This blog is part two in a four-part series on maximizing your marketplace opportunity, with a focus on growing your pipeline with digital self-service sales through the Microsoft commercial marketplace. Read part one of this series.
Business-to-business (B2B) buyers are more independent than ever, favoring digital self-service over traditional sales interactions, especially as AI investments continue to grow. Digital commerce is now the norm as buyers grow comfortable spending $50,000 or more in a single online transaction1. As the preferred platform for managing cloud portfolios, cloud marketplaces are where today’s business buyers go to find, purchase, and deploy the software solutions they need.
As organizations look for the right AI investments to help them innovate, buying through the marketplace gives customers confidence that the solutions are vetted by Microsoft and will work with their existing technology. To keep pace with customer demand, software companies can align their go-to-market (GTM) strategy with the Microsoft commercial marketplace, making it easier for customers to access solutions for their business. Digital self-service sales in the marketplace have grown 230% annually2, reflecting the tremendous opportunity to build an always-on, frictionless sales channel that reaches Microsoft customers and accelerates growth.
Always-on selling with the Microsoft commercial marketplace
For many software companies, scaling a digital self-service sales motion while minimizing operational costs and complexity can be a challenge. The marketplace offers an always-on solution for enabling digital self-service B2B sales at a global scale. Selling through the marketplace places your application in front of over six million monthly active shoppers across our digital storefronts, Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource, as well as in-product experiences like the Azure portal and Microsoft Teams.
Leading with a marketplace-first approach is a more efficient way to reach customers through a single, trusted platform that adapts to their buying preferences—whether via credit card or aligned to their Microsoft contract. With support for digital commerce in more than 140 geographies, 17 currencies, and over 50 tax IDs, the marketplace empowers you to unlock global reach and scale into new markets without ever leaving your home base.
“The Microsoft marketplace is our storefront to the world—our leading source of inbound leads, our top revenue driver, and our strategic advantage for scaling sales globally.”
- Dan Langille, Vice President of Business Development, Breakthru Immersive
Using the marketplace to grow your sales pipeline
To start selling on the marketplace, your solution must first be listed as a “transactable offer”—meaning customers can purchase directly from your product page. Every time a shopper clicks “Get it Now,” you receive a lead (assuming they’ve provided consent). This creates a low-touch opportunity to turn customer interest into a self-serve sale, capitalizing on the shift away from direct customer interactions (Gartner forecasts that 80% of B2B sales will occur digitally3).
Grow your digital self-service pipeline of Microsoft customers through the marketplace by starting with free trials or low-cost licenses to build trust. Many partners are doing this with great success, like Confluent. They embraced this approach for their marketplace-first digital sales with tremendous success. Confluent Cloud, a cloud-native data streaming platform, focused on free trials. After trial acquisition, Confluent centralized the customer data in Partner Center for a comprehensive view of their marketing dashboards. This helped them identify high value leads to convert customers to paid, at scale.
“The Microsoft marketplace has been a strong driver of customer acquisition, consistently increasing adoption of our Confluent Cloud offering and growing marketplace sales. By offering usage-based trials and promotional credits, we’ve been able to incentivize trial sign-ups and successfully convert ‘Get it Now’ clicks into customers.”
- Paul Mac Farland, Senior Vice President, Partner Innovation and Ecosystem, Confluent
Marketing best practices: turning clicks into conversions
To drive awareness, conversions, and long-term success, here are some best practices to help you maximize your digital self-service sales:
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Have the right offer and price point
In digital self-service, nothing is more compelling than free. Once you’ve hooked a customer through a freemium offering, your pricing strategy plays a critical role in converting them. Pricing should reinforce value and align with customer expectations to drive conversions. As you build and configure your marketplace offer, be sure to include a trial or freemium component to remove friction in the customer’s decision to get started.
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Activate marketing to drive demand
Once you have the right offer and pricing, turn non-paying trial users into paying customers by setting up targeted marketing touchpoints that nurture them from awareness to purchase. As you look to reach Microsoft customers, graduate leads within one connected experience by adopting the marketplace like a first-party channel.
While best paired with your own marketing efforts, Microsoft offers you support through Marketplace Rewards. Marketplace Rewards is available to any partner with a published marketplace offer. These performance-based rewards are designed to accelerate your growth as you sell more through the marketplace. Partners that use Marketplace Rewards benefits see 7x higher marketplace sales, making it a powerful tool to grow your sales. The Marketplace Rewards Toolbox makes it easy to activate and manage your benefits, supporting you at every stage of your marketing and sales journey.
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Optimize and grow sales
Microsoft is invested in your success, giving you the tools to help you grow. Partner Center is your hub to manage your business relationship with Microsoft, customers, and other partners. Within Partner Center, the Marketplace Insights dashboard allows you to track key metrics including page visits, offer engagement, transactions, customer information, and other growth trends. This gives you an end-to-end view of your business, helping you further optimize your marketplace strategy with a data-driven path to growth.
With the right tools and best practices, you can attract, nurture, and convert digital self-service users—activating marketing to drive demand while leveraging marketplace insights (via the dashboard) to continuously optimize for growth.
Unlock more growth with the Microsoft marketplace
If you’re considering a marketplace-first strategy, keep this in mind: Microsoft helps you keep more of what you earn, with a standard 3% agency fee and a 50% discount on customer renewals through the marketplace to help you strengthen retention and scale with ease.
Cloud marketplaces are leveling the playing field for startups and established software companies. Winning in today’s B2B software landscape requires diversifying your GTM strategy to embrace marketplace-first sales while using proven sales and marketing tactics to drive demand. By following these best practices, you can create a repeatable, scalable approach to marketplace success.
Up next: in part three of this series, we’ll explore how to activate the channel ecosystem and scale through partners—unlocking more growth opportunities with the marketplace.
You can continue to stay connected to us through the Marketplace Community, follow our Marketplace Blog for important announcements, and check our events calendar for upcoming webinars and calls.