Reshaping enterprise go-to-market with Microsoft Marketplace and ecosystem partnerships

The ecosystem angle here is real, but there's a gap most ISVs are hitting right now that's worth naming: the QRP retirement on March 31 changed how referral matching actually works under the hood, and a lot of partners haven't connected that to their GTM strategy yet.

The old model rewarded partners who built relationships with Microsoft sellers directly. The new AI-based matching in Partner Center rewards listing quality — specifically, how well your solution description, industry tags, and co-sell materials align to Microsoft's solution areas. Partners who've built strong ecosystem relationships but have stale AppSource listings are finding their inbound referral quality has dropped since the transition, even though nothing changed on their side.

The practical implication for anyone thinking about Marketplace-led GTM: listing optimization is now a prerequisite for co-sell, not an afterthought.