Day 3: The SharePoint Fairy to the rescue

After a couple of days looking at the new SharePoint technology it was time to turn to the question ‘how do we become better partners and win more business?’. The day started with an excellent presentation on using Story Telling to convey our strength and capability and to resonate with our prospects and clients. Bob McDowell, VP of Information Worker at Microsoft delivered a very passionate session with very good story telling examples. These will come in handy!

A great aspect of today was the continuous switch from selling technology to engaging with prospects and clients. Knowing more about your intended customers is a key to quick and positive engagement. It is no longer sensible or feasible just to be technology specialist but you must be able to talk the talk. Bob gave a great rendition of being asked ‘so what keeps you up at night?’ question – one which he loathes as it is still ‘sales speak’. He followed by suggesting ‘tell me about your current objectives and the challenges you are facing Mr Customer in reaching those objectives so I can determine how or if we can help you overcome them’; I know which would work best.

As it is a key requirement within our client base the ‘Proven Principles and Best Practices for Intranets’ session doubled a consultancy approach to the actual delivery for DelMonte foods (co-hosted by the Portal Manager involved from DelMonte). Much as what you would expect but sometimes the obvious is missed. This was followed by the ‘Building an enterprise knowledge management solution with SharePoint and Solving Information Chaos. The former was focused on 2010 and the road Microsoft themselves have been treading on building a better KM service. A key part of the information was how under 2007 they have over 350 different SharePoint sites all supposed to be providing knowledge. Under 2010 they will have a one-site-one-style environment which learns about the users and delivers the right information through tagging and meta data extraction – very cool and very powerful.

Having wandered the Showcase I must admit my surprise that there are NO application vendors on any stand. Everyone is selling a ‘SharePoint add-on or booster’. This must be an opportunity for Calsoft.

During my tour of the Showcase arena I came across the SharePoint Fairy – see picture. Believe it or not she is the Marketing Director for a sizable SharePoint services partner in the US – nice marketing tactics!

Dave Gardiner