When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued his 3,000-plus-word manifesto last July outlining his vision for Microsoft, one thing he stressed was the need for more customer focus.
“We will obsess over our customers,” he wrote. “Obsessing over our customers is everybody’s job.”
The emphasis is part of a broader set of cultural shifts that Nadella, who became CEO in February, is trying to instill to make the company more innovative, collaborative, agile and responsive.
But for Susan Hauser, the corporate vice president who heads Microsoft’s worldwide enterprise and partner group, ability to get feedback from customers, and to get that feedback heard and responded to at Microsoft is less of a shift and more of an extension of how she’s always worked.
Hauser, 57, has focused on Microsoft’s customers for more than two decades, rising from a position managing resellers in the New York City area to her current position leading 8,500 sales and marketing employees.
In her current job, she’s responsible for driving sales to corporations and other large organizations worldwide — sales that accounted for a significant portion of the $50 billion in commercial revenue Microsoft earned in its last fiscal year.
She’s also responsible for making sure those customers and partners — independent companies that provide Microsoft products or services — have what they need to make their businesses succeed.
Hauser’s rapport with, and genuine curiosity about, people helps with that, as she and her team try to make sure that Microsoft’s technological developments meet customer needs, while taking feedback from those customers back to Microsoft.
Down to earth and naturally inquisitive, Hauser remembers and asks about things such as a customer’s kid’s soccer game or a co-worker’s parents’ anniversary party.
“She has an ability to connect across multiple styles, multiple types of people,” said Adam Warby, CEO of Avanade, a business-technology consulting company originally founded as a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture. Hauser serves on Avanade’s board.
With Nadella’s push toward more customer focus, “I think Microsoft has moved more toward Susan’s style,” Warby said.
Hauser says, “For me, it’s always been about collaborating to drive the right outcomes — trying to look for how to bring people together under a common goal.”
Teaching to tech
Hauser’s office on the Microsoft campus in Redmond holds hints of her start at Microsoft.
Posters on the wall tout “Windows on Wall Street” and “Windows Takes NY” — memorabilia from Microsoft’s first big event touting Windows to Wall Street CIOs, held in the early 1990s.
Hauser, the daughter of immigrant parents from Israel, was born and raised in New York City. Her father, who worked in construction, and her mother, a tailor, spoke mostly Hebrew at home; English is Hauser’s second language.
Inspired by a teacher from her childhood, Hauser initially worked as a teacher in the south Bronx. Even then, she said, she was working to drive change.
“The way they were engaging the kids there — they were using an old-fashioned approach,” she said. “They weren’t reaching the kids.”
On the suggestion of a friend who thought she would be good at sales, Hauser took up an evening telemarketing job. She found she loved the interaction.
After jobs selling copy machines, then computers, Hauser — who had had her second child by then and was looking for a job with more flexibility — applied for a part-time marketing job at Microsoft that allowed her to work from home. She managed the top resellers across the New York City metro area.
“I had followed Bill Gates in terms of his story,” she said of his early days. Back then, Microsoft “was a startup. I was drawn to the people, the opportunity to have an impact.”
Addressing needs
The part-time job soon turned into a full-time one, and she began climbing the ladder.
She saw a need for Microsoft to build a group specifically to cater to Wall Street customers.
Previously, Microsoft’s sales groups had been based largely on geography, so someone serving one area could be called on to go to Citibank in the morning, then to a small business that afternoon.
“I was seeing more and more that we should segment by different industries,” Hauser said.
She brought together the CIOs of top Wall Street firms such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, along with senior executives from Microsoft.
“We just sat around and listened to them: What they liked, didn’t like, what it would take for us to be a different type of partner,” Hauser said. “Part of it was: They didn’t believe our team knew their business. They wanted more industry-specific expertise. They wanted to give us more feedback early on, on product engineering.”
From those meetings, the company established a new Wall Street team that included Microsoft employees who could help the firms on-site with their technology.
That ability to get feedback from customers, and to get that feedback heard and responded to at Microsoft, is part of what makes Hauser effective in her role, those who know her say.
“She is customer obsessed. Anytime there’s an issue for our customers, she’s all over it,” said Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of worldwide services. “She’s very collaborative. She doesn’t have an ego. It’s not about her.”
New city, new focus
Three years ago, Hauser moved from New York, where she was Microsoft’s vice president for worldwide industry and global accounts, to Seattle, drawn by a promotion and the opportunity to have a bigger influence on Microsoft.
She’s already stayed longer than the two years she initially thought she would.
“I believe in Satya’s approach — belief in people, in creating a place that’s open, that fosters new ideas and a willingness to take risks,” she said.
Nadella’s approach means that Hauser’s sales teams have been brought closer to engineering and marketing teams in order to respond more quickly to customer needs.
In the past, for instance, there would be a series of meetings where Hauser’s folks would meet separately with the engineering or marketing teams.
“Now there isn’t a series of meetings,” she said. “Now every meeting has the right groups of people” — both from within the company and, often, with customers brought in to offer their insights.
Nadella also has had all the heads of engineering go out and meet with customers to bring back insights from the field, Hauser said.
There’s more focus now, she said, not just on building the best technological features and functions, but making sure the technological developments are useful to customers’ business goals. Often, those developments benefit Microsoft as well.
For instance, one customer — an elevator company in Germany — told Hauser’s team it was getting more expensive to pay for labor to go out and service elevators each time something went wrong.
Microsoft’s engineers then built sensors that could gather data on elevator usage and performance that could predict which parts of an elevator would need maintenance work, and when. Now, Microsoft is bringing that technology to other types of manufacturers, such as bottling companies.
More than a speech
The increased emphasis on customers and partners was especially apparent at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) this year, said Russell Agrusa, president and CEO of Iconics, which offers building automation, energy management and operations software for businesses. Iconics was among the companies singled out with Microsoft Partner of the Year awards in 2014.
Each year at WPC, where some 16,000 of Microsoft’s 640,000 worldwide partners gather, a reception honors partners of the year. Typically, in the past, Microsoft’s CEO would come speak and then leave, Agrusa said.
This year, Nadella came, spoke, then hung around for another hour or so to talk, shake hands and take pictures with attendees.
As far as he recalls, Agrusa said, “in the past, we’d never seen Gates or Ballmer do that. Whereas we’re seeing Satya doing that, and Susan — who’s always been very partner friendly — doing more of that now.”
Janet I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @janettu
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Focus on customers nothing new to this Microsoft VP
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