At the end of the day... any customer wants the process of engaging a Microsoft Partner to be as easy as possible. In the past you might have a go to Licensing Partner, a go to Systems Integration Partner, and a go to Development Partner. However, as the breadth of capabiltiy of the different Microsoft Platforms (Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics etc) has grown... so has the need for speicalist expertise that many 'generalist' partners may not have the depth to deliver. So where do your customers find that expertise when they need it?
When working in a P2P group, you have the opportunity to help your customer make the right connection to the right partner, with the skills and experience your customer needs to achieve their technical or business outcomes. This is a powerful upside of working in a Partner ot Partner alliance.
From our experience, there were a few interesting things that started to occur when we started to share news of our new P2P alliance with existing customers:
- Our customers opened up and shared more of their strategies and plans with us, as they knew we could potentially help them solve a problem by connected the customer the right expertise they needed.
- Their trust level our customers had in us as an individual supplier increased as we were not trying to "solve every problem for them". Instead we focused on what we were good at, and introduced our P2P partners who could deliver on other aspects of the customers vision
- We were able to significantly reduce the paperwork/vendor management required for the customer
Recently we helped the City of Hobart start their Modern Workplace journey (with three of the five members of our P2P group having a key role to play). In this short video - Peter Carr, Director of City Innovation and Technology at the City of Hobart briefly shares the the impact that P2P relationships can have when you are looking to deploy platforms like Microsoft 365
