Microsoft

Microsoft Office 365 Partner Marketing Handbook

Microsoft’s hosting team commissioned EMM to develop a marketing handbook to help Microsoft CSP hosting partners sell Office 365.

The Microsoft hosting team wanted to create a program for their CSP Hosting partners that enabled partners to more easily create effective sales and marketing materials highlighting Office 365. Because the Hosting team works with breadth partners, there wasn’t the capacity to work one-on-one with each partner, so they came to the EMM team for some assistance.

Through a series of brainstorming sessions with Microsoft, we were able to create a workbook that offers step by step guidance to creating basic marketing materials for Office 365. The workbook was pre-loaded with the features & benefits of Office 365 and potential target audiences. The guide also gave suggestions for Hosting partners to add information about their company, including their customer support offerings, migration services, ongoing support after the sale, experience level, Office 365 packages, and any other add-on services.

This roughly 70-page guide assisted Microsoft partners with the steps for developing a Messaging Framework, search engine terms, website content, customer solution sheets, landing pages and other key marketing deliverables. The guide was initially rolled out to a small test group of partners. EMM then revised the workbook and it was rolled out to all mid-level CSP Hosting partners.

After the guide was in market for about a year, Microsoft asked EMM to create a second version of the partner marketing guide with the updated features of Office 365, which was well received by partners.

Since creating the Office 365 guide, Microsoft has engaged EMM to create 10 additional guides for other Microsoft cloud solutions, such as Azure, which were subsequently rolled out to Hosting partners.