April 7-9, 2025 | Virgin Hotels | Las Vegas
Sales Masterclass
FY 25 Microsoft + Neural Impact Dynamics 365 High Volume Acceleration Fundamentals Sessions
Register Here for the Next Cohort
50% off for first 5 Directions San Diego Attendees Only!
Space is Limited! Dates:
Want to know how your revenue growth, sales cycle length, profit and more compares to your peers?
Conduct the 5 minute self assessment and get a sense of where your gaps are.
Want to know how your revenue growth, sales cycle length, profit and more compares to your peers?
Conduct the 5 minute self assessment and get a sense of where your gaps are.
Free Tools and Assets
To access over 30 free partner resources to help you accelerate your volume of Dynamics 365 customer ads and migrations, see:
Accelerate and scale your SMB-focused Dynamics 365 practice: Partner series (microsoft.com)Free guide to help you double your volume of new Dynamics customers – download it here
Volume Acceleration Guide for Business Application Partners in the SMB MarketMissed the Directions San Diego live sessions? See these recorded sessions:
Overview of the eight capabilities needed to accelerate volume and scale (microsoft.com) Moving GP/NAV on-premises customers to the cloud proactively (microsoft.com)Strategies to help you optimize and grow:
Optimize and Grow GuideTo get more leads on AppSource see the free marketing best practices guide:
Microsoft AppSource & Azure MarketplaceNeural Impact’s Directions 2023 Sessions Slide Decks
Leverage Buyer Psychology to Win More Deals – Nailing the Five Moments That Matter
Presented By:
Mark Stuyt
Chief Engagement Officer
Not all customer conversations and meetings are equal. Sales cycles are binary. They only lead to one of two outcomes. And – how you facilitate a very small number of sales cycle events often dictates whether you win or lose. Business decisions, especially those involving technology project with confusing solution elements like AI and low code, are highly emotional, and heavily influenced by fear.
Decision makers rationalize their emotional choices with selective data points (logic) to support their decision narrative. Understanding how, and when, to influence project stakeholder emotions in a Bus Apps buying cycle is critical to driving a consistently high win rate. Good sellers do it unconsciously. Sales professionals do it proactively.
Mark will walk you through five critical (emotional) prospect/customer interactions that you must navigate effectively in every sales cycle to create bias. He’ll also share the neuroscience-based sales strategies and tactics required to control and reframe those meetings.
Download the slides
Overcoming emotional barriers in implementations
Presented By:
Joe DeHaai
Chief Business Impact Officer
Implementations are hard. Technical skills are critical. But resistance, fear and emotions are often the lead cause of failed or low margin projects. Come learn new strategies that help.
Are you or your team effectively upselling during the project implementation phase? Are your Business Central implementations achieving the high customer satisfaction you envisioned? Are you effectively aligning product functionality and features with your customer’s business needs and priorities? Struggling to navigating interpersonal dynamics, or manage conflicts? The key might lie in understanding the human dynamics at the heart of every project.
In this session, you’ll discover how neuroscience-based techniques empower consultants to build trust, foster emotional connections, and manage customer expectations more effectively. Learn
strategies to unlock trust, overcome objections, and align on business outcomes that accelerate timelines and boost both customer loyalty and revenue.
Walk away with practical approaches to transform every customer interaction into a relationship building opportunity and every project into a growth driver. Don’t just implement empower your team to deliver value beyond the software and create lasting partnership
Download the slides
Differentiate and Dominate with AI: - How to position AI in Bus Apps Sales Cycles
Presented By:
Mark Stuyt
Chief Engagement Officer
with George Brown
(Partner Economics)
Customers are curious, partners are becoming educated…but the deals aren’t closing. Why?
Because there is a LOT of buyer psychology that comes into play when positioning and selling emerging technologies. The hype cycle drives desire and curiosity, but fear and risk undermine the decision-making/approval process. Far too often sellers are attaching AI to the wrong set of business drivers.
This session will be co-led by the dynamic duo of Brown and Stuyt that haven’t co-presented at Directions for more than 10 years. Attend this session if you want to advance your base level understanding of AI, how co-pilot can be leveraged, some real-life cases of AI in action and the key learnings and outcomes of ten global AI practice optimization workshops Neural Impact delivered for Microsoft to leading AI services partners.
You’ll learn how to transition from IT to business leaders, avoid the “proof-of-concept” trap, and overcome the two (emotional) AI objections that kill deals.
This is a workshop with educational material along with real time audience interactions and lots of entertaining commentary, a must see for all advanced sales professionals.
Download the slides
Tired of SaaS Leads Ghosting You? Use 3 Neuroscience Strategies to Convert
Presented By:
Inge Boubez
Senior Marketing Strategist
Facing challenges in winning SaaS customers and standing out in today’s competitive, attention-starved digital landscape? In a world where great technology alone no longer guarantees success, the question becomes: how do you gain an edge? The answer lies in neuroscience.
This session combines the transformative insights of behavioral economics and neuroscience to help you develop marketing and sales strategies that not only attract but also convert and retain customers. Discover how cognitive biases—such as the primacy/recency effect, tribal resonance, and loss aversion—shape purchasing decisions and make your messaging impossible to ignore.
Key Takeaways:
1) Decode the Science of Customer Decisions: Understand how cognitive biases and behavioral economics influence buyer behavior and apply these insights to optimize your marketing efforts.
2) Craft Emotionally Resonant Campaigns: Explore neuroscience-driven techniques to design messages and experiences that capture attention and forge stronger connections with your audience.
3) Achieve Real Results: Examine proven examples of behavioral and neuroscience-powered strategies that drive higher conversions and improve retention in the Dynamics ecosystem.
Leave this session with actionable tools, innovative perspectives, and a clear roadmap to transform your customer acquisition strategies to thrive in the ever-evolving Dynamics marketplace.
Download the slides
Stop Losing Customers to the Cloud: Migrate and Secure Your Base
Presented By:
Joe DeHaai
Chief Business Impact Officer
Are you grappling with a base of on-premise customers who are deeply attached to their current systems and haven’t yet transitioned to the cloud? If you’re encountering resistance to migration or facing internal resource constraints that hinder proactive conversations, this session is designed for you.
You’ll learn how to refine your cloud value proposition and messaging to create a compelling urgency for transition. Additionally, gain insights on effective migration deployment strategies that enable you to scale migration projects efficiently.
This session represents a pivotal shift to a proactive migration sales and delivery strategy, empowering you to secure your customer base and drive more recurring cloud revenue a shift likely to gain momentum with Microsoft’s recent GP end-of-life announcement. Seize this opportunity to lead your customers into a new era of innovation and growth.
Download the slides
Struggling to Differentiate with AI? Turn Microsoft Copilot into Your Business Central Competitive Edge
Presented By:
Joe DeHaai
Chief Business Impact Officer
AI….customers are interested…partners are educated…but the deals aren’t closing. Why?
Because there is a LOT of buyer psychology that comes into play when positioning and selling emerging technologies. They hype cycle drives desire and curiosity, but fear and risk undermine the decision-making/approval process. Far too often sellers are attaching AI to the wrong set of business drivers.
This session will focus on how to (re)position AI in your BC/CE sales cycles, based on the key learnings and outcomes of ten global AI practice optimization workshops Neural Impact delivered for Microsoft to leading AI services partners. Learn about their best practices, as well as from some of their mistakes so you avoid them yourself.
AI represents your company’s single best chance to drive meaningful differentiation (especially if you focus on defined industries), but the window of opportunity won’t be open for long. You’ll learn how to transition from IT to business leaders, avoid the “proof-of-concept” trap, and overcome the two (emotional) AI objections that kill deals.
Download the slides
Stop Losing Prospects from Your Home Page in the First 10 Seconds
Presented By:
Sharka Chobot
Chief Transformation Officer
Inge Boubez
Senior Marketing Strategist
with Diane Saeger
(Marketeery, CEO)
Transform the Three Most Critical Pages of Your Website into a Lead Magnet, and Turn Clicks into Conversations. Does your website capture attention or send prospects running?
For Dynamics 365 Partners and ISVs, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Your Home, Services, and Company pages aren’t just placeholders; they’re the gateway to your business. Yet, too often, they fail to engage, leaving potential clients unimpressed and moving on to competitors within seconds.
In this session, we’ll tackle the common pitfalls that are costing you leads and explore how to craft landing pages that emotionally engage, build trust, and turn visitors into valuable prospects.
Download the slides
Want to Close and Deliver 50-100 New Customer Adds per Year?
Presented By:
Sharka Chobot
Chief Transformation Officer
with Justine Vendrame
(Global SMB Business Applications Channel lead)
Come hear from Microsoft resellers how they are doing it. In this panel fast growing Microsoft resellers share how they have disrupted and changed their traditional sales approach, marketing strategy, solutions, services offerings and delivery model to scale, drive revenue growth and increase profit.
Download the slides
Don’t Let Your Buyers Slip Away: A Video Strategy Blueprint for Lead Generation Success
Presented By:
Jordy Starling
Video Trainer, Consultant, and Producer for B2B High Tech
Most B2B tech marketers have experience implementing video in their marketing strategies. However, a common struggle is creating videos reactively rather than proactively and lacking confidence in their video strategy’s effectiveness. If you can relate to this challenge, you understand the risk of investing effort into the wrong marketing assets.
In this session, we will crack the code on what a successful video topic strategy blueprint looks like, specifically for Microsoft partners. Learn the most essential video topics that will drive your buyer’s journey and qualify your leads. You will also get to see example videos for each topic, understand what engaging and effective video structuring and development looks like, and gain a video methodology that will help you fully understand where video is needed in your organization. Without this video strategy, your competitors could outpace you.
Takeaways:
1) How to think like your buyers when it comes to video.
2) Which videos you should be creating for your buyers.
3) How to structure and develop your videos efficiently and with the highest engagement.
4) Confidence in knowing that you are creating the right videos.
Download the slides
Our Team
Mark Stuyt
Chief Engagement Officer
Mark Stuyt is the founder and Chief Engagement Officer of Neural Impact; a sales and marketing consulting agency that applies behavioral economics, neuroscience and persuasion psychology to help Microsoft and its partners radically improve their customer acquisition and cloud strategies.
Sharka Chobot is the creator of the CRM product category (1995) and Chief Transformation Officer of Neural Impact. Sharka applies behavioral economics, neuroscience and persuasion psychology to help Microsoft partners develop an effective customer acquisition and go to market strategy.
She has over 35 years of technology specific expertise and teaches behavioral marketing at leading universities in Canada. Sharka has worked with hundreds of Microsoft partners on six continents to develop their cloud product, packaging, pricing and vertical market strategy and to accelerate their transition to a SaaS business model.
Sharka Chobot
Chief Transformation Officer
Inge Boubez
Senior Marketing Strategist
Inge Boubez is a visionary leader in marketing, with over 20 years of experience at the forefront of high-tech innovation, including her latest focus on AI-driven strategies. Her career spans global industry giants like SAP and agile startups in ERP, CRM, and modern workspaces, where her transformative strategies have delivered measurable growth.
As Senior Marketing Strategist at Neural Impact and former Head of Marketing at Moz, Inge has mastered SEO, AI-powered marketing, and neuroscience-based content development to supercharge lead generation and digital engagement.
At Directions, Inge will share actionable strategies for optimizing your website to boost conversions and for leveraging AI to secure a competitive edge. Whether your goal is to dominate search rankings or future-proof your marketing, Inge’s insights will empower you to take bold steps forward.
Jordy Starling is a strategic, multidisciplinary video trainer/producer/consultant who advocates value driven content with a focus on authenticity and viewer engagement. He helps Microsoft partners build video marketing strategies and in-house capabilities to automate sales and shorten time to value.
Jordy is the Master Video Director, Consultant, and Trainer with Neural Impact, an organization that helps Microsoft Dynamics Partners accelerate their customer acquisition and growth strategies through a better understanding of neuroscience, emotional engagement and tribal behavior.
Jordy Starling
Video Trainer, Consultant, and Producer for B2B High Tech
Joe DeHaai
Chief Business Impact Officer at Neural Impact
Joe DeHaai brings over two decades of experience in Microsoft Business Applications, having served in various roles including consulting, startup practice leadership, presales engineering, sales, and sales leadership. His extensive background equips him with valuable insights and a distinctive perspective that he passionately shares with Microsoft and Microsoft Partners.
His expertise is not just theoretical, Joe has a proven track record of transforming sales strategies and leading teams to success. During his tenure at RSM, he spearheaded a major shift in the sales approach. Moving away from traditional ERP selling focused on features and functions, he led the team towards a strategy centered on industry-specific solutions. This pivotal change catalyzed remarkable growth.
Joe’s leadership is characterized by his commitment to developing sales personnel and managers, empowering them to achieve their maximum potential through innovative and effective sales strategies.
Cutting-Edge Tactics for Achieving High-
Engagement Video Content
Presented By:
Jordy Starling
Master Video Trainer and Producer
Sunday, April 14
6:00 – 6:45pm
SEAGLASS
B2B marketing experts who harness the power of video experience a jaw-dropping 49% faster growth in revenue compared to those who don’t.
But many B2B marketers still struggle with a low-risk, high-engagement video strategy that they can confidently implement in their business to automate sales and shorten time to value.
In this highly valuable session, you will learn about the power of video, recommended videos to create, production engagement tips, and how to engage your audience when you distribute your video content to further to stand out from your competition.
From strategy, production, and distribution, this session will help you develop a strong online presence and connect with your audience.
Discover:
• What types of videos gain traction with examples
• Tactics for producing engaging videos that stand out
• Secrets for distributing video content
• Create the right calls to action
• Get discovered with SEO and social media tips
• And more…
Secure Your Customer Base by Breaking the On-
Premise Bond
Presented By:
Dr. Christian Lehmann
Chief Growth Officer
Tuesday, April 16
10:30 – 11:15 am
SEAGLASS
Are you grappling with a large base of on-premise NAV, GP, or SL customers who are deeply attached to their current systems and haven’t yet transitioned to the cloud? If you’re encountering resistance to migration or facing internal resource constraints that hinder proactive discussions with your customers, this session is designed for you. You will learn how to refine your cloud value proposition and messaging to create a compelling urgency for transition. Further, you will gain insights on effective migration deployment strategies that will empower you to scale your migration projects efficiently. This session marks a pivotal shift to a proactive migration sales and delivery strategy, enabling you to secure your customer base and drive more recurring cloud revenue. Seize this opportunity to lead your customers into a new era of innovation and growth.
Getting Attention and Driving Conversion in a Noisy Digital World
Presented By:
Sharka Chobot
Chief Transformation Officer
Tuesday, April 16
12:30 – 1:15pm
SEAGLASS
In an era where attention is a scarce commodity, mastering the art of captivating and maintaining customer focus is essential. This session aims to equip Dynamics ecosystem partners with neuroscience-infused marketing strategies that cut through the noise of our hyper-connected world. We’ll explore how understanding the human brain’s processing of information and decision-making can revolutionize our approach to digital marketing. From leveraging the principles of attention economics to crafting messages that resonate and stick, participants will learn how to accelerate deal closures and increase conversions without leaning on specific product references. Join us to discover a blend of psychological insights and digital marketing tactics that promise to transform your engagement strategies, making your marketing efforts more impactful and efficient in this attention-deficit age.
Maximize Customer Lifetime Value: Strategies to Enable Your Delivery Teams to Build Trust and Value
Presented By:
Joe DeHaai
Chief Sales Strategist
Tuesday, April 16
12:30 – 1:15pm
SHOREBREAK 1/2
You have a massive revenue opportunity within your customer base to upsell and expand, but this requires your consultants be able to craft compelling business cases and identify upselling opportunities tailored to unique industry requirements. Although your consultants and delivery team members are trusted and respected by customers, many are unable to effectively align solutions with customer priorities, let alone manage unrealistic customer expectations. In this session you will learn strategies for deeper customer engagement and value-driven solution delivery that will empower greater customer satisfaction and upselling success. Gain insights on techniques to enable your consultants to build credibility and emotional connections with customers and align with customer priorities during and post-implementation, thereby enhancing customer lifetime value and improving consultant career growth and retention rates.
Top Video Assets Marketing Managers Need to Create to Automate Sales & Shorten Time To
Value
Presented By:
Jordy Starling
Master Video Trainer and Producer
Tuesday, April 16
5:45 – 6:30pm
SEAGLASS
Most B2B marketers have experience implementing video in their marketing strategies. A common struggle with video is that marketers are often creating videos reactively rather than proactively and lack the confidence to know whether the video strategy they have will be effective.
In this session we crack the code on what a successful video topic strategy blueprint looks like specifically for Microsoft partners. Learn the most needed video topics that will drive your buyer’s journey and qualify your leads. You will also get to see example videos for each topic, what engaging and effective video structuring and development looks like, and gain a video methodology that will help you fully understand where video is needed in your organization.
Takeaways:
• How to think like your buyers when it comes to video
• Which videos you should be creating for your buyers
• How to structure and develop your videos efficiently and with the highest engagement
• Confidence in knowing that you are creating the right videos
Best Practices to Double Your Customer Ads
Presented By:
Sharka Chobot
Chief Transformation Officer
Wednesday, April 17
9 – 9:45 am
CORAL 5
In an era where attention is a scarce commodity, mastering the art of captivating and maintaining customer focus is essential. This session aims to equip Dynamics ecosystem partners with neuroscience-infused marketing strategies that cut through the noise of our hyper-connected world. We’ll explore how understanding the human brain’s processing of information and decision-making can revolutionize our approach to digital marketing. From leveraging the principles of attention economics to crafting messages that resonate and stick, participants will learn how to accelerate deal closures and increase conversions without leaning on specific product references. Join us to discover a blend of psychological insights and digital marketing tactics that promise to transform your engagement strategies, making your marketing efforts more impactful and efficient in this attention-deficit age.
Please provide your contact info to download the Session Slides
Directions Lyon 2023 Slides
Download the slides for Directions Lyon 2023
Microsoft transform
The global Business Applications SMB market represents a huge opportunity for partners, but targeting small and medium sized businesses within the cloud-buying landscape requires a shift in how you sell, market, and package cloud-based business applications. A sales, marketing, and delivery foundation that can reach a higher volume of customers, deliver faster time to market, and enable the business to scale and expand globally all while maximizing margins is critical to success.