Josh Elmore FastTrack Partner Manager US

Quisitive has been getting a lot of traction with AADP and MDE but lagging behind on MDO. Mike mentioned a few consistent blockers they have been running up against. 

The decision makers for Viva are much different than the ones for typical E3/E5 workloads. We typically work with IT teams and we're great at driving IT focused intent with customers. Viva typically rolls up under another team that owns employee experience (typically HR). They are the ones to drive the intent and then it's passed back to IT for adoption. We're not networked to the Viva decision makers enough to make a lot of traction with deploying the seeded Viva value. 

 

Topics have been the easiest to drive intent since "everyone hates search" so it provides major value. 

Viva:

• Product Feedback: Will want a SME for Connections when they make progress in the future. It's a very heavy lift.
  • Connections takes significant effort when a customer's SP is not set-up properly.
• Customer Blocker: Savvy leaders know that big value is locked behind premium licensing so customers don't want to pull the trigger till they can go all in and realize all the value.
  • Completing a POC with a customer is key to making traction here.
• Customer Blocker: Technology innovators are interested, and CIOs are where traction is being made. IT teams are overwhelmed and don't want another thing on their plate. Blocking internally to the HR decision makers as it's just going to come back and put more work on their plates. 
• Customer Blocker: Customers have no idea that Viva is part of their licensing SKUs so they
• Customer Blocker: Had a customer with a competiting learning management tool (safeschool) already in place, Microsoft product is more expensive and deployment costs didn't make a lot of business sense.

Customer Blocker: Customers are not entertaining the license workloads.

• Any traction with Viva is with Viva connections.
• Pressure from Microsoft to create new offers around new modules which require licensing purchases from the customer.
• Doing plenty of demos and having customer conversations and not going anywhere yet.
• Demand for the other workloads isn't here right now. Where are partners seeing success? Where are they getting traction?

 
Seeded value:

• Not really doing go back campaigns on Viva today but can do tomorrow.
• RFA Demand from the FRP side is coming for security. Only received one Viva RFA.
• Customers don't know what they need to use and for what. Just like with files years ago (when do we use OneDrive, SP and Teams? Was the challenge in the past, it's similar with Viva)

 
Are Insights and Connections opportunities generating more licensing opportunities?

• Lots of interest in Engage and Power Apps (these opps are going hand in hand).
• Huge FLW play with Connections (have a win wire in flight for this). Started as a FL workshop. Evolving quickly into security and 10 other directions.

VR has identified a lot of opportunities for 3rd-party takeouts so they have developed laser focused sales materials for relationship managers to leverage to help drive E5 S&I workloads. The below is from Norm who also send the documents he developed to help with this. The key feedback here is we have a lot of competitive products that partners need to be proactive and prepared for value discussions (beyond licensing consolidation) to get traction with customers. 

• The Security Infographic that I mentioned that was a joint effort between Sheryl’s Digital Strategy team who execute our Solution Assessment deliverables and our Marketing team. This references the specific capabilities across the Security assessments we look at for 3^rd-party takeouts. We have gotten super positive feedback from the Microsoft field on the value of this.

• The superset of the current pitch deck we use when we are meeting Specialists from the STUs and CSUs. Love to get your feedback on this. Typically we’ll focus on a few slides based on their interest.

Submitted on behalf of Angi, Scott and Jude (eGroup Enabling Technology) 

 

Customers are commonly purchasing E5 in several different scenarios. 

- Targeting some non-security functionality. 

Driving awareness and intent for P2 workloads is key to driving AU with these customers. This was not in the standard strategy for a deployment project but will be moving forward. Ultimately customers don't know what they own and it's on the FRP to intentionally drive awareness with the customers, and then intent before they can put these into action for deployment. 

 

- Being upsold from multi-line LSPs and purchasing E5 along with "best in class" products for security and identity. 

This is particularly challenging since some customers have a mindset of "best in class over best in platform." So unseating the competing products proves to be a long term effort since significant time and money were invested at the time of purchase and are typically quick to deployment since they are not bundled and only do one to a few things. LSP's are incented to stack licensing and focus on best in class rather than best in platform.