Microsoft accelerates channel sales with Qorus Content Hub

Microsoft knows firsthand that its partners make more possible. When a company joins the Microsoft Partner Network, they become part of a global community that connects them with training, practice-building guidance, sales and marketing resources, and the Microsoft partner ecosystem to help differentiate their business and drive growth. 

Microsoft Partner Network Marketing Benefits is one of Microsoft’s strategic investments designed to help partners reach more customers and drive success. Marketing Benefits include a set of core tools, resources, and marketing programs that help partners save time and money while strengthening their capabilities to better serve customers and accelerate time to market. 

When Microsoft discovered that partner sellers were spending more time searching for sales and marketing content within their organizations, taking time away from growing their solutions, the Go-To-Market Services team set out to add a sales enablement benefit to the Marketing Benefits portfolio. 

Sales enablement for winning teams 

With Microsoft partners spending an average of 3–8 hours per week searching for sales and marketing content to send to prospects, up to 2–3 days creating a single pitch deck or proposal, and their salespeople often avoiding using existing content because it’s outdated and not customizable, Microsoft wanted to instantly bring Sales, Marketing, Proposal & RFP, and Channel teams together to collaborate on content to support key deals.

“Many businesses are operating in a state of content chaos," explains Cydney Hoffnagle, Digital Marketing Lead at Microsoft. "Microsoft created a vast library of content for our partners to leverage in their sales and marketing communications, and we wanted a way for them to find and use this content quickly and effectively across digital their channels.”

Microsoft partnered with Qorus Software to license their sales enablement solution, Qorus Content Hub. As an added benefit available to all Microsoft partners, Qorus Content Hub is a Microsoft Office add-in that allows users to find, create, personalize, and share sales and marketing content without having to leave the Office applications. 

A simpler way to engage customers

Qorus Content Hub is highly intuitive and easy to use. Because is it integrates with Microsoft Office, Microsoft 365, and Teams, users simply click the icon in the Office ribbon to search their content library and choose the content they want to add directly to sales and marketing emails, presentations, and documents. Qorus comes fully stocked with Microsoft Partner Network content library to help sales teams find the best customer-facing content and get to market even faster.

“Qorus Content Hub enables our partners to easily find content and put it to work by creating customer proposals and presentations more easily, quickly, and effectively,” explains Hoffnagle. “They can securely share this content with their customers, tracking engagement to inform follow-up conversations and accelerate the sales process even further.”

Microsoft partners can accelerate the sales cycle by giving their sales team the power to respond to RFPs themselves, pull data from their content management systems including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and more, and then measure the effectiveness of their work. Additionally, the ‘Auto Answer’ feature gives prospects and customers instant access to approved, up-to-date information to the partner’s most frequently asked questions. 

Better together! 

Qorus Content Hub is helping Microsoft accelerate channel sales and add value for its partners. Microsoft partners now have instant access to the Microsoft Partner Network website content through Office applications, with 85% of partners having increased their use of Microsoft partner content. 

Microsoft partners using the platform have reported 50% less time spent searching for content and five times faster creation of pitch decks and customer proposals, resulting in $20K annual productivity savings per user. 

Additionally, 62% of partner users reported a noticeable increase in sales productivity, and partners can now efficiently find and create market-ready customer content, and close more deals, more easily, resulting in a 20% increase in sales velocity.  

Businesses value personalization, simplicity, convenience, seamlessness, and responsiveness. With the industry’s largest network of partners, who actively use, sell, and evangelize Microsoft offerings, Microsoft and Qorus Software can provide Microsoft partners with the tools, resources, content, support, and guidance to reach new customers and business growth.

"Microsoft values its partners very highly, so we're pleased to be able to help them find the right content for every sales situation and put it to work in marketing campaigns, sales pitches, and other revenue-generating initiatives," says Gavriella Schuster, Corporate VP, One Commercial Partner Organization at Microsoft. "Qorus Content Hub also enables us to track content usage trends, which means that we can make sure we are creating the right type of content for our channel and better serving our partners."