Steen Helmer from TBK Consult helps Microsoft Partners' ability to grow cloud business on Azure

KLAMPENBORG, Denmark - Feb. 26, 2016 - PRLog -- Microsoft is no longer measuring their Partners only on license sales.  The focus is now on customer consumption of the Microsoft products.

Microsoft and their Partners are changing from sales-oriented to a more customer-value oriented approach.

This maybe sound easy but it is not. The Partners are going from knowing their products and delivering them to the customers, to understanding their customer’s jobs, pains and gains and establishing a product market fit.

To be successful with this means developing a better, deeper and longer-term relationship with customers. The customer support changes from “break & fix” to more proactive support and advisory services on how to achieve the most value from the installed products on an ongoing basis.

Microsoft has always been focused on making tools and frameworks available for the software development community. Many of their solutions are moving into the cloud, which has a direct impact on the Partner’s business model. Many of the Partners are therefore in a transformation phase evolving their existing license based business models to fit a more cloud-oriented business.

"We are transforming our business to ensure that our customers and partners thrive in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. We transform to empower them to create even higher value. When we transform, our partners transform as well. A key area is the overarching focus on business value & consumption. We need to get closer to our customers and help them capture the full value of our services,” says Lars Bell, Sr. Director, Microsoft Sales & Partners.

TBK Consult has developed five videos about successful channel building for Microsoft’s Smart Partner Marketing Portal, http://smartpartnermarketing.microsoft.com/, which will inspire and help the partners achieve success with sales through other partners.

In October 2015, Steen Helmer was invited as a speaker at Directions EMEA for Microsoft Dynamics Nav Partners in Mannheim, Germany. Steen spoke on the topics; "How to Prepare Your Business Model for Cloud Business" and "How to Grow Your Business using LinkedIn".

“The buyer’s journey and business communication is changing. It has never been more important to be able to evolve and communicate the Business Model and Value Proposition to the ideal target audience – at the right platform and with right timing. Around the world top executives who were once convinced that social media wasn’t worth their time, now consider their participation in social media networks as essential to their role and a natural part of their growth strategy. More and more business communication is moving to social media platforms.” says Steen Helmer, executive partner at TBK Consult.

“For some software companies, such as Microsoft, moving to the cloud has been a global success, but for others, making it work can be a challenge. The objective of our business development workshops is to use our own successful experience helping others getting it right, first time. I am delighted with our collaboration with Microsoft to help the Partner Community prepare their business models for cloud business and social selling.”

More information about Business Model Management, Value Proposition Design and Social Media in the software industry can be found at http://www.tbkconsult.com and www.linkedin.com/in/steenhelmer