July 26, 2022
This is the tenth instalment in this year’s Microsoft Partner Insights, our annual research into Microsoft Partners.
Table of contents
Finance
Undoubtedly one of the most import areas for any Microsoft Partner, the finance department is responsible for core activities such as payroll, accounting and taxation, budgeting and measuring performance, to name but a few. But which systems do the Microsoft Partners in our survey group trust with such important functions?
For the second year running Xero came out as the clear favourite with just over half of the votes (53%). QuickBooks was a distant second with 19%, but this was an improvement on last year where they were the third most popular accounting platform with 13%.
Sales
Many consider sales to be the engine room of a business, without sales there is no revenue, and no chance of success. Below are the sales management systems most widely used by the Microsoft Partners we interviewed.
Once again, HubSpot was the most popular sales management tool with 37%, even increasing its lead over Microsoft Dynamics (20%) compared to last year.
Marketing
It was the same result when it came to marketing platforms, with HubSpot once again the overwhelming favourite amongst our cohort.
Globally, Salesforce occupies the #1 spot in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space with 35% market share. Various sources estimate HubSpot’s market share to be considerably lower at 2-3%.
Support Desk
For many Microsoft Partners this is unsung hero behind the scenes, helping to power their service desk and is also the tool that can deliver operational reporting, billing, and customer self-service. Microsoft Partners are increasing their reliance on good systems integration to manage their business with the ability to procure Office 365 and other licences, virtual machines, hardware and provision Azure or other Microsoft services directly from the support system.
Operations
We wanted to know which operational applications Microsoft Partners relied on to handle areas such as professional services automation, customer service support and team collaboration tools. There is a broad mix of software in use as can been seen below.
Of the named applications, ConnectWise remained the top choice in line with the 2021 results.
Human Resources
A Microsoft Partner’s greatest assets are the employees. HR applications provide support from tracking of staff key performance metrics and analysis of employee engagement to payroll management and holiday/sick leave logging.
It was surprising to see Microsoft Teams come out as the ‘HR’ application of choice. However, this may reflect that many Microsoft Partners are purely using it as a HR document repository (staff handbook, employee contracts etc.) rather than a full-service HR platform. Of the dedicated HR options, Breathe HR was the most popular choice (23%, unchanged from 2021), followed by People HR.
We hoped you enjoyed this year’s Microsoft Partner Insights series and found it useful as a benchmarking tool for your business. Look out for future blogs coming soon.
If you missed any of the previous chapters in the series, don't worry, you can find them here by visiting Microsoft Partner Insights