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Marketplace blog
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Marketplace Rewards is now part of the ISV Success program

Brady-B's avatar
Brady-B
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Nov 15, 2022

Microsoft continues its strong commitment to the growth and success of ISVs and supporting them throughout the entire journey of building, publishing, and selling apps through the Microsoft commercial marketplace. To further this mission, Marketplace Rewards will now be included in the ISV Success program, available—at no cost—to all participants of the program, automatically, effective today.

 

Leveraging Marketplace Rewards helps you to grow sales. The benefits you unlock in Marketplace Rewards are performance-based and focus on both the app and the commercial marketplace. In fact, we find partners who access Marketplace Rewards benefits see five-times higher billed sales in commercial marketplace compared to those who don’t engage in the program*.

 

Consolidating Marketplace Rewards as automatic benefits within the ISV Success program will help simplify and streamline all the benefits to take advantage of as you build, publish, and grow with Microsoft. You could use these benefits, as some partners did, to triple your customer base or see traffic grow exponentially on your listing.

 

Key benefits included in Marketplace Rewards
Marketplace Rewards offers valuable benefits at no cost to you. These benefits are intended to increase traffic to commercial marketplace listings, generate more leads, advance sales success, and unlock additional benefits as you sell more. Here’s some of what you can do:

 

  • Build brand awareness: Get expert guidance from professional marketers on your listing and leverage Microsoft social engines.
  • Reach new customers: Expand your reach by getting featured placement on Microsoft AppSource or Azure Marketplace.
  • Evangelize joint sales: Access guidance for co-sell and partner-to-partner sales and increase awareness of your offer to Microsoft sellers.
  • Nurture prospects with customized assets: Amplify your brand through co-branded content and get reduced cost Azure infrastructure.
  • Reduce costs while closing deals: Scale with readiness materials and offset the cost of proof-of-concept implementations to close sales deals.

 

To explore Marketplace Rewards benefits in detail, see this resource.

 

Continued Marketplace Rewards benefits and how to access them
While Marketplace Rewards will be combined with the ISV Success program, the benefits will continue to be available to every partner who has an existing or new service or solution listing in the commercial marketplace. To see your company’s available Marketplace Rewards, from the Partner Center dashboard, navigate to Benefits and go to the Marketplace Rewards page and select Sales and Marketing benefits.

To learn more about the ISV Success program and how to join, please visit the ISV Hub. Microsoft looks forward to the increased success of ISVs to grow with these expanded benefits.

 

*Based on comparing transactable publishers who used one or more program benefits to those who did not use program benefits.

Updated Nov 15, 2022
Version 1.0

2 Comments

  • Below are answers to the above questions that may help partners with Azure sponsorship. You can also find more information in the Azure sponsorship FAQ: https://aka.ms/AzureSponsorshipFAQ

    • Once a test drive has been created and added to a solution in Microsoft AppSource or Azure Marketplace, and the customer has decided they want to do the test drive with the partner, the Azure sponsorship may then be requested to cover any consumption while the customer is using the test drive. So if $5k is requested and approved, the first $5k of Azure consumption will be covered by the sponsorship.
    • If a partner is hosting a solution for a PoC/deployment, they can use the Azure sponsorship to cover any Azure consumption during the PoC/deployment. If a partner wants $5k for an Azure sponsorship for a customer, they may request the sponsorship to be on their tenant. Since sponsorships are only available for EA and PAYG accounts at the time, if a partner assigns the sponsorship to an Account ID and the Azure consumption goes over the $5k, the EA would be billed for any overage. If the sponsorship is added to a PAYG account, a credit card must be submitted in case there are any overages beyond the sponsorship amount.
    • For the development of a new solution that will be added to Azure Marketplace, a partner may request a sponsorship amount for this activity.
  • mbbowker's avatar
    mbbowker
    Copper Contributor

    Hi Brady-B and justinroyal ,

     

    The rewards are great and we look forward to leveraging them as we grow. We're unclear on some of the Azure benefits though and what the criteria is for their use.

     

    Could you please help shed some light on the following 3 questions regarding each type of Azure benefit on the Rewards program:

     

    1. “Azure sponsorship for deployment or proof of concept: Free Azure to remove the Azure cost for proof-of-concept engagements or initial customer deployments.” 

     

    What criteria needs to be met for the Azure environment to be “POC or an initial customer deployment”? We have two Azure environments – DEV and LIVE. Our “POCs” are built and tested in DEV before being copied to live. Will our DEV environment be eligible for these Azure credits?

     

    2. “Azure sponsorship for commercial marketplace publishing development/testing: Free Azure to support development and testing for your commercial marketplace solution.”

     

    Can you confirm what this covers? Can we use this against either our DEV or LIVE Azure environments?

     

    3. “Azure sponsorship for Test Drive/trial sandbox: Free Azure to support Test Drive development or maintenance in Azure Marketplace, a ’try before you buy' option for customers”

     

    Our LIVE environment is multi-tenant and includes a “Demo User” for ‘test drives.’ Will our LIVE Azure environment be eligible for these credits, or will we need to create a completely separate Azure environment dedicated solely to the Test Drive offer?

     

    Thanks in advance,

    Miles