How has Microsoft stayed at the top for decades—and what can your sales team learn from their approach?
Success isn’t just about having a great product; it’s about truly understanding your customers’ needs and innovating around them. This episode explores how Microsoft consistently stays ahead, and why early, insightful customer conversations are the secret weapon that can help your team outperform competitors in 2026.
By listening, you’ll learn:
- How to uncover exactly what your customers want in the first meeting to drive faster, more successful sales
- Why relentless innovation is important—but knowing your customer is even more critical
- Practical ways to align your product, service, and sales process with your customers’ core needs to increase close rates
Press play to discover how to put customer understanding at the heart of your sales process—so your team can stay ahead, close more deals, and build lasting success like Microsoft.
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Episode Transcript
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you will discover how Microsoft’s ability to continuously innovate and keep themselves ahead of the rest of the pack is a very strong lesson that we can apply into our sales and business teams over 2026.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Process Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade, sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years.
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you will discover how Microsoft has been able to stay at the top of their game by innovation, what that then means for us as sales and business leaders, and some ideas that we can implement for our teams to keep us ahead of the pack in 2026.
There’s absolutely no doubt that Microsoft is a global powerhouse. We rank them along businesses such as Apple, such as Amazon, different in their own rights, but as a business that has been absolutely able to stand the test of time. I am still a Microsoft user. I have been since my very early 20s, and at 43, I’m 23 years into the product here. I can’t imagine how many billions of people around the world that have had similar usage patterns for Microsoft over the last few decades as well.
Now, of course, they’re not the only player out there. They haven’t been able to live in a monopoly. They’ve had fierce competition from a large number of other players over the decades that they’ve been in business, too. However, they’ve always been able to stay at the top. For me, that success has been driven by their ability to not only create essential tools, well, they’re certainly essential tools now, and that’s Windows and Office, that have become habits for millions of people worldwide. I think that’s a terrific lesson in how they’ve been able to succeed.
For me, the bigger one is that they’ve been able to continuously innovate. So, they’ve gone from just Windows and Office to expanding into cloud services like Azure, integrating their ecosystems, right, lots of different things that have allowed them to really stay ahead, not just simple functional improvements like we have through Word and through Office and, you know, PowerPoint and Windows and so forth. Even Copilot, right, is something that they’ve launched recently that is trying to keep them at least with pace, if not slightly ahead of their competitors.
Of course, they are a huge business now. They’re north of $100 billion. I think they’re getting close to $200 billion in terms of their revenue, but they’ve been very, very successful at standing the test of time when it comes to growing, well, first of all, maintaining, but then growing their business.
So, when we have a think about what’s the sales lesson that comes out of this, absolutely, there’s one around staying ahead of industry trends and innovating relentlessly. Absolutely, there’s one around creating essential tools that your customers need on a daily basis. However, for me, the one that I really like is that they have been able to understand what their customers want. And when you can understand what your customers want or, in short, the value you need to provide to win their business, that’s when you have a brand that will continue to grow and stand the test of time. And that today, for me, is the lesson as sales teams to think about how we can really make sure that, whilst aspirationally, we’d really like to continue to evolve our products and our services so that they are always staying ahead of the competition or that we are always providing something that is of critical and core needs for our customers, unfortunately, it’s not always the case. And even product development cycles, they move so quickly across many industries that you can never be at the top forever.
But what we can do is always be at the top around what our customers want. And by having a real focus on ensuring that our first meetings, that very first time we sit down with our customers, we zero in on what’s most important to them and how we can best help them, then we are staying ahead of exactly what they need. Then the relentless pursuit of having the best tech or the best service or having a product that is just critical to their needs falls to a secondary priority and even a tertiary priority because what we’re understanding right now is what’s most important to them.
So, as we exit out of today’s podcast, the area I’d really encourage you to focus on as a sales leader is how do you understand truly what your customer wants as early as you possibly can? How do we sit in front of them and ask them the key questions that will help us understand exactly how we can add value to them? Because if we get that right, then we can simply plan, quote, create, whatever it may be, the product or service that lines up exactly with those needs and really significantly increase our chances of closing a deal with them. Now, very easy in concept but very hard to do and I find a lot of sales people miss that ability to find out exactly what their customer needs in that first meeting and roll straight into telling them what they can deliver themselves.
So, in recap for today, Microsoft, they’ve done lots of things right, lots of things wrong, of course, over that journey, but their ability to know what their customers want has certainly helped them build a successful brand over many decades.
For us as leaders, it’s something we need to have a think about is what can we be doing to really understanding what our customer needs, but in particular, focusing in on our first meetings with our customers to be asking the right questions to uncover those needs. Because when we get them right, we can simply flow into everything that we need to do to deliver around that for the rest of that process rather than trying to justify exactly why our products are the best fit for them.
So, in leaving today, the piece I’m keen for you to think about or the emotion I’m keen for you to leave with is are we asking enough questions of our customers to know what they want? And if we’re not, how do we roll that into our sales experience with our customers?
Thank you for being on the podcast today. We launch every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’m really grateful that you take the time to listen. Short, sharp episodes, very much a focus around being 1% better each and every day because when you can do that every single day, it does make all the difference to moving the dial on your sales growth.
We’ll see you next time. Bye for now.
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