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Customer leads from your commercial marketplace offer

  • Article

Leads are customers interested in or deploying your offers from Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace. You can receive customer leads after your offer is published to the commercial marketplace. This article explains the following lead management concepts:

  • How your commercial marketplace offer generates customer leads to ensure that you don't miss business opportunities.
  • How to manage your leads in Partner Center
  • How to connect your customer relationship management (CRM) system to your offer.
  • The lead data we send you so that you can follow up on customers who reached out to you.

Generate customer leads

Here are places where a lead is generated:

  • A customer consents to sharing their information after they select Contact me from the commercial marketplace. This lead is an initial interest lead. We share information with you about customers who express interest in getting your product, including notes they wrote to express their needs. The lead is the top of the acquisition funnel.

    Screenshot that shows Dynamics 365 Contact Me.

  • A customer selects Get It Now (or selects Create in the Azure portal) to get your offer. We share leads information with you about customers who start to deploy or show interest in your product.

    • For transactional offers on AppSource, the lead is generated after the customer completes the purchase. For those on Azure portal, the lead is generated after the customer selects either the Subscribe or Create button.
    • For non-transactional offers, the lead is generated after the customer selects the Get It Now/Contact me button.

    If a connection to the partner's CRM is set up, the lead appears in the CRM shortly after it's generated.

    Screenshot that shows the SQL Get It Now button.

    Windows Server Create button

  • A customer selects Free Trial to try out your offer. Free trials are accelerated opportunities for you to share your business instantly with potential customers without any barriers of entry.

    Dynamics 365 Free Trial button

Receive customer leads

When you publish an offer to the commercial marketplace with Partner Center, you'll receive leads with customer contact information as soon as someone expresses interest in or uses your product.

These leads are available on the Referrals workspace in Partner Center. See Manage leads.

Connect to your CRM system

In addition to Partner Center, you can have your offer's leads sent to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and manage them there.

Note

Connecting to a CRM system is optional.

Understand lead data

If you're not using Partner Center, or an existing CRM system integration, here's how to understand the data in leads: Each lead you receive during the customer acquisition process has data in specific fields. The first field to look out for is the LeadSource field, which follows this format: Source-Action | Offer. Sources: The value for this field is populated based on the marketplace that generated the lead. Possible values are "AzureMarketplace", "AzurePortal", and "AppSource (SPZA)".

Actions: The value for this field is populated based on the action the customer took in the marketplace that generated the lead.

Possible values are:

  • "INS": Stands for installation. This action is in Azure Marketplace or AppSource when a customer acquires your product.
  • "PLT": Stands for partner-led trial. This action is in AppSource when a customer selects the Contact me option.
  • "DNC": Stands for do not contact. This action is in AppSource when a partner who was cross-listed on your app page gets requested to be contacted. We share a notification that this customer was cross-listed on your app, but they don't need to be contacted.
  • "Create": This action is only inside the Azure portal and is generated when a customer purchases your offer to their account.

Offers: You might have multiple offers in the commercial marketplace. The value for this field is populated based on the offer that generated the lead. The publisher ID and offer ID are both sent in this field and are values you provided when you published the offer to the marketplace.

The following examples show values in the expected format publisherid.offerid:

  • checkpoint.check-point-r77-10sg-byol
  • bitnami.openedxcypress
  • docusign.3701c77e-1cfa-4c56-91e6-3ed0b622145

Customer information

The customer's information is sent via multiple fields. The following example shows the customer information that's contained in a lead:

  • FirstName: John
  • LastName: Smith
  • Email: jsmith@microsoft.com
  • Phone: 1234567890
  • Country: US
  • Company: Microsoft
  • Title: CTO

Note

Not all the data in the previous example is always available for each lead. Because you'll get leads from multiple steps as mentioned in the "Generate customer leads" section, the best way to handle the leads is to de-duplicate the records and personalize the follow-ups. This way each customer gets an appropriate message, and you create a unique relationship.

Best practices for lead management

Here are some recommendations for driving leads through your sales cycle:

  • Process: Define a clear sales process, with milestones, analytics, and clear team ownership.
  • Qualification: Define prerequisites, which indicate whether a lead was fully qualified. Make sure sales or marketing representatives qualify leads carefully before taking them through the full sales process.
  • Follow-up: Acting quickly on leads yields the best results and customers submitting Contact me leads expect a swift response, so don't forget to follow up within 24 hours. Request scheduling a phone call to better understand if your product is a good solution for their problem. Expect the typical transaction to require numerous follow-up calls.
  • Nurture: Nurture your leads to get you on the way to a higher profit margin. Check in, but don't bombard them. We recommend that you send email to leads, at least a few times, before you close them out; don't give up after the first attempt. Remember, these customers directly engaged with your product and spent time in a free trial; they're great prospects.

After the technical setup is in place, incorporate these leads into your current sales and marketing strategy and operational processes.

We're interested in better understanding your overall sales process and want to work closely with you to provide high-quality leads and enough data to make you successful. We welcome your feedback on how we can optimize and enhance the leads we send you with other data to help make these customers successful. We encourage you to share your feedback via the smile icon on the top right corner of Partner center. Sign in to Partner Center.

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