Jun 4, 2020
In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I catch up again with
Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft,
to get the latest from the Queen of Marketing for Microsoft
Business Applications Group. We chat about the success of Virtual
Events, Customer Insights, Power Apps vs Power Apps, and touched on
SMB. Enjoy!
BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 4PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays!
Transcript below:
Alysa Taylor:
Hello?
Steve Mordue:
Alysa. Steve Mordue. How are you?
Alysa Taylor:
I'm doing well, Steve, how are you?
Steve Mordue:
Well, you know why I'm calling, right?
Alysa Taylor:
I have a hunch.
Steve Mordue:
Yes, yes. I've got the record button on and I just wanted to see if
you had a few minutes to talk about just things. It's been a while
since we caught up.
Alysa Taylor:
Yeah, absolutely. Would love to spend some time and just chat. It
has been a little while.
Steve Mordue:
So we just came off Business Applications Summit the first pivot
over to a virtual conference. And at least from the rumors I hear
the attendance was off the charts compared to an in person
conference.
Alysa Taylor:
It was off the charts. It was actually our first Microsoft virtual,
we classify events and this is a tier one event, so it was our
first one that we executed as a first party tier one event in a
virtual capacity. So we were both nervous and excited. We had over
50,000 people registered. So it really was... And it's a very
different format. We condensed two and a half days into a half day.
But I would agree, we were very pleased with both the online
turnout. And then I think, from what I heard from the community,
the format worked well. It was a nice mix, we did a prerecorded
keynote, then we had live sessions that were moderated with subject
matter experts. And then we were able to do some networking and fun
interstitial type activities in between the programming.
Steve Mordue:
You know, I would have to think that if I were Microsoft, having
done in person events for so long and the expense of doing those
and the coordination of putting those together, because it's a
production when you guys do those. And then looking at the number
of attendees there were able to make it because of schedule or cost
because of getting approval by their employers and versus now
suddenly a virtual event at no cost. I mean, there was no limits to
anybody being able to get into that. And while we might lose some
of that in person networking amongst one another, from Microsoft's
standpoint getting the information out to as broad an audience as
possible seems like this is a better way to do it.
Alysa Taylor:
You know, my team and I have talked a lot about that and I think in
the post COVID-19 world, because we're learning so much about
virtual events, I think we'll end up, and no timeline on this, but
we'll end up probably in the future in some kind of a hybrid type
scenario. Because I do think there is always that benefit of face
to face, being able to network, shake people's hands, see old
friends. So I think that in person will never completely go away,
but I think we're learning how to do virtual events that will
compliment the in person. And so I think, and again, this isn't an
official statement, but I think there'll be a world of probably
smaller, more intimate events. And then the big scale events will
be virtual because at the end of the day we've had over 150,000
views of our content from Microsoft Business Application Summit,
compared to we do 7,000 to 10,000 in person. So it's a very
different scale.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah. It really is. When you think about the ability to touch just
so many people that way and the expense. I think that, obviously,
we all got thrown into this virtual event motion when we weren't
quite ready for it and our tools weren't quite built for it but
ready or not, here we come. And I was, I can't remember the earlier
virtual event that you guys did that I... Oh, I think it was the
launch maybe?
Alysa Taylor:
Yes, we always do the virtual launch event. That we've been doing
for a long time.
Steve Mordue:
And that was pretty good, but then you still thinking about as a
large scale event, which we've historically done in person, how
does that translate in a way digitally, virtually that it feels as
valuable to the people? Not withstanding the fact that we've now
got 10 times as many people that can see what's there, but that the
event feels as much like a live in person event. And I think the
tools are getting... Obviously you guys are tweaking the tools for
just that kind of experience, like you said, with some of the
networking and we're kind of figuring it out, but as we get this
stuff figured out, and these tools for virtual events are just 100%
rock solid and exactly the way everybody would want. And I don't
know, it seems like the future of live events across, not just
Microsoft, but industry-wide, is going to be tough.
Alysa Taylor:
Well I think the thing that we're learning is how to do programming
to your point. Because when we did the virtual launch event, it's
our engineering leads and our product marketers doing content and
then demos. Content, then demos. And I think what we learned with
the Microsoft Business Applications Summit is that how much that
programming matters, the back and forth, being able to do moderated
forums, because it keeps people engaged. And we do it in much
shorter segments. Like the virtual launch event is two hours. We
were doing 35 minutes segments in the Business Application Summit.
And yes, so to your point, I think doing the right programming
allows us to have virtual events that are engaging. And then we get
the benefit of being able to scale to such a degree that we can't
do in person.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah. Obviously time zones will be a challenge for anything like
that because you're going to have people doing multiple versions of
their session at different time slots to be able to capture
everybody. And that's a trick. I think one of the things, some of
the feedback I heard from some of the folks was that they thought
the sessions times might've been a little short because oftentimes
the presenters were pressed right up to the time limit with their
content and there wasn't much opportunity for questions. In those
live events we're just peppering the person with questions
throughout the whole thing. So that would be an interesting one
to...
Alysa Taylor:
We got that feedback as well. And I think that's right. I think
that's good that we spend a little bit more time and we're learning
as we go. And I sort of said that, so I think that is one thing you
will see us is more Q&A time. I think the presentation time was
probably the right amount of content, but then allowing for more
Q&A is important.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah, I thought it was nice in the new, whatever the platform you
guys were displaying all that in, that, typically at a live event,
I'll walk into a session and five minutes into it I might decide,
"You know what? This isn't what I thought." And I want to bounce
out and go down the hall to another one. And the virtual equivalent
of that to be able to drop out of one and see below it, "Here's the
other ones that are going on right now." And just click a button
and bounce from one to another, I felt like we're getting closer to
that kind of experience with the tooling and stuff now too, which
is handy.
Alysa Taylor:
Good. I'm glad you had that experience. That's great to hear.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah. And of course they're all being recorded and available
immediately or as soon as possible, is just huge. Because then you
don't feel... Like I can remember at live events feeling like there
were three different things I wanted to see, but I could only see
one, and since they weren't necessarily all recorded, you just had
to miss some content. But now, of course, they can all be recorded
by default and you have no excuse to miss anything today. So I
think it's pretty cool. Looking forward to see where that goes.
Steve Mordue:
So what are some of the exciting things in your mind? Because you
look at this through a different lens than some of the other folks,
because you look at it through that marketing lens. And so you
would see things differently than maybe Googs or Phillips as
interesting or important. What are some of the things you think we
should all be really paying attention to?
Alysa Taylor:
Well, I think there's probably two things and I think James and I
would say the same probably on both, which is, I think we've
continued to bring some pretty remarkable innovation to the
portfolio. And when you see things, products like Dynamics 365
Customer Insights, that has been one that's just been phenomenal to
see the customer adoption on this. And I don't know if you saw like
Chipotle was a big customer, wall-to-wall sales floor shop that is
adopting Customer Insights. We'll announce here Walgreens is doing
the same.
Alysa Taylor:
So the customer data platform and being able to have a 360 degree
view of the customer, even in times of crisis as people are moving
to digital selling and remote service, knowing your customers is
even more important. And so it's been very exciting to see the
innovation that's been built over the course of the last couple of
years in market and seeing the customer adoption on that. And then
I think the broader vision of how Dynamics 365 in the Power
platform fits into the Microsoft Cloud.
Alysa Taylor:
You see very large customers like Coca Cola that are moving their
entire IT and cloud infrastructure to the Microsoft Cloud. That's
inclusive of Dynamics 365 and the Power platform and doing some
pretty cool things with it. Power platform, just even in the recent
environment, we released a set of crisis response templates that
have just gone like wildfire throughout healthcare organizations,
first responders, organizations needing to be able to get in touch
with employees, with volunteers, with those that are on the front
lines. So you see the direct impact that it can have and it's
pretty incredible and pretty inspiring at the same time.
Steve Mordue:
I mean, I think we're all pretty amazed at what citizen developer
has been able to do when given some tools that could actually do
things with, which they never had before and I'm continuously
seeing citizens building apps to solve problems that they have in
their department or their area that there never would have been
budget approved for a partner SI to come in and build something
like that, or go buy an ISB solution, all these problems that have
gone unsolved forever, it seems like suddenly are getting solved
and they're getting solved quickly and easily without great
expense.
Steve Mordue:
Problems that never would have been solved. They just had no other
way they were going to get solved before this. That's been
phenomenal to see the change of the platform, frankly, just in the
last couple of years, that huge pivot towards that citizen has just
opened up so much. You're talking about Coca-Cola. I mean, that's a
lot of what's driving that there I'm sure is department heads, line
of business people, seeing something that's accessible and fiddling
around over a weekend and creating a solution to a problem they've
had for years.
Alysa Taylor:
Absolutely. And we have the Unilever executive team in to meet with
[Sati 00:12:04] and his directs. And they have done this whole
movement to empower their frontline workers with the Power platform
to give them the tools to solve problems. And we always say the
value of the Power platform is putting tools in the hands of those
closest to the problem. And Unilever is just an incredible story of
creating a digital factory of the future that is completely from
bottoms up, it's from frontline factory workers that are giving
input, using Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI to automate
manual tasks that would take them way too long to do, to have
insights and analytics to the health of the supply chain and the
factory line, having a digital command center that they could
access through a power app.
Alysa Taylor:
So you see all of this. And then the great thing about the Unilever
story is they've been really working to empower their frontline
workers with these tools. And then as COVID-19 happened, they
actually just took that same rapid innovation model and use it to
do things like pivot to being able to scale up production and
ventilators because they had, if you think about their IT their
traditional IT and developer workforce is everyone. It's not just
limited to one department or one set of individuals.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah. That's still a challenge for Power Apps. I know in big
organizations, we're frequently running up against the wall known
as IT that is resistant to almost anything in a lot of
organizations. Sometimes they're very intransigent to get them to
think about new things. You know, the, oh, it's escaping me now,
the name of the enterprise management tool that you guys released
for templates... At any rate-
Alysa Taylor:
You talking about EMS?
Steve Mordue:
No, the stuff that was released by the team to help enterprise
manage Power App growth in their organization.
Alysa Taylor:
Oh, yes. Yes. So yeah, within Power apps, absolutely. And that you
saw that Toyota is a great example of that. They actually use that
enterprise management, so enabled their organization, all of their
employees, to train them, enable them with Power Apps as a
technology, but then they have within the IT department, to make
sure they can do things like handle confidential data sharing, they
used a set of control mechanisms with Power Automate and Power
Apps. And so this gives the IT department that final sort of go,
no, go on what gets published. But you still have the empowerment
of the citizen developers across the organization.
Steve Mordue:
Center of Excellence.
Alysa Taylor:
Yes.
Steve Mordue:
That's the term I was thinking of. So, Center of Excellence. Yeah,
I think that was key to really having this thing takeoff because
before the Center of Excellence, I know that there was some concern
with IT about, "People are going to go crazy out there with our
data. We don't know what's going on." And that Center of Excellence
toolkit really should allay a lot of those concerns. It seems like
it has. And we still have a couple of challenges in the market that
I know I hear a lot of partners and I struggle with around
licensing.
Steve Mordue:
And I know licensing is a necessary thing, but man, does it ever
get challenging. And it seems like, I guess, it's just the downside
of having lots of innovation is every new thing that comes out we
need to figure out, "Okay, now how're we going to license this?"
And we end up with lots and lots and lots of licensing
conversations with customers trying to figure things out. It's one
of those things, they sit back and say, "Microsoft needs to solve
that." But then when you think about it, it's not an easy problem
to solve having lots of different models of licensing.
Alysa Taylor:
Well, we have lots of products. I will say, our design principle is
on simplicity. And I think we have, if you look at what we've done
with Power Apps in particular, we reconstructed the licensing model
to be on a per app per user. It used to be, if you remember, based
on feature, right? What was canvas versus model driven application
development, which is incredibly hard for an organization to figure
out. And so we've really worked to try and simplify the licensing,
but at the end of the day, we have a lot of products.
Alysa Taylor:
In licensing, I always tell our internal teams this, licensing, we
go for the 80-20 rule, we designed for 80% of the scenarios and
there's always going to be the 20%, and we actually strive to do
90-10, can we hit 90% of the core scenarios? But there's always
going to be very unique scenarios that we can't solve for, which is
why we do different custom type deals. But our licensing, our
principles are simplicity, customer centric and designed for as
much scale as possible.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah. I've started to take the position with other partners that
are complaining about the old days when we only had like three
licenses to sell, and now there's maybe 100 different or more SKUs
out there, that this is just a new part of your practice. This is
something that you need to be proficient in and competent in, just
like anything else that you're doing, and that is how to help a
customer navigate the licensing. To make sure they're not over
licensed or under licensed, that they're using licenses the right
way. It's just a whole new motion that we didn't have to worry
about before that you're just going to need to learn and
understand. Have somebody on your staff that understands the
licensing or can reach out and get answers because it's part of the
business now, it's just part of the business model. I think the
worst thing that happens is a partner just gets lazy. And frankly,
we saw this even with Microsoft seller, just go in and sell the
enterprise plan to everybody.
Alysa Taylor:
[crosstalk 00:18:19] Yeah, when I started three years ago, we sold
two things. That was it. We sold the customer engagement plan and
the finance and operations plan. We'd two things that we... There
was maybe six standalone SKUs under those two things, but everyone
just sold the plan. And so yeah, going from two to a number
significantly higher than that, I do have empathy. We've ramped and
changed a lot in three years, but I think we are at a place right
now where we think we have the right model for how we bring new
products in and we're trying to drive for consistency now. So we
don't have a unique pricing, I had this meeting with my team
yesterday, we don't want to have, three different types of pricing
models for the insights line. We want to have one. And so we're
trying to now strive for consistency across the different product
lines. But yeah, you're right, going from two to 100 is a leap.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah. And then ditching the plan, I think, was great because not
just Microsoft sellers, but you know, partners and SIs, it didn't
require any thinking about what kind of license the customer needs,
just put everybody on the plan. But that wasn't in the customer's
best interest. They're paying for all this functionality that this
particular user doesn't need. And just because somebody didn't want
to go to the effort of figuring out, "You know? That user could
probably get by with some lesser license or some other license." Or
something like that. And it's forcing us to have to do more work to
figure it out. But I think the winner at the end of the day is the
customer. They're just not overpaying. Overpaying doesn't help any
of us because if they're over purchasing, then they end up churning
because they don't see the value. So we want to put them on the
right SKU that gives them the right level of value and then they
won't churn. So I think it's definitely important.
Alysa Taylor:
Yeah I mean, that such a huge thing. When I say the principles are
simplicity, customer centricity and scale, having a plan where
you're... I don't know, Steve, if you've ever met a human being
that's a marketer, a salesperson, a customer service person, a
field service person, all in one, but I haven't yet, that'd be a
superhuman, I think. But that's how we sold. We sold a per user
license with five different job descriptions against it.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because it's also changed
the landscape of the partner community, because as you guys launch
new products, these are new skillsets.
Alysa Taylor:
Right.
Steve Mordue:
And almost each one of these is deep enough that, with the
exception of maybe the largest partners out there, you're just not
going to find one that has the skill set across all of these
different things. AI on the insight side and development of Power
Apps, the canvas apps and flow. There's just so many different
pieces that we really, as partners, are having to look at how we
build our organizations differently. "I need a Power Automate
expert. I need an expert in this. I need an expert in that and the
other thing." Whereas before, everybody was an expert in
everything. Now there's just too much.
Alysa Taylor:
Right. Yeah. Now it's got to be deeper. Deeper levels of expertise.
Absolutely.
Steve Mordue:
So one of the things that's not... It's not negative, I'm not going
to go negative on you, but one of the things that has concerned me
and I still see confusion in the marketplace is about Power Apps.
What I call Power Apps versus Power Apps.
Alysa Taylor:
Oh, interesting. Say more.
Steve Mordue:
Well Power Apps started out of the Office 365 side with canvas,
mostly on SharePoint, embedded in the Office 365 licensing, all
these enterprise customers using Power Apps. And then Power Apps
also became a name used for something that technically was
completely different, right? Model driven Power Apps. And there
still is confusion, consistent confusion, among partners also, but
mainly among customers, about the difference between these two
things that have the same name. I know we've talked about
converging them, and there is some convergence going on, but not at
the license level, right? That Office 365, that customer who thinks
they have Power Apps licensing because they have Office 365, they
can't build a model driven app on CDS, that's a different Power
Apps license. And how do you think we can make that story clearer
to end customers that there's two things called Power Apps,
essentially?
Alysa Taylor:
Well, I think we're a little early on this podcast because we'll
provide some clarity in July to the market. But what I would say is
today, what is seeded in Office is exactly what you're talking
about. Which is Power Apps the maker, but it does not have the
common data service underneath it. And so it's effectively the head
of Power Apps without the CDS back engine on that. And so you have
a lot of people that are using Power Apps, but they're their data
source is SharePoint list. We'll release in July what we are doing
to make that a more seamless story. And I think you'll be pretty
excited. But we're just a little early for me to talk about it.
Steve Mordue:
Understood. Well, good to hear there's some thinking about it.
Alysa Taylor:
So it's coming. And it's coming very soon.
Steve Mordue:
Obviously I come from the CRM world, so I'm a CDS guy and I think
model driven, but I don't have anything against, or any problem
with, canvas apps on SharePoint list. I think there's tons of
scenarios where that makes perfect sense, but there's tons of
scenarios where the customer would be infinitely better off having
built that on top of the common data service than on top of
SharePoint. And right now I think there's a lot of customers out
there that think they're using Power Apps.
Steve Mordue:
I mean they don't have any reason to think that they're not using
all of Power Apps when they're just building on top of SharePoint
list and kind of making some things much more difficult or much
less effective than they could be, and not realizing that, "Hey,
there's a whole other side here that is way more powerful,
depending on what it is you're trying to do that you should be
looking at." And I continuously find myself having that customer
conversation. "Well, we already have Power Apps. We already know
all about Power Apps." And then pulling up a demo of a model driven
app. And they're like, "What's that?" "That's Power App." So
looking forward to the clarity. [crosstalk 00:24:58] Looking
forward to the clarity in July.
Alysa Taylor:
Well, and it's not negative. Know that your feedback and the MVP
community, our partner community, the feedback that you guys give
us is what allows us to be able to learn and adjust, and that's
what we're doing. And so I think you'll be pleased in July.
Steve Mordue:
So one of the other customer segments that we've focused on for
years, and is still an important segment to us is that SMB
customer. And I go back and forth from feeling like Microsoft is
very concerned about that customer to Microsoft is not very
concerned about that customer. Almost weekly I see motions that
seem like they're helping and then motions that we've got such a
revolving door with some of the folks that have looked at SMB. How
do you feel about that SMB customer? And how we should be attacking
that customer base?
Alysa Taylor:
Well, it's an incredibly important customer base for us. And I
think that we have a model in which we have a workforce, in my mind
they're sort of two discrete workforces that work with our SMB
customers. So we have a digital sales team that allows for both
inbound and outbound triaging of those customers. And then, as you
know Steve, we spend a lot of time making sure that our partner
workforce has the right incentives, offers, skills to be able to
service that community as well. And so I think those are the two
facets in which we deploy against our SMB community.
Alysa Taylor:
And we've seen some really phenomenal customer wins that are in the
SMB space. And so we want to make sure we've got the technology and
the right resources for that customer base. But there is a very,
very high commitment through our partner channel and through our
telesales team to service that customer segment base. And I think
in our world we say SMB, but there's managed and unmanaged really.
Because there are some very, very large customers that we would
classify historically as SMB, which I've always had a little bit of
heartburn about because they're [inaudible 00:27:16] they're a big
business, they're just not managed under our management.
Steve Mordue:
Well you got a whole rack of levers.
Alysa Taylor:
I'm going to have to wrap here in a second. I have, speaking
customers, a customer meeting that I need to attend to.
Steve Mordue:
Perfect. Perfect. All right. Well, I appreciate the time and look
forward to catching up with you again soon. And maybe seeing you
again in person some point in the future. Who knows when that'll
be.
Alysa Taylor:
Yeah. We don't know when, but definitely. So thank you, Steve.
Thank you for everything.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah, thank you very much for the call. Bye.
Alysa Taylor:
Same. Bye.