Microsoft Commercial Marketplace Benefits: Growth Tips for ISVs to accelerate business

As an ISV, if you are selling in the cloud marketplaces, you have already unlocked an incredible growth opportunity to capitalize on committed spends of your customers as well as facilitate geographical expansion. However, if you feel you are all on your own to navigate your success, you might want to look at it again. Selling in the Azure marketplace brings along a variety of Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits that ISVs can leverage to accelerate their growth journey. In each step of the way, Microsoft brings to you several incentives, resources and support to take your solutions and experience to the next level. If you have not been leveraging these incentives, you are missing out on a lot of opportunities. To help you understand the Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits available and how they can empower your journey, we have created this comprehensive resource. Let’s explore the support available along the way.

Your journey on the cloud marketplaces begins with building the right solutions. Here you can leverage the solutions workspace to take your solution from idea to market with curated resources, proven advice, and actionable steps to move your idea forward. However, as an ISV, chances are you already have a robust solution in place which you have to calibrate for the Azure marketplace. This requires ensuring the right integrations and APIs as well as other technical and operational requirements are in place. You can refer to the readiness resources by Microsoft to gauge where you stand and navigate your journey to make your solutions ready for the marketplace. Do it better with SaaSify: SaaSify can significantly reduce your time to build your solutions and take them live on Azure marketplace. SaaSify's zero engineering platform, pre-built connectors and APIs, ensure that ISVs don't have to make any engineering changes to their SaaS solution. This enables ISVs to go-live within a week.

Once you have your solution ready to be published in the Microsoft marketplace, you need to market it well to ensure that it can be discovered by your customers. It’s time to build a presence in the market and the right resources and Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits can accelerate your pace exponentially. Through the Microsoft Partner Network as a part of the Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits, you can explore various resources, digital marketing assets, guidance and consultation to navigate your marketing journey. To reach the right customers, Microsoft is empowering ISVs with support in two ways:

1. Marketplace rewards

Once your offer is live in Azure Marketplace, there are several rewards and incentives you can reap based on your performance to accelerate your growth. These rewards are customized for each stage of the growth journey. For instance, when you arrive at the marketplace, the rewards will help you get visibility and awareness among the right audience. As you progress along the way, the rewards will enable you to convert sales and close deals. Therefore, Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits have you covered with the right rewards and support for each step of your sales lifecycle. Based on your eligibility and the type of offers that you have published, you will be eligible for different types of rewards. While List and Trial offers receive one time benefits, if you have a Transact offer, you are eligible for lifetime benefits and rewards. As your revenue in the cloud marketplace grows, the incentives move from simple awareness support to demand generation, co-selling, lead development as well as sales enablement opportunities. Put simply, as your revenue increases, Microsoft becomes more vested in your growth and offers more comprehensive rewards and incentives. Here’s a quick snapshot of the rewards and support you are likely to receive based on your eligibility:

List, trial, and consulting Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits (illustrative)

• Commercial marketplace listing optimization
• Commercial marketplace what’s new blog
• Self- serve digital marketing on demand
• Co-sell solution finder listing guidance
• Market research and marketing materials
• Onboarding documentation
• Press release support
• Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription

If you have a transactable offer, you are in for some exciting rewards, designed to support you in marketing, sales, and technical activities, and thereby helping you to get more visitors, receive more leads, and convert more business. In addition to some of the Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits above, there are several others heading your way, based on your revenue, including:

Marketing benefits

• Partnering and global expansion readiness assessment
• Commercial marketplace marketing toolkit
• Marketplace rewards testimonial
• Customer success story
• Partner spotlight in Microsoft internal commercial marketplace newsletter
• Microsoft executive event endorsement
• Individual guest blog post
• Featured homepage placement
• Social promotion spotlight

Sales benefits

• Azure sponsorship for development/proof of concept
• Microsoft seller webinar
• Solution spotlight to Microsoft sales team

Technical benefits

• Commercial marketplace consultation
• Azure sponsorship for commercial marketplace publishing
• Azure active directory integration

2. Go-to-market services

Within the go-to-market services, Microsoft offers digital marketing and personalized consultation, guidance and customizable marketing assets, and a lot more to help you reach more customers.

Marketing resource hub

A collection of marketing tools and support to to create and execute a powerful go-to-market plan and connect with your customers as a part of the Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits, including:

• Digital Marketing Content OnDemand: Customizable content to use in your social media, emails and newsletters to create the right messaging and attract customers to your cloud marketplace listing.
• Partner marketing center: Collection of customizable digital materials, including a comprehensive content library with sales presentations, infographics, and web images.
• Partner branding resources: Learn how to develop a strong brand with partner branding resources
• Sales insights: Leverage machine learning technology and hundreds of data sources to highlight new opportunities and generate fresh customer propensity reports each month.

• Smart partner marketing: Develop your marketing skills with the latest industry research, market trends, and partner best-practices
• Geo expansion readiness assessment: Check your readiness to grow into new markets and scale your solutions

Reach more customers

Resources, support and Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits to help you reach a wide base of global customers along with the right guidance to connect with them, including:

• Dedicated cloud specialist: Grow your cloud business with one-on-one personalized guidance over a six-month period as a part of Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits
• Referrals: Cultivate valuable customer relationships with referrals from Microsoft
• Co-selling opportunities: Co-sell with Microsoft is the path to be discovered, deliver your expertise, and expand your customer footprint for positive customer outcomes

Do it better with SaaSify: SaaSify Cloud GTM Platform empowers ISVs to kickstart their Cloud GTM journey with cutting-edge features, GTM support and the power of automation. It enables ISVs to understand partner program offerings, benefits, requirements are and how to use them, create cloud co-marketing strategy to drive awareness and lead-generation, access to resource guides, content templates, and frameworks, provide cloud GTM content for joint messaging and template materials and much more.

Once you have your offers published in the Microsoft marketplace and have a fair idea of the go-to-market benefits you can leverage, you are already on an accelerated growth path. You are already capitalizing on the multiple marketing benefits available for your solution. However, it is now time to leverage the Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits to expand your sales, generate more leads and reach more customers. The greatest incentive and support here is to co-sell. Co-selling, for an ease of understanding, is when ISVs sell their solutions with support from cloud providers or cloud partners to expand their footprint by leveraging the strengths of each other. You can explore co-selling opportunities with cloud service providers (CSPs) who are a part of the Microsoft Partner Network. However, more importantly, you must explore co-selling with Microsoft itself and understand how you can leverage Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits. By leveraging co-selling with Microsoft, you can get greater visibility, exposure and customer reach. To co-sell, you need to:

• Be ready as an ISV with the right agreements in place
• Have c-sell ready offers with marketing collaterals like pitch decks, demo guides, etc.

The idea is to acquire a co-sell ready status with the right documents to help your partners understand your solutions. Do it better with SaaSify: SaaSify enables ISVs to become co-sell ready with comprehensive support. Co-selling advisory helps ISVs with the best practices to build relationships with Azure marketplace PDMs, make offers co-sell ready as well as automate the entire process of creating private offers for co-selling from within Salesforce. SaaSify also helps ISVs create transactable offers which are now a pre-requisite for Azure IP co-sell incentives.

The several Microsoft commercial marketplace benefits mentioned above are different ways in which Microsoft is empowering ISVs to accelerate their growth in the cloud marketplace. However, as an ISV, you might need to make your solution ready before you can reap any of these incentives. Here, you can explore a partnership with SaaSify to create a go-to-market solution which is ready within a week. As a white labeled solution, SaaSify’s zero engineering platform can help you to optimize, list, sell and manage your SaaS offerings seamlessly. Book a demo today to know more.