One of the biggest challenges we see partners have when trying to create winning offers and getting them into market is what we call ‘execution fear’ - but, aligning sales and delivery will create a better Microsoft customer experience across your products and services.
We believe that in order to overcome this fear, partners need to build credibility. This means giving the sales team confidence to go out and sell your products and services without knowing whether what they’re selling can, in fact, be delivered in the way they’re selling it.
Aligning your team’s skills & capability with your sales strategy will avoid you getting into a situation of “just sell it and we’ll figure it out later” – which is all too common for MSPs and ISVs. Being in this position leads you to chase your tail by hiring quickly or losing valuable delivery hours to upskilling your staff at an inconvenient time.
Perhaps worst of all, your customer will start to lose confidence in your ability to deliver on your promises.
Step 1 to building credibility is skills alignment
Do you have the technical skills and capability you need to support the technology that you’re promoting in your offer? This seems like an obvious point, but something that many organisations fail to consider. After all, you need to be able to deliver on your sales pitch otherwise you’ll lose credibility and your sale.
When it comes to looking back into the business and identifying how you will deliver on your offer, there are few things to consider;
- Configuration
- Delivery
- Support
Having a good understanding of these three areas is an important step to creating the connection between your offer in market and the skills and capability within the team that you need to deliver on that. To break it down:
Configuration
When kicking off a project, no matter what it is – there is process of discovery. This might be strategic or technical, or both. Think about what skills within your team you have available to complete the discovery process, and their ability to communicate the solution detail back to your tech team through a process of handover prior to delivery. Having a team member (or multiple) who can take a business requirement and turn it into a technical solution is valuable resource – so make sure you don’t have gaps in your delivery pipeline by ensuring this capability exists.
Delivery
The process of delivery is self-explanatory, and there’s a likelihood that you’ve delivered this solution or something like it many times before so we’re not here to tell you how to do that.
Here, think about ways you can use your skills and IP to build repeatability around your services or solution. There are many Microsoft tools and technologies that help delivery teams automate their processes – creating capacity within your delivery team to take on more projects at once and not waste time repeating tasks over and over when they can be automated. This will result in reduced cost of delivery, ultimately improving your bottom line.
Support
How you are going to support your solution into the future so you can stay sticky with your customer? This means being clear on the skills you’ll need to access to support your customer’s solution over time, and what capacity they have. Will they need to know ALL the ins and outs of the solution, or simply identify when there is an issue for resolution?
Remember…
- Hope is not a strategy – salespeople that KNOW the team can deliver will be better sales people
- Customer experience is paramount – keep your customers happy with sales & delivery alignment
- You can’t always ‘just figure it out’ without impacting the customer experience
What’s next?
Since you’ve made it this far you might be interested to know more about our SalesPlay On-Ramp™ Program? If we're right, shoot us an email and we'll send through all the details.
