AutoPylot Technologies is a new company, and for a variety of reasons, we have placed our first integration bet on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Over time, the AutoPylot mobile app will integrate with the rest of the top 5 CRM systems, but today all our focus is on the D365 community.
This is why last week’s Community Summit NA event was such a big deal for me personally as well as for AutoPylot Technologies.
In fact, it was a slew of firsts – my first time attending a Summit event, my first tradeshow in a *long* time, and my first time interacting face-to-face with potential customers and VAR partners.
With that in mind, here are my top three take-aways:
Everyone gets it
Gerry Pagano talks with a prospective customer at the AutoPylot booth at the Summit trade show.
My colleague Gerry demonstrated the AutoPylot app at least 50 times. Every person ‘got it’ – the value proposition of automating the collection of calls and texts so sales reps don’t have to spend hours a day on data entry (our new report shows it’s an average of 6 hours a week!). Often people would go back to their stand to send their sales leaders over to us insisting they see the demo for themselves.
Validating the problem and acceptance from prospective customers was a definite highlight.
It really is a community
Many of the people I talked with had been Community Summit for years. They could name friends, colleagues, and leaders within the Microsoft community and other companies. It’s the place where you can see friendly faces year after year.
Building momentum
With that said, a company like AutoPylot Technologies needs to build momentum and awareness within the community. Microsoft is an enormous company, and the ecosystem surrounding it is vast and expansive (are there really 64,000 ‘Gold’ partners???) and global.
We’re just getting started, having been recognized as a Microsoft for Startups Partner, and signing up our first CoPylot reseller partner, but it’s a flywheel effect, and it’s going to take time (so we already paid for SummitNA 2023 in Charlotte!).