CLOUD WARS: Eighteen months ago, when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outscored Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff for LinkedIn, some wondered why in the world Microsoft would spend $ 26.2 billion for a professional social networking site.
But today, with Microsoft looking to do nothing less than completely transform the way companies sell products and services, and interact with customers, the potential to link the more than 530 million LinkedIn members with Microsoft Dynamics Sales applications. and CRM is starting to generate that $ 26.2 The price of a billion seems like a bargain.
What is at stake is enormous: at the first level is the huge corporate application market that covers the automation of the sales force and the management of customer relationships, and beyond that, the equally broad revenue opportunity. for complementary applications to automate service, support, commerce, CPQ relationships and more.
In some of those areas, Benioff's Salesforce is considered a world leader. And Benioff, the CEO-as-showman, has gone so far as to double these "Salesforce Economy" market segments, with his company stating that its "ecosystem of customers and partners will drive the creation of 3.3 million new jobs and more "of $ 859 billion in new business revenue worldwide for 2022."
Hi, good job if you can get it.
But 2022 is far away, and in the here and now Microsoft has been making an extraordinary record of success in the business cloud that encompasses IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and its revenues from Dynamics 365 SaaS in the last 3 quarters have grown 81%, 74% and 69%.
And now, with full LinkedIn integration, both Microsoft and LinkedIn leaders are aggressively pushing new strategies to exploit the full power and reach of LinkedIn in all facets of Microsoft's business: data, productivity, enterprise applications, intelligence artificial and more.
At the forefront of these efforts is an initiative called Microsoft Relationship Sales, which combines one of Microsoft's SaaS applications - Dynamics 365 for Sales - with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool.
In a press release announcing a major customer victory for Microsoft Relationship Sales, and we will reach that very satisfied customer in just one minute, Microsoft offered this description of how the merger of those products will work in the Park Place Technologies client: " By appearing relationships between people, and then integrating that information into a single platform, Park Place vendors will be able to access information in a way that saves time and improves productivity. "
Park Place offers post-warranty maintenance for third parties for storage, software and networks in data centers, and has more than 10,000 customers in 100 countries around the world. Those customers have 28,000 different locations in data centers with more than 300,000 assets involved, all of which made it essential for the company to make the leap to fully modern business applications as part of its ongoing digital transformation.
This initiative will be based on Microsoft Relationship Sales (LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 for Sales) plus Office 365, with the overall goal of increasing the productivity of the Park Place sales team and the ability of the entire company to collaborate in real time to that it can continue its high growth trajectory while continuing to deliver superior service to its data center customers.
Chris Adams, president and chief operating officer of Park Place, said in a telephone conversation last week that the combination of strong organic growth plus multiple acquisitions in the US. UU And all over the world, it had reached a point where traditional sales and prospecting tools and methods could no longer scale with the company's business.
Park Place began aggressively using LinkedIn a few years ago, and Adams said the company quickly realized that as LinkedIn helped drive more business, Park Place's obsolete financial and automation systems simply did not They could keep up.
"Our salespeople are what I call the LinkedIn generation, and some are even the InstaGram generation," Adams said. "This is your natural environment."
Noting that each sales representative must complete at least 60 calls per day to customers and prospects, Adams said: "We are adding hundreds of logos of new customers every month." And even though that great growth is excellent, it is also taking Park Place's local financial applications to its limits.
So Park Place began looking for a software solution that could scale over the next five years by offering a combination of front-end capabilities compatible with the company's LinkedIn-centric sales process, along with financial and CRM-based cloud applications. that could easily handle Park Place's continued growth rates both in the United States and abroad.
"We looked at some of the major ERP / CRM solutions that exist, and some are large, robust and sophisticated, but we realized that Microsoft is already driving broad integration with LinkedIn, which is what is driving our business, and determined that's where the great value is, "Adams said.
"But of all those business applications that we observed, Microsoft was the only one that had the integrated and optimized LinkedIn capability," he added. "All those other applications are good, but Microsoft's ability to automatically include all of these relevant data for our vendors directly in line with the way they work was already the big differentiator for us."
Adams also said he was surprised - pleasantly surprised - by the reaction he received from sales representatives at Microsoft and LinkedIn, after expressing his concerns about how the change to the cloud means that the impact on the Park Place budget goes from capex to opex, which Adams said created a non-trivial challenge to Park Place in managing cash flow to pay subscription fees.
"We said that we are already heavy users of LinkedIn, so give us a package that allows us to take advantage of our current investment in LinkedIn along with the new SaaS applications we were receiving, I think we could be the first Microsoft client to request it, and when They came back, and it was in 48 hours, they gave us a package with a lot of scale.
"It was great to work with them and I was very impressed."
Park Place executive director Jennifer Deutsch said both her company and her clients are excited about Park Place's ability to expand its "follow the hero" strategy that said only LinkedIn can provide and that their company has been able to take advantage of with great advantage.
"One of the things that LinkedIn is really good at is showing how people change jobs, so we follow our clients and prospects and stay in touch with them and build extended relationships," Deutsch said on the call last week. with Adams.
"And here at Park Place, because the services we offer our customers help them reduce costly downtime and boost uptime and efficiency, the IT people we turn to and who deploy our services in their companies. they become heroes, their colleagues love them, "he said.
"And when they gain that hero status and move on to a new job, they want to extend that status to their new company so they want to continue working with Park Place on their new employer." With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we can do that and much more, "he said. Deutsch
"It is a tool that helps us track, identify, communicate and establish relationships very efficiently with customers and prospects, and has helped us achieve a 97% customer satisfaction rate."
Adams, president of Park Place, emphasized that the radical change that CEO Nadella has led at Microsoft in recent years was a definitive factor in his choice of Microsoft Relationship Sales and the SaaS applications of Dynamics 365 plus Office 365.
"I wanted to move in the direction of Microsoft because I've seen such big changes in the company." For a while, a few years ago, Microsoft had become an outdated, somewhat slow, not very innovative company, and particularly compared to Apple, Facebook , Google, Amazon and similar, "said Adams.
"For me, Nadella has been the key to the great change at Microsoft: I am deeply impressed with the way it has changed that risk aversion company and outdated to new, modern and cutting edge.
"What he has done with Azure, and then the acquisition of LinkedIn, was brilliant, and put Microsoft's CRM in the foreground for me.
"I said, 'That's who I want to be with.'"
As companies jump into the cloud to accelerate innovation and engage more closely with customers, my Cloud Wars series analyzes the top cloud providers from the perspective of business customers.
