Reorg for Dummies: Q&A with Microsoft’s Alyssa Fitzpatrick

…Microsoft to do different kinds of business with us. You only go one place and we’ll help you.

CP: How does One Commercial Partner and Microsoft’s prioritization of six industry markets align?

AF: In the model that we’ve built there’s a partner management team – that single point of contact where we’ll have a partner manager aligned to each partnership, or what we call the “build with.” In the middle is the go-to -market where we take the things that we’re building – whether it’s solutions, assets, capabilities or offerings – to market aligned with industry.

When you look at the model, partner management is partner aligned; go-to-market is industry aligned; and the “sell with” is customer aligned. This gives us a simplistic model that says, we’re going to work with you, we’re going to build things and figure out how to go to market. We’ll address the customer need in each region through vertical specialization. Our “sell with” teams will all live in-territory and be aligned with customers in those territories, so that’s the customer-facing side.

CP: Is this model still in progress?

AF: This is it. We’re here. We spent time with our internal organization two days prior to Inspire to say this is how all of this is orchestrated.

CP: What are you hearing from partners?

AF: Well, the partners seem to love it because now they have clarity on their engagement model with us. The question I’m getting most frequently is, “Who’s my team?”

So, [I say] let’s get back into our areas when we go home from Inspire and we’ll network you to all the new resources that are covering you, bearing in mind that a lot of them are the same people, just in new roles. It’s the same population that they’ve engaged with, but there’s a very streamlined approach to what the individuals will do, whether they’ll be sellers or partner managers or go-to-market orchestration.

CP: Does this new model impact partner organizations differently by the size of their company?

AF: The segmentation isn’t by the size of the partner anymore. We used to do segmentation by those who sat in SMB or those that sat in corporate accounts or in enterprise. Now, all of our partners are managed by one partner management team. So, the segmentation – enterprise and small-media corporate (SMC) – is on the customer side.

Our partners can address any customer they want.

If you look at the engagement model, you have the partner manager side and the go-to-market. On the sell with, the customer-facing side, that model is segmented by enterprise and SMC. We have two different channel management motions – if it’s enterprise, our channel management teams are aligned with our account executives and they work hand in hand in a co-sell motion. In SMC, it’s 100 percent partner-facing so the channel manager is working to connect solutions and partners with the customer.

For the SMC, we’re going to have more …