Commercial marketplace lead management

  • 3 minutes

One of the unique benefits of the Microsoft commercial marketplace is the ability to receive leads when users interact with your listing in Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace.

Leads are generated when a user clicks your listing's call-to-action (CTA) and consents to share their contact information with you. Commercial marketplace CTAs are the blue buttons that appear on your offer's listing, and include Contact me, Free trial, Test drive, and Get it now.

Screenshot of a product listing from Azure Marketplace with emphasis on the Free trial button.

Connecting to your CRM system

To receive leads from Microsoft, you'll need to connect your listing to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in Partner Center.

Screenshot of the offer setup page in Partner Center with focus on the customer leads configuration.

The commercial marketplace supports connections to the following CRM systems:

  • Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement
  • Marketo
  • Salesforce

If you don't use any of these CRM systems, you'll still be able to see your leads. You can store customer lead data and import/export it for followup by configuring an Azure table or HTTPS endpoint.

Important

If you don't configure your lead destination in Partner Center, you won't be able to access the customer leads from your listing. Microsoft adheres to strict privacy policies regarding our customers' personally identifiable information (PII), which means we won't be able to resend leads to publishers that haven't configured their lead-management connection.

For detailed instructions on configuring your lead-management connection in Partner Center and deciphering lead data, you can reference our documentation on customer leads from your commercial marketplace offer.

Lead management best practices

As you get ready to engage your customers through the commercial marketplace, consider how you're going to process, qualify, and nurture the leads you get from your listing. Let's look at some recommendations to help drive leads through your organization's sales cycle:

Process: Your commercial marketplace plan should include well-defined lead management framework. A clear structure, including milestones, analytics, and team ownership will put you in a better position to convert leads to paying customers.

Qualify: Before you start getting leads from Microsoft, make sure your lead-qualification process is adapted for your commercial marketplace leads. This means training your sales and marketing representatives to interpret incoming marketplace leads so that you're following up with different types of leads in the best way. Marketplace leads contain valuable information about the ways that potential customers interacted with your solution in the marketplace. You can typically find this information in the LeadSource field in lead data you receive from Microsoft.

Note

For more information on deciphering lead data, you can reference our documentation on understanding lead data.

Follow up and nurture: When you receive leads from your listing, follow up in a timely manner to catch potential customers while they still have your product in mind. Focus on determining if your solution is a good fit for the customer, following up as needed until you can close out the opportunity.

Tip

Remember, leads represent customers that engaged with your product. In many cases, they've spent the time testing your offer through a free trial or a test drive. These are valuable opportunities, so make sure your organization is prepared to follow up with them in a timely manner.