Seizing a business opportunity of this magnitude requires having the right team in place to introduce Microsoft to a brand-new segment of the market – small- to medium-sized businesses – most of who are unfamiliar with Microsoft and the Cloud. Success requires this team of sellers to create long-term relationships with new customers, building trust, and expanding accounts over time.
Focused on rapid innovation, Microsoft hired over 1,600 new inside sales representatives in under 18 months. Most of these sellers were completely new to technology sales, so they required advanced onboarding, training, and sales enablement.
Meanwhile, Microsoft did not have an enterprise-wide solution for educating and empowering their team. Nearly every regional office created their very own isolated system for sharing documentation and training their teams. By doing so, it meant relying on “Infopedia,” a learning and delivery cataloging system, and different SharePoint team sites to onboard their teams and keep them up-to-date on product enhancements, pitch decks, cheat sheets, and sales training.
One of the unfortunate results of having this information siloed was that sales reps were not consuming the mass quantities of educational resources produced by Microsoft’s product, marketing, and sales-enablement teams.
The Microsoft Inside Sales Team, operating more like a rapid-growth startup within a large enterprise, knew they needed visual design, user experience (UX) design, and lean execution expertise to create a truly user-centric approach to sales enablement.
They needed a partner with an excellent track record, and more importantly, one they knew they could trust. In 2012, Microsoft chose UpTop to transform the digital experience of its Partners, completely redesigning the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Portal. Because of UpTop’s record of success in designing an expansive portal for the Microsoft Partner ecosystem, we were their first choice for tackling this equally complex undertaking.
