With its alignment to
Microsoft Solution Selling Process (MSSP), the Diagnostic phase
innately supports the solution provider's sales cycle, providing
guidance and activities that lead the seller through a prescriptive
selling cycle.
The following diagram shows
the Sure Step Diagnostic phase flow and alignment of the seller with the
MSSP. The flow shown in the diagram specifically depicts how the sales
cycle for a prospect, that is, a new customer is supported. Sure Step
Diagnostic phase also has a similar flow for existing customers, which
will be discussed in a later section. The flow includes six Decision
Accelerators for the prospect (we will discuss the seventh DA for the
existing customer in the later section).
Just as with MSSP, the Sure
Step Diagnostic phase is broken down into seven stages of the sales
cycle. For the seller, these stages correspond to the probability that
the sale will be completed. The Activities and Decision Accelerator
Offerings are then aligned to these stages in a manner so as to
accelerate the sales cycle to bring it to a close. The final stage in
this process is a lead-in to the solution delivery, or the
Implementation phase and the corresponding activities of Sure Step.
Prospect 0% through Qualify 10%:
Diagnostic Preparation Activity
Qualify 10% through Develop 20%:
Requirements and Process Review Decision Accelerator Offering
Solution 40%:
Fit Gap and Solution Blueprint Decision Accelerator Offering
Architecture Assessment Decision Accelerator Offering
Scoping Assessment Decision Accelerator Offering
Proof 60%:
Proof of Concept Decision Accelerator Offering
Business Case Decision Accelerator Offering
Proof 60% through Close 80%:
Proposal Generation Activity
Final Licensing & Services Agreement Activity
Deploy 100%:
Project Mobilization Activity
Starting the discovery process with solution positioning
The Sure
Step Diagnostic phase begins with the Diagnostic Preparation activity,
which provides the sales teams with key information on positioning the
solution to the customer. Along with the guidance on positioning the
solutions for select industries and their corresponding sub-industries,
the solution capabilities for the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM
solutions are also covered in this section.
As
seen in the previous diagram, the Diagnostic Preparation activity is
situated across the 0% — Prospect and 10% — Qualify stages of the
selling cycle in Sure Step. At the 0% — Prospect stage, the customer is
looking for more information on the potential solutions in the
marketplace, and they may or may not have a complete grasp of the needs
of their organization for the new solution. The positioning content can
then help the seller start the initial dialog with their customer around
the general business needs that the Microsoft Dynamics solutions are
designed to solve. The content could be used as preparation by the
seller for face-to-face meetings with their prospective customers, as
part of a script for a telephone conversation with the customer, or for a
prospectus or introductory letter to the customer that may set the
stage for a future meeting.
The positioning content can also be used by the sales teams to respond to high-level questions on a customer's Request for Information ( RFI) or Request for Proposal (RFP).
Most of this positioning information is available on product websites,
but it has been brought together in Sure Step as a quick reference for
the sales teams.
Positioning guidance and
solutions for the industry is another important area covered in this
activity. In the Sure Step 2010 release, the methodology has been
expanded beyond coverage of general Microsoft Dynamics solutions usage
to a specific application of the solution, for an initial subset of
industries. The topic of industry solutions will be covered in more
detail in an ensuing section.
Sure Step also provides links
to other Microsoft tools such as the Microsoft Dynamics Business
Solutions Roadmap and the Industry Playbook, to help us position the
right modules of the solution in this activity. The Microsoft Dynamics
Business Solutions Roadmap tool is designed to determine the right
modules of the core Microsoft Dynamics products, along with the
corresponding number of seats that a customer may need for their
organization. The Industry Playbook tool, on the other hand, addresses
the Independent Software Vendor ( ISV) solutions for Microsoft Dynamics for given industries and their sub-industries.
The next screenshot shows the
general positioning guidance for the Microsoft Dynamics solutions,
including links to the Microsoft Dynamics Business Solutions Roadmap
tool:
As the sales team moves
towards the 10% — Qualify stage, they will need to gauge if the customer
organization has already defined a selection process, and appointed
resources to evaluate solution fit and alternatives, as well as
ascertain if the customer has a high-level budget allocation to acquire
the solution in the near term. They will also want to ensure that the
customer's evaluation is a fair one, meaning that it is not already
weighted towards a particular competitor and they are just going through
the motions to appease corporate standards or rules. When the
qualification has been accomplished, the sales teams can begin making
use of the Decision Accelerator offerings to help the customer envision
their future solution.
The following sections
explain the usage of Decision Accelerator offerings for the sales cycles
of the selling organization. A later section expands on this usage, and
provides the customer's perspectives for their usage.
The first step to envisioning the future state
The first Decision Accelerator
offering in Sure Step is the Requirements and Process Review offering
that is designed to help the customer determine the business
requirements for their future state, as well as visualize their "to-be"
process flows for the associated organizational functions.
The first part of this
DA offering enables the seller to ascertain the customer's
requirements, with detailed, role-tailored questionnaire templates
specific to the ERP or CRM solution that the customer is exploring. The
role-tailored aspect of these questions in these templates allows the
seller to address the functional requirements of the specific groups in
the organization, such as accounting managers, marketing personnel,
inventory manager, product planner, or production manager. This is a key
enabler of solution selling in that the seller is able to engage the
prospective customer in a manner that resonates with them. Instead of
approaching the customer and leading with product features and
functionality and potentially turning them off, the seller now has the
ability to engage the customer in a meaningful discussion on their
day-to-day functions and job responsibilities, allowing them to unearth
the customer's pain points and other valuable information such as
current system limitations and other inhibitors of their performance.
A good solution seller
and/or a services sales executive should be able to parlay these
questions to develop a relationship with the customer. Depending on the
size and scope of the prospective engagement, the sales team may also
involve a solution architect, senior consultant, or project manager in
these discussions, to provide real-life credibility and experiences to
the customer. Going through the questions in a methodical fashion, the
sellers document the findings from these customer sessions, and they in
turn become the basis for the business requirements of the solution.
The following is a
screenshot from Sure Step of the contents of the Role-Tailored
Questionnaire for Microsoft Dynamics AX. The AX questionnaire includes
questions to initiate dialog with the executives of the organization,
such as the President or CEO, through to individual roles such as
Accounting Manager, Accounts Payable Coordinator, and Materials Manager,
among others.
While the questionnaires assist
with the requirements part of this offering, this DA also provides
access to specific business process maps to enable the process objective
of the offering. The business process maps constitute the standard
processes when using the solution features, and they can be used as a
starting point to envision the future state workflows of the customer
organization.
From the service provider's
perspective, they are helping the customer through their needs analysis
in this exercise. While the templates included in Sure Step for this
offering, including the Questionnaires and Process Maps, are
distinctively fashioned along the lines of the corresponding Microsoft
Dynamics product, it is not a stretch for the customer organization to
take this output and use it as the basis for other solution evaluations.
In doing so, there is also the potential that the customer decides to
go down the path of an alternative solution other than Microsoft
Dynamics. Keeping that in mind, it is important for the service provider
to expect fair compensation for their services. This is one of the keys
to positioning this mini-engagement as a DA offering — the service
provider is putting forward experienced resources from their
organization to enable the customer to envision the future state of
their organization, and document the requirements for a solution to meet
this vision. In the strict sense of the engagement, the services
rendered are akin to business consulting, even if there is a bias
towards a given solution.
As such, the service
provider can legitimately position their services for customer
compensation. Of course, the service provider may also choose to view
the engagement as a business investment, and provide all or part of the
services pro bono; however, it is in their best interests to do so only
when they see it as fair competition, and that they have been afforded
an equal shot at winning the customer's business as their competitors
have.
It also bears mention that
the Requirements and Process Review does not always have to be
executed, and there are circumstances such as when the customer has
already independently executed a thorough analysis of their needs and
documented them into a Request for Proposal (RFP). However, in the cases
that a customer already has an RFP in place, it is possible that
another competitor or vendor assisted the customer in developing the
requirements, in which case you may have to execute the Requirements and
Process Review DA, at least to an extent. This discussion is elaborated
in the Other usage scenarios for the Decision Accelerators section.
Identifying the right solution
After the requirements for the
new solution have been identified and documented, the next step in the
process is to ascertain how well the proposed solution fits for these
requirements, and how it aligns with the vision of the customer
organization. The Sure Step Fit Gap and Solution Blueprint Decision
Accelerator offering has been architected to serve that purpose. This
also aligns well with a major tenet of the Microsoft Solution Selling
Process (MSSP) to make yourself equal before you make yourself
different.
Fit Gap analysis is an
important exercise that the customer and sales teams should perform in
the solution evaluation phase. The premise of the analysis is to go
through each of the requirements defined for the new solution and
determine if they can be met by the proposed solution. To do so, the
first step entails that the sales team translate the business
requirements gathered in the previous exercise into solution
requirements. As noted in the previous section, it is also possible that
the sales team gets involved after an RFP or Request for Quote
(RFQ) has been generated, in which case, it becomes even more important
to be able to translate the general business needs into specific
solution requirements.
Functional
solution architects and/or experienced functional consultants are
typically involved in breaking down a larger business need into smaller
solution requirements. An example of this may be when the customer
indicates that an overhaul of their Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)
process is one of their business needs. S&OP involves many areas,
including sales planning and forecasting, supply and inventory planning,
among others. While this is an extreme example, it just goes to show
that a business need may be a bigger objective, but a solution
requirement will need to be more compartmentalized to ensure that the
solution delivery team can truly map the degree of the requirement to
the solution.
If a requirement can be achieved
either by the out of the box solution features or by configuring the
standard solution, the requirement is considered as a fit
to the proposed solution. It is also possible that minor change in the
current process or workflow of the customer organization could lead to a
fit with the solution. However, if the base solution needs to be
customized, or in other words, some code needs to be written to achieve
the requirement, that requirement is considered as a gap to the proposed solution.
It is also important to understand what constitutes the solution.
Typically, the Fit Gap analysis is conducted with the base Microsoft
Dynamics solution. If, however, add-on Independent Software Vendor (ISV)
solutions for the Microsoft Dynamics solution are expected to be part
of the overall solution, the term solution
should encompass the base Microsoft Dynamics solution as well as the
corresponding ISV solutions. Accordingly, a requirement will be
considered a fit if it can be met by the combined solution, without the need for any additional custom code components.
The percentage of the
requirements that fit with the overall solution to the total number of
requirements deemed necessary for the new solution is expressed as the Degree of Fit of the proposed solution.
Number of Requirements that fit the proposed solution =
Requirements met by the
standard features of the solution + Requirements met by a configuration
of the solution + Requirements met by a workflow/process change in the
customer organization
Degree of Fit of the proposed solution (expressed as a percentage) =
Number of requirements that fit the proposed solution/Total number of requirements for the new solution
The point about a simple
change in the customer's business process or workflow to meet a given
requirement cannot be overemphasized. In practice, this option is often
not given consideration; instead, you can see the service provider
coming up with expensive customization designs or add-on solutions as
alternatives. But the first step should always be to examine the current
workflow of the customer organization. We need to find answers to
questions, such as are they presently going through the steps because of
limitations in their current systems, or perhaps because of a creative
workaround that was set up sometime in the past and is no longer
necessary, or any other minor reason that a simple shift in a procedure
could result in the company using the standard feature of the solution
to achieve their goals? If our answer to the questions is yes, it is
preferable for both parties to consider workflow change as the
alternative, not only from the perspective of lower delivery costs for
the solution, but also from a long-term perspective—the more the
customer can use standard features of a solution, the easier it will be
for them to maintain the customizations as well as to upgrade to future
releases of the solution whenever they decide to do so. In the long run,
this results in a lower value for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
for the proposed solution for the customer. If the seller is truly
practicing the solution selling ideology, they will also work towards
lowering the TCO for the customer, and not towards increasing the scope
of the solution via customizations. Additionally, the service provider
should always strive to architect the simplest solution to meet a
customer's needs, thereby lowering the overall risk profile of the
proposed solution. This should also be a point of consideration for the
seller in moving away from complex customizations wherever feasible.
Coming back to the Fit Gap
analysis, the output of the exercise is to determine the Degree of Fit
of the proposed solution to the customer's requirements. However, what
value for the Degree of Fit the solution should have for it to be
acceptable is a contextual question. Some organizations may require a
minimum of 75% Degree of Fit for lower TCO objectives. Others may be
fine with a lower value for the Degree of Fit due to the specific nature
of their business that precludes them from using out-of-the-box
functionality to meet their needs, and could be evaluating if they
should be developing their own application or if it would feasible to
start with an existing code base and expand it to meet their needs.
The following screenshot shows
a sample output from Sure Step of a Fit Gap analysis for a Microsoft
Dynamics CRM engagement. This is just a simple screenshot with five
requirements being mapped to the categories, but it shows the pictorial
depiction of the Degree of Fit for the customer to the CRM solution.
Upon
completion of the Fit Gap analysis, the second part of the Fit Gap and
Solution Blueprint Decision Accelerator offering is to develop the
solution blueprint. The solution blueprint is a document that
communicates the service provider's conceptual design of their proposed
solution to meet the customer's requirements. The document should
include the seller's understanding of the customer's business needs
along with the overall solution, including any add-on solutions,
customizations required, and integration components that are deemed
necessary to meet the customer's future state vision.
