Enterprise Focus of Sales Reorganization

Microsoft is changing the way its sales force deals with large customers and enterprises in an effort to win more server business. The changes are intended to address several problems with Microsoft’s current enterprise sales methods, including multiple Microsoft groups trying to sell to the same customer; an emphasis on individual products rather than integrated solutions; and a tendency to emphasize desktop applications rather than server applications and operating systems that more directly address an organization’s business needs.

By enhancing the incentives and roles of account managers and technical support in the sales process, Microsoft hopes to promote long-term customer loyalty and encourage enterprises to purchase integrated solutions that make broad use of Microsoft server technologies.

Goals of the Changes

Given its current dominance of the desktop PC and the maturity of that market, Microsoft sees few opportunities to achieve significant revenue growth from desktop applications in the enterprise. But it has plenty of room to grow in the server market by taking sales from the competition. Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, is focused solely on server applications, and many large enterprise resource planning (ERP) and e-commerce systems run on IBM, Oracle, or Sun platforms.