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 …