As we approach vacation season, I find myself both reflecting on the year so far and looking forward to what’s coming. My overall feelings are of pride, inspiration and excitement. I’m incredibly proud of how we do what matters for our clients, and the recognition of the impact we’ve had and continue to have – none of which would be possible without our incredible and diverse team around the world.

Celebrating Partner of the Year awards
A couple of weeks ago, we not only won the 2023 Microsoft GSI Partner of the Year Award, for the 18th time, but we also won the Dynamics 365 Sales & Marketing Partner of the Year award. Gaining this recognition from Microsoft is a great honor as it validates the incredible work we’ve delivered and more importantly, the outcomes we’ve driven for clients in elevating their sales and marketing capabilities.

When I consider how we won, I look back at the impact we’ve had with our clients. Take the large insurer who needed to become more customer centric for example – their business had no common view of customers across its brands, a whole range of siloes across their organization, and over 10 disparate systems that were holding them back from understanding their customers.

With our insurance expertise and the unrivalled Microsoft technology experience across our global team, our partnership has given them that common view of their customers they’d never had, and so much more. Their interactions with customers and propositions are hyper relevant, they can meet customer needs with speed and simplicity and their sales and marketing teams are collaborating. The siloes have gone.

They’re also generating more leads, their processes are less complex and costly, and they’re uncovering greater cross selling and up selling opportunities from their data.

While winning awards makes me proud, it’s our amazing people that inspire me – making the magic happen by creating value for clients.

Helping clients to meet their goals
To take another example, CRIF is a global company specializing in credit information, business information systems, analytics, outsourcing and processing services. They needed to improve operational effectiveness with a unified CRM experience across group companies and regions. We helped them to achieve their goals by building a scalable platform based on the native integration of Dynamics 365  and Microsoft 365. They are now benefitting from improved sales activities, forecasts and departmental alignment, as well as complete integration between customer facing systems and CRM. Their customers are getting personalized experiences and tailored, relevant marketing campaigns.

At Mercedes Benz, they had no standard or centralized system for managing prices and applying product discounts, meaning employees had to interact with multiple legacy CRM platforms. The company’s headquarters had limited visibility of regional pricing offerings, and approvals and contract management were complicated and time consuming. Avanade helped Mercedes-Benz with a flexible, agile sales solution, based on Dynamics 365 – ensuring that fair and uniform pricing is available to customers. Pricing and sales functions are more user friendly, sales processes are more efficient, and the speed to process deals and contracts has been cut in half.

With clients across a huge range of industries, these are just a few examples. As I mentioned above, the impact we have when we partner with clients is what really inspires me, but I’ll always be proud when we win awards, particularly Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards! And it’s all down to the incredible, diverse team of people who solve our clients’ biggest problems.

If you’d like to learn how we can help you achieve your goals and why we’re serial winners of Microsoft Partner awards, please contact us today.