I've written a lot of articles
dealing with Microsoft, and I've interviewed plenty of Microsoft reps. As you'll find at any company, some products and people are better than others. I've found the company to be generous, brilliant, and helpful, and I've had important (to me, anyway) requests and opportunities blown off and lost into the PR black hole from which not even light can escape. The bigger a company gets, the more mixed the results. That's life. No surprises there.

Microsoft takes its fair share of lumps in the press, especially the consumer press with its loathing of authority and propensity to promote the underdog. Everybody loves to watch a beating, even if out of morbid curiosity. Monopoly rulings? Whack! The moral/technical/spiritual superiority of open source? Whack-whack! But sometimes our love for drama bleeds over into business. We can focus on the negative and lose sight of the things our partners offer that shine brightest and matter the most. If we all did this with our domestic partners, none of us would be married today.

You know the cliche about how the best things in life are free. Free and Microsoft are two words you often don't see together in a sentence. But there are many things Microsoft gives to its channel partners gratis—or at least the price of a .NET account, which is about two minutes of your time. No, these aren't cash incentives. In a way, they're better than cash. Cash in your pocket is here one day and gone the next. The things Microsoft can give you for free are designed to help improve your knowledge and make your operation smarter. That's like gold, something you preserve that grows in value over time.

I spoke with Bob Crissman, Microsoft's general manager of partner enablement, about this. Crissman's job is to manage the U.S. partner program, partner marketing, readiness training, physical learning centers, and more. In effect, he's the right hand man of Margo Day, with whom we've also spoken in RAM, and his job is to help develop and distribute this free gold to Microsoft's channel partners.

When Crissman started with Microsoft 11 years ago, he was a product manager for Excel, back when all marketing focused on individual products. Now, solutions marketing is at the core of virtually everything he does. At this point, an overwhelming majority of users in the consumer and business worlds use Microsoft OSes and applications on their PCs. Getting the technology into people's hands is no longer Crissman's worry. Getting them to use the technology more effectively is, and to do this Microsoft needs all the help possible from its channel partners.

"This comes down to winning with partners," says Crissman. "We cannot go out and do this on our own. As soon as you start talking about solutions, you're inherently talking about more than Microsoft technology. We're going to provide a horizontal platform, if you will, but there are these more specific vertical partners—the ISVs with the third-party applications, the VARs, the solution builders—bringing their unique piece of the puzzle, their special sauce, and taking it that last mile. But we need to provide partners with the right tools, programs, and engines that are solution-focused so they can do that."

The examples of this that have emerged from Redmond over the last three years are formidable. We've talked about the Action Pack several times in these pages, and no, the Action Pack isn't free. Another way to look at it, though, is that for $299 or $399 (Standard and Plus subscriptions respectively), you're paying for a 10-seat MS Office Professional 2003 pack, and the several thousand dollars worth of other included Microsoft titles, partner guides, and additional materials are all gravy.

Or there's the Custom Collateral Tool, often called Marketing Services for Partners, with which a reseller partner can order up marketing collateral based around Microsoft solutions. You design the mailers online based on several easy templates, use your own list or rent one from a third party, and out comes a co-branded campaign you don't ever have to touch or lick. The service is free in the sense that you pay for ad campaigns anyway. Not only can you do a campaign more cost effectively through the Custom Collateral Tool, but you get the free benefit of effortlessly matching your verbiage and image to product/solution campaigns that Microsoft is paying millions to mount all around you.

A new facet of Microsoft's channel efforts that really is free is PEPs, or Partner Engagement Programs. One example is the Connected Productivity PEP, which uses Office Professional 2003 as a foundation, then builds value through integrating OneNote 2003, SharePoint Services, Windows Mobile, and other optional titles into a total solution. Essentially, you need only be a registered U.S. partner, complete some online sales training courses, and enroll in the PEP you want. In return, you will get everything you need to not only sell clients on these platforms but also open new service and training revenue streams for your reseller operation.

"All of these things we do are based on partner feedback saying, ‘Hey, have you thought about doing it this way?'" says Crissman. "We get a lot of ideas or engines from that, but they may not tie together super well. So what the marketing guy for partners tends to do is tie these things together and put it in some greater context."

If a PEP project sounds like it takes more pep than you have at the moment, perhaps some basic marketing training is more up your alley. One of Microsoft's recent freebies for partners is its series of Marketing How-to Guides. As of this writing, there were 11 guides available through partner.microsoft.com:

Unlike college courses dealing with many of the same subjects, these Guides are like Cliff's Notes written by sales veterans from the trenches. Take the first document, the Marketing Guide for Partners. In it, you'll find things like not only why and how to craft an elevator pitch on your business but where to use it effectively. You'll learn how to determine ROI for an ad campaign, build a marketing network with other businesses, and decide on smart promotional offers. The latter part of the Guide is decidedly slanted toward Microsoft content, but that doesn't change the fact that most of the document gives a very concise and clear education on marketing with lots of effective examples.

Microsoft did its best to sell me on the Guides, which of course made me skeptical. So I found a couple of resellers who had downloaded and read the Marketing Guide. Verbatim, here's what they had to say:

"I'm incredibly impressed by the Marketing Guide for Partners that Microsoft put together," notes Courtney McKenzie, marketing communications specialist for Ascentis Corporation of Bellevue, WA. "I had a chance to go through the publication last night and was blown away by all of the useful information included. That guide is a Marketing 101 class and so much more! Not only does it help with basic marketing, it's incredibly insightful on how to navigate all the Microsoft Partner Web sites and resources."

"The Marketing Guide gives a step-by-step approach to developing an effective campaign," says Gred Sad, marketing director for Irvine, CA-based reseller Iteration 2, "including some great examples of ROI calculation spreadsheets, ways to measure success, and identifying the additional resources available for each marketing activity. I would have to go to 10 different Microsoft Partner related sites to gather the information contained in the guide. We have found the checklists a very useful tool for making sure things don't drop between the cracks, which we use for all our webinar and seminar engagements. We do a lot with online and email marketing promotions, with which I was able to compare our plans versus the Marketing Guide to validate our activities and strategies. Overall, the information in this document is very comprehensive and well presented."

Here's another reason you should make taking advantage of the free gold from Microsoft an imperative for your organization: upgrade revenue. Like you, I as a journalist am able to obtain NFR Microsoft software for pennies on the dollar. But here we are at 2005, and I'm still using Office 2000. Why? Because I as a consumer never felt a sufficient compulsion to upgrade. No one ever got in my face and said, "For your uses in your environment, you could realize a substantial improvement in efficiency and do all these new things through these X, Y, and Z features present in the new version."

This is what Microsoft means by needing reseller partners. Only a reseller trained on a breadth of the vendor's solutions has the understanding and proficiency necessary to tell me why I need an upgrade then turn around and tell another client why he needs the same upgrade for an entirely different set of reasons. With the materials Microsoft offers for free to partners, a whole new vista opens up for upgrade opportunities. After all, most of your customers are already pre-sold enough to own an older copy.

"I think we're heading down the right path," says Crissman. "We can always do a better job and improve. Just by talking about solutions rather than a particular product, that's half the battle right there. But we're getting the material, collateral, demos, supporting case studies. All of those are very solution-based. But in reality, it's more challenging to bring together all the information for a solution rather than a product. That's why we need our partners to help us, because I don't want to just create stuff in a vacuum. We need them to tell us what works and what doesn't so we can keep improving."

So devour the freebies, invest the gold, and tell your Microsoft partner reps how to help you even more going forward.