solution packages, especially for smaller cloud solutions that don’t justify a lot of time creating custom configurations. We will dive into this a little deeper in a few minutes.
Having pre-written product descriptions makes it easy for your sales team to create price quotes. Request For Information (RFI) and Request For Proposal (RFP) templates are very helpful. If you provide these to the prospect, you can influence the specifications of what the prospect will buy. You are also helping them do their job.
Pre-written sales contracts are useful in that they can be shown to the prospect before the formal proposal, thus avoiding surprises when it comes to the actual time to sign the contract. These may be beyond the scope of marketing per se, but they are very useful practices to nurture prospects along the journey to becoming clients.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

13. Expand: Drive consumption / increase stickiness
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Expand: Drive consumption / increase stickiness
Trainer Guidance
There are a lot of details in the speaker notes for this stage.
This is when we want to help ensure successful adoptions, drive consumption and increase stickiness
Drive successful adoptions
Help the client on-board users with training
Use pre-written communications to inform client users
Drive consumption
Assign a client success manager to every engagement
Utilize all touchpoints you have in your organization to ensure client success
Identify other potential groups within the client organization
Use up-selling, cross-selling to sell pre-bundled solution packages
Increase stickiness
Inform client users about new features and capabilities via and newsletters
Send “Did You Know?” series to get them using more features and capabilities
Leverage your support services to get feedback and to increase client satisfaction
Your prospect is now your client. The Expand stage is where marketing can really shine! There are a number of very significant things that can be done during this stage to drive successful adoptions of your solutions, drive consumption and increase stickiness.
Using training to help prepare their organization and users to adopt the new solutions is an good example. In addition to enabling successful deployments, these increase revenues, profits, and create distinctive competitive differentiators.
Successful on-boarding relies on communications from the client’s leadership to their users to articulate the reasons for the new solutions' adoption, anticipated features and benefits. Marketing should collaborate with the technical experts and sales to create these messages, making it easy for your clients to send these communications. This same activity also creates the basis for case studies, white papers, and testimonials.
To drive consumption, client success should be a key goal of every engagement and every person in your company should be committed to that goal. A great technique to accomplish this is to assign a specific individual to each engagement as a Client Success Manager. This person should engage with the client to make sure they are happy and accomplishing their goals for the engagement.
Having a person function in this role will help identify opportunities to drive additional consumption by increasing the scope of products being used and the number of users of those products. Marketing can also help find new users in the client organization by researching and marketing to other departments in the organization. Internal referrals from your initial client contacts are another technique to identify new prospective users groups. Remember, it’s much easier and less expensive to sell more to an existing client than to find a new client. These activities are best done when marketing and sales collaborate.
We can increase the size and scope of each selling opportunity by using up- selling and cross-selling techniques which we will describe in the next section. These techniques are also used to create the pre-bundled solution packages mentioned earlier.
The more users know how to use your solutions the more likely they are to continue using them. This is called stickiness. The best way to increasing stickiness is to expose users to additional features and capabilities of the solution(s). Create a series of “Did You Know?” articles that are sent via periodic s or newsletters to users. These mini trainings can also be distributed via newsletters, blogs and can also take the form of short videos. One great advantage of creating these materials is that they can be built once and re-used many times over.
To learn and become proficient about Microsoft product features and capabilities, partners should use their Internal Use Rights (IURs) to use the same products they are selling for their own internal use – a benefit of being a Microsoft Partner.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

14. Drive consumption: increase size & scope of every opportunity with up-selling, cross-selling
Trainer Guidance
These are some examples of how up-selling and cross- selling can result in selling more seats, more products and your services
When selling Office 365
Can they use Skype for Business?
Will they need onboarding & training?
Will they need support services?
What are they using for security?
Can you sell to other parts of the organization?
Does the sales department need CRM?
Just like the store clerk asking if you need batteries to go with your new electronic toy. The question is helpful. Do you want this toy to be fun or a disappointment when you get home to find you have no batteries to run the fun toy?
Often purchasers don’t think further than their initial purchase. Up-selling and cross-selling are your suggestions and recommendations to enhance your client’s purchase experience. What other products and services could make their experience better? Your recommendations enlarge each sales opportunity and provide more complete and satisfying solutions to your client.
To enable this, your sales and marketing teams need a clear mapping of which products and services go together. They need solutions that are easy to understand, make sense to the purchaser, and easy for the purchaser to add- on. You can go even further by productizing, branding, and creating bundled solution packages.
Up- and cross-selling selling is about increasing the size or scope of the core solution. Helping a prospect understand the value of let's say the Office 365 E5 SKU compared to the E1 or E3 flavors, is a good example. Expanding a client’s purchase by presenting your solutions’ benefits to other departments within in the client organization is another good approach. The goal is to increase your client’s satisfaction, which increases your revenues and profits. When you think about it you probably have many products and services that can be sold together – bundled – to provide the best solutions for your client’s needs.

15. Examples: Productized bundles
Trainer Guidance
The last step is to create your own branded bundled product and service packages makes it easy to stand out from the competition while selling more.
Awesome Partner Office 365 Solutions
Bundle name
Office 365
Basic
for Sales
Complete
Components
Training
CRM
Support
Skype for Business
Endpoint security
Price per seat
$nnn
It’s a great idea to create and to brand your own bundles of products and services. This makes it easy to sell and market complete solutions that address the needs of your clients. They also create unique competitive differentiators for your business! Another benefit is that the sales can offer solutions quickly and move on to the next opportunity. Remember with cloud solutions,, you need to sell more stuff faster.
You can choose if you want to sell them on a monthly basis or sell some portions monthly with some components – such as training for a specific price that is paid for up front.

16. Trainer Guidance
This activity is to create pre-bundled solution packages, making it easy to market and sell.
Lets look at how this is done
Individual activity
Create up-selling and cross-sell mapping for your company

17. List out your products and services
Trainer Guidance
The first step is to list all your products and services.
Products
Office 365 (List each plan you sell)
Azure
CRM
SharePoint
Security solutions
Skype for Business
Storage devices
Services
conversion
Business continuity planning
Cyber security audits
Training
On-boarding services
Support and Managed services
Configuration & customization
Here are the steps in the process. First list all of your products and services. This list is just an example but may have some items that are similar to your offerings. If you don’t have some of these services, you may consider adding them to you offerings. What other valuable add-ons can you provide your clients?

18. Map up-sell and cross-sell possibilities
Trainer Guidance
The second step is to identify all the add-on products and services you can offer to clients on a product by product basis
When selling these
Office 365
CRM
SharePoint
Azure DR
You may
be able to sell these
O365 E3 or E5 plan
Skype for Business
Storage devices
Azure security center
Configuration & customization
Security solutions
Certified Azure add-on’s
Training
SQL Server & IIS
Support services
Cyber security audits
Business continuity planning
conversion
On-boarding services
Support and Managed services
Then for each product, map out all the other products and services that could enhance the client’s satisfaction. Get input from sales, techs, and others to get this as complete and accurate as possible. If you sell to different vertical markets, or if you have vertical market solutions, it may be helpful to organize this mapping by vertical as opposed to products. In all cases the end goal is to make it easy for the client to see the advantages of these additional products and services and to market and sell these more complete solutions.

19. Renew: Focus on client experience, satisfaction
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Renew: Focus on client experience, satisfaction
Trainer Guidance
The Renew stage is crucial. This is when there is a risk of clients to not continuing being a client. Here are things you can do to avoid that unhappy occurrence.
Begin working on renewals 90 days in advance
Best practice: frequently with ongoing feedback loops
Resolve any outstanding issues
Use communications for ongoing engagement
Renew your services agreements
Use cross selling and upselling to increase client lifetime value
As you approach the Renewal stage, the client is deciding if they should renew the subscription and if they should continue the relationship with the Partner of Record. Your profitability is impacted by renewals in that it is always less expensive and easier to continue with an existing client compared to having to replace a customer.
A key insight from successful cloud partners is to reach out and check in with your customers 90 days in advance of the renewal date to make sure all outstanding issues are resolved. This time frame is an excellent opportunity to use cross-selling and up-selling techniques to increase the customer lifetime value. When the client is renewing the subscription, you can also renew your services agreements.
An even better practice than waiting until 90 days before renewal is to create ongoing feedback loops and ongoing communications strategies so that client engagement becomes a constant – not a periodic event. This is a role marketing can play and another reason why you should have a Client Success Manager function attached to every engagement.
Client renewal rates are under 80%, meaning that in over 20% of cases they choose to not renew their licenses or subscriptions. Many clients renew their products but not the relationship with the partner! Don’t leave renewal to billing or auto-renewal. Engage with the client early and often.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

20. Advocacy: Having happy clients spread the word
1/25/2018 5:50 PM
Advocacy: Having happy clients spread the word
Trainer Guidance
Advocacy is great! This is when clients are willing to help you. This is the fruition of the engagement and the satisfying experience you provide to your clients.
Focus on the client experience throughout the lifecycle
Create a client success function
Ask for and use
Referrals
Recommendations
Testimonials
Case studies
Joint speaking engagements at industry conferences and trade shows
The Advocacy stage is when the client’s satisfaction with you, the solution and the experience you’ve delivered are so good that they are willing to be an advocate for you and to help you get more clients. This takes the form of referrals, recommendations, testimonials, case studies, joint speaking engagements at their industry conferences and trade shows. See the Foundational Marketing: Advocacy module to learn about this phase.
Make sure they are satisfied through every stage of the lifecycle. This can be done by creating a client success function. This is part of the ongoing communication and feedback loops mentioned previously.
Make them the heroes of your marketing. Remember we said earlier that having client success stories are very helpful in the evaluation and purchase stage? You should always be looking to your happy clients to see if they are willing to help you.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

21. Review Marketing has many roles to play
Optimize and manage every stage of the journey
Drive consumption and increase stickiness
Use up-selling, cross-selling, pre-packaged bundles
Increases client lifetime revenues and satisfaction

22. Partner resources to use
Marketing helpdesk: your marketing questions to the workshop developers
Smart Partner Marketing
and
Microsoft value props partners can use
Marketing planner tool
Partner Marketing Center Ready To Go Marketing
aka.ms/pmc
readytogo.microsoft.com
ModernBiz campaigns
aka.ms/modernbiz
Workshop feedback and questions