In a move to reshape customer engagement for CSPs, last year Microsoft announced of the public preview of Project Orland, an innovative product that harnesses the power of AI to change how CSPs proactively interact with their customers. At Inspire this year, Microsoft announced another significant update, that Project Orland has been rebranded as the Microsoft 365 Lighthouse Sales Advisor. The Sales Advisor has now transitioned from its former home in Partner Center to Microsoft 365 Lighthouse and is now generally available for free to all CSPs.

So, what exactly is the Microsoft 365 Lighthouse Sales Advisor – It’s a dynamic solution poised to transform how CSPs approach renewals, upsells, and customer acquisition. The rationale behind integrating Sales Advisor into Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is rooted in Microsoft's belief that customer success requires a comprehensive organisational effort.

By providing Account Managers and Service Engineers with a 360-degree view of customers and deep insights into their current state and health, the Sales Advisor empowers CSPs to finely target their customer success strategies. This shift effectively transforms Microsoft 365 Lighthouse into a strategic bridge, uniting account management and engineering teams. Now, CSPs have a unified platform that seamlessly combines multi-tenant remote monitoring and management tools with invaluable customer insights and sales opportunities offered by Sales Advisor.

Benefits Include:

  • Maximised Investment: CSPs can guide customers towards optimising their Microsoft 365 investments and extracting greater business value by making sure they are using all the M365 workloads they are licensed for.
  • Strategic Engagement: With Sales Advisor, CSPs are equipped to understand their customers' needs and know when the best time is to engage with time, armed with customer insights and resources to support the engagement.
  • Surfacing Hidden Opportunities: Sales Advisor ensures that no valuable opportunities go unnoticed. CSPs have comprehensive data at their fingertips – including AI-driven insights, resources, and guidance.

To get access to Sales Advisor, your tenant’s global or billing admin can purchase the free ‘Microsoft 365 Lighthouse’ license under Billing > Purchase Services in the M365 admin center. After 48 hours, the customer data/reports will be available in the Microsoft 365 Lighthouse portal. To access the Sales Advisor section in Lighthouse, you also need to have either the ‘Executive report viewer’ or ‘Report viewer’ role. The former grants access to all reporting data sets, while the latter provides access to most data sets, excluding sensitive information like revenue or personal details. Both GA's and admin agents can assign these roles.

When you click on an opportunity in Sales Advisor you will see either the reason for the recommendation or the customer insight, and it will include clear next steps and links for downloadable resources like one-pagers and email templates to support the engagement. In the subscription tab you’ll see the customers subscription details like the subscription name, number of seats and expiry date, and the usage report will have information about the active usage compared to the assigned seats.

An example of a Sales Advisor opportunity is ‘Upgrade to M365 Business Premium by leading with the Microsoft Defender for O365 Safe Attachments’. In this case, Sales Advisor has identified that 60% of the emails sent by the customer contain email attachments, so it’s recommending that you talk to your customer about the benefits of Safe Attachments.

Microsoft’s data scientists look at over 2m SMB customers and using advanced machine learning models they can identify they key features of the customer that has a high propensity for upsell, for example, for example, they know that is a customer already has one Business Premium license, that customer is 28x more likely to have an increase in conversion to Business Premium, and if they have a custom domain, they are 8x more likely to have an increase in conversion to Business Premium. It’s also looking at the number of seats, workloads, and subscription renewal information. They also add contextual data specific to the customer, such as the customer having high mobile or Exchange Online usage. All this data is used to create a dynamic sales play to help your sales team have valuable upsell conversations with the customers, where you can explain why and how they would benefit from the service with context specific to the customer and how they work.  

As always please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, or contact your Dicker Data Microsoft PDM if you’d like us to go through the opportunities in Sales Advisor with you.