The Importance of Partnering Together with Alyssa Fitzpatrick, General Manager and Worldwide Partner Co-sell at Microsoft

On this episode, Lauren is joined by the General Manager and Worldwide Partner Co-Sell of Microsoft Alyssa Fitzpatrick to discuss how culture shift makes an impact on decision making and how to ensure that a culture shift will be successful.

3 Takeaways:

Making any type of transition within a major organization or company is always stressful and comes with lots of challenges. COVID has made those challenges even more difficult, but with the right plan of action, they can be overcome.Culture shifts are something that many companies are afraid to do because of the risk involved, but despite the risk, the reward can be far superior.“If you build it they will come.” Alyssa used that model in a previous job that has carried over to her current role with Microsoft. As simple as this might sound, Alyssa knows that in order for people to follow your lead, you need to have a plan and build something so that others can follow your lead.

Key Quotes:

“It takes a while to get that culture shift, but once you start to shift culture, that's when you know your change is taking hold and, and that's where we're at right now. We're not done, we still have a long way to go. And we're learning along this entire journey.”

“If you want to put a yellow sticky on your computer, it should say, don't assume. Everyone needs to have that reminder because we do: We assume someone already knows, we assume they're already in our camp or they assume they're going to get the information from someone else. We assume that a topic is closed, done, and dusted. It's not, let's make sure, you know, make sure you finish that sentence. Get to that punctuation point.”

Bio:

Alyssa and her team focus on accelerating Microsoft’s business through partner sales engagement across all customer and industry segments. She manages the corporate strategy and worldwide field teams that are responsible for local, regional, and global partner sales. In this role, Alyssa maintains focus on all aspects of the customer engagement process and sales execution, which includes the sales model design, channel strategy, partner selection, partner co-selling motions, revenue attainment, and field incentives and readiness. With more than 25 years of leadership experience, Alyssa has led significant business transformation efforts, driving organizational changes, commerce initiatives, and cloud adoption across the global partner ecosystem.