Microsoft EA Renewal Strategy: Mike Austin Explains How the War Room Method Works.

It gets very hard for them to say no. I mean, they still can. Trust me, they still can. You might have to go back with them 100 times. But all we're doing is building more and more ammo to put another arrow in our quiver, so to speak. And so this is how the war room works, right? A war room works by going out and doing discovery and understanding what we have out there, what we actually need and documenting that. And then it's a validation, a validation of what we need moving forward, what we need to purchase, how, what are the options on how to purchase that. And then you build a negotiation strategy and then you just work the plan with Microsoft. Now you flip that. What was Microsoft's war room strategy? Microsoft's war room strategy was to get to you six to nine months before your renewal, maybe if you're bigger even a year before with a proposal two and a half times bigger with us going out and talking to all these people inside your organizations. Therefore there's all this stuff that you need. And we gave you this pretty 100 page slide deck with a spreadsheet that has 100 line items or more of licenses and quantities. Probably not unit prices, but a bottom line price. And yeah, here you go. This is, this is where we're going to start. Those are two, two massively different, different strategies there, right? So if you look at what happened here, right, they started out with the Microsoft proposal. Seven and a half million dollars, 50% confidence on this thing, right. So if I go back to my thing, 50% confidence because it's vendor led Microsoft, how much of that's real? Not real. We know some of this baseline's real, right. But we're not sure how much. And then the industry average when you got about 70% confidence because you know, you kind of have your data, you get some version of it, you probably know you don't have everything that you need if you're honest with yourself, right. And you're going to get it down to 6.8. You're going to go, it's a little bit of an increase, but we can live with it versus running a real war room process where you get it down to five and a half percent or 5.5 million, sorry. Because you're sitting at 95% and you're controlling the conversation, right. You're controlling the theater of the war, so to speak. Right. And so that's how you go from a two and a two and a half percent increase to a controlled renewal. Right. Instead of paying more to feel safe, because it was SQL audit like this client would have done. They ended up paying less because they were certain they had 95% certainty on their data and that was enough to help them win. And so data wins negotiations every time, right? And when you control your data, you control the story. And when you control the story, you control the outcome. And this is where a real war room where intelligence beats influence and assumptions every day, right? And so if you think back to it, if you had to go and present to the cfo, right, let's go back to our boardroom with Microsoft and you're like, okay, we can get them down to 6.8 versus going in with this data driven approach. We've done your homework, you've done the road mapping, you've talked to all the key usage. Whose version will the CFO believe? Which one? Which one of those two war rooms, Right. Because so often I hear people, you know, hear of people that went to the CFO to get final sign off on these things and they were in that first camp and it wasn't a pleasant experience because even somebody that's not in licensing can ask a couple of questions that can really push back on, on what you're doing here, right? And so if you're bringing, you know, if you're heading into renewal, don't bring a spreadsheet to a gun flight gun fight. We do these Roar room sessions with our clients as part of our process. We're happy to help. We've used it on everybody from 500 user companies to some of the Fortune 500. And our results are validated by the big four.