How to reach your audience by utilizing the Microsoft Marketplace

The Marketplace is a Microsoft states “The Marketplace is the launch pad for joint go-to-market activities with Microsoft that can help accelerate your business growth” Long story short: When publishing your solution to the Marketplace, you become a part of a large ecosystem that you can benefit from.

Selling your solution

Benefits of the Azure Marketplace

The goal of Microsoft is to connect with partners and customers and support them in expanding their business through the Azure Marketplace solutions. Other than leveraging current Marketplace solutions, you can also publish your own solution. There is one condition: your solution must (partially) run on Microsoft Azure. By publishing your solution to the Marketplace, you will have the following benefits:

• Scale globally
  Customers have the option to deploy your solution to a region of their liking. Make sure your backend supports this though;

• Create new sales opportunities / leads
  Azure is growing, and the ecosystem grows with it! By publishing your solution to the Marketplace you generate more visibility and generate new leads in a multitude of industries.;
  
  
• Brand awareness and promotion.
  
  

As mentioned, your solution will be visible in all Azure Public regions (currently 54, spread over 140 counties). This will improve band awareness and promotion.

• Upsell en cross-selling
  If you sell through the Marketplace you can shorten your sales-cycle and speed up projects because you’re selling a complete solution;

• It’s free
  Publishing your solution to the Azure Marketplace is free;
  
  
• Valuable insights
  Receive information and insights on your campaign performance, orders and payouts and use the analytics to maximize profits and reach a broader market.

The Marketplace is the launch pad for joint go-to-market activities with Microsoft that can help accelerate your business growth. If you’re new to the Marketplace you initially receive benefits out-of-the-box. These are Go-To-Market benefits that help build awareness with other Microsoft customers. Once your offer is published and live, the Microsoft Go-To-Market team will contact you and help you get the most of the it by providing:

• Technical Support
  Support for everything you need to publish your application. Support ranging from technical support to architectural support. 

• Co-marketing
  When you’re co-sell ready (more on this later), you will have a Go-to market team appointed to you. This team will help you with your marketing activities, strategies and connect you to the internal sales channels of Microsoft.

Azure Marketplace versus App Source

Microsoft has provided a clear overview of the differences in benefits:
Source

Publishing your solution

Step 1: Become a Microsoft Partner.
You can register yourself at https://partner.microsoft.com. After signing up you will receive a Microsoft ID which you can use to create an offer in the Cloud Partner Portal.

Step 2: Choose your offer type
You can choose to create any of the following offers:

• Azure Applications
• Consulting Service
• Containers
• Dynamics 365 Business Central
• Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement
• Dynamics 365 for Operations
• IoT Edge modules
• Managed Services
• Power BI Apps
• SaaS apps
• Virtual Machines

Step 3: Describe your offering
Once you’ve selected the offer type you can add a subscription to your new offer. Choose the right category to make sure you reach the right audience

Step 4: Select your pay method.
You can choose any if the following payment method.

• Free;
• Bring your own license (BYOL)
  Software licences are still managed by you and provided to the customer directly by you. Microsoft will only charge the infrastructure and Azure usage;
• Pay-as-you-go
  Price per hour (usually on vCPUs);
• Subscription price
  Software licenses are billed based on a subscription.