January 12, 2022

How to leverage the Microsoft ecosystem for meaningful growth | Partner Success Guide

This series aims to make it easy for you to achieve meaningful growth in five areas that define successful partners. With each post, you gain actionable guidance for deepening the characteristics of each success attribute within your team.

As a Microsoft partner, you are a member of one of the largest partner ecosystems. By creating models that enable partners to manage and master their digital transformation, incentivizing partners to continue to innovate, and rewarding results, we’ve been able to achieve more together.

Together, we’ve created a unique ecosystem of customer-centered cloud solutions, and Microsoft has built up programs to help you maximize the power of the ecosystem for greater growth.

By leveraging the selling motion of Partner-to-Partner (P2P), you can find synergies and reach broader markets while maintaining focus on your point of differentiation. When we show up together, we boost customer confidence and offer customers a richer, more streamlined experience.

1. Start with customer outcomes

As customer experience has gained priority over price and product in recent years, customers have come to expect seamless collaboration from technology partners tasked to deliver their solutions. Microsoft partners can deliver this seamless experience through partner-to-partner (P2P) partnerships. The foundation for any ecosystem partnership is ensuring all parties are laser-focused on the customer so you can create solutions that solve problems and drive business outcomes. Being customer-obsessed is key to winning customers today and deepening their loyalty tomorrow.

Take a minute to refresh on the 4 ways to build a customer-first reputation, then hop back in here to continue.

2. Deliver greater value together

“With all of the needs and requirements placed on our customers today, they’re looking for our partner community to show up together as one force,” says Efrem Stringfellow, VP, Americas Partner Sales at Citrix.

The Microsoft ecosystem serves the mutual benefits of partners, customers, and Microsoft by enabling us to create better solutions together. Partners can leverage the ecosystem and incentive opportunities to simplify the customer experience while delivering greater business outcomes.

“Our advice to partners is simple: Focus on what you do best and partner for everything else.” —Suzy McClure, BitTitan (source Case study blade).

If differentiation is the key to deepening expertise to solve specific customer problems, then partnership is the way to leverage complementary expertise to deliver joint solutions at scale. When partners bring deep industry or workload knowledge to the table, they unlock unique perspectives into opportunities to offer unique solutions and drive cloud consumption in untapped areas.

By identifying similar or identical approaches to layer, partners can leverage the ecosystem to bring greater value and simplicity for customers. The partner-to-partner (P2P) selling motion can surface new opportunities for growth and monetization while preserving unique focus.

Leverage the ecosystem with P2P

Understand what successful P2P partnerships look like and get access to Microsoft’s best-in-class resources designed for partners like you.

Learn more: Build partnerships with P2P

Learn how to leverage the ecosystem and accelerate growth through P2P with this series of bit-sized readiness videos for service partners.

Watch now: P2P Channel Readiness (eventbuilder.com)

Extend my customer reach with a results-driven strategy

Learn how to showcase your solution directly to customers, build customer trust, and create strategies for better-together selling.

Get started: Co-sell with Microsoft

Identify customer opportunities to address

Understand the problems your current customers are trying to solve with the Insights tab in Partner Center. Your customer opportunity dashboard will surface high-value areas for strategic partnership and inform a more strategic, solution-specific sales funnel.

Learn more: Partner Essentials: Expand your business with existing customers

Boost offer visibility and incentivize sales through marketplace

Microsoft’s commercial marketplace is where you reach millions of customers, Microsoft sellers, and resellers with your unique offer. Take it a step further by achieving “co-sell ready” or “co-sell incentive” status to unlock greater visibility and incentivize Microsoft sales teams and other partners to sell your solution.

Get co-sell ready: Co-sell with Microsoft sales teams and partners overview

Unlock global markets through geo-expansion

Get resources and guidance you need to launch your self-guided expansion journey through a member-exclusive partner portal. Learn how join other partners who are levering P2P to scale into new markets and boost growth across channels.

Learn more: Accelerate your cloud business in new markets with Geo Expansion

Check your readiness: Geo-Expansion Assessment

Other ways to leverage the ecosystem

Connect with other partners and stay on top of new opportunities in the US Partner Zone within the Microsoft Partner Community.

Takeaway

The Microsoft ecosystem is rich with opportunities to deepen differentiation and unlock if you are willing to lean in to find synergies with Microsoft and other partners, leverage insights and opportunities available through Partner Center, and take advantage of the foremost tech marketplace in the world. Get started now.