Office 365 Things You Need To Know – The EMS Up-Sell Opportunity & Strategy

Josh Condie - A key concern for small and midsized businesses these days continues to be security, and rightly so. High profile enterprise security failings that we commonly see in the media are often triggered by enterprise partnership with smaller businesses. At the core of many of these security events is identity. Securing identity is the control plane at the center of Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS). For example, there’s often a very simple challenge that needs to be addressed in SMB with regards to security – removing the reliance on usernames and password for access. Yet this message alone does not sell.

So what is the best way to address this oft-ignored necessity, and opportunity, with EMS? What solution selling strategy should you employ? Well, at EMS’s core (and in its name) is Mobility. Yet should we always focus on the device when we think of mobility? Perhaps not. How about the mobile experience? End-users will think of the experience in the context of device and productivity. Only business and technical decision makers will think about the security of the experience. And the comprehensive, yet quite simple, security story that EMS tells is well suited to capture their attention. Further, if they are current Office 365 subscribers, this message will really resonate. Let’s take a look at this simple message:

What’s in EMS:

Now, I would recommend that you do not “sell” Azure Active Directory Premium, Intune, Rights Management and Threat Analytics. Your audience may not stay awake long enough (maybe I’m wrong though). Instead, sell the comfort, confidence and compliance that each one of these components directly provides:

Each component of EMS directly maps to a security need for a modern SMB. If they are enjoying the mobile productivity of Office 365, then they are ready to hear of the dangers that come with not addressing the security of that complete mobile experience. Together, in securing all four of these pathways, you offer comfort, confidence and compliance that will help an SMB sleep well at night. Yet they’ll stay awake to hear your pitch!

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