QGate is one of the UK Microsoft Partners that moved on Copilot early, while many of their peers were still deciding whether the market was real. This is the story of how they made that call, the strategy they followed, and how 365 Talent Portal helped them close the one gap that remained: the confidence to talk about Copilot across the full Microsoft 365 estate, not just the Dynamics territory they already knew. It is written for Partner leaders who can feel the AI wave coming and want a practical read on what good looks like.

QGate is a UK Microsoft Partner with a long track record of helping customers get real value from Microsoft technology, spanning Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Copilot in Microsoft 365. QGate combines deep technical capability with a consulting culture focused on genuine business transformation.

www.qgate.co.uk

Quick Facts

Partner: QGate Software Limited, UK — Microsoft Partner

Sector: CRM, Business Applications & Digital Transformation

Programme: 365 Talent Portal Copilot Sales Enablement, February 2026

Focus: Embedding Copilot internally, then equipping teams to sell it with confidence

Outcome highlight: Two new Microsoft 365 Copilot customers won and deployed outside QGate’s traditional Dynamics territory

For QGate, the decision to commit to Copilot came from the market, not from marketing. Their customers started to ask, their peers started to ask, and the direction of travel across the Microsoft ecosystem was hard to miss. Rather than wait for certainty, QGate chose to lean in.

“What made us decide to fully embrace Copilot is that our customers started talking about it a lot. And it was not just our customers; it was the whole industry.”

STEVE CLARKE, SALES DIRECTOR, QGATE

The second reason was strategic fit. QGate’s business is built on helping customers transform how they work, so Copilot was not a left-field product to graft on; it was an accelerant for the value they already delivered.

“We realised that a lot of what Copilot brings goes hand in hand with what we do anyway. So we knew we could benefit, and our customers could benefit.”

STEVE CLARKE, SALES DIRECTOR, QGATE

Steve Clarke also recognised that much of the market was moving slower. Through QGate’s industry podcast and regular conversations with AI practitioners, they could see that plenty of organisations were still on the fence, which made the window for credible Copilot advisers genuinely open.

Steve Gibson is clear that, before Copilot was ever a product conversation with a customer, QGate treated it as a business conversation. The team started from who their customers are and what they are really buying from QGate: not software, but transformation.

“We are a CRM business, but first and foremost we are a business that helps customers rethink their processes and create genuine transformation. We are very focused on that, and we knew we could offer something to bridge that hesitancy and fear gap.”
STEVE GIBSON, AI AND TRANSFORMATION CONSULTANT, QGATE

That framing shaped four clear priorities:

• Lead with the business problem, not the feature list. Copilot was positioned as a way to accelerate transformation outcomes QGate already sold, not as a separate AI product line.
• Meet customers where they are. Much of the market was a mix of curiosity, uncertainty, and genuine anxiety about AI. QGate saw that as a reason to lean in and help bridge the gap, not a reason to stay quiet.
• Get the house in order first. Consultants and sellers needed to be genuinely fluent in Copilot before they walked into a customer conversation about it.
• Move from awareness to commercial conversation. Internal enablement was valuable, but the goal was always a sales team that could position Copilot credibly, handle objections, and close.

By the time Steve Clarke and Steve Gibson engaged 365 Talent Portal, QGate had already done meaningful internal work on Copilot. They had experimented, they had opinions, and they had a point of view on where Copilot fit inside their services. What they did not yet have was confidence to sell Copilot across the full Microsoft 365 estate. Dynamics was second nature; the wider Copilot story was not.

“Historically, we are not sellers of Office licences, and therefore had not been in the Microsoft 365 space. Although we were super users ourselves, we wanted to make sure that as part of our delivery we could talk with authority about the Microsoft 365 tools and Copilot within them. That is specifically where we wanted to go, and we knew 365 Talent Portal were expert in that.”
STEVE GIBSON, AI AND TRANSFORMATION CONSULTANT, QGATE

“Our customers were saying: great, we can see we can get Copilot in Dynamics, but that is only a small piece of what Copilot does. Copilot is huge; it touches every branch of the Microsoft ecosystem. That was exactly what we needed from you: to understand what it does, the benefit of it, and how that benefit can be conveyed.”
STEVE CLARKE, SALES DIRECTOR, QGATE

There was a second, bigger reason QGate chose 365 Talent Portal: they saw the training not just as enablement for their own people, but as a trial run for a long-term partner they could bring in to train their own customers’ end-users on Copilot.

“When we are deploying things like Microsoft 365 Copilot into our customers, they will have users who are brand new to it and will need training. So it was almost a trial run: you deliver to us, we see that these folks are really good, and we are then happy recommending 365 Talent Portal to our customers, or even including them as part of our service offering.”
STEVE CLARKE, SALES DIRECTOR, QGATE

365 Talent Portal designed a two-part Copilot Sales Enablement programme for QGate, delivered live over Microsoft Teams by Sandra Koutzenko from 365 Talent Portal and tailored in advance to QGate’s language, customer base, and services portfolio.

The clearest measure of the 365 Talent Portal programme’s value came from Steve Clarke: new customers already won and deployed on Microsoft 365 Copilot, outside of QGate’s usual Dynamics territory.

“Some very tangible benefits: since the training, we have already had two new customers that we have deployed Copilot into outside of Dynamics, in Microsoft 365. This is not something we have done historically; we had always focused on the Dynamics space. But the training you delivered absolutely gave us the confidence to not only sell it and convey the benefit, but also deploy it. The tangible benefit is that we have won new business from it.”
STEVE CLARKE, SALES DIRECTOR, QGATE

Beyond that headline result, Steve Gibson highlighted something equally important for a services business: consistency across the whole team.

“For the people who attended, we can now be comfortable that if any of them are in conversations with clients, as we often are in an SMB, they are all at the same level, or at least have been taught to the same level. I cannot imagine anyone is not now using what they learned in that session in practice.”
STEVE GIBSON, AI AND TRANSFORMATION CONSULTANT, QGATE

“Your clear commitment to knowing what you talk about was really apparent. Not only are you very knowledgeable, you are very passionate in this space, and that comes across. The recipients of your training come away more knowledgeable and more enthused. That enthusiasm comes across, and it is infectious.”
STEVE CLARKE, SALES DIRECTOR, QGATE

“You had clearly listened to what we said about where we were on the journey. You very quickly realised where the whole group was, and therefore we got into material that added value rather than repeating things we already knew. That differentiated it for me.”
STEVE GIBSON, AI AND TRANSFORMATION CONSULTANT, QGATE

Taken together, the programme delivered four outcomes QGate can name precisely:

QGate’s Copilot journey did not end when the workshops did. The team is actively tracking Copilot Workspaces as one of the next significant directions of travel, working to identify strong use cases they can demonstrate to clients. Meanwhile, they have Dynamics projects currently running that embed AI as a core part of the solution from the start — not as a later addition — and Steve Gibson
expects the results those deliver for clients to be genuinely eye-opening.

On the learning side, Steve Clarke’s approach is simple: commit to never missing a beat. He has attended his third or fourth Microsoft Copilot sales training session in the space of two and a half months. The sessions cover similar ground each time, but that is precisely the point: something will have changed since the last one. In a technology moving this fast, staying at the front means treating continuous learning as a standing commitment, not a one-off exercise.