I've dubbed this interview and series, Microsoft's Season of Change and Transformation. This is the first interview in a series to help the partner community best engage with the technology giant as it evolves it's partner business to better serve partners and customers. As most of you know, Microsoft announced a major reorganization to it's customer and partner - facing business in early July which included the formation of a "One Commercial Partner" or OCP organization. This included three key elements - "Build With", "Go to Market", and "Sell With"*. *In an earlier episode, Bill Hawkins helped decode the announcements for our listeners in greater detail and you can listen to this Episode 18 as a primer. With Microsoft summer and implementation still underway, I thought it would be good to walk our partners down the hallways of Bellevue and Redmond and "peel back" through interviews with partner leaders on how to best align and engage with Microsoft at this critical season. My guest for this interview episode is Eric Loper. Eric leads a "Build With" organization of partner business development managers focused on growing competencies, capabilities and capacity with Microsoft's top partners in the United States. This is a second or " encore" interview episode with for Eric. If you listened to Episode 2 of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering you will remember Eric as my very first interview guest. At the time Eric and I had a great discussion and he shared with partner listeners the essential elements of partnering, his observations on technology trends and recommendations on how to best engage with the technology giant. You can listen to that episode here. For this interview episode, Eric updates us on how the changes are positively impacting his organization, the renewed excitement and energy around partners, how both partners and partner sellers now need to think and act, and the increased investments in growing the business with and through partners. A full transcript of the interview is below in the show notes. If you have not listened to the podcast, now is your chance by going to iTunes , Google Play, Player FM, other Android podcast players or by going to my website “Ultimate Guide to Partnering“. You can also review this podcast by going to iTunes and searching “Ultimate Guide to Partnering” and clicking on the album art and hitting the ratings tab. This helps others find the podcast. You can also follow and like on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Thank you for following and listening. Vince Menzione Transcript of our interview. Eric, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you back for this encore episode and to update our listeners on you and the business. You were my very first interview guest about 25 episodes ago. Boy, have we come a long way since then. At the time, you had a fairly small team, focused strictly on the National Solution Provider Program, and your organization was nested in the US business underneath the S&S&P team. Flash forward six months now, all of that is changed, and I'm super excited to have you here, and hear from you about the changes. The charge in the energy in Bellevue and RedMon right now. So, tell our listeners a little bit about what's happening. Eric Loper: Awesome. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. It's always good to have a chance to catch up. By the way, I listened to some of your conversation with Bill Hawkins the other day. I thought that he did a great job. I took away some things from that and excited that you continue to deliver something that's pretty cool for our partner community. Vince Menzione: Thank you. So tell us,
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