With more enterprise-technology choices than ever before, customers today call the shots.

This is why customer relationships are no longer merely managed in the fast-moving digital world, but they must be deeply understood to the point of obsession. And it is valuable insight for a top executive who manages commercial channel sales for one of the largest technology companies in the world.

“The one competitive advantage you can have as a company is to really deeply understand your customers,” said Lani Phillips (pictured), vice president of U.S. Channel Sales at Microsoft Corp. “We have to listen to our customers to make sure we’re learning from them. That is going to be a competitive advantage for anyone that really focuses on what it means to be customer obsessed.”

Phillips spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed how customer obsession translates into seamless experiences for clients and the importance of managing channel partner relationships early in the sales cycle (see the full interview with transcript here) (* Disclosure below.)

Seamless customer experience

Customer obsession has been an important focus for Phillips and her channel sales organization at Microsoft. She has written on the subject in various company forums, and Phillips has defined it as the “foundation” of being a successful Microsoft partner.

The company’s relationship with Cohesity Inc. provides an example.

“Our customers have the ability to run their data workloads in Azure seamlessly with Cohesity,” Phillips said. “That is what it means to have customer obsession, to be customer-centric. They keep the customer at the center and make it seamless for them to transition.”

Being customer-centric demands that Microsoft is partner-centric as well. This often means making sure that channel participants are involved early in the sales process to ensure success.

“Internally, we refer to it as hardwiring partners,” Phillips explained. “We’re trying to do a better job of making sure we include partners as we identify opportunities with our customers, bringing them in earlier in the sales cycle so they can participate in the entire journey with us. It’s in every aspect of everything we do, because we can’t be successful without them.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Microsoft Ignite event. (* Disclosure: Cohesity Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cohesity nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE