Responding to a question asked at the Dec. New-Age Salespeople: Capable Of Writing Shippable Microsoft Code.(Within quoted excerpts of Hood’s comments, I’ve occasionally highlighted particularly meaningful passages in bold-italic text.) So I’ve pored over the transcripts of those two events and have pulled out for your reading pleasure Hood’s thoughts on 10 strategic issues of significance to Microsoft and its customers-and the entire tech industry. Microsoft’s booming cloud growth follows its decision to invest heavily in hiring technically sophisticated salespeople. The evidence of Hood’s stature as one of the industry’s-if not the world’s-top CFOs is reflected not only in Microsoft’s superb financial performance but also in her penetrating and unique insights into the company’s customers, strategy, competitors and operations. 31, several weeks before that Hood was the featured speaker at a tech-industry investors conference hosted by Wells Fargo. In addition to her participation with CEO Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s fiscal-2018 Q2 earnings call on Jan. Customer success has become an obsession with Microsoft’s sprawling cloud business and the new way sales teams are compensated because “ultimately in a consumption-based business, customer success is all that matters.”.

While cloud services are the core of Microsoft’s current growth and its future business, Hood says that when it comes to customers choosing to either invest more in on-premises products or to shift budget dollars to cloud services, “I am really indifferent as long as it meets the customer need.”.The $26-billion acquisition of LinkedIn almost two years ago has been widely lauded as a strategic masterstroke by Microsoft-but Hood says it’s turning out to be an even “more strategic asset than we expected.”.Hood’s description of their technical skills is a classic.

Microsoft’s created a legion of highly technical salespeople who become embedded at customer locations to get cloud projects up and running, showcase Azure capabilities that address undiscovered customer needs, and place unprecedented focus on ongoing customer success and Azure consumption.

And taken as a whole, Hood’s perspectives reveal a great deal about how the world’s leading enterprise-cloud company thinks, plans, imagines and executes.

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