PLATFORM VISION

Commerce, an integral part at Microsoft, is a multi-partner ecosystem that enables our customers to do business with Microsoft & ensures smooth product on-boarding for our enterprise user. 

Project VL Central - a transformation initiative is aimed towards re-imagining the commerce experiences at Microsoft. A unified and intelligent platform for deal journey (negotiation to post sales) is designed to drive experience, productivity and deal velocity.  

It encompasses core modules to manage Deals, Partner Quotes, Agreements, Ordering & Invoicing, the platform is staged to provide details on Reporting & Analytics  as well as Support & Case Management.

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USP ( Unique Selling Proposition )

- Single pane of glass by integrating various tools required from Opportunity claim to Quote Generation

- Intelligent portal giving all relevant information in same work space required for deal modelling  

- Smooth experience from claiming Opportunity to creating CPS by removing many redundant steps and manual steps

Persona

Sellers i.e. In terms of Enterprise Operating Unit (EOU) are - 

AE (Account Executives), 

CE (Commercial Executives)

Solution Specialists managing workflow desk

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Business scenario: 

Large organizations (10K+ Info workers across its HQ and subsidiaries e.g e.g. SAP, Birla Group Tata etc.) keen to purchase M365 license for org wide usage, typically will incur a cost $300K/month for a E3 license - cloud-based suite of productivity apps (w/ Security and Compliance).

Here they can consult and negotiate Microsoft partners partners/reseller (like Dell, Ingram Micro etc.) or connect directly with Microsoft for an Enterprise agreement and enrolment. This helps large scale org to manage their OPEX budgets through VL at significant savings.

In case if a subsidary/JV like Vodafone IDEA wants to have access to E5 license - cloud-based suite combined with Info protection, IDAM, data visualization, and voice capabilities like Teams. - They can easily request for a supplementary quote and upgrade to E5 for users at VI‍

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There is a huge scope of untapped potential lying dormant with VL which needs CE team to
- understand the customers/markets within the competition landscape better
- manage seller partnership and alleviate their issues to resolve on priority
- build a fast-paced and agile deal environment across the CE field and operations team

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Vis-a-vis if we compare the Classic commerce with New Commerce: It’s a sales motion that was established few years ago that uses different platforms for different users.
- Partner centers for partners (CSP),
- MAC for M365 direct users  
- Azure management portal (AMP) for Azure direct users.

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The Customers: Buyers of volume licensing are typically enterprises, businesses, governmental or educational institutions, SMEs, and large corporations.
- Partners: They are the 3rd party vendors, can be big or small organisations or even individual people who sell Microsoft services to end customers. Microsoft sells to these partners and we have no visibility or record of the pricing and invoicing to the end customer.
- The Field sales and account teams: These people are the main relationship owners and are the bridge between the customers/partners and Microsoft. Primarily include account managers and field sales support.
- Licensing specialists and Executives​: They are the business rule experts in each sales location who are the go to people for any complexity faced during the entire licensing workflow. They support the sales processes and help close the licensing deals.
- The Consent Desks: These are the regulatory bodies who create checks and balances throughout the process and are mainly involved in reviewing and approving the decisions made by the account teams and the licensing specialists. They give the final go-ahead before final invoice is generated and sent to the partners.

Out of these 5 persona groups, the customers and the partners are from outside Microsoft, rest all three groups belong to the internal commerce team. Together these 5 groups, undergo a time consuming and lengthy process to convert a customer demand into a final invoice.

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More often than not the journey starts with the customer contacting the partners about their respective license requirements and it is important to keep in mind that these customers are offices and organisations who need licenses in bulk. 

The partner starts by identifying the opportunities and works along-with the account executives to define the sales strategy and any upsell opportunities if available.The internal sales team starts by re-doing the account research that the partner will have already done and creates the renewal plan to be approved by the internal leadership. At this stage in time, the account executives are also reaching out to the internal PMs and engineers, for technical clarification if needed regarding the products. Once approved by the legal teams, the plan is now ready to be presented to the decision makers to gain commitment.

Once approved by the internal leadership, the next set of decision makers at this stage are the customers who are presented with the plan and asked for a commitment by the partners. Once that commitment is received next comes the actual deal modelling and quote creation stage. At this stage the commercial executives who are the subject matter experts on deal creation get involved and drive the process through deal creation, getting approvals from the different desks and final buy-offs from the internal leadership. Once that is received the quote is generated and sent to the customer for final review.

As the customer gives their final approval and signs the agreement, the compliance desks checks for all legalities and genertes invoice which is shared with the partners, who further creates their invoices and share with the customers. Once the invoice is generated, the revenue lands in Microsoft’s account and the deal is closed. Now the sales team is mainly involved in responding to customer tickets, resolving queries and providing support.

Identified Pain-points from the Deal Journey (Pre-deal to Usage):

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In Landscape on Competition, MS lies more towards the concierge model of seller experience. In a way, we lead in customer trust but lag in  Ease of Doing Business and Efficiency at Scale versus benchmarks. Visibly seen in Deal to Invoice time, and absence of customer view, integrated flow, lack of approval workflow and automation.

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The first opportunity was to define a Design System for VL Central. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, we decided to benchmark the Partner Center toolkit and further contribute to make it more robust. Also, to ensure hassle-free alignment with the Engg. team we have decided to use the Azure Custom Domain as the base infrastructure on which the platform will be implemented.

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Azure Management Portal - aka Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Capabilities of Marketplace platform

• Plan, Assess, Buy or Subscribe, Sell or Publish the solutions - from open source container platforms to threat detection to blockchain
• Find apps and services that meet business needs, from open source container platforms to threat detection to blockchain
• Provision end-to-end solutions quickly and reliably
• Save time by direct purchase rather spending hours on vendor negotiations for licensing and pricing

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M365 Admin Center - License Summary

Transforming user experience by providing seamless and single pane of glass to Microsoft Customers is one of the manifestation of Microsoft's mission to empower every person and organization to do more.