Challenge
For Microsoft’s small and midsize business (SMB) customers, understanding the complex array of products, services, and features available to them can be complicated. These customers want solutions to their business problems, not technology jargon. With hundreds of ways to mix and match the right technologies to deliver business solutions, the partners that sell to these customers needed stories—not data sheets—to connect customers to the right solutions.
Solution
The solution started with identifying key business challenges that Microsoft technologies can solve, and then mapping the most relevant and compelling product capabilities to those needs. The result was a campaign messaging framework organized around customers’ common business goals. The approach is to use stories to illustrate all the real ways businesses can thrive using modern technology from Microsoft—things like helping mobile employees be more productive and safeguarding sensitive business data. Our mission was to make those solutions interesting to business decision makers on their terms with illustrative scenarios showing what life could look like as a “modern business”.
Results
With a campaign framework and story in place, the next step was to provide partners with the content and resources to help them market and sell to their customers. We created content to help drive success in every phase of the customer lifecycle, from building awareness online and in social channels, to empowering sales to make the right pitch to close the deal. The result was a company-wide campaign spanning all five major product divisions that launched at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference. The messaging and content was lauded by partners for enabling them to sell in a way that speaks the language of SMBs—ultimately helping partners to grow their businesses selling the entire spectrum of Microsoft offerings to help SMB customers grow their own.
Audienz
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