Microsoft kills off Pinpoint partner finder

Microsoft has killed off its online partner directory, Pinpoint, as it moves to integrate myriad portals.

Pinpoint has been replaced by a new ‘Find a Partner’ section – or referral engine – of the Partner Centre website, which went live last week in the lead-up to Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto.

Pinpoint was launched at WPC 2008 with the initial aim of driving 500,000 leads to partners. The directory, which was relaunched in 2014, has come under fire from partners in the past.

A Microsoft spokesperson admitted partners had been unhappy with site, in particular the changes made in 2014 – for instance, the 2014 relaunch was not search engine optimised. The redesign comes in response to partner feedback and hopes to address many of the complaints.

Some of the improvements in the new referral engine include:

• The partner’s company name will be in the URL of their profile page, helping SEO.
• The new site boasts ‘IP sniff’ to automatically geo-locate partners based on the customer’s location.
• Microsoft has removed the limitation introduced in 2014 that a Pinpoint profile only showed the company’s HQ.
• It comes with improved foreign language support.
• Partners can once again publish separate profiles for different locations, from country level all the way down to state operations, or even multiple practices in the same city.
• Search results will be weighted on the highest level of competency, rather than the total number of competencies.
• Search results will no longer be weighted on customer reviews.

Partners will also be rewarded for interacting with the portal. For instance, if partners track their leads within the referral engine, they’ll earn Microsoft points that will boost their position in search results, and could also be used to recognise partners in other ways. Likewise, partners will earn points for speedy responses to any leads provided by Microsoft.

There are currently 62,000 partners with Pinpoint profiles, among the hundreds of thousands of companies in Microsoft’s global channel

All in one place

Microsoft hopes the refreshed Partner Centre will become the single, integrated portal where customers can find partners, and where partners they can do everything from registering their membership of the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), to tracking referrals, to tracking customer usage and consumption.

Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group, said “it will be the one single transaction hub for everything a partner does with Microsoft”.

"We want every referral to be highly qualified and easy to process, so we’ve re-imagined our referral engine. Now, your solutions and profiles will be syndicated across our digital properties and communications so customers will find and understand your offerings before they even engage with you," Schuster said.

The new site now spans what was Dev Centre as well as the CSP portal. Over time, it will also absorb Partner Membership Centre. Longer term, it will replace the vendor’s incentives engine, where market development funds and co-op funds are currently managed.

Schuster said: “The problem with Pinpoint is it was the place for the lost-soul customer."

She said customer referrals would be more likely to come from product websites, such as Office, Azure or one of the various marketplaces, including the newly launched AppSource. The referrals engine is built on the same commerce platform that powers all Microsoft's marketplaces, including Windows Store.

By tying together a number of disconnected portals, “we are investing to connect them [partners] with customers, investing to make it simpler to do everything they need to do with Microsoft from one easy place”, Schuster said.

“They will be able to come here and register my membership, upload my application, upload my services or my profile, start to transact with my customers, see what my customers’ usage and consumption was, get my referrals – everything you want to do with Microsoft in one place.”

The new system will also overcome the challenges in recognising and compensating partners “regardless of whether the referral came for the field, from inside sales, from any of our digital marketing assets or portals. It will always come to this one console for the partner that says where it come from, what was the customer journey so they can score it, and know how hot is this lead,” said Schuster.

“They can accept the lead, we’ll tag it with an ID then we know when it closes as a sale. Then we can start to give partners credit without these fabricated mechanisms today, like partner of record – we know this was your customer and this was your sale.”

At the back end, Microsoft will also be able to access telemetry from the engine to score partners “beyond just gold”.

“It gives us telemetry that says: How good are you at closing leads? What is your sales velocity? What is your customer churn rate? How many new customers did you get in a year? It gives us a way to create a telemetric score of how good is this partner – beyond just gold, beyond the fact you have met certification and have certain performance, like revenue or consumption," said Schuster.

“Really these are other ways to start moving you up, to say, we should be doing more with you because you are really good. You are really good at closing leads so we should move you up."

Steven Kiernan is a guest of Microsoft at Worldwide Partner Conference