Susanne Dansey’s Blog

In the last few days I’ve had some good meetings. Interestingly, both featured DemoShowcase which is a set of 24 predefined customer scenarios which you can customise in a virtual machine environment.

After chatting to the London IT Pro Group, I showed them how easy it is to talk about how five different applications in just over two and a half minutes. The thing is, DemoShowcase isn’t available to those who are exclusively Microsoft Small Business Specialists…

… Today’s meeting was with some of the Partners who have been feeding back to Microsoft and helping shape the way the application has been designed and promoted. In addition, the guys from the Worldwide Partner Group came over to work with Chris Parkes from the Information Worker (IW) team to find out what the next steps for the product would be.

The Partners came from a range of backgrounds and the meeting was full of really great ideas. If you have been able to get your hands on DemoShowcase, then you will see that at the moment Small Business Server isn’t included so that was my plea of the day; INCLUDE MICROSOFT SMALL BUSINESS SERVER IN DEMOSHOWCASE please! There have been a few hang-ups over this (64-bit hasn’t helped) but it was good to hear that it is definitely on the wish-list to be included in the next release. Also added to the list is the need to get one of the best sales and marketing tools to be released from Microsoft into the SBSC Partner Community.

But why would you want to use DemoShowcase in the first place?

At some point, you have to talk to your customers. I know it’s tough, but if you don’t talk to them it’s very hard to achieve a sale. Most Partners sell on some degree of empathy. You see a problem in another business and you want to fix it. Sometimes, it’s not always easy to convince a propsect that the products and services you sell are what they need by talk and paperwork alone. There are many, much larger Partners who I have met, who went that next step further and created virtual environments to configure situations that showed their clients exactly what they mean when they say ‘VPN’, ‘mobile worker’, ‘remote collaboration’. These are all great words but they don’t mean anything if the client doesn’t understand the word and doesn’t know how to position in it. Get that wrong and you’ve wasted your opportunity to get buy in.

Even from a young age at school, most of us were encouraged to join in on ’show-and-tell’ because that way you were able to talk about something you knew and you could gain the complete focus of the listeners by engaging not only with their brain but also with their eyes and ears.

DemoShowcase is an adult’s techie/sales/marketing show-and-tell. It puts everything you’re trying to say and wraps it up on one (or some DVDs) for you and your colleagues to use either as in-house training and/or to demo to your clients.

It doesn’t sell for you, but it gives you the confidence to say ‘I know what you need because I’m showing you what you’ve been trying to articulate for the last few months to your previous IT provider or to anyone who will listen’.

What if you can’t get your hands on a copy of DemoShowcase?

Fear not reader, if you are a Microsoft Small Business Specialist and want a copy then I grabbed a plastic bags worth of discs (yes, I have no shame) for anyone who asks for a copy - first come, first served! Drop me an email to my Westcoast email address (becaust that’s where they’ll despatch from) and I’ll get one in the post to you. Copies will also be available to delegates at the Westcoast Small Business Forum on November 29th if I run out.

In addition, and this is where it’s good to work for a company that lets me do these kinds of things for the Community, I am in the process of recording some of the demos for you to download from the company site (no, not this blog) so that you don’t have to read through the script and you can either use them to teach yourself and/or your staff or show them to your customers.* Requests for technology subjects to be recorded are welcomed or you can have what you’re given.

You have the choice of the following applications in the current version of DemoShowcase:

• Windows Vista Enterprise
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
• Windows SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005
• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
• Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• Microsoft Office Project 2007
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007
• Microsoft ProClarity Desktop Professional
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services
• Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 R2
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server
• Windows Mobile
• Windows Server 2003 R2
• Microsoft MapPoint 2006
• Microsoft Dynamics AX
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobiel Express

Now, that took me a while to type out so there must be a handful of products there that you already use and sell, as well as a few that you’ve looked at and thought ‘hmmm, I’d like to know a bit more about that in case my customer asks me about it and I say ‘er, I don’t know”.

Team this up with the Business Technology Assessment Toolkit (or BTAT as was bandied around in today’s meeting!) and you’ve got the start of a mean set of tools to prepare your sales team (or you) to get out there and sell well. If you get time, check out the Partner Portal (don’t be scared, it’s really not that hard to navigate if you take the time to learn it) as there are some other tools on there that will hold your hand through the sales process.

For those in the US attending SMB Nation at the end of the month, DemoShowcase will be showing itself off courtesy of Nigel and Vivek from Microsoft so make sure you pop along and say ‘hi!’.

*yes, that was a long sentence… you can breath now…