Steve reads his Blog

Welcome to the "Steve reads his posts podcast". For those of you who are too busy, or too lazy, to actually read my posts, I have taken on the huge effort of reading them to you. Enjoy.

Sally in HR has a Business Problem 09/15/2023

Sally in HR has a Business Problem Sally's problem: the onboarding process for new hires at Acme Corp. Sally inherited the current process from her predecessor, consisting of a Master spreadsheet and a New Recruit spreadsheet. After a new applicant accepts an offer, she emails the New Recruit Spreadsheet to the new recruit. It is fairly straightforward on the surface, appearing to the recruit to be one page of questions. Bob, an Excel Guru who left the company three years ago, created it. There are quite a few hidden and locked cells, and no one is really sure what they are for, but it works. When the recruit returns this spreadsheet, the data needs to be added to the Master spreadsheet, which Bob also created. There is a button on the master spreadsheet to copy this data automatically, but it stopped working for some reason, so now Sally just copies and pastes the data across; it does not take that long. The Master spreadsheet used to get automatically uploaded to Acme's ERP every night, as long as Sally accessed it from a certain folder, but that also stopped working for some reason, so now Sally exports it as a csv and manually imports it into the ERP. As there have been some rare but problematic copy/paste errors, along with the manual steps required, Sally wants a better solution. Sally reaches out to her boss, Bill, for suggestions. Bill has also been nervous about the onboarding process risks and picks up the phone and calls Art in IT. Art concedes that quite a few of Bob's old spreadsheets are still floating around in various departments. He has looked a few in the past, but Bob was indeed a Guru. Then Art recalls an email he got from their Microsoft Partner a couple of days ago about "App in a Day". Art is slammed but suggests maybe Sally or Bill could attend the event tomorrow as it says you don't need an IT background to build apps. Art thinks this could solve all of Bob's other spreadsheets... The next day, both Sally and her boss, Bill, attend the App in a Day event, along with about eight other people from other companies having similar business problems. Chris, the presenter, starts by saying, "Anyone can build an App; it's Super-Simple". Everyone opens the laptops Chris had previously set up around the conference table, where all the software and templates are already installed. Chris asks what kind of challenges people are having, and Sally raises her hand and describes her spreadsheet issue. Chris acknowledges that Sally's issue is common and that it is Super-Simple to create an app to solve it. Sally smiles. "But that is not what we are creating today", says Chris. Sally frowns. The group follows along as Chris walks them through the steps of building "something else". The App in a Day material is quite refined, and the room hums along. Chris prefaces all of her answers for questions that pop up with "Yes, that is Super-Simple...". As the event concluded, most attendees could build most of the sample app using the templates. Chris passed out the "Completion Certificates" while proclaiming, "Congratulations, you are now all app builders," and started clapping her hands as the attendees all smiled. On the drive back, Sally says to Bill, "That was not that difficult", and Bill responds, "Not at all; it was Super-Simple". Feeling empowered, Sally decides to create an app tomorrow to solve this problem herself. The next day, with a fresh cup of coffee and her calendar marked unavailable, Sally sits in front of her computer and grabs the notebook full of scribbles she made at the event. She decides to start with the New Recruit spreadsheet and opens it up. Chris had said there was a way to automatically create an app from the spreadsheet, which sounds promising. She finds and opens the link from her notes, and "You do not have access" blinks on her screen. Ugh. She calls Art, who asks her to share the link with him, and he will investigate, but it may take some time as he is "slammed". Sally changes her calendar status to "available". The next afternoon, she receives an email from Art saying, "Try again". She marks her calendar status as "Unavailable", opens the link, and again, "You do not have access" blinks on her screen. She replies to Art, who responds, "Clear your browser history". She complies, and voila, the web page finally opens. Yup, it looks just like the page from the event, and right there on the front page is that button Chris mentioned to create an app from a spreadsheet with one click. Sally is going to solve this problem in no time. She clicks the button, selects her New Recruit Spreadsheet, and a gear starts spinning on the page. Sally is smiling broadly now. After a few minutes, the gear stops spinning; it's just frozen. Sally clicks around the page, but everything seems frozen, so she clicks refresh and starts over. This time, the process goes very quickly; the gear only spins for a few seconds, and then a window pops up that says, "There is an issue with your spreadsheet; click this link for help". Sally clicks the help link, and the home page for Microsoft opens. Thirty minutes after commencing the process, she again reaches out to Art. Art asks, "What was the error?" and Sally says, "It just said there is a problem". Art says he will take a look at the spreadsheet and get back to her as soon as he can. Sally marks her status as "Available". The next morning, Sally receives another email from Art: "I am no Excel Guru, but I can see some macros and stuff in here. I'm not sure what their purposes are, but maybe they are causing the issue. You may have to just create the app manually, but I heard it is Super-Simple!". Sally reviews her notes from the event, recalling some discussions of creating apps from scratch, but mostly about automated app creation. Maybe there is something in that package from Chris? Nope, it's just a brochure for the partner Chris works for. Sally thinks, "I am not stupid. I have an MBA, and Chris said this was Super-Simple, so I'm sure I can figure this out". She opens her search engine and types "Build an app from a spreadsheet"... About 37,000,000 results, ugh. Maybe YouTube... 124,000 results. Okay, maybe filtering YouTube on "most popular"? After scrolling through several video results that have nothing to do with her inquiry, she finally sees some that look promising. The first one she views shows how to automatically create an app from a spreadsheet, the path that already failed for her. Hmm, maybe filter on Microsoft's content? The first one of those that she views opens with an animated headline, "This is Super-Simple", then with really high production quality and a great soundtrack, flips through a bunch of smiling business people, both individually and in happy groups, all with awesome animations finally landing on a page that says "Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more" which fades out to a "Buy Now" Button. Finally, Sally finds a video by someone proclaiming to be a "Microsoft MVP", whatever that is. In it, the gal describes exactly what Sally is trying to do! So with the video open on her second monitor, she goes about following the steps precisely, as the MVP repeats, "This is Super-Simple". "The first thing you need to do is decide whether your app will be Canvas or Model-Driven," says the MVP, smiling a little too much. The MVP continues, "We won't go into the details here; instead, we'll just build a Canvas app". "Great", thinks Sally, because I've never heard of "Model-Driven". Sally proceeds to dutifully follow the steps, pausing and rewinding the video many times to make sure she does not miss anything. By the end of the day, she has something; she is excited and eager to show it to Bill. "That is incredible", says Bill, looking over Sally's shoulder at her screen, "It looks just like the spreadsheet!". Sally responds, "Yes, it was Super-Simple". "we should start using it right away", says Bill, and Sally smiles proudly. Sally thinks momentarily and says, "How do we do that?". "Ask Art", says Bill. The next morning, Sally calls Art, "Guess what? I built that app I wanted by myself". "Very impressive", Art replies. Sally says, "How do we start using it immediately with our new recruits?". Art thinks momentarily and says, "I'm not sure, but I will look into it and get back to you. Have you thoroughly tested it?". "Well, it seems to work fine to me", says Sally, a little perturbed. After lunch, Art calls Sally back, "I have some bad news; it seems that the last step of our onboarding process is buying and assigning licenses to the new hires". Sally says, "So what does that mean?". "That means they can't use your app", says Art, "I called our Microsoft Partner to clarify, and they suggested that maybe Power Pages could be an option as long as we avoid any kind of multiplexing". "So you are saying that I just wasted my time?" fumed Sally. "Not at all", said Art, "You built an App, so now you are an App Builder!" "Thanks a lot," said Sally, "but I am not giving up; it is supposed to be Super-Simple to solve this problem... explain Multiplexing to me please". Tune in for the next exciting episode of "Sally in HR has a Business Problem". eAF5xMHH8UDyTnylK4y1 /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/28041711

A Mountain of Shitty Little Apps 06/19/2023

A Mountain of Shitty Little Apps When Microsoft introduced the Power Platform as a "Citizen-Friendly" set of tools for non-technical business users to create apps to solve business challenges, it seemed a worthy endeavor. Well, enough time has passed to assess the outcome. Those who jumped in with both feet now have a mountain of shitty little apps. Those who watched from the sidelines decided, "We don't need that!" So is that the end of the tale? Let's see. The First Mistake To enable broad and rapid adoption of the Power Platform, Microsoft decided to add a "seeded" Power Apps capability to all Microsoft 365 licenses. Thus instantly putting a version of this technology into millions of "citizens" hands. While IT could turn this "off", it was "on" by default. Microsoft knew that no IT Admin would ever enable it if it were the other way around. This led to many citizens seizing the opportunity to replace their shitty little Excel spreadsheets with a slightly less shitty app. Excel was the original Citizen tool, and many organizations have a ton of Excel spreadsheets floating around, which are now slowly but surely being replaced with shitty Power Apps built by people who not only don't know what they are doing but don't know that there is anything beyond those seeded capabilities. The Second Mistake Once IT figured out what was happening, many flipped the switch stopping this unchecked motion. In response to alleviate their concerns, Microsoft launched the "Center of Excellence" CoE. A tool that could wrangle this proliferation of shitty apps to be under IT's control again. CoE was a solution to a Microsoft-created problem. Now IT could see all of the shitty apps that had been built, including apps that never got used, multiple apps trying to solve the same problems, apps connecting to external sources, apps exposing internal confidential sources, and users having access to apps they shouldn't. There are few things more fun than watching the faces of fear of IT when a CoE lights up. Going back to the Fork I have written before about the poor citizen, oblivious to anything beyond the seeded capabilities, building some contorted solution only to months later learn there were better options. They unknowingly took a fork, unaware there was more than one fork to take. Their anger towards Microsoft is deserved. But they are not the only ones to take the wrong fork; Microsoft also did. Microsoft determined at the beginning that Joe NoNothing building his own app to solve his own problem was the best path. With rare exceptions, disaster ensued, or a least a lot of wasted time. Recognizing the obvious, that no organization wants a thousand shitty little apps, Microsoft took a pivot with an emphasis on a new idea, "Fusion Teams". Pair Joe NoNothing with Sally KnowsAlot and Bob ProDev... this is a "Fusion Team". Now instead of a shitty little app that does not do very much, you can expect a nice little app that does not do very much. Again, even the Fusion Team has taken the wrong fork. What Other Fork is There? There is another fork, but you can't see it from the seeded Power Apps. Had Microsoft called the seeded Power Apps something like Power Apps Lite, you might have been given a clue, but inexplicably, they chose not to. So you are left thinking that you have seen Power Apps and are justifiably unimpressed. But there is another "Power Apps" in the Power Platform. One that is much more capable and runs on top of a relational database called Dataverse instead of a SharePoint list or Excel spreadsheet. Why did you not know about this? Why would you? In the time you have been struggling to create a Canvas app, you could have built an entire, bulletproof solution to your problem. A solution that could be easily extended also to solve related problems. What's the Catch? Ok, you got me; the catch is that the "real" Power Platform is not included with your Microsoft 365 license. It will add either $5 or $20 to your monthly cost per app user. Still pretty cheap to actually "solve" a problem rather than just canvas over it with shit. The Fork Microsoft Should Have Created I am sure some inside of Microsoft would agree that mistakes were made. Had they forgone the Citizen path and instead emphasized the Rapid Development low-code Power Platform as a way to solve mission-critical business challenges at a much lower cost than ever before in history, we would all be in a different place today. Fusion Teams was the one bright spot in this series of missteps. What about Citizens? Don't Citizens already have a job? Why are they wasting time pretending to be app developers? As an organization, your cost to have complex mission-critical applications built by professionals is a fraction of what it was only a few years ago. Seriously, drop a zero off of the end of what you previously paid! Do you really need to reduce those cost savings even further by having Sally build some shitty app on her own? Some of you reading this are already sitting on a pile of shitty apps and can see that the "savings" were never real. So What is the Power Platform... Really? I'm glad you finally asked! The Power Platform is a suite of capabilities, including Apps, Automation, ChatBots, Webpages, and AI. Individually, each component is pretty cool, but when combined, there are few business challenges that cannot be solved. Forget about your shitty little "Time Off" app. I am talking about enterprise-grade; run your entire organization level stuff. That $5-$20 is starting to sound pretty cheap now, isn't it? Why hasn't anybody told you about this? It's because of that $5-$20 thing. Microsoft and most partners would actually prefer that you buy their first-party business applications for a buttload more money. If word got out that instead of customizing Dynamics 365 Sales @ $95+/user, you could spend the same amount customizing on the Power Platform and end up with the same thing at a fraction of the cost... well, that would not be good for those who sell the $95+ apps. Prove It! Ok, here are some examples of some of our clients. An NFT company that sold $90 million worth of NFT tokens on its first day manages the entire process on the Power Platform with integration directly to the blockchain. A Solar contractor runs their entire end-to-end business, from web prospects to permitting to construction and long-term maintenance agreements on the Power Platform. An Insurance Brokerage generates and tracks thousands of quotes daily on the Power Platform. A Mega-Church manages hundreds of monthly events, including event creation, promotion, and kiosk-based check-in for thousands of constituents on the Power Platform. An Opportunistic Investment firm created an in-house deep financial research solution on the Power Platform. A Petroleum Distributor and Convenience store operator with thousands of locations runs their organization on the Power Platform. Still think the Power Platform is about shitty little apps built by Joe NoNothing? /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/24026925

Microsoft is Infected with AI as Copilots Consume all of the Oxygen 06/19/2023

Steve has a 4th chat with charles 09/13/2022

Steve has a Chat with Vahe Torossian 09/13/2022

Steve has a Chat with Vahe Torossian I had a chance to sneak up on , a Microsoft Corporate Vice President and the man in charge of Sales for Microsoft Business Applications. While Vahe has been with Microsoft for 30 years, many of you may not know him, so I wanted to fix that. Vahe is no ordinary Seller; he’s the “Top” guy who sets the sales strategy and motions for the entire global team. Vahe is also the guy who runs the really big enterprise customer meetings, and he’s super-friendly, as you would expect for the Chief Rainmaker. We covered a lot of ground in this one, so enjoy! Transcript Below: Vahe: Hey, Vahe Torossian speaking. Steve: Vahe, Steve Mordue, how are you? Vahe: Hey Steve. In fairness let’s say Charles mentioned that somehow you were going to call me. I didn’t know when, but it’s great to talk to you. Steve: After I interviewed him, I asked him who would be a good person to talk to? And he dropped your name. So it doesn’t surprise me that he gave you a little heads up. Have you got a few minutes to chat? Vahe: Yeah, of course. Thanks Steve. Steve: Oh, perfect, perfect. So before we get into it, maybe we can tell the listeners a little bit about what your role is. I know you’ve been at Microsoft forever, I think like 30 years or something like that, and you’ve held a lot of different positions. But now you’re in the business application space and that’s been fairly recent. So there’s probably a lot of folks that might not be familiar with you, who should be. Vahe: Oh yeah, thanks Steve. You’re right. I’ve been celebrating my 30 years anniversary at Microsoft in April in 2022. I actually took the helm of the Biz Apps sales organization globally in late 2020. So basically I took my one way ticket to Redmond in December 2020. And the plane was almost empty, it was during the pandemic. And it was kind of a strange feeling for someone who has been traveling so much in the past. And of course, let’s say I came with the lens of the business application, of course. Having led let’s say Western Europe in my past role, having all the businesses of Microsoft. And I think Western Europe was quite successful on Biz Apps, our trajectory growth. And I guess that was also in fact the good match to some degree to try to take it at the global level. Steve: So is it a little easier to think about a smaller segment of the product mix, now really being able to focus like a business application? So I think before you were looking over all sorts of different things, weren’t you? Vahe: Yeah, actually it’s a great question. Because I think it’s very different way of looking at the business. When you are, let’s say almost you are the CEO of Microsoft in the countries that you are, let’s say leading. You have all the levers to engage customers, partners, government, in different circumstances. And you try to leverage as much as you can the portfolio that you have to maximize the value. In the context of let’s say the business application. I think it was, the interesting bet to some degree Steve, was to say, Hey, this has been a portfolio at Microsoft, whether you call it Dynamics 365 or Dynamics only as a brand in the past. And if you go back 20 years, let’s say almost, with the Navision and Axapta, and Solomon Software and Great Plains. All these stories, all these product came together. And 20 years later, I think it has been part of a portfolio somewhere. Vahe: And you had almost what I will call the strong, let’s say, portfolio of Microsoft, the platform, the modern workplace and environment. And I felt the work that James Phillips in the past, and with Alyssa, and Charles, and Amy here now on the marketing side. Have been a strong inflection point to bring together both the technology in the cloud environment. But at the same time, a market environment that requires very different, let’s say tools to make the most of this transformation. And I felt that there’s one piece at Microsoft that requires a huge catalyst leveraging the innovation. But responding as much as we can to what the customer need or even don’t know yet what they need. And I think that’s what I think to me was almost a bet. It’s almost like all of a sudden you move to the little dog, if I may say. But with a huge potential of transforming something with great asset for Microsoft, and the customers and partners. Steve: Well I have to say, having been involved with Microsoft for a while, we have a phrase over here called redheaded stepchild, which is kind of what Dynamics was for many, many years. It was off campus, it was just this thing out there and under Satya, when Satya came in, he’s the first one that I think came into the position that recognized this should be another leg on the stool, not some remote thing out there. And I think that’s made a huge. Difference because I was involved in the years before Satya with business applications and they were not just something over here on the back shelf, and now they’re right front and center. I think that between Dynamics and what’s happened with the power platform, cloud in general. Microsoft’s ability to get into and help customers is massively different than it used to be. And in your role now, you’re dealing with a lot different type of customer. You’re talking about Office 365 or Azure, you’re dealing with IT. And now you’re mostly dealing with business users. It’s a completely different audience you’re having to work with today, isn’t it? Vahe: Absolutely. I think also you’re right since Satya took the helm of the company, to some degree you of course we have seen how we tackle the cloud computing hyper-scale environment. But at the same time, in fact what happened with the Covid in the last two years, have seen an acceleration of what we call in the past, the productivity tools to become more and more collaboration environment. And from almost an application or a set of application, it became more and more a platform on its own. And so it’s almost like when you think about where we are today and we were talking about the Covid, I don’t think the Covid is yet over fully everywhere. But now everybody’s talking about recession, right? And there’s no one headline that you look, you say, oh my goodness, what’s going to happen? Which just means in terms of planning for 22, 23. Vahe: So I think the assets that is now quite unique to some degree, or differentiated as you said, between the Dynamics 365 platform components and the Power Platform, it’s almost bringing together. But I think, I don’t remember Steve, in a few years back, I think Satya was talking about the mobility of the experience. And that was more from a device perspective initially. But actually what you see now is that with Teams as a platform, the system of productivity almost connect with the system of record more and more. And it’s re-transforming the way you are thinking. It’s almost like, you think about, you don’t have to go to a CRM environment or ERP environment to get access to the data. It’s almost like wherever you work, if you use an Excel or if you use Teams or whatever, you get access naturally, almost intuitively to your data set. And the data set are that’s almost fulfilled naturally. And so we have no additional task. Vahe: And so I think that’s the transformation world in which we are. Which connects cheaper well. We almost do more with less, right? And that’s going to be almost the conversation we’re going to have in the coming month. And it started already with many customers and partners. How we can optimize the assets that they have, how they can let’s say increase the deep provisioning of some assets that they have. They are paying too much to concentrate a bit more, to get more agility. And I think this is where also, from a partner perspective, Steve, I see a lot of potential. You are referring to Power Platform, it’s fascinating to see what it was in the very beginning, this notion of citizens developer, what does it mean? Vahe: People didn’t know exactly what it is, we’re quite afraid to touch it. But now when you see the shortage of developers in the market in general. And how you can make the most of some absolutely topnotch people who are not developer, touching the last mile execution challenges. Have been facing crazy environment and situation that they say, I can’t believe how my IT guide doesn’t solve these things. I’ve been telling them the customer pain point for so many years. And now with some, let’s say [inaudible 00:08:45] place, let’s say available for them, along with some let’s say technical assets, you can really make the magic in the very, very, very time. Steve: Charles came up with a term on the fly, ambient CRM. Kind of where we’re heading here when you talk about things like Viva Sales and some of these pieces that are really wiring all these components together. Covid was a terrible thing, but it certainly was a perfect storm for pushing the technology forward into a place that it’s been fighting to get to, it’s really been fighting to get to that point. And Teams was a great product. But certainly Covid created the perfect environment where Teams made insane sense for companies that were maybe just thinking about it or dabbling with it, and suddenly they’re all diving into it. And you guys of course poured the investment on top of that. And I think that the silver lining of Covid, for technology, is how far it really allowed it to advance in that period of time. Maybe we just need a pandemic every five years to push a technology forward. I don’t know. Vahe: No, but I have to say that even in my previous role when I was running Western Europe. Even the most skeptical people in regard to the cloud or the transition to a cloud environment. Having the one that rushed in the first, almost to a cloud environment, once the pandemic has been a bit of a real situation to face, and to drive the economy or the public services let’s say on. So I think you’re right, so you don’t want to wish for another pandemic or whatever, but it has been absolutely a forcing function in many domains. And that’s true. Steve: I think the challenge we have is particularly in the business application space. You guys have launched so many things in such a short period of time. And as you mentioned before, Power Apps, people picking it with a stick, they don’t even know what it is. And there’s also this first mover fear, I think. Microsoft has been, in my mind, kind of famous for coming to the game late and then just taking over the game. We were very late to the cloud, but once we got there we just took over the cloud, and it seems to be a pattern. But when you look back at the early days of cloud before you guys stepped into it, it was wild west. And all sorts of challenges with cloud. And I think that that gave a lot of people fear about, I remember I moved into cloud early and we got destroyed. Steve: And so I think there’s a lot of folks out there, just from a technology standpoint, that have gotten their hands burnt by moving too quickly. And we’re at that point with the platform and dynamics, where these are not new anymore. Relatively in history, they’re new. But they’re not new products and they’re not built by some garage shop somewhere with a couple of developers. This is what 15,000 people building this stuff back there. This is professionally built, well built stuff, that is ready for prime time. So the first movers have already come through and they all survived. So I really feel like we’re at that point where it should just take off now, it should just absolutely take off. And I’m sure you guys are seeing this. Vahe: Yeah. And Steve, I think one thing also is that you’re right, there’s a usual thing about let’s say the first mover advantage. At the same time from a customer perspective, you don’t want to be the Guinea pig, right? On any situation, especially from the technology standpoint. I think that increasingly what I see in the conversation is that there’s almost now, because of the quality of the native integration of the several different applications. Whether you are in the customer experience environment, on the service side, on the supply chain, on the finance or the local no code or app. All these components are absolutely connected to each other. And basically whether you have Teams as a platform in your company, or Azure in environment, all these component are connected very, very easily to each other. Vahe: And so I would say that the beauty of it now is that you have all almost the notion of marginal cost. If you really want to leverage many of the assets that we can bring, and you don’t have to take all of them at once, of course it has to be matching what you need now. But the right is that, let’s say there’s an almost fully integrated benefit all the connectors with the rest of the world outside of Microsoft environment, which is a great value for the partners, ISV and [inaudible 00:13:58], and at the same time to the customers. Who think now, hey I should do more with less. How should I think about my investments for the next, let’s say five years? Most of the customers now are really thinking about the longer term relationship. And defining what’s the value SLA almost that you’re expecting both from the partner of the vendor and the vendor itself. Vahe: And so it’s almost like, you remember when we transition from a world of build revenue and licensing, to now more consumption and usage. It’s almost the user and consumption discussion is a forcing function about the customer success, how we align on the same definition of the customer success. And what’s the time to value that you committed? What are the key milestones, in full transparency, that you need to bring in? And I think that’s where we are now. And because Microsoft, I think overall as a company, have been increasing tremendously the level of trust. From the security standpoint, the compliance components, and so on, and the scalability. Vahe: I think that’s the great leverage for us now in terms of the conversation and making sure that the customers are getting the value that we have been selling to them. How we show how much skin in the game we have to make them successful. And then it’s a flying wheel. It’s almost like the innovation will help you to bring new things, respond, anticipate, take the feedback of the customer to the engineering, develop new stuff quickly to the market. So I think it’s what we are heading to now, Steve. And I think from a partner perspective you might even see and feel it, right, more and more. Steve: Oh yeah, I mean I think the sales motion has changed completely. Only a few years ago we go into a customer and try and convince them to replace Salesforce with Dynamics. And they’d say no, and we were done. We’d say okay, well we’ll come back in a couple years and ask again. We had nothing else to sell them. And now today, I mean if they have Salesforce, fine that’s great, keep Salesforce, let’s add some things around it. Salesforce will work with Viva Sales, Salesforce will work with Power Platform. Steve: There’s so many doors now, I think, for a seller to be able to get into a customer and solve problems for that customer without having to do the one big yank and replace. Which is very difficult to do, it’s difficult to do on opposite as well. I mean once a customer gets a big solution like Salesforce or Dynamics 365 installed, those are very difficult to uproot, it takes a very long time. And you guys have created now, this product mix, where we don’t have to uproot something to sell that customer and to get engaged with that customer. We can go all over that business without having to uproot something. And I think that’s huge. Vahe: I agree Steve. And I think that it’s almost this notion of rip and replace type of strategy, right? In some cases it works because this is what the customer wants. They are fed up about let’s say competitive environment that didn’t deliver on the expectation. And we should be ready to cope with that and respond, and we have a lot of this. But at the same time as you said, what we call the strategy of having a hub and spoke, let’s say, almost environment, gives us for every line of business. That we decided as a company to go and have a significant acceleration of growth and market share, is very much to give that option to say, Hey, you know what, Mr. Customer, Mrs. Customer, you decide to be on that type of environment, who we are to ask you to change? Vahe: If you are happy that’s fine. But what we can bring you is almost to enhance what you have with some component that absolutely will be transparently integrated to what you’re using. And it’s a great circuit, an additional circuit for the partner, it’s a great value for the customer. We don’t feel harassed to change something because we know the cost of transitioning from one to another one. And then it’s up to us to demonstrate the value we can bring and eventually we can take from there to the next level in the future. Steve: It’s got to put some pressure on the competitors also. I if think of, I might just use Salesforce because they’ve always been the big competitor. I’m sure that they were confident sitting there at their large customer when all we had was trying to replace their instance that was going to be difficult to do and then we’d go away and they didn’t have to worry about us. Now we’re coming in and we’re circling around, and we’re solving problems in this department, and we’re building apps in this department, and we’re literally bolting into Salesforce. And one potential outcome is that the customer decides over time that wow, all of this Microsoft stuff that we’ve brought in works really, really well. Steve: That’s gotta put some pressure on the incumbent big application in there that hey, you’re surrounded by a bunch of stuff the customer is very happy with, you better make sure they’re happy with your stuff and they don’t reach that point. Cause like you say, oftentimes when you see those rip and replace, it’s because the product, or the company, or something hasn’t met the expectation. And to be fair, that could actually happen with any of us, right? It has a lot to do with implementation, design, how thing was put together. Less to do with the application itself, that could happen to any vendor. But certainly raises the bar to some of these competitors when they’re surrounded by well performing Microsoft products that are satisfying customers. Would you think? Vahe: Yes. Absolutely. And that’s why there’s a continuity between what we sell, how we sell, to who we sell, and how we drive the implementation. It’s an ongoing wheel that is a very different mindset that we all learn in the transition to the cloud, let’s say, environment. But absolutely. I think it’s a good forcing function to raise the bar to some degree, raise the bar for the benefit of the customer. You mentioned the competitiveness of what this type of hub and spoke strategy can create. You’re right. But in the end, the biggest, let’s say winner, will be the customer, right? Which I think is always and should always be the north star for us and our partners. Vahe: And I would say the relevance of the innovation should be in fact the pressure that we put to each other to make sure that say we listen carefully to what the customer is facing as a challenge, but potentially to translate their current challenge into the future challenge, to push them also to think differently. Because I think the notion of rip and replace [inaudible 00:21:06] One of the thing was, I don’t know if you remember that the initial issue and worry was that people were saying Oh, we... /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/24359718

Steve has a Chat with Jukka 08/25/2022

The Works Services-as-a-Subscription Model Update 08/04/2022

The Works Services-as-a-Subscription Model Update Back in May, I wrote a describing a completely new Services model we call "The Works from Forceworks". It is a Services-as-a-Subscription model that is unique in the industry. I also promised to follow up with our learnings from this new model, so today I will do just that. The Works First, I'll remind you of what the offer is. Thanks to advances in low-code/no-code for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform we decided it was finally time to launch a completely new services model. An all-inclusive, unlimited service that included not just support, but also deployments and customizations, along with several other things. You can see what we included . Based on our analysis of recent customer history, "The Works" will cover 100% of the requirements for about 90% of the customers. How's it Going? Customers are eating it up. Almost all of our existing customers have converted. I am thinking we may have left some money on the table. But now is not the time to maximize the revenue, rather now is the time to flesh this out. We wanted this to be as "turn-key" as possible starting with getting a quote that can be done right on the website. This meant "standardizing" the pricing. Today there is a Fixed Base cost, plus an additional fixed cost for certain combinations, like Dynamics for Marketing for example, and then a Per User cost. Part of the thinking was that the number of users would be a good measure of the work our team would need to perform. But in reality, while a good general rule, there are exceptions. For example, a simple deployment with basic needs, but a large number of users, versus a highly complex deployment with only a handful of users. For the former, the price is too high and for the latter, the price is too low. We are still thinking about the best solution to this. Pro-Active Almost all services offered by Partners to Customers are "reactive", responding to customer requests. This makes sense in an hourly model as it is not the Partner's job to decide how to spend the customer's money. But in an unlimited subscription model, we are able to be "pro-active" since it does not affect the customers' cost. A simple example may be once a week checking to see if all Flows are running properly or checking capacity. One of the primary differences in a Subscription model is that it is very important that the customer renews at the end of the term. Customers will scrutinize that monthly charge and compare the value they received each month. If at renewal time, they didn't see the value, they will not renew. Over a twelve-month term there will be months that are more active than others. But you cannot allow a month to go by with no activity, and this is where pro-active services fill the gaps. We are continuing to add to the list of things that we can do pro-actively to bring value and building tools to try and automate that as much as possible. User Support We were initially thinking this might be a big item, and for some it is. We had this idea that all users would be added to a Team or Distribution List that our team were also members of to communicate and resolve issues. Some customers loved the idea and added all users. Others preferred to keep that group small. We built a solution that we install on each customer environment that adds a life ring icon in the top navigation. This opens a form modal where a user can report an error, ask a question or suggest an improvement which via Flow is added to the Team or Distribution list. I am pretty happy with the result having seen many improvement ideas coming directly from the trenches. Deployments The service includes unlimited deployments. This was a dicey one, but I insisted that we include it. The easiest thing to do is to specifically exclude things from an unlimited service to reduce your risk. But you would quickly get to a point were "Unlimited" did not mean anything. This is also a key point at which an unlimited service makes extra sense. For a deployment month, you know your needs will be higher than usual. When comparing to hours you could easily spend as much in a deployment month than the entire annual subscription cost. We have not been doing this that long, but I can already see that we will go underwater during deployment months for a customer. Fortunately, deployments do not happen very often. Customizations This service also includes unlimited customizations, and by extension, to do those properly, unlimited Solution Architecting. If low-code/no-code were not where it is today, this would not be feasible. Where deployments are typically a one-time big bang, customizations are continuous. Although the amount varies from month to month. So far this is averaging out okay. Exclusions We tried really hard to include as much as possible on an unlimited basis, but developers are expensive, and development can often take a lot of time. So "development" is excluded and offered on our traditional hours model. This is the one area that some customers get suspicious about. Looking for the "gotcha" they expect that every time they ask for anything we will cry "development". But again, tracking with our earlier research, many customers never hear the word "development". It does seem that the more sophisticated the customer the more they look for sophisticated solutions which can often require some development. There is some grey area here and we are likely to do something one-off that might meet the technical definition of development within the service rather than bring up the need for development hours, because again the goal is renewal. Are We Making Money Yet? It is still too early to tell, but probably not. However, this is not unusual for a new subscription service as it builds scale. We are also still building the tooling to make this more efficient. As of now, we do have one customer that I can see we will consistently lose money on every month. This is the reason I added the right for us to terminate for any reason in our Terms and Conditions. We still need to figure out the best way to handle that. Summary Was this a good idea? I was not sure when we launched this, but now I can see it was indeed a good idea. There is a tipping point of profitability based on the number of subscribers that we have not reached yet, but I am confident that we will. My next update will be when we reach that tipping point, hopefully in the not too distant future. /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/23960976

Power Platform Blind Spots 07/21/2022

Power Platform Outside the Bubble 07/14/2022

Power Platform Outside the Bubble In my recent conversations with Charles Lamanna and Jason Gumpert , we discussed the explosive growth of the Power Platform. Then while listening to Jukka Niiranen on yet another podcast I was reminded that we are all inside the Power Platform bubble. From the outside, however, this bubble is tiny. Expanding Bubble There is no denying that the Power Platform's growth is impressive, but who is growing it? Microsoft has a fist-full of enterprise-sized customers who went all-in and sang the praises. But of all the enterprise-sized customers worldwide, I doubt this has touched even 1%. Sure, we have a ton of new "citizens" making things, but a "ton" does not even register on the scale. In an imaginary global IT heatmap, the Power Platform is still invisible. Popping the Bubble The Microsoft bubble is our constraint. Microsoft people are talking to Microsoft Customers and Microsoft Partners about Microsoft stuff. Obviously, "Microsoft" is quite visible in that imaginary heatmap, but the Power Platform is still largely unknown. While organizations may be starting to hear about components, like Power Automate, for example, too many are oblivious to the other components that make up the Power Platform whole. Many think the ability to create a reminder Flow in Power Automate is the limit. Mistakes Were Made I spend much of my time with customers today trying to work around go-to-market mistakes Microsoft made and continues to make. Seeded Power Apps is one. This should have been called Power Apps Lite or Basic, so people would be aware that there is something more, like Power Apps Pro. This alone would not have solved the invisibility issue, but it could be a start. I think too many feel that the seeded capabilities are the extent of it. There are undoubtedly many widget-type apps that have been built with these seeded toys, but if a customer were to inquire about more, they would reach another GTM mistake. If they want more than a simple Laptop Checkout app, the next logical step must be "Dynamics 365". I recall clearly jumping straight into a Jet cockpit after mastering my tricycle at three years old. But that was me. Too Small Those who somehow accidently discovered that there is more available than just the seeded capabilities realize quickly that Microsoft just gave them a toy to play with. Looking back over their shoulder, they see mostly broken toys now. Many wondering why Microsoft let them waste so much time and energy before they tripped through the curtain of awareness. Too Big I am not knocking Dynamics 365; Microsoft has built a colossal Power App aimed squarely at enterprise organizations. It is indeed a "step up" from the seeded toy builder. But, among the zillion features coming soon to add to the existing gabillion features are the abilities to "Create sequences with looping of repeated steps" or "Assignment by segment priority" WTF is that? I just want to sell my stuff! You will need a team of internal and external resources just to sift through the capabilities and understand what they are and whether they can do anything for you. Just Right? There is a space between the seeded toys and Dynamics 365, which is actually the biggest hidden space. Obviously, Microsoft would prefer that you drop half of your annual revenue subscribing to their big solutions; it is not "bad"; it is their business, no different from any other enterprise software company. In my recent chat with Charles, he said, "we have some great data about every user who adopts Power Platform is significantly more likely to adopt Dynamics within the next year or two." Maybe these users were unaware of what the Power Platform could actually do? Low-Code/No-Code "LCNC" This "is" the movement of this decade. The movement of the last decade was getting all but the genuinely paranoid to the cloud. But once there, many realized it wasn't cheaper; it was quite a bit more expensive, and subscriptions are like waves in the ocean; they never stop. Where can you save? Development expenses. Chipping away at that 5, 6, or 7-figure albatross. This is what LCNC is about. It may be subscription protection at the developers' expense, but it is still a big win for customers. From Win to Win-Win LCNC will save customers a lot of money on their Dynamics 365 deployments. Some development may still be required for some things, but not nearly as much as in the last decade. And we are only in 2022! That is indeed a massive Win for customers. But a Win-Win is achievable for those who take the time to understand the Power Platform, the same thing that Dynamics 365 runs on, and what they can build with LCNC directly on there. Not only will they save massive development costs, even if they still engage an LCNC partner, but they could also save +/- 90% on Microsoft Licensing costs. This is not highly promoted for apparent reasons, but we are helping customers build sophisticated business applications with advanced logic and automation, solving complex business problems on $5 Microsoft licenses daily! Summary LCNC, while still in its infancy, is already very powerful and growing more so every month. To see an example of what I am talking about, you can check out our app and our addons. All of which were built using LCNC on the Power Platform. Microsoft tells a "No Cliffs" story, meaning that you can start with the seeded capabilities, and once you hit a limit, you can advance to the Platform Platform, and once you hit a limit there, you can advance to Dynamics 365. What they don't emphasize is that the Power Platform doesn't have any limits you will hit. Many, starting with RapidStart CRM as a head start, used LCNC to build massively complex mission-critical solutions, with and without our help. LCNC and the Power Platform is a movement you cannot afford not to explore! /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/23745515

The Microsoft Partner Dilemma 07/08/2022

Steve has yet another Chat with Charles 07/01/2022

Steve has yet another Chat with Charles I have had my head down working on some big things since RapidStart CRM growth exploded, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with who recently took over for James Phillips as head of Business Applications for Microsoft. This was my fourth chat with Charles, and it was interesting to back listen to them in order. It really gives you a sense of where Microsoft has come. I managed to catch him in his office having just wrapped up their year-end. Enjoy! If you want to listen to my chats with Charles in order, The was October of 2018, the was September of 2019, the was March of 2020. Transcript Below: Charles: Hey, this is Charles Lamanna. Steve: Charles. Steve Mordue. How are you doing? Charles: Good. Great to hear from you, Steve. It's been a long time. Steve: It has been a while. Have you got some time for a chat? Charles: For you, anytime. Steve: I appreciate it. Well, I guess the big news for you obviously is putting on the big boy hat, huh? Charles: Yes. I moved up an extra floor in the Advanta building in the Microsoft Campus. Steve: Oh did you? Charles: No, I'm just kidding. But metaphorically speaking at least. Because for folks that don't know, James Phillips leaving in March of this year, I kinda stepped in across all aspects of business applications of Microsoft. And, over the last four years, I've gotten to know the place, know the people, know the business and I'm super excited about the opportunity. And I think the future has never been brighter for business at Microsoft. Steve: Well, I never got the feeling that James held you back, or any of the folks on your team back, but he certainly, we have to give him a lot of credit for really taking this thing to a whole nother level. You weren't here before, I don't think, at least with the business apps, but it was really run by morons before he took over. And he completely turned that thing around and turned it in a whole nother business. And now with you taking over, I'm expecting that to continue. I don't know if there's been some things that have been in your bag that you've wanted to do that James was keeping you from, that you're going to pull out, or if you're just going to continue the path, or what's your thinking now that you've got that gavel? Charles: So definitely not held back. I would say I was super fortunate I worked for James for, I think seven, eight years in total. So I was able to learn a bunch and he was without a doubt, the most supportive manager I've ever had in my career, in terms of both enabling and clearing paths for what we wanted to do from a vision and dreaming perspective. And if it weren't for his support, things like Power Apps would have never gotten off the ground. So, definitely. And I think as we go to the future, we have this amazing foundation. I mean, BizApps is a major and key component and pillar of the Microsoft Cloud. Charles: 10 years ago, you probably would've thought that impossible. Right. To have Dynamics and Power Platform alongside Azure and Office. Now that we're here, let's go take it to the next level. And that's the push, and it's continuing a lot of the great innovation we've already done from a data-first, AI-first approach. Kind of sprinkling in some more collaboration with teams, and really revisiting the end-user experience, the platform, to go increasingly modernize and scale it and make sure that all our components from CRM, to ERP, to Power Platform work great together. Steve: I don't think it could have achieved that status with Dynamics 365 alone. It really took the Power Platform coming into being, I think, to give it the breadth that it needed to be able to get there. With Dynamics 365, we didn't have apps for users to do small things, there was no way it was going to permeate an organization the way the Power Apps do. Charles: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I say two things are interesting. The first is, Power Platform has allowed us to help more users and more customers with business process transformation, which is what BizApps are all about. Right? Steve: Yeah. Charles: How do you make your sales processes better, your financial processes better, and Power Platform really turbocharged that. And that earned us credibility in a lot of those departments and with a lot of those users, and we have some great data about every user who adopts Power Platform is significantly more likely to adopt Dynamics within the next year or two. So we see that symbiosis working in a way which is incredibly customer-friendly, and it helps our business. Second thing is Power Platform has even helped us reimagine parts of the Dynamics apps themselves. And I think probably two of the best examples are the connectors, which are key to the Power Platform. Charles: You see the connectors starting to show up inside all these Dynamics apps, like Customer Insights uses Power Query for data ingestion, or Viva Sales even connects to Salesforce. So there's this amazing interoperability that we have, and also enabling the end-user. Our team built Viva Sales, even though it's not in the Dynamics or Power Platform brand. But it's this idea of having an integrated experience in Office for sellers, built on connectors and built on the Office integration. So it's changed the way you think about some products, and it's also helped us go expand our user base. Steve: Yeah. I saw I was on a PGI call with that yesterday. Very, very cool stuff. At the last PAC meeting, I was supposed to be on the Viva Sales round table, but I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds boring. I think I'm going to go to this one." And I really, I went to the wrong one, I missed a good one. But you know where I am, right? I'm on the platform. Charles: Yep. Steve: And we're exploding. Our app is continuing to grow on the platform as a low-cost simpler alternative to Dynamics 365 for companies that aren't ready for that. And I'm always bugging you about, "Hey, that cool new feature you guys got in the first-party. When are we going to get that at the platform level? So ISVs, and people that are just building their own stuff from scratch, could take advantage of some of the syncs." We got the Outlook app a while ago, we've been getting some things. And when I saw Viva Sales, that was probably my only disappointment was that, at least as I understand it, it's hardwired to Dynamics or hardwired to Salesforce. And I get that trying to play those two against each other, but it's leaving guys like me out in the cold. Charles: Well, I'd say for Viva Sales, the intent is to support any CRM, and I really do mean that generally. And even customers, because there are customers out there that we talked to today who have homegrown CRMs, they coded 15 years ago. They have a whole dev team still working on it. The idea is to support interoperability with your account records, your lead records, your opportunity records, standard pipeline data. And to do that in a way which works through the connector. So today it'll earn V1, it'll only be Dynamics in Salesforce, but the intent is to make that be a general purpose adapter. And you could have a RapidStart CRM connector, which shows up and supports the contacts the way we want, and it would be connectable. That's not going to happen in the next three months, but that's the ambition. Steve: I can call you in four. Charles: I go down and said... What was that, in four Months? Steve: I can call you in four months. Charles: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I might not pick up the phone then in four months, no I'm just kidding. Because even talking about, if people are even on Seibal. We should be able to support them with their sales. Because the idea is, you shouldn't have to transform the seller experience at the same pace that you transform your core CRM, your core system of record, and that's just the way the world's moving. Steve: Well, I love the idea that one of the challenges that CRM has always had, of course, is user adoption. It's one more place they need to go to do something. Outlook app helped with that, getting data into CRM without them having to actually go to it. It seems like yet another way for people to engage with their CRM without actually realizing they're engaging with their CRM. Charles: Exactly. Yeah. It's almost like ambient... Yeah for sure. Sorry. Yeah. I say it's almost like ambient CRM basically. How do you make it so that, instead of the user goes to your CRM, the CRM goes to the user where they are. And the outlook app was the beginnings of that. Some of the Team's integrations we've done are the beginnings of that. And that Viva Sales and that whole Viva idea is how do you elevate it? So anywhere you go, your CRM data is accessible without you having to go to a different user interface. Steve: Very cool. Very cool. So I ask you every time we get on a call about exciting features that are coming up. And in particular, maybe even some features that have launched, that didn't take off the way you thought they would and people are just missing something. We have this problem with our app sometimes, people don't understand and so they don't move forward, and it would be perfect for them. And I'm sure there's lots of features and capabilities that you guys broke a sweat building, and know in your heart, this would be awesome, but people don't seem to be getting that. What's a good example of one of those? Charles: I'd say a product which we've had a capability, where we've had a lot of customer usage from a small number of customers, but very deeply and with huge impact, and we wish were with more customers, is probably Conversation Intelligence. I'm not sure if you've seen that around the Sales app, and where that actually will sit in inside of say a phone call or a meeting and help you generate action items, and summaries, and coaching, and help you understand sentiment, and listening and talk ratio. We've used that internally at Microsoft with great success. So our digital sales reps and the folks who work our phones, they are diehard fans. We have this amazing video we released a couple months ago where we actually went out and interviewed these digital sales reps and their managers, and they just were going on and on about how great it is. Charles: And that's rare where you hear that about a piece of technology for a seller. And we have a few other external customers that have gone through that same journey, where they have a thousand digital reps, 2000 digital reps using this and just in love with it. But it's not as pervasive as we thought it would be at this point. And it's one of those things where, it's a product discovery, and easing people into the capability, because then you got to go out of your way to enable it and configure it. So we're doing work now to simplify it, and make it more accessible to more users. And we're doing that partly through Viva Sales, like conversation intelligence, the major capability of Viva Sales. Charles: And the second thing is also, there's even some culture aspects to it. Because if you use it, it's generating transcripts and recordings of a call, and not everyone's necessarily super comfortable with that. So we're even working about how do you enable more features without having to record the call, and how do you enable capabilities without having to get a transcript? Or how do you make it more natural to say, "Hey, I have a sales co-pilot thing. Are you okay if I enable it?" So there's a lot of interesting things, it's never just a technology problem. It's also a discovery and a, I'd say, change culture management problem. Steve: Yeah. I think that's been the challenge with anything AI really. A lot of people, it seem to think it might be a little too futuristic. They look at the benefit and think that's really cool, but they have no idea how to get it. And AI just in general, doesn't feel that approachable to people, even though in certain cases, it's extremely approachable. You don't have to do anything, it's approaching you. So it's a learning curve, you got to wait until my generation dies off and then you guys will see. Charles: I don't have as myopic of you, as you Steve. But I would say that, the big thing that we have to do is, there's been this evolution of AI where the AI is going to be something that automates away what humans do. And what we've realized is, AI is not even remotely close to being able to do that. But what AI can do, is it can turbocharge the people that use it. And so what we're trying to do is, how do we go expose these AI capabilities in a way where you or anyone else who uses them feels so much more productive. And just like when you first got the ability to use PC or a spreadsheet, you're like, "How did I exist before?" We're hoping we'll get to the point where, once you start using some of these AI assistive capabilities, like we've done in Conversation Intelligence, you'll be like, "How did I ever do a customer call before? And I had to take notes on paper while listening as opposed to having the AI take notes for me?" Yeah, exactly. Steve: I'm terrible about that. I'll be chicken scratching over here while I'm talking to people, and then we get off the phone I look at and I can't understand a word I wrote. Charles: Yeah. I like post-it notes next to my desk where I'm always writing stuff down. Steve: Yeah. So what else cool's coming on the horizon that we should be... That sounds like the Conversational Intelligence has been around. Sounds like Viva Sales is going to really bring that to the masses, so that one's on a path. What are some other new things that we should pay attention to that you're able to talk about? Charles: Yeah. Another one of my favorite things, which we've started to reveal some capabilities going back to last Ignite, so November of 2021. And we have some big announcements planned for the second half of 2022, is the new Contact Center related capabilities inside of Dynamics Customer Service. We have Omnichannel, we announced integrated voice, the Nuance acquisition closed, and the Nuance contact center AI team joined my group to align with customer service and contact center. So there's a lot of really exciting innovation happening there. And I'm really excited about the potential to make it super easy to get a comprehensive customer engagement story, without having to wire up eight different pieces of technology and do a ton of different complex integrations. So that's a place where there's a lot of innovation, there's new capabilities, Omnichannel, Power Virtual Agent, even the same type of conversation intelligence applied to support cases, Nuance for their Gatekeeper, which is identity and authentication verification based on voice and biometrics. Charles: There's a lot of cool stuff in that space. And that's one of the places where so many of the customers we work with are trying to improve the customer experience, and to go reduce costs. So I say that's a place where we've had a lot of exciting announcements over the last six to nine months, and we have a whole bunch more planned for the next six to nine months. So I say, stay tuned. And I won't say more than that to avoid getting in trouble by leaking information. But I just say, that's a place to really pay close attention. Steve: Who knew call centers could be cool? Charles: Yeah, exactly. Who would have thought that I'd be talking about contact centers, and how it's the next generation or next frontier of AI applications in 2022. Steve: Oh, well. Well I do have to thank you guys for the low-code advances you've continued to make in that platform. It actually allowed us to launch a, I think we're the first ones to try this, a new Service as a Subscription. Which includes awesome includes deployment, customization, training, everything except development code, which as you know today in so many of these projects, there's so little, if any of that. Charles: Yeah. Steve: Just a few years ago, if you tried to offer something like this, it really would be little more than a support agreement. But now, we're deploying, we're building, we're customizing, we're building entire things for customers all on a monthly subscription. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully I don't go broke, but... Charles: But you know what, it's fascinating. I literally was talking about this with the Power Platform team this morning. About a future where we'll have more partners who are able to sell a comprehensive service agreement, which includes the cloud hosting licenses, but also some incremental custom development and also ongoing maintenance and support. And it'll be almost this whole new industry, which will push a lot of innovation to the edges of the ecosystem, right? Steve: Yep. Charles: Not built by Microsoft, built by partners who really understand particular regions, particular industries, or particular segments. Like y'all are targeting a space where we're not trying to go take Dynamics, CRM, and go bring it down there. You can go build a world-class experience on top of our platform and provide a very much all-in-one, which exactly serves the needs of that audience and that market. And we can stay focused on building the super horizontal platform, which has great performance, great usability, incredible power, those types of things. Steve: Yeah, it sounds great. I'm glad that we had the same idea you guys did. I'll let you know, in a few months, if it was a smart one. Time will tell. Charles: Yes. Yeah. Steve: So, how are the rest of the team doing? It seems like some folks have moved around a little bit in the org, who's moved where? Charles: Yeah. So one of the big things we've been really focused on the engineering side, for the engineering organization, is bringing together strength from a product perspective that target the same type of user. And for example, we have a new customer experience platform team underneath Lori Lamkin, who leads all of our Dynamic Sales apps. So the Core Sales and Viva Sales, as well as commerce, as well as marketing, as well as customer insights. And it's very much focused on revenue generation, customer journeys, customer experiences. And what's great is by bringing those assets together, we have a great answer for B2B customers, as well as B2C. Like if you want to have self service, no touch eCommerce experience with lightweight telesales, you can do that all with those sets of applications. If you want to do a high relationship, high touch B2B sales process, you can do all of that. You're not going to use commerce, but you're probably going to use customer insights and sales, and maybe a little bit of account-based marketing. So we brought together these things, which are solving similar problems under a single leader. And that way the engineering teams can go back and forth between these different places to finish out full end-to-end customer journeys. And so that's a big area that we've spent a lot of time on, and that's a place where it's really the biggest and fastest growing category for us in the Dynamics 365 application portfolio. So that's one interesting example. Jeff Comstock, folks may know him. He's been around Dynamics 365 for a while. He continues customer service, he leads omnichannel, he's done some of this great expansion around the contact center for us. Ray Smith leads our supply chain team. So that includes things like more supply chain. Steve: So Ray moved? Charles: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He by way of acquisition to SAP then moved. He worked in Dynamic Sales for a bit, where people may have known him. And now the supply chain, and really helping us be this new data driven, AI powered, supply chain story for core supply chain execution. Then we also had some exciting announcements around process advisor and the minor acquisition to help turbocharge that. Or Georg Glantschnig who leads our finance room of the house. And basically we call the room of the house,... /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/23601650

Let's Talk About Funnels 05/18/2022

Let's Talk About Funnels In my 20-plus years in this CRM business, I have seen my share of "Funnels". Lead Funnels, Sales Funnels, Delivery Funnels, every kind of business-related funnel you can think of, I have probably seen it. From what I have witnessed, most businesses have no idea how to use them effectively. So, let's talk about Funnels. The Numbers Game One of the most significant areas I see where customers are consistently missing the mark is in their Sales Funnels. While at the same time tripling their investment in Lead Funnels. The logic seems to go like this; if we currently convert 5% of our Leads into Sales, we just need 10X more Leads. As if somehow, by dramatically increasing the size of a pile of crap, the smell will improve. But, logical as their argument may be, the math does not hold up in execution. If your sales process is working as hard as possible to convert 5% of your Leads, multiplying what gets thrown into that process by ten will not result in a 10X sales increase; more likely, your conversion rate will plummet. And, by the way, multiplying your leads by ten is not cheap or easy to do either. Fixing the Right Problem Don't get me wrong; Leads are vitally important to any business. But creating a waterfall that you are only capturing a bucket from is more than a waste of money and energy; it could actually be hurting you. If 95% of your Leads are not buying, then something is broken, and shoving more people down a broken path is like shooting a bullet into the head of each of those missed opportunities because they are now dead forever. Today you seldom get a second chance. What is a Healthy Conversion Rate? That depends on many factors, varies widely by industry, and actually starts with your Lead Funnel. Wide funnels will capture a large number of non-prospects. Why do they click or call when they are not valid candidates? Who knows, boredom, bots, etc.? Either way, they are a waste of your resources. This is a common technique employed by many marketing/SEO agencies, creating a wide funnel so they can point to how many leads they generated to justify the continuation of their services. But the number is not important if you only convert a small percentage of them. There are three possible reasons that you are not converting more. Either a) your value proposition is crap, b) your leads are the wrong people, c) your sales funnel sucks, or a combination of these. Your Value Proposition Your perception of your Value Proposition is irrelevant, it is something seen through the eyes of your Prospects, and even highly qualified Prospects will each view it differently. How hard is it to sell your product or services to a qualified lead? If it is too hard, there is something wrong with your value proposition. If it is too easy... there is also something wrong with your value proposition. I am not a buyer of whatever you sell, so having the right value proposition is on you to figure out. Your Leads are the Wrong People Congratulations, if how much money you throw away was the measure... you're winning! Unfortunately, no amount of unqualified Leads will fix a Conversion problem; instead, it compounds it. This leads us to the real issue. Your Sales Funnel Sucks The good news is that you are not alone; the bad news is that you are failing to convert 95% of your leads. Effective Sales Funnels are elusive things. This is probably why so much money is shoveled into increasingly wider lead funnels in an attempt to overcome the real problem, but it just masks it at best. Too many people think that their Lead Funnel IS their Sales Funnel, which means they are missing a Funnel. In most businesses, Marketing, whose job is to create leads, and Sales, whose job is to close them, are related but completely different things. Sure, one thing "should" feed into the other, but the skill to get someone to click on a Google ad, for example, is a different skill than getting that someone to buy. But they are directly related in that the person creating the leads can make the conversion of that lead easier or harder depending on their skill. For most B2B and many B2C organizations, a seller will take over at some point, and a "Sales Funnel" will ensue even if it does not actually exist. Suppose you don't have an official Sales Funnel that has been thoughtfully developed. In that case, you actually have a unique unofficial funnel for each salesperson based on their personal knowledge, skill, and history. This is also why you see such a wide disparity of close ratios across your sales team. Building a Sales Funnel First, do you need a CRM to have a Sales Funnel? A Sales Funnel, like a Lead Funnel, will need some steps. Too many people try and skip having any steps other than "get the prospect on the phone a close them!". But the 1960s are ancient history, and selling today requires more sophistication and finesse. Just getting that prospect on the phone is no easy task now. A logical, systematic process will generate much higher success, and modern CRM solutions are purpose-built for this. If you feel like CRM solutions are too expensive or complicated, you can check out to build your Sales Funnel. It is possible to build a Sales Funnel by mirroring the steps and process of your star sellers unless all you have are mediocre sellers. Either way, a good Sales Funnel should start before the Lead Funnel ends. To be proactive, you have to know what is coming, what context they are coming in from, and what they have already been informed of before their arrival in your Sales Funnel. CRM solutions can also be utilized to build and track Lead Funnels, making this visibility much easier. Reactive Sales Funnels always have lower success. A good Sales Funnel can make both your stars and your mediocre sellers better. Automation You may have heard the terms "Sales Enablement" or "Sales Automation"; they are popping up a lot lately. A Sales Funnel is also at the center of these, and varying "Automation" is layered over the Funnel. Applying "Automation" to steps where it makes sense throughout your Sales process can accomplish many things. Among these is a consistency of process. Once you have a working Funnel that generates successful outcomes, you will want to replicate that motion consistently, and nothing is more consistent than automation. Automation is also "instant", so your process commences immediately when triggered, which is something many customers seem to like. Automation can also multiply the capacity of an existing team, meaning you may not need to hire, and you may be able to shed some dead weight. You have to be certain that your Sales Funnel works before you automate it, or you could automate yourself right out of business. Summary Funnels are not generic, although my advice here is. Effective Funnels will be unique to every business, so, unfortunately, I can't provide a step-by-step guide in a blog post that would do much good for you. If I tried, it would not be the proper Funnel for you and could cause more harm than good. But, a firm that builds Sales Funnels all the time, like my company, , can help you if you need it. /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/23151986

It's Time for a New Services Model for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform 05/17/2022

It's Time for a New Services Model for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform About seven years ago we pioneered the "Support by Blocks" model, and it has served our Forceworks clients and us well. But thanks to Microsoft, it is time for a whole new model for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Support and Services. Let's unpack this one. The Challenge Let's be honest, no business application you can buy will serve your needs as delivered. Any of them will require some modifications to fit your goals. Fortunately, you have many Microsoft Business Applications partners to assist you with this, including my company . This is not new; customizing business applications has been around as long as business applications have been around. For a small organization, you may only have to invest a few bucks to get things where you want; enterprise customers often invest six or seven figures to get things right. It is not a small industry that I am in. It is precisely this high cost that has led Microsoft to invest so much into low-no-code technologies. How many more customers could Microsoft have if this "startup cost" was significantly reduced? More on that in a minute. Models There are quite a few engagement models available from different partners. The old "Fixed-Price based on your Requirements" has fallen out of favor, and for good reasons. Scope creep is a common one, but customers, thinking that competitive bidding got them the best price were often surprised at how much the bids came in at—typically ranging from 25-50% higher than what Time and Materials may have cost. Partner risk padding has probably run off many customers, But as I said, few partners even offer this model today. The most prevalent model is the Time and Materials model, which may be based on an estimate. But Scope Creep rears its head just as often there, the difference being that the customer assumes the risk. Still, this usually works out cheaper than what a "Risk-Adjusted" Fixed Price would have been. Blocks Several years ago, we pioneered a variation on the Time and Materials model called "Support by Blocks". In that model, the customer pre-purchased blocks of time, like 80 hours, for example, for a single blended rate that was discounted for their pre-payment. These hours would be consumed by anyone on our team, developers, analysts, consultants, etc., to meet customer requests until the block was depleted. It was a better model for both the customer and us than traditional Time and Materials and has served us well for many years. The downside was that some customers became too focused on the hours, often hoarding them to stave off having to buy more. This also meant that they would never reach the full potential of what these solutions could achieve for them. It was understandable but frustrating for me to know what "could be". It often triggered their "we'll take it from here" reflex when a block was depleted. This always meant the end of the line for any hope of exploiting the full potential for their business. They were obliviously missing out on dollars to save pennies. Is it Time? I have had this idea in my head for many years about an "All-You-Can-Eat" subscription model to eliminate scope and hours from the equation. But to not go broke, you would have to either charge an astronomical amount or exclude the development work. And each time I had looked in the past, there was still way too much development work, relegating any Subscription to just Support. But in the meantime, Microsoft has continued to advance the low-no-code platform, and I was noticing the utilization of our code-writing developers was falling, and developers are some of the highest paid people in a partner organization. To confirm my thinking, we analyzed our customers over the last 18 months, and sure enough, the level of actual code development had continued to drop. In fact, in the previous 12 months, less than five percent of our customers needed any actual code development at all. Bingo! "The Works from Forceworks" I could not wait to take this new information and finally build the model I had been thinking about for years... so I did. "" is that all-inclusive model with unlimited everything except code. One challenge is making sure a prospective customer understands what "Code" means. They seem to feel that anything they could not figure out themselves must be "Code" and fear that anytime they open their mouth, the "Code Alarm" will go off. But our analysis says that is not the case. And frankly, the way you make money on a "Service as a Subscription" is over time, so renewals are far more important than some quick buck made from the code alarm. If that "Code Alarm" goes off too often, or possibly even once, the renewal is at risk. Again, this model would not have been viable even two years ago, so I have to give Microsoft a big hug. The Big Gulp A model like this is not without its risks for us. For one thing, our primary competition was not other partners but rather customers thinking about hiring someone internally. While these people are not easy to find, the thought that they could be found limits what a customer would pay, and it would have to be less than an internal salary. We went with an extensive list of unlimited services, starting from and including deployment(s). There were some heated conversations internally about what could be realistically offered on an unlimited basis for a fixed monthly cost. Still, I pushed for the max, and I happen to own the company. The service does have a one-year term to prevent someone from maxing out capacity in the first month and then canceling. Resellers To work financially, we need scale in both customers and people for a model like this. We had dabbled with some resellers with our "Support by Blocks" model, but I was not happy with the results, both for us and the end customers. Adding a third party in the middle created conflicts. But this new model is perfect for resellers, who are all looking for a recurring revenue component that they can bolt onto their existing billing arrangements with their customers. And since it is "scopeless" and "unlimited", there really is no reason for conflicts. Summary It is early days, but we have already transitioned most of our current customers to this new model and have started onboarding new ones. So, the customer verdict seems to be in on the value proposition. I expect to be underwater for a while financially as we scale up, but I was prepared for that. I am "Betting the Farm" as they say. We are firmly planted in the battle for the limited talent, but even those folks seem to like this model, so I am not too worried about that. In fact, I have another idea for that, but I will let you in on that a little later :) Those of you who know me know that I am not afraid to try new business models, and so far, each one has been better than the last, and I feel stronger about this one than any other. Wish me luck! /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/23137313

Are you over-paying for Dynamics 365? 02/02/2022

Are you over-paying for Dynamics 365? Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications are fantastic products. Unrivaled power and features and priced accordingly. Are they over-priced? No! Are you over-paying? Maybe. So, let's unpack this one. My Cable Bill Several years ago, I moved into a new home, and shortly afterwards the local cable company salesperson was on the phone. I was easily talked into the "Gold" package because it "included everything" and I suffer from FOMO. After a few months I realized that I only watched about 10 channels out of the 500+ that I was paying for. Maybe there are other people who watch all 500? Anyway, I was able to slash my cost by about 80% and not miss a thing. But I digress... What can you do Dynamics 365? Out-of-the-box, Dynamics 365 apps bring a ton of features and capabilities. The Enterprise Sales app for example, at $95/pupm, allows you to create and manage Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities, but it doesn't stop there. Since it is built on Dataverse, it also integrates with Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Office and the entire Power Platform. You can create Product catalogs and multiple pricelists, along with quotes, orders and invoices. It also includes A.I. capabilities to help you predict sales risks and next best actions to take. For your sales team you can enable guided selling to quicky onboard new sellers and implement best sales practices across your team. With your Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license, you can set up and experience Sales Premium features such as Sales accelerator, conversation intelligence, and predictive scoring. There are many more features to explore also. And you can add Dynamics 365 Enterprise Service to this for an additional $20/pupm. But wait a minute... will you use all of these capabilities, or even many of them? If not, maybe Dynamics 365 Sales Professional is a better option. Professional Microsoft also offers Dynamics 365 "Professional" for Sales or Service at $65/pupm. Or you can get both Sales and Service for an additional $20/pupm (total of $85/pupm). In this "scaled down" version, they have changed a few things. For Sales Professional for example, the following are not included: Competitor tracking, Customization or extending out-of-the-box reports, charts and dashboards, Knowledge base, Embedded AI, Forecasting, Sales Goals, Product families/hierarchies, Product relationships, Business card scanning, Sales Literature, Territories, Sales Teams, Email Engagement, Predictive Forecasting and Relationship analytics. There are also some limitations in place including: a maximum of 15 custom tables, maximum of 5 Business Processes, maximum of 5 custom reports or charts or dashboards, maximum of 2 custom forms or views. Similar limitations apply to Service. But wait a minute... does this still include things you may not use? Are the customization limitations too great for you? Customization Even though Microsoft Dynamics 365, particularly the Enterprise apps, include a boatload of features and capabilities, we still find ourselves working with customers to configure and extend the apps. Adding custom tables and fields, adding new relationships, building new forms and views as well as workflows. We often end up modifying much of what is provided out-of-the-box. All of this in effort to make Dynamics 365 "fit" an individual business' needs. Most of the time these customizations become the priority elements, and much of what was provided out-of-the-box is never used. Every Customer is Different For some customers many of the provided features and capabilities will be utilized. For others, they may just use the basics. For others still, their customization needs are so great that Dynamics 365 really ends up serving as more of a platform to build on. If you are in the first group, then you are probably not over-paying as you will get the benefit of the features that the price incudes. But if you are in either of the other two groups, you are absolutely over-paying! RapidStartCRM Okay, here's my pitch. Some readers complain when I promote my business, but I gotta eat too. We created RapidStartCRM to address the very issues I described above. RapidStartCRM is a basic Sales and Service app built on the same platform as Dynamics 365. What does that mean? Well, first it means that many of the things that are available for Dynamics 365 are also available for RapidStartCRM, like integration with Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Office and the entire Power Platform. While the enterprise apps obviously come with many more features, even though they look similar side-by-side, RapidStartCRM will manage your basic Sales and Service needs, which even at the lower Dynamics 365 "Professional" level would cost you $85/pupm. If you foresee a lot of customizations in your future, RapidStartCRM shines even brighter. Since RapidStartCRM is built on the same Dataverse platform as Dynamics 365 the customization capabilities are the same. RapidStartCRM also has over 70,000 users, about half of which came from either Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.com! Oh, I almost forgot to mention, RapidStartCRM itself is free and runs on a Microsoft Power Apps license will cost you $5/pupm. Why Stop There? Yes, we are exploiting the fact that Dynamics 365 is very expensive and too complex for many users. And yes, we built a low-cost alternative on the same platform right next to Dynamics 365. But then Microsoft gave us a clear path to continue our exploitation with their Dynamics 365 Field Service application at $95/pupm and their Dynamics 365 Project Operations app at $120/pupm. The exact same issues described above apply to both of these apps as well. So, we thank Microsoft for the inspiration and went ahead and built our RapidStartCRM Field Service addon and RapidStartCRM Project Management addon, both priced at $10/pupm. Why so Cheap? Microsoft has basically taken over the business world with their Microsoft 365 products (formerly called Office 365). They offer a very robust set of features for your productivity needs starting at $5/pupm. As a result, many SMB customers and enterprise departments have gravitated to them. When it comes to adding business applications however, too many of these same customers choke when they see the costs. The expected result is that they seek business solutions elsewhere, from other vendors who, while they don't integrate or share the security model of Microsoft 365, they do meet the price criteria! We intentionally priced our top-rated apps, which run completely within your Microsoft cloud environment, to make it easy for you to decide to maximize your Microsoft 365 investment and security. Also, full truth be told, we know that many of you will reach out to us to assist with your support, integration and customization work. If you want to learn more about RapidStartCRM, , or hit me up! /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/22001651

The Myth of Single Version of the Truth 02/02/2022

The Myth of Single Version of the Truth I've heard this term bandied about for many years now, "Single Version of the Truth". As Jack Nicholson once said, "You can't handle the Truth!" I would paraphrase that as, "You can't afford a Single version of the Truth, and you wouldn't want it anyway!". So, let's see how many of you I can get to agree on this one :). What is Implied? From a business standpoint, "Single Version of the Truth" or SVT, is often pimped as this utopian idea that all of your data, about everything to do with your customers and your business is in one place. providing the coveted 360-degree customer view. First, no such Utopian application can be subscribed to from anyone on this planet today. However, you can subscribe to several applications and potentially spend an enormous sum of money and time to wire them all together, giving the illusion of a SVT. While some of you might be sad to hear that SVT is not "push-button", I will try to cheer you up by saying you would not want it anyway. Silos are Bad! Yes, if you read back on my blog, you will see me also preaching that data silos are bad. In fact, I used the same post image for this post. But that was then, and this is now. Back in the days before the Power Platform, when all we had was Dynamics 365, we also sang Microsoft's tune of the time that "You want all of your data in one place", meaning in a Dynamics 365 database. This was a strong argument for a customer who was considering multiple point solutions made by vendors other than Microsoft. And we had a great deal of success consolidating those multiple point solutions under a single Dynamics 365 umbrella. But to call that a SVT was a stretch. Maybe "Fewer Versions of the Truth" with a 245-degree view of the customer was a more realistic goal, as that was typically the outcome. Dynamics Silos Even under the Dynamics 365 brand there were, and still are, silos. Dynamics 365 Sales runs on top of Dataverse, while Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics 365 Finance run on their own databases. Dual-write is an ongoing effort to create the SVT illusion. Power Platform The Power Platform arrived and blew up the whole concept of SVT. Even Microsoft started singing a different tune, promoting their Center of Excellence "COE", so you could more easily manage the possibly thousands of environments (aka Data Silos) that users could now create in your enterprise tenant. So, is SVT dead? The problem was never with "Point Solutions" and their siloed data, it was with "Point Solutions" and silos from other vendors. With the Power Platform, Microsoft created a rocket engine to crank out "Point Solutions"... but these would be "inside the wall". Silos are Good! So now let me be my own devil's advocate. I will take our own organization, Forceworks for example. The Sales side of our business watches over AppSource prospects and website prospects etc. You can probably imagine that with over 50K users of our RapidStartCRM app, that means there were way more prospects than that, who did not move forward. So, we have thousands of prospects and most of these will never amount to anything, of course. Not unlike any other business where the number of prospects is typically exponentially higher than the number of actual customers. The Services side of our business works with our actual customers, not every RapidStartCRM user becomes a customer. Our customers are organizations who have engaged us to support or customize not only RapidStartCRM, but also Dynamics 365 or anything Power Platform related. So, our Service database is a fraction of the size of our Sales database. In our case, Sales runs on a customized version of RapidStartCRM in one environment, and Service runs on another customized version of RapidStartCRM in another environment. The rationale? Why should the service team have to navigate around thousands of irrelevant records? If they are not customers, they don't need to be in the Service silo. But what about Synchronization! Much of "Synchronization" is unnecessary hype. Yet many organizations pay us tons of money to try to achieve it. Flow can handle 90% of what is actually useful. For example, when a prospect in our Sales solution becomes a customer, a simple flow creates the record in the Service solution. If a service customer asks about a new app or service, a simple flow in the service app updates the record in the Sales solution. Unintended Consequences If you have not yet built a flow that acted beyond the scope of what you intended... you have not bult enough flows. Both of our environments have multiple flows, many quite complex, automating a bunch of things. Were all of these in a single environment, the chances of a Service flow accidently scooping in some Sales records for example is much higher. So, flow development becomes much more complex. But what about my 360-degree view of the Customer? Let's face it, you are not going to get around the fact that you will have multiple sources of data. At least with Microsoft, it is possible to have all of those data sources under one roof, which I do not believe can be provided by any other company today. If you really want that 360-degree view, yet another application can give you that, Power BI (Microsoft's Business Intelligence app). Power BI can not only connect, munge together and regurgitate beautiful charts and graphs using data from all of your Microsoft sources, it can bring in most of your external data sources as well. I would still argue that the "360-Degree view" is over-rated, the only positions that might actually need that are very high senior management, and we all know they don't look at data anyway... unless it supports a personal agenda. So that's my take on this. If you are looking to shovel money to someone in pursuit of this dream, hit me up. Or if you just want business applications that "work" for your business, you can also hit me up. Feel free to leave any comment you like, as long as it supports my personal agenda, I am a CEO after all :) /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/21996338

Pay as you Go, Go, Go 11/04/2021

Pay as you Go, Go, Go Microsoft just announced, and released in the next breath, a new Pay as You Go model for Power Apps. This has huge implications for all organizations and also for users of our free solution. Let's unpack what it means. Pay as you go Who doesn't like the idea of only paying for what you use? I wish it applied to more things: "I only ate half of this hamburger, so I'll just you pay half the price", "I only drove my car three days last month, so I'll just pay 10% of my car payment". "I didn't need to see doctor last year, so I won't pay that health insurance bill." Sadly, most things don't work that way, but some do, like gas for your car, electricity in your home, and now... your critical business applications! What does this mean? This is a new option, in addition to the previous option of licenses. Before, when thinking about users for your applications, you may have pondered whether Sally would use the app often enough to justify paying for a license for her every month. Or those seasonal staffers, or volunteers who use your app sporadically. With this new model, you don't have to think about any of that anymore. You also don't have to worry about getting and assigning new licenses for newly onboarded staff. You just "Share" the app with them. Cost impacts Basically, in the background Microsoft is watching your app. When Bob signs in and uses it, "cha-ching", Bob is added to your monthly bill. If Bob did not use your app next month, he is not added to your bill for that month. Brilliant! So your monthly bill will go up and down based on how many users used your app in the month. For seasonal staff, maybe you see a cost spike in November, but the cost plummets back down in December for example. How do you get it? Well... it depends. Many organizations use Azure for various things and have an existing Azure subscription. Many do not. An Azure subscription is required as that is where the Pay as you go mechanics are located. If you do not have one, you can go and create one with a credit card. Once you have an Azure Pay as you Go subscription established, you won't necessarily need to go back there, it is kind of a one-time step. It should take about 10 minutes. Environments The next thing you will need to do is decide which environments you want to utilize Pay as you Go for. Then connect those environments to the Azure Pay as you Go subscription. After that you can just share your apps with any users as you do today. But only pay when the apps are used by those users. Questions Yes this begs more questions than it answers, and some of those details are filtering out as I write this. But I have a feeling this will be a game-changer both for Microsoft and RapidStartCRM customers! /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/21054794

Hit 50K Users? Get ready for the knock-offs. 09/03/2021

Hit 50K Users? Get ready for the knock-offs. Shortly after we launched RapidStartCRM back in 2015, a couple of competitors followed us into the emerging space we identified. They are gone now, but new ones occasionally pop up. I hear "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". First Mover Advantage As the very first simple-to-use CRM solution built on Microsoft's Business Applications platform, we did have an early advantage. We brought a lot of SMB knowledge to the offering, and SMBs were eating it up. My assumption that there was a market hungry for CRM, but turned off by the complexity of Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.com, proved correct. Even Microsoft was a promotor of RapidStartCRM, seeing it as a path to capture a segment of the market they were never very good at. But the first mover advantage won't carry you forever. While we may be able to forever claim we were the first, it requires ongoing work to continue to claim we are the best. First Users Advantage Being the first to market is important, but having the first users of a new product, is much more valuable. As an SMB ourselves, we could anticipate many needs for a simple CRM, and we incorporated them into the very first version. But our ability to anticipate needs pales in comparison to actual user feedback. While largely the same application (in appearance) that we launched in 2015, there have been over 25 version updates over those years. Every one of those updates was a direct result of feedback from our growing user base. I see what you did there When we launched, there was no "AppSource", the best our potential competitors could do was watch one of our videos to try and reverse-engineer what we were doing. A few tried, some even copying and pasting our web copy. I was mostly annoyed at the sheer laziness of their efforts. It's a little different today, our app is now available to anyone via , and not surprisingly of the competitors I am aware of today, each of them had installed RapidStartCRM in advance of launching their copies. Some have at least attempted to take a slightly different approach, yet others simply came up with a catchy name and are basically trying to replicate what they think we are doing. One even pretended to be a customer and reached out with questions! Even Microsoft closely dissected and reviewed RapidStartCRM as they were developing the "Business Edition", the "never launched" predecessor to the Dynamics 365 Professional offers. The Missing Link The primary reason we have had so many updates, while our competition seldom gets past their first one, is the over 50,000 users we have on our app. You don't get that many users launching a knockoff with your fingers crossed. Sure our brand recognition for RapidStartCRM is high, but that would not mean anything if the app was not excellent, and continuously updated as new capabilities come out and features are requested, as long as both of those items fit within our mantra of "Simple-to-Use". We closely evaluate any changes, to ensure we don't trip the touchy complexity wire. This is a lesson some of our aspiring competitors should learn as they replicate our concept, but then proceed to add a bunch of crap to it. Simple isn't Easy You would think that building something simple should be easier than building something advanced... it's not. Even with Microsoft's vast resources, the Dynamics 365 Professional apps that they positioned for SMB, missed the simplicity mark by a mile. The fact that so many SMBs are using the professional apps is a testament more to Microsoft's marketing might, than the apps being appropriate for most of their SMB customers. It's funny how our roles have reversed. When they were first promoting RapidStartCRM it was with an eye towards eventually moving those new customers to Dynamics 365. Instead, many Dynamics 365 customers are moving to RapidStartCRM. Of course I knew this would happen, but I continued to smile as they told me about "their" plans for RapidStartCRM. It's about the Churn In the SaaS software business "Churn" is a critical number. Basically it means that while you successfully sold a customer on your product (Yay!)... they cancelled shortly thereafter (Boo!). While Microsoft does not publish their churn rates, I am aware that for SMB customers, over the years, the churn rate for Business Applications has been very high. Not surprising since Microsoft cannot not grasp the concept of "Simple", a natural by-product of an organization comprised of thousands of engineers. RapidStartCRM's churn rate on the other hand is near zero, the one exception being future competitors of course. Healthy Competition While anyone would want to have a monopoly in their space, it is not realistic in a free enterprise economy. I look forward to "healthy" competition, something that moves the needle forward. But for now, I guess we will have to continue being the ones who move the needle, because knockoffs don't move anything. If you are thinking about a Simple CRM, think RapidStartCRM, the first, with the most users, and still the best, Simple-to-Use CRM built on the Microsoft Power Platform. /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/20364116

Your organization (tenant) is over capacity 08/30/2021

Your organization (tenant) is over capacity It seems like a couple of times a week I get a panicked message from a customer who saw the dreaded alert: "Your organization (tenant) is over capacity" in the Power Platform Admin Center. Sometimes they are over a little, and sometimes they are using 500% or more of their allocated capacity. Let's chat about this shall we? Capacity We still have a handful of customers on the "Old Model", the combined "Extra Storage" SKU. If I recall it was $10 USD/GB... and people complained about that. Recently Microsoft changed from the "Additional Storage" model to a "Capacity" model. In the process they split the storage buffet into three entrées: Database Capacity, File Capacity and Log Capacity. They also changed the pricing... significantly. Additional Database Capacity will cost you $40/GB/Month, additional File Capacity goes for a mere $2/GB/Month, and additional Log Capacity comes in at $10/GB/Month. Truing up can be an expensive proposition. What will happen? The first concern of customers seeing this ominous alert is that their business applications will suddenly stop functioning. Clearly this would not be good for Microsoft's business relationship with that customer. So nothing currently running will "stop". However you may notice that will not be able to create new environments, or copy or restore environments, while you are over-capacity. It is not clear if there are any other things that may be happening like throttling your speed, etc., but regardless, you are out of compliance. So while not something you need to solve immediately, you do want to solve it. If you have an urgent issue like needing to copy or restore an environment while you are over capacity, you can request a 30-day extension. Buying your way out For some customers, the least expensive option is to simply buy your way out of capacity debt. We recently had a customer with about 100 Sales Professional licenses inquire whether moving to the Enterprise Sales licenses would be an option. Not a chance, in their case the cost was almost triple, and only got them halfway there. So how much do you get? Many Dynamics 365 customers have no idea how much storage capacity they have, or how they got it. You can get a better understanding in the . Here is an example screenshot of a tough situation: As you can see this customer is way over their allotment. On the right side you can see how they got their allotment, including their default capacities, additional capacity via additional user licenses (not all licenses include this), and any extra Capacity they may have purchased, all of which sum up to their totals. In this case this customer has quite a few users, but most are on Dynamics 365 "Professional" licenses, which add no capacity. We estimated their cost to true up by just buying the capacity needed with a small cushion would be about $3,300/month. Wow! Alternatives There are several things you can do to help this situation. First we'll tackle the low-hanging fruit, that I can immediately see is their Log storage, which is about 700% over. Since log storage is not very expensive, their cost to get right-side up on this is not that much, about $160/month, so it is not worth having "our" team do anything. But on their own, they can delete some of their old logs, or if they need them, export them out to cold (cheap) storage. They can also look at "what" they are logging to make sure each item needs to be logged, they may have hit the ole "Check all" option when they set it up. The next item to look at is File where they are about 422% over. Again, their cost to get right-side up on this is not that much, about $300/month. On their own they can run some advanced find queries and delete unneeded email and note attachments, and just pay the difference. The cost to do more, would not have an ROI. Lastly, we come to the real problem... Database, where they are also about 435% over. This would be expensive to buy out of @$40/GB, about $3,000/month! This is an area worth having our team dig in and see what can be done... and we did. Solutions and Addons The first thing to understand is that your "Database" holds more than just "your" data. Any solutions you have installed also consume this, including the Dynamics apps themselves. Kind of like how your 16GB iPhone only has like 12GB available before you even touch it. It might seem like there is nothing you can do about this, but if you are not using all of the advanced features of your Dynamics 365 apps, you may want to try with it's much smaller solution footprint. Speaking of solutions, and the capacity they consume, you should definitely review any addon solutions you may have installed and are not using anymore. Just delete them. For those you need, make sure you are on the latest versions, as many ISV's have made their code more efficient now that capacity is an issue. If you have some old addons, with no recent updates, you may want to consider switching them for more modern ones with similar capabilities. If you are stuck with an old addon for some reason, maybe hire a developer like us to do a code review. Again, the Capacity issue is recent, previously ISVs for addons did not really worry much about storage, so efficient code was not a priority. Normal Data Of course every time a new record, like a Contact for example, is added, all of the data entered into each of those fields is added to the database. So think about all of the records you have, not just the obvious ones like Accounts and Contacts, but also activities, etc. it creates a huge pile of data. Of that huge pile, your team is probably only engaging with a fraction of it on a daily basis. Before capacity was an issue, there was no reason not to keep 10 year-old emails, but now you have to think about it. The same goes for any "inactive" records. The first question is "Do I need this at all?", if the answer is still "yes", then the next question is "Do I need it to be in here?". Probably not. It may make sense to archive that data to cold (cheap) storage. Bonus result: your system will run faster! Transactional Data Some customers generate enormous volumes of "Transactional" data, often automatically imported via an integration. Do you need to see each of these transactions in your database, or would a summary of totals do the trick? If you do need to see it all, could it be moved to "colder" storage and accessed by your users via "". Import History When you import a csv or other data file into your Dataverse environment, like via data import in Dynamics 365, that excel or other file remains behind after it has been parsed and added as records. You can free up some space by deleting these import files, just make sure you don't check to "delete all records imported" also. Indexes Here's another thing you can look at that could have an impact. If Quick Find lookups are configured for data that's frequently used, this will also create additional capacity-hungry indexes in the database. Admin-configured Quick Find values can increase the size of the indexes based on: The number of columns chosen and the data type of those columns. The volume of rows for the tables and columns. The complexity of the database structure. Because custom Quick Find lookups are created by an admin in the org, these can be user-controlled. Admins can reduce some of the storage used by these custom indexes by doing the following: Removing unneeded columns and/or tables Eliminating multiline text columns from inclusion Bulk Delete Jobs You can create bulk delete jobs for two things, first for the initial cleaning up, and second to help to keep clean. You can use bulk delete to clear out old records of all kinds initially, old emails or attachments, completed system jobs, etc. Afterwards, you can them be recurring, so they automatically clear this old data on your schedule. Unused Environments All environments consume a minimum of 1GB... even if they don't have a Dataverse database. So you should regularly review your list of environments in the , and remove any that are not being actively used. Even some that are being used, should be reviewed to make sure they are necessary. Be aware, that unless you have deactivated the capability, by default any user in your organization can create an environment. We frequently find environment "experiments" that were created, and abandoned by users, including users who are no longer with the organization! Note that Default, Production, and Sandbox environments are all counted for capacity, however Trial, Preview, Support, and Developer environments are not counted. Conclusion If after doing all of these things, you are still over-capacity, you may have no option but to buy more. Depending on your specific scenario, some or all of these steps may have significant to very little effect. But it's definitely worth a try. Based on the potential expense, we saw a new business opportunity and recently launched . Maybe we can help you. /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/20305697

"Even after everything, we still have adoption problems" 08/27/2021

"Even after everything, we still have adoption problems" One of the smartest things I have done in a while was to introduce a monthly Principals call with our customers. Our customers are all very happy with our team, so why rock the boat by injecting myself? For the same reason I might tell the waiter that my food is "fine" when it isn't. The Owner's Dilemma Every single day people go into a restaurant and have a sub-par meal. It seems the wait staff everywhere has been trained to ask leading questions, like "isn't your steak great?", with a huge smile on their face. Like many people, it's easier to just say "it's fine", rather than interfere with their smile. Instead, I just make a decision to not come back. Meanwhile, the owner asks smiley how things are going, and they reply, "Well people seem to love your food!". Which leaves the owner wondering why sales are down. Our sales are fine, but I'm not taking any chances. How's it Going? I have no interest in a "feel good" conversation with my customers. Instead, I am more like a Business Applications detective, asking hard questions, probing for the real issues. It was on one of these recent Principals calls that a customer conceded that they were having adoption problems. Ugh... the perennial bane of Business Applications. This particular customer was on Dynamics 365. In addition, they had bought basically everything that Microsoft business applications group offers, including Dynamics 365 Marketing, Customer Insights, Power B.I., oh... and a few more "Insights". They had also built out an extensive user training library. It seems like they had done everything possible to insure adoption, yet for a particular group they were struggling. Carrot, Stick or Both The usual way most organizations approach adoption is, "Use it, or else". Or else what? This seems to range from, "you'll get a reprimand (oh no!)" to "you're fired (oh shit!)", with a lot of options in between. The growth in "work from home" has not helped the adoption challenge. A few other organizations try the more "touchy/feely" approach. "If you use the system, we'll enter you in a drawing for a "NEW CAR!!!" And still other organizations use both, you either get a new car, or you get fired. (You have to say that in your best Alec Baldwin voice.) Damn Salespeople Most organizations have workable adoption from their administrative staff, and pretty good adoption from their support staff. It never fails, when I hear this concern, it is always related to the sales staff. For this particular customer they had an even bigger challenge in that their key sales staff is made up older "Rainmakers". Rainmakers Most businesses have a sales team. Within that team you have mostly average sales people, but often there will be a few that make most of your sales. The 80/20 rule applies. These are your "Rainmakers". Any other salesperson could quit and you wouldn't bat an eye, but if a Rainmaker quit... it would keep you up at night. Rainmakers are rainmakers because they are smart, and smart enough to know that they are Rainmakers... with leverage. The kind of leverage that, if they don't use your system, they know nothing will happen. They are completely unmotivated by your pleas to track their sales activities. So your forecasts are shit. Whether you are heading for your record high month, or record low month, you won't discover until the following month. Herein lies the challenge. Attempts so Far The Rainmaker challenge was not lost on this customer, and they initiated several efforts to overcome it. More training materials of course, and an ongoing effort to make their apps simpler to use. Not unimportant, but not effective either. In my experience the only way to motivate a Rainmaker is to provide them with a tool that makes them more money by using it, than not. Full Stop! Easier said than done, but all other efforts are window dressing. Some Ideas for thought Vlad, a Principal in our organization on the call, suggested playing to ego as one idea. If you know you are are a Rainmaker and won't be fired, it can definitely swell your self-importance, leading to exponential ego growth. If you have been to a car dealer, you may have seen "The Board". Usually a white board visible to all salespeople showing who is at the top in sales so far that month. While Rainmakers will always be in the top 3, being at the very top is food for their ego. Motivation and Manipulation are often the same thing. Vlad's thought was to start tracking the leaderboard, and sending periodic notices to the sales team to login to see it. While there is no silver bullet for adoption, this could motivate a segment. Day in the Life Another more abstract idea of mine was more in the line of making them more money by using the system, shifting from their Ego to their Greed. Maybe you are offended by that term, but let's be honest, the best salespeople are usually greedy egomaniacs, and most companies need them anyway. Most of them also have their "secret sauce", their unique "process" if you will. If you understand their process, you can use your system to possibly grease their wheels for them. In many cases, getting them to share their secrets may be a challenge, so some forensic analysis on their past wins may provide some clues. The goal is to give them a self-serving reason to use the system. Outlook and Memory I find that many of these Rainmakers use a combination of Outlook and their memory to manage their pipeline. Ask any of them how well that is working for them and they will all say "Great! The only way I have ever done it!". Newsflash, your memory is shit, and Outlook is a mail program that can't keep track of anything. If they had ten deals going on, they probably could not name six of them off the top of their head. The four they would remember are the ones closest to becoming money in their pockets. These may not even be the best deals financially for them, they are just the closest. It's Sales Human Nature. So my goal was not to "solve" you adoption issues in this post, but spark some ideas. I would love to hear your other Rainmaker adoption ideas in the comments below. /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/20283806

We Upgraded from Dynamics 365 to RapidStart CRM 08/24/2021

We Upgraded from Dynamics 365 to RapidStart CRM I have had my head down for a while working on the next version of RapidStart CRM. We also recently deployed RapidStart CRM for our own support operations. In the process, I came across a few items that I thought would be of interest to the users of our free app, and since they would also work for any Power App, including Dynamics 365, I thought I might discuss them. Next Version Before I get into this, I want to clarify what I mean by "Next Version" of RapidStart CRM. We have been developing this product since 2015 when we launched it a the Worldwide Partner Conference (Now called Inspire). Over the years we had made hundreds of updates and tweaks in direct response to users. We also refactored the solution a couple of years ago to run on the low cost Power Apps licenses in addition to Dynamics 365. Each update, with the exception of the refactoring, had progressively fewer changes as we honed in on our target customers' requirements. I am pleased to inform you that the next version will have the fewest tweaks yet... I mean it is damn near perfect already. So let's get back to our internal project. Forceworks Support We had been running our support operation on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for over 10 years. Several times I had contemplated moving it to RapidStart CRM, but as a certified partner my licenses were free, so I kept putting it on the back burner. Our support operation is not very complicated. Customers buy blocks of hours which we add to their bank, and we track our activities against those blocks. We also maintain a portal where customers can login and see their bank balance as well as review all activities. We had been using a third-party portal since before Microsoft even contemplated a portal product. The portal company had been purchased by another company for other assets of value to them and the portal product came with the package. But portals was not a priority for them. I figured it was a matter of time before they shut it down. So the time had come to move. Dynamics 365 So, as I said I get Dynamics 365 licenses at no cost. So it might seem an obvious choice just to fire up a Power Apps Portal and connect it to our existing instance. and be done. However, as years have gone by now with us supporting customers on RapidStart CRM, many of whom had moved to it from Dynamics 365, I have come to not really like Microsoft's first-party apps very much. I truly feel they are unnecessarily complicated and bloated. And while my licenses may be free, any additional database capacity is not. Our instance, even though it was not doing all that much, was consuming the lion's share of our capacity. So I made the decision to "upgrade" our support operation off of Dynamics 365 and on to our own RapidStart CRM. Also, Power Apps Portals works the same on RapidStart CRM, so there was no reason to continue with the bloated beast. And, if for some reason I was no longer getting free licenses, my cost would be about $10 vs. $95 per user... a factor in many other customers' "upgrading". Migration We could have done this upgrade/migration in a day, but I took this opportunity to make some improvements to our process. Mainly around automation, nothing we could not have done before, but this was a good time, since we were opening things up. We started with the same RapidStart CRM solution as our customers get, and installed it from on a new environment the same way any customer would. We made use of the RapidStart CRM Accounts, Contacts and Cases. We created two custom Tables, one for Case Notes, to track time and activities, and one for Support Hours, to track the customers' purchases and banks. We also created several Cloud Flows with Power Automate... things like calculating hours and various customer notifications. In addition, we added some specific charts to the RapidStart CRM dashboards for quickly getting a view of things. We also tweaked the RapidStart CRM App to hide Opportunities and a couple of other items we were not using for this need. Lastly, we mapped and migrated all of our historical data to the new environment. I didn't even pause before I hit the "delete" button on our old bloated environment we had depended on for 10 years. Portals So I mentioned that Microsoft offers a Power Apps Portal. Again, for me it would cost nothing. Depending our your requirements, it might be a good solution for you. Unfortunately, like everything the Microsoft Business Applications group produces... it is more complicated than necessary. This is even more noticeable when your requirements are simple. Our requirement was to have a place customers could log into and see their account information, purchase history, case information and case notes. I wanted it to be clean, simple and easy to maintain. Not too complicated. Our Forceworks main website runs on WordPress, like so many other small to mid-sized businesses. So my preference was a WordPress based portal. My friend, and fellow MVP, George Doubinski had the answer. The WordPress integration solution. Using Alexa, we are able to display any information we want from our RapidStart CRM environment on any WordPress posts or pages. For us, it was a better solution. AlexaCRM can do much more, I am aware of customers running full eCommerce portals with it! If you let George know that you heard about his solution from this post, he promised me he would sing you a short song of your choice. Power Automate Our previous environment had used classic workflows for everything, so this was a good time to move those to Power Automate Cloud Flows. However, I am not 100% sold on Power Automate... yet. Classic workflows still exist because Microsoft has not yet reached parity with Power Automate to be able to turn them off. The "Fullness of Time" does seem to be quite full indeed. But I decided to use Cloud Flows wherever possible. It seems that every time I look for a connector in their expansive list of hundreds, it either does not exist, or does not do what I need it to. This was the case for WordPress also. The connector exists... but is essentially useless. Once again, a fellow MVP to the rescue. Heidi Nuehauser is working with Nick Hance at , and they have a rock-solid Power Automate connector for WordPress that can be used with either Gravity Forms or Contact 7 forms on your WordPress site. If you use the code FORCEWORKS, you can try it out for a month for free. BTW, I did not actually need the Reenhanced connector for our Support site, but while I was under the hood, I decided to update all of the forms on our main Forceworks and RapidStart CRM websites. So now all forms submitted create a record in Dataverse automagically. Results Since our Support Portal is not public (unless you want to buy some hours), I added some screenshots below for your reference. If you would be interested in a similar solution, please contact . Account Summary Page Cases Page Case Details Page /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/20245067

Steve has another Chat with Toby Bowers 08/02/2021

Steve has another Chat with Toby Bowers I have had my head down working on some big things, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Toby Bowers, the Leader of the Microsoft Bizapps ISV Program. I managed to catch him in his car, and got a great update on some new things happening in the ISV arena. Enjoy! Transcript Below: Toby: Hi, this is Toby. Steve: Hey Toby, Steve Mordue, how's it going? Toby: Hey, Steve. I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? Steve: Not too bad. I catch you at a decent time? Toby: You've caught me at a fine time. I'm actually in the car at the moment. I'm just taking my team out for a little celebratory launch after our big Inspire event and also our Ready event earlier this week. So it's actually a good time. Let me just pull over so we can have a chat. Steve: It's Been a pretty frantic couple of weeks for you guys. Toby: Frantic, but good. Yeah. Yeah. We had a great showing at Inspire. We made some exciting announcements across the business applications business, but especially around our ISV program, ISV Connect, as you and I have chatted about before. So, it's been good. Steve: Well that's [crosstalk 00:00:50]- Toby: How about you [crosstalk 00:00:51]. Steve: [crosstalk 00:00:51] the reason for my call is to try and catch up on ISV Connect. We talked some time ago about some things that you kind of had just inherited this role from Googs who moved on and were kind of getting your feet wet. Now you've had a close to a year in this position, right? Toby: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I remember our initial chat and I think in fact I'm guilty, Steve, because we agreed to speak a little bit more often, but it's been an interesting year this past year, as we all know, but yeah, it's been almost a full year of execution since we last spoke and I even remember Steve, the nice article you wrote with some suggestions for me as I sort of took over. Toby: Yeah, I'd love to actually go back to that. We can talk about a little bit about some of the enhancements and announcements that we made last week. Steve: Yeah. I mean last week, I think for a lot of the ISV's that they weren't thrilled with some things as the program got launched, they were starting to kind of get their arms around it. But some of these announcements that I was hearing and hopefully we can talk about today, anything of course isn't NDA, I think should make the ISV community pretty happy. It's making me pretty happy. And really kind of throw some gas on that fire. Toby: Yeah. Well, absolutely. I'd love to reinforce it. I know, I know you get a lot of people listening to your impromptu calls here. So why don't I do this? Let me maybe just set a little bit of context, just kind of where we left off Steve, and then I can hit on the high notes of what we announced and then we can dive into any particular areas. That sound all right? Steve: Yeah. You are pulled over, right? Toby: I am pulled over now, yes. Steve: Okay. Toby: You got my full attention. Steve: All right sure, kind of hit some of the highlights. Toby: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, for those who don't know, we originally set out with the ISV Connect program a couple of years ago to attract ISV's to our platform, building and extending upon it. That platform being both Dynamics 365 and the power platform with a specific focus on partners who had great industry or vertical IP to enhance the portfolio and delivering better value to our joint customers. So through the program itself, it's a revenue share program and we reinvest back in the ecosystem in the form of platform benefits, go to market benefits, co-selling with our field. Toby: So when I sort of took over Steve, I wanted to sort of get a full year of execution in place. And in that first year we were pretty happy with the numbers. We have over 700 ISV's enrolled in the program. Now we use AppSource as sort of the cornerstone of the program. We have, we have 1400 apps or more certified in AppSource. But after that first year, I really with the team wanted to understand how things were landing, and I think your feedback was good Steve. We did a bunch of research. We do partner satisfaction surveys. I of course talked to a lot of partners in my travels. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:59] in a year's time, you can kind of get a pretty good gauge on what was working well? What could work better? What wasn't working well? What do we need to just abandon? What do we need to step on? And I kind of got the feeling that was this readjustment that we just saw was kind of bringing some of those things to light. Toby: That's exactly right Steve. I mean, it's such a diverse ecosystem of emerging partners to large mature partners across a pretty vast portfolio. So, it was a diverse set of feedback, but you're spot on. We wanted to give it a little bit of time, but then check in and listen and make some adjustments. So that's what we did, based on a lot of the feedback we got. Toby: I'd sort of summarize what we changed in three big areas Steve, the first is that the business model itself, the fee structure, and we talked about this last time, but not only having an investible model where you can reinvest, but actually investing in the ecosystem, especially as it's growing like this business is growing. Toby: The second thing was a lot of feedback around the go to market, whether it was the marketing benefits, the co-selling with our field, really just getting that value proposition right Steve, and really delivering on the promise we made. We needed to balance that equation a little bit and equalize the effort. Toby: And then the third piece is really around the platform itself. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but just the platform, the tooling, dev test environments, app sources, and marketplace itself. Toby: So those were the three key areas that we sort of listened and got a lot of good feedback around. So with that in mind, what we actually announced at the event is that first of all, back on the business model we're significantly reducing the rev share fees down from 10 and 20%, which you might recall, we had a standard tier and a premium tier. So we were bringing those fees down from 10 and 20% to 3%, just a flat 3% going forward. Steve: That's across the board? Toby: That's across the board. And in fact, it was part of a broader announcement we made as Microsoft, Steve, where we're also bringing our commercial marketplace fees, so that's both Azure Marketplace and app sources. We get transact capabilities down to that same flat 3%. Steve: So what's the motivation behind that? I mean, what is it that they're hoping that will accomplish for Microsoft? Toby: Yeah, it's interesting. If you catch any of the sessions, even starting with Satya, he really talks about Microsoft wanting to be the platform for platform creators. And then if you parlay that into what Nick Parker said and Charlotte Marconi around being the best platform for partners to do business on, it really just came down to helping the partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. Toby: So it's not a P&L, a profit center for Microsoft. It's a way to deliver benefits. We think it's pretty differentiated in the market compared to some of our peers. And it was sort of interesting to see, because we were planning on bringing the fees down for ISV Connect specifically, and then we started to align across the organization and just thought, gosh, we should just do this in a very consistent way across the entire Microsoft Cloud with that one flat 3%. Steve: So the math equation had to work out something like, if we dropped this to 3%, that's going to grow that side of the business significantly, which is going to increase platform sales, right? There has to be an up for the down. And I guess maybe... I mean, not that the platform wasn't already growing by leaps and bounds, but somebody must've been thinking this thing can grow a lot faster if we get rid of some of these hurdles. Toby: You're exactly right. I mean, it's kind of what we've talked about in the past. Just the value that an ISV ecosystem brings to Microsoft with that, whether it's the industry relevance, industry specific IP, or just a growing ecosystem in general. I don't know if you'd caught what we just did, our earnings earlier this week, but Dynamics 365 is growing 43% year over year, we doubled our power apps customer base. And so to your point, the business is growing, the platform is growing, and we want the ecosystem to grow and we want to attract as many partners to do that as possible. Steve: So, I mean, you can't reduce fees and increase the benefit, you have to have taken some things away or maybe gotten rid of some things that weren't being utilized, or how did that kind of offset? Toby: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, so we are investing deliberately to build this out and kind of putting our money where our mouth is, but we did, you're spot on. We learned a lot around the benefits, the go to market benefits in particular, the second key thing we announced is that we are reducing just down to one tier at that flat 3%. So no more 10% and 20% or a standard and a premium tier. And we're reducing the thresholds within that one tier for partners to unlock those go to market benefits and those marketing benefits. And then what I heard, especially from partners, again, to my point around, you've got some mature partners and some emerging partners, it's not a one size fits all. And so we've got an option sort of an, a lA carte, option for partners to choose marketing benefits that make the most sense for their business. So we just tried to simplify things and streamline things a little bit. Steve: You know, I talked to a lot of partners. We're, kind of unique in that our application is free. So, the revenue shared didn't really come into play for what we were doing because there wasn't a fee for our app or any recurring services with it. But you know, a lot of these ISV's their business is significantly different. They've got revenue generating applications that run on top of your platform. Many of them that kind of told me in confidence that they just weren't paying the fees. They were getting the notice from Microsoft saying, "Hey, please do us a favor and tell us how much money you've made and what you owe us." And many of them were just kind of ignoring that. Steve: I guess if we're getting down into a 3% range, it'd probably make it a little easier for some people to be more honest about things too you think? Toby: Yeah. Well, yeah we hope so. Again, that was kind of my point around balancing the equation and making sure that we're delivering on the promise that we set out with the program itself. And I talked to a lot of partners as well, and there's definitely benefit being realized, whether it's from a marketing perspective or co-selling with our field, again, based on what's important to their business, but you're right, we do think by reducing it to this level and also just getting better at delivering the benefits in a consistent way, we'll have more partners participating in the program. Toby: The one thing I would say, Steve, that I was just going to close off on with this sort of consistency across Microsoft is we also realized that's our value proposition. If we can not only have a similar model with the 3% marketplace fee and ISV Connect fees across Microsoft, but a similar model to the way we deliver those benefits, to the way we engage with technical resources or engage from a co-selling perspective across Azure Teams and 365 Dynamics Power Platform, that's kind of how we differentiate ourselves versus, the rest of the players out in the market. Toby: So we made a bunch of enhancements and announcements across the business Azure teams, ISV Connect obviously, and you'll see us continue to sort of work towards a much more consistent approach from a Microsoft Cloud perspective, because obviously we'd love it if partners were integrating with Teams. We have over 250 million monthly active users with Teams now driving dynamics integrations all the way through to CDM and Dataverse and integration into Azure Synapse. Those are the partners we want to work with and the type of partners we want to support and go to market with. Steve: Well, I'll tell you, I think the 3% has probably eliminated a hurdle for a partner, certainly I remember at the time a lot of partners complaining about the 10 and 20 saying things like, "If it was like three." Okay, well it's three now, so shut up and move forward. Toby: Yeah. We've had a lot of- Steve: And it's interesting, because it's kind of the way we sell is I guess for an industry ISV who built something specifically for Dynamics 365, maybe they approach things a little different. Our approach is more, we really try and sell the potential of the platform because we've got a simple CRM. So we're up against a lot of competing simple CRMs. And when you open one of their CRMs and open, rapid start, for example, they look very similar and do very similar things. So for us, we really have to sell the value proposition of, hey, behind that little CRM that you're using from Acme Cloud CRM company is really nothing. You've got the extent of what you can do with that right there in front of you and there's nothing more that can be done, and we really lean in hard on the potential for things like integration with Teams, with things like integration with Azure. Steve: Obviously the integration with Microsoft 365, all of the pieces that are available in the power platform that we haven't enabled in our app that are there to be enabled, you like the forums and some of the AI stuff, it definitely seems to be a huge differentiator in that sales conversation. Toby: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear that's really what we're trying to get right and stitch together the teams if they exist across Microsoft and iron those out. I think your company is a great example of that Steve, and I know you talked to a bunch of our partners and sort of as an independent third party, we had a few partners join us at inspire. Icertis has been a longstanding partner of ours. They're a similar story from, from Azure Dynamics Teams really across the board, and getting more and more focused on industry solutions with their particular IP. Toby: And then we had more emerging partners like Karma, Frank at Karma talked to us about some of the benefits we're building into the platform, specifically license management, and now he's taken advantage of that. And we have big partners like Sycor, that's been working with us for a long time on the Azure side of the business and is doing some really interesting things now on the dynamic side and sees value in that co-sell motion. Toby: So I think that value prop is what we're trying to land, and then we're seeing lots of different types of partners take advantage of it in different ways, which is great to see. Steve: Yeah, it's not often that you see both a cost of participation come down and the value of the benefits go up. And when we talk about benefits, and before, you and I have talked about some of these go to market benefits, there's a segment of ISV's that could make use of those probably mostly new ISV's that don't really understand that system. Steve: But for a lot of the ISV's, they really didn't see value there, but in the meantime they're maintaining their own licensing systems and their own transaction systems and things like that, which as an ISV, that's just like a tax. You're building your solution to solve a particular problem, but you can't just stop after you built this wonderful solution, you got to protect it, you got to monetize it. So those things ended up being just kind of attacks. Steve: And, every ISV out there has had to kind of build their own system for licensing and transacting. And you guys coming through now recently here would be with the licensing capability we were in that pilot, and that thing's got some great potential, a couple of things left for them to do on that to get that really where it's going to solve a lot of problems that ISV's have had, even with their own licensing. Steve: Because with your own external licensing system, you can only do so much, but working with one that's on the platform, that's essentially the same one you guys are utilizing, is going to be huge for ISV's, and then we'll get to transactability, that's just going to close another piece that ISV's have had to deal with, especially when you talk about those startup ISV's, they know an industry and they can build an app, but when it comes to licensing and transacting, and if they can just tick a button and plug right into a couple of those things, that's going to lower the bar to entry and make it a lot easier for some of those folks to get in I think. Toby: Yeah, I hope that you're right Steve, in fact, I didn't know you were working with Julian Payor and the team on piloting the license management stuff. It's great to hear your feedback. That was kind of the whole intent with the journey. If I rewind a bit with AppSource itself, you'll recall we had to do quite a bit of work on the overall user experience for AppSource. We worked hard with the engineering team to improve that, improve discoverability and search capabilities and just sort of the plumbing underneath. And then the next step was, was licensed management, which we've just GA'd working again with the engineering team, and then from there, to your point, the value proposition, a lot of ISV's put all this together and then you add transactability and the ability to actually sell your stuff on our marketplace to what's now more than 4 million monthly shoppers, going to that destination is it is definitely a point of value that I've heard positive feedback from ISV's on. Toby: So that's why we really invested there. I know it's taking us a little bit of time to get there, but that was another key announcement. We announced license management later in the fiscal year. We'll have translatability and AppSource for our customer engagement apps, for power apps, and then we'll continue to roll out a roadmap from there. Toby: And then the other piece I forgot to mention Steve, we made some noise about as well, was these new sandbox environments. And I know you've given me this feedback before, but you know, sort of in the broader internal use rights world, the value in having sandbox environments for our partners to do dev tests and do customer demos around, I heard loud and clear from you and from other partners. And so that's the other thing we announced. We have these new discounted skews, which are basically just at cost skews across the business for those dev test environments. And then for partners who are participating in ISV Connect and hitting those new lower reduced rev share thresholds, we'll provide those licenses for free. Toby: So we think that's going to be a great new benefit for partners as well, more on that technical and platform side of things. Steve: Yeah. Particularly for the ISV's, because ISV's don't necessarily see a lot of value or need to get Microsoft competencies. Competencies are definitely, as a program that was designed for resellers to demonstrate their competence. But a lot of ISV's don't want to have a need for that. And that's where [inaudible 00:19:22] had historically kind of been tied was to those competencies. Steve: So is there any talk about any sort of... I mean, they did do that kind of short-lived ISV competency, which was primarily around, hey, if you've got an app in AppSource you qualify. Here's some IUR. Steve: So this new program will replace that, but are they going to be revisiting any sort ISV competencies or need? Toby: Yeah, well I won't say too much as far as future plans are concerned, but what I can say Steve is that we did this for biz apps, we did it for ISV Connect because that's our... /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/20007197

Steve has a Chat with Ryan Cunningham 01/07/2021

Steve has a Chat with Ryan Cunningham So I noticed , Product Lead for the Power Apps side of the Power Platform for Microsoft, suddenly come available in Teams. So of course, I ambushed him, and we had a great conversation about Power Apps and the whole Microsoft Business Applications group. Enjoy! Transcript below: Ryan Cunningham: Hello. This is Ryan. Steve Mordue: Hey, Ryan. Steve Mordue. How's it going? Ryan Cunningham: Oh, Steve Mordue. How you doing? Does this mean I'm in trouble? Steve Mordue: No, you are not in trouble, but you are about to be a guest on my Steve has a Chat podcast if you have time and are up for it. Ryan Cunningham: You mean like right now? Steve Mordue: Like right now. Already recording. Ryan Cunningham: Hey, okay. Let me check my calendar. There's nothing I'd rather do right now than being an impromptu guest on a Steve show. Steve Mordue: Well, we'll try and make sure you don't regret that decision. Ryan Cunningham: I regret a lot of decisions, Steve. But it wouldn't be the first. Steve Mordue: So let me ask you first, how long have you been with Microsoft? Ryan Cunningham: I just crossed five years. Steve Mordue: Five years. Ryan Cunningham: Just this past fall. Steve Mordue: I used to be a Salesforce consultant. We were Salesforce consultants for about 10 years and we moved over to Microsoft when they first moved CRM online back in 2011. So about 10 years ago. Ryan Cunningham: Sure, yeah. Steve Mordue: And I remember there being a few bumps making that transition going from on-premise to online, but then it kind of leveled out into what I kind of called the lazy river ride. It was predictable, it didn't move very quickly. There was no urgency and then James took over and he brought in all you young guys. It's been like a rocket roller coaster ride ever since. You ever got one of those really big roller coaster rides where you start praying for it to end, but you know it's not going to. It's just going to keep looping around and you can't get off. I almost feel like for a lot of us partners that have been around at least since it was lazy river, man, my head is rocking from all of the stuff you guys are doing. Ryan Cunningham: We don't do lazy rivers very well, Steve. Steve Mordue: Not anymore. Ryan Cunningham: Not anymore. Steve Mordue: Not anymore. Ryan Cunningham: At least class three rapids around here. Steve Mordue: How is it like on the inside for that kind of pace and ideation and everything that's going on internally? Ryan Cunningham: It's a great question. It certainly has not been constant here either. And again my experience in this community is not as long as yours. I joined at about five years ago and specifically joined the Power Apps team long before Power Apps was really a thing. I joined the team when Project Siena was for those that are familiar with that term, the sort of precursor to Power Apps was kind of in an early beta phase and there were grand ambitions of expanding out who could build software, but not a lot of... How do we say it coming out? Not a ton of product truth yet behind that. Steve Mordue: So I was in the audience, I think for one of your very first presentations before a big group of this product. You looked a little deer in the headlights at the time. Ryan Cunningham: I still feel that way sometimes. But if you take that over the course of the last five years where that idea has solidified, that product has gotten more mature. Certainly there's still more work to do, but we've gone from literally zero humans using at least standalone Power Apps to millions around the world and really also in the same breath gone from very long tail, very simple use cases to this grand merger with the Dynamics platform and customers building and trusting frankly much more sophisticated workloads to the platform. Ryan Cunningham: The world has changed a lot for us internally in how we approach this problem as you go through that product maturity life cycle. In the early stage, it's really about can we make anyone successful here? Now, it is much more about how do we scale and how do we focus on enterprise trust and developer productivity and really turn millions into hundreds of millions and that's... Steve Mordue: Oh, we got a little stall there. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Did I lose you for a second? Steve Mordue: Just for a second. I kind of sometimes think of Microsoft kind of like the Japanese manufacturing economy where they saw ideas that we would come up with and then they would put all their resources to make it better, faster, cheaper whereas a lot of the things we're doing in the power platform are not things that weren't being done before by others, it's just that someone on the team somewhere recognize hey, there's this movement going on out here with some of these smaller players and I think it's got some legs, so let's let's drop all of the arsenal that we have available as Microsoft onto this idea because clearly, we weren't the first low code platform right, but suddenly we're bringing everything Microsoft has to bear on this idea and to see it blow up like that. Steve Mordue: You can say that for almost everything that we've got going on, the bots, the flow, all of these sorts of things. We weren't the first, but then we came in and just put all this horsepower into an idea. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. And it so much is about execution and executing at the right time and doing it for the right people. I think part of the reason why we internally work quickly and don't want to be on the lazy river is also because I think we tried to approach it with this fundamental... This is going to sound weird, but distrust of our own instincts to say, "Look, we have a thesis that people are going to want to build software faster. We have a thesis that they're going to want to do that beyond just forms over data." That's going to take many different forms, but in the nitty-gritty details of who's actually going to find the most value in individual features and individual assembly of those features, there's a lot of margin for error. Ryan Cunningham: And the sooner you get real software into the hands of real humans and they can use it and react to it and give you feedback actively about it, but also just give you feedback through their usage or non-usage of it, then the sooner you have real data to adjust and change and do the next thing. Steve Mordue: So it's not really like build it and they will come, it's more like build something and let's see who comes. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. Steve Mordue: And then build some more. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. Develop a relationship with those people who have come and then make sure that you're building it in a way that they're going to get really excited about it and then extend to others. So we really prioritize when we have enough of a hypothesis to head in a direction get there as soon as possible in the world and then work really closely and quickly once you've landed there to make it great and learn, and be willing to be wrong and be willing to change. Steve Mordue: Don't worry. I pointed out when you [crosstalk 00:07:43]. It's a lot of moving parts. I know you came in through the Power Apps door but have since kind of got your fingers into the whole pieces of platform it feels like. There's a lot of moving parts going on. Whenever you have that many moving parts, there's going to be bumps and issues along the way. So I can imagine that's just a continuous thing that somebody's building something over here. Somebody over here. Maybe they didn't coordinate as well as they should have and it gets discovered later and then I imagine these little fire drills going on internally [inaudible 00:08:20]. Steve Mordue: Left hand wasn't talking to the right hand enough. Let's get that stuff going on. Is that part of your role is to referee those sorts of things or identify them? Ryan Cunningham: I guess you could say that. And that's also part of growing a product and a team across a really wide surface area. How do we put in place the right listening mechanisms to customers, to data and reviews internally so that we can catch those things sooner and react to them more quickly. Because in many ways the ambition here is to span a really wide area of software and do it with a platform that has value and relevance to a number of different people in that spectrum, which is fundamentally really hard. Ryan Cunningham: It's one thing to build a focused experience for one very focused narrow niche of people, it's another... That alone is hard. It's another to build a set of tools that a lot of different people can use. But I think that was actually part of our... If you rewind several years ago and look at what we did between the Power Apps software project which started independently and the Dynamics platform and bringing them together, we really realized at the limit these things converge. At the limit, making it easier for non-traditional software people, citizen developers, amateurs, makers, whatever you want to call them and making it faster for professionals to build apps, those two ends have to meet each other at some point for this to really scale. So let's rip that band-aid off. Steve Mordue: How close do you think we are? How close do you think we are to getting to that ideal point? I mean, I think there's still... Even when I look at the citizen developer stories, a citizen can go so far and obviously we'd like them to go as far as they're able to go, to comfortably go and pro dev takes over. I have to assume there's a continuous motion inside to keep trying to move that line. Let's simplify some of these formulas that may be required that are just whatever those stopping blocks where you see a citizen is able to get this far, it hits a wall. Can we get them to the next wall? How much is going on in that process? Ryan Cunningham: It's a great question and it is really one of the central things that keeps driving a lot of what we do. I mean, we also look at a professional's experience through that journey, right? You look at not enlightened professionals such as yourselves, but all of the other software people out in the world who are very skeptical of platforms and who have an instinct to start from scratch and write everything themselves and go through some- Steve Mordue: Some of that could be financially motivated also. Ryan Cunningham: Oh, sure. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Ryan Cunningham: Right? But I think realizing that two trends are really converging here. To your point earlier, low code is not new, but we've had low code in two very different camps. This is the company that shipped Excel 35 years ago, 36 years ago. We certainly know low code for true amateurs and there's always been this world of people without a software development background working around the boundaries of the software they're given with tools to solve problems and that goes straight to- Steve Mordue: To Access wizards. Ryan Cunningham: Absolutely. Excel macros, VBA, Access, InfoPath and a number of other products outside of Microsoft. That's an enduring tradition. Then on the other side, what we've been doing is professional software people for the last 40 years is just adding layers of abstraction and tooling and not repeating ourselves and borrowing from other people to more efficiently assemble solutions as well. You can look at a platform like what XRM was unofficially and Dataverse and Power Apps on top of it now is just a natural extension of making professionals more efficient by not doing everything from scratch. Ryan Cunningham: Now, that's where those two trends converge and you're absolutely right to answer your question. We focus on okay, we made a number of people successful at that. There's a plenty of existence proof in our community and in our growth numbers and in our customer stories of people coming at the product from both of those directions and getting really successful and having a lot to show for it. Now of course behind the scenes, we're still, I would say very hungry. We're still at a couple orders of magnitude less than the addressable market of software consuming humans of what we could be serving even for all the astronomical growth we've seen in the platform over the last couple years. Ryan Cunningham: I mean, so it is absolutely about how do we take people coming in the front door. I'm a Teams user. I have some Excel skills. I happen to stumble on this Power Apps thing. How far do I get on my first try? What brings me back? How do I go from a user who expresses intent to a user who has a moment of success, to a user who then has an app that's used in production. And even from that point to somebody who keeps coming back to keep putting apps in production. Ryan Cunningham: Then similarly as a professional, how do I expand my tool set from Azure and Visual Studio and how do I have good experiences in my first try with a platform. How do I get to a point where I put something out there that humans are using in the world and I feel good about it. We really closely look at retention. We look at funnels through those early experiences. We look at satisfaction. All those annoying prompts of how likely are you to recommend Power Apps to a friend or colleague. Those are really valuable data points for us in addition to just the general growth rates overall because of indicators of the likelihood to be successful and grow in the future. Steve Mordue: I know we definitely have had success with enterprise organizations in particular where IT has embraced this and shepherded the process and built in their own systems like at the whole chevron way that they go about making power apps developers out of their employees and they've got a very specific process. I guess the other side of the equation is a smaller company that doesn't have those kind of resources. It's just Bob who's always been handy with spreadsheets. Suddenly he's trying to figure his way around. It seems like that's the one where we can't give that guy too much help. Steve Mordue: In enterprise they're going to have their system. Maybe have classes internally. They send their people to and stuff like that. It's a smaller organizations where he's left to the documents he can find and what he can understand. I think one of the things that Microsoft has always been a little bit of a challenge with Microsoft and documentation in particular is that they assume a certain level of understanding, in particular Microsoft and there's lots of folks that are coming to the platform that have zero understanding of Microsoft or history or know anything. Even acronyms or none of it. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Steve Mordue: It's almost like you can't make the documentation too dumbed down to get to that success. Well, how big is the team up to? Now, the last number I heard, and this has been a while ago, it was like 7,000. It was a pretty, pretty good sized team for the bag. How big is it now? Ryan Cunningham: That's a good question. I'm not trying to dodge you. I suppose I could look it up. I don't know for sure what James is... That whole business applications group org size is, but that's actually probably a decent estimate now that's not too inaccurate. Now, that's spread across a really wide surface area. All of the first party Dynamics apps have dedicated teams working on them. There are a number of other orgs within that organization focused on things like advancing AI and whatnot and then there's the core platform team, the Charles Lamanna team which I'm a part of which we structure into a core team focused on the backend, on Dataverse. A core team focused on each of the front-end products, so Power Apps, that's my team, Power Automate, Power Virtual agents. Then we also have a dedicated group in the platform org around admin and pro developers, and those experiences. Steve Mordue: I think when he came in, there was closer to a thousand on the team. So I mean the team has exponentially grown because you can't keep a lazy river going. Ryan Cunningham: Nope. Steve Mordue: You got to have speed when you got that many people on the payroll all working on something. So I also recall a time and I know it's still there, where there was a maniacal focus by the business applications group on the competitors particularly Salesforce at the time. I know that Salesforce is still in the radar. It does feel like we've kind of moved from really being focused on one primary competitor as we've launched all of these different applications into other competitive spaces where now you guys have hundreds of competitors that are all out there. How much do you guys focus on what the competition is doing internally and how you guys gauge what directions to go? Ryan Cunningham: It's really important to be aware of what people are doing in the marketplace. And we do spend a lot of time making sure that we have an intimate and hands-on not just academic understanding of what a lot of different software companies are producing out there. Steve Mordue: So you guys have licenses for everything. Ryan Cunningham: Well, where we can and it gets complicated because Microsoft also partners with many companies. Some companies we have agreements with about who will or won't use what software and we've got a lot of great lawyers to help us navigate that whole [inaudible 00:18:23]. I think the point is look, we're adding software to a world that already has a lot of software in it. It's important to look left and right and be aware of what else is out there because none of this stuff gets consumed in a vacuum by customers. You go to any moderately large customer organization, there's already a CRM system or seven in place. There's already an ERP system or eight in place and there's already a bunch of individual systems around that for point things and that's just the world we live in. Steve Mordue: And if they're exploring something, they're seldom exploring one thing. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly, right? And often if they're exploring especially a platform. There's a lot of existing things and a lot of the conversations become about how does this work in an existing ecosystem and how does it work? How can it potentially consolidate some of those things? We had Ecolab at a recent digital event talking about some of their Power Apps and Dynamics implementations. The average field employee at Ecolab had something like 27 different individual tools that they had to use to get their job done and it was a mix of... I mean, they had dynamics and they had Salesforce, and they had an ERP system, and they had a whole bunch of individual custom homegrown things and this experience was just really terrible for somebody out there on a tablet or a phone trying to inspect your water filter at your company. Ryan Cunningham: Starting to bring in Power Apps as a front door to some of those other systems without replacing them and just even making the wayfinding better is key. So look, it's important for us to be aware of what the world is doing. I would say it's never as simple as pure competitor or not in that picture because look, if you're a company like Microsoft, a lot of the names you rattled off or alluded to are also Azure customers and they're partners with them in other places. We're fundamentally a platform company I think is what it comes down to. Ryan Cunningham: The world is better when people can choose what they want to choose and are able to interoperate with those things at scale. Now obviously, there's incentive for us to have them using our stuff in that mix which is why we care a lot about it, but there's really not... Especially if you look at the body of what we offer even just in the platform, there isn't a clean head-to-head competitor right now for all of it. There are certainly competitors for each piece and I think being aware that those customers have choices and that we want them to genuinely choose the best and we want to be the best, that means we have... /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/17457227

$10 bills for $3 each, for a limited time! 12/01/2020

Microsoft marching masses to peak of Mt. Stupid 11/23/2020

Microsoft marching masses to peak of Mt. Stupid I recently became aware of an interesting concept in psychology called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and Citizen Developers came to my mind. What the hell am I talking about now? Read on to find out. The Dunning-Kruger Effect Essentially the Dunning-Kruger effect is one's own perception of their reality. Often displayed as the following image: For those of you who are listening to this, instead of reading it, I will describe the image. On the vertical axis is confidence level, from low to high. On the horizontal axis is Competence level, from "Know Nothing" to "Guru". It seems that many people, who know nothing, can have high confidence of their knowledge in spite of that fact that they... well... know nothing. In the Dunning-Kruger model this places these people at the peak of "Mt. Stupid". I am very familiar with that particular peak have spent my early 20's there. Following the peak of Mt. Stupid, is the Valley of Despair, where one realizes that they actually know... well... nothing, and their confidence plummets. From there, they travel the "Slope of Enlightenment" back up, slowly, until they reach the "Plateau of Sustainability", or actual Guru level. This assumes they remain on the "Slope of Enlightenment" long enough. Citizen Developers Almost every other day, I am on the phone with Citizen Developers at various stages of this model. Like all of the low-code platforms, the Power Platform's primary goal is to "enable" Citizen Developers. Unfortunately, all of the Low-Code platforms, including the Power Platform, present themselves in such a way as to give a person who "Knows Nothing" very high "Confidence". Thus, marching them Pied Piper style to the peak of Mt. Stupid. I have spoken to Citizens with this high confidence, aka "Cocky", and after about 30 minutes of conversation. aka "Enlightenment", have unintentionally knocked them off the peak and into that valley. Well... not the really cocky ones. Riding the Slope I have been involved with Business Applications for over 20 years and still feel firmly on the "Slope of Enlightenment". Whenever a platform, in my case Microsoft, adds a slew of new capabilities, that "Plateau of Enlightenment" just moves farther out. The best that the most knowledgeable and experienced of us can hope for, is to remain on the Slope... indefinitely. When a "Citizen Developer" thinks they are as capable as one who has been on the Slope for 5-10 or 20 years, they are clearly straddling the peak of Mt. Stupid. While I am not easily impressed by your Power App, I am professional enough to not laugh out loud at your feeble effort, since I understand, sitting on the Peak, you are quite proud of your accomplishment. Circumventing the Peak In my experience, this idea will be harder for men than for women, because it requires reading directions. But if you want to bypass the Peak, start at the Valley. Since you would not have gone to the Peak in the first place, the Valley is not one of despair, but rather the beginning of your journey on the Slope. If you want to do this right, and many say they do, but actually don't, then you need to invest the time. Do not fall for the over-confidence building marketing messaging from any low-code platform. Why? 25% 25% is about the percentage of our practice's work that is allocated to fixing things built by Mt. Stupid flag planters. I am reminded of a buddy of mine when I was a teenager. He thought he was a great mechanic, but every time he rebuilt something, like an engine, there was this odd pile of parts leftover. When asked about them he would say something like, "I'm not sure what those are, but they are definitely not needed". As I recall, his vehicles were always on blocks, and I never saw him drive one. A Fork in the Road What many Citizens miss are the forks in the road. Some are obvious, and still the wrong one is taken, and many are not so obvious. Where this matters is down that road, when the clear realization that the wrong fork was taken becomes apparent. I'm not sure if any statistics exist, but I would assume the number of efforts that went the wrong way, and were then either abandoned in frustration, or taken all the way back to the fork, is quite high. The biggest thing that Mt. Stupid does not provide, is a clear view into the future. However, after a while on the Slope, the future becomes quite predictable. Back to the Slope The Slope of Enlightenment is vast, and as I said, even those of us with decades on it, are still climbing. So where does a Citizen even start? I can tell you where we start. First, before building anything, we create the data-model. Apps are pretty easy to change, but the data model will eventually expose any wrong forks taken, and these tend to be the most complex to reverse. Second is typically the UI, getting the data onto forms in a usable way... this is harder than it sounds if you take into account user friendliness vs. function. Lastly is automation, which seems to be the thing too many Citizens are way too eager to get to. If this post sounds like I am bitch-slapping Citizens.... I'm not. I am fully cognizant of the movement, and it is actually not even a new movement. We still spend time unwinding Access databases built by tech savvy, but not business savvy Citizens of those days. I'm just suggesting that scaling Mt. Stupid does not give the same satisfaction as scaling Mt. Everest. /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/16925192

The beatings will continue until morale improves 11/19/2020

The beatings will continue until morale improves James Phillips, the head of engineering for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, that we all either use, or make a living on, recently tweeted "The name changes will continue until morale improves". It was a joke people!!! Relax My inbox blew up with people asking me what "morale" issue James was referring to. Jimbo was paraphrasing an old quote that I used for the title of this post. In fact, Jimmy is not even responsible for naming as far as I know, that merry-go-round is operated by Alysa Taylor's team. I think JP was acknowledging the angst of name changes in a humorous way. So.... relax... morale is fine. But for some, there are legitimate concerns with certain motions other than naming. ISVs on Edge Despite James' public insistence that Microsoft wants to be a platform company, his product engineering teams are continuing to crawl up-the-stack. It was not that long ago, that the position expressed by Microsoft was, we will never go vertical, that is for our partners and ISVs. It feels to me like the recently launched "" is pretty darn vertical. I also assume this is the first of more "Industry Clouds" to come. Microsoft's message to ISVs? "There's plenty of opportunity for ISVs here". I'm not convinced yet. Keeping up with the Jones' This is most likely a Microsoft reaction to similar motions by Salesforce. I do understand the competitive forces in the marketplace, and reacting to them is necessary. But one of the reasons I moved from a Salesforce Consultant to become a Microsoft Partner 10 years ago, was the "Partner First' ecosystem. "Partner First', or 'Partner Led" have never been part of SFDC's lexicon. At the moment, I am struggling to reconcile Satya's words with some of these motions. You will eat it, and you will like it Historically, Microsoft provided the platform, and some relatively generic applications, that were then extended by SIs and ISVs to meet the specific requirements of verticals, including healthcare. It has been the meat of a business application partner's business. It feels to me that these Industry Clouds scrape much of the meat off partners' plates, and onto Microsoft's. It feels like we are left with mostly vegetables... and I never liked vegetables. Get on, or get out of the way None of us can say that Microsoft has not been crystal clear in their guidance to Partners and ISVs in the last few years: Get Vertical! Seeing the huge vertical opportunity, maybe Microsoft just got tired of waiting for us all to come around. So "Partner Led" becomes "Partners Follow", I can't say that I blame them, I'm not a particularly patient person either. Looking at a vast unmet opportunity, and sitting on your hands waiting for partners to see and act on it, would probably drive me to eventually elbow past the stagnant herd also. Seeds were planted I hate to say "I told you so"... but I did. I saw this coming with the initial launch of the first "Industry Accelerators", free data models with "example apps". Again, not enough of us bought into the accelerators, so "Industry Clouds" built by Microsoft on top of them, was an obvious next step. "Example Apps" evolved into finished, supported and SKUed applications from Microsoft. Impact on ISVs and SIs? It's too early to tell what the impact will be from these motions. Clearly if you had built extensive healthcare IP, there will be an impact, you may even find yourself competing with Microsoft in some cases. If you were thinking about building IP for Healthcare, you may have to focus on the vegetables now. For SIs, what you may have charged historically to build out a healthcare solution, will likely be less for extending a pre-built "Industry Cloud" solution. Who wins! This motion will be a win for the customers of course, by potentially lowering development costs, and having more direct support from Microsoft for Microsoft-built stuff. But I really feel that Microsoft will be the biggest winner. I have written before that Partners are simultaneously Microsoft's biggest asset, and biggest liability. While opening every partner presentation with the obligatory "Thank You Partners!" slide, there have been distinct moves to reduce their dependency on partners from Microsoft's first stepping into the cloud. "Citizen Developers" for one obvious example. I'll conclude this post by saying that, no business model is immune from disruption, and that includes Partners. /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/16878434

Microsoft taking away Direct CSP from Small Partners 11/05/2020

Microsoft taking away Direct CSP from Small Partners When I moved from Salesforce to become a Microsoft partner about ten years ago, they were just launching the "Advisor" model for cloud license sales. The road got rocky after that. Life was Good The Advisor model was great. Microsoft handled everything, billing, support, collections, etc. All we had to do was bring customers and get paid a commission on the licenses that were bought. Cloud was exploding at that time a rate Microsoft did not seem prepared for. The Advisor model was putting too much of a strain on Microsoft, so CSP was born. CSP sought to put Partners or Distributors in the line of fire, in front of Microsoft. As a CSP, you were now responsible for billing, support and collections. CSP Bumps Microsoft launched CSP in basically two flavors, Direct or Indirect. The Indirect model was were partners would transact though a distributor. But distributors seemed to have been caught flat-footed at launch, and not a single one of them had even a plan to figure this out. Distributors were still reeling from the loss of hardware and CAL sales as the cloud loomed larger. The other flavor was Direct CSP, originally intended for large partners. The problem was that large partners were moving to cloud way too slowly. Desperate to get out from under the burden, and not having the patience to wait for Disti to get their shit together, Microsoft decided to lower the bar to entry for Direct CSP, and a bunch of small partners, including us, rushed in. Our Strategy The CSP has support responsibility, meaning in the Indirect model, the Distributor was responsible for support, something they were ill-equipped to provide. But, as a small partner we were not really equipped to provide significant support either. So we became both a Direct and an Indirect Partner. My thinking was, that if we had a customer who looked like they would need a lot of support, I would run them though Disti, otherwise we would take them Direct. It seemed like a good plan, but again, Disti was not prepared or capable of anything. Simple things like adding a license was a huge project. Our Shift At the urging of Microsoft, we got into some things we were not particularly good at. As a CRM partner, we suddenly found ourselves selling Office 365 and Azure, and we pushed all of that through Disti. It was a mess, where our CRM customers thought we were awesome, our non CRM customers, rightfully thought we were idiots. So I got out of that business by transferring it all to a Gold Office 365 partner. Now we were back where we should have stayed, a CRM-Only partner. As a CRM partner, working with CRM customers, we had little need for support, from either Disti or Microsoft, so we dropped the Indirect relationship and went all Direct. Things were good. Microsoft Knocks A couple of years ago, I got an email from Microsoft saying that they were adding a new wrinkle to Direct CSP. "Advanced Support" from Microsoft would now be a requirement, at a minimum cost of $15K/yr. I thought for a minute about getting out of the licensing game. This was an obvious move by Microsoft to get rid of partners exactly like us. That $15K was eerily close to our entire license margin! But licenses were still petty expensive, and I thought we would continue to grow that side, so I bit the bullet and paid it (a decision I regret). Worthless As a partner focused deeply on a single product, we really did not need any support from Microsoft. I think we may have opened one ticket, found the support to be no better than standard support, and never opened another ticket. Support was just a tax on our revenue... at least in our case. When the MS rep called about renewal, I said we were going to pass. He told me that we would basically be kicked out of the program. I pressed him on this, "What about our existing customers?", and he conceded that we would be able to maintain our existing customers. I decided that was good enough. I suspected that MS did not have any technical enforcement, and was correct, as we were still able to add new customers. The $10 Pass When Microsoft launched Power Apps at $40/month, and then the $10 Per App pass, we immediately started changing our customers licenses, where we could, to the lower cost licensing. Obviously this lowered our license margin revenue significantly, but it was the right thing to do for the customers. It also lowered our total license revenue to Microsoft. Microsoft Knocks Again I got an email from Microsoft the other day, that I am sure was sent to all small Direct CSPs. The next effort to get rid of small partners in the program. Microsoft has decided that the minimum revenue to remain in the program was now $300K/yr... oh and you had to pay the Support tax too. Otherwise you would be off-boarded. Off-boarded from a program they asked me to join. To be honest, since we are now focused on selling our solutions, that run on low cost licenses, there is not much of a license margin opportunity for us in CSP anyway. Option For those that don't meet the new requirements, Microsoft is suggesting we go to Indirect with a Distributor. I have no interest in that, Distis are idiots. What I would prefer, is to continue to manage my existing customers, and eventually move them to Microsoft Directly over time as their renewals come up. I have asked what the process is for that, and have not been given an answer. Pricelists Microsoft updates the Cloud Reseller Pricelist monthly. Often new SKUs are added, and some SKUs are removed. Once a SKU is removed, it can no longer be sold to new customers, but existing customers of that SKU can continue to add and remove licenses based on that now deprecated SKU. It is not at all clear to me that customers will be able to keep these SKUs in a transition to either Disti or Microsoft, which would now be a new tax on customers, if they are forced to move to the current pricelist in the transition. The Undesirables We all have them... undesirable customers. It would be nice to just flip a switch and get rid of them, but I made a commitment. In some cases I have agreements in place with terms that I regret, but again, I made a commitment. I can make up new rules for new customers, but I feel bound by the deals that were made with current ones. Maybe if I had as many customers as Microsoft has Partners, I too could be ruthlessly arbitrary... but... I can't. Basically this is just a "venting" post with no real conclusions, but I am sure there are other partners who are in a similar situation, so I thought I would share my opinions. Feel free to share yours below. Here are a couple of links of interest: /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/16695689

Steve Reads Jukka's Post 09/22/2020

I recommended Zoho! 09/18/2020

I recommended Zoho! In this past week, I had two potential customers who were deciding between our Power Apps or . For one of them, I had no choice but to recommend Zoho. I you want to know why, keep reading. Customer Number 1 I got a call from Bob, the owner of Little Bitty Inc., in Podunk, Nebraska. Bob was managing the finances for his 5-person business in his checkbook, and managing his sales with a Google spreadsheet. He said he had been considering Zoho, but then saw an ad for our RapidStartCRM talking about how it was "Simple-to-Use". I realized at that moment that "Simple-to-Use" is a relative term, and was pretty sure that our app was not "Simple" enough for Bob. Plus he wanted to move his checkbook onto something, and that is not what RapidStartCRM is. My mind flashed across an integrated RapidStartCRM/Business Central scenario for a brief second, and then I said, "Bob... if I were you... I would go with Zoho". I'm all about RapidStartCRM, or even just Power Apps, being a path forward from spreadsheets, but for Bob... it was going to be too much of a leap. Zoho was going to be good enough for Bob. I actually like Zoho, and for a customer like Bob, I think it is the perfect solution. Zoho is not particularly powerful, nor extendable, but then... neither was Bob. Customer Number 2 I got a call from Rich, the IT Manager at Acme Solutions, a 30-person business in Atlanta. Rich had already moved his company to Microsoft 365, and was ready to tackle his sales team's challenges. They were currently using Excel Spreadsheets and SharePoint to manage their pipeline. Rich was also looking at Zoho, but just their CRM capabilities, Acme did not need the finance side. But since Rich had recently moved to Microsoft 365, he thought he would explore Microsoft's options. He did a trial of Dynamics 365 Sales Pro, and while he liked the power and extensibility, compared to Zoho, he concluded that it was simply too complex, and would need to be modified quite a bit to meet their specific requirements. He knew that Zoho could not be modified to meet his exact requirements, but it was cheaper and easier to use. So he had decided to start with Zoho, and see how far it would take them... it was better than spreadsheets. He got a call from a Microsoft rep because he had trialed Sales Pro, and after explaining his concerns, she suggested he check out RapidStartCRM, and so we ended up on the phone. Knowing he was considering Zoho, I assumed price was important, so I started by pointing out to Rich that RapidStartCRM was free, and ran on a $10 Power Apps Per App license. He informed me that was about half the cost of Zoho's lowest plan, which I opened a browser and confirmed, Zoho's base plan was $18/month. This actually backfired on me as Rich became suspicious that since RapidStartCRM was less, Zoho's CRM must have more. I asked about his requirements and it sounded like 80% of them were covered with RapidStartCRM, out of the box, the same 80% that Zoho also covered. Then we explored that 20% that Zoho could not get to, and even though the requirements were quite specific, none of them were complicated to extend to in RapidStartCRM, which again is a Power App. In fact, we extended the conversation of his requirements, talking about some platform capabilities he was not even aware of, and then he decided those were now critical! I really love the "discovery" aspect of these calls. Solution Fit I would love to say that RapidStartCRM is the ideal fit for any company, in any situation, but that's simply not the case. It was the perfect fit for our new customer Rich, but not a good fit for Zoho's new customer Bob. I think the key difference is looking out beyond today's need. While there are plenty of simple-to-use apps, including Zoho and RapidStartCRM, it is really about where you can eventually go with them. Microsoft likes the term "No Cliffs", meaning you will never hit a wall with the Power Platform and have to migrate elsewhere. I like that term also, and so do companies that are expecting to grow into bigger companies. The offer you can't refuse Two things happened that changed the landscape for us. The introduction of the $10 Power Apps Per App Pass (license), and our decision to make our apps free. Where I had been quite used to making the case for more capabilities at a higher cost than the competition, we are now offering more capabilities at a lower cost than the competition. It sure makes selling easy! :) /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/16067825

The Evolution of an ISV 09/16/2020

The Evolution of an ISV I get that it is mostly partners and Microsoft employees that read my blog, I have not really targeted my content toward customers, which was probably a mistake, but that is a topic for another day. Today, I want to break down some significant changes we made to our ISV strategy and why. Every ISV is Different Our strategy is obviously not going to work for every ISV. For us, I think it makes sense, for others it could be non-sensical. In this post, I want to further expand on our recent strategy to make our Apps free, and how we plan to generate even more revenue than before as a result. I had a Dream When I first conceived of the idea of RapidStartCRM in 2015, there was nothing else like it in the market. "Dynamics CRM Online" was a complicated product to deploy and get adoption on... and still is. We built a solution that sat on top of it, mostly hiding the complexity. I had joked to James Phillips once, that every time he adds a new feature, we have to go back into our solution and hide it... he was not amused. But this was not my dream. My dream, was that users would just install RapidStartCRM, pay us some cash every month, use it as-is, and leave us alone. I dreamt of thousands of companies just using the solution as we designed and intended for them to. Well, that last part of my dream never came true. Almost every single customer wanted some sort of "tweaks"! They completely ruined my plan of laying off all of my tweakers...and pocketing their salaries. Resistance is Futile I spent quite a few years trying to crack the nut of I.P. without services. It's okay, my tweakers were aware, and apparently knew better than me the futility of this effort. At some point you just have to play the hand you're dealt. So we pivoted from trying to minimize services for customers, to instead leaning in on that inevitability. Where I had hoped our revenue mix would be 10% Services and 90% recurring I.P. cash, it ended up the other way around. And of our services revenue for , 90% of that was coming from our RapidStartCRM customers. This is also why we recast our apps as "Accelerators", an acknowledgement that no app is perfect for any customer. Five Years In Business is great, growth is great, revenue is great, albeit not in the ratios I originally intended it to be... but I got over it. So now what? What could be my next move, to go to the next level? I mentioned in my last post the spark of a new idea, that came as a result of building a new idea, . Looking at the WordPress ISV freemium model got me thinking. Some of these WordPress addons have hundreds of thousands of users. I'm sure most of those users are sticking with free, but it does not take a large percentage of them to opt for a "Pro" version or something, to add up to a significant chunk of change. In looking at our Apps, we make 10X in services over the recurring revenue on the apps themselves. If the apps were free, I would be betting that sacrificing the 10%, would easily be made up for in addons and services for much faster growing user base. Decision made! I need a Plan Just removing the costs of some apps was not going to be enough, the strategy had to be more comprehensive than that. A ton of new free users is useless if you cannot monetize them, even worse than useless actually, as there are still costs. Step one, how to support them. Knowing previously, that most customers were going to reach out for help to get the most out of something they were paying for, we had not worried too much about our documentation. We had documentation, but not at the level that would be needed to support a large number of free users. Why do I care about the free users, particularly the ones who are never gonna buy anything? Because we live in a world of ratings today. If your free apps are crap, or useless without paid extras, or you don't support them at all, your ratings in the marketplaces will plummet. Good ratings are hard to get, you almost have to beg even your happiest customers to go to the time to give them. Free users got nothing but time to go blast bad ratings all day long. It is the single biggest risk in the freemium strategy. Fortunately our apps are great, probably because they were not originally developed to be free. Freemium Support So reasonable support is important, even for free users, but you can't go broke providing it. It comes from 3 places in our strategy. The first is more comprehensive documentation. The more issues that can be addressed in your documentation, the fewer frustrations a customer will suffer. But a lot of issues can pop up, that are not able to be covered in even the best documentation in advance. The next step for that free customer is a free support forum. There is no SLA in a free support forum, and hopefully over time, customers will be able to get answers to previously asked questions there, or from other users, as well as us checking in. This is about the best we can offer to a free user, and it should be good enough for many of them. But you have to give them a path forward if that is not enough for them. But that path, at that stage, does not need to be free anymore... but it still can't be too expensive. So we bubble up our managed service offerings, a paid program that can provide that next level of support, in a few flavors. But what if that still is not enough? Again, 90% of our business was coming from customers who wanted significant customizations... so this brings them to our model, the model we have used for many years now for current RapidStartCRM customers, or all other non-RapidStartCRM customers, including enterprise customers, and P2P projects. It is basically our SI model. Other Revenue Options We are also working on two other primary monetization paths. The first is what we are calling "Simplementations" via Forceworks. This is something that we have been offering for a while for some of our non-public I.P., and it seemed like a natural fit for our RapidStartCRM apps as well. Basically, Simplementations are fixed cost, scope and time engagements for targeted scenarios. Lastly, paid addons... an area that we will be focusing on heavily in the coming months. Our RapidStartCRM apps, are like platforms on a platform, this was intentional many years ago, but only to streamline our providing services for them. But they are perfectly designed for adding additional "packaged" capabilities quickly and easily. We already have some of these, RapidPROJECT and RapidSERVICE, for example. Again replicating our motion of taking something Microsoft made too complex , and creating a simple version of it. In this case, RapidPROJECT is a subset of PSA capabilities, and RapidSERVICE is a subset of Field Service capabilities. BTW, neither of these require RapidStartCRM as a pre-requisite. But over the years we have built all kinds of things on top of RapidStartCRM in response to customer requirements, and many of those things would have broad appeal, if we packaged them up. So this is going to be a busy development year for Forceworks. I'll keep you posted on our progress. If you are an ISV, I would really appreciate your joining , I may need the gas money for my motorcycle. /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/16036025

ISV Connect ED!, also our Apps are now Free 09/10/2020

ISV Connect ED!, also our Apps are now Free I had planned on making this two posts, but frankly I have too much on my plate at the moment, so its a twofer. The first part is about something new I launched, and the second part is about a bold move I made. ISV Connect ED I have certainly been one of the "complainers" about Microsoft's ISV programs, including ISV Connect. Well, you can only complain so much, and then, if you are in a position to, you have to take action. I decided that what ISVs were missing, was a community that was ISV Focused, instead of just being in a subcategory somewhere. The ISV Ecosystem is a big business and Microsoft seems to be grasping how important we are, particularly after a recent study they commissioned on ISVs that got their eyes-popping. Toby Bowers confirmed this in my . Speaking of Toby, he is now the new leader for ISV Connect, taking over for Guggs who is retiring from Microsoft. So, new blood, new opportunities... seemed like the time was right to launch something to help everything move along. is a membership site, so it's not free. I would love to have done it for free, but then it would not get the love it would need to succeed... and it will require a lot of love and attention. I won't go into a lot of detail here, I wrote a post on it describing what it is, and why I am doing it, . But I will say, if you are an ISV, I want you to join and participate, otherwise you better steer clear of me when in-person events resume in the future. My Bold Move Okay, I don't know how bold this seems to you, but it was a pretty big deal to me. I tossed and turned for weeks before committing. As we were building the site for ISV Connect ED, I found us making heavy use of WordPress plugins. Almost every plugin we found had a free version, and then a "Pro" version. For about 90% of the ones we used, we ended up opting for the "Pro" version. This got me thinking about our Solutions on AppSource. While our apps have done quite well, I found myself wondering what things would look like if I had 100X the user base. The only way that would happen is either a massive marketing campaign, which would cost a ton, or... make the apps free. Either way the cost is significant. Not only would I be giving up the potential future recurring revenue for the apps, but I would have to stop charging all of our existing customers for them too! How could this work! Obviously, my plan was not to go broke, but "free" certainly does not help a bottom line. Looking at the WordPress model, most of the free plugins have basic capabilities. But if you need something more sophisticated, almost all of them offer a "Pro" version. We could certainly do that. Our core RapidStartCRM apps are intended to be simple apps, but over the years we have built some fairly sophisticated I.P. on top of them for certain use cases, like Project Management and Field Service. So we already had our "Pro" addons started. Also, most customers ended up engaging us to do further customizations, and why not, who knows our app better than us? So there's two revenue generating possibilities... would that be enough? Controlling Costs Imagining thousands of customers on the free app... that could bury us in support costs. Again, the WordPress Plugins developers' model came up. Most of them offered free support for their free apps in the form of a User Forum. Not only does this limit the effort, but more often than not, another user answers the questions raised. If you want more than forum help, you can buy it from the developer, or in some cases upgrade to their "Pro" version to get it. Brilliant! We will replicate that motion as well. Farm Betting I am taking a big risk, but I am not betting the whole farm on this. Our primary revenue source has always been Project Services, often on RapidStartCRM implementations, but about half come from other customers. So trading the potential, and existing recurring revenue from the apps, for what may come with greater scale is not crazy. Or, at least I don't think it is. Well, I hope not, since it is already underway and too late to turn back. Unlocked Again, following the WordPress model, where the plugins are not usually protected code. If you have the development skills, you can edit them yourself. So our RapidStartCRM apps are also all completely unlocked and able to be extended by the customer, another partner or... hopefully by our team at . I may be opening a Pandora's box here, but I feel confident we will get our share. Which Apps? So we are making free four existing apps, and one more in the future pipeline: , the simple to use Sales and Service app that started it all in 2015. , a version for businesses that operate on a referral model. , a purpose built sales application for production homebuilders. , an in-app training solution that actually was always free. In our pipeline we have a new "RapidStartCRM B2C" in development for businesses who primarily sell to and engage with consumers. Worst Case The worst case scenario, is not really that bad. It is possible that many organizations will use our free apps without ever opting for a "Pro" anything, or needing any help at all. I mean there could potentially be thousands of customers being introduced to Microsoft's Business Applications as a result of our free apps... I guess that's not a bad thing either. I'll be covering our progress with this approach on the blog at , so if you want to see how this ends up, well you'll have to join that! /episode/index/show/stevemordue/id/15964874

Steve reads his Blog

TOPICS