FAQ’s

Co-selling in cloud marketplaces (CMPs) is one of the most effective ways for ISVs to increase their sales and grow their revenue. Essentially, co-selling in CMPs is all about partnering with your cloud provider to generate, nurture and close deals at a faster pace and greater volume. However, with an exponential increase in cloud selling and subsequent rise of ISVs, cloud providers find it difficult to offer co-selling in CMPs support to every ISV.   Invariably, you might find yourself struggling to co-sell, despite fulfilling all requirements and eligibility considerations. Fortunately, you can now reinvent the wheel by adopting a new approach to co-selling which will push your cloud provider to take notice of your efforts and support you towards business growth. Let’s uncover how to reinvent co-selling in CMPs for 2023.

A twist to co-selling in cloud marketplaces

Co-selling in cloud marketplaces has often been a pull activity for ISVs. It involves waiting for leads from cloud providers and gradually nurturing them to foster sales. However, with fierce competition, ISVs need to supplement this pull with a complimentary push which involves getting direct deals to grab attention. Once the cloud providers take notice of your organic impact, they will see the potential of deals from the partnership, leading to higher co-selling opportunities. Thus, you need to reinvent your approach towards co-selling to achieve higher support from your cloud providers.

How to reinvent co-selling in CMPs for 2023?

There are 4 major questions that you need to answer to reinvent co-selling in CMPs to create a value proposition for cloud providers to accept their co-selling status.

1. How to divert deals from other channels?

To divert your existing deals from other channels and close them in the cloud marketplace, you need to create a value proposition for them with the ability to utilize pre-committed spends in the cloud marketplace. You can attain a co-selling status by encouraging your existing customers to purchase your offers from the cloud marketplaces instead of the conventional channels.  The process is quite simple. During the sales process, your team can illustrate cloud marketplace as an option for the customer to purchase your offer from. Focus on highlighting the several benefits that come along when transacting through cloud marketplaces. Factors like ease of procurement, less paperwork, etc. can help create a powerful pitch for transactions through marketplaces. Initially, you should focus on shifting those deals to the marketplace which are more or less confirmed. This will create a perspective of high deal closure rate and the cloud providers will take greater notice of your existing in the marketplace.

2. How to increase renewals for co-selling in CMPs?

Co-selling in cloud marketplaces is not only about landing new deals, but also about deal renewal. The bottom line is additional revenue realization that is routed through the cloud provider. Hence, any deals that you are able to renew with your customers in the cloud marketplace will also help you create a mark. There are two ways to get a co-selling status via renewals.

First, focus on the deals that you have closed while co-selling in cloud marketplaces itself. Be it through organic outreach or diverting your deals from other channels, you focus on deals that are already in the cloud marketplace and which need to be renewed in due course of time. Their renewal in the cloud marketplace will be easier to achieve as they already have a proof of concept and have benefitted from the said transaction.

Second, you may have existing customers in the other sales channels whose deal term or duration may be coming to an end in the recent future. You can take these deals and renew them for co-selling in cloud marketplaces. Follow the same value proposition as with new customers about benefits of these marketplaces.

3. How to boost marketing efforts for co-selling?

Focus on your marketing efforts to gain co-selling status as an ISV in the cloud marketplaces by attracting leads organically. Right from defining your offer with the right keywords to leveraging marketing resources available in the marketplace, there are several steps to boost your visibility.  Leveraging the right marketing strategies can have dual benefits to help you reinvent co-selling with AWS or Azure co-selling. First, you will be able to garner the attention of more customers organically leading to greater sales and revenue in the marketplace which will lead cloud providers to notice you. Second, your offer will become more visible to cloud providers as well, pushing them to notice your business and accelerate your co-selling in CMPs status.

4. How to identify CSPs and other partners?

Reinvent what co-selling in CMPs means to you. You may see co-selling with AWS or Azure co-selling as a means to sell collaboratively with leads from the respective cloud provider. However, if you take a step back, you will realize that there are other partners in the ecosystem of your cloud provider that you can explore co-selling with. For instance, you may want to explore collaborative opportunities with CSPs, who sell specific cloud solutions to their customers and can add your offer as a value add.   The objective is to identify opportunities of partnerships and co-selling beyond the conventional ISV-cloud provider relationship. Ultimately, your focus is to boost your sales and growth. Invariably, such partnerships will also help you get noticed by cloud providers as an ISV making sincere efforts and facilitating results. Thus, increasing your chances of gaining a co-selling status.

How to leverage SaaS enabled platform to promote co-selling in CMPs?

Your cloud provider will provide you with a co-selling status when they have confidence about your offer. Unless they are sure that your offer will add value to the journey and business of their customers, the quality and volume of leads you will receive will be far from satisfactory. To ensure that you are able to leverage co-selling in CMPs to the maximum extent, you may want to collaborate with a SaaS enablement platform to take your offer to the cloud marketplace. One such solution is SaaSify, which can help you:

• Take your solution to the cloud marketplace within days, without any engineering changes
• Create custom offers for your customers, and sell as they want to buy
• Manage all your public and private offers from a single dashboard
• Accelerate your branding and visibility with the option to create a customized landing page with your logo

If you want to get started with co-selling in CMPs and learn how to make the most of it, connect with our marketplace experts today!

As an ISV with a SaaS product, you would by now understand the benefits of SaaS solutions for your sales. The benefits significantly outweigh the investments and efforts required. However, if you are new to cloud marketplaces, you might have to face resistance from your teams about new work and might feel overwhelmed with a lot that needs to be taken care of. Here, a SaaS enablement platform like SaaSify can help you with all the support you need to prepare your product, team, etc. to reach the cloud marketplaces seamlessly.  

How SaaSify Supports SaaS Enablement on Cloud Marketplaces? 

If you look closely, SaaS enablement is all about ensuring that a SaaS solution is able to successfully operate in cloud marketplaces. For ISVs, it refers to the support they need to publish their offers and start selling in the cloud marketplace of their choice. As a SaaS enablement platform, SaaSify brings several capabilities and features that you can leverage to grow your marketplace sales exponentially.  

How to create SaaS to reach customers superfast? 

You can significantly reduce the time you take to reach your customers with SaaS enablement. If you engage in the process of preparing your SaaS product for the cloud marketplaces, you might need to make several engineering changes which can take anywhere between 6 weeks to 6 months. However, SaaSify’s zero engineering platform can help you reach your customers at a superfast speed. Most of the ISVs we have worked with in the past have been able to publish their offers within a week. Reaching customers fast translates to quicker sales and revenue realization.  

How to build a SaaS platform with white glove onboarding?

When you start selling through the marketplaces, there is a lot of knowledge transfer that is needed to help your team members come up the curve. SaaSify provides a white globe onboarding experience to help your team members with all the necessary information about the marketplaces, key terminologies, how to edit offers once published, etc. In addition, there is significant listing support with AMI development, CFT template development, etc. Put simply, SaaSify ensures that all your team members are on the same and the right page of the onboarding process.  

How to give instant brand recall with enablement SaaS?

When you first reach the marketplace with any SaaS enablement partner, you need to make sure that it’s your brand that stands out. That’s where a white labeled solution like SaaSify can make an impact. SaaSify enables you to use your domain name, logo, tailor made templates, etc. while leveraging its platform to publish your offers. While you use our tech expertise and state of the art features, what the audience sees is just your brand. This ensures brand recall and helps get repeat customers.  

How to communicate powerfully? 

Communicating effectively with your existing and potential customers in the cloud marketplaces is integral to business success. However, if you have to manage communication across different platforms and dashboards, it can be an administrative nightmare, where some threads might just get lost. Fortunately, with SaaSify as your SaaS enablement partner, you can manage all your customers from a single dashboard. Be it providing customized quotations or providing customer support, you can rely on SaaSify to ensure that there is no communication gap.   

How to manage offers seamlessly? 

Selling in the marketplace is all about managing your offers effectively once you publish them. There are several forces at play here, you might want to create special private offers for some customers based on your understanding, there might be some custom subscriptions that you want to add, or you may want to bill your customers based on different usage meters. All these can be technically as well as administratively overwhelming, if you try to do everything on your own.  However, as a SaaS enablement platform, SaaSify takes care of end-to-end offer management and even provides a quote to cash feature in which our marketplace experts will create relevant offers for you which you can just approve with one click. That’s not all, we help you create transactable offers and convert your contact me ones as well to help you make instant sales.  

How to get subscription lifecycle management support? 

Once you sell your offer to a customer, managing the subscription through the various lifecycle stages is all your responsibility. However, you may find yourself pulled between acquiring new customers and managing the subscription lifecycle. While you focus on business development efforts, you can rely on SaaSify end-to-end lifecycle management of purchases, for customer-initiated PAYG / public offers or pre-negotiated private offers with reference from your internal systems. Furthermore, you can easily integrate manual provisioning of SaaS enablement services by operations team with notifications through email or integrations. 

How to access insights with smart reporting? 

Whenever a customer lands on your marketplace listing, they observe and engage with several options and all available before they finally transact the offer or request for free trial, contact me, etc.  Every move that the customer makes once they land on your listing reflects their marketplace purchase behavior. There are key insights hidden in the way they navigate your listing, which can help you customize the experience for them. As a SaaS enablement platform, SaaSify has an in-built data tracking which captures every move your customers make after reaching your offer.  Armed with this data, you can get unparalleled customer insights to make intelligent business decisions. For instance, if a customer stays on your listing for long actively, but doesn’t engage with any options, it could be that they are having a hard time navigating the listing and you need to work on your UX. Furthermore, based on their historical trends, SaaSify can also provide you with insights on their payments, transactions, etc. to help you be prepared.  

How to get started with SaaSify? 

You can get started with SaaSify before you can finish saying cloud marketplaces, that’s how agile and easy it is to get SaaSify as your SaaS enablement partner. All you need to do is get in touch with our marketplace experts and we will take care of the rest. Get, Set, SaaSify!

Selling SaaS on Coud Marketplaces involves a wide range of activities that go beyond having an impressive product to sell. Once you have published your offer in the cloud marketplaces as a part of selling B2B SaaS software, the next step is to generate and convert leads. A robust Go-To-Market strategy that focuses on effective marketing efforts will take care of attracting traffic to your listing. However, the key transition point for business growth with selling B2B SaaS software is the ability to convert the traffic or your visitors into prospects who will buy your SaaS solution. This B2B SaaS sales guide will help you in understanding how you can accelerate your B2B sales in the cloud marketplaces.

How to Sell SaaS on Cloud marketplace effectively

As mentioned above, selling SaaS on cloud marketplaces requires intense efforts to attract your potential leads and convert them to prospects. You can’t expect visitors to turn into customers simply because your product is good. Chances are that many similar solutions are available in the market already and your visitors need something else to become prospects. You may have most of your customers coming in from other channels and may not need to focus energy for such activities. However, there will be new visitors who can bring in extra business for you.  Here, it is important to focus on the overall experience of customers when they reach your listing. If they don’t have a pleasant experience on your listing, chances are they will not be convinced about your solution. Thus, for selling B2B SaaS software, you need to optimize the experience of your listing from a customer lens.  

How to convert your visitors into prospects for selling B2B SaaS software? 

ISVs across the globe who are selling B2B SaaS software in the cloud marketplaces have shared many practices that can help you convert your visitors into prospects. Based on our experience and the most sought-after practices, we have created a list of top 5 ways which can help you achieve the same.  

Provide transparency 

Once a visitor lands on your listing, they would want to know more about your solution which requires transparency. You cannot have an option to contact you for every feature or word that you have on your listing. Make sure you have some information there to help the visitor understand your offer better. Here, having a combination of brochures, videos, etc. can really help. They can give your visitors the transparency and comfort of a solution which is robust and not hollow. Furthermore, it creates credibility when you are transparent about some of your terms upfront, to ensure that there is nothing hidden which can make the prospect feel trapped later.  

Offer free trial

This is one of the most important practices that can help you in converting your visitors to prospects for selling B2B SaaS software. It goes without saying that your customers would want to experience the solution before actually making a monetary and long term commitment to ensure it makes business sense for them and meets their needs. Depending on the cloud marketplace you have listed your offer on, you may have different options to give your customers a firsthand experience.  

Free trial

A free trial is enabling your customers to use the offer in their set up, the way it is meant to be used, without any charge for a specific duration. You may want to restrict some functions from the free trial, depending on your solution. If there are multiple tiers of your solution, your customers can toggle between them, but the duration will not be reset. A free trial will help the visitors gauge the efficacy of your solution for their requirements and help you convert them into prospects who can eventually become paid customers.  

Test drive 

This is a slightly different version of a free trial, where the customers can try a solution in a pre-configured set up. Instead of giving them a trial offer in their business environment, you can create a sample environment based on your target persona and encourage the visitors to test the solution within it. Test drive allows the visitors to test the solution without actually using their machines or infrastructure.  

Stimulated or interactive demo 

An interactive demo enables you to take the visitor through your solution and share information that they may not be able to gauge while just looking at the offer listing. It enables you to share use cases and success stories for different features and learn about the customers to adapt your pitch. However, an interactive demo, while giving an expansive view of the solution, doesn’t give your customers a chance to try the product for themselves. Invariably, it is a good way to convert your visitors to prospects by giving them more than marketing collateral.  

How to make your offers transactable for selling B2B SaaS Software?

One other very important way to convert your visitors to prospects is to make your offers transactable. You may lose out on visitors who do not want to wait for you to get in touch with them for the next steps. Such visitors generally believe in immediate gratification and would want to transact your offer without the wait time. Thus, if you make your offers transactable, it will definitely pique the interest for your visitors as they will now have a self service option to buy the offer with minimum dependencies. They may not buy the offer in the first instance, but will definitely become a strong prospect, because it gives them more power over how they transact with you.  

Keep it simple 

The third practice for selling B2B SaaS software by converting your visitors to prospects involves keeping your listing simple and easy to comprehend. Be very clear about the messaging you want to communicate. Stay aware from using too much jargon or words which are too technical in nature. Ensure that you have a clear value proposition which talks about the differentiators, benefits to the customers, etc. Having simple and clear communication will help your visitors understand your offering better, leading them to become prospects.  

How to engage and convert your visitors to prospects for selling B2B SaaS software?

Converting your visitors to prospects is not only about what you do when they land on your offer listing, it also includes the next steps. After the free trial or the interactive demo, your visitors might be interested in your solution more than before. However, if you don’t follow up, and engage them well, you will lose out on the interest. Thus, it is very important to have the next steps in place for each action. If your visitor opted for a free trial, send them a gratitude email with next steps to avail the same. Even during the trial, communicate with them to learn more about their experience. It is very important to ensure that you don’t burden them with excessive communication. Make sure each follow up has some value add, which increases their level of interest and facilitate selling B2B SaaS software.  

How to sell SaaS with zero engineering efforts?

Optimizing the experience with clear and transparent communication, option to try the product before purchase and a robust follow up strategy can collectively help you in converting your visitors to prospects and facilitate selling B2B SaaS software. To give your visitors an optimized experience and reasons to become prospects, you need to have a robust listing and features. Here, collaborating with SaaSify can help significantly. With SaaSify, you can: 

• Use the zero engineering platform to take your product live in the cloud marketplaces in a matter of days 
• Create transactable offers to get revenue driving prospects 
• Help your customers understand how they can utilize their pre-committed spends with cloud providers to procure your solution 
• Create a custom brand experience for your visitors to create recall value 
• Provide them the option to bill their usage as they want with smart metering 
• Offer smooth onboarding and listing support 

These and other benefits from SaaSify can help you convert your visitors into prospects and help you with selling B2B SaaS software. To know more about how you can boost your business growth with SaaSify and sell where your customers want to buy from, contact us today.  

As an ISV, there are several Azure marketplace listing types you can choose from before publishing your offer. Depending on whether you want to give your customers a feel of what’s in store or not, whether you want them to transact directly or go through your sales process, you can make the right choice. Furthermore, you can explore a combination of Azure marketplace listing types as well based on your SaaS solution and customer expectations. Through this article, we will discuss the various types of listing available and a few best practices to ensure your Azure marketplace listing ranks well.  This will help you better reap the benefits of Azure marketplace.

What are Azure marketplace listing types for ISVs?

When you publish a listing in Azure marketplace, you will have four major options to choose from. The listing type you choose will determine the type of button or option that will be visible to your customers when they reach your offer in the Azure marketplace. The four options include Free Trial, Test Drive, Get it Now, and Contact Me. Let’s understand the meaning and use cases for each one in detail to help you make an informed choice.  

What is a Free Trial? 

As a Azure marketplace listing type, free trial enables you to offer your customers an option to try out the offer before monetarily committing to it. A free trial on the Azure marketplace can help customers give your solution a go in their business environment to gauge whether or not the solution makes sense for them. It is an effective way to build credibility and trust for your brand in the Azure marketplace.  You can offer a free trial for a duration between 30 days to six months. In case your offer has more than one plan, the customers have the option to switch plans during the trial period, without resetting the duration clock. Using a free trial can entice more customers to try your solution and eventually become a loyal customer.  

What is a Test Drive? 

Similar to a free trial, test drive in the Azure marketplace listing type, enables you to provide exclusive and free access to your SaaS offer to your customers. The major difference lies in the business environment that customers use your solution.  Contrary to free trial, users who select the test drive listing type don’t have to download or configure your SaaS offer. Rather, they get access to use a pre-configured business environment, much like a sandbox environment. The preconfigured environment generally lasts for a few hours and also provides a guided tour of your solution.  For both Free Trial and Test Drive Azure marketplace listing types, once the pre-decided duration is over, you can engage with your customers to sign proper contracts with pricing and billing terms.  

What is a Contact Me Offer?

As the name suggests, this Azure marketplace listing type enables your customers to get in touch with you to know more about the solutions. This is one of the simplest listing types available in Azure marketplace. All you need to do is publish your offer and select this option.  A Contact Me option will be available on your listing. Once the customers click on this button, their important information including their name, organization, need, etc. will be captured and will be shared with you. Once you receive the information, you can follow your sales process to follow up and close the deals.  

What is a Get it Now Offer?  

Finally, in the last Azure marketplace listing type, your customers can directly start using your offer from the Azure marketplace once they agree to the terms and conditions. The offer can be Get it Now (free), in case your solution comes at a cost of $0.00. Transactable offers also form a part of this subsection of Azure marketplace listing. This allows your customers to pay through the marketplace directly, without elongating the sales cycle where they might need to connect with you before transacting the offer.  Using the Get it Now option will prevent you from losing out on the sales from customers who might want to use the offer instantaneously, but the waiting period might act as a deterrent. When it comes to Azure marketplace listing fee, Microsoft reduced the transaction from from 20% to only 3% making transactable offers attractive for both customers and ISVs. 

How to choose the best Azure Marketplace listing type for your SaaS offer?

In some of the previous resources, we have talked about different marketing and other best practices that you can leverage as an ISV to reach your target audience in the most effective manner. This following section will help you ensure that your listing stands out in the Azure marketplace, improving its discoverability and impact. 

1. Make sure that your offer name includes the top keywords that your target customers might be searching for. This will ensure that your offer organically appears in their search.
2. Provide a crisp and clear description of your solution. Instead of talking in detail about your product specifically, you should also focus on the user persona or target audience your solution seeks to serve. Furthermore, talk about the pain points or the challenges that your solution seeks to address.
3. Have a fair mix of industry keywords and nomenclature along with your features terms. Simply focusing on features might dilute the value as some customers might have a limited understanding of the features and may have difficulty in associating them in their vocabulary.
4. Have a clear high-resolution logo. Optimize the same once the partner center calibrates it for use. 
5. Add some screenshots to help your customers get an instant look at the UI and the aesthetics and clear design of your solution.
6. Incorporate a few knowledge resources to help your customers learn more about the solution. There will be limited content that you will be able to cover as a part of your solution description. For anything more that you want to share with your customer, you can add whitepapers, brochures, pitch decks, etc. Make sure all your documents are in PDF format and can be added as a URL to your Azure marketplace listing.
7. Finally, make your Azure marketplace listing attractive by adding one featured video about the solution. It is best to keep the video 60-90 seconds long. Instead of focusing purely on the product or the service, focus on how it benefits the customers, the challenges it addresses, and what it can achieve overall. You can also supplement your efforts with other videos on how to use your product, customer testimonials etc. which can help the customer make an informed choice.

How to get started with Azure marketplace listing with SaaSify?

As an ISV, you may need help in choosing the right offer type for your Azure marketplace listing. Furthermore, you might want to convert your Contact Me offer to Get it Now offer to make it transactable. Here, SaaSify can help you with all the support you need, including: 

1. Publishing offers within a week with the right listing type
2. Converting your contact me offer to transactable offer
3. Creating a transactable offer in the Azure marketplace from scratch

You can get these and a lot more benefits for your Azure marketplace listing to make it highly effective for your ISV business with SaaSify. Book a demo today to learn everything that awaits you in the Azure marketplace.

This post was originally published on EINPressWire –The Essentials plan for ISVs provides self-serve onboarding capability to software vendors looking to expand their go-to-market channels and grow their revenue. REDMOND, WA, USA, November 16, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ — Spektra Systems, a leading cloud solutions company enabling businesses to fast track their digital empowerment journey has just launched their much-awaited pricing plan — the SaaS Essentials Plan — to enable Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to start selling their SaaS offers on Cloud Marketplaces within a week, and, in a cost-effective manner .SaaSify is a zero-engineering platform that is leveraged by top ISVs across the globe to publish, sell and manage their products on commercial marketplaces. It is pre-integrated with the Fulfillment APIs of marketplaces which allows vendors to get listed in a time and resource efficient manner. SaaSify allows ISVs to publish and sell transactable products on both Azure Marketplace & AWS Marketplace through a single pane of glass.Cloud marketplaces are bound to become the mainstream channel for software sales as both software vendors and buyers are increasingly relying on them for smooth SaaS selling and procurement. Microsoft has reported that number of products listed on Azure Marketplace has crossed 16,000 by the mid of 2021.

ISVs asked and we delivered. Our Essential’s Plan enables them to publish their products on their own within a week and without making any major monetary commitment.”

— Manesh Raveendran, CEO & Founder at Spektra Systems

Spektra has structured the Essentials plan to provide self-serve onboarding capability to Software vendors looking to expand their go-to-market channels. Compared to the other SKUs (Standard and Premium) offered by SaaSify, the Essentials plan is a cost-efficient option which allows ISVs to quickly get their SaaS offers listed in the marketplaces within a week — through an easy-to-use Self-Service Portal. SaaSify will provide all the necessary guidelines and documentation on all technical aspects, so that businesses are able to onboard their products easily. Through the SaaSify dashboard they will be able to seamlessly manage customer subscriptions, capture leads, and initiate and close private deals. The plan is ideal for ISVs who want to try out the public cloud marketplace sales channel and assess how it helps them in bringing in more customers, enter an ever-growing partner system and discover mutually beneficial partnerships with Microsoft, registered Azure partners and Amazon AWS partners.

SaaSify Essential plan for ISVs offers the following features and services at a price of $7,500.00/year:

1. Unlimited Offers, Plan & Product Management
2. Standard Metering (w/o APIs)
3. Email Notifications
4. Integrations (Microsoft Teams, Slack)
5. Professional Services based on the requirement.

As a launch offer, Spektra Systems is offering the SaaS Essentials plan at a discounted price of $5K/year until Dec 2021.

Core SaaSify Benefits that make it the all-in-one solution for Marketplace success:

1. ISVs can publish SaaS offer within a week — with either/both private and public pricing
2. Unified subscription management throughout the offer lifecycle
3. Is compatible with both AWS and Azure Marketplace
4. Complete onboarding — zero-engineering efforts required which minimizes 6-months long publish cycle to a week.
5. Smart metering helps accurate usage reporting across different billing structures
6. Advanced analytics for transactions, payouts, collections, taxes, and fees.
7. Integrations — Microsoft Teams, Slack, Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Marketo, and Salesforce.

SaaSify is trusted by leading technology giants and the team works closely with Microsoft & AWS to empower the partner ecosystem and enable customers to maximize on their cloud marketplace returns. ISVs can start their Cloud marketplace journey by visiting SaaSify Essentials.

If you are looking list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace so that potential/existing customers can buy your SaaS-based technical products, this blog offers a step-by-step breakdown of how to publish your offer through the Microsoft Partner Center via SaaSify’s white-labelled user friendly offer management portal.

Why is Azure Marketplace the most lucrative go-to-market channel for ISVs?

In mid-2021, there were a total of 16,000 products and services were listed on the Azure Marketplace, with the majority listed under the IT and management tools category. The market has responded well to Azure’s pricing strategy, with nearly a third of all respondents to a global survey of IT professionals rating Azure as providing the best value for money, more than any other provider.

It’s a well known-fact now that the revenue opportunity at Azure is unlike any other. Thus, if you list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace, you can accelerate your business growth.

Let’s get started.

[Note: This article and blog use the reference of Cloud Connect Corp, a fictious corporation created to help you understand the process in an effective manner.]  

First things first

If you haven’t already, you need to plan your SaaS Offer — the pricing and metering configuration, along with assessing the technical and legal requirements. This blog from Microsoft will explain everything in detail. Read now.

 SaaSify takes away all onboarding worry. Book a demo.

How to create a SaaS Offer?

Watch the Guide Video to successfully list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace:

1. Sign in the to the Azure Partner Center. URL for Microsoft partner center is: partner.microsoft.com
2. After signing in, navigate to the partner center dashboard. You can do this by clicking on the “Partner Center” button on the top right of the screen.
3. Once you are on the dashboard, click on “Overview” under the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace navigation menu on the left-hand side of the screen.
4. In the Overview tab, select “New Offer” and select “Software as a Service”.
5. In the “New Offer” dialogue box we need to provide “Offer ID” and “Offer alias”. Each offer in your partner center account must have a unique offer ID. Also, note that only certain characters are allowed in this field.
6. Offer alias is an internal name used for the offer in the partner center. This is not visible to the customer in the commercial marketplace. You can customize “Offer name”, a different field shown to the customers, later.
7. Click on the “Create” button once you provide the offer ID and offer alias. Once an offer is created, we can see them in the “Offers” section on the Overview page

How to configure your SaaS Offer?

When you list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace you can configure is how do you want to to provide each of your products to your customers. After creating your offer, you will need to configure it and it either make it directly buyable through Microsoft or lead prospects to your lead funnel.

1. Click on the offer alias to go to the offer details page.
2. The Overview tab for offers provides high-level details on each offer listing. Think of ‘offer’ as your product. For each of your products that you want to transact you will create an offer. There are scenarios where you might create multiple offers for the same product.
3. The Publish section will show you the offer publishing status once you submit the offer to be published in the Azure Marketplace.
4. The Marketplace Programs section shows you if your offer is ready for co-sell and if your offer is enrolled in the marketplace.
5. Within the Offer Setup tab, you can update the alias if required. Remember Offer alias is an internal name used within partner center only.
6. Under the setup details, you will choose whether you want to sell your offer through Microsoft or not.
7. Offers sold through Microsoft are referred to as “Transactable Offers” which means that Microsoft collects the money from the customer.
8. Depending on whether the sale is made directly to the customer by Microsoft or through the CSP Partner channel there will be different flows of money exchange.
9. In all cases, Microsoft will collect the amount and make payment to your bank account based on the payout schedule.

How to ace lead capturing and management?

An integral part on how to list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace is to understand the process of lead capturing and management.

1. In the offer setup to list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace, you can configure your CRM system to collect customer leads. Salesforce, Marketo, Dyanamic 365 for customer engagement and Azure Table for supported destination types.
2. You can also configure an HTTPS Endpoint for lead destinations if you want. SaaSify provides an in-built HTTPS leads Endpoint. The same SaaSify Endpoint can be used for configuring multiple offers in your partner center. You can choose not to specify test drive and Microsoft 365 integrations. You will provide information that is visible to customers in the marketplace through the “Properties” tab. Here, you will define the categories and industries applicable to your offer, your app version and legal contracts.
3. If you have standard terms and conditions  for your offers across all your customers, then you can specify that in the Terms and Conditions text field.
4. Remember if you choose this approach, you do not have a way to override the terms for a specific customer.
5. Another option is to choose the standard contract from Microsoft’s commercial marketplace and then provide the universal amendment and specific override to your non-customers. If you want to follow the standard contract from Microsoft’s commercial marketplace then you can leave the area empty for the universal amendment.

How to navigate the Partner Center Dashboard?

The Offer Listing tab contains all the information that is displayed in the marketplace including name, description, searched keywords, display text on the search result and getting started instructions. You can enter HTML text in the description field. This is where you can also specify all your contact information to list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace.

How to ensure CSP Channel Setup?

If you do not plan to sell through the CSP channel you can leave the CSP information empty. Co-sell With Microsoft is the tab where you will need to submit the documents and other details so that Microsoft can review them for the Co-sell program. Co-sell is not mandatory to publish an offer on Azure Marketplace.

Resell through CSP is where you can specify if you want to enable your offer for sale through Microsoft CSP resellers. Today, there are more than 90,000 CSP partners who can resell once you list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace.

How to List SaaS Offers On Azure Marketplace?

To list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace, you can provide supporting documents that will get listed on the marketplace public page and media assets from the listing tab. The images need to be of specific resolution as shown. It is not mandatory to upload videos for your offer.

1. In the Preview Audience tab, you can specify a set of users who can see the preview version of the offer and validate it during the published lifecycle. This way the preview audience users can validate the details before the offer goes live.
2. For your SaaS offer to be built through Microsoft, integration is required with the Azure Active Directory. The integration is expected to handle the lifecycle of SaaS subscriptions in Azure Marketplace as shown in the API documentation.
3. Lifecycle states include purchase, provisioning, plan changes, suspending of purchase. When a customer purchases your SaaS offer, they will be re-directed to the landing page URL that you are configuring here.
4. There are many event messages that Microsoft will send to you.  Connection web hook is a point where Microsoft will post those messages. All these integrations are pre-built in SaaSify and you can get these details from the seller account page. You will configure all your pricing SKUs from the plan overview tab. You can think of ‘plan’ as an SKU that you are making publicly available to all your customers or privately making available to specific customers.
5. We have another video that dives into the specifics of how to decide the right pricing plan and configure them through the partner center. You can access the video here.
6. With this, we have filled in all the mandatory information required to publish an offer on Azure Marketplace. Now you can review and submit the offer for publishing by clicking on the “Review and Submit” button on the top right.

If there are any tabs that need more information, it will show as ‘incomplete’ at this stage. Remember before you can list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace, you need to have your banking profile and tax profile associated with your seller account. If they are not associated partner center will not allow you to publish your offers.

Once your offer is submitted to be published it will go through an automated validation process, followed by preview creation. Once the preview is ready any Preview audience can take a look at the offer and check it. With that your journey to list SaaS offers on Azure marketplace is successful.

Imagine getting rewarded for selling your B2B SaaS products on a marketplace. Here is the thing, you no longer have to imagine it. Azure marketplace rewards are all you need to check out.  

Once your offer is live on the marketplace, you are eligible for various Azure marketplace rewards. The best part? The rewards just keep getting better and bigger as you cross different revenue thresholds.  

Explore all the questions related to Azure marketplace rewards along with testimonials from businesses who are already benefitting from them.  

The Azure marketplace rewards differ on the basis of the listing of the offer. So, let’s begin with the different types of listings provided by Azure and assess the Azure marketplace rewards for each.  

What are different types of Offer Listings in Azure marketplace?

1. Free Trial: The Free Trial allows prospective customers to utilize your offer at zero cost. The trial period may range between one month to six months, depending on the offer type.

2. Test Drive: The Test Drive is similar to the Free Trial. It provides a preconfigured environment to the prospective customer for a duration of a few hours. However, Test Drive also includes a hands-on, self-guided tour of your product’s key features and benefits being demonstrated in a real-world implementation scenario. 

3. Contact Me: The Contact Me button on your offer’s listing page is used by customers to request you to connect with them about your offer. 

4.  Get It Now: The Get It Now listing option includes Get It Now (Free), bring your own license (BYOL), Subscription, and Usage-based pricing.    

• • List and Trial offers receive one-time use benefits. They earn benefits based on whether or not a free trial is attached.  
  • Transact offers are eligible for evergreen benefit engagement as you increase your billed sales.   

According to the eligibility of the offer, a member of the Rewards team will contact you. The Azure marketplace rewards can be easily viewed in the Sales and Marketing benefits tab of the Marketplace Rewards page in Partner Center. 

Marketplace success is just a click away.

What are Azure marketplace rewards?

Driving traffic to a new offer on the Azure Marketplace can be challenging, hence Microsoft Azure Marketplace Rewards support its growth right from the first step, which is awareness. As the offer progresses in terms of growth in revenue, new rewards and benefits are unlocked.  

Note that all Trial and Consulting Azure marketplace rewards expire after three months. In a situation where there is a requirement to change the listing type of the offer, SaaS offers can simply update to Transact and republish.  

For other changes, a new offer listing would be required. SaaS supports both monthly and annual subscriptions. It also provides Metered billing and per user (per seat) pricing. List and Trial publishers can opt in or opt out to activities per offer publication. Partners may opt out of any engagement at any time. 

Source

What are the types of rewards?

Azure marketplace rewards are designed to assist in marketing, sales, and technical activities; hence the rewards are broadly categorized in the same manner.  

What are Azure marketing benefits?

Source
 

The various Azure marketplace rewards in the marketing category listed in the image above create an environment conducive to exponential growth of your published offer.  

1. 1. Social Promotion Spotlight: A social promotion spotlight would put your offer in front of the right audience. 
   2. In-depth customer review: A consumer case study for a partner-drafted customer provides Microsoft reviewed case study showcasing the success of a customer using your solution. 
   3. Marketplace Rewards Testimonial: Such a testimonial would highlight the abilities of the offer to attract customers looking for the mentioned abilities. 
   4. Press release support: A press release would bring your offer out to thousands of potential customers, like a free advertisement.   
   5. Commercial marketplace what’s new blog: New offers such as yours get a head start by coming in front of the numerous blog readers. 
   6. Partner or customer success story: A success story of your customers act as reliable sources and add reason for other potential customers to choose your offer. 
   7. Commercial marketplace marketing toolkit: This incredibly helpful toolkit provides an overview of best practices, the setup process and other helpful resources. 

Go-To-Market (GTM) Resource Desk works with you to execute GTM activities including, but not limited to, your one point of contact for GTM help, expertise, and guidance. Don’t take our word for it, see for yourselves how startups like Veeam and Drizti are taking advantage to shape their company. 

“Assisted by the Microsoft GTM Services team, our press release drew nearly 107 million unique visitors, helping Veeam to attract customers.” – Ratmir Timashev, CEO, Veeam Source 

“Marketplace Rewards was such a pleasant surprise. Drizti, being a startup, could now benefit from the marketing power of Microsoft to highlight its solutions. This really helps to solidify our choice of Azure Marketplace as our go-to-market strategy for the near future.” – Devarajan Subramanian, CTO, Drizti. Source 

What are Azure sales benefits?

Source
 

Though the above list might seem a little brief, it is immensely powerful, capturing the Azure marketplace rewards for sales 

1. 1. Azure portal solution promotion: A promotion on the Azure portal has the potential to shoot up the sales.
   2. Microsoft seller webinar: This webinar could update you on the current needs of the market and help you update your offer accordingly.  
   3. Co-sell solution finder listing guidance: Guidance in helping you find co-sell solution finders greatly reduces the tedious task of finding the perfect co-sell solution. 
   4. Azure sponsorship for deployment: An expensive task of deployment is sponsored, which would definitely help increase your profits.  

Nicole from Barracuda Networks understands the ideal opportunity: 
 

“With clear evidence of the commercial marketplace driving low-touch growing deals (both revenue and Azure Consumed Revenue), and enterprise capabilities that are drawing in deals from our larger customers, Barracuda sees strong opportunity to use our multiple Co-sell Ready/Preferred solutions to engage our sellers for joint selling via Azure Marketplace.” —Nicole Napiltonia, VP of Business Development and Alliances, Barracuda Networks Source 

What are Azure technical benefits?

Source 

People involved in marketing and sales are less likely to be familiar with technical responsibilities. Hence the Azure marketplace comes in with the perfect guidance to help through the process. Right from the onboarding to an active directory, the technical benefits are the complete package for a smooth experience on the platform.  

1. 1. Onboarding documentation: Documentation is essential for understanding the working of the platform. 
   2. Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription: The developer subscription is extremely fruitful as it would allow effective maintenance of customers or records. 
   3. Azure sponsorship for commercial marketplace publishing development/testing: Azure sponsors even the development and testing of new solutions, which usually is the main component, thus saving your funds or increasing profit.  

All the listed Azure marketplace rewards ease the technical aspects of the platform, even for non-technical users. See how it could strengthen the stand for OnePlace Solutions and KUMAVISION in the competitive market. 

“The availability of OnePlaceMail in Microsoft AppSource is critical to running our business and generating leads. More than 71% of our leads over the past 12 months have come through AppSource.” – James Fox, CEO, OnePlace Solutions. Source 

“The @MSFTDynamics365 tweets exposed KUMAVISION to a targeted audience of 65K+ followers and achieved 8K+ impressions. Overall, AppSource has quickly generated more than 100 contact inquiries for KUMAVISION.” – Holger Schüler, Director of Business Unit KUMA365, KUMAVISION Source 

Learn what SaaSify can do for you

Spektra Systems LLC is proud to announce the launch of the SaaSify platform (https://saasify.ai), enabling cloud ISVs to simultaneously sell, manage and grow SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) services through the leading SaaS services marketplaces, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud. Using SaaSify, ISVs can deploy their offerings to any or all marketplaces within just one week.

Enterprise SaaS buyers are looking for a simplified path to the best solutions compatible with their preferred cloud platform. SaaS cloud marketplaces attached to the leading cloud offerings meet this need while reducing purchase friction, simplifying billing, and enable co-sell opportunities between the cloud vendor and cloud ISVs.

SaaSify makes it possible for cloud ISVs to publish SaaS offers, with both public and private pricing, to multiple marketplaces in under a week, leading to more opportunities to engage with enterprise buyers in the cloud they are most familiar with. SaaSify also offers unified subscription management and reporting for SaaS offerings across multiple clouds.

With SaaSify, cloud ISVs can quickly deploy and manage a multi-cloud SaaS offering with a single, integrated solution through the offer’s full lifecycle –

1. Onboarding – White glove service. Focus your efforts on building the best offerings, instead of diving into the arcana of each vendor marketplace. Ensure your SaaS offering is available in your prospective customer’s preferred cloud (Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, etc.)
2. Offer Management – Manage public and private offers seamlessly using a unified model working across clouds.
3. Subscription Lifecycle – End-to-end management of public, private, and pre-negotiated offers.
4. Integrated SaaS Provisioning – Automatic account management in ISV and customer owned cloud subscriptions.
5. Smart Metering – Manual or automated usage reporting.
6. Insights – Advanced analytics for transactions, payouts, collections, taxes, and fees.
7. Integrations – Microsoft Teams, Slack, Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Marketo, and Salesforce.

About SaaSify

SaaSify integrates natively with the leading cloud marketplaces (Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and more), enabling cloud ISVs to sell and manage SaaS solutions and services through any or all cloud marketplaces. With SaaSify, get listed and start selling within days, instead of weeks.

About Spektra Systems

Spektra Systems (https://spektrasystems.com) is a partner focused cloud solutions company. At Spektra, our mission is to enable technology partners for Microsoft, Amazon, and others to achieve more with the help of effective business and technology innovation. Spektra Systems also provides CloudLabs (https://cloudlabs.ai), providing content creators and customers an immersive virtual training and online hands-on learning environment.