0
The Business Apps Analyst Forum
The event was two days crammed with many of the Business Applications executive team e.g. James Philips and Alysa Taylor, Hayden Stafford, Param Kahlon, Kishan Chetan and Jeff York, among many others giving us loads of information on everything from the status (with demos) of the current specific products ranging from the sales, customer service, field service, talent, and new marketing applications to discussions about their pricing, the changes in their partner model, and the overall status of Business Applications within the confines of the greater Microsoft vision and strategy (I think they did the latter. That may be a bit of wishful thinking, though. Minimally, they provided the pieces and I mentally glued them together).
They held a lively customer panel with two of their customer companies — two who in fact, couldn’t be more disparate — which of course goes to Dynamics product versatility, which I presume was one of the points. They brought in Chip Suttles who is the VP of IT for the Seattle Seahawks (sports is an industry that Microsoft Dynamics CRM dominates) and a trio of customers from MacDonald-Miller, a company that does mechanical contracting and facilities management.
I’m not going to dwell on the details of the event, since I reserve detailed event discussions for my user conference focused Event Scorecard which will be back this year (starting with Infor’s Innovation Summit on March 19).
But what I will say is that Clare Henry who has overall responsibility as the GM of analyst relations at Microsoft, Fred Pullen, Umran Hassan, and The WE team (Waggoner Edstrom team) did a terrific job of managing the event, keeping the discussions lively, handling the analyst/whoever-was-on-stage interactions really well and managing time without getting anyone even vaguely upset, much less angry — and minus a couple of things, (see above on the CSR omission) managed to provide the right content in the right mix to satisfy the usually insatiable hunger of a group of analysts who had disparate coverage areas.
Plus making sure that there were one on one meetings with executives and the analysts had a good time. A serious kudos and thank you to them for the quality and obvious effort that went into this.
But, sayeth I, that is not all.
Positioning and messaging
For a few years now, Microsoft has been ahead of the pack — one of the first in fact — in their messaging around customer engagement. They no longer call their Sales, Service, Marketing pillars CRM per se but instead complete the offering with the social integrations, analytics, mobile apps etc and call the whole thing Intelligent Customer Engagement. (ICE).
I’ve always applauded their getting ahead of the market — they and SAP were the first two to broaden beyond CRM with their messaging — and they managed to avoid the stupid “CRM is dead” declaration that many companies go with.
Instead they wisely — intelligently in fact — broadened their messaging and positioning to something that was more strategic and encompassing and despite some thinness here and there positioned their applications where they needed to be positioned.
When we got to the analyst forum, a new message was coincident with intelligent customer engagement. In other words, didn’t replace it, but sat along side it or encompassed it. The theme was “digital feedback loop,” which looks something like this.
The Digital Feedback Loop
Courtesy of Microsoft
What of course makes it work is the front office, back office, underlying platform nature of Microsoft’s Dynamics offerings in combination with PowerBI etc. So it kind of works though I have to say, I’m not as enamored of it as I am of ICE — but then I would be more excited about ICE, given my area of coverage wouldn’t I?
The products/platform
I’m not going to dwell on the details here because I don’t need to. I’m going to point out what I found either interesting, surprising and outstanding.
Sales and Service: Mature, Solid, Trustworthy… Except for Sales Navigator
First, a brief comment on sales and service, two of the three pillar applications/solutions of CRM. Microsoft, under now Param Kahlon’s engineering leadership. They are solid. They have what they need to keep a contemporary CRM sales and customer service organization functioning operationally, have communications tools built in and have the services that have to be there to make sure that the solutions continue to evolve with the company that acquired them. Period.
They are reasonably priced. The integration with Parature at the core of service seems to be completed and is now scalable which is honestly a big deal since Parature appealed to the lower end up to the middle of the midmarket and didn’t scale on its own. Microsoft has taken care of scalability. Plus, despite all the pricing entanglement, they are reasonably priced and more than competitively so.
This is one of those instances where the good speaks for itself really. I’m just letting you know. Solid. Mature. Already battling in the marketplace. Is it perfect? No. Nothing is. But that’s not what this post is about. You want a product analysis? Talk to me offline.
However, there is one thing that no matter how hard I try, I don’t understand. Microsoft has a highly competent valuable Sales Force Automation application. No question. Yet, they spend an inordinate amount of time on talking up and selling Sales Navigator, which I have considered to be a TERRIBLE application since it was first developed and was the cause of one of the worst things that the then independent LinkedIn did — closing the API which had been “almost” open up until that time.
Yet Microsoft with the most amazing asset LinkedIn persists in selling that ridiculous tool. The only value Sales Navigator has is as a faux middleware to get access to the LinkedIn data. It is nowhere nearly as good as Microsoft’s native tool. Yet their offering is actually bundle selling Microsoft Sales 365 and Sales Navigator together, which unless Sales Navigator is the only access point to the LinkedIn data, makes no sense at all. Why sell two competing tools?
If Sales Navigator is only really there for access to LinkedIn data build the necessary connectors and other pieces and sell the connection. Sunset Sales Navigator as a sales tool. Microsoft’s native sales offering competes well with anything on the market. No reason to create market confusion with something that doesn’t hold a candle to it.