BrainStorm uses technology to transform organizations and empower their employees to thrive at work and at home by maximizing the value of the software they already use. Since 2020, those are often one and the same. As a Microsoft partner, BrainStorm enables IT pros to scale change by building an app utilizing the Microsoft Teams platform — thereby delivering productivity to employees wherever they are — at home, or in-office. It’s a new approach to productivity that perfectly aligns to today’s work culture.

“We decided to bring the learning to where the individual sits, instead of asking them to go somewhere else to find it,” says Casey Trujillo, BrainStorm VP of Sales. “Communicating in the same platform where most of the organization spends their workday just makes sense. It’s a new way of working. Why wouldn’t we do it?”

Recognizing the digital transformation moment

Too often, IT professionals are asked to do so much with so little. The challenges of the pandemic and the ensuing Great Resignation added more burden to their already crowded plate. BrainStorm set out to find a scalable experience that didn’t add extra effort for the end user while enabling IT professionals and reducing their workload.

They found the perfect opportunity to showcase this app when they were approached by a global auto manufacturer to help solve this very modern work problem. With only three people in the IT department trying to enact a standardized approach to hybrid work for a company with 30k employees, scaling up was unmanageable. Unfortunately, they found the current setup was leading to poor productivity, decreased collaboration, and dwindling employee satisfaction.

BrainStorm stepped in to create a personalized communication plan with specific goals users could track in the platform. These goals included:

Reducing internal email while increasing chat in Teams
Decreasing email attachments and increasing collaborative documentation sharing through Teams and OneDrive
Decreasing the number of meetings while increasing engagement during meetings

How did the app work? Essentially, BrainStorm developed a 12-week, scalable program offering platform and productivity tips messaged through the BrainStorm-developed Teams app. By building their solution on top of the Microsoft Teams platform, BrainStorm was able to transform a learning tool into a productivity and collaboration platform designed to help customers adapt to a more efficient hybrid and remote work approach. The app communicated with users to ensure a better productivity approach for using Teams and helped them focus on their work-from-home goals. The company was thrilled with the result and how it enabled better collaboration across time zones and continents. As Trujillo says, “It helped eliminate ‘Reply All-itis’.”

Here’s a short video that walks through how BrainStorm enables IT professionals to help their employees take better advantage of their Microsoft productivity stack. BrainStorm also developed a best practices sample comm plan for partners ready for digital transformation

What has BrainStorm learned about finding success as a Microsoft partner?

Communicate with your users in a language that speaks to them. They want to know, “what’s in it for me?”
1. Go to where your users are: That’s why BrainStorm decided to enact digital transformation within Teams.
2. Speak in the terms of the user: if you can find why it benefits them, it will eventually trickle up to benefit the org as a whole.
3. Automate it: it should take little to no effort on the user’s part.
4. Engage the user: If you’ve set up a good program, it should intrigue them to become a part of it and help them want to do more.
5. Trust the data: We have the data to help give you results of your digital transformation Once you review the data, then you can rinse, lather, and repeat back to step one.
Know the Microsoft language, scorecard and who wants to work with you. We have a business development team that aligns with enterprise and the client configuration manager.
Familiarize yourself with the Microsoft Partner Network. It’s an everyday go-to for finding resources like plays-in-the-box, starting co-sell actions, and more. It’s regularly updated and available for all partners.
Use the Marketplace to drive awareness and visibility. It’s the easiest way to share any changes, updates, and improvements to your platform. Plus, it’s a great help with the transaction process. Microsoft is investing time and resources into growing Marketplace, and we have found that aligning with Microsoft and learning where they are focused is a key way for us to grow so we are investing more there as well.
Connect with other partners. One of the fastest ways BrainStorm has scaled their solutions is by teaming up with other Microsoft partners. They recognize their secret sauce and work with other partners to help their customers. “We don’t do deployment or sell licensing,” says Trujillo. “Our whole goal is to enable other partners, like Smartsheet or DocuSign, create a scalable solution to give customer ROI.”

Digital Transformation is daunting, but it’s not as hard as it seems. “Every partner can use our learnings to help them be successful,” says Trujillo. “We also love to form partnerships with other partners and welcome the opportunity to provide additional value to your customers. We created a 90-day free trial experience and any partner with at least 200 users or more can try it out or offer it to their customers.”