Activating channel partners on Microsoft Marketplace: A sales and marketing playbook
You already sell through channel partners today. Now, you can bring those partnerships into Microsoft Marketplace and jumpstart new revenue streams. This playbook provides guidance and ready-to-use assets to help software companies recruit, enable, and grow channel and distribution partnerships through Microsoft Marketplace. Customize these marketing materials to enable your channel to sell your cloud and AI solutions through Microsoft Marketplace. Microsoft continues to invest in channel-led sales through Marketplace, making it easier for software companies, channel partners, and distributors to work together at scale. The value for channel partners Streamline transactions, payments, and customer procurement through a single commercial platform. Access customers looking to apply their Azure consumption commitments toward eligible third-party solutions. Expand sales opportunities across markets with built-in support for cross-currency transactions and global commerce. Get the marketing materials for channel-led sales. Implement your Marketplace channel strategy This playbook provides step-by-step guidance and customizable assets to help software companies build and scale a channel-led sales motion through Marketplace. Use the guidance, templates, and tools to recruit, enable, and grow channel partnerships that support your go-to-market strategy. Step 1: Identify your target markets Start by identifying which countries have the highest revenue potential and where your existing channel partners already have customer traction. Map your current channel footprint by auditing where your channel partners are actively selling today, and which markets are generating the most partner-sourced revenue. These are good target markets in which to start a Microsoft Marketplace channel-led sales motion. Microsoft Marketplace provides multiple sales motions for software companies to engage with channel partners and distributors. As you define your channel partner recruitment strategy, select the right model. Next, determine what solutions you want your distributors or channel partners to sell. Use multiparty private offers to go-to-market together with channel partners on specific customer opportunities. Use resale enabled offers to enable channel partners to resell your solution at scale to customers. For markets that have resale enabled offers and multiparty private offers available, engage your distributors to scale through their channel partners. See available markets here. Step 2: Build your target partner list Select a shortlist of existing partners to onboard first, based on their market coverage, current depth of partnership with your company, and readiness or openness to selling through Marketplace. Create a list of your current channel partners who sell your software in your target markets. Segment partners based on their customer base size in your target markets. Prioritize partners with proven sales capabilities and customer relationships with Microsoft customers. If you need help prioritizing partners, Microsoft publishes a list of eligible channel partners each month, which is a good starting point for identifying channel partners engaged with Marketplace. If you plan to sell with resale enabled offers, you may choose to prioritize partners with whom you have existing direct payment relationships. If you want to sell through distributors, prioritize partners based on the strength of their reseller community. Resources: Channel partner outreach email template to engage existing and prospective channel partners about reselling your solutions through Microsoft Marketplace. Target channel partner list template to prioritize and track target channel partners by country, resale motion, and relevant solutions. Step 3: Articulate the value to your channel partners Marketplace helps channel partners participate in more opportunities by streamlining procurement and payments, unlocking access to customers with Azure commitments, and making it easier to sell across borders through a global commercial platform. Use the Microsoft co-branded partner enablement pitch deck template to help your channel partners understand the opportunity. Step 4: Set up preferred deal construct(s) with your target partners Depending on your chosen sales model(s), ensure that your partners have completed your company’s requirements. You should first agree on pricing and terms and conditions for reselling your software through Marketplace. If using resale enabled offers, you will need to sign appropriate agreements outside of Marketplace. Agreements between parties must be in place before authorizing a channel partner for resale enabled offers. These agreements should specify who is responsible for the Microsoft Marketplace agency fee and payout mechanisms between you and the channel partner. If your channel partners are outside the United States, they may be able to take advantage of tax treaty benefits. For resale enabled offers, authorize your target partners and create and manage resale enabled offers in Partner Center. You will also need your channel partner’s seller ID to create resale enabled offers. For multiparty private offers, ensure that your target partners have met all prerequisites to sell multiparty private offers to customers in your target markets. Your channel partners with a tax profile in the United States need to file resale certificates with Microsoft. Guide your channel partners to contact channelready@microsoft.com for support with tax and payment profile pre-requisites. Step 5: Enable channel partner sales teams Once your partners are authorized to resell through Microsoft Marketplace, the next step is to help them sell your products to their customers through Marketplace. Enable your channel partners on why this motion matters, how to position your offer to their customers, and how to grow their revenue through Marketplace-led sales with you. Enable channel partner sellers with a simple sales enablement kit that provides clear messaging on how to pitch your product, why customers should buy through Microsoft Marketplace, how the partner can attach services, and how your incentives and programs apply. Provide them with a clear process for contacting you with questions, deal support requests, sales blockers, and run regular sales enablement sessions at the start of the motion to quickly enable your channel partners’ sales team(s) to sell your offers on Marketplace. Offer sales incentives to your channel partners’ sales teams, such as SPIFFs, bonuses, and revenue sharing opportunities, which motivate your channel partners’ sales teams to identify and close Marketplace opportunities. Share leads and map accounts together. Compare customer and prospect lists to identify account overlaps and prospects that may have pre-committed cloud budget that could be used to purchase your solution via Marketplace. If you participate in Marketplace Rewards, use the customer propensity list to prioritize customers. Use available Microsoft incentives and resources to help your channel partners sell your products to their customers. As a best practice, remove internal channel conflict by working with your finance and sales operations teams to ensure your direct sales team is not penalized when a channel partner closes a Marketplace deal. Use the Internal sales enablement template to ensure your internal sales and channel teams are enabled on the channel-led Marketplace opportunity and operational steps. Resources: Sales enablement kit for channel partners: Microsoft co-branded partner enablement pitch deck template to help your channel partners understand the Microsoft Marketplace opportunity, value proposition for working with you, and how to get started. Customer-facing brief that channel partner sellers can use to promote your solutions to their customers. Internal sales enablement template to train your internal sales and channel teams on your Microsoft Marketplace channel-led sales motion Step 6: Track pipeline, optimize, and scale Track and measure Marketplace activities with your channel partners, including pipeline and sales by country, to identify which partners are the most active, which countries are driving the most revenue, where deals are progressing and where additional channel partner enablement is needed. You can also track metrics such as average deal size and time to close for Marketplace versus non-Marketplace deals, percentage of pipeline and revenue utilizing pre-committed cloud spend, and the impact of sales incentives on driving adoption of Marketplace channel-led sales. Use Microsoft Partner Center Insights to monitor sales, customer acquisition, and channel partner performance in the Insights workspace. Use the Referrals space to see if your channel partners’ customers and prospects have pre-committed cloud budget that they could use to purchase your solution. Based on early results of your Microsoft channel-led sales motion, build your ideal target partner profile, optimize your channel sales collateral and incentives, and expand your target partner list in your target markets. Reach out to your existing channel partners at scale using the channel partner outreach email and LinkedIn ad templates to drive awareness of your Marketplace channel-led sales motion. Resources: Channel partner outreach email template to engage existing and prospective channel partners about reselling your solutions through Microsoft Marketplace. Channel partner outreach LinkedIn ad template to capture the attention of existing and prospective channel partners by highlighting the opportunity to sell your solution through Marketplace and attach services. In summary Select your markets: identify the countries where you want to activate Microsoft Marketplace channel-led sales with your existing channel partners. Build your target partner shortlist: select 3-5 channel partners to activate first, starting with those who have existing customers and pipeline in your target markets. Articulate the value to your channel partners: reach out to your target partners and share the opportunity to transact through Marketplace. Choose your deal construct(s): decide which Marketplace channel-led sales models best fit your channel strategy and your channel partners’ sales motions. Activate your Marketplace channel-led sales motion: use this channel recruitment playbook to authorize, onboard and enable your channel partners at scale. Optimize and scale: use early learnings to refine your strategy and content, activate additional existing channel partners to your Marketplace channel-led sales motion, and recruit net new channel partners to expand your ecosystem of Marketplace channel-led sales partners. Assets to help you activate your Microsoft Marketplace channel-led sales motion Multiparty private offer channel partner onboarding guide Resale enabled offer channel partner onboarding guide Repository containing: Internal sales enablement template to train your internal sales and channel teams on your Microsoft Marketplace channel-led sales motion Target channel partner list template to prioritize and track target channel partners by country, resale motion and relevant solutions Channel partner outreach email template to engage existing and prospective channel partners about reselling your solutions through Microsoft Marketplace Channel partner outreach LinkedIn ad template to capture the attention of existing and prospective channel partners by highlighting the opportunity to sell your solution through Marketplace and attach services Microsoft co-branded partner enablement pitch deck template to help your channel partners understand the Microsoft Marketplace opportunity, value proposition for working with you, and how to get started Customer-facing brief that channel partner sellers can use to promote your solutions to their customers
MCA billing account stuck in "under review" status for 4+ days, no resolution
I'm the Global Admin for a Microsoft 365 tenant (domain: fortunamg.net) recently transitioned from a GoDaddy CSP reseller relationship to a direct Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) billing account. After setting up the MCA billing account and adding a payment method, I attempted to make an edit to my billing account address (updating to the new 9-digit zip code format). This triggered an "Account under review" status, which states the review usually takes up to 2 days. It has now been over 4 days with no update or email notification. This review is blocking me from purchasing a subscription, which I need to do to restore an active Microsoft 365 subscription on this tenant (currently showing as "Disabled" following the GoDaddy detach). Billing Account ID: 7793dd6e-68c9-5362-c5e2-3fe091b9854c Domain: fortunamg.net Could someone help check the status of this review or escalate to the appropriate team? Phone support has been unable to resolve this. Thank you.
Open Data Infrastructure: How Fivetran in Microsoft Marketplace powers agentic AI on Azure
In this guest blog post, Natalie Waller, Lead Product Marketing Manager at Fivetran, examines why agentic AI is stalling in most enterprises — not because of the AI itself, but because today’s data infrastructure wasn’t built for autonomous agents.Designing a reliable environment strategy for Microsoft Marketplace AI apps and agents
Technical guidance for software companies Delivering an AI app or agent through Microsoft Marketplace requires more than strong model performance or a well‑designed user flow. Once your solution is published, both you and your customers must be able to update, test, validate, and promote changes without compromising production stability. A structured environment strategy—Dev, Stage, and Production—is the architectural mechanism that makes this possible. This post provides a technical blueprint for how software companies and Microsoft Marketplace customers should design, operate, and maintain environment separation for AI apps and agents. It focuses on safe iteration, version control, quality gates, reproducible deployments, and the shared responsibility model that spans publisher and customer tenants. You can always get a curated step-by-step guidance through building, publishing and selling apps for Marketplace through App Advisor. This post is part of a series on building and publishing well-architected AI apps and agents in Microsoft Marketplace. The series focuses on AI apps and agents that are architected, hosted, and operated on Azure, with guidance aligned to building and selling solutions through Microsoft Marketplace. Why environment strategy is a core architectural requirement Environment separation is not just a DevOps workflow. It is an architectural control that ensures your AI system evolves safely, predictably, and traceably across its lifecycle. This is particularly important for Marketplace solutions because your changes impact not just your own environment, but every tenant where the solution runs. AI‑driven systems behave differently from traditional software: Prompts evolve and drift through iterative improvements. Model versions shift, sometimes silently, affecting output behavior. Tools and external dependencies introduce new boundary conditions. Retrieval sources change over time, producing different Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) contexts. Agent reasoning is probabilistic and can vary across environments. Without explicit boundaries, an update that behaves as expected in Dev may regress in Stage or introduce unpredictable behavior in Production. Marketplace elevates these risks because customers rely on your solution to operate within enterprise constraints and support AI scalability for enterprise. A well‑designed environment strategy answers the fundamental operational question: How does this solution change safely over time? Publisher-managed environment (tenant) Software companies publishing to Marketplace must maintain a clear three‑tier environment strategy. Each environment serves a distinct purpose and enforces different controls. Development environment: Iterate freely, without customer impact In Dev, engineers modify prompts, adjust orchestration logic, integrate new tools, and test updated model versions. This environment must support: Rapid prompt iteration with strict versioning, never editing in place. Model pinning, ensuring inference uses a declared version. Isolated test data, preventing contamination of production RAG contexts. Feature‑flag‑driven experimentation, enabling controlled testing. Staging environment: Validate behavior before promotion Stage is where quality gates activate. All changes—including prompt updates, model upgrades, new tools, and logic changes—must pass structured validation before they can be promoted. This environment enforces: Integration testing that supports AI app performance optimization Acceptance criteria Consistency and performance baselines Safety evaluation and limits enforcement Production environment: Serve customers with reliability and rollback readiness Solutions running in production environments, regardless of whether they are publisher hosted or deployed into a customer's tenant must provide: Stable, predictable behavior, supported by deliberate AI workload capacity planning Strict separation from test data sources Clearly defined rollback paths Auditability for all environment‑specific configurations This model highlights the core environments required for Marketplace readiness; in practice, publishers may introduce additional environments such as integration, testing, or preproduction depending on their delivery pipeline. The customer tenant deployment model: Deploying safely across customer environments Once a Marketplace customer purchases and deploys your AI app or agent, they must be able to deploy and maintain your solution across all their environments without reverse engineering your architecture. A strong offer must provide: Repeatable deployments across all heterogeneous environments. Predictable configuration separation, including identity, data sources, and policy boundaries. Customer‑controlled promotion workflows—updates should never be forced. No required re‑creation of environments for each new version. Publishers should design deployment artifacts such that customers do not have to manually re‑establish trust boundaries, identity settings, or configuration details each time the publisher releases a solution update. Plan for AI‑specific environment challenges AI systems introduce behavioral variances that traditional microservices do not. Your environment strategy must explicitly account for them. Prompt drift Prompts that behave well in one environment may respond differently in another due to: Different user inputs, where production prompts encounter broader and less predictable queries than test environments Variation in RAG contexts, driven by differences in indexed content, freshness, and data access Model behavior shifts under scale, including concurrency effects and token pressure, which also affects cost and requires attention to cost optimization for AI apps Tool availability differences, where agents may have access to different tools or permissions across environments This requires explicit prompt versioning and environment-based promotion. Model version mismatches If one environment uses a different model version or even a different checkpoint, behavior divergence will appear immediately. Publishers should account for the following model management best practices: Model version pinning per environment Clear promotion paths for model updates RAG context variation Different environments may retrieve different documents unless seeded on purpose. Publishers should ensure their solutions avoid: Test data appearing in production environments Production data leaking into non-production environments Cross contamination of customer data in multi-tenant SaaS solutions Make sure your solution accounts for stale-data and real-time data. Agent variability Agents exhibit stochastic reasoning paths, which becomes more pronounced when scaling AI agents. Environments must enforce: Controlled tool access Reasoning step boundaries Consistent evaluation against expected patterns Publisher–customer boundary: Shared responsibilities Marketplace AI solutions span publisher and customer tenants, which means environment strategy is jointly owned. Each side has well-defined responsibilities. Publisher responsibilities Publishers should: Design an environment model that is reproducible inside customer tenants. Provide clear documentation for environment-specific configuration. Ensure updates are promotable, not disruptive, by default. Capture environment‑specific logs, traces, and evaluation signals to support debugging, audits, and incident response. Customer responsibilities Customers should: Maintain environment separation using their governance practices. Validate updates in staging before deploying them in production. Treat environment strategy as part of their operational contract with the publisher. Environment strategies support Marketplace readiness A well‑defined environment model is a Marketplace accelerator. It improves: Onboarding Customers adopt faster when: Deployments are predictable Configurations are well scoped Updates have controlled impact Long-term operations Strong environment strategy reduces: Regression risk Customer support escalations Operational instability Solutions that support clear environment promotion paths have higher retention and fewer incidents. What’s next in the journey The next architectural decision after environment separation is identity flow across these environments and across tenant boundaries, especially for AI agents acting on behalf of users. The follow‑up post will explore tenant linking, OAuth consent patterns, and identity‑plane boundaries in Marketplace AI architectures. See the next post in the series: Designing Tenant Linking to Scale Microsoft Marketplace AI Apps. Key Resources See curated, step-by-step guidance to help you build, publish, or sell your app or agent (no matter where you start) in App Advisor Quick-Start Development Toolkit can connect you with code templates for AI solution patterns Microsoft AI Envisioning Day Events How to build and publish AI apps and agents for Microsoft Marketplace Get over $126K USD in benefits and technical consultations to help you replicate and publish your app with ISV Success
