Office 365 too 'complicated' for VARs to sell

Microsoft dishes out advice to partners on how to best sell its cloud product

Microsoft has doled out advice to partners on how to best sell Office 365 after admitting many find the product "too complicated" to flog.

On a public blog post summarising content included in a partner-only webcast, Microsoft hailed "fantastic momentum" for the product but admitted it can confuse channel sales staff.

"One thing we often hear in contrast to some of our competitors is that our line-up of products is too complicated, and navigating what to sell [is] too difficult for our partners," said Microsoft senior product marketing manager Caroline Stanford.

Office 365 is one of Microsoft's key focus areas and in its Q2 results last month, it said the product helped drive a 114 per cent annual boom in commercial cloud revenue for the quarter.

But last September its partner technology strategist Josh Condie admitted that its pre-sales and post-sales processes were still not quite up to scratch.

On today's blog post, Stanford dished out advice for partners finding the product to be a hard sell.

"There is still work to be done to make sure current and potential customers understand what the product is and what it can really do within their organisations," she said.

"We'd encourage you... to look at the opportunity to customise a solution for your customer's specific needs, while focusing your attention and sales training most heavily on the key 'hero' offers.

"Our experience with top-performing partners has shown that the vast majority of selling situations fall into the three big categories we covered [in the webinar]: customers coming to you for Office, customers looking for email solutions, and customers who want to move to the cloud in a more holistic sense. Simple frameworks can help you quickly identify the right solution to pitch."

Last week, Microsoft's UK partner boss Linda Rendleman said the percentage of partners in the country actively selling cloud products now stands at 35 per cent, up from just six per cent in the summer of 2013.