Convert Your Contact Me Offers to Transactable SaaS Offers for Business Growth

As an Independent Software Vendor, you would understand that there are several benefits you can leverage by selling on the Cloud Marketplaces. Ability to capitalize on the committed spends of your existing customers, accelerating time to revenue, are just a few reasons to make Cloud Marketplaces a part of your growth strategy. However, if you still follow the, you might be losing out a huge business opportunity. If your offers are not immediately transactable, your customers might feel the friction and move to your competitor. Fortunately, there is an effortless way to turn the tables around.This detailed guide will help you convert your contact me offers to transactable SaaS offers and give your realize revenue immediately.

What is a Contact Me offer?

Technically speaking, contact me is a simple, quick, and easy to create listing that enables prospects to discover your offering. The listing broadly features text description, images, supporting documents, and optional video content. It seeks to encourage the customers to request contact from your team. Based on customer action, Microsoft routes these leads to the Partner Center Referrals portal and CRM system of your preference.

Sell through Microsoft with Transactable SaaS Offers

To offer a seamless experience to customers as well as ISVs, Microsoft gives you the option  to sell through its commercial marketplace. This way you will be able to share immediately transactable SaaS offers, also called Get it Now offers, with your customers. However, to facilitate the same, you need a billing model to charge your customers. The price is set on each plan and can be different based on contract duration, allowing you to offer exclusive discounts for longer commitments.

Why Transactable SaaS Offers?

ISVs have identified a variety of reasons for converting the contact me offers to transactable SaaS offers, including:

• Reduced store fee to 3% for each transaction, enabling ISVs to capture a greater share of the revenue
• Ability to define the revenue share for Cloud Service Provider partners to ensure meaningful partnerships
• Potential to capitalize on the pre-committed credits in Cloud Marketplaces by existing and new customers.
• Facilitate a faster sales cycle and quicker revenue realization, where tax is collected and remitted by marketplace vendors
• Option to sell Private and Public offers through the marketplace.
• Exclusive access to trusted apps that support growth
• Opportunities to co-sell with CSPs and other partners for greater revenue streams

How to convert the Contact Me offers to a Transactable SaaS offers?

If you are impressed with the potential of Transactable SaaS offers to impact your bottom line, you need to focus on achieving the same. There are two ways to deliver  Transactable SaaS Offers to your customers:

• Convert existing Contact Me offers to Transactable (Get It Now) offers.
• Create a new Transactable SaaS offer from scratch.

Convert existing Contact Me offers to Transactable (Get It Now) offers.

To convert your existing offer from under the Contact Me listing to a Transactable Offer, you need to:

• Go to the Offer Setup of the Contact Me offer in the Partner Center
• Select the radio button “Yes, I would like to sell through Microsoft and have Microsoft host transactions on my behalf” as shown in the screenshot below:

 

• On selecting Yes, you will get a message to complete the Technical Configuration to integrate the offer with the commercial marketplace This choice cannot be changed once the offer is published. Complete the Technical Configuration and create a pricing plan (SKU’s) for the offer.

Create new Transactable SaaS offers from scratch

If  you want to keep your Contact Me Offer as it is and create a new transactable offer, simply follow the steps mentioned in this detailed guide Create Transcatable SaaS offers in the commercial marketplace | Microsoft DocsIn creating Transactable SaaS offers, there are two major activities that you need to focus on  i.e., Technical Configuration and Creating a pricing plan.

What is Technical Configuration?

On the Technical configuration tab, you need to define the technical details which the commercial marketplace will communicate to their SaaS application or solution. Here are a few steps that are important for technical configuration:

• Landing page URL– Define the SaaS website URL (for example: https://contoso.com/signup) that customers will land on after purchasing the offer from the Azure Marketplace and triggering the configuration process from the newly created SaaS subscription.
• Connection webhook – For all asynchronous events that Microsoft needs to send to you (for example, SaaS subscription has been cancelled), you must provide a connection webhook URL. Microsoft calls this URL to notify you of the event.
• Azure Active Directory tenant ID- Mention your Tenant ID
• Azure Active Directory application ID– Mention your Application ID

Pricing Plans:

Once you have updated the technical configuration for the offer, you need to the define the pricing plans for the same You can have different pricing plans based on different SKUs of the offer. For example: You can have plans with Basic, Standard, or Premium SKUs with distinctive features and pricing associated with them.With Transactable SaaS Offers, you have the opportunity to expand your reach to 141 different countries, out of which 55 countries are Microsoft Tax Remitted (i.e., Microsoft assumes responsibility for managing End Customer Taxation, including calculating, collecting and/or remitting certain taxes.).

Pricing model:

There are two types of Pricing models that are currently supported for transactable SaaS Offers:

1. Flat rate
2. Per User

Your plans can either have Flat Rate or Per User pricing model.With the Flat Rate pricing model, you get flexibility to choose the billing terms (Monthly, Annual) and define Metering Dimensions (Additional usages). For Example: you can have additional usages such as, Registration Fee, Consumption Fee, Setup Fee, etc., that you can levy in addition to the Recurring Monthly or Annual charges. Please refer to the screenshot below: If you prefer to charge your customer separately for each use, you can make use of the Per User pricing model in which you can define the pricing for the plans in Monthly or Annual billing terms for each user. Additional usage (Metering Service Dimensions) is not supported for Per User pricing model. Please refer to the screenshot below: Note: All plans for an offer must use the same pricing model.

Plan Visibility:

In the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, you have the choice to either make your offers visible to everyone in the selected region/countries with Public Plans or you can limit the visibility of your plan to selected audiences using Private Plans.Once you update all the requisite details,  you can go ahead and publish the offer in Partner Center. The offer goes through different publishing phases such as:

• Automated Validation
• Preview Creation
• Publisher signoff
• Certification
• Publish

You can view the publishing status of the offer on the Offer Overview page in Partner Center as shown below: Once your offer is successfully published as shown in the image below, there will be a link for either AppSource, Azure Marketplace, or both depending on the options you selected while creating your offer. 

How SaaSify helps in landing transactable SaaS offers in Azure Marketplace?

At SaaSify, we have successfully enabled ISVs from across the globe to convert their Contact Me offers to Transactable SaaS offers and leverage the Azure Marketplace to its maximum potential. Here are some of the top advantages that SaaSify offers:

• Faster time to market: SaaSify is a pre-built integration platform hosted on Azure Marketplace by Spektra Systems. It has all the SaaS fulfilment APIs already built and will enable to make your SaaS Offers transactable in no-time.
• Key integrations: You can leverage SaaSify’s suite of key integrations that are mandatory for Azure Marketplace.
• Technical configuration: SaaSify takes care of the complete Technical Configuration required for your offer which commercial marketplace uses to communicate with your SaaS application or solution. There is 0% R&D required from your end. All you need to focus on is enhancing and improving your offer with Marketing assets, artifacts, etc.,
• Diverse offerings: SaaSify offers three SKUs to help you cater to different requirements and customize your pricing models. These include:
  • SaaSify Launch
  • SaaSify Scale
  • SaaSify Enterprise

• Onboarding support: SaaSify team provides complete White-Glove onboarding support for first offer listing as a part of the Standard & Premium SKUs, which includes: Walkthrough of the best practices on pricing your SaaS solution for the cloud marketplace.
• Close partnership with you to understand your pricing strategy / requirements and provides insights on the right pricing model as supported by cloud provider.
• Working on your feedback and enable you with listing of the product with various pricing dimensions.
• Unlimited Listing (Available for all three SKUs): SaaSify team enables self-service capability, where you can list any number of products, private offers and transact through SaaSify. There is no limit on the number of listings or revenue recognized through SaaSify.
• Notifications (Available for all three SKUs): Through the lifecycle of the subscription, you can configure the notifications to be sent through Email, Microsoft Teams, and/or Slack Channel.
• Subscription Lifecycle Management (Available for all three SKUs): End-to-end lifecycle management of purchases, for customer initiated PAYG / public offers or pre-negotiated private offers. Ability to hook up manual provisioning of SaaS services by operations team with notifications through email or integrations.
• Reporting (As part of Standard & Premium SKUs): Advanced analytics on transactions, payouts / collections, taxes, fees. Stay on top of all subscription lifecycle events.
• API Access (Available for all three SKUs): API access to retrieve subscription details and report usage information.
• Integrated support (Available for all three SKUs):
  • Full support is provided and included for any issues/questions related to SaaSify.
  • Monthly 1-hour review with the Partner Success Managers.
• Salesforce Integration (Premium SKU Only).
• Integrated SaaS Provisioning (Premium SKU Only).
• Intelligent Transactions & Metering (Premium SKU Only).

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References:

• Create the SaaS offer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/create-new-saas-offer
• Configure SaaS offer properties: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/create-new-saas-offer-properties
• Configure SaaS offer listing details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/create-new-saas-offer-listing
• Add a preview audience for a SaaS offer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/create-new-saas-offer-preview
• Add technical details for a SaaS offer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/create-new-saas-offer-technical
• Create plans for a SaaS offer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/create-new-saas-offer-plans
• Create a test SaaS offer: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/create-saas-dev-test-offer
• Test and Publish: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/test-publish-saas-offer
• Review and publish an offer to the commercial marketplace: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/review-publish-offer
• SaaSify: https://docs.saasify.ai