Unlocking the power of co-sell: what to expect in the upcoming webinar series with Rubrik and Tackle
For ISVs, partnering with cloud providers is a powerful growth engine, opening doors to new customers, expanding market reach, and driving revenue. Co-selling is a key lever in this partnership, enabling ISVs to align with cloud providers like Microsoft to accelerate growth, strengthen relationships, and close larger deals. However, developing a successful co-sell practice doesn’t just happen overnight—it requires strategic alignment, scalable resources, and a deep understanding of partner incentives. To help you navigate this journey, Rubrik and Tackle are teaming up for a two-part webinar series designed to help you build, operationalize, and scale a strong co-sell strategy with Microsoft. In these sessions, you’ll learn how to: Develop a scalable co-sell strategy aligned with Microsoft’s goals Streamline your co-sell motion with workflows, CRM alignment, and deal-sharing strategies Strengthen relationships with Microsoft sellers and aligning with Azure’s consumption goals Led by Rubrik Head of Global Cloud Alliances Jasmine Kronk and Tackle’s co-sell experts, this webinar series will equip you with the tools and knowledge you need to co-sell with confidence. Here’s a preview of what you’ll learn in each session: Session 1: Building a Winning Strategy to Accelerate Growth with Microsoft Date: February 24, 2025 at 9:30 am PST To successfully co-sell with Microsoft, ISVs need a clear strategy that aligns with Microsoft’s priorities, streamlines collaboration, and maximizes growth opportunities. In this session, experts will share key insights on how to operationalize co-sell, build strategic relationships, and leverage marketplace to accelerate revenue. Here are the top takeaways from this session to help you build a winning a winning co-sell strategy: Use Co-Sell as a strategic GTM motion. Co-selling with Microsoft is not just a checkbox activity; it's a fundamental go-to-market (GTM) strategy that can drive growth, increase deal sizes, and accelerate sales cycles. ISV should leverage co-sell partnerships to shorten sales cycles and close larger deals. Understand the value proposition. To succeed in the Microsoft ecosystem, ISVs must clearly define their unique value proposition. Aligning your solution with Microsoft’s priorities, like driving Azure consumption, creates mutual benefits and strengthens co-sell opportunities. Operationalize co-sell for scale. Streamlining internal processes is key to scaling co-sell efforts. This includes integrating CRM systems, defining deal-sharing criteria, and maintaining a structured approach to pipeline management. Regularly sharing deal updates, tracking performance metrics, and ensuring cross-team alignment helps optimize efficiency and collaboration. Measuring key indicators, such as deals won and revenue impact, ensures ongoing success. Build relationships with Microsoft stakeholders. Establishing a network of advocates within Microsoft is critical for driving future co-sell opportunities. By building trust and understanding, you can create an environment where Microsoft reps actively refer and promote your solutions to customers, ultimately generating more leads and sales. Leverage marketplace as a growth engine – Combining co-sell efforts with marketplace sales streamlines procurement for customers, improves accessibility, and accelerates revenue generation. Session 2: How to Operationalize and Scale Your Co-Sell Motion with Microsoft Date: February 26, 2025 at 9:30 am PST To scale their co-sell motion, ISVs need a structured approach that integrates co-selling into their overall GTM strategy, fosters alignment with Microsoft stakeholders, and prioritizes high-impact opportunities. In our second session, we share key strategies for operationalizing co-sell, from creating scalable resources to building cross-functional support. Here are the top takeaways to help you drive repeatable success and accelerate growth: Co-sell as a strategic element: Co-selling should be treated as a fundamental part of your go-to-market strategy, not just a one-off tactic. It’s about embedding co-sell into your broader sales approach to drive sustained growth. A strategic co-sell motion can accelerate sales cycles, increase deal sizes, and create longer-term partnerships. By making co-sell a core component of your GTM plan, you ensure it aligns with your broader business objectives and supports scalable growth over time. Align product-market fit: For co-sell success, your product must seamlessly integrate within your partner’s ecosystem and address critical customer pain points. It’s not just about having a solution that works technically, but one that directly ties into your partner's goals and creates clear value for the customer. This ensures both parties can demonstrate the solution’s unique value, which not only drives immediate sales but fosters repeatable success and strengthens your co-sell partnership. Understand mutual incentives: Co-selling is most effective when both parties benefit. To maximize this, you need to understand your partner’s motivations—whether that’s driving Azure consumption, hitting specific adoption targets, or achieving quota goals. By aligning your co-sell strategy with these priorities, you create a win-win dynamic that fosters stronger collaboration and accelerates the deal process. Recognizing and addressing your partner’s evolving incentives ensures that both sides remain motivated to drive deals forward. Create scalable co-sell resources: To sustain and scale co-selling efforts, it’s critical to build reusable resources and processes. This includes developing playbooks, one-pagers, email templates, and other assets that can be quickly deployed across teams and regions. With these resources, sales teams spend less time creating new materials and more time engaging meaningfully with partners. Scalable resources streamline operations, maintain consistency, and support seamless collaboration, which ultimately drives more efficient and impactful co-selling motions. Prioritize high-value accounts: Rather than spreading your co-sell efforts across a broad spectrum of clients, it’s more effective to focus on high-value accounts. Start by identifying where your ideal customer profiles overlap with your partner’s customer base, and build upon these existing synergies. This focused approach allows you to dedicate time and resources to deals with the highest potential for revenue growth. It reduces wasted effort on low-impact accounts and increases your chances of closing more significant, higher-value deals with your partner. Join us to master co-selling Whether you’re just getting started with co-sell or you’re looking to optimize existing efforts, these sessions will provide actionable insights you can immediately apply to your strategy. Register now to secure your spot and take your co-sell strategy to the next level!How we increased trials 200% with Marketplace Rewards
Hi All, Kitameraki Limited's TeamsWork brand provides intuitive and collaborative apps for Microsoft Teams that cater to the needs of small and medium-sized businesses and has successfully launched Ticketing As A Service and Checklist As A Service apps, and just recently CRM As A Service App on the Microsoft Marketplaces. As a Microsoft partner for nearly four years, TeamsWork recognized the importance of maximizing visibility and reach within the Microsoft ecosystem. Our team has been able to leverage many of the benefits available through Marketplace Rewards to help drive significant growth and quantifiable results, thanks to expert guidance and the broad range of resources available to better market apps on Microsoft marketplaces. Just a few of these benefits included: The listing optimization allowed us to receive expert recommendations from Microsoft about how to optimize our marketplace offer pages. Azure sponsorship credits cut down on our costs of marketplace solutions. Press release support featuring a quote from a Microsoft executive helped amplify the announcement of our marketplace availability Our customer success story demonstrated how one of our customers increased administrative efficiency by 20 percent using our marketplace solution. featured category placement on the Azure Marketplace, which spotlighted TeamsWork and drove more users to view offer pages. Marketplace Rewards has helped drive a 200% increase in new trials for our marketplace offerings! Read the full story here: Kitameraki case study What success has your organization seen with Marketplace Rewards?
There are no benefits to being a MS Partner
The absolute absurdity of being a Microsoft Partner is beyond insanity. Some of us have built businesses around the Microsoft Ecosystem (STUPIDLY I MUST ADD). And for what? For Microsoft to block us from our accounts and give zero explanation of the issue? As I am sure others have seen since there are posts everywhere of other people having the same issues, its mind blowing that Microsoft does nothing to assist its partners who are the ones generating them the revenue. Supporting their crappy products over and over and over again being the ones on the front lines getting beat up by their customers because of constant outages, constant issues. Back in September my account was blocked. Not one bit of an explanation. Not one email telling me why. The only thing I got was a notice saying my visual studio enterprise license was removed. Upon checking I couldn't find anything. I open a support ticket. And so far, the only thing I have been told is my account has been blocked. Yet not one person can apparently tell me why? Not one person can tell me what I need to do to fix it? Not one person can even get on the phone to assist on this. Before I lost numerous customers because of this. I was selling 30k a month in licenses. And now because my account was blocked, I have lost access to a crap ton of my development, I have lost access to any and all of the benefits. I have lost access to basically everything even though when you look at my partner center account. Every single thing still shows active / approved. Etc. My suggestion, if you are considering becoming a Microsoft Partner. DONT. SIMPLE AS THAT. The fact they can block you from doing business, block access to products and services you have paid for. And give you zero ability to fix it so you lose numerous customers and don't even tell you what happened or what needs to be done to rectify the issue. Partnering with Microsoft is the single biggest mistake I have made as a business owner. The second biggest would be that I built my development side of the business fully integrated into the MS ecosystem. Which made it so they cost me countless amounts of money and ability to even do business with my customers.ISV Success: New and expanded benefits for software companies with AI projects
As an ISV pursuing new AI solutions, you're changing the way businesses solve complex challenges and meeting the demand of global customers looking to do more with AI. That’s why we’re bringing new resources and financial incentives to ISV Success—benefits that are designed to help software companies build innovative AI applications and grow sales in the commercial marketplace. New AI benefits & incentives: 1. Technical guidance AI Envisioning Events - learn from our generative AI experts during interactive AI Envisioning Events with sessions designed for both business and technical teams. These monthly sessions will help you identify the most impactful AI use cases for your business and then create a development plan for execution. Check out our events page to sign up. AI Consultations - software companies in ISV Success also receive free AI-focused 1:1 consults to support scenarios that include extending Copilots, integrating AI services, and responsible AI practices. To accelerate development and uplevel your team, all participants can now access GitHub Copilot using Azure credits and take AI certification exams with free vouchers. 2. Expanded package for AI apps ISVs with high-potential AI projects will be upgraded from core to expanded package. With up to 50 hours of technical consultation and additional Azure credits, you’ll be set up to build and test new market-place ready apps. These ISVs also receive GTM benefits, including customer propensity scoring and Azure sponsorship to close deals, through marketplace rewards at an earlier stage. To find out if your project is eligible, schedule an Architecture Design Session or Architecture Review Session in Partner Center, or reach out to your Engagement Manager to learn more. 3. New advanced package with financial incentives ISV Success now offers a new advanced package for ISVs with a certified software designation. These ISVs are eligible for up to 100K in financial incentives to build and deploy AI and analytics apps. Additionally, there is an opportunity for ISVs to qualify for up to 50K in financial incentives to migrate end-customers to Azure-based applications. Visit the offer benefits page on the ISV Hub to learn more about the advanced package. To become eligible for certified software designations, partners must meet the following criteria: - Have a transactable offer in the marketplace - Undergo a technical review for interoperability with Microsoft products - Demonstrate a proven track record of customer success ISVs that qualify for the advanced package can access financial incentives in the incentives workspace. Note: these incentives have previously been available as part of the Azure Innovate and Azure Migrate and Modernize offers. Take advantage of these benefits For current ISV Success members, many of these benefits are available now in your Partner Center Dashboard if qualified. If you’re not enrolled and are ready to explore what ISV Success can offer your business, apply today to access our benefits package. Learn more by visiting the ISV Hub and chatting with our AI-assistant.Leveraging Azure Sponsorship to Drive ROI and Customer Value
Azure sponsorship credits are available to ISVs participating in ISV Success and Marketplace Rewards are a powerful way to grow sales on the marketplace, to allow customers to try solutions at no initial expense, and to sweeten deals with customers. Here's a little snippet of how we've used the credits at Wiz. Our team executed a three-month campaign to promote offers through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and utilized over $350,000 in Azure sponsorship credits to close over a dozen competitive deals, driving an ROI over 1000%. We then used our remaining credits to create an Azure Marketplace pipeline for our customers. This helped us save time and close deals quickly. The Azure sponsorship credits allowed us to showcase to our customers the great partnership we have with Microsoft and provide them with even more value to their cloud and security teams. To learn more about how we are maximizing the value of Marketplace Rewards, read our success story: Wiz case study.A story about our journey on the marketplace. I hope it will inspire and help on your journey
I would like to share my experience with publishing transactable apps on the Microsoft commercial marketplace, the Microsoft 365 App Certification Program, Marketplace Rewards, and certified software designations. Starting with publishing our apps on to the marketplace: We have several apps that operate within the context of Microsoft 365, including apps for Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Copilot Agent, Office, and SharePoint. We have been in AppSource for many years and have customers worldwide. We developed an in-house license application to manage our customers' licenses. Before the commercial marketplace, we managed all invoicing and license management manually. Now, everything has become much easier. We have published monetized SaaS apps connected to the AppSource apps. Using the SaaS Fulfillment API, we integrated the purchasing process with our in-house license application. We have gained numerous benefits, including: Significant time savings in the invoicing and billing process, as purchasing, adding, removing, or cancelling licenses is automated and managed by Microsoft Customers appreciate the ability to manage licenses themselves, finding it easier Improved market awareness due to promotion in the marketplace And new customers are joining regularly. It is also important to mention Marketplace Rewards, which offer various benefits. For example, customer case stories can be published through Marketplace Rewards on Microsoft customer case stories. Here is a link to our latest story: Microsoft Customer Story - Design for Leisure improves efficiency 30% with iGlobe solutions and Microsoft Planner. Additionally, the Transact & Grow Incentive Campaign has provided us with financial incentives through marketplace sales, as well as Azure sponsorship credits to offset deployment costs. Considering these advantages, there is potential to make the apps CSP Ready as well: https://aka.ms/P2PeBook. Equally important is obtaining the Microsoft 365 App Certification. Certification confirms that an app solution is compatible with Microsoft technologies, compliant with cloud app security best practices, and supported by Microsoft. This is significant because: It provides certification from Microsoft, confirming app security and compliance It saves time in the sales process, as security and compliance are already verified It makes the app easier to find on AppSource, the Commercial Marketplace, and in the Teams App admin portal, where it will be listed in a special category Achieving sales in the marketplace, having customer case stories, and obtaining the Microsoft 365 App Certification provides the foundation to obtain Certified Software Designations, which come with additional benefits and opportunities for co-selling with Microsoft. Today two of our apps have achieved the Certified Software Designation for Modern Work. Soon iPlanner Pro for Teams that includes a Copilot Agent will follow as well. I share this story not to boast but to inspire and motivate others. There is nothing exceptional about us or our experience here – it can be completely replicated by leveraging the resources that Microsoft provides. Was it all very easy…. No. Is it doable? Yes!
Cpor Microsoft Information protection
Hi, I have notices an issue recently that all of our cpor claims for Microsoft Informaton Protection shows as 0 paid avialiable units and 0 Monthly Active Users. Even though the customers have licenses that includes MIP and have MIP deployed. Have any one else experianced this problem and how have did you solved it? So far Microsoft haven't been that helpful. For us it's really important with these cpor claims in regards to our partnerships with Microsoft. Br, Henrik
