I've dubbed this interview and series, Microsoft's Season of Change and Transformation. This is the first interview in a series to help the partner community best engage with the technology giant as it evolves it's partner business to better serve partners and customers.

As most of you know, Microsoft announced a major reorganization to it's customer and partner - facing business in early July which included the formation of a "One Commercial Partner" or OCP organization. This included three key elements - "Build With", "Go to Market", and "Sell With"*.

*In an earlier episode, Bill Hawkins helped decode the announcements for our listeners in greater detail and you can listen to this Episode 18 as a primer.

With Microsoft summer and implementation still underway, I thought it would be good to walk our partners down the hallways of Bellevue and Redmond and "peel back" through interviews with partner leaders on how to best align and engage with Microsoft at this critical season.

My guest for this interview episode is Eric Loper. Eric leads a "Build With" organization of partner business development managers focused on growing competencies, capabilities and capacity with Microsoft's top partners in the United States.

This is a second or " encore" interview episode with for Eric. If you listened to Episode 2 of the Ultimate Guide to Partnering you will remember Eric as my very first interview guest. At the time Eric and I had a great discussion and he shared with partner listeners the essential elements of partnering, his observations on technology trends and recommendations on how to best engage with the technology giant. You can listen to that episode here.

For this interview episode, Eric updates us on how the changes are positively impacting his organization, the renewed excitement and energy around partners, how both partners and partner sellers now need to think and act, and the increased investments in growing the business with and through partners.

A full transcript of the interview is below in the show notes.

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