Hi, welcome, and thank you
for joining me for a Fireside Chat.
This is Jigisha Deb,
senior product marketing manager at Microsoft.
And with me, I have the pleasure
of hosting Tom Galambos from Hitachi Solutions.
Tom, welcome to this series.
And can you share a little bit
about yourself, your role, with Hitachi?
You bet.
Thanks for the invite.
I am the president of Hitachi Solutions.
And if you don't know who we are, we're a global SI,
100% Microsoft-focused, pretty much across all the clouds,
with still the majority
of our business in the Dynamics space.
Been in the space for some 15 years now.
And as you can all tell from this video and the wonderful
background that Tom's use,
I want to take a moment and congratulate you and the entire
Hitachi Solutions team for being awarded
as Partner of the Year
for Dynamics 365 Intelligent Sales and Marketing.
Congratulations.
Thank you, thank you.
Feel very fortunate to have won the award this year,
big focus area for us, and it's great for the team.
Ton of hard work last year, and some great customers.
And absolutely well-deserved,
so thank you for all your hard work, your partnership,
and being so central to working with us.
A question for you.
I know last year was really good, you ended well.
But life and work have changed.
I don't think anything is normal.
What has it been for you and for your practice?
And what are some of the challenges that you've had
to think through to maintain this business continuity?
If you don't mind sharing some of that with us.
No, you bet.
I think for us, first and foremost,
was health and safety of employees.
So it was really about how do we continue
engage with our customers in an a remote environment.
Due to the nature of the business, for us,
probably certainly 50 to 60%
of the engagement with customers was remote to begin with.
So the transition for us on the actual execution side,
the deployment of solutions was probably not that traumatic.
It was just doing a little bit more,
and always remote of, what we had done before.
I think the bigger challenge was around actually the sales
and go-to-market motion, certainly in selling solutions
and explaining our value prop,
and really trying to build relationships
with prospects and customers,
that had always been face to face,
or a significant portion of that, face to face.
So for us moving to totally digital
in that sales engagement, in that sales process,
was probably one of the bigger adjustments
that we needed to go through.
And I think that's been for quite a few customers.
But in spite of all these challenges,
you've done wonderfully,
you ended the year, again, very strongly.
Would you like to share if you feel, you know,
Dynamics 365 Sales has actually helped
with the success in any form at all?
Yeah, you bet.
I think there's two ways to look at it.
One, I can even actually look a bit internally.
Obviously we run the solution ourselves.
We're big users and, you know,
the breadth of the capability with the solution
and this whole motion for us to moving to all digital,
but being in a way, and being able to communicate,
really in these rapidly evolving times,
where are pipelines, what is going to close,
and for me to communicate up and down the chain of,
with Japan on where we are and just leverage a tool
internally worked extremely well for us.
And I think we're able to carry that story to customers
that we're trying to transition the same way
that had moved to an environment
where similarly they obviously needed sales.
Right.
They were probably in a position where things had changed
with their sales motion as well.
And both the digital selling aspects
combined with our ability to share our own stories,
I think actually worked quite well together.
We actually saw pipeline growth through our Q1,
which would have been Microsoft's Q4.
So really, even from a year-over-year basis,
as we look at this last quarter, even with COVID,
we had some pretty tremendous pipeline growth.
so a lot of interest out there.
and a lot of activity around D365 for sales.
That's commendable that through all of this
you're seeing that strong pipeline, robust pipeline.
And I feel a lot of it is also coming from other customers,
Like you said, your customers realizing
from their own experience, from others' experience,
that they do need to move to a digital selling platform.
That said, what kind of adjustments have you made. if any,
to your business model in FY21?
Do you feel like definition of success has changed
in any form for your business?
Yeah, I think we're in a mode
that the biggest challenge,
our KPIs and the areas of focus have been
around how do we build relationships
and maintain those from a customer standpoint,
that interaction, and have continuity in that,
and just think a little bit differently
in terms of some of the simple things
when you're operating remotely,
whether that's in a sales engagement
or actually deploying the Solution.
Right.
So that's from an outward-facing customer standpoint.
I think when I look internally, it's then how do I also,
to a degree, maintain that sense of community
and keep connected as a team,
because we're all operating remotely.
KPI's overall, we set our expectations lower
in terms of while pipelines are up.
I would say that sales, the close rates
are moving around a little bit more,
and seeing closes that people aren't quite
as willing to commit to the big buy.
'Cause they're a little bit,
how's this remote thing going to work?
So we'll sell more pilot and looking for POV-type activities
that we can execute on quickly.
And Dynamic Sales is a good engine for that.
Easier to do it there perhaps than say
with F and O, or on the back-office side of things.
So the ability to sell that quickly
and then actually deliver that value
so that you do get that follow on sale,
I think is probably one of the key KPIs for us
as we look about how the business has transitioned a bit,
or at least is going to go through that motion
for perhaps the next couple of quarters.
I think you brought up some really good points,
one, talking about starting slow, going in,
giving that bite-size success to the customers,
helping them through it instead of
those big investments once and for all,
but then building those strong relationships,
helping the customers first, instead of going and selling
what they may or may not require at this time.
I think that's the right approach.
So glad to hear you're doing that.
Yeah.
Any advice or tips that you can share
with other partners in this industry
who are either struggling or trying to grow their practice?
Where do they start?
How it goes, yeah, I think for us,
and this is a journey we've been on for some time,
but it has been one of the key measures of success,
and it becomes even more so.
If I go back to that how do I convince the customer
to really try this and drive value quickly,
is to be extremely focused from an industry perspective.
So the ability then to convey industry knowledge,
to talk the language of the customer,
the greater depth that one has in that,
even if you are remote, it's easier to build
the credibility there and to build
relationship with customer and can relate to them.
And then it also helps you define that proof of value.
How do I do that small thing quickly
and go execute well on that?
And I think the last thing would be,
it puts you in a position where if you've done that,
where you probably have
some repeatability in your solutions,
which again takes us back to that time to value,
delivering it quickly to customers, and really hitting
some key milestones quickly, building credibility,
and then getting that larger follow on.
Awesome, totally makes sense.
If there was one question they should be asking themselves
while they're trying to grow, what would it be?
I mean, what do you feel would be a pragmatic
and an incremental approach to moving forward?
You know, I think it would be,
it'd be a couple of things in terms
of both narrowing your focus,
you know, are we trying to do too much?
Where do we have our strengths?
And building upon those, whether that's from
an industry perspective or a capability perspective,
and then being mindful of perhaps are there some other
assets and tool sets on the periphery around my focus area.
In this case, we're talking
about intelligent marketing and sales.
The big one, which we've had a lot of success with
is around Power Platform and Power Apps
as a way to quickly do a few more things more broadly
and not have to make huge investments in capability,
and bring value to the customer.
So look back at where Microsoft had it
and where some of those assets are,
where the funding vehicles are around that.
And then put some focus on that and perhaps put some other
things off to the side here, and be mindful of that,
in these interesting times, I guess I'll say.
Some really, really good guidance
and nuggets to take from here.
Any closing words for our viewers,
and something that our partners,
and they can learn from you?
I think just take advantage
of your relationship with Microsoft.
I think you guys have been a great partner,
and there's a good understanding
of the challenges that the partners have.
Sometimes it's a little bit hard to find in Microsoft.
So have that dialogue. Lesson learned.
Well, yeah, and all of us have been
in the channel a long time.
So ask those questions and be very much,
you know agile is a really popular word right now,
but that level of agility and the ability to
kinda quickly adapt is really,
really key to success, and anticipate that.
You know, for us, this has been an interesting challenge,
and it will change, but it will never be
like it was before, I think.
And so how can you anticipate,
take learnings and the positives from this,
take these obstacles and turn those
into advantages as we kinda move forward
and move through these times.
Again, really great advice,
really good tips for all the partners in the ecosystem.
Definitely a lot to learn from you over here, Tom,
and from Hitachi Solutions.
Congratulations once again.
Your team absolutely deserves the award,
and looking forward to so much more in FY21.
Thank you for joining.
Thank you for your time.
And I'm looking forward to a big year
this year too, thank you.