Engage your customers
Several steps are involved to engage with customers in the commercial marketplace, where you can interact meaningfully with potential customers, as your offers gain visibility.
Here are the steps to engage with your customers:
- Create a compelling business profile: Your business profile is often the first point of contact with potential customers. Ensure your business profile highlights your company's experience with Microsoft-specific offerings, and that it's up-to-date, brief, and informative.
- Generate more leads: Use the Find a solution provider search to be discoverable by customers looking for specific solutions. Microsoft sends millions of leads per year to its partners. Make sure your profile is optimized to receive these referrals.
- List and market your offer: Understand the different listing types such as Contact me, Free trial, Test drive, and Get it now, and choose the one that best suits your offer. This helps you align your marketplace offer with the right audience and drive sales more effectively.
- Use marketplace rewards: Engage with the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program and evaluate the marketplace options to publish your offer. This can lead to sales and marketing benefits that help grow your business.
- Engage through Partner Center: Use the Partner Center to manage your partnership with Microsoft, which facilitates transactions, promotes relationship building, and offers analytics to track your success.
- Tap into Microsoft's marketing resources**: Access marketing resources provided by Microsoft to learn about best practices and how to use them effectively to participate in the ecosystem of customers, partners, and sellers.
By following these steps, you can create a robust engagement strategy that not only attracts customers but also builds lasting relationships with them in the commercial marketplace. Remember to keep your offerings aligned with customer needs and stay proactive in managing your leads and profiles.
Find more details in the resources section at the end of this learning module.
Engage customers with your marketplace offers
Further your engagement with customers in the commercial marketplace by utilizing various strategies to showcase your offers.
Here are some steps you can take to refine your customer engagement:
- Optimize your listing: Ensure your offer stands out by providing clear, concise, and compelling product descriptions. Highlight unique features and benefits that differentiate your solution from others.
- Offer a Free Trial: A free trial can be a powerful tool to attract customers. It allows them to experience the value of your offer firsthand, increasing the likelihood of a purchase.
- Make your offer Transactable: By enabling transactions through the commercial marketplace, you simplify the purchasing process for customers, making it easier for them to buy and deploy your solution. When you choose to fully invest in your commercial marketplace engagement by making your offers transactable, you can take advantage of a flexible set of billing, packaging, and deployment options to fit the specific needs of your organization and your customers.
- Enhance your content: Provide rich content such as detailed guides, case studies, and optional instructional videos. This not only helps with improving discoverability of your offer, but also helps educating potential customers about your product.
- Get customer reviews: Encourage your users to leave reviews. Positive feedback can significantly influence potential customers' decision to buy and build trust in your solution.
- Use analytics: Use the analytics tools provided in the marketplace to understand customer behavior and preferences, which can be useful for your marketing and engagement strategies.
- Participate in comarketing opportunities: Engage with Microsoft's marketing campaigns and events to increase visibility and reach a wider audience.
By implementing these strategies, you can create a more dynamic presence in the marketplace, improve customer interactions, and ultimately drive more sales for your solution.
Private offers
By default, your Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace solutions are available to all customers. You can also extend private offers to individual customers privately by using the private-offer capabilities.
When using the private-offer capabilities of Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace, you can tailor your solutions to meet the specific needs of individual customers. Here's how:
- Personalize your offers: Create offers that address the unique challenges or requirements of your customers, providing them with a solution well-suited to their business.
- Offer exclusive pricing: Use private offers to extend special pricing or terms that aren't publicly available, creating exclusive relationships with your customers.
- Negotiate terms: Engage in one-on-one negotiations with customers to agree on terms that are mutually beneficial, ensuring a more personalized and flexible purchasing process.
- Customize licensing: Offer licensing agreements that align with your customers' usage patterns and business models, providing them with the flexibility they need.
- Enhance support: Provide premium support options or extra services as part of your private offers, enhancing the value of your solution.
- Keep it confidential: Ensure that the details of your private offers remain confidential, building trust between you and your customers. By focusing on these key areas, you can use private offers to create a more personalized and strategic engagement with your customers, ultimately leading to stronger business relationships and increased customer satisfaction.
Customer leads from your marketplace offer
Regardless of the offer type you choose to publish, Microsoft sends you customer leads when potential customers interact with your commercial marketplace listing. When customers consent to share their information after clicking the Continue button, leads are routed to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
If you want more information about leads, see Customer leads from your marketplace offer.
Listing options
Listing options define how easily a customer can find, try, purchase, and deploy your solution online. There are four primary options: Contact me, Free trial, Bring your own license (BYOL), and Transact.
Contact me
Contact me is a simple listing of your solution with the lowest level of engagement with potential customers, and the lowest level of investment in the commercial marketplace by your organization. With this listing type, you can add text description, product screenshots, supporting documents, and optional video content to your offer's landing page.
Customers are encouraged to contact your team through the Contact me button on your product's marketplace landing page. When customers agree to provide contact information, Microsoft sends that customer's information to your organization for follow-up. This means your potential customers must first contact your company before they can gain access to your solution.
Free trial
A free trial of your solution provides an opportunity for your potential customers to try out your offer for free before they commit to purchasing it. When you offer a free trial in the commercial marketplace, you can add all the information associated with a Contact me offer to help customers evaluate your solution.
When customers select the Free trial button on your offer's landing page, they're routed to your website to initiate the trial for use. When publishing your offer in the commercial marketplace, you can specify the destination website for customer redirection and integrate the trial experience within your company's web solution.
Bring your own license
Note
BYOL listings are only available to customers in Azure Marketplace.
Azure Marketplace's bring your own license (BYOL) feature enables customers to apply their current software subscriptions to deploy your software directly into their Azure account. BYOL transactions occur outside of Microsoft's commerce system, where you're responsible to validate the customer's pre-existing license. In your BYOL offer's landing page, you can include a narrative description, visual screenshots, supplementary documents, and video content.
When customers select the Get it now button and accept the terms and privacy policy on your product's landing page, they're directed to the Azure portal. There, they're prompted to configure the solution, create the resource, and deploy it to their cloud subscription. During this setup process, customers must enter a license key to activate your software solution.
Transact
A transact offer in the commercial marketplace maximizes customer interaction and enables the complete process of finding, evaluating, purchasing, and deploying the offered solution. By opting for transact offers, you choose to fully invest in your commercial marketplace engagement. You can take advantage of the flexible billing, packaging, and deployment tailored to meet the needs of your business and your customers.
When customers select Get it now on your offer and consent to your company's terms of use and privacy policies, the subsequent steps differ based on the listing type.
- For Azure Marketplace transactable offers, customers are directed to the Azure portal for product configuration.
- For Microsoft AppSource, customer steps can differ by listing type and your offer's configuration.
When a customer selects Get it now, Microsoft provides you with the customer's lead details for the deployment of your offer.
Transact offers are billed to an existing Microsoft account or a credit card. For offers that require the use of Azure infrastructure in a customer's Azure account, the associated infrastructure and/or software costs also appear on the customer's consolidated Microsoft invoice. This streamlined billing method is a significant benefit for customers, as they don't need to handle a separate invoice from your company.