Kati Unplugged: Are You Helping Customers Evaluate the Cloud, or is Your Head in the Sand?

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A Blog Series for Microsoft Dynamics Partners by Kati Hvidtfeldt, US Microsoft Dynamics ERP Cloud Lead.

Kati color 2004Our last several posts have focused on the partner’s role in ensuring win-win ERP implementations by effectively guiding customers to make the right decisions. In the last Kati Unplugged blog post we looked at the issues customers should consider when selecting a deployment model for their ERP solutions.

This week, Matt Woodward, President of Microsoft Dynamics partner SMB Suite, explains how his company positions the cloud in a sales scenario.

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At NextCorp/SMB Suite we provide Financial Accounting and ERP solutions, technologies that are critical to running our customers’ businesses. And as trusted advisors we must support them through waves of technology innovation.

The market move to the cloud has been steadily growing across categories, including managed service, infrastructure, CRM, and HR technologies. Now the wave is extending to reach the mission-critical back office through cloud-based ERP. If you believe your customers aren’t evaluating a move to the cloud, then it’s likely you simply aren’t at the table for the discussion.

It’s not enough to just take a seat at the table. To ensure your customer lands on the right Cloud/SaaS solution you need to actively drive the agenda and discussion.

We recently worked with a new client running QuickBooks. The client was seeking a solution that would increase reporting intelligence, offer multi-company/multi-currency support, provide a CRM solution, and allow them to to scale their home grown e-commerce solution. We walked them through a number of considerations, comparing our Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SMB eCommerce solution to other competitive solutions, both on premise and in the cloud.

By anchoring the discussion on three core pillars—economic, business, and technology—we responded to the client’s key pains and closed the sale on our SMB Suite Integrated Cloud Solution.

Economic:

· SMB Suite provided a simple subscription pricing plan.

· The solution is flexible and scalable for their business.

· We were able to provide business continuity.

Business:

· The solution aligns with their current business processes.

· We provided a fully integrated cloud platform.

· The Microsoft platform gives their users an easy and familiar user interface.

· The cloud deployment provides ubiquitous availability anywhere.

Technology:

· The solution is extensible to other systems, such as billing and manufacturing.

· The solution is safe and secure, with reliable recovery.

· The managed operational environment is backed by experience.

In evaluating the alternatives the customer found many ERP solutions were missing one or more of these attributes.

Because we presented the vision of how the client’s economic, business, and technology issues directly align with our ability to meet the rigorous demands of their business – today and into the future—we guided the customer to our cloud solution.

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NextCorp/SMB Suite provides extensive TCO evaluation tools and resources to customers and partners to aid in the evaluation process. For more information on Cloud ERP/ SaaS ERP TCO evaluations, and on partnering with SMB Suite as a Cloud provider for your customers, please reach out to Matthew.

To learn more about how to incorporate cloud-based solutions into your business plans visit the Microsoft Dynamics Countdown to the Cloud page on PartnerSource. Go to www.microsoft.com/dynamics/growyourbusiness for resources that demonstrate to customers how Microsoft Dynamics ERP cloud, hybrid and on-premise solutions can benefit their businesses.