Help customers discover your Marketplace solution with Intelligent Discovery and App Advisor
Technology buying is becoming more self-directed, digital, and AI-assisted. Instead of beginning with a specific product or vendor, customers start with the business problem they want to solve. Microsoft Marketplace is evolving with them. With intelligent discovery in Marketplace, customers describe a business challenge in natural language, receive contextual recommendations, compare solutions, and ask questions as they evaluate options. If you want to see how the experience is changing for customers, start with Accelerating AI adoption with intelligent discovery in Microsoft Marketplace. For software companies, there is another side to the story. If Marketplace is getting better at connecting customer needs with relevant solutions, your listing needs to provide useful, relevant information about what you offer. As the blog points out, that makes the quality of your Marketplace listing part of your growth strategy. Want to skip right to a no-cost, fast listing optimization in App Advisor to improve your listing on six categories that customers care about? Customers start with business needs, not product names Imagine a retail leader looking to improve demand forecasting or an operations team trying to automate repetitive workflows. They may not know your company or product name. Increasingly, they don't need to. Intelligent discovery lets customers describe goals, challenges, or desired outcomes in natural language. Marketplace uses that context to surface relevant solutions. According to Microsoft's early preview results, customers using intelligent discovery were 68% more likely to find solutions that met their needs and take the next step toward purchase. That raises an important question: Does your Marketplace listing clearly communicate the solution your customers are searching for? With Intelligent Discovery, customers can now: Use Smart Search to pinpoint their needs, without even browsing, Start an interactive chat on any Marketplace listing page, with answers grounded on the listing detail, Compare products using a toggle on multiple listings that produces a customer-focused grid with specifics like price, ratings, and plans With these tools, customer browsing can be more targeted. It also allows your Marketplace listing to shine if you have these details. Your Marketplace listing needs to address customer questions Your listing still needs to make the business value case for your solution on Marketplace. A strong listing should make it easy to understand who your solution is for, what problem it solves, how it works, and what outcome a customer can expect. Be specific about the business problems and use cases your solution addresses. Explain important Microsoft integrations, requirements, limitations, deployment options, and the path to buy or get started. Use the language your customers use to describe their needs throughout your title, summary, description, captions, and metadata. Give them enough information to evaluate your solution. Representative screenshots or videos can demonstrate the experience. Current security, privacy, compliance, support, customer evidence, and reviews can help establish trust. This becomes even more important as the buying experience becomes conversational. Customers can use interactive chat on Marketplace product pages to ask about capabilities, integrations, industry use cases, and fit. Your listing supplies important context as customers explore and evaluate your solution. App Advisor can show you where to improve If you have a published Marketplace offer, App Advisor can review your listing and provide personalized, AI-powered recommendations for improving it. Rather than manually comparing your listing against pages of guidance, you can see specific opportunities to make it stronger. Maybe your description focuses on features but doesn't clearly explain outcomes. Your value proposition needs to be sharper. An important Microsoft integration is hard to find. Your screenshots don't give customers enough context. The point is not to add more words or even stuff your listing with keywords. It is to make your information clear, comprehensive, and relevant to a customer deciding whether your solution fits their needs. Intelligent discovery & App Advisor: two sides of the Marketplace experience The connection is simple. Customers describe what they need. Intelligent discovery helps them find and evaluate relevant solutions. You describe what your solution does. App Advisor helps you strengthen the Marketplace listing customers use to understand and evaluate it. Together, those experiences reinforce why a listing optimization in App Advisor can no longer be a one-time publishing task. Your product will likely change—you'll launch new capabilities, reach different industries, add Microsoft integrations, learn more about customers, and sharpen your capabilities and positioning. Your Marketplace listing should evolve with it. Publishing is just the start of your Marketplace growth Getting an offer onto Marketplace is only a starting point. You have to optimize your listing to grow your presence. Look at your listing from the perspective of a potential customer starting with a business need rather than your product name. Can they quickly understand the problem you solve? Can they tell whether your solution fits their environment? Do you give them enough information to confidently take the next step? As Marketplace discovery becomes more intelligent, the answers to those questions become more important. Use App Advisor to review your published Marketplace listing, get personalized recommendations, and make it easier for customers to understand why your solution fits what they need. Ready to get started? Optimize your listing with personalized recommendations.How and when do I use Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace benefits?
The latest App Advisor guidance shows how Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace can help at every stage: 🔨 Build & Publish: Create and optimize your Marketplace offer. 📈 Grow: Increase visibility and accelerate transactions. ⭐ Differentiate: Access advanced benefits that support long-term growth. Whether you're just getting started or scaling an established Marketplace business, App Advisor can help you find the right resources for your stage. 📖 Read the blog: Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace: New App Advisor Guidance for Software Companies Which stage best describes your Marketplace journey today: Build & Publish, Grow, or Differentiate?Explore App Advisor for details on how Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace can help you sell more
Explore the latest Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace updates available through App Advisor. Learn how software development companies can discover relevant Microsoft Marketplace resources, benefits, and commercialization opportunities that help accelerate solution development, reach new customers, and scale revenue growth through Marketplace.
Can a reseller set exact customer totals on an Azure private offer?
When we create a multiperiod private offer, we enter our markup as a percentage. Sometimes the customer total Azure calculates is a few cents off the signed quote, even when we use all eight decimal places. Is there a way to set the exact customer price for each period? If not, how are other resellers handling these rounding differences?
Choosing the right offer type for your cloud and AI solutions
Whether you're bringing a new AI solution to market or evaluating how to scale an existing application, understanding Marketplace offer types can help you choose the right path to monetization and customer adoption. Check out this short video that compares the capabilities of SaaS offers, Container offers, and Azure managed applications to understand which model best aligns with your architecture, deployment requirements, and customer needs.
What's preventing your Marketplace growth engine from scaling?
Many SDCs know where they want to go with Marketplace, but struggle to turn individual activities into a repeatable growth motion. The latest in the Sell more with App Advisor blog series, asks: ✅ What part of your Marketplace journey is most repeatable today? ✅ Where do you still rely on manual effort or tribal knowledge? ✅ If you could eliminate one friction point between building, publishing, and growing, what would it be? Read the blog and share your thoughts: Build a Repeatable Marketplace Growth Engine with App Advisor The responses could generate useful insights for future Marketplace content and help identify common challenges across the community!Build a repeatable Marketplace growth engine with App Advisor to sell more
Publishing your offer is only the beginning. Learn how App Advisor helps software development companies build a repeatable Marketplace growth engine with curated go-to-market guidance, Marketplace Insights, AI-powered optimization, and proven best practices that drive long-term visibility, engagement, and revenue growth.What are your frictions points between build and revenue?
Turning a great product into Marketplace revenue isn't always straightforward. The latest post in the Sell More with App Advisor blog series highlights How to use App Advisor to avoid 5 common mistakes and sell more on Marketplace Many software companies have the technical capability to build great solutions, but still encounter delays caused by fragmented guidance, uncertainty about next steps, or difficulty navigating Marketplace programs and processes. That's exactly the challenge App Advisor is designed to address. 💬 Where does your team encounter the most friction today? Choosing the right Marketplace offer type? Finding the right architecture patterns or code samples? Publishing and optimizing listings? Understanding co-sell and negotiated deal opportunities? Scaling revenue after launch? If you haven't explored it yet, check out the latest post in our Sell More with App Advisor series and join the conversation.
