The future of pricing models in the Microsoft partner ecosystem with Ben Vollmer

Ben Vollmer [00:00:00]:
So the days of coming in and spending six months doing a needs assessment followed by a six month sprint zero of an agile waterfall methodology, those days are kind of over. I think what you're gonna see is you're gonna see micro vertical. You're gonna see managed services, which says, okay. I'm gonna take this and do this for you over a period of time, and you're gonna see enablement. Think about the average partner you work with. What was the first thing you cut when the project timeline got squeezed? Change management, testing, training. Oh, end user training, you could do that yourself. Well, we're gonna we'll do a super user training and let the super users then train people to do this.

Ben Vollmer [00:00:33]:
That's the wrong way to do it.

Neil Benson [00:00:35]:
Good day, and welcome to Practice Leading, a podcast for emerging and curious practice leaders of Microsoft partner businesses. If you're anything like me with an unquenchable thirst for improvement and zero tolerance for BS, you've come to the right place. Hi. I'm Neil Benson, and this is my personal invitation for you to join me on my own journey of discovery. Together, we'll learn from innovators and investors, executives and entrepreneurs, business leaders and business coaches that have already left their stamp on the Microsoft community and those that are exploring new and smarter ways of building their businesses. Whether it's groundbreaking innovations, hiring high performing teams, or the sheer force of will to disrupt our industry, each episode is a master class from the trailblazers who have already achieved significant success. Find Practice Leading on YouTube or visit practiceleading.com and learn from the mentors you wish you had earlier in your career. Today, I'm learning from Ben Volmer.

Neil Benson [00:01:35]:
Ben is a senior vice president at RSM in The US, responsible for growing their PowerFactory offering. He's probably best known in the Microsoft community as the former global director of Microsoft's Dynamics three sixty five field service business. Ben's a prolific presenter at Microsoft conferences with a reputation for helping partners level up their pricing and delivery models. Ben and I have a fascinating discussion about the evolution of pricing and how Microsoft partners and customers might exchange value. Traditionally, partners have delivered services and charged based on a time sheet and a rate card. How is that model changing? One option we discuss is outcome based pricing. But do customers really want outcome based pricing? There are challenges here too. We also pull apart the user story point estimation and pricing approach that my business, Superware, uses.

Neil Benson [00:02:25]:
Lastly, we ask whether blended teams are necessary for success and how customers should eventually assume full ownership of the applications that their partners build. So Ben, why is it you think that pricing drives the whole culture of a Microsoft partner's organization? That sounds outrageous statement to me.

Ben Vollmer [00:02:43]:
So pricing, I think, does two things. One is it establishes value. When you think when you go to the store and you buy something, the price of something, if it goes up, you're like, gee, why do I wanna buy that? The price is too low, like, do I really wanna buy that? So pricing is kind of, for me, is the physical manifestation of me exchanging something of value, something I'm getting in value. As where those two things need to come kind of in sync with each other becomes, I think, the the critical thing that makes pricing fun and interesting. My background's mainly doing software pricing, so I love the software pricing. So I I actually read the licensing guide, Neil. I love it. So

Neil Benson [00:03:15]:
Remember, it's only a it's only a guide, Ben. It's not a contract. So

Ben Vollmer [00:03:19]:
Neil, why is he gonna do that to me, man? Don't let you trap. But pricing is for services partners, it's also the manifestation of of a cost of goods sold and how do you how do you scale your offering to to the customer. But what most people, especially the smaller practices realize and have learned is that your evaluation as a company, when you decide you're gonna go into m and a mode and you wanna find a suitor for your your business, trying to take your baby over, your pricing model is one of the single largest drivers in your valuation and how you get sold to next stage. So it's a it's a kind of a complicated thing because it's a lot of moving pieces, but the outcome is really customer value of what I'm giving and change for it.

Neil Benson [00:03:59]:
The second one is when I

Ben Vollmer [00:04:00]:
sell my company, what am I getting?

Neil Benson [00:04:02]:
Okay. Well, can can we talk through that? Because I'm but today, we're running Superware. We're just getting started. We're 20 people today. We're building applications for an industry. We're hoping to sell those on a subscription basis. We are selling those on a subscription basis. We're also a services team, and and we're selling implementation services.

Neil Benson [00:04:19]:
So traditional systems integrator. Yeah. On five or ten years, I'd like to pull up sticks and and sell this whole thing to somebody who who values the business more than I do. How should I think about pricing? What we're pitching today is an ISV application on a subscription basis. And I listened to a podcast recently called Acquired, and it was the history of Microsoft. It's a three part podcast series. Each one's about four hours long. It's an awesome in-depth look at the history of Microsoft.

Ben Vollmer [00:04:42]:
I was driving from your house to Melbourne. Right?

Neil Benson [00:04:44]:
That was that was Yeah. That's right. Yeah. It's just a a trip around the the neighborhood. And I talked about the the pricing of Windows in the early days and how Microsoft left a lot of money on the table. They priced quite low, in order to capture market share. Once you have a substantial market share, now you can ratchet pricing whichever which way you wanna go. Should ISVs be thinking about that as a pricing strategy? And and what's the future of pricing for services?

Ben Vollmer [00:05:07]:
I I would say a couple of things here. One is, I was actually blessed when I go in Microsoft to I joined with she just retired, but she was there when Windows was delivered on pallets to customers. Like, before the enterprise agreement existed, so she actually has customers where they delivered pallets of windows because they didn't have any way of buying it on a corporate level, so they would just deliver a pallet of windows. Not the kind you opened, but the kind you used. Let's look at business models. Okay? So so what is it that their business wants? They want predictable revenue. They want predictable outcomes. They they want predictable everything.

Ben Vollmer [00:05:38]:
And things that are predictable tend to get a higher valuation, things that are unpredictable. So if I have a partner and I'm a partner and I deliver services, I think every partner I've seen they go through a feasting famine. Like, I get a big project and I suck up every resource in the planet and I feast like there's no tomorrow, and then I'm dead broke. And then I feast like there's no tomorrow, and then I'm dead broke. You've seen it so often that it kinda hurts your head. But part of the future, I think, is gonna have critical revenue. It means they're gonna have to have micro vertical expertise. So yeah.

Ben Vollmer [00:06:08]:
And you can call an ISV. You can call it an accelerator. You can call I don't care what the internal buzzwords you use because you well, this may see product for that microverse. K? You got a product on that microverse. Right?

Neil Benson [00:06:19]:
Yes. Yep. We got a product from micro vertical. It's doing well.

Ben Vollmer [00:06:21]:
Perfect. First thing, I think the days of implementation, as we think about implementation, you and I started doing CRM in various ways, shapes, and forms back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Neil Benson [00:06:32]:
02/2006, sorry?

Ben Vollmer [00:06:34]:
Okay. Well, it was before that for me. But, like, I can remember, like, when CRM live came out, CRM online, people live, oh my god. Microsoft's gonna take our business. I'm like, if your value in life is running set up by PNC, you need to go reevaluate your values.

Neil Benson [00:06:48]:
I was joining a CRM hosting company at the time. So I had CRM three point o running on virtual servers at Rackspace and Microsoft announced CRM live. A few nervous nights, but it actually worked out really well in the end.

Ben Vollmer [00:06:58]:
There's actually a partner I know that has still has customers on their own internal host because their SLAs are so onerous that they're taking them off their competitor, their hosting without. But it it's a back in the day, it was, you know, you installed software. Let's look at Business Central. Nothing you spin it up, and it's basically up and running almost immediately. And you look at how they're taking the FNS C apps. They're kinda breaking them into pieces, and they're making them. So the days of coming in and spending six months doing a needs assessment followed by a six month kind of sprint zero of an agile or waterfall methodology, those days are kind of over.

Neil Benson [00:07:31]:
Agreed. I think

Ben Vollmer [00:07:32]:
what you're gonna see is you're gonna see micro vertical. You're gonna see managed services, which you said, okay. I'm gonna take this and do this for you over a period of time, and you're gonna see enablement. Think about the average partner you work with. How much time do they actually spend training the end users? I mean, you've worked for some big companies over the years, and you've worked with some some fun ones over the years. Think about some of the projects you've done. What was the first thing you cut when the project timeline got squeezed?

Neil Benson [00:07:57]:
Well, traditionally, it was it was change management, right, and testing, and then, you know, whatever you work backwards from the end of your timeline, and those were the things that got cut first.

Ben Vollmer [00:08:05]:
Change management, testing, training. Oh, end user training? You can do that yourself. Well, we're gonna we'll do a super user training. I'll have the super users then train people to do this. Again, from my perspective, that's the wrong way to do it. You think about, well, how clients do projects today, it's come in and train us. Like, we just did a project for a customer, very small project, but they're deploying a Copilot for internal knowledge management. And the entire SoW was come in and train my team how to pull the data out, write a Copilot so we can show it to our end users.

Neil Benson [00:08:35]:
Right. Okay. So flip the whole SoW backwards.

Ben Vollmer [00:08:38]:
And now there's gonna be advisory services. I I call them managed service. They're really advisory service. Right? Hey. How do we do this? Should we do this or that? Kind of architecture on demand. I think my my personal opinion is where the model is going. From a pricing perspective, how do we re pricing that into this in this piece? Whoever requires you is gonna want what?

Neil Benson [00:08:55]:
Predictable revenue.

Ben Vollmer [00:08:56]:
Predictable revenue. They're gonna want a good client base that's not gonna go anywhere. They're gonna want some IP you have. If you are basing on the evaluate, almost like a software company. And so I think actually, from my perspective, pricing is the manifestation of the acquisition. What do you pay for a gallon of milk?

Neil Benson [00:09:13]:
We buy two liters of milk at a time. So there's four and a half liters in a gallon. And we buy the fancy stuff, the cream on the top, and it comes from a nice local farm, and it's $5 for two liters. So that's, let's call it $12 a gallon. Okay.

Ben Vollmer [00:09:28]:
Alright.

Neil Benson [00:09:29]:
That's 12 Australian.

Ben Vollmer [00:09:30]:
So about 4 to put some

Neil Benson [00:09:32]:
No. It'd be $9 American to me like that.

Ben Vollmer [00:09:36]:
Like. That farm, though, got paid. If that farm was to sell its milk, like, I I grew up in a dairy area, or soon as you had wineries and or vineyards and dairy farm. The the milk got sold by the pound. And it got sold by the pound so dirt cheap it wasn't funny. I remember I remember buying a gallon of milk and I'm like, this is, like, three and a half pounds or four pounds. And, like, I know my friends get paid for a gallon of milk and, like, the disparity was huge. And that's almost the same thing we're looking at when we're trying to sell services.

Ben Vollmer [00:10:02]:
Right? I mean, right now today, most services firms are, you know, meat puppet based. How many meat puppets do I have? What's my hourly rate for meat puppet? And how do I sell that meat puppet?

Neil Benson [00:10:12]:
Can I call people meat puppets, Ben?

Ben Vollmer [00:10:15]:
Well, okay. Fine. Meat sacks? Most consulting firms there based on how many people they have, and you pay x number of dollars for a junior, y number of dollars for a senior, you know, zed number of dollars for a, you know, a director, you know, principal. Right? I don't think customers want that. I I think what customers actually want is they want the outcome. Now here's the funny rub, by the way. This is kind of I haven't seen on the services side. I have seen on the software side, so I can talk about outcome based pricing.

Ben Vollmer [00:10:45]:
You say, hey. What they really want is the outcome. Oh, just the outcome based pricing. That's what, you know, servization, outcome based pricing. Here's where it gets interesting. Customers don't wanna share their money. I say that kind of a little bit time and cheap, but give me a heads for a second. If you can come in and save a customer a million dollars, why not split that million dollars to the customer? Hey.

Ben Vollmer [00:11:01]:
Customer will come in and save a million dollars on your processes, and I will I'll I'll go I'll go halves these with you. Right? And I won't start getting for deployment, but I'll go halves. I believe in my product. You're gonna find almost exclusive customers just say no.

Neil Benson [00:11:12]:
That's right. Yeah. I've I've tried those approaches. For example, in this superannuation industry in Australia, which is like a private retirement accounts, we've proposed pricing based on funds under management. So these funds have billions of dollars of people's money invested in in markets, and they measure themselves, like, how many tens of billions of dollars? How much growth did I get? I mean, what's the the thumb growth year over year? Or they can measure themselves based on number of members. Right? I've got a million members or I've got 2,000,000 members. And I said, okay. Well, we'll tie our pricing to either the number of members you have or the funds under management that you have rather than the number of users of the software.

Neil Benson [00:11:48]:
And they're not so keen. And I I I don't I don't quite know why. I'm trying to tie my price to their value, but it's not working out so well. They're not as receptive to it as I had anticipated.

Ben Vollmer [00:11:58]:
Now there is exceptions to that, by the way. Exception to that is if I was, selling to a facilities management firm in Australia, not that I've done that before, but I've I've read the book on it once. I might wanna price my product by the amount of square footage that customer has under management and then notch that directly to the number of square foots they have or square meter. So so my my question is what's the difference there? What's the difference between assets under management versus versus number of square feet that a that an FM company manages?

Neil Benson [00:12:28]:
Yeah. Very similar. It's a key metric. They both wanna grow. They might not have management or whether it's, you know, area or funds.

Ben Vollmer [00:12:35]:
But there's one nuance difference.

Neil Benson [00:12:37]:
Oh, okay.

Ben Vollmer [00:12:38]:
Which is square footage under management is a direct chargeable activity to the tenants. If you read your lease, it says, you know, anything that's directly attributable to your unit, you're gonna pay. We might pay it for you, but you're gonna pay it eventually. Okay? So if I charge you per square footage, it effectively gets comes out of the company's bottom line and becomes an aligning them on the lease that gets signed and you you get passed over to it. So companies are actually willing to do that when you can align with their their bottom line. And that's a great way that I that's not outcome pricing. That's not outcome driven pricing, Neil. That's just a new pricing model.

Ben Vollmer [00:13:13]:
So if you can figure out how your your interest aligns with your customer's interests so an example might be, you're helping people write grants. If your hard cost goes directly against the grant, the grant receiving organizations write it. But if you can be broken up and attributed to each one of the the the sub grantees, you become a cost that gets passed on through to the sub grantees. So those kind of pricing models think of we have not done enough experimentation there in that section. We've gotten kind of who outcomes are the next thing to do, but we haven't said, okay. So if you take, like, you know, assets under management, is there something you can do that allows your app to be able to be a passed on cost to somebody in their contract. If you can, I think then then you have a better chance of of being successful with that than you will under under a true outcome group?

Neil Benson [00:14:01]:
So, the cost per member is an interesting idea because there's a cost to serve, and every fund wants to reduce the cost of service. They wanna make themselves more efficient so that they don't have to charge fees. They wanna reduce the the fees that they charge to members. That helps them attract more members, right, if if they're a low cost fund. So if we can say, our our cost is a dollar per year per member, and the fund knows that they charge a hundred dollars per year per member, then they know that we're 1% of their operating cost. It's software to do all the complaints management, all of the the customer relationship management, all the marketing and engagement. Then they've got a a much more accurate assessment of of the cost of our software versus the the income that they receive. And that's receptive, but they're not quite willing to go there yet.

Neil Benson [00:14:42]:
And I I can see why because if they acquire another fund, suddenly I said, hey. Your software costs are double. They might not have rolled out our software to the other half of of the new fund yet. So it gets a little and outcomes like, we we've been selling Salesforce optimization software for a long time. I've never sold a deal that said, hey. Tell you what. If we double your revenue next year, we wanna share of that. That that's the outcome you're you're aiming for with your CRM implementation.

Neil Benson [00:15:08]:
If you double your revenue, we'll we'll charge you based on on the, the success of our software implementation. It's never happened.

Ben Vollmer [00:15:16]:
There's one partner I know that's up in the Atlanta area that's doing it with a smaller subset of his customers. Like, if I can reduce your MQL cost, if I can re if I can increase our SQLs, if I can reduce you know, increase your velocity in your initial stages, I'm willing to to to take some of my services fees and roll them over into that that as an outcome driven. And I'll be honest with you, that's the only and and and he and I have had long conversations about it. I love the man to death. But he's doing it for a portion of the fees, not for all of his fees. And I think it becomes kind of a a a way for the customer to say, is this gonna work or not? And it's a way for him to make sure he kinda hedges his bets and covers his costs. So I think there there is not what do I think customer ever gonna go a % that way? No way. But do I think there's gonna be some level of it in some some I think it's very possible.

Neil Benson [00:16:03]:
Right. Yeah. Okay. I had a a customer recently, a small nonprofit organization, maybe 50 people. Previously, when somebody registered for one of their events, they would just type in an email address in the registration form and maybe a first name or something. In their old CRM, they had hundreds of thousands of people. When they looked at all the duplicates, 80% of them were duplicates because people registered for the next event and they type in their email address again, and that would just create another contact in the old CRM, and another one, and another one, and if I came to 12 events, I would have 12 contact records. We said, okay.

Neil Benson [00:16:34]:
Well, let's look at Dynamics three sixty five customer insights journeys, and we will have people register once using a Power Pages registration site, and they'll create a profile. You'll capture their dietary. You'll capture their accessibility. You'll capture their email subscription preferences, and there'll be one contact record. Fantastic. If we had, some kind of pricing based on an outcome associated with that, better data quality, increase in memberships, we need to find a a hard benefit to attach our our value to. We could have been winning, but here we are twelve months later, the CEO has come in and said, I hate profiles. This is awful.

Neil Benson [00:17:10]:
People don't wanna have to type in a username and a password to register an event. Take it all away, please. Go back to the old model. Right. Okay. Well, despite this might be pointing out that Eventbrite and Meetup and every event platform on the planet uses a username and password before you can register for an event. She's the expert and wants to unwind it all. And so if you wanna have a value exchange based on outcomes, you need to be really clear what the outcome is and how it's measured and what other factors might influence the the measure a year from now.

Ben Vollmer [00:17:41]:
It's actually funny. The the only services partner I've ever been that's gone whole hog there was actually out of Dubai. And they was able to validate what he told me he did and talk to a customer, but he was in a very subvertical niche. Like, it was a vertical inside of a vertical inside of a vertical. His whole thing was, I'm gonna come in and save you money on waste. If I save you money on waste, if I can teach you how to cut your metal fabrication time down and reduce your waste, I will take my fees from from your waste earnings. And and that was a he he knew the industry well enough, Jill, to say, this is where it goes. I think that's an outcome pricing model that actually works.

Ben Vollmer [00:18:16]:
Now I do think what you're you're gonna see more of, though, and should see more of, is think about, and I'm gonna use an example and, you know, people are gonna hate me for. I'll I'll accept the hate later. You remember when Xbox first came into those Xbox points? You bought so many points in every per you know, it was kind of a quasi currency, but every country had a different point value. So, you know, it was 40 points in in Australia, and it was 55 points in Canada, and it was 22 points in The UK, and it was 35 you know, like, everybody had a different point value for everything. I do think seeing some sort of, like, menu of services. Like, I'm gonna come in and provide a two day workshop. That's x number of points. I think if I'm gonna provide a services offering of a a tune up, that's y number of points.

Ben Vollmer [00:19:02]:
I think those are the kind of things that are easy pickings and easy to sub so if you're if you're a services partner today, I don't know. The whole subscription model thing scares me. Okay. Take your after sales, after deployment, after delivery projects and and and deploy it. And then how do you monetize, you know, Power BI reports? Or, how do I monetize, you know, coming into SQL cleanups or, you know, additional reporting or, you know, kind of build some offerings that are kind of point based. Say, mister customer, I'll come in and do this. You know, when I was at, a financial services firm twenty five years ago, we had people in the office who I we call them milk runners. Like, they basically done, you know, you'll you'll delivery milk guys.

Ben Vollmer [00:19:46]:
Right? They basically just had a couple customers. They just kind of did a milk run around every who wanted to package that up and say, mister customer, pay us, and we'll do a milk run, and we'll do these services for you all the time. Do you wanna get into this without going whole hog? There's an easy way of doing it.

Neil Benson [00:20:00]:
Yeah. Well, that sounds pretty close to what we do today from a services perspective. So we points. We we call them user story points. Right? So we we estimate your requirements and story points. When we build a team that that we think, oh, a team like this should be able to get 50 points done in a two week sprint. And therefore, the cost per point is about $2,000. So if you've got a five point story or five point requirement, then that's gonna be $10.

Neil Benson [00:20:23]:
Is it worth it or is it not? Like, it's a 10 it's gonna cost $10 to solve that problem. Is it a $10 problem? That's up to you, mister customer. Great. You wanna go for it? Off we go. We put that story into the backlog and we get it done. And we just keep rolling like that and, but the customer knows the cost per now how I staff the team, do I staff it with a lot of senior people who can get a lot of points done in two weeks sprint? I could, but it's very expensive for me. Or do I a lot of junior people who maybe can't go as quickly and to get the 10 points done or five points done, it's it's gonna take me four weeks. So we're making all those kinda normal trade offs, you know, blended teams of experience and inexperience, and it seems to work reasonably well.

Neil Benson [00:21:02]:
There's a selling point, to executives go, what the heck is a user story point? Why are you estimating like this? But once they get over that, once they get their heads around it, they seem to enjoy it.

Ben Vollmer [00:21:11]:
That for me, Neil is a great way of doing it in a way that that makes sense. I mean, if you've done a project, and they're like, well, this this has done this exact way. And you're like, I'm gonna break a system because you want something done that exact way. And then you you you push the the the project manager out, and they kinda go no. And then they get in front of the executive. The executive was like, I don't really care how it's done as long as it's done. And you're like, what? I'm just spend so much time and money doing this for nothing. And I mean, think about what your user story points gives you.

Ben Vollmer [00:21:42]:
It gives you the the ability to say that feature is worth extra dollar. Do you actually wanna spend that there? What's the iterative payback? I think a lot of customers don't know why they're doing I mean I mean, think think about how often you've done a project and you're like but then somebody just wake up one day and go, gee, I wanna do this. I think I think we all have. But if you put value associated with what it and what the value coming back is okay. So let's take I think 10 user story points. Right? Which is an expensive feature. Right? And then I take those feature points and I will mister Casper. That's like, that's gonna return back to you this.

Ben Vollmer [00:22:14]:
But if I come over and I do two user story points, I can get you all of this. So let's start with a two user story points and get that all done first, and then come back and and and look

Neil Benson [00:22:24]:
at the the ten years

Ben Vollmer [00:22:25]:
or what once we get some once we get some return on on it, Beth.

Neil Benson [00:22:29]:
Yeah. But so that that's exactly how we try to approach it. Let's get some quick wins of the small ones. But also look at the big ones, and can we split them up? Because I bet you, if we split them into smaller rocks, like a like a old asteroids game, I bet you not all of them are as equally valuable. So if you take that 10 and split it up into five two point stories, three of them are probably really valuable. Let's get those done. The other two, no. I'm not too sure.

Neil Benson [00:22:51]:
Let's kick those down at the bottom of the backlog, and, we'll take a look at them in six months' time.

Ben Vollmer [00:22:55]:
Well, I think you're an anomaly of that. And and so the thing for other partners who are listening is, how do I start wrapping up my conversation? How do I start having those conversations with customers? The only thing I would say is is, you know, you talk about scrum teams general. Right? If we think about, though, there should be a some point we need to start enabling our customers to go take this product time themselves. I I again, if our business value is running set up with DXC, we're in the wrong business. If our business value is doing the same forms and the same thing something that's trying to do, so this is 10 points to do this story. Five of these points are gonna come from your internal teammates. Five of these points are gonna come from my team. We were talking earlier about a a project amount where we've got it was actually about four different partners in there providing staff augmentation services.

Ben Vollmer [00:23:42]:
It actually is working. I think one of my, colleagues will probably wanna tell me when he hears you say that out loud, but it was it's working in that you're able to deliver projects. Then when when we roll off, they have people on the you know, we're running the architects and the high level designers and some testers, but the everyday coding and changing that has happened as this app is used to evolve, they've effectively taken in house. I I don't care whether in house is actually in house or in house is in house view plus a plus a GSI in the background. That that's both that's a that's a form of in house for you. Just go ahead and do it.

Neil Benson [00:24:17]:
I think the these blended teams are are essential today. I'm really glad when a customer says, look. We've got it from here. Thanks very much. You've taken us through the the hardest stuff for the first twenty sprints. There's still 10 more sprints worth of work to do, but but my team's got it from here. Like, awesome. I want you to own it because I know that system is gonna gonna be fed and watered and maintained and enhanced and live for a long time rather than the olden days of all the funding dries up as soon as the project goes live, and nobody touches the system for the next ten years until we rip it out and replace it because the requirements have evolved and the system didn't.

Neil Benson [00:24:50]:
And we're gonna rip it out and start start from scratch? Like, that's hard work.

Ben Vollmer [00:24:54]:
I just had a call with a with a Fintech customer last week. I'm like, okay. Cool. We can do that. Who's gonna own it after we leave?

Neil Benson [00:25:01]:
Oh, great question.

Ben Vollmer [00:25:02]:
I'm like, okay, guys. I don't think we're a good fit for you.

Neil Benson [00:25:06]:
If if you're listening on a podcast audio podcast, Ben is, looking around the room trying to find an executive to own the system. Pregnant boss.

Ben Vollmer [00:25:16]:
There's gotta be some ownership of that thing going forward. And I think if if you don't have the ownership going forward, you don't have somebody to maintain it internally, you're gonna be paying however you fit. And especially as you get into I think, you know, you look at, like, ERP, people go, well, it's different. It's strange beast in IT, which I I and there's some use case there I understand. Even CE, I understand some of those use cases too. Well, even in PowerApps, I mean, yeah, there's some things IT may or may not know. Like, they may not may or may not touch. Like, it's part of the Microsoft platform.

Ben Vollmer [00:25:46]:
It's part of the things they do every day. It's something that they're used to doing. So, I think it's a it's a foreground conclusion that you should share with them enable and take and answer the things as you answer your projects.

Neil Benson [00:25:57]:
Okay. So just to bring us home with the pricing discussion, the way you see it is gonna be lots more vertical specialization, micro, vertical segments, like, you you said. Some value that's evolved from just a software subscription license, maybe attached to the the outcome or the value that the customer is getting. And at the same time, services evolving as well from, you know, away from just selling timesheets towards some kind of subscription model and and how we judge what a customer can get for the ongoing subscription they're paying for, you know, whether they wanna use points or something unlimited or some kind of constraint on the services you get within a time period. You see that shifting as well. Any any other big changes that that you think partners of the future need to think about when it comes to their pricing model?

Ben Vollmer [00:26:44]:
Alright. Again, I think those those two things were there. I got my partner IP. Enablement. Enablement. Enablement. Enablement. If you don't have enablement on your on your price sheet, you're not offering enablement.

Ben Vollmer [00:26:53]:
Yeah, knock it off. Go figure a way to deliver enable.

Neil Benson [00:26:55]:
That's a critical one. I I don't have, in my organization today, anybody who I'd consider a great trainer, right, who can train end users, who can train customers developers, who can train customer system administrators. That that's a key capability I need to invest in.

Ben Vollmer [00:27:10]:
And I actually think but you go back to that training for a second, though. I mean, I I I started in a product called Goldline, which is a CRM product from the North, if you wanna wanna call it that. Right? And I actually think we got more work from our training team than we gave our training team. I I worked at a a small gold mine reseller and and the the glass wall. And I was the first person on the list of the glass wall, so I got to see the you know, every come in and fill the classroom up. But we did a a twice a month, you know, two and three day long, you know, intro to gold mine, dance gold mine. So it was it was a week long, twice a month, open classroom. I don't know.

Ben Vollmer [00:27:44]:
It was a thousand $1,200 to go. It wasn't it was money, but it wasn't, like, a ton of money. I think we made more from that one employee than we did from any other employee we had. But because we then also went on to train like, and what's funny is the woman who did the training for us was not technical. That's I mean, I remember being on the technical team and every kinda made fun of the trainer because she knew the the clicks to follow how to do the clicks. But she wasn't like, we asked her a question. You know, she like, about 14 times a day, I get interrupted. He got how do we do you you do, like, a micro consulting order that you rent there.

Ben Vollmer [00:28:16]:
Yeah. Any partners, we did most of the Microsoft, Before Microsoft learned the documentation for CRM, we ended up writing quite a bit of that. So it was one of those things where don't think of it as I just gotta do it. Think of it as enablement drives by customers. If you had a Power Apps for beginners class, you know, and you offered it to public, even in where you live now in the you know, you'd still get a once a month, three to four people show up and pay a couple thousand bucks to go to receive their class once you get.

Neil Benson [00:28:45]:
Yeah. Like, there's, you know, the app in a day offering is still very popular. I'd say the the couple of partners in Australia who offer regular power apps in a day or dashboards in a day and, all the variants, they're pretty successful. Right? They're they've got a lot of projects, and they do a lot of app in a day sessions. Now is it a coincidence that they have, you know, a good pipeline and a healthy bunch of consultants and a healthy, pipeline of of, projects? Probably not a coincidence. It's probably causation in there somewhere.

Ben Vollmer [00:29:14]:
I don't know anything about Australian retirement accounts, but I know Australian retirement accounts, dead cold. I know member driven organization is dead cold. You know, here's what I know, and I can offer you kind of a turnkey. Here it is. Enablement. I wanna help your team get the most out of this. Anyone could be end user enablement. It could be technical enablement.

Ben Vollmer [00:29:31]:
And then lastly, it's kinda that managed services. How do I put together an offering that allows me to stay engaged with that customer? Backlog as a service, which is gonna go to Sprint teams, or it could be, you know, further enablement, or it could be consulting. Think about this for a second. If you take field service, which is my old baby. Right? And you fired that puppy up with configuration, you can get a field organization up and running with one single custom entity you wanted to. And you probably meet eighty eighty nine kind of needs. Why not opt you're not doing consulting at that point. You're not going in there saying, so so, Neil, so how do you wanna do that again? What what's the purpose of that? You're going to say, Neil, other relations do it this way.

Ben Vollmer [00:30:11]:
We're gonna do it this way. You wanna do it some other way? Great. You're maybe kinda in the queue also do it. But this is the way we're gonna do it, and I can fix the cost, fix the price, fix the deliverable, fix everything for you. But I think the days of coming in and saying, what do you want? How do you want it? Those are all over the micro vertical enablement, then after enablement, after go live, some sort of service that helps us, you know, the point based system keep them alive and engaging with the community.

Neil Benson [00:30:35]:
Yeah. Awesome. Today, I think Superware's got half of those things going, and there's a a few things to work on. I really enjoyed this conversation today, Ben. That's been been amazing. If people wanna find out more about you and get in touch and follow your work, where where's the best place for them to to reach out?

Ben Vollmer [00:30:49]:
I treat, you know, LinkedIn like a 12 World Trace Instagram. So so feel free to reach out for me on LinkedIn.

Neil Benson [00:30:54]:
Ping me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best way to get ahold. Okay. Well, we'll make sure your LinkedIn profile is in the show notes, and thanks so much for joining. Thanks to Ben Volmer for joining me today on Practice Leading. As always, in his own inimitable style, Ben shared some nuggets that I'm gonna take away and noodle on some more. Firstly, the evolution of pricing models. To be honest, I don't know what the future holds for the exchange of value between Microsoft customers and partners today.

Neil Benson [00:31:21]:
Some kind of time based pricing, although imperfect, seems pretty simple and acceptable to most customers and partners. Value based pricing sounds so much better, but implementing it in practice is much harder than it sounds. Secondly, customers want empowerment. As SuperRare grows, we're gonna have to add an empowerment capability to our portfolio. We already work pretty closely with our customers in blended teams, and we strive to upscale them and ensure they can be self sufficient. But to be honest, we don't have a training team, and we couldn't easily run-in a day training classes right now. I'd like to address that opportunity in the next year or so. Lastly, focusing on micro verticals.

Neil Benson [00:32:01]:
Right at the end of our conversation, Ben advised us to find and focus on micro vertical segments. Create products and offerings for them that require little configuration to implement instead of rocking up with a whiteboard and some sticky notes and asking, okay, so what do you want us to build for you today? Superwire is already focusing on micro vertical segments, and I'm confident it's a bet that will pay off. I hope you enjoyed this practice leading episode and found it just as inspiring as I did. Who would you like to hear from on a future episode, or what leadership topic would you like to learn more about to help you scale your Microsoft practice? Send me a LinkedIn message and let me know. Your feedback helps me create the show you find most useful. Until next time, keep experimenting.