Microsoft fans all across the world very much well know Microsoft’s mission statement: to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” Very much so, it appears now that this mission statement and growth mindset has also left an impact on the Redmond giant’s products and sales strategies.
Judson Altoff, President of Microsoft North America, was one of the speakers at Envision 2016’s conference, and at the event, he remarked to Envision Attendees on a change at the sales force at Microsoft. As per remarks published on ZDnet, Altoff mentioned that Microsoft has been learning to eliminate the separation between how they are traditionally market sold, and serviced. He also detailed that Microsoft is selling more and more of its products as subscription services and that the sales team needs to go beyond just selling a customer on something one time. In addition, he also remarked that Microsoft is moving the focus off of the technology alone, and more towards how customers can and should use the technology.
“Your focus needs to be on who’s actually figured out how to attach more Xbox controllers and games to every console sale? Who’s actually figured out how to sell their customers machine learning and data science projects running on Azure? Who’s actually figured out how to get customers to see value out of the increase utilization of Skype for Business and greater connectedness and collaboration on your environments,” Altoff said.
Additional comments from Altoff published in ZDnet also appear to suggest that Microsoft has been empowering its fans, via “fan creation.” Altoff is quoted as saying,
“Happy product advocates trump indifferent users. Sales needs to make sure that customers aren’t just using their products, but they’re actually happy about doing so because they’re getting value out of it.”
The comments from Altoff are together very interesting and seem to show that Microsoft has been taking steps to making overall changes to better live up to its goal of empowering the planet. We would love to hear your thoughts on these comments, so please drop us a comment below and sound off on the situation!
