Get your organization ready

  • 9 minutes

Setting your commercial marketplace strategy requires consensus among your organization's leadership team and collaboration across different departments. In this unit, we'll share some ways that you can work with your colleagues in sales, marketing, finance, and engineering to position your organization for success in the commercial marketplace.

Leadership

A good strategy starts with consensus among the members of your company's leadership team. It's important for your leaders to learn about the commercial marketplace and understand the ways that selling with Microsoft can affect their departments.

Consider nominating someone from your company to act as your team's lead point of contact for the Microsoft commercial marketplace. This person can help your leadership team understand the benefits of the commercial marketplace for your company and its customers, answering questions that get raised by members of your team.

Tip

Start educating your team by encouraging them to complete the Introduction to the Microsoft commercial marketplace module on Microsoft Learn. This brief module provides an overview of the benefits of joining the commercial marketplace for you and your customers.

After learning what the commercial marketplace is, your leaders will need to come to an agreement on your organization's goals for selling your products and services through the commercial marketplace. Some common benefits include:

  • Growing your company's reach and finding new customers by selling your products and services in more than 140 countries/regions.
  • Shortening sales cycles by simplifying discovery, evaluation, and purchasing for your customers.
  • Lowering the cost of selling your solutions by leading new customers to purchase your solutions through the commercial marketplace, giving them the chance to leverage their existing purchasing agreements with Microsoft.
  • Achieving cost savings and operational efficiencies as Microsoft takes on billing, collection, payment instruments, currency translations, and taxation for purchases from the commercial marketplace.
  • Leveraging Microsoft's global brand recognition and reputation by selling with Microsoft.

Once your leadership team agrees on your goals, you can make your plan more specific and actionable by working with different departments to build out your commercial marketplace strategy.

Sales

The commercial marketplace gives customers the flexibility to find, try, buy, and deploy software and services at their own pace. Some of your customers will be able to purchase your offering without interacting with your salespeople, taking advantage of the self-service benefits that e-commerce offers. These customers can find your product in the online stores and in-product experiences, test it by activating a free trial, then purchase and deploy your software once they've decided it's a good fit for their business.

Selling your products and services through the commercial marketplace also lets you supplement your existing sales process with new leads generated by your listing in the online stores (Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace). When customers select Contact me, Free trial, or Get it now on your listing, Microsoft sends leads that your sales team can contact for follow-up. Before following up, your salespeople will need to understand commercial marketplace benefits from your customers' perspective. Knowing why your customers want to purchase through Microsoft will help your sales team provide advice and make the sale. Some popular customer benefits include:

  • The ability to instantly try your product with a free trial or test drive that can be activated from Microsoft AppSource, Azure Marketplace, and the Azure portal. This makes it easier for customers to experience the benefits of using your products.
  • Simplified payments and billing with consolidated invoices from Microsoft that include marketplace purchases and other Microsoft services, like Azure, in one place. This makes it easier for customers to manage their software subscriptions and payments.
  • For customers that have Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) or Azure commit to consume (CtC) agreements, eligible commercial marketplace purchases can be applied towards commitments. This streamlines the buying process for customers with enterprise agreements (EA) or Microsoft Customer Agreements (MCA).
  • The ability to offer customers negotiated pricing and custom terms and conditions through private offers. This gives customers the flexibility they need to negotiate large-scale deals through the commercial marketplace.

Each of these benefits is an opportunity for your sales professionals to increase customer engagement and shorten the sales cycle. For example, your sales team can:

  • Encourage customers to try your software by activating a free trial from the commercial marketplace, which automatically converts to a paid subscription at the end of the trial period.
  • Educate customers about simplified billing and consolidated invoices when they purchase through the commercial marketplace, helping them streamline their subscription management processes.
  • Ask larger customers if their organization has a MACC or Azure commit to consume, letting them know that purchasing your product might help them meet their Azure consumption commitment.
  • Use private offers to negotiate pricing and custom agreements to facilitate large-scale deals through the commercial marketplace.

Note

For more information on commercial marketplace customer benefits for MACC, reference the documentation on the Azure consumption commitment benefit.

Your sales and finance leaders will also need to make sure sales compensation plans account for deals closed through the commercial marketplace. If you want your sellers to prioritize leads received through Microsoft, you should make sure they're compensated for sales through the commercial marketplace.

Marketing

The commercial marketplace attracts millions of monthly active users every month, and each user is a potential customer. Companies that are most successful in the commercial marketplace are deliberate about driving new customers to their marketplace listings.

Your marketing team can help increase your leads by incorporating your commercial marketplace solutions into your existing marketing strategy, setting aside time and resources to invest in the commercial marketplace as a new sales channel. Consider some of the following activities:

  • Point existing product marketing links to your Microsoft AppSource or Azure Marketplace listings.
  • Create content that's specific to your commercial marketplace offers, including product demos, videos, blogs, webinars, and other related assets.
  • Promote your commercial marketplace solutions with paid media, including social media and other online advertising.
  • Run trackable marketing campaigns that will help you calculate the return on your marketing investment and measure the effectiveness of different kinds of outreach.

We'll spend some more time talking about marketing best practices for the commercial marketplace in other units of this module. You can also download the Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace Best Practice Guide for a longer list of recommendations.

Technical teams

Publishing your solution to the commercial marketplace will require some work from your technical teams, too. The level of effort required depends on the kind of offer you publish and the level of integration with the commercial marketplace.

Here are a few example activities that require some technical knowledge:

  • Connecting your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to get customer leads from your commercial marketplace offer
  • Offering a free trial or test drive of your offer so customers can test your solution
  • Integrating your software with Microsoft Entra ID for streamlined purchasing, fulfillment, and management of your solution for customers
  • Building a transact offer to provide streamlined purchases and automated distribution of your solution

Your technical teams will also need to be involved as you consider different pricing strategies and software-deployment models. For more technical information, your team can reference the commercial marketplace documentation.

Finance

Your finance team is an integral part of your commercial marketplace strategy. They'll need to plan for the changes that your sales, marketing, and technical teams make to manage your organization's investments in the commercial marketplace. At the same time, they'll need to understand the ways that selling your products in the commercial marketplace changes your organization's financial operations.

To help your colleagues in sales, marketing, and engineering, your finance team will need to budget for investments and process changes that will position your organization to sell through the commercial marketplace. Some of those investments and changes might include:

  • Changes to your company's sales compensation structure to incentivize sales through the commercial marketplace.
  • Investments for new marketing campaigns that generate customer leads from the commercial marketplace and promote awareness of your offers.
  • Funding to help your engineering team integrate your solution with the commercial marketplace so customers can purchase your software and services through Microsoft.

When you publish a transact offer to the commercial marketplace, invoicing, collections, and tax activities in many countries/regions are all processed by Microsoft. This leads to a different cost of sales for your marketplace products, and changes to product finance and accounting processes. Your finance and operations departments should plan accordingly, starting with the following activities:

  • Planning for commercial marketplace service fees charged when you sell your product through Microsoft
  • Reviewing the billing and payout processes to modify existing finance and accounting practices
  • Incorporating commercial marketplace analytics and offer data into financial reports and analyses
  • Evaluating changes in your company's operational costs as you process sales through the commercial marketplace

Note

When you sell your solution through the commercial marketplace, Microsoft charges a 3% service fee as described in the Microsoft Publisher Agreement. Microsoft reduces this service fee for certain products that meet Co-sell program requirements.

Summary

The commercial marketplace provides opportunities to grow your company's sales revenue and global reach, but success requires thorough planning across teams. While the information we've shared in this unit is meant to help you get started, you'll find that you need to go beyond these example activities to develop your organization's unique commercial marketplace strategy. To plan thoroughly, make sure that you include teammates across different departments to understand how doing business through the commercial marketplace will impact the different parts of your organization.