Microsoft has reorganized its financial services sales organization and added positions for more industry experts to bring both industry expertise and technical expertise to a larger number of banks, brokerages, and insurance companies.

“This is a new enterprise selling model,” explained Tracy Issel, general manager for financial services in North America. “We have organized so we can get the right resource to the right customer at the right time.”

To accomplish this, Microsoft is adding 10 percent to its field sales staff in three primary areas – consistent customer relationship teams, deeper industry expertise, and deeper technical specialization.

“We have always had extremely competent technical people, but we were asking them to cover a wide variety of products and solutions,” Issel explained. “Now we will have technical specialists who are focused on well-defined areas such as security, messaging and collaboration, or systems management.”

Microsoft divides the country into three regions – West, Central, and East – and into 12 geographic districts. The additional industry experts will be subject matter experts aligned regionally. The technical specialists will be assigned to districts and will be available to work with customers from any industry in those geographic centers.

Instead of focusing on just the top 100 financial services firms in North America, the financial services group will now have responsibility for every enterprise-level financial services account. The number of industry specialists is growing by 50 percent to support this expanded effort.

“Through this redesign, we will make more of an impact on our customers and the financial services industry. By hiring on a much larger scale industry experts, we will be able to take Microsoft’s phenomenal investment in R&D and tailor it to the needs of the industry,” said Issel. “We will have sales people who know how to apply technology to enable a business solution. Our surveys indicate that customers were more satisfied when aligned to industry sales teams. They felt those teams brought more solutions than products to the table and spoke to them in their own language.”

The new organization will also affect the way Microsoft works with partners. Local and technology systems integrators will be managed within the 12 districts and three regions. Industry solutions partners will be managed by the financial services team. Industry partner account managers will be aligned by banking, insurance, and capital markets at a regional level. The result is that a national partner such as Corillian will work with the banking partner account manager on opportunities with any financial services customer in the region. Previously, partners had to determine the point of interaction based on whether the customer was managed by the financial services team or the district. The company will hire more partner managers for this effort.

Solution specialists, such as those focused on applications like business intelligence or knowledge workers, are now part of the customer relationship teams.

“These teams pivot on a set of customers and share all the same goals – including those of the customer. Each set of customers has dedicated account managers and account technology specialists, an applications solutions specialist, and an information worker solutions specialist,” said Issel. These customer teams are aligned by industry wherever possible. In larger areas, the teams are aligned at the vertical level. New York City has dedicated customer pods for insurance, capital markets and banking, while in the Midwest the pods are for insurance and more generally for financial services. The Southeast has one pod focused exclusively on banking and the Southwest has one focused on financial services.

A few territories don’t have enough enterprise level financial services accounts to support a dedicated team, but large firms in much of the country will see a significant change as a result of this reorganization. Issel said the industry will go from 20 percent of Microsoft financial services customers working with a financial services affinity team to 50 percent. Even those whose customer team cannot focus exclusively on financial services, will now have access to the industry expertise of the regional industry subject matter experts.

A new position of “Industry Solution Specialist” has been added to bring on board senior sales executives with deep experience in the business. They will focus on solutions that deliver improved experiences for customer, employee, and operations teams. Specifically, the areas of focus include: channel renewal, the insurance value chain, and advisor platforms.

“These are areas of opportunity. They represent challenges for our customers, areas where they plan to spend money, and areas where Microsoft has partners and products that other financial services firms have used to grow their business. We selected areas where Microsoft-based solutions are differentiated from the competition,” Issel said.

Customer feedback suggests that financial services enterprise customers who have had access to industry experts have a higher level of satisfaction around issues such as security, she added.

“We have not communicated as effectively to customers without that access. Now that we are expanding our resources and focusing more on industry, we can ensure all financial services customers have increased awareness about our investments, initiatives and strategies to help them meet their business objectives,” said Issel. “We can now touch all of those customers and can focus on delivering value-added solutions, effective communications, and customer satisfaction.”