Services co-sell overview

  • Article

Appropriate roles: Referrals admin | Referrals user

Microsoft has a large ecosystem of partners who are skilled in helping our customers achieve their goals with Microsoft technologies. Services co-sell enables such skilled partners who attain Microsoft AI Cloud Partner program designations to unlock better outcomes by working with Microsoft sellers in a co-selling motion. Furthermore, such qualified Microsoft partners who have either Solutions partner designations, Specializations, or Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP), can now co-sell with Microsoft sellers without having to publish a marketplace Consulting services offer.

Publish a business profile

We encourage our services partners to publish a business profile in the Referrals workspace. This profile showcases their capabilities and designation status to Microsoft Sellers appropriately in our internal tools as well on the marketplace listing. To learn more about how the recently modernized business profiles, see Create a business profile.

Note

A business profile admin role is necessary to create and update the business profile listing.

Create a services co-sell opportunity

Partners can now create a Services co-sell opportunity in the Referrals workspace in Partner center and request help from the Microsoft Sales team. A typical services co-sell opportunity includes a Partner role field that indicates what role the partner would like to play in the deal such as Presales envisioning, Migration, and so on.

The following roles are applicable for Services co-sell deals:

  • Presales envisioning
  • Solution design
  • Proof of concept
  • Business strategy
  • Deployment services
  • Adoption and change management
  • Transaction
  • Managed services

In addition to specifying their role, a Services partner must also indicate the appropriate customer objective - the Solution area and Solution play for the opportunity - to help us direct the opportunity to the appropriate seller in the Microsoft Sales team. This also helps the Microsoft seller understand the customer needs in familiar terminology to make the partner and seller interactions seamless. Partners can optionally add their consulting services offer/solution to the opportunity, but it's no longer required to actively co-sell with Microsoft.

Receive a services co-sell opportunity

Microsoft sellers can now send co-sell opportunities to Services partners who attain Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program designations, Specializations, or Azure Expert MSP. Microsoft sellers evaluate these partners for co-selling based on the partner's business profile that is published in Partner center. These opportunities shared by Microsoft sellers are available in the Inbound tab in the Co-sell opportunities page.

Specifically, we've introduced two fields in the services co-sell opportunity, Partner role and Partner program, to help partners qualify such opportunities. A Partner role is the role that a services partner can play in the opportunity based on their endorsements, such as migration. The Partner program field indicates if this referral was shared because of your enrollment or participation in a specific go-to-market program, such as the Qualified Referral Program (QRP). Services co-sell opportunities also have Solution area and Solution play fields indicate the customer's needs. This helps partners understand the opportunities and deliver the best outcome for the customer.

Next steps