Data Platform & Analytics OpenSistemas MSFT Playbook

Insert Photo Here
Data Platform
& Analytics
Microsoft Practice Development Playbook
aka.ms/practiceplaybooks

About this Playbook
This playbook is intended for the business
and technical leadership for new and
existing Microsoft partners that are adding
a new practice to their business focused on
Data Platform and Analytics.
Objectives
The goal of this playbook is to help you understand what you
need to do for accelerating or optimizing your Azure focused
practice and why you should perform the recommendations.
Our goal is to not to re-write the existing body of detailed
guidance on how to perform any given recommendation—we
instead point you to resources that you should be aware of that
will help you in this regard.
For the business side, the intent is to provide valuable resources
for some of the key aspects of the business including driving new
revenue opportunities, strategies for marketing, selling, and lead
capture, as well as building deeper and longer team
engagements with your customers through potential new
service offerings such as managed services.
For the technical side, the intent is to offer guidance on a
number of topics that range from the technical skills your team
will need, to resources that you can use to accelerate learning as
well as explaining some of the key opportunities for technical
delivery that you can focus on as you get started and grow your
practice.
How this playbook was made
This playbook is one of four that was written by two Microsoft
Partners (Opsgility and Solliance) while working in conjunction
with the Microsoft Worldwide partner group and 21 other
successful Azure partners that have volunteered time and
information to provide input and best practices to share with the
rest of the partner community.
To validate the guidance provided in these playbooks, we
conducted a survey of 1,136 Azure partners from around the
world with MDC. In this survey, we gathered insights on a range
of topics from how they hire, compensate and train resources;
their business model, revenue and profitability; what practices
and services they offer and what skillsets they have in place to
support their offers. The results of this survey are provided in-
line with the guidance found within this playbook.
CONTRIBUTING PARTNERS
Artis Consulting Mirabeau
Atea OpenSistemas
AwareComm PC Solutions
Blue Meteorite Perficient
DEFTeam Solutions PlainConcepts
Dimension Data Slalom
Empired Softjam
Equinix SpanishPoint
Fragma Data Systems SQL Services Ltd.
Hanu Software Theta
Kloud Solutions

DATA PLATFORM & ANALYTICS PAGE 3
Using the playbook effectively
Quickly read through the playbook to understand its layout and the available content. Each
section has an executive summary and key actions to take with the information provided
within. Review these summaries to decide on which areas to focus on. Go over content
several times, if needed, then share with your team. Here are some suggested actions you
can take to use the content effectively:
 Get your team together and discuss which pieces of the strategy they are responsible for
 Share the playbook with your sales, marketing, support, technical, and managed services teams
 Leverage the resources available from Microsoft to help maximize your profitability
 Share feedback on how we can improve this and other playbooks by emailing playbookfeedback@microsoft.com

Table of Contents
Introduction
About this Playbook.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................2
Objectives...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................2
How this playbook was made.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................2
Using the playbook effectively...................................................................................................................................................................................................................3
Table of Contents..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................4
The Booming Cloud Opportunity.................................................................................................................................................................................................................15
Define Your Practice Focus & Area of Expertise ......................................................................................................................................................................................16
Understand the Data & Analytics Practice.................................................................................................................................................................................................17
Why choose Microsoft?...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................17
Committed to Partners..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................18
Case Studies ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................19
Looking Ahead..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................21
Understand the Data & Analytics Practice................................................................................................................................................................................................22
The Data Platform Modernization Opportunity...............................................................................................................................................................................22
The Data Platform Modernization Technology Scenario..............................................................................................................................................................23
The Business Analytics Opportunity......................................................................................................................................................................................................24
Demand Forecasting .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................25
Personalization ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................25
Predictive Maintenance........................................................................................................................................................................................................................25
Business Analytics Technology Scenario .............................................................................................................................................................................................26
Internet of Things (IoT) Opportunity .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 27
The Internet of Things (IoT) Technology Scenario...........................................................................................................................................................................28
Maturity Model .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................29
Laggards & leaders ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................30
Transforming Laggards into Leaders.....................................................................................................................................................................................................31
Maturity Scenarios .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................32
Partner Practice Development Framework..............................................................................................................................................................................................34
Define Your Strategy.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................34
Operationalize & Get Trained........................................................................................................................................................................................................................34
Go to Market........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................34
Close & Execute Deals ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................34
Optimize & Grow Your Practice....................................................................................................................................................................................................................34

Define Your Strategy.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................35
Executive Summary ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................36
Define Your Strategy...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................36
Define & Design the Solution Offer ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 37
Understand the Cloud Business Models.............................................................................................................................................................................................. 37
Cloud Profitability Benchmark Assessment .............................................................................................................................................................................................38
Benchmark your business..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................38
Benchmark your cloud business now across the four pillars of the Modern Partner ...................................................................................................38
Develop a Business Plan ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................39
Starting Your Business Plan ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................39
Cloud Opportunity.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................39
Creating the Marketing & Sales Plan ....................................................................................................................................................................................................40
Marketing ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................40
Sales .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................40
Delivery.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................40
Financial Projections..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................40
Capital Requirements............................................................................................................................................................................................................................40
Differentiation..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................40
Develop a Financial Plan.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................41
Financial Projections...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................41
Anticipated Valuation Impact.............................................................................................................................................................................................................41
Risks and Mitigation ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................41
Define & Design the Solution Offer ............................................................................................................................................................................................................42
Defining Your Value Proposition............................................................................................................................................................................................................42
Defining Your Solution Offer ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................44
Project Based Services ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................45
Managed Services ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................47
Intellectual Property....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................50
The Importance of Developing Intellectual Property......................................................................................................................................................................51
Which Azure Services to Include in a Data Platform & Analytics Practice..............................................................................................................................52
Defining Your Pricing Strategy................................................................................................................................................................................................................53
Standard Pricing......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................53
Virtuous Pricing.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................53
Flat Rating Pricing...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................53
Upfront fees..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................55
Payment terms.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................56
Defining Sales Incentives........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 57

Reward a sales action ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 57
The level of incentive versus required selling effort orients the sales ................................................................................................................................ 57
Simple enough to be understood and drive actions................................................................................................................................................................. 57
Sales Compensation Variables........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 57
Positioning the Offer via Incentives................................................................................................................................................................................................. 57
Include Automation ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................58
Continuous Innovation through DevOps............................................................................................................................................................................................58
Key services for this offering...............................................................................................................................................................................................................58
Consider Verticalizing the Offer .............................................................................................................................................................................................................59
Identify Partnership Opportunities ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................61
Partner to Partner..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................61
Make connections with Dynasource.com ......................................................................................................................................................................................61
Get started now.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................62
Getting the Right Partners into the Azure Business...................................................................................................................................................................62
Define Engagement Process..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................64
Pre-Sales & Post Sales.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................64
Pre-Sales.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................64
Post-Sales...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................64
Implementation ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................65
Team Data Science Process.................................................................................................................................................................................................................65
Scrum Process ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................65
Agile Process.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................65
Capability Maturity Model (CMMI) Process .................................................................................................................................................................................65
Join the Microsoft Partner Network............................................................................................................................................................................................................66
About the Microsoft Partner Network .................................................................................................................................................................................................66
Network member ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................66
Action Pack................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................66
Competency .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................66
Take the next step with a competency...........................................................................................................................................................................................66
Microsoft Partner Programs..................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 67
Business Intelligence Partner Program........................................................................................................................................................................................... 67
Advanced Analytics Partner Program............................................................................................................................................................................................. 67
Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 67
P-Seller Program..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 67
MPN to Resource Alignment.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................68
Align Individuals to MPN Requirements .............................................................................................................................................................................................68
Join the Azure Mentor Program....................................................................................................................................................................................................................71

Define Engagement Process.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 72
Identify Equipment, Services and Tools............................................................................................................................................................................................... 72
Practice Cost Calculation................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 73
Estimating your Azure Spend .................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 73
Identify Potential Customers/Pilots ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 76
Build your prospect hit list........................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 76
Define Customer Support Program and Process................................................................................................................................................................................... 77
Support Overview......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 77
Supporting Your Customers..................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 78
Support Options from Microsoft............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 79
Submitting Azure Support Requests.....................................................................................................................................................................................................80
Partner Advisory Hours ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................81
Technical presales assistance ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................82
Deployment services...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................82
Support.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................82
Summary of Support Options .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................83
Operationalize & Get Trained........................................................................................................................................................................................................................84
Executive Summary ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................85
Operationalize & Get Trained..................................................................................................................................................................................................................85
Creating a hiring plan.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................86
Should you Hire New Resources or Train Existing Resources?....................................................................................................................................................86
Hire Resources..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 87
Sales Resources.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 87
Marketing Resources................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 87
Technical Resources.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................88
Management..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................89
Support Resources .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................90
Job Descriptions.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................91
Recruiting Resources.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................98
Top 10 Sources to Find Skilled Labor and What to Look For .......................................................................................................................................................98
Resource Compensation.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 100
Train Your Business Team ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................101
Training is Good for Business..................................................................................................................................................................................................................101
Cloud Platform University ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 102
C+E Partner Curriculum Guide........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 102
MPN Learning Paths............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 102
Microsoft Inspire Conference Recordings................................................................................................................................................................................... 102

Partner Community Events, Calls & Webinars........................................................................................................................................................................... 102
Smart Partner Marketing ................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 102
Build staff on-boarding and mentoring plan........................................................................................................................................................................................ 103
Preparing and Training IT Staff for the Cloud ................................................................................................................................................................................. 103
Complete Training........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 104
Technical Training...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 104
Azure Skills............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 104
Microsoft Conferences........................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 104
Safari.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 104
Pluralsight................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 104
Opsgility ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 104
Partner Community Events, Calls & Webinars........................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Microsoft Virtual Academy ............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 105
edX Courses ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 105
Cloud Platform University ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 105
MPN Learning Paths............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 105
Microsoft Inspire Conference Recordings................................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Azure Skills............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Microsoft Learning On Demand Courses.................................................................................................................................................................................... 105
TechNet Virtual Labs ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Attend a Microsoft Azure Course ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Microsoft Azure eBooks ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Channel 9................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 105
Azure Documentation ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 105
Stack Overflow....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Microsoft Learning Partners ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 105
Complete Certifications................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 106
Solutions Associate Certifications ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 106
MCSA: Cloud Platform Solutions Associate................................................................................................................................................................................ 106
MCSA: Linux on Azure Solutions Associate................................................................................................................................................................................. 106
Solutions Expert Certifications................................................................................................................................................................................................................107
MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure ....................................................................................................................................................................................107
MCSE: Data Management and Analytics ......................................................................................................................................................................................107
Solutions Developer Certifications ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 108
MCSD: App Builder............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 108
MCSD: Azure Solutions Architect ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 108
Setup Azure for internal use......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 109

Azure Credits................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 109
Flexibility with Azure Credits.................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 109
Visual Studio........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 109
Microsoft Partner Network ............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 109
CSP Sandbox........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 109
Ways to Purchase Azure ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................110
EA Agreements.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................110
Pay as you go and Trial Accounts....................................................................................................................................................................................................110
Identify and enroll into Azure Sell Incentives..........................................................................................................................................................................................111
Attaching a Digital Partner of Record (DPOR) ..................................................................................................................................................................................111
How does it work?..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................111
Multiple Partner Support.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................111
Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA)..................................................................................................................................................................................................112
Cloud Solution Provider............................................................................................................................................................................................................................113
CSP Direct .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................113
CSP Indirect..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................113
Identify and apply for Azure Investment Programs.............................................................................................................................................................................114
Cloud and Enterprise (C+E) Investment Programs.........................................................................................................................................................................114
Objectives.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................114
Build materials to support sales and marketing efforts......................................................................................................................................................................115
Understanding Push vs. Pull Marketing..............................................................................................................................................................................................115
Sales and Marketing Resources..............................................................................................................................................................................................................117
Campaigns................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................117
Web Content ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................117
Marketing SureStep..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................117
Services......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................117
Digital Stride............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................117
Microsoft Community Connections ...............................................................................................................................................................................................117
Logo Builder ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................117
Create key contracts.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................118
Key Contracts for your Practice..............................................................................................................................................................................................................118
Service Level Agreement.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................118
Master Services Agreement...............................................................................................................................................................................................................118
Statement of Work................................................................................................................................................................................................................................118
Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement...............................................................................................................................................................................................118
Setup Tools & Systems ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................119
Project Management .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................119

GitHub........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................119
Visual Studio Team Services ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................119
Microsoft Project....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................119
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation ......................................................................................................................................................119
Collaboration Tools & File Sharing ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 120
Microsoft Teams.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 120
Yammer .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 120
OneDrive for Business......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 120
Skype for Business ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 120
Surface Hub............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 120
Customer Relationship Management..................................................................................................................................................................................................121
Support Ticket Setup and Tracking........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 122
Customer Support...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 122
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service ......................................................................................................................................................................... 122
Create Consistency and Loyalty ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 122
Make your agents' jobs easier.......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 122
Get an Adaptive Engine...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 122
Decide on a Solution Marketplace ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 123
Azure Marketplace..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 123
Certify Applications and Services.................................................................................................................................................................................................... 123
Develop your sales channel .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 124
Operationalize ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 124
Cortana Intelligence Gallery................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 125
Experiments ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 125
Jupyter Notebooks............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 125
Solutions................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 125
Tutorials.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 125
Collections............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 125
Competitions.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 125
AppSource..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 126
Power BI ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 126
PowerBI.com Solution Templates................................................................................................................................................................................................... 126
PowerBI.com Partner Showcase...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 126
Increase your visibility............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 126
Create Engagement Checklists & Templates..........................................................................................................................................................................................127
Standardize Customer Engagement....................................................................................................................................................................................................127
Go to Market...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 128

Executive Summary ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 129
Go to Market................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 129
Define your sales process.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 130
Plan your customer’s journey to buying............................................................................................................................................................................................ 130
Advance Analytics Customer Decision Framework ..................................................................................................................................................................131
Launch digital marketing activities ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 132
Build a modern, discoverable website................................................................................................................................................................................................ 132
Social Media............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 132
Content Creation .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 132
DigitalStride............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 132
Digital Transformation with Azure ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 133
Leading with Digital Transformation.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 133
The four pillars of digital transformation include:.................................................................................................................................................................... 133
How enterprises make this work........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 134
Digital Transformation with Azure ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 135
Account Based Marketing (ABM)......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 136
Self-Evaluate........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 136
Get to know your existing customers.............................................................................................................................................................................................137
Use predictive analytics.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................137
Dig deeper............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 138
Engage with Customers & Prospects........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 139
Meetups ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 139
Conferences.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 139
Publications .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 140
Webinars and Podcasts............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 140
Bill of Material (BOM) ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................141
Define Technical Community Strategy.................................................................................................................................................................................................... 142
Engage with Workshops.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 142
Workshops............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 142
Microsoft Technology Centers (Where available).................................................................................................................................................................... 142
Execute Nurture Marketing Efforts............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 143
Creating Long Term Customer Relationships.................................................................................................................................................................................. 143
Why Nurture?......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 143
Invest in relationships ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 143
Authenticity ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................144
Relevance.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................144
Variety.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................144

Follow-up.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................144
Automation.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................144
Engage Technical Pre-Sales in Sales Conversations............................................................................................................................................................................ 145
Selling is Technical ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 145
Find Your Customers....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 146
Find Your First Customer......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 146
Qualifying Your Leads............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 147
Find a business sponsor...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 147
Confirm the budget............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 147
Determine use case.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 147
Ensure customer readiness................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 147
Targeting Advanced Analytics............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 148
Demand Forecasting ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 148
Personalization ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 148
Predictive Maintenance...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 148
Find Your Next Customer........................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 149
Successfully drive your sales and marketing efforts................................................................................................................................................................ 149
DigitalStride............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 149
Web syndication ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 149
Case Study:.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 149
Engage Customers............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................151
Assessing for Customer Readiness........................................................................................................................................................................................................151
Creating a cloud migration plan........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 152
Migration Planning.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 153
Measure Customer Adoption & Engagement....................................................................................................................................................................................... 155
Measure & Track......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 155
Close & Execute Deals .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 156
Executive Summary ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................157
Close & Execute Deals................................................................................................................................................................................................................................157
Develop Customer Adoption & Onboarding Plans ............................................................................................................................................................................ 158
Maximize customer lifetime value....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 158
People ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 158
Process...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 158
Technology ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 158
Identify Opportunities to Co-Sell with Microsoft ................................................................................................................................................................................ 159
Closing the Sale Together....................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 159
Develop Proposal............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 160

Write winning proposals.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 160
Negotiate and Close Deals ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................161
Be on point with Azure Sales Training.................................................................................................................................................................................................161
Training Recommendations ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................161
Pitch Perfect Conversation Checklist........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 162
Selling Azure Solutions............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 162
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PARTNERS...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 162
Deploy/Implement Solutions ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 163
Execute Efficiently ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 163
Architecture Design Session................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 164
Primary Audience ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 164
Before the ADS....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 164
During the ADS...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 164
Discovery.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 165
Envisioning.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 165
Planning ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 165
After the ADS.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 165
Implement Proof of Concepts ............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 166
How to perform a Proof of Concept? ............................................................................................................................................................................................167
Define Scope............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................167
POC Execution ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................167
Next Steps.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................167
Common Proof of Concepts for Data Platform and Analytics: ............................................................................................................................................167
Transition to Managed Services ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 168
Pass the customer off to your managed service team ................................................................................................................................................................. 168
Expectations............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 168
Opportunity............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 168
Digital Partner of Record ................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 168
Best practices for running an Azure project........................................................................................................................................................................................... 169
Troubleshooting Resources...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................170
Data Platform & Analytics Troubleshooting Resources ..........................................................................................................................................................170
Leverage Investment Resources ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................171
Consumption Investment Funds (CIF).................................................................................................................................................................................................171
Deal Support (Pre-Sales).....................................................................................................................................................................................................................171
Driving Consumption & Adoption (Post Sales)........................................................................................................................................................................171

Deployment Planning Services for Data Platform & Analytics.............................................................................................................................................171
Safe Passage ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................172
Azure Everywhere........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................173
Azure Everywhere..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................173
Delivery Format......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................173
Azure Access..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................173
Optimize & Grow Your Practice.................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 174
Executive Summary ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................175
Optimize & Grow Your Practice.............................................................................................................................................................................................................175
Collect Feedback ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................176
The Basics .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................176
Use Feedback to Optimize and Grow..................................................................................................................................................................................................177
Don’t forget the Case Studies ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................177
What is a post mortem?............................................................................................................................................................................................................................178
Land & Expand ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................179
Growing Scope.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................179
Land ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................179
Expand .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................179
Refine Customer Value Proposition.......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 180
Refine Customer Value Proposition and Offer................................................................................................................................................................................ 180
Expand to Similar Customers........................................................................................................................................................................................................................181
Vertical Customer Play ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................181
Optimize Costs.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 182
Efficiency, Profit and Growth ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 182
Metrics that matter in a cloud business............................................................................................................................................................................................. 183
Revisit Partnerships.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 184
Grow Partnerships...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 184
Playbook Summary ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 185

The Booming Cloud Opportunity
IDC forecasts that worldwide public IT cloud services revenue (i.e. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) will
reach $141.2B USD by 2019, a 19.4% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR): almost six
times the rate of overall IT spending growth! SaaS still makes up the majority of spending,
though PaaS and IaaS are expected to grow at almost twice the rate of SaaS over the next five
years.
IDC predicts double digit cloud services growth across all geographies. The US accounted for 64% of revenue in 2015, but will drop to 60%
by 2019. Latin America (31.4% CAGR) and Asia Pacific excluding Japan (24.1% CAGR) will see the highest growth rates for public cloud over
the next 5 years.
Public IT Cloud Services Growth
(2014-2019 CAGR %)
SERVICE MODELS:
SaaS (Software as a Service)
15.8%
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
30.6%
Read the E-Book 
Latin America: 31.4%
Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan): 24.1%
Middle East and Africa: 22.4%
Western Europe: 20.5%
Japan: 20.3%
Central and Eastern Europe: 18.9%
Canada: 18.3%
United States: 18.0%

PLAYBOOK INTRODUCTION PAGE 16
Define Your Practice Focus & Area of
Expertise
This playbook focuses on the Data Platform and Analytics practice. Leverage the Microsoft
trusted hybrid and cloud portfolio – including SQL Server 2016, Cortana Intelligence Suite,
Microsoft R Server, Power BI and IoT Suite – to create rich offerings that transform data into
insights.
BUSINESS ANALYTICS DATA PLATFORM
MODERNIZATION
INTERNET OF THINGS
Build intelligent solutions and apps that
harness the power of data to surface
predictive and cognitive insights –
enabling your customers to make better,
faster decisions.
Area Home
Help your customers build custom
applications, modernize or migrate their
existing application platform to the
leading data solutions from Microsoft.
Area Home
Support your customers with offerings
targeting common Internet of Things (IoT)
scenarios, simplifying deployment and
providing the ability to scale their
solutions to encompass millions of
“things” over time
Area Home.

Understand the Data & Analytics Practice
Why choose Microsoft?
A trusted global leader, committed to partners, a leading analytics platform.
More than 86% of Fortune 500 companies have the Microsoft Cloud (source: Microsoft), which offers companies a fully integrated stack for
any kind of data from on-premises, hybrid or fully in the cloud, with an open cloud platform that supports a wide variety of Operating
Systems and programming languages.
Microsoft has the industry leading database platform in SQL Server 2016, with everything built-in including in database advanced analytics,
built in ETL and mobile and self-service BI (as opposed to offering a myriad of separate SKUs for each component).
Sources: National Institute of Standards and Technology Comprehensive Vulnerability Database update 10/2015,
TPC-H 10TB non-clustered results as of 04/06/15, 5/04/15, 4/15/14 and 11/25/13, respectively.
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results.asp?resulttype=noncluster
SQL Server 2014 and 2016 have set world records in Data Warehouse performance with in-memory and columnstore capabilities, coming in
the top spots for TPC-H performance results in non-clustered environments against 1TB, 10TB and 30TB data sets.

The data story doesn’t stop with SQL Server, however. Microsoft provides a complete big data and analytics platform, from on-premises to
the cloud and relational to the host of options that go beyond relational, all in support of yielding customer insights.
COMMITTED TO PARTNERS
From the diverse range of partner focused training Microsoft produces on sales, marketing and technical topics, to the business investment
funds it makes available to help partners succeed in their customer engagements, to unique programs like the Cloud Solution Provider
program that enable partners to own the complete customer relationship and to marketplaces and digital show cases that highlight
partners to new customers and give partners broad exposure, Microsoft is committed to enabling partner success in Data Platform and
Analytics.
Research shows this commitment to partners also shows appears in the partner revenue, as the average partner sells over $4 of their own
offering for every $1 of Microsoft cloud solution that they sell or influence the sale of. For partners who focus on cloud (e.g., where cloud
revenue is more than 50% of their revenue), that number jumps closer to $6.

Case Studies
One important avenue Microsoft provides is a track record of successful partner engagements. A track record of customer success is an
easy way to build confidence in the solutions your practice recommends and helps win over customers. Microsoft provides a collection of
case studies highlighting how partners make their customers successful through Data Platform & Analytics solutions, including artifacts like
case study PDFs, PowerPoint slides summarizing the key learnings and videos. The Data Platform & Analytics section of the Partner Stories
website also provides a curated collection of case studies. Use these case studies to help you position your offering to customers and to
identify potential solution partners whose practices may complement yours.
The following is a selection of case studies available from the Microsoft Customer Stories website. It is recommended you check back
periodically for new case studies that empower your efforts as a partner.
CUSTOMER CHALLENGE SOLUTION RESULT
JABIL
See the full case
study here
Staying competitive
requires offering
faster, more
personalized
services. Dealing
with impossibly
complex supply
chain logistics with
less quality
assurance can lead
to wasted time.
Use machine learning, predictive
analytics and the cloud to identify and
predict errors or failures before they
happen. Some examples of actionable
insights they were able to deploy are
below:
Failures due to poor quality solder paste
application can be predicted before the
expensive electrical components (CRD)
are applied.
Rewashing a board cost cents, while
discarding a board after CRD application
can cost 10s to hundreds of dollars (e.g.
computer motherboards).
Jabil was able to predict machine processes
that would slow down or fail with an 80%
accuracy.
Jabil was able to deliver an energy savings
of 10% and reduced costs of scrap and
rework by 17%.
Jabil is working towards implementing the
solution across all of their global plants, 110
global factories in phases.
ROLLS ROYCE
See the full case
study here
Flight delays are a
familiar headache
for most people who
fly on commercial
airlines. Minimizing
the cost and
disruption of
maintenance
activities is a key
focus for these
businesses.
Use hundreds/thousands of sensors,
sampled at various frequencies to
monitor hundreds of systems in the
aircraft.
Use historical data to drive 1-2%
increase in fuel efficiency, saving
millions of dollars annually.
Use savings from actionable insight to
offer additional services to customers.
Do failure prediction for next flights and
fleet monitoring using anomaly
detection.
Rolls Royce was able to generate more
efficient flight and maintenance plans.
They gained targeted and actionable fuel
efficiency insights.
They expanded their scope of services to
include TotalCare®, letting customers pay
by engine flying hours.
PIER 1
IMPORTS
Retailer Pier 1
Imports wanted to
better connect with
its customers using
Microsoft and partner MAX451 helped
Pier 1 Imports develop a web-based
solution that collects the retailer’s e-
commerce site data and point-of-sale
Learning how to best serve customers.
Taking the learnings from this pilot, in the
future, Pier 1 Imports expects to gain more

See the full case
study here
insights and data. To
do that, the
company took to
the cloud to pilot a
predictive analytics
solution based on
Microsoft Azure
Machine Learning
and Microsoft Power
BI. As a result of the
pilot, Pier 1 Imports
may use data
insights to predict
which products
customers will want
in the future, create
a dynamic website
using predictive
modelling and
create more efficient
and effective
marketing
campaigns.
store data in Microsoft Azure HDInsight.
That data is then made anonymous and
processed with Azure Machine Learning
models and exported into actionable
Power BI reports and visualizations that
can be accessed by Pier 1 Imports’ data
analysts. They were able to quickly
consolidate and process relevant Pier 1
Imports data and use it to create an
analysis model to help them ask better
questions and use the answers to predict
which products customers might want
to purchase next.
data driven insights to make better
decisions
More effective marketing, stronger
relationships.
By better understanding customer
behaviors and purchases, Pier 1 Imports
can create more effective marketing
campaigns.
ACCUWEATHER
See the full case
study here
AccuWeather
provides weather
forecasts for all
locations worldwide
through multiple
channels including
smartphones,
websites, and social
media. With an
ever-increasing
array of mobile
devices on the
market, the
company looked for
new ways to bring
potentially lifesaving
information to
people anywhere, at
any time.
To handle the escalating demand while
keeping costs under control, the
company migrated its application
programming interface (API) from its
on-premises datacenter to the cloud on
the Microsoft Azure platform in April
2012. The conduit for most of the
company’s services, the API is used by
AccuWeather and its customers to
create customized apps for mobile
devices, websites, and, increasingly,
social media. The transition to the cloud
made it possible to scale out globally,
and it also opened the door for other
opportunities.
Besides scaling better, the new API
significantly expands possibilities for
AccuWeather and its customers by
integrating new data sources and
functionality, including radar feeds,
imagery, and device sensors. For
example, AccuWeather has created
MinuteCast®, a new service that
provides a highly accurate, minute-by-
minute precipitation forecast for the
next two hours. It is available for more
global locations than any other source.
A future initiative includes using Azure
Scale and innovation on demand. With
Microsoft Azure, the company has the
scale and flexibility it needs to adapt to
rapidly changing weather conditions. “Our
data and traffic are driven 100 percent by
weather,” says Patti. “Before, we couldn’t
do any type of adaptive scaling. Now, we
can spin up virtual servers on Azure to
serve 20 minutes of traffic when we need it,
and then turn them off. That type of on-
demand scalability is a huge benefit.”
Transform business operations. The cloud
elasticity helps AccuWeather transform
business operations by improving real-
time big data analytics too. “In the past, we
were really dragged down by capital
expenditures and technology limitations.
With a partner like Microsoft and cloud
scalability, we can handle rapid growth
while focusing on new ways to bring
content to people and organizations.”
More growth at lower capital cost.
Deploying in the cloud is also helping the
company cut costs and implement new
capabilities affordably. No longer held
back by infrastructure, the company has
cut the number of its existing, on-premises

Machine Learning to build predictive
data models based on historical
information and live telemetry data
pulled from mobile phones, cars, and
other devices.
API back-end server computers by about
70 percent.
Lifesaving, real-time information. “With
Azure, we’re bringing weather data to
people who never had it before,” says Patti.
“I heard a story recently about a farmer in a
developing country who got his forecast by
looking through a telescope at a guy a mile
away who held a sign printed with the
weather prediction. Now, he can use a
simple phone and instantly get a
temperature forecast or a warning about
catastrophic events like flooding. It’s a
huge capability to be able to give this kind
of information to people.”
JJ FOODS
See the full case
study here
JJ Food Service
wanted to anticipate
customer orders,
recommend
additional products,
and, above all, cut
the time it takes
customers to place
orders, so they can
spend more time on
their food-service
businesses.
Create predicted shopping lists for
customers.
Capture customer behavior and use
available transactional data to train the
data model.
Integrate Azure ML data and
recommendations to call centers so
customers and customer service agents
have the same information.
JJ Foods now serves up predictive
shopping lists for customers.
The system reviews the total order right
before checkout to see if the combination
of items indicates a possible need for other
products.
These recommendations currently make
up about 5 percent of customers' total
shopping cart.
REAL MADRID
FOOTBALL
CLUB
See the full case
study here
Real Madrid wanted
to increase revenue,
customize
marketing initiatives,
and reinforce the
club’s leadership
position in the
worldwide sports
industry.
Develop PaaS solution for fan
engagement and consumer app, while
using telemetry and analysis to measure
application usage.
Use captured details to deliver
personalized messages and offers in
app.
Real Madrid FC is able to generate highly
personalized and segmented marketing
messages.
They’ve solidified they’re already strong
position with a long-term solution that will
increase customer engagement and most
likely long term revenue as well.
Looking Ahead
In addition to the accomplishments and accolades, it is important to look ahead to the what is coming next from Microsoft by using
Microsoft’s Cloud platform roadmap. You and your customers can get a sense of the new technologies that are on the horizon, and be well
prepared to launch innovative efforts in concert with new capabilities from the Microsoft Cloud.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Data Platform
Modernization Webcast
The Data Platform Modernization
Opportunity
Expect a fast growing, profitable segment
The opportunity for big data and analytics is itself big, with data warehousing and Hadoop
driving large market revenues, and modern data platform approaches expecting significant
growth.
Big data, data warehousing and advanced analytics generate sizeable and profitable projects
for Microsoft partners.
.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Data Platform
The Data Platform Modernization Technology
Scenario
Expect a fast growing, profitable segment
In the data platform modernization practice area, business customers are looking for better
BI and analytics, faster decision making, improved availability/uptime and generally avoiding
technology performance related slowdowns. Addressing customer frustrations like the
following present a significant opportunity:
From the IT side, customers are looking to upgrade their existing data platform for any of
the following reasons:
 End of extended support for SQL Server
 Enhanced features and performance in new SQL Server versions
 Impact on security and compliance
 Execute their Move to Cloud strategy
Modernization means migration, and driving existing mission critical, data warehouse and
advanced analytics workloads from either legacy version of SQL Server or competitors
offerings to the modern data platform offerings.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Data Platform
The Business Analytics Opportunity
Expect a shift to modern business intelligence, and profit.
The trend is towards business led, self-service analytics as the market enters the final stages
of a multi-year shift away from the IT-led system of record.
One way to look at this opportunity is from an industry verticals perspective and how they
map to scenarios in business analytics.

Let’s drill into the highlighted hero scenarios as a means of showing the new value that can
be created by leveraging advanced analytics. The primary examples of this are demand
forecasting, personalization and predictive analytics.
DEMAND FORECASTING
Demand forecasting is the ability to accurately predict demand for products and services based on customer preferences. It helps
customers optimize resources, supply chain and employees by predicting demand. The key value propositions are as follows:
PERSONALIZATION
Personalization means leveraging data and analytics to deliver individualized experience for a current or prospective customer. It means
using data to truly understand the customer and serve them in the best way possible. The key value propositions are as follows:
PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE
Predictive maintenance aims to prevent asset failure, detect quality issues and improve operational processes. The outcomes of which are
to optimize resources, increase revenue and improve efficiency.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure IoT Suite
 Mastering Azure Analytics
Business Analytics Technology Scenario
Build data pipelines that surface insights from enterprise data
assets.
Whether in whole or in part, the BI, Big Data and Data Analytics practice area encompasses
all the following technologies used in creating a data pipeline for hot and cold paths of data
processing, but most customers will leverage only a small subset of the available pipeline
options.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure IoT Suite
Internet of Things (IoT) Opportunity
Expect significant value creation from business to business IoT
scenarios.
With billions of connected things, a trillion dollar market is emerging in IoT. The IoT
opportunity is more than just connecting devices, it is about enabling advanced analytics
against data produced by these devices. It is the ability to sell analytical data and predictions
as intellectual property.
An Internet of Things offer represents an opportunity to include a variety of components,
including connected devices, analytics, visualization and line of business application
integration.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure IoT Suite
The Internet of Things (IoT) Technology
Scenario
Leverage pre-built IoT Suite solutions to accelerate time to
market, or build innovative solutions by integrating Azure
services.
The Azure IoT Suite provides solutions that can quickly get a customer operational, covering
the majority of the use case. These solutions include the Remote Monitoring and Predictive
Maintenance solution, with more solutions coming soon. Naturally, you are also free to
implement your own IoT solution using the various Azure IoT, Storage and Data Services as
building blocks.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure IoT Suite
Maturity Model
Customers exist at differing levels of process and capability
maturity
In order to understand the opportunity available in building a Data Platform and Analytics,
start by understanding where customers are and where you can take them. For this you can
use the Data & Analytics Customer Maturity Model.
The data & analytics customer maturity model is as follows:
Research shows that, mature companies (stage 3 and stage 4) have better business
performance—they generate more revenue, are more profitable, more productive revenue-
wise per employee.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure IoT Suite
Laggards & leaders
Understanding the difference between laggards and leaders is
important to understanding how to succeed with your
customer.
So how do you identify where in the customer maturity model your customer (or prospective
customer) sits? Based on our research laggards and leaders are notably differentiated by
which data technologies they use and how they apply them.
Laggards use less data, more packaged apps, older versions of software and are reluctant to
upgrade:
 Have existing data marts and some data warehouses
 Limited open source use (no Hadoop/Spark)
 Limited use of advanced analytics
 Limited use of cloud
 Rarely transform unstructured data for analysis
 Rarely have an enterprise data lake
 Basic collection of data for business operations decision making with retrospective
analytics.
Leaders use more data, more custom apps, newer versions, are more open to upgrade:
 Have established data warehouses
 Open source use: R, NoSQL, Hadoop, Spark
 Real-time predictive analytics
 Cloud for applications and Data & Analytics
 Commonly transform unstructured data for analysis
 More likely to have an enterprise data lake
 Optimization of data with business processes (marketing investments, operations,
etc.) including real-time analytics

Resources
RESOURCES
 Machine Learning Case
Studies
 HDInsight Case Studies
 Data Lake Analytics Case
Studies
 SQL Data Warehouse Case
Studies
 Power BI Case Studies
Transforming Laggards into Leaders
Show laggards business possibilities and business benefits of
additional IT investment.
After you identify that your customer or prospect is a laggard, create a plan to show them
the business possibilities associated with transitioning into the leader category. Through our
research we found that great ways to do this include holding envisioning sessions with key
stakeholders or line of business decision makers, sharing a case study from Microsoft or one
you have created with a customer of yours, holding a demo or creating a proof of concept.
You can also show them the business benefits of additional IT investment, highlighting the
move towards enabling forward looking, real-time, intelligent business actions as opposed
to looking at the business using only a historical perspective:

Resources
RESOURCES
Studies
Studies
Studies
Maturity Scenarios
Enterprise Data Warehouse and Data Lake Customers
For the customer with enterprise data warehouse, the opportunity for evolving the IT
investments is to gain scale, performance improvements and built-in analytics by upgrading
to SQL Server 2016 or SQL Data Warehouse.
For Data Lake investments, the maturation of the investment comes by first having a data
lake in which to collect unstructured data, then to batch analytics/reporting and ultimately
into enabling real-time analytics on that data. This could be accomplished by deploying
Hadoop alongside SQL Server 2016 or in the cloud leveraging Azure Data Lake Store with
either Azure Data Lake Analytics, HDInsight or SQL Data Warehouse.

RESOURCES
RESOURCES
Studies
Studies
Studies
Maturity Scenarios
Advanced Analytics Customers
For advanced analytic investments, the maturation arrives in layering on predictive analytics,
at first in batch then gradually in real-time. For your customers, this might mean using the
Cortana Intelligence Suite, R Server on Spark, R Services for SQL Server, Azure Machine
Learning and real-time stream processing with Stream Analytics, Spark or Storm on
HDInsight

Partner Practice Development Framework
The partner practice development framework provides five stages that define how to take a practice from concept through to growth. It is
the foundation of this playbook, and each phase of the framework is covered in a dedicated chapter in this playbook.
Define Your
Strategy
Define your offer,
benchmark your practice
and identify required
resources.
Hire or train
resources, complete
certifications and get
your practice ready to
launch.
Execute your sales and
marketing strategy to find
your first customers.
Negotiate deals, writing
winning proposals,
implement contracts and
leverage Microsoft
investment funds.
Collect feedback, identify
expansion opportunities,
optimize your practice,
grow partnerships and
refine your offer.
Operationalize
& Get Trained
Go to
Market
Close &
Execute Deals
Optimize & Grow
Your Practice

DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY PAGE 35
Define Your
Strategy
Data Platform & Analytics

Executive Summary
Define Your Strategy
Now that you understand the opportunity before you in
building a data platform and analytics practice, we will begin by
helping your thoroughly define the strategy upon which your
practice will be built. Like the foundation of the house, thinking
though your strategy is critical to the long-term success of your
practice and it is worth it to take the time to think this strategy
through.
We begin with the decision tree you can use to make the go/no-
go decision on defining and launching your practice based on
increasing levels planning. If you successfully make it through
the key evaluation phases, you can rest assured you’ve
established a solid base.
Upon that we will guide you through the process of defining
your offer and the value proposition your offer encloses. This is a
critical piece of your strategy- it is literally the definition of what
you will sell and why customers will want to buy it. Along the
way we will review the four cloud business models (reselling,
project services, managed services, and intellectual property) ,
their respective profitability and how you can assess the
profitability of your own practice. We will help you drill into how
you should price your offer based—what pricing strategy to use
to drive adoption of your offer, and how to minimize your risk by
establishing upfront fees and payment terms. In addition, we will
cover how you can estimate the Azure related costs you should
account for in launching your practice. The ultimate goal here is
to help you build a solid business
plan that address your team,
marketing, sales and financial
aspects.
Then we dive deeper into sales, to
define your pre-sales and post-
sales engagement process, and
how you should compensate your
sales executives.
If you are not yet a Microsoft Partner, we will provide you the
walking tour of all the key things you need to about the
Microsoft Partner Network, the programs you should be
leveraging to grow your practice, how you earn competencies
that yield you additional benefits and what you should be
planning to maximize the benefits you get from the program.
After that, we’ll give you a head start planning how you can
identify potential customers with which to start your practice
and what services you could offer to them.
We conclude this section helping you understand support—how
you should plan to support your customers, how Microsoft can
provide you with Azure related support, and the support related
benefits you get from establishing your competencies in the
Microsoft Partner Network
Let’s get on to defining your practice strategy.
Top 5 things to do
Measure twice and cut once. Here are
the top 5 things you should absolutely do
to build, grow or optimize your practice.
 Identify your unique value proposition
 Define and price your offer
 Build your business plan
 Leverage the Microsoft Partner Network
 Plan your support options

Define & Design the Solution Offer
Understand the Cloud Business Models
As you get started with your cloud practice,
it’s key to understand that not all revenue
streams are equal.
There are four primary ways to make money selling and
delivering cloud services:
 Resale
 Project Services
 Managed Services
 Packaged Intellectual Property (IP)
Partners that focus almost entirely on product revenue have the
biggest barrier and typically see margins in the range of 5-20%.
This is due to the margins for this revenue line being tied to
vendor incentives. These partners are subject to changes in
strategy and desire to fund programs and have the least control
over their own destiny.
Project services typically drive approximately 35% gross margin but this has been under pressure for some time. This is a result of little
differentiation in the channel which has caused billable price points to hold steady over the past 5+ years, while increasing salary and
benefit costs of consultants and inflation have eroded profitability.
As a result, the aggressive and entrepreneurial members of the channel have adapted and gone after the higher margin opportunities of
managed services which generate on average 45% gross margin and packaged IP which often exceeds 70%.
Managed services is not a new business model. For more than 20 years, large enterprises have relied on service providers to manage their
IT assets. Whether you call them an Outsourcer, an RMM provider, or a Managed IT provider, service providers have been managing their
customers’ workloads—either in their own data centers or those operated by their customers. Cloud, however, requires a new method of
management because of its focus on scale, elasticity, and automation. For CIOs, cloud represents a paradigm shift in the way they think
about embracing IT. Dev-ops has completely changed the way applications are developed and maintained. The hyper-scale nature of
cloud provides a completely new meaning to scalability, elasticity and resiliency – and has redefined how applications are architected and
delivered. The pay-as-you-go model provides a fail fast, agile method of app development. Device and data proliferation means customers
want to—and can—do so much more with their IT assets, with cloud providing the computing resources to do so. Because of cloud, CIOs
are demanding a new way to think about data governance and security. A cloud MSP is someone who helps their customer transition to
(and embrace) this paradigm shift in technology—by guiding them in all aspects of their cloud journey. From consulting to migrations, to
operations management, cloud MSPs show customers all the benefits that come with cloud adoption. This IDC report highlights the
importance of cloud based professional and managed services.
It’s these partners who are setting themselves up to be rewarded. The M&A space is quite active. The partners who have gravitated toward
the recurring revenue lines and realizing healthy growth are being presented with much higher valuations. This can have a dramatic
increase in the cash event of the company and overall shareholder value – far higher than what a traditional partner focused on product
and billable services can realize

Cloud Profitability Benchmark Assessment
Resources
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Cloud Profitability
Scenarios Overview
 Financial Models
 Customer Lifetime Value
Model
 Microsoft Modern Partner
Benchmark your business
Partners have requested help in identifying how they can build a profitable business driving
Microsoft cloud services, devices, and other products. Through IDC research and discussions
with thousands of partners around the world, we’ve identified four pillars of the modern
partner that contribute to building a profitable, sustainable cloud business including:
 Pillar #1: Differentiate to Stand Out
 Pillar #2: Modernize Sales & Marketing
 Pillar #3: Optimize your Operations
 Pillar #4: Deliver Customer Lifetime Value
You can find the key findings of this research in the Microsoft Modern Partner eBook series.
BENCHMARK YOUR CLOUD BUSINESS NOW ACROSS THE FOUR PILLARS OF
THE MODERN PARTNER
Start by answering a series of questions about your business, including questions that cover
firmographics, customer/market orientation, cloud business metrics, customer adoption and
usage, and revenue generating activities. This step should only take about five minutes and
will be the basis of your results, so take your time in entering the correct information.
Once complete, you will receive an overall maturity score of Start, Grow, or Optimize, along
with an individual maturity score for each of the four pillars of the Modern Partner. In
addition to your maturity score you will also be given some recommended next steps to
increase your cloud maturity for each of those pillars. Be sure to follow those recommended
steps and read the Microsoft Modern Partner eBook series.
Now that you understand your strengths and weaknesses across the Modern Partner pillars,
share the results of the assessment with your team. We’ve made it easy to share – simply
download and email the results, or click the “Share Results” button on the site.
Pull your team together to discuss the results, build an action plan and assign ownership of
the tasks you determine are most important. If you have a Microsoft partner account
executive, share the results with them to guide you to the best resources and support
provided by Microsoft.
*Source: IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2016 Predictions — Mastering the Raw Material
of Digital Transformation, doc #259840, November 2015

Develop a Business Plan
Resources
The cloud business plan template
RESOURCES
 Cloud Business Plan
Template
 Video: How to Create a
Marketing Plan
 Marketing Plan Contents
 ROI Worksheet
 Competitive Overview Video
 Offerings Video
 Cloud Financial Models
Starting Your Business Plan
A business plan is critical asset that help you envision and
think through the details of your practice, identify gaps you
will need to address and helps you explain the fundamentals
of your practice to others.
In the pages that follow we provide a section by section walk thru of Cloud Business Plan,
which is a template provided by Microsoft you can use to accelerate your business plan
authoring.
CLOUD OPPORTUNITY
In this opening section describe the overall demand for Cloud Solutions, the reasons it is a
significant business opportunity, and summarize the financial gains you could achieve from
aggressively developing a Cloud practice. If you have data available for your specific market
use it, but the sample text in the plan can be used almost verbatim in many cases.
COMPANY OVERVIEW
In this section briefly describe: How long your company has been in business. How large
your company is, in terms of employees and revenue. What your company does.
TARGET MARKET
In this section describe: The specific market you will target. The rough number of firms in
the target market. If possible, use databases to more precisely define how big your target
market is, but the real key is to give the reader confidence your target market is large
enough to support financial projections laid out in a later section.
COMPETITIVE OVERVIEW
In this section list who your main competitors are in the specific market(s) you will target.
OFFERINGS
In this section describe your specific offerings. In many cases, this can be taken directly from
your website, although care should be taken to present a concise description of what your
company does, and what business benefits the customer derives from that.
DIFFERENTIATION
In this section describe your core strengths relative to the competitors earlier described, and
why they are inherently sustainable and cannot be easily replicated by competitors.
EXECUTIVE TEAM
In this section provide brief bios of your senior management team.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Marketing Infrastructure
 Video: How to Create a
Marketing Plan
 Marketing Plan Contents
 Cloud SureStep Series V1
 Cloud SureStep Series V2
 Sales Infrastructure Video
 Cloud SureStep Series
 IP Development
 Support Infrastructure
 Financial Tutorial
 Capital
Creating the Marketing & Sales Plan
A section by section walk thru for starting your Marketing and
Sales Plan using the Cloud Business Plan template.
MARKETING
In this opening section summarize the overall demand for Cloud Solutions from your
business plan. Describe the marketing strategy you intend to pursue in the Cloud and the
investments you should make to execute this strategy.
SALES
In this section describe: The Cloud sales strategy you intend to pursue and the investments
you must make to execute this strategy,
DELIVERY
In this section describe: The Cloud delivery strategy you intend to pursue and the
investments you will make to execute.
FINANCIAL PROJECTIONS
Using the Cloud Financial Models available, outline your core anticipated financial impact
from executing on your plans.
CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS
Using the Cloud Financial models, indicate the capital you need and how you will spend it.
Review the Financial Leverage video for guidance on sourcing options for the capital. .
DIFFERENTIATION
In this section describe your core strengths relative to the competitors earlier described, and
why they are inherently sustainable and cannot be easily replicated by competitors..

Resources
RESOURCES
 Financial Tutorial
 Capital
 Risks and Mitigation
Develop a Financial Plan
A section by section walk thru for starting your Financial Plan
using the Cloud Business Plan template
A business plan is very much conceptual and doesn’t become real for the reader until the
numbers get plugged in. Investors, customers, partners and others will ask to view this
model during normal business transactions. It will benefit your cloud practice to develop
this financial plan early in your business life. You will want to update them periodically so
they are on hand as needed.
Microsoft provides you with support in building out these financial plans. You can find a
walk-through video here. You will not only learn more about the significance of your
financial planning, but also pick up practical tips on building the model. Taking the time to
think through these important numbers will prove to be beneficial per our most successful
cloud partners. Some of the areas you will want to include in your financial plans include the
following:
FINANCIAL PROJECTIONS
Using the Cloud Financial Models available, outline your core anticipated financial impact
from executing on your plans.
ANTICIPATED VALUATION IMPACT
Using the Cloud Financial models, indicate what the anticipated shareholder value creation
will be.
RISKS AND MITIGATION
List the key business risks that could affect the realization of the preceding financial
projections and how you plan to reduce these risks. In your financial plan it is important to
understand that most cloud business will not be profitable for 12-18 months. Based on a
recent survey of 1,136 Azure partners, survey respondents reporting it taking from 6 months
to 2 years to achieve profitability. It is critical that you plan for this timeframe and ensure you
have enough cash to carry you through until your business is profitable. (Source: Microsoft
Cloud Practice Development Study, MDC Research, November 2016).

Resources
RESOURCES
 Value Proposition Video
Defining Your Value Proposition
Your value proposition is what gets customers excited to
transact business with you and enables them to match their
needs with your services, ideally in a way that differentiates
you from the competition.
Microsoft has created a stream-lined process for defining your value proposition as a part of
the Microsoft Partner Crossover program. In short, defining your value proposition amounts
to building a single phrase from these components:
FOR... Customers, Companies, Decisions makers
WHO... Needs or problems to solve
OUR SOLUTION... Short phrase that describes the solution
DOES/INCLUDES... What is the solution (seen by the customer)
AND ENABLES TO... Benefits for the customers
UNLIKE... Direct and indirect competition
THANKS TO... Killer feature / Company top strength
© 2016 Lemon Operations for Microsoft
FOR: Define the target audience of your value proposition. Who would see the value? These
are the profiles of your target customers, companies and the decision makers within those
companies. Try to make these definitions succinct and precise, but avoid making them too
generic. For example, you might say “Companies between 50 to 100 employees” instead of
just “SMB”. Also, note that the customer may have as many as three different roles- the
customer can be the one who uses your service, the one who decides on selecting your
services and the one who pays for your service. Sometimes all three roles are owned by one
person, but sometimes the roles are spread across two or three people.
WHO: Describe the specific business process you want to help- this is the customer’s need.
Examples of this include “improve sales conversation rate” or “spend less time getting to
sales insights”.
OUR SOLUTION: Describe the solution you are offering to your customer. It is critical this be
simple to understand and succinct. The easier it is for prospects to understand your solution,
the faster you will sell it and the lower will be your cost of sales. For example, “A full
dashboard service to provide your topmost business indicators in real-time”. In defining your
solution avoid being too generic (e.g., “a service to increase your productivity”) or too
feature centric (e.g., “an HTML5 dashboard powered by AJAX”).

DOES/INCLUDES: Describe the features as they are viewed by the customer, not as you have designed them. For example, “A globally
accessible solution with advanced collaboration features” as opposed to “a digital workplace that powers the experience with external
compute in datacenters hosted in 23 regions”. Focus on the most important features and use terms that your customers are familiar with
from their particular industry.
AND ENABLES: Highlight the benefits of your solution. For emerging market, the benefit should highlight the process improvement, while
for a mature market you should consider highlighting the competitive advantage it provides the customer. For example, “No upfront
investment”, “free up your IT resources to focus on your core business” and “flexible and scalable solution that grows with your business”.
UNLIKE: Describe what the competition is doing and why your solution is the best one. For example, “undisputed leader in TPC-H
performance” or “a fraction of the cost of most standard analytic solutions with the fastest learning curve”.
THANKS TO: Describe the “killer feature”, that one tangible argument a customer can use to justify the purchase of your product that does
not apply to any of your competitors. Examples of such differentiators include: “delivered via a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Cloud” or
“the only solution to operate 100% in country”.
Here is an example of a completed value proposition phrase:
FOR... Companies between 50-100 employees, Business services/ Fast growing, CEO/MD/CFO
WHO... Make sure their team are equipped to the right IT equipment, Focus on their core business
OUR SOLUTION... All-in Digital Workplace service for employee
DOES/INCLUDES... IT device, O365, integration, training, support for 79$/m/user
AND ENABLES TO... No upfront charge, one-stop-shopping, evolution
UNLIKE...
Buying fragmented solutions with a big upfront fee to buy the equipment and fund
integration services
THANKS TO... Exclusive 24/7 services / Microsoft Gold Certification
Take the time to create your one phrase value proposition, it sits at the core for your solution offer.

Defining Your Solution Offer
A solution offer is how you package your value proposition.
You determine what it is you think customers will buy and
balance that with how selling that offer is good for your
business. The key here is to think thru this offer in advance of a
customer need.
Most service providers sell using demand-based approach. That
means they are like the clothes tailor who makes every clothing
article on-demand and custom to each individual customer
need. What you want to do is evolve this into an offer-based
approach. In contrast to the tailor, in the offer based approach
you have an inventory of jackets you can offer to customers that
meet their needs directly or with minimal adjustment. To switch
from a demand based approach to an offer based approach, it is
critical to think of your services as a product. This solution offer
includes the unique value you have defined in your value
proposition, the services included, and the way you price the
benefits made available to your customer. The key is that this
solution offer is a stock offering- it is the same offer you can
make to every customer.
Why is this packaging of a solution offer important? First,
because most customers are now shopping for their solutions
and making significant decisions before they even talk to a
salesperson. A well-defined solution offer can turn a lead into a
qualified prospect or even a customer without any active
intervention on your part. A lack of a solution offer, wherein the
lead needs to talk to a salesperson first, may mean the customer
keeps searching and gravitates towards vendors that do provide
a solution offer that meets the customer needs. Second, this
packaging is important because the potential market for tailor-
made offers is significantly smaller (e.g., 10% of the market) than
those for ready-made offers (which may represent 90% of the
market). Third, by having your solution offer packaged in
advance it means your pre-sale effort is done exactly once- you
are not having to repeat it for every prospect. Fourth, because
statistics show that the average gross margins for packaged IP
(like that capture in a well-defined solution offer) can take
project services margins from 15% to over 45%.
Read on to understand how you define the pricing for your offer
as this turns out to be an integral piece as you define your offer.
Be sure to review the content on Project Services, Managed
Services and Intellectual property within this playbook to help
you define what goes into your offer.

Project Based Services
Your solution offer is what you will ultimately sell to your customers. It can take differing forms
depending on the type service you plan to offer.
Project based services are services you offer to help your customers design, configure, implement or support a solution and are typically
charged on one time or non-recurring revenue basis
According to our research, surveying 486 partners having a data platform and analytics practice, the top three project services most
commonly offered were Proof of Concept, Systems Integration and Data Architecture Design. Consider this ordering when prioritizing
which project services to include in your offer.
PROJECT SERVICES
Proof of Concept 60%
Systems Integration 54%
Data Architecture Design 52%
Solution Analysis, Scope, & Design 49%
Custom Application Development 47%
Database Infrastructure Development 46%
Deployment Services 43%
Data Warehousing Deployment 41%
Solution Configuration/Customization 41%
Solution Support & Training 41%
Backup & Storage Deployment 39%
Virtualization Migration & Deployment 39%
Cloud Solution Costing & Spend Optimization 32%
Training 32%
User Experience Consulting 32%
Cloud Readiness Assessment 31%
Data Center Migration 30%
Health Checks 30%
Data Cube Construction 30%
Disaster Recovery Deployment 29%
Scalability & Load Testing 28%
Security & Compliance Enablement 24%
Mentoring 24%
Security & Compliance Assessment 22%
Network readiness assessment 20%
Data Lake Implementation 18%
Data Lake Design 17%
Bandwidth Planning 16%
Security- Penetration Testing 13%
We do not offer any of these project services 4%
ANNUAL REVENUE
Total Median
(n=849)
$55,000
SMB
(n=666)
$50,000
Enterprise
(n=183)
$250,000
When targeting your project services, our
research with partners emphasized the
importance of targeting the enterprise
customer to attain significantly higher per-
project revenue.
Source: Microsoft Cloud Practice Development Study, MDC Research, November 2016.

Don’t be an ostrich. Cloud makes software
your competitive advantage. We have
packaged repeatable projects that are
focused around rapidly demonstrating
value within the cloud and identifying the
big transformational opportunities…
Alex Brown
CEO, 10th Magnitude
“
“

Managed Services
Managed services are services you offer to help your customers on a regular and recurring
basis by offering white-glove support.
As an Azure managed service provider, your offerings can span from planning, enablement and day-to-day operations.
Managed services can help to DEEPEN YOUR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP:
 Truly engage with customers, meet their needs, and solidify relationships
 Deep relationships unlock further revenue opportunities – especially with cloud migration and net new app development
 With CSP - Microsoft partners can offer managed services not just for Azure, but for all Microsoft cloud services products
including Office 365, EMS, and Dynamics CRM OnlineManaged services provide your practice with recurring revenue:
 Month in, month out billing to customers for managed services packages
 Ensures a constant revenue stream as opposed to a project based method • Revenue grows as customer cloud spend grows
Managed services yield HIGHER MARGINS:
 Typical managed services gross margins (45%) higher than professional services (35%) and resale services (15%)
 Margins increase with scale and automation
Managed services UNLOCK PORTFOLIO OPPORTUNITIES:
 Diversify your managed services portfolio with Azure
 Add new offers like cloud dev/test, cloud backup and data recovery, cloud native app design, etc. to your practice
 Serve global customers with Azure’s geographic presence.

Most Azure MSPs offer seven discrete areas of functional support:
1. Cloud assessment & planning
2. Cloud migrations/deployment
3. Infrastructure operations management
 Configuration management
 Automation/DevOps
 Backup & Disaster Recovery
 Identity management
4. Monitoring
5. Cost optimization
6. Security
7. Support
According to our research, surveying 486 partners having a cloud application development practice, the top three managed services most
commonly offered were Application Lifecycle Management & Support, Application Support/Help Desk, and Configuration Management.
Consider this ordering when prioritizing which managed services from the aforementioned menu to include in your offer.
MANAGED SERVICES
Application Lifecycle Management & Support 43%
Application Support/Help Desk 40%
Configuration Management 32%
Reporting and Analytics 30%
Single Sign-On Management 29%
Troubleshooting 29%
Azure Consumption Monitoring & Optimization 29%
Microsoft support (interface between MSFT &
customer)
27%
Performance Monitoring and Reporting 26%
Virtual Database Administration 26%
Reports and Dashboard Maintenance 25%
PowerShell Script Automation 24%
Critical Response Support 23%
Reactive Help Desk Support 22%
Reports & View Adjustments 21%
Workload Performance Monitoring 20%
Mobile Device Connectivity & Management 18%
Network Monitoring 18%
Data Center Performance Monitoring &
Optimization
17%
Security Management & Identity Protection 16%
Identity as a Service 15%
Online Training and Self-Paced learning 13%
Anti-Virus Monitoring 13%
Web defense (restricting URLs, phishing
malware, spam)
12%
We do not offer any of these managed services 22%
REVENUE
Total Median
(n=467)
$100,000
SMB
(n=338)
$50,000
Enterprise
(n=129)
$100,000
When targeting your managed services, our
customer to attain significantly higher
managed revenues.

Ensure you are solving a problem. Attach
managed services wherever possible and
make sure you have a very robust offering
around it. This allows for a scalable high
margin business.
Nick Sone
CEO, Ensyst
“
“

Intellectual Property
Intellectual property (IP) includes the proprietary elements you develop in-house, own,
maintain and sell directly or as value add to project and managed services.
Productizing IP and creating repeatable processes has been a very successful strategy for many partners. Some partners are achieving gross
margins in excess of 70% by productizing IP and selling it to their customers on a recurring revenue basis. Productizing IP helps you create
stickiness with customers and opens up opportunities to sell your solutions through the partner channel. If you don’t want to create your
own IP, you can also look to the partner ecosystem for incremental solutions that can be bundled with Microsoft’s offerings to round out
your total solution.
There are multiple opportunities for building intellectual property that can be used to expedite engagements, or even as an entire
engagement. With the ability to create fully automated solutions partners can challenge their creative side to offer up solutions that can
save their customers money as well as add a striking differentiator amongst your peers.
According to our research, surveying 486 partners having a data platform and analytics practice, the top three intellectual property services
most commonly offered were Pre-Configured Dashboards, Automated Data Migration and Integration and Customer Self Service Portals.
Consider this ordering when prioritizing which managed services to include in your offer.
It may surprise you to see that 41% do not offer any of these intellectual property services. In our conversations with partners this translated
into one of two scenarios—they either did not have IP based services or they had very differentiated services from the list we provided. This
wide variability means there is an opportunity for providing your own IP to differentiate your practice in the market.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY SERVICES
Pre-Configured Dashboards 30%
Automated Data Migration & Integration 26%
Customer Self-Serve Portals 26%
Turnkey BI Portals 24%
Automated Monitoring, Alerting, & Logging 23%
External Portals for End Customer Information 23%
Vertical specific functionality 20%
Automated Consumption Monitoring &
Reporting
19%
Middleware for Hybrid Synchronization 15%
Online Training & Self-paced Learning 14%
We do not offer any of these intellectual
property services
41%
ANNUAL REVENUE
Total Median
(n=519)
$14,500
SMB
(n=401)
$20,000
Enterprise
(n=118)
$75,000
When targeting your IP services, our
customer to attain significantly higher IP
services revenue.

The Importance of Developing Intellectual Property
Implementing IP in your Cloud Offerings
Tips to get you started with productizing your IP and going to market:
1. DEFINE YOUR SOLUTION. Through our research process, when we asked partners how they determined what IP they
were going to build, we often got the same answer, which is that they realized most of their customers were asking for the
same thing or something very similar, and rather than continuing to do high-cost custom work for every customer, they
decided to productize what their customers were asking for. Bring your sales, marketing, technical and delivery teams
together to brainstorm and define what your solution will look like.
2. DETERMINE WHAT WILL DIFFERENTIATE YOUR SOLUTION from others in the market. It is really important that
you think about your differentiation strategy. What is going to make your solution better than other solutions like it in the
industry?
3. MAINTAIN RIGHTS TO THE IP. It is critical that you maintain the IP rights to the solutions and get customers to agree to
the terms through your customer agreements
4. ESTABLISH A RECURRING REVENUE MODEL. The beauty of deploying IP in the cloud space is that you can light up
the recurring revenue model which will have a positive impact on the valuation of your business and will help even out your
cash flows in the future.
5. CONSIDER YOUR CHANNEL STRATEGY. One of the advantages of productizing your IP is that it opens up a lot of
doors to sell your solution through channel partners.
6. CONSIDER SOURCING STRATEGY. In order to develop IP, it is not necessary to build your own development
organization. There are thousands of companies in the world that do software development as a service. But remember to
secure rights to your IP in this case.
Here are a couple of resources for an even deeper dive into cloud profitability:Check out Blue Rooster’s story on how they transitioned
from a project services to an IP focused partner in just nine months! Resources: IP Development and Create Stickiness with IP

Which Azure Services to Include in a Data Platform & Analytics
Practice
Based on a recent survey of 491 Azure partners delivering data platform and analytics
solutions, survey respondents reporting we identified the following services has being the
most commonly include in solution offerings.
It may surprise you to see Azure Active Directory near the top of the list for data centric solutions- it should serve as a reminder not to get
lost in offering features but to think about the complete solution you offer to your customers, which as these statistics show includes
considerations for identity and security as managed by Azure Active Directory.

Defining Your Pricing Strategy
Pricing your offer is no longer determined simply by cost plus margin.
Pricing a product or offering is different in today’s marketplace.
Increasingly it is about return on value (ROV)—the added
benefits (e.g., better per unit price, improved service
characteristics) your customer gets by being a better customer
of yours (e.g., buying contracts with longer durations, making
upfront payments, etc.). Customers will only pay as much as the
value they estimate they will get from the offering. Price is
rarely mentioned on service provider web sites. The sales copy
speaks of partnerships and bring out the price only after
speaking to a sales representative. In an offer-based strategy this
will not work. In the business of cloud price is always disclosed
up-front. Because price is part of your value proposition, part of
your solution offer, your pricing is something you can be proud
of and share. Remember you are in a race – against yourself and
competition. Be proud and show your price early removing any
customer concerns. Pricing is now a result of the product and it
begins with your value proposition. To understand how to price
your offers let’s review the pricing strategies to see the benefit
they bring to your solution offer.
STANDARD PRICING
Pricing is the consequence of the product and aligns to
accepted industry/application standard. Think of this as
reference pricing, as in customers have seen similar products
sold for this amount, so you price your offer so that it is close to
that accepted price. What’s the
standard price for a mobile phone
app? $0.99. If you charge more, you
are breaking from the industry
accepted, standard pricing. This is an
old way to look at pricing. Buyers
today will accept this model, but they
do not prefer it and it provides
minimal help in getting your offer
purchased. © 2016 Lemon
Operations for Microsoft
VIRTUOUS PRICING
Virtuous pricing is about using the price as a sales weapon. The
goal of virtuous pricing is to create a virtuous sales cycle within
your customers, where each sale encourages the next sale within
the customer organization. It fosters product adoption and
proliferation. Let’s begin with a counter example of what is not
virtuous pricing—a fixed price per user. Here, you have a simple
pricing (which is important), but there is nothing to encourage
more aggressive purchasing by the customer.
Enter digressive pricing, which drops
the per unit price with purchase of
more units. Your customers get a
discount per unit price the more they
buy. This can help create a virtuous
sales cycle within the customer
because now the customer is looking
for way to bring their cost per unit
(e.g., user) down. © 2016 Lemon
Operations for Microsoft
For example, assume one line of business has already purchased
19 users from you at $49 per user. Now, there are discussions
within another line of business within the same customer
organization to purchase a similar product from a competitor or
to purchase yours. Your existing customer is incentivized to
lobby on your behalf because if the other line of business
purchases your product their cost per user will drop to $39 per
user. And the cycle can continue as each new group evaluates
your solution offering.
There is a way to adjust digressive pricing slightly to make it
significantly more profitable—this is called step pricing This
method sets the price for each step as the top number of users in
the range. Building on the example from digressive pricing, let’s
say that the customer purchased 15 users. They would pay for
the equivalent of 19 users since that is the price for this range of
units. Why is this more profitable? Because your customer is
effectively paying you for the 4
users they are not using (yet)—
which goes straight into your
profits. What’s more is you have
amplified the virtuous sales cycle,
because the customer wants to get
as close the maximum number of
users for the step as possible in
order to get the lowest possible cost
per unit within the step.© 2016
Lemon Operations for Microsoft
FLAT RATING PRICING

This is one of the most powerful business pricing strategies.
You have probably already experienced it although you may not have realized. It is leveraged by banks, insurance, etc. every time you pay
premiums. While it can have varying levels of sophistication (banks and insurance firms use very sophisticated versions of this based on
significant work by their actuaries), the model can be described and implemented in a simple fashion. The basic idea is you provide a
certain quantity of value for a set cost that all customers pay. Some customers may come close to (or even exceed) using the full value of
what they pay for, while the rest are nowhere close. A well-crafted model identifies the average consumption across all of your customers,
and creates a situation where over 80% of the customers are using less than what they are paying for (and ideally less than the average
consumption) and fewer than 20% are using more. You set your price to be above the average consumption. By doing so, clients in the
80% who use less than what they pay for generate your profit. The further they are below the average consumption, the more profit they
generate. For the 20% who use more than they pay for, you might take a loss on them individually. However, in the aggregate the long tail
represented by the 80% of customers who do not fully use what they pay for more than covers the cost of your heavy consumers, and these
heavy consumers are likely to be your biggest champions so there are tangential benefits to supporting their cost. Pricing model built
around Flat Rate Pricing have shown between 1.5 and 3 times as much profit as traditional models.

UPFRONT FEES
Another consideration of your pricing strategy is if you charge your customers an upfront fee.
Reasons for doing so including providing some working capital to get resources going in the
early days of your practice, mitigating the risk that a customer abandons a project without
any payment and ensuring the customer is as invested in project as you are. It can also serve
to minimize financial impact to your practice when the customer has requested longer
payment terms (see next section).
In our recent survey of 1,136 Azure partners, we found that only about half charged an upfront fee for project or managed services. When
an upfront fee was requested it was typically less than 25% of the total project or managed services fee.
Source: Microsoft Cloud Practice Development Study, MDC Research, November 2016

PAYMENT TERMS
The final consideration for your pricing strategy is the payment terms. This is defined as the
duration of time between when you invoice the customer for service rendered and when you
receive payment from the customer. Payment terms are measured in days, for example 10
days, 15 days, 30 days or 90 days. These are usually expressed as NET 10, NET 15, NET 30 or
NET 90 payment terms. In addition, you might consider offering the customer a discount for
prompt payment on your shortest payment. For example NET 2/10/30 is used to describe
terms where a 2% discount is provided for payment received within 10 days of invoicing,
otherwise the full invoice amount is due in 30 days.
In the Microsoft Cloud Practice Development Study, we found that the most common payment terms used was NET 30, and that for SMB
customers shorter payment terms were preferred.

Defining Sales Incentives
Compensation for sales executives is an area all partners grapple with. Without the right mix
in compensation, you won’t attract and retain the best people and they won’t drive the offers
you intend. Our research revealed three core principles of sales compensation.
REWARD A SALES ACTION
This means you need to reward an array of sales activities not just the final close. Sometimes this can be challenging. The reward does not
have to be big, but there must be something to reward the right sales behavior that will lead to the final sale.
THE LEVEL OF INCENTIVE VERSUS REQUIRED SELLING EFFORT ORIENTS THE SALES
Not all sales are created equal. Sometimes a renewal, for instance, can be much easier than acquiring a new customer. You need to
consider effort put in when setting up your compensation model. Reward, reward, reward … the right behavior that gets you to the result.
Don’t over-compensate for routine activities that require less effort and expertise. You should always consider how much of the sales
process can be done by lower level sales staff versus the sales executive. This is also a way to keep sales compensation costs manageable.
SIMPLE ENOUGH TO BE UNDERSTOOD AND DRIVE ACTIONS
Always keep it simple. Sales people are brought on for their ability to communicate, engaging ways, skills in educating and the always
important act of closing. Don’t overly complicate sales actions required to be compensated. Drive the behavior that you know leads to
closing business. Reward that behavior and get your reps to see it through to the close of business.
Remember that everyone is a seller in most companies. You should train all employees in appropriate sales techniques. Everyone should be
on the lookout for existing customer opportunities as well as new ones. Teach them the signs and how to react. Reward everyone in the
company for positive sales behavior.
SALES COMPENSATION VARIABLES
When deciding how to calculate the compensation for your sales incentives, consider the variables that help describe the magnitude of the
benefit of the sale to the company and the effort required to close the sale. Examples of this include:
 Expected Duration: How long is the contract for?
Longer contracts are more lucrative to the
company, and should have higher valued
incentives.
 Expected # of Units: How much of the service is
purchased? Higher quantity purchases deliver
more value to the company, and should have
higher valued incentives.
 Feature options: Some offer features are more
profitable to the company than others. Consider
incentivizing the higher profit margin features
with higher valued incentives to drive sales.
Positioning the Offer via Incentives
Depending on the maturity of your practice, you may have to create different incentives to encourage the selling of the offer. The following
diagram illustrates a decision-making process you can follow to tune your incentives based on how the offer’s incentives compete with
other company incentives.

Resources
In a dev-ops world, customers
expect you to provide continuous
integration, deployment, and
automation for all their applications.
Everything from code deployment
to testing, staging to release, can be
automated. This is an opportunity
for you to help your customers
leverage the full dev-ops experience
of developing on Azure.
RESOURCES
 Azure Automation
 Azure Automation DSC
 Azure PowerShell
 Azure CLI
 VSTS DevOps and ALM
 Chef, Puppet, Docker and Linux
VMs
 Using Jenkins and Storage for
Continuous Integration
3RD PARTY RESOURCES
 Chef
 Puppet
 Jenkins
 Ansible
 SaltStack
Include Automation
Automation and orchestration are extremely important
functions to a successful Azure practice.
Your ability to automate routine tasks allows you to lower your delivery costs and offer
superior SLAs – driving a virtuous cycle of efficiency and repeat business. Automation is the
key to creating the right balance between cost, reliability, speed, and time to market.
Automation can also offer significant benefits to the customer as it can optimize Azure
spending and increase reliability for workloads that have varying resource requirements.
Some of the key customer challenges and questions you may face include:
 Customer lacks technical expertise required to efficiently manage PCs, servers,
software, user access, and policies
 Customer lacks a unified toolset for implementing an appropriate configuration
management work stream
 Customer lacks a unified management plan and instead carries out changes on live
equipment on an ad hoc basis
 Lack of resources and knowledge to maintain their own system and integrate
automation capabilities
 Automation tools are perceived as too complicated and too expensive to
implement
 Lack of familiarity with dev-ops approach to operations - or unable to bring the
cultural change required to adopt dev-ops as a way of doing things
 Fear and uncertainty surrounding the loss of control associated with automation
 IT environments are not mature or well defined enough to warrant automation
Continuous Innovation through DevOps
For Dev-ops on Azure it is important to have a strong understanding of the command line
tools and Azure Resource Manager templates as well as services like Chef or Azure
Automation DSC to enable configuration management for a stronger offering. With these
tools in your toolbelt you can automate tasks normally done through the Azure
management portal and control large amounts of resources with fewer people.
KEY SERVICES FOR THIS OFFERING
 Template and script authoring
 Automatic start and stop of virtual machines (cost optimization)
 Automatic scale down of services
 Continuous deployment and Integration
 Configuration management

Consider Verticalizing the Offer
Through our research we found that a key best practice among top performing partners is that they are targeting industries or verticals as a
part of their go to market strategy. The following are examples of these types of specialization:
 Vertical specialization: manufacturing, banking, retail
 Functional process specialization: accounting, human resources, marketing campaign management
 Technology specialization: systems management, analytics, enterprise resource planning
Think about it this way, if there is lack of differentiation in the market owing to approaches like verticalization, then price becomes the
primary differentiator between you and your competition. This can erode your margins and trap you in a business you can’t afford to invest
in as prices race to the bottom in order to win customers.
Once you have a identified a primary vertical or set of verticals to focus on, it will be important for you to establish your company as an
expert in your the selected areas. This can be achieved through the hiring of subject matter experts, attendance and participation in
industry events and online forums, blogging about the chosen topic, sharing customers stories oriented to each vertical and creating
content that speaks to the specific needs of customers in each vertical. You can also focus on a specific technology or be known as an early
adopter and technology leader. But the real value comes from IP or expertise in an industry, vertical or business process. The combination
of adding IP to a vertical or business process expertise makes that advantage even more powerful For additional ideas see the Differentiate
to Stand Out ebook.
Our research with partners suggest mastering one specialization before adding additional ones. We understand that it is easy to be
distracted, by saying “yes” to every request, and by diversifying into too many offerings. But in the long run, it is better to say “no” to those
projects that are outside of your focus. Partners have shown benefit from having a strict focus on one key solution and growing by
expanding one vertical at a time.
EXAMPLES OF VERTICALIZING THE OFFER FOR THE DATA PLATFORM & ANALYTICS PRACTICE
Let’s look at some examples of how you can verticalize the unique value propositions of predictive maintenance offer across four different
verticals.

RETAIL MANUFACTURING
 Reduce unscheduled downtime of in-store equipment -
like elevators, escalators, refrigerators, etc.
 Optimize inventory management
 Develop a more cost-effective, collaborative supply
chain
 Deliver engaging in-store experiences
 Use telemetry to determine quality of POS systems and
predict when failure will occur
 Proactively schedule maintenance of equipment to
maintain high levels of equipment uptime
 Up-sell custom maintenance services based on
customer use patterns
 Predict outages on the assembly line process and
improve product quality
 Utilities: Predict outages in power generation
equipment
 Oil and Gas: Develop custom and optimal maintenance
schedules for expensive assets such as submersible oil
pumps
HEALTHCARE GOVERNMENT
 Reduce equipment maintenance spend - hospitals typically
spend 5-10% of their capital budgets on equipment
maintenance
 Use machine learning to identify potential emergency issues
for home care patients
 Provide streamlined, collaborative care
 Give patients self-service access to certain devices
 Proactively manage health trends
 Enable faster response times and quicker issue
resolution
 Balance maintenance services based on citizen use
patterns
 Understand the impact of events and incidents
 Simplify compliance and auditing
 Make better informed decisions with deeper
understanding of citizen and business needs
 Find ways to operate more efficiently

Identify Partnership Opportunities
Resources
RESOURCES
 Smart Partner to Partner
Relationships
 A Recipe for Global Success
 Dynasource
 Selling thru Partners
 The right ingredients for
partner-to-partner success
 4 Ways to Increase Revenue
through a Partner Channel -
Entrepreneur.com
Partner to Partner
Build Smart Partner Relationships and focus on what you do
best
It is tempting to want to do everything related to your business, but the fact remains you will
never have enough time. This is a primary reason to seek out compatible partners that can
help you to:
 Complete your solution by filling in gaps you do not offer
 Build credibility
 Provide infrastructure you do not offer
 Leverage joint marketing
 Increase revenue by expanding the services & products in your offer
 Broaden your customer base
Finding the right type of partnerships is key to finding success in today’s incredibly
competitive market. Some partner combinations meld together wonderfully to create truly
satisfying success, and to help you find the right mix, here’s an example of a partner recipe
we know works:
ISV + channel-based MSP partners = international success
Find out what’s in it for the Partners and customer and the secret of success.
MAKE CONNECTIONS WITH DYNASOURCE.COM
It’s hard to beat the value of partner-to-partner conversations and networking. Luckily, there
are communities to help you expand your network and make an even bigger impact on your
business.
Dynasource is, a global two-sided marketplace that allows partners to connect with other
firms that have complementary expertise and capabilities. If you have excess capacity,
increase your billability and profitability by finding partners that can drive utilization of
your staff. If you lack the capacity, Dynasource can help you connect with partners that
have the expertise to enable and expand your solutions.
If your customers are looking for a solution that is outside your particular expertise, you
can use Dynasource to find an expert that can provide that solution. By connecting
through Dynasource and agreeing to work together, you can meet customer demand for
needs across the Microsoft portfolio and grow your business.

TRANSFORM THROUGH COLLABORATION
After you’ve created a profile on Dynasource, you can search the Dynasource Microsoft Partner Community for qualified resources that can
collaborate with your team on an opportunity. This allows you to transform your cloud business and expand your offerings at a pace that
works for you.Increase demand for your resources
Business is not always predictable, but retaining your quality staff is essential to your success. With Dynasource, you are able to make
your resources and capabilities available to partners who can utilize them today, making your workforce agile and billable.
GET STARTED NOW
In order to join Dynasource, all you’ll need is general information about your business. Once you create a profile, you will be able to
search for other resources and jobs, as well as create and post your own. You will be able to control the availability of your resources
and what level of information you would like to share about your capabilities. With the Dynasource premium membership, you’ll be able
to request connections with other members and resources.
GETTING THE RIGHT PARTNERS INTO THE AZURE BUSINESS
Matching the right partners with an Azure practice sometimes takes help from Microsoft.
First you want to look at the different types of Azure Partners Microsoft has. Do you have strength in one or more of these areas today?
Can you build muscle in other areas? Where do your interests and professional contacts lie? Microsoft offers Partnership opportunities in
these four areas.
 Cloud Application Development
 Cloud Infrastructure & Management
 Data Platform & Analytics
 Mobility & Security
46% of solution providers collaborate with other channel partners to target a vertical and enhance their
total solution.
Instead of trying to develop all the vertical expertise in-house, work with other partners to
complete vertical solutions.
If there is a leading provider(s) in your vertical market, figure out how to work with them. You can better serve your customer by working
together. Alliances that allow customers to continue to utilize legacy components can streamline projects for both you and your customer.
If you have horizontal intellectual property (IP) or unique skills, you may be able to differentiate by working with partners with vertical
expertise. You can decide how the relationship works on a partner by partner basis. For instance, you may just need a partner to introduce
you to the right decision maker in a vertical. If you don’t speak the language of the vertical, you may need a partner to take on the sales
consultant role. You may want the partnership to extend to scoping the requirements for a vertical or to jointly build a vertical-specific
version of your IP.
There are many ways that a Partner to Partner (P2P) relationship may help you specialize. You probably will need separate partnerships for
each vertical focus. If one or two verticals become dominant, consider developing your own internal expertise.

Working with other partners can also be an effective method of expanding your geographic reach or to provide ongoing customer support
more efficiently than you can yourself. In most scenarios, working with other partners allows you to focus on your own core advantages.
Some strategies to make the most out of your partnerships:
 Identify the vertical market pain point you would like to solve and identify the various players that contribute to current practices.
 Next determine if there is a player (or two) that you can work with to build a solution more efficiently that starting from scratch.
 Analyze the opportunity by developing a plan and a deep cost analysis to make sure it will be profitable before jumping in.
 Identify the verticals where you have opportunities for your horizontal IP.
 Look for partners that have the vertical expertise you need by utilizing Microsoft Partner Center and other ecosystem resources.
 Clearly define your joint strategy and roles so the customer sees a unified force.

Define Engagement Process
Resources
 Hybrid and Cloud Briefing
Deck
 Dev and Test Pitch Deck
 Development and Test
Solution Architecture
 Line of Business Pitch Deck
 SAP on Azure Technical Pitch
Deck
 Microsoft Apps Technical
Pitch Deck
 Java Apps Technical Pitch
Decks
 Consistent Hybrid Cloud
Pitch Deck
 Software Define Data Center
Pitch Deck
 Business Continuity and
Disaster Recovery Pitch Deck
 Backup and Archival
Technical Data Deck
 Disaster Recovery Technical
Data Deck
 Technical presales and
deployment services
Pre-Sales & Post Sales
Get ready for sales by defining the technical effort required
before the sale (pre-sales) in support of a sale and after the
sale (post-sales). You will need to decide for your solution
offer the technical pre-sales and post-sales requirements.
PRE-SALES
The technical effort required to make the sale typically involves the following steps:
 Discussion of the customer requirements and objections.
 Technical pitch deck
 Technical demo. This demo may be generic or may need customization to the
better meet the requirements of the customer. The goal of the technology demo is
to inspire confidence in your ability to deliver the desired solution by
demonstrating you have “already done something like it before”.
A pre-sales bill of materials should be prepared before meeting your first customer that
addresses these items.
POST-SALES
The technical effort required after the sale typically involves the following:
 Addressing follow-on customer concerns about the technology or implementation
 Providing training to increase awareness of the solution that will be implemented
 Providing a technical demo more customized for the customer to better
understand their needs before moving on to the next phase of the project.
 Follow-up with the customer to ensure implementation is on track and meeting
expectations
Do not wait until after you have closed the first deal to think thru the aforementioned post-
sale items. A profitable practice results from having repeatable processes- the more you can
have at the ready after closing the sale the closer you are to payment. For guidance with
these sales efforts, consider the Microsoft Partner University learning paths:
 Data Platform Solutions (SQL Server 2016)
 Advanced Analytics
 Business Intelligence
Also, consider that Microsoft provides support for technical presales and deployment
services. See Partner Advisory Hours in this document.

Resources
RESOURCES
 How to Choose a Process
 Team Data Science Process
 Agile Process
 Capability Maturity Model
Process
Implementation
The process you follow in delivering your solution to your
customer is just as important as the technologies you use to
deliver it.
When it comes to delivering solutions for a Data Platform and Analytics Practice choose
from among the following (or incorporate the aspects from the below) that best fit your
needs and your team
TEAM DATA SCIENCE PROCESS
The Team Data Science Process (TDSP) provides a systematic approach to building
intelligent applications that enables teams of data scientists to collaborate effectively over
the full lifecycle of activities needed to turn these applications into products.
SCRUM PROCESS
The Scrum process works great if you want to track
product backlog items (PBIs) and bugs on the
Kanban board, or break PBIs and bugs down into
tasks on a task board. This process supports the
Scrum methodology as defined by the Scrum
organization. Tasks in this process support tracking
remaining work only.
AGILE PROCESS
Choose Agile when your team uses Agile planning
methods, including Scrum, and tracks development
and test activities separately. This process works
great if you want to track user stories and bugs on
the Kanban board, or track bugs and tasks on the
task board. You can learn more about Agile
methodologies at the Agile Alliance. Tasks support tracking Original Estimate, Remaining
Work, and Completed Work.
CAPABILITY MATURITY MODEL (CMMI) PROCESS
Consider CMMI when your team follows more formal
project methods that require a framework for
process improvement and an auditable record of
decisions. This process supports formal change
management activities. Tasks support tracking
Original Estimate, Remaining Work, and Completed
Work.

Join the Microsoft Partner Network
RESOURCES
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Partner Network
 Join the Microsoft Partner
Network
 Microsoft Action Pack
 Cloud Platform Competency
 Explore All Competencies
About the Microsoft Partner Network
The Microsoft Partner Network is the start of your journey.
As a Microsoft partner, you gain tools, resources, and support to build your business.
The Microsoft Partner Network provides three types of memberships. Each type provides a
set of benefits to help your business grow. As you achieve your goals, participate in the
program at the level that suits your unique needs to access more benefits and develop your
relationship with us and other partners in the network.
NETWORK MEMBER
This no-cost, basic level is your first step to receiving relevant information and exploring
Microsoft’s resources. You will receive a set of no-cost introductory benefits to help you save
time and money.
ACTION PACK
Access developer tools, support, training, and software to run your business. This affordable
yearly subscription is for businesses looking to begin, build, and grow their Microsoft
practice in the cloud-first, mobile-first world through a wide range of software and benefits.
Action Pack includes all the benefits of a Network membership.
COMPETENCY
Be rewarded for your success with increased support, software, and training.
TAKE THE NEXT STEP WITH A COMPETENCY
As a competency partner, you can earn both gold and silver competencies in one or more
areas. Earn a silver competency to help your business demonstrate its expertise or a gold
competency to showcase your best-in-class capabilities within a Microsoft solution area.
Later in this playbook we’ll review the competencies relevant for launching a successful
Microsoft Azure Practice.

Join the Microsoft Partner Network
Resources
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Partner Network
 Get Started in the Business
Intelligence Program
 Get Started in the Advanced
Analytics Program
Microsoft Partner Programs
Join the Partner Programs Designed for your Data Platform &
Analytics Practice
The following programs all build upon your membership in the Microsoft Partner Network
and provide you with additional benefits and incentives as you prove your practice by
earning competencies, passing assessments and winning customers in your practice focus
area.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PARTNER PROGRAM
The Business Intelligence Partner program enables you to build your expertise and showcase
your solutions to customers. It enables you to get listed on PowerBI.com and supports you in
becoming a Solution Partner where you can be showcased on PowerBI.com, AppSource.com
or get listed as a Solution Template partner on PowerBI.com. This program also provides
funding programs you can tap into for delivering workshops or proof of concepts to your
customers.
ADVANCED ANALYTICS PARTNER PROGRAM
The advanced analytics partner program enables you to get listed as a partner who can
deliver Advanced Analytic services as well as to get your solution showcased on the Cortana
Intelligence Suite Solution Showcase.
CLOUD SOLUTION PROVIDER (CSP)
CSP rewards partners for driving cloud revenue through the CSP model, which enables you
to drive deeper customer engagement with greater profitability as you get to combine high-
margin service offerings with Microsoft cloud products and retain the ability to provide
customer support and manage billing for your customer. You get to become your
customers’ single solution provider and trusted advisor by servicing all their cloud services
needs. See more about the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program in this document.
P-SELLER PROGRAM
P-Sellers are Microsoft’s “go to” partner resources across the customer lifecycle, and act as
an extension of Microsoft in working with customers. As a Business Intelligence Solution
Partner, you will receive sponsorship for your admission to the P-Seller program.

MPN to Resource Alignment
Align Individuals to MPN Requirements
For maximum benefit, your engagement resources should align with MPN competency
requirements
The competencies applicable to the Data Platform and Analytics Practice are:
 Data Analytics competency
 Data Platform competency
 Cloud Platform competency
One of the next steps is to ensure you align the technical team to the MPN competency for your practice.
The following table summarizes the skill requirements needed by people in your organization to achieve either a Gold or Silver
Competency for the competencies relevant to the Data Platform and Analytics practice. Some competencies have alternative options your
organization can elect to meet in order to achieve the competency. You only need to meet the requirements of one option in any given
competency.
Data Analytics Competency Silver Requirements Gold Requirements
Option 1: Business Intelligence Two people must pass one of the
following exams:
Exam 70-466: Implementing Data
Models & Reports w/MS SQL Server
2012
Exam 70-467: Designing BI Solutions
with MS SQL Server 2012
Exam 70-475: Designing and
Implementing Big Data Analytics
Solutions
Four people must pass one of the following exams:
Exam 70-466: Implementing Data Models & Reports
w/MS SQL Server 2012
Exam 70-467: Designing BI Solutions with MS SQL
Server 2012
Exam 70-475: Designing and Implementing Big Data
Analytics Solutions
Data Platform Competency Silver Requirements Gold Requirements
Option 1: SQL Database Specialist Two people must pass one of the
following exams:
Exam 70-464: Developing Microsoft
SQL Server 2012 Databases
Exam 70-465: Designing Database
Solutions for Microsoft SQL Server
2012
Implementing Cloud Data Platform
Solutions
Implementing Big Data Analytics
Solutions
Four people must pass one of the following exams:
Exam 70-464: Developing Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Databases
Exam 70-465: Designing Database Solutions for
Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Exam 70-473: Designing and Implementing Cloud Data
Platform Solutions
Exam 70-475: Designing and Implementing Big Data
Analytics Solutions

Option 2: Big Data Two people must pass the following
assessments:
HDInsight Technical Assessment
Technical Assessment for Using
Azure for Data Analytics and Data
Platform Solutions
Four people must pass the following assessments:
HDInsight Technical Assessment
Technical Assessment for Using Azure for Data Analytics
and Data Platform Solutions

Cloud Platform Competency Silver Requirements Gold Requirements
One person must pass one of the following
assessments:
Technical Assessment for Using Microsoft
Azure for Datacenter Solutions
Technical Assessment for Using Azure
Remote Desktop Service
Technical Assessment for Using Azure for
Data Analytics and Data Platform Solutions
Azure for Application Development
Internet of Things Solutions
Or, one person must pass one of the
following exams:
Exam 70-532: Developing Microsoft Azure
Solutions
Exam 70-533: Implementing Microsoft
Azure Infrastructure Solutions
Exam 70-534: Architecting Microsoft Azure
Solutions
Exam 70-473: Designing and Implementing
Cloud Data Platform Solutions
Big Data Analytics Solutions
MCSA: Linux on Azure
Two people each must complete one of the
following assessments:
Azure for Datacenter Solutions
Technical Assessment for Using Azure
Remote Desktop Service
Data Analytics and Data Platform Solutions
Azure for Application Development
Internet of Things Solutions
Or, two people each must pass one of the
following exams:
Exam 70-532: Developing Microsoft Azure
Solutions
Exam 70-533: Implementing Microsoft
Azure Infrastructure Solutions
Exam 70-534: Architecting Microsoft Azure
Solutions
Cloud Data Platform Solutions
Big Data Analytics Solutions
MCSA: Linux on Azure

Join the Azure Mentor Program
The Azure Mentor Program’s goal is to help you build your Azure business as you go through up to 5 Azure deals and deployments.
The program is designed to provide partners with customized technical training, and pre-sales to deployment deal-specific support. The
program provides free access to partner Technical Consultants (PTCs) with deep technical expertise to support a partner across enablement
through deployment support.
Successful completion of this program would look like 3 key things:
1. 5 Azure solutions successfully deployed within 6 months
2. You well on your way to achieving your Silver Cloud Platform Competency
3. And your ability to build a profitable Azure or Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) practice
Eligible Partners will
1. Be relatively new to Azure
2. Have a valid MAPS or competency (but not yet Cloud Platform or EMM competency)
3. Have 3+ opportunities in Azure BU, ASR, VMs, Storage, Networking, Websites, or EMS
4. Dedicate a technical resource to work with the program5.Commit to building an Azure or EMS practice within the next 12 months

Resources
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Internal User
Rights
 License Table for
Competency Partners
Identify Equipment, Services and Tools
Equip your team for success
For a Data Platform and Analytics practice the following tools are recommended:
 Azure Subscriptions
 Visual Studio Subscriptions
 Power BI Pro Subscription
 Open Source Developer Tools – R Studio, Eclipse, etc.
 Linux, Windows or Mac OSX workstations
 Broadband Internet connectivity
One way you can acquire some of the above tooling is by leveraging your Microsoft Internal
Use Rights that come as a benefit of your MPN Competency attainment. The complete list of
cloud service or on-premises product licenses granted by your MPN core and competency
benefits is available in the License Table for Competency Partners.

Practice Cost Calculation
Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure Pricing Calculator
 Enterprise Agreements
 Azure Cost Modeling
Estimating your Azure Spend
Your practice relies on Azure services to deliver customer
success, so understanding the Azure related expenses
incurred in delivering a customer solution is critical. How do
you calculate these Azure costs?
In our research of 1,136 Azure partners, we found that enterprise focused partners spent a
median of $8,107 in Azure for research and development annually, whereas SMB focused
partners spent a media of $1,933 annually.
Use the Azure Pricing Calculator to estimate Azure costs. You can build an estimate online
and the export it to Excel for further refinement and analysis. This tool will give you the retail
rates (also known as the Pay-As-You-Go option) for the Azure services, so treat it like the
“high end” of your consumption estimate.
Become familiar with the discounted pricing and Azure credits:
 Graduated Pricing: Services like Azure Storage have tiered pricing based upon the
volume used. For example, if you use less than 100 TB per month it costs $0.024 per
GB per month, but if you use significantly more it can drop to $0.0223 per GB per
month).
 Enterprise Agreement: By making a 3-year monetary commitment, Azure services
are available at a discount off retail rates. To learn more, see Enterprise
Agreements.
 Azure Credits: Microsoft Partners can receive Azure credits as a part of their benefit.
For example, Partners with the Silver Cloud Platform Competency receive $350
USD per month in Azure credits; those with Gold Cloud Platform Competency
receive $600 USD per month in Azure credits.

It can be helpful to identify items which are used elastically versus items that have a fixed monthly cost. Significant savings can be achieved
via elastic use of resource because you can turn them off (or pause them) when they are not in use. For example,
 Elastic: SQL Data Warehouse used only during month end calculations. It can be paused the rest of the month. Another example
of elastic use is to leverage auto-scale capabilities of the resource, such as auto-scaling the number of App Services instances
down in the evenings and back up during the work day.
 Fixed: Azure App Service hosting your website in a Web App. This App Service needs to run 24x7 because your visitors will arrive
at all hours.
Finally, if you don’t understand how much of a given resource you will use, consider build a scaled down proof-of-concept to get a first
estimate. When it comes to measuring your Azure consumption, particularly across multiple subscriptions (as is likely for any practice), you
should consider deploying the Azure Usage and Billing Portal. This portal is an open source project you can acquire from GitHub and
deploy into your own subscription, configure it to report on multiple subscriptions and view the results within a Power BI Dashboard.
Example Dashboard from the Azure Usage and Billing Portal

Atea Global Services focuses 100% of our
Cloud R & D efforts on Microsoft Azure.
This gives us a unique in-depth expertise
in all Azure technical capabilities and
allows us to maximize value and
efficiencies for our managed services
customers.
Mareks Zirdzins
CTO, Atea Global Services
“
“

Identify Potential Customers/Pilots
Resources Build your prospect hit list
Your goal is to build the list of prospects that could potentially turn into customers. To
accomplish this you should create an awareness campaign to draw attention to your Azure
practice, highlight your service offerings and use your success to earn additional business
with your customers and the industry at large.
Some of the awareness activities you can conduct to generate new customers include:
Webinars and Podcasts: a great way to transfer knowledge, establish yourself as an expert
and pique the interest of potential customers.
Referrals: Ask for referrals in email and phone calls – when talking with existing customers,
partners and vendors who might know someone who is ready for your services.
White Papers: these are a great way to build credibility to decision makers. Technical staff
often expect a white paper to understand underlying architecture and technology of your
solutions.
News Articles: Leverage Public Relation efforts to have articles written about your
technology, things your company is doing in the market and other topics of current interest.
Social Media: Social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. is a place to build awareness,
reputation, customer satisfaction and gain new customers.
Also, consider offering your services as a pilot project to your prospects. With a pilot project,
the customer receives two important values. First, they get to better understand how the
project goals will be successful and second, they have a production-grade starting point for
their larger efforts.
It is important to keep the distinction between Proof of Concept and Pilot clear—a PoC
should never be considered for direct deployment into production, whereas a pilot should
be constructed with a production release in mind.
Case Study:
Perficient
Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Perficient is an information technology and management consulting firm serving Global 2000 and
enterprise customers from offices throughout North America and delivery centers in Eastern Europe, India, and China. Perficient
now finds 90 percent of their Microsoft business tied to Microsoft cloud, and 85 percent of their revenue coming from repeat
business.
Read the case study

Define Customer Support Program and
Process
Resources
Leverage agile frameworks to
provide a robust synopsis for high
level overviews. Iterative approaches
to corporate strategy foster
collaborative thinking to further the
overall value proposition.
RESOURCES
 Azure Support for Customers
Support Overview
It has been said that an unhappy customer represents an
opportunity to make a customer for life. Studies have found
when a customer gets to the point of a complaint, they are
very emotionally engaged. If you can turn that negative
around to a positive, you may just have a customer for life.
When it comes to support, there are two perspectives you should consider. First, how will
you support your customers when they have engaged you for project services, managed
services or are utilizing your intellectual property. Second, where do you go for Azure
support from Microsoft when you need for a solution you are building or because you need
to assistance on behalf of your customer?
The items you will need to work through include:
 Defining your support model
 Provisioning your support infrastructure
 Defining and implementing your escalation process
 Selecting and enabling your support options for Azure
We cover each of these topics in the pages that follow.

Process
Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure Support for Customers
Supporting Your Customers
Let’s begin with the first scenario, where you are supporting
your customers directly.
At a fundamental level, there are three big items you need to define:
Support Model: How do you package and sell your support? The typical options are to
provide support either on a retainer basis (where the customer pays a monthly fee for up to
a certain number of use it or lose it support hours) or per incident (where the customer pays
a fee every time they utilize your support).
You must also define your support availability so your customers have a realistic expectation
of when they can access your service.
Escalation Process: How does a customer get help at the right technical level? For your
support process to make economic sense, you want to avoid having your most skilled and
most expensive resources (e.g., your architects, senior developers, data scientists, etc.)
answering every support call. For your particular solution offering, you should consider a
tiered support offering that places junior level resources that are equipped to handle
common issues. These resources should be equipped to escalate a customer support case to
a more senior level resource once the common issues have been ruled out. You will need to
decide how many levels of tiered support to offer, but it is common to see organization with
between 2 and 4 tiers. When defining your escalation process, do not forget about the
basics- how do customers get in touch with you for support in the first place: a dedicated
support telephone number, a forum or chat room, a Twitter handle, email address, etc.
Support Infrastructure: How will you manage your customer support requests and track
them to closure? Many MSPs over premium support offerings such as a Technical Account
Manager who is responsible for tracking, reporting and the escalation of issues.

Process
Resources
RESOURCES
 Signature Cloud Support
 Microsoft Advanced Support
for Partners
 Premier Support for Partners
 Azure Paid Support Plans
Support Options from Microsoft
How do you receive support for your implementation efforts
or on behalf of your customer?
Notice: Details on Microsoft programs, offers, and support are subject to change.
Signature Cloud Support is provided as benefit to Silver and Gold Level MPN Partners. It is
primarily for support with issues occurring in Azure subscriptions you own or on which you
are a co-admin. It is not intended for use in supporting issues in subscriptions owned by your
customers.
Microsoft Advanced Support for Partners is the ideal solution for partners who are
growing their cloud business. Not quite ready for Premier Support, but need a higher level of
service than the Microsoft Partner Network core benefits provide? The Advanced Support
program delivers the right level of support to meet you in the middle while your business
grows. With Advanced Support for Partners, you get cloud support at an accessible price
point, which helps you be a great ally to your customers and grow your business faster. The
program includes valuable proactive and reactive services delivered by experienced Services
Account Managers and Partner Technical Consultants. Advanced Support for Partners
enables you to provide support on behalf of your end customers, in addition to providing
support on subscription you own directly. Designed from the feedback of over 1,500 partners
like you, Microsoft Advanced Support for Partners addresses the specific needs of Cloud
Solutions Providers (CSP), born-in-the-cloud partners and all other partners selling Microsoft
cloud services.
Microsoft Premier Support for Partners delivers a managed support offering for you and
your customers, proactive support services for developing, deploying, and supporting
Microsoft technology whether on-premises, hybrid, or in the cloud. As the only partner
program with complete, end-to-end managed support across the full Microsoft platform,
Premier Support for Partners also provides a powerful marketing tool to gain competitive
advantage in the marketplace.
Microsoft offers a range of paid support options for customers from developers starting their
journey in the cloud to enterprises deploying business critical, strategic applications on
Microsoft Azure, these are available in tiers Premier, Professional Direct, Standard and
Developer Support Plans that are available for purchase directly without having to be a
Microsoft Partner. In addition to these paid plan, Azure provides Core support that is free
and provides best effort support via forums and help with account billing or management
question.

Process
Resources
RESOURCES
 Submit Azure Support
Requests Step by Step
Submitting Azure Support Requests
Leverage Microsoft’s Azure support when you need help with
Azure.
At some stage, you will need to access support from Microsoft. Support requests need to be
submitted using the Azure Portal, when logged into the subscription for which you want to
receive support. Once a support request is submitted, you can manage the incident from the
Azure Portal as well.
The process to request support for Azure is as follows:
1. Log in to the Azure Portal with your credentials
2. Select either the “?” in the top right, or the “Help+Support” tile
3. Select Create Support Request
4. Complete the step by step instructions to create your incident.

OPERATIONALIZE & GET TRAINED PAGE 81
Process
Resources
RESOURCES
 Top 5 Ways to Use Your
Partner Advisory Hours
Partner Advisory Hours
As part of your company’s Microsoft Partner Network membership, your organization
receives partner advisory hours for attaining a Microsoft competency, membership in
Microsoft Cloud Accelerate, and subscribing to Microsoft Action Pack Develop and Design.
Partner
Level:
Network
Member
Action Pack Silver Gold
0 Hours
5 Hours
(after first
cloud sale)
20 hours 50 hours
Partner advisory hours are used as currency for technical presales and advisory services
offered by the Microsoft Partner Services team, in other words it’s how you “pay” for these
services.
These hours can be used, for example, to:
 Deploy the latest Microsoft technologies internally
 Build skills and knowledge
 Close deals faster
 Get expert advice
 Chalk talks
Augment your sales, lead generation, training, and technical efforts by spending your
available partner advisory hours. This benefit is especially impactful for small businesses with
limited time and resources, who may not know where to start finding new customers, and
need to focus more on their core business.

Here are some areas you can use the partner advisory hours benefit:
Technical presales assistance
Gain a competitive advantage to win more deals by connecting with Microsoft experts for personalized
remote technical assistance during the presales phase to help you position Microsoft solutions,
overcome customer objections, demonstrate the value of solutions, and present solutions to your
prospective customers.
Deployment services
Develop better solutions, accelerate deployment, and increase consumption by connecting with
Microsoft experts for personalized remote technical assistance during the design, development, and
deployment phases of your projects to help you expand your capabilities, be more efficient, and apply
best practices as you build and deploy Microsoft products and solutions.
Support
Grow and develop your practice by leveraging competitive sales support, one-on-one advisory sessions,
and learn how to save time and money. You also have access to product support and signature cloud
support, depending upon your partnership membership level.

Summary of Support Options
In the previous pages, we covered the multiple support options available. One factor in deciding on which support option to utilize is the
service level agreement (SLA) for the response time on a support request. The following table summarize the SLA for each option. Note that
these are subject to change—you should always confirm the latest support response times for customer facing options, and partner facing
options from the locations hyperlinked in the table below.
PARTNER FACING OPTIONS RESPONSE TIME
Signature Cloud Support LESS THAN 2 HOURS
Microsoft Advanced Support for Partners LESS THAN 1 HOUR
Microsoft Premier Support for Partners LESS THAN 1 HOUR
Partner Advisory Hours N/A
CUSTOMER FACING OPTIONS
Premier LESS THAN 1 HOUR
Professional-Direct LESS THAN 1 HOUR
Standard LESS THAN 2 HOURS
Developer LESS THAN 8 HOURS
Core N/A

Operationalize
& Get Trained

Executive Summary
Operationalize & Get Trained
In the previous section, you evaluated the various services your
business can pursue in Azure, as you set up or build your Data
Platform and Analytics practice. Now that you’ve identified some
avenues of success, you may be wondering how to build and
train your team.
We begin this section helping you define the members of your
team and the skills they should bring to the table. If you need to
hire to fill gaps, we provide you with detailed job descriptions
you can use, as well as provide you with where to look for
resources, the factors you should look for in candidate new hire
skillset, and what you should expect to pay by role and region.
A big focus of this section is the critical piece of ensuring all of
your practice resources are trained and continue to receive
ongoing training. We cover not just the technical training, but
the training your sales and marketing resources should be
receiving. Additionally, we provide you with the details on the
specific Microsoft certifications your technical resources should
be working towards, both for their own professional
development to earn your organization Microsoft Partner
Network competencies.
If Azure is new to your organization, we guide you thru the
options for acquiring Azure for
internal use within your
organization, as well as you how
can deepen relationships with
your customer by re-selling it as
an overall package deal along
with your custom software to
your customers, creating a new
revenue stream for your business.
This section also provides
guidance that helps you with the important artifacts you need to
operate your business, from how to build materials to support
your sales and marketing efforts to the key contracts you will
want to put in place.
Whether you're building products, providing managed services,
or performing project work for customers, your success may be
impacted by your ability to manage your customer records, your
projects, and your support trouble tickets. We provide guidance
on what tools and systems you should consider implementing.
Finally, we cover how you can increase visibility for your practice
by reviewing the marketplaces Microsoft offers and how you get
listed on them.
Top 5 things to do
You’re crafting your gameplan to build
your team and form partnerships. To
create your product or market your
services. Whatever your strategy, make
sure you nail down these 5 tasks before
you move to the next section.
 Hire, train and certify your team
 Setup Azure for your practice use and
become the Digital Partner of Record on
your customer’s Azure Subscriptions.
 Setup your CRM, project management,
collaboration and support tools
 Build your sales , marketing and legal
materials
 Evaluate your marketplace options

Creating a hiring plan
Resources
RESOURCES
 Should you hire or Train
(adp.com)
 Grow your own or hire
outside (inc.com)?
Should you Hire New Resources or Train
Existing Resources?
Human resources are a critical asset to any services based
practice.
Starting a new practice requires you to start with an evaluation of your existing team
members (if any) and then make the decision of whether to hire new employees or bring
your existing team up to speed. You will need to make a plan that describes your resource
gaps and the requirements of the resources you will use to fill those gaps.
The following sections describe the recommended resources across Sales, Technical and
Support functions that you will likely need. In many practices that are just getting started
you may not be able to fill all roles with individual professionals. In this situation one person
will likely be required to fulfill the duties of multiple roles.

Hire Resources
Before you can hire a resource, you need a job description for roles to be hired. Microsoft
has several examples to share with you. You can leverage them as a start to your job
description.
The following sections describe the recommend resources across Sales, Technical and Support functions. Depending on your unique
service and solution offering, you will require various combinations of these roles.
Sales Resources
You have a vision for developing the next great Azure solution, but even the best products
need a sales strategy to gain maximum market traction. Depending on the size of your
company, the following sales positions are recommended for broad reach.
The Solution Sales Manager (SSM) is a senior leader within our enterprise sales organization. The Data Platform SSM leads, develops and
manages a team of high performing sales and technical pre-sales/post-sales resources to drive solution opportunity revenue and market
share by leveraging the Microsoft Data Platform and Cloud offerings to meet their customers Mission Critical Tier1/OLTP and Business
Analytics solution needs. Ten or more years of sales experience is required for this position. Qualifications include people management,
business development, competitive selling and ability to thrive in complex, ambiguous and dynamic environments.
The Cloud Infrastructure Solutions Sales Manager is a Solution Sales Leadership Role that is responsible for delivering sustainable new
business growth across segments; providing thought-leadership; and driving customer acceleration to cloud and mobility across the
enterprise sales and marketing teams. The Solution Sales Manager is a great sales coach and leader, has a challenger mentality, is savvy in
sales-leadership practice and contributes with vision and flawless execution of solution sales across workloads and solution areas.
The Technical Sales Manager is a senior leader within our enterprise sales organization. An Azure TSM drives revenue and market share
by leading a team of technical sellers who are providing customers with insights and solutions leveraging Microsoft Azure. The Technical
Sales Manager will manage, coach and lead a team of Solution Architects and Tech Sales professionals to uncover and support the business
& IT goals of our customers, by driving the technical decision at the customer and provide Business value with the Microsoft Platform, thus
securing long-term sustainable Growth. A computer science degree or related field is required for this role. Additional qualifications
include strategic insight, project management, analytical problem solving, customer/partner relationship building and exceptional product
and technical expertise.
Marketing Resources
Marketing is a key function of the successful practice, and partners who invest in marketing
resources succeed to a greater degree than those who do not. The following is a key
marketing position you should consider for your practice.
The Product Marketing Manager compliments the Product Manager, executing on key campaigns and customer outreach. This role will
create the brand and messaging to accompany it. They will own social media as well as traditional marketing vehicles such as web sites,
demos and data sheets. Product Marketing Managers create the go-to-market strategy for the company and help set pricing. Launch

activities are orchestrated through this role as well as technical and industry trade show attendance. Public relations may be handled
directly by the Product Marketing Manager or the role may work with an agency or centralized group on this.
Technical Resources
These roles form the heart of your Azure solution. Hiring the right people can turn your vision
into reality.
A Cloud Architect (CA) drive Azure based customer initiatives in collaboration with customers, and participates in both pre and post-sales
(e.g., deployment) efforts. The CA is a technical, customer facing role that is accountable for the end-to-end customer cloud deployment
experience. CAs own the Azure technical customer engagement including: architectural design sessions, specific implementation projects
and/or Proofs of Concepts, and deployment. The ideal candidate will have experience in customer facing roles and success leading deep
technical architecture and application design discussions with senior customer executives to drive cloud deployment. A computer science
or related engineering degree is required.
A Data Architect (DA) drives customer initiatives leveraging Azure data and analytics services (e.g., ranging from SQL Server to SQL
Database and SQL Data Warehouse to Cortana Intelligence Suite) to solve the biggest and most complex data challenges faced by
enterprise customers. The DA is a technical, customer facing role, accountable for the end-to-end customer deployment and usage
experience for Azure data services. DAs own the Azure technical customer engagement including: architectural design sessions,
implementation projects and/or proofs of concept and pilots. The Data Architect is proficient in distributed computing principles and
familiar with key architectures including Lambda and Kappa architectures, and has a broad experience designing solutions using a broad
set of data stores (e.g., HDFS, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Apache HBase, Azure DocumentDB),
messaging systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub) and data processing engines (e.g., Apache Hadoop, Apache
Spark, Azure Data Lake Analytics, Apache Storm, Azure HDInsight). The ideal candidate will have experience in customer facing roles and
success leading deep technical architecture and design discussions with senior executives. Five plus years of experience with deep
understanding of databases and analytics, including relational databases, data warehousing, big data, business intelligence and analytics.
Five plus years of success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects. Technical BS degree in Computer Science or
Math background desirable.
A Data Scientist is responsible for identifying the insight opportunities present in the customer’s data, and helping shape the data pipeline
that deliver the insights by applying advanced analytics (e.g., machine learning) in collaboration with the customer. The Data Scientist is a
technical, customer facing role, who along with the Big Data Engineer is accountable for the end-to-end data pipeline envisioning and
development that starts with addressing issues of data acquisition and data sampling, data exploration and data quality assessment, data
wrangling to massage the data so it is better suited to applying advanced analytics, and visualizing or reporting on such data to make the
insights available to the customer’s business. The ideal candidate will have experience in customer facing roles and has a cross-disciplinary
background consisting of statistics and software development. A technical BS degree in Computer Science or Math background is highly
desirable. Three or more years customer facing experience desired.
A Big Data Engineer is responsible for helping to select and implement the tools and processes required of a data processing pipeline in
support of the customer requirements. The Big Data Engineer may be a customer facing role, but the primary responsibilities include
implementing ETL (extract, transform and load) pipelines, monitoring/maintaining data pipeline performance. The Big Data Engineer in
proficient in distributed computing principles and familiar with key architectures including Lambda and Kappa architectures, and has a
broad experience across a set of data stores (e.g., HDFS, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Apache
HBase, Azure DocumentDB), messaging systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub) and data processing engines (e.g.,
Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Azure Data Lake Analytics, Apache Storm, Azure HDInsight). The ideal candidate has three or more years
experience working on solutions that collect, process, store and analyze huge volume of data, fast moving data or data that has significant
schema variability.
A Senior Software Developer has a history of designing, owning and shipping software, as well as excellent communication and
collaboration skills. With a focus on cloud-based application development, the candidate must have demonstrable experience architecting
and deploying applications to cloud platforms, the ability to effectively integrate disparate services as needed, and decide when to
implement IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS components. As a mentor to junior developers, the senior software developer should have a solid

understanding of the software development cycle, from architecture to testing. They should have a passion for quality and be a creative
thinker. A senior developer will write secure, reliable, scalable, and maintainable code, and then effectively debug it, test it and support it
live. This person should also be comfortable owning a feature and making decisions independently.
Another aspect of a senior software developer, is that they can effectively gather customer requirements, and ask clarifying questions when
needed. This person must be able to translate these requirements to actionable tasks they will perform, or delegate to members of the
team.
A Software Developer enjoys the challenge of building applications that solve today’s business needs. This person must be willing to keep
up to date with the fast-moving cloud services landscape to remain an effective member of the development team. A software developer
should work equally well on a team or independently, given a set of project requirements or tasks. This requires the developer to possess
excellent communication and collaboration skills. The developer should understand the aspects of the software development cycle, from
architecture to testing. This person will design, build, and maintain efficient, reusable, and reliable code.
Management
Consider the following management positions if your development effort will involve eight or
more technical staff. However, in smaller teams, senior-level employees sometimes take on
management duties along with their other responsibilities, obviating the need for dedicated
managers.
The Product Manager (or Product Management team) establishes and sustains the business case for the project, and plays a key role in
identifying and setting priorities across the target audience. This includes ensuring that business expectations are clearly articulated and
understood by the project team, and that the functional specifications respond to business priorities.
Product Management owns the vision statement for the project. The vision statement is an informal document that communicates the
expectations and assumptions on which the project is based.
Product Management is also responsible for high-level project communications such as business projections, project costing, and contract
negotiation. Product Management communicates the high-level milestones to the target audience and other team members.
The Program Manager or Program Management team "owns" the specification for an application's features and functionality and
coordinates the day-to-day communication required to develop and deliver the application effectively and consistently within
organizational standards.
Program Management has a key communication and coordination role. With input from other team leads, Program Management assists
Product Management in articulating the vision for the project. Using this vision, Program Management drafts the initial version of the
functional specification and is considered the keeper of the functional specification. Program Management is responsible for all activities
associated with analysis, specification, and architecture.
Program Management is also responsible for defining how the project will interoperate with external standards, maintaining external
technical coordination and communication, and managing the master schedule.

Support Resources
A lot of effort goes on behind the scenes, or in positions that involve post-sales customer
engagement. To ensure long-term success of your projects, consider hiring some of these
support roles.
A Customer Success Manager is passionate about engaging your customers and helping them expand their use cases. They have
excellent relational skills, and can create win/win environments for all parties they work with. In their day-to-day responsibilities, they own
the overall relationship with assigned clients, by increasing adoption and ensuring retention and satisfaction. They make a large impact on
your cloud application development business by establishing a trusted and strategic advisor relationship with each assigned client, driving
continued value of your products and services. The Customer Success Manager will help drive sales by working to identify or develop upsell
opportunities. Additionally, they will advocate customer needs and issues cross-departmentally, and program manage account escalations.
Qualifications include prior experience in Customer Success, or equivalent history of increasing customer satisfaction, adoption, and
retention.
A Quality Assurance (QA) / Test Technician is extremely thorough and detail-oriented, and should work well with established processes.
The primary goal of this role is to help avoid defects in your final product or solution. This person will be involved throughout the
development process, and use their intuition to problem solve and identify technical, procedural, and ease of use concerns. They must take
meticulous notes, be organized about recording process steps, and work well with others, since they will be coordinating with your
technical and management teams to ensure that the correct measures are put into place to align the final product with the initial goal.
An Information Security Analyst assesses and provides security advice on your cloud infrastructure, including network, service, and
application components. This role conducts risk assessments, architectural reviews, provides cyber security subject matter expertise, and
assists in the building and design of secure solutions. Additional duties may include network and application penetration testing, and
support for cyber security investigations as well as on-call response for cyber security incidents. A computer science or related engineering
degree is required, or the equivalent combination of education, professional training, or work experience.
A User Support Specialist assists your customers who are having technical issues with your product, or who need help realizing the full
benefit of your solution to help them deliver their cloud-based workloads. They will likely be in a position to help customers navigate the
operational challenges of cloud computing, so thoroughly training them on both your product and the infrastructure on which it is built is
paramount to their success, and ultimately, your customers’ satisfaction. Qualifications include technical support experience and great
communication and interpersonal skills (soft skills). Experience with cloud technologies is a major plus.

Hire Resources
Job Descriptions
The following tables provides detailed job descriptions you can utilize to hire the key technical resources. All technical skills, non-technical
skills, certifications and technologies listed are potential items a candidate should have, but no candidate will have all the items listed.
CLOUD ARCHITECT
A Cloud Architect (CA) drive Azure based customer initiatives in collaboration with customers, and participates in both pre and post-
sales (e.g., deployment) efforts. The CA is a technical, customer facing role that is accountable for the end-to-end customer cloud
deployment experience. CAs own the Azure technical customer engagement including: architectural design sessions, specific
implementation projects and/or Proofs of Concepts, and deployment. The ideal candidate will have experience in customer facing roles
and success leading deep technical architecture and application design discussions with senior customer executives to drive cloud
deployment.
Five or more years of architecture, design implementation and/or support of distributed applications designed to run in the cloud or
across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. Experience in consultative sales, design and deployment of projects strongly
preferred.
A computer science or related engineering degree is required.
Technical Skills
Advanced analytics, agile, application architecture, application development, application design, application
lifecycle management (ALM), capacity planning, cloud archival, cloud data analytics, cloud disaster recovery,
cloud storage, cloud systems management, cloud systems operations, cloud transformation, compliance (PCI,
HIPPA, etc.), data architecting, data migration (cross platform / upgrade), database and server virtualization,
database architecture, database lifecycle management, database management, DevOps, diagnostics,
distributed application design, distributed application development, distributed database design, event
sourcing, HADR / replication, health checks, identity and security, information architecture, modern
applications, monitoring, networking, performance tuning, polyglot resiliency, predicative analytics, resiliency
(clustering, etc.), scalability (up and out, high performance), scrum, security architecture, security compliance,
software design, storage, systems operations/management, technical migration upgrades, technology
architecture, virtualization
Non-Technical Skills
Consultative sales, collaboration, stakeholder management, relationship management, technical oversight,
technical recommendations, problem solving, risk management, architecture design session, program
management, proof of concept design, technical demonstration

Technologies
AML, Analytics, APS, AWS, AWS RDS, AWS EC2, AWS Redshift, AWS S3, Azure Active Directory, Azure Data
Factory, Azure Data Lake, Azure Storage, Azure API Apps, Azure API Management, Azure DocumentDB, Azure
SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Import/Export, Azure HDInsight, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Machine Learning,
Azure Mobile Apps, Azure SQL Database, Azure Search, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT
Hub, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Web Apps, Azure Web Jobs, Azure Cognitive Services, BizTalk, Business
Objects, Cassandra, Cloudera, Cognos, Cortana Intelligence, CouchDB, Data warehouse, Database, DB2,
Docker, Excel, IBM Bluemix, Google App Engine, Greenplum, Hadoop, HANA, HBase, Hive, Hortonworks, IBM,
IBM Teradata, Informix, IoT Solutions, Java, Kafka, Machine Learning, MapR, MapReduce, ML, MongoDB,
MariaDB, MySQL, Netezza, Networking, NoSQL, Oracle, Oracle Exadata, Oracle SOA, PBI, Pig, Power BI,
PostgreSQL, Python, QLik Tech, REST, Samza, SAP HANA, SAS, Security, Spark, SQL Server, SQL Server IaaS, SQL
Server Integration Services, Storage, Storm, Streaming, Sybase, Tableau, Teradata, TSQL, Virtualization,
webMethods, WebSphere, YARN
Programming/Scripting Languages: C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails,
Pig/Hive, SQL, T-SQL, Scala, PowerShell
Platforms: Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.), Windows
Certifications
MCSA Cloud Platform Solutions Associate, MCSA Linux on Azure Solutions Associate, MCSE Cloud Platform
and Infrastructure, MCSE Data Management and Analytics, AWS Certified Solution Architect, AWS Certified
Developer, AWS Certified Developer
Project Experience
Types/Qualities
Advanced analytics (including machine learning), database modernization, coordinate and execute pilots,
burst to cloud, hybrid deployments, prototypes or proof of concepts, provide validation on specific scenarios,
document and share technical best practices, further customer investment, hybrid solutions on premises or in
the cloud, industry-visible, large project relative to size of customer, lift and shift, migrations and upgrades,
on-premises to cloud, production environment, projects where data is born in the cloud, size of project team
(complexity), significant challenges..

DATA ARCHITECT
A Data Architect (DA) drives customer initiatives leveraging Azure data and analytics services (e.g., ranging from SQL Server to SQL
Database and SQL Data Warehouse to Cortana Intelligence Suite) to solve the biggest and most complex data challenges faced by
enterprise customers. The DA is a technical, customer facing role, accountable for the end-to-end customer deployment and usage
experience for Azure data services. DAs own the Azure technical customer engagement including: architectural design sessions,
implementation projects and/or proofs of concept and pilots. The Data Solution Architect is proficient in distributed computing
principles and familiar with key architectures including Lambda and Kappa architectures, and has a broad experience designing
solutions using a broad set of data stores (e.g., HDFS, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Apache
HBase, Azure DocumentDB), messaging systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub) and data processing engines
(e.g., Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Azure Data Lake Analytics, Apache Storm, Azure HDInsight). The ideal candidate will have
experience in customer facing roles and success leading deep technical architecture and design discussions with senior executives.
Five plus years of experience with deep understanding of databases and analytics, including relational databases, data warehousing, big
data, business intelligence and analytics.
Five plus years of success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects. Technical BS degree in Computer Science or
Math background desirable.
Technical Skills
Advanced analytics, analysis services (tabular, multi-dimensional), application architecture, application
development, application lifecycle management (ALM), big data, business intelligence, capacity planning,
cloud archival, cloud data analytics, cloud disaster recovery, cloud storage, cloud systems management, cloud
systems operations, cloud transformation, compliance (PCI, HIPPA, etc.), data architecting, data cleansing,
data migration (cross platform / upgrade), data modeling (physical and logical), data movement, data
potency, data transformation, data warehouse design, database and server virtualization, database
architecture, database design, database lifecycle management, database management, database sharding,
database tuning, diagnostics, distributed application design, distributed application development, distributed
database design, event sourcing, HADR / replication, health checks, identity and security, information
architecture, information management, in-memory database architecture, IoT, Kappa architectures, Lambda
architectures, MapReduce, master data management, mission critical DB design and architecture, modern
applications, monitoring, performance tuning, polyglot resiliency, predicative analytics, reporting services
design and deployment, resiliency (clustering, etc.), scalability (up and out, high performance), security
architecture, security compliance, technical migration upgrades, technology architecture
Consultative sales, collaboration, stakeholder management, relationship management, technical oversight,
technical recommendations, problem solving, risk management, architecture design session, program
management, proof of concept design, technical demonstration

Technologies
AML, Analytics, APS, AWS, AWS Athena, AWS Glue, AWS QuickSight, AWS RDS, AWS VM, AWS Redshift, AWS
S3, Azure Active Directory, Azure Data Catalog, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, Azure Storage, Azure
DocumentDB, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Import/Export, Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning,
Azure SQL Database, Azure Search, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Web
Jobs, Azure Cognitive Services, Birst, BizTalk, Business Objects, Cassandra, Cloudera, Cognos, Cortana
Intelligence, CouchDB, Data warehouse, Database, DB2, Docker, Excel, Flume, IBM Bluemix, Google App
Engine, Greenplum, Hadoop, HANA, HBase, Hive, Hortonworks, IBM, IBM Teradata, Informix, IoT Solutions,
Java, Kafka, Machine Learning, MapR, MapReduce, ML, MongoDB, MariaDB, MySQL, Netezza, Networking,
NoSQL, Oracle, Oracle Exadata, Oracle SOA, PBI, Pig, Power BI, PostgreSQL, Python, QLik Tech, REST,
Revolution R, Samza, SAP HANA, SAS, Security, Spark, , SQL Server, SQL Server IaaS, SQL Server Integration
Services, Storage, Storm, Streaming, Sybase, Tableau, Teradata, TSQL, Virtualization, webMethods,
WebSphere, YARN
Programming/Scripting Languages: C#, DMX, DAX, MDX, SQL, T-SQL, Java, Scala, Python, PowerShell, R,
Ruby
Certifications
MCSE Business Intelligence, MCSA Cloud Platform Solutions Associate, MCSA Linux on Azure Solutions
Associate, MCSE Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, MCSE Data Management and Analytics, AWS Certified
Solution Architect, AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified Developer, Big Data, Certified Analytics
Professional, Certificate in Engineering Excellence Big Data Analytics and Optimization (CPEE), Cloudera
Certified Developer, Cloudera Certified Specialist, Data Warehousing, IBM Certified Data Architect/Engineer,
Mining Massive Datasets Graduate Certificate (Stanford), Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, SAS Certified Big Data
Professional
Project Experience
Types/Qualities
Advanced analytics (including machine learning), database modernization, coordinate and execute pilots,
prototypes or proof of concepts, provide validation on specific scenarios, document and share technical best
practices, further customer investment, hybrid solutions on premises or in the cloud, industry-visible, large
project relative to size of customer, lift and shift, migrations and upgrades (SQL, etc.), on-premises to cloud,
production environment, projects where data is born in the cloud, cross-platform SQL Server migration, size of
project team (complexity), significant challenges, IOT – Connected Devices, IOT- Command and Control, IOT-
Data Ingestion, batch analytics, interactive analytics, real-time/streaming analytics.

BIG DATA ENGINEER
A Big Data Engineer is responsible for helping to select and implement the tools and processes required of a data processing pipeline in
support of the customer requirements. The Big Data Engineer may be a customer facing role, but the primary responsibilities include
implementing ETL (extract, transform and load) pipelines, monitoring/maintaining data pipeline performance. The Big Data Engineer is
proficient in distributed computing principles and familiar with key architectures including Lambda and Kappa architectures, and has a
broad experience across a set of data stores (e.g., HDFS, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL Data Warehouse,
Apache HBase, Azure DocumentDB), messaging systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub) and data processing
engines (e.g., Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Azure Data Lake Analytics, Apache Storm, Azure HDInsight). The ideal candidate has
three or more years’ experience working on solutions that collect, process, store and analyze huge volume of data, fast moving data or
data that has significant schema variability.
Technical Skills
Advanced analytics, analysis services (tabular, multi-dimensional), application architecture, application
development, application lifecycle management (ALM), big data, business intelligence, capacity planning,
cloud archival, cloud data analytics, cloud disaster recovery, cloud storage, cloud systems management, cloud
systems operations, cloud transformation, compliance (PCI, HIPPA, etc.), data architecting, data cleansing,
potency, data transformation, data warehouse design, database and server virtualization, database
architecture, database design, database lifecycle management, database management, database sharding,
database tuning, diagnostics, distributed application design, distributed application development, distributed
database design, event sourcing, HADR / replication, health checks, identity and security, information
architecture, information management, in-memory database architecture, IoT, Kappa architectures, Lambda
architectures, MapReduce, master data management, mission critical DB design and architecture, modern
applications, monitoring, performance tuning, polyglot resiliency, predicative analytics, reporting services
design and deployment, resiliency (clustering, etc.), scalability (up and out, high performance), security
architecture, security compliance, technical migration upgrades, technology architecture
Technical recommendations, problem solving, risk management, proof of concept design, technical
demonstration, consultative requirements clarification and issue troubleshooting
Technologies
AML, Analytics, APS, AWS, AWS Athena, AWS Glue, AWS QuickSight, AWS RDS, AWS VM, AWS Redshift, AWS
S3, Azure Active Directory, Azure Data Catalog, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, Azure Storage, Azure
DocumentDB, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Import/Export, Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning,
Azure SQL Database, Azure Search, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Web
Jobs, Azure Cognitive Services, Birst, BizTalk, Business Objects, Cassandra, Cloudera, Cognos, Cortana
Intelligence, CouchDB, Data warehouse, Database, DB2, Docker, Excel, Flume, IBM Bluemix, Google App
Engine, Greenplum, Hadoop, HANA, HBase, Hive, Hortonworks, IBM, IBM Teradata, Informix, IoT Solutions,
Java, Kafka, Machine Learning, MapR, MapReduce, ML, MongoDB, MariaDB, MySQL, Netezza, Networking,
NoSQL, Oracle, Oracle Exadata, Oracle SOA, PBI, Pig, Power BI, PostgreSQL, Python, QLik Tech, REST,
Revolution R, Samza, SAP HANA, SAS, Security, Spark, , SQL Server, SQL Server IaaS, SQL Server Integration
Services, Storage, Storm, Streaming, Sybase, Tableau, Teradata, TSQL, Virtualization, webMethods,
WebSphere, YARN
Programming/Scripting Languages: C#, DMX, DAX, MDX, SQL, T-SQL, Java, Scala, Python, PowerShell, R,
Ruby

Certifications
MCSE Business Intelligence, MCSA Cloud Platform Solutions Associate, MCSA Linux on Azure Solutions
Associate, MCSE Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, MCSE Data Management and Analytics, AWS Certified
Solution Architect, AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified Developer, Big Data, Certified Analytics
Professional, Certificate in Engineering Excellence Big Data Analytics and Optimization (CPEE), Cloudera
Certified Developer, Cloudera Certified Specialist, Data Warehousing, IBM Certified Data Architect/Engineer,
Mining Massive Datasets Graduate Certificate (Stanford), Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, SAS Certified Big Data
Professional
Project Experience
Types/Qualities
Advanced analytics (including machine learning), database modernization, further customer investment,
hybrid solutions on premises or in the cloud, industry-visible, large project relative to size of customer, lift and
shift, migrations and upgrades (SQL, etc.), on-premises to cloud, production environment, projects where data
is born in the cloud, cross-platform SQL Server migration, size of project team (complexity), significant
challenges, IOT – Connected Devices, IOT- Command and Control, IOT- Data Ingestion, batch analytics,
interactive analytics, real-time/streaming analytics.

DATA SCIENTIST
A Data Scientist is responsible for identifying the insight opportunities present in the customer’s data, and helping shape the data
pipeline that deliver the insights by applying advanced analytics (e.g., machine learning) in collaboration with the customer. The Data
Scientist is a technical, customer facing role, who along with the Big Data Engineer is accountable for the end-to-end data pipeline
envisioning and development that starts with addressing issues of data acquisition and data sampling, data exploration and data
quality assessment, data wrangling to massage the data so it is better suited to applying advanced analytics, and visualizing or
reporting on such data to make the insights available to the customer’s business. The ideal candidate will have experience in customer
facing roles and has a cross-disciplinary background consisting of statistics and software development. A technical BS degree in
Computer Science or Math background is highly desirable.
Three or more years’ customer facing experience desired.
Technical Skills
Advanced analytics, analysis services (tabular, multi-dimensional), backpropagation. bagging, boosting, Bayes,
big data, business intelligence, classification, clustering, cloud data analytics, data architecting, data cleansing,
potency, data transformation, data warehouse design, database architecture, database design, decision trees,
descriptive analytics, forests, genetic programming, image processing, inverse deduction, machine learning,
neural networks, predicative analytics, prescriptive analytics, recommendation, regression, rules, support
vector machines, statistics, text mining
Consultative requirements gathering, collaboration, stakeholder management, relationship management,
technical oversight, technical recommendations, problem solving, risk management, architecture design
session, program management, proof of concept design, technical demonstration
Technologies
AWS Machine Learning, AWS Lex, AWS QuickSight, AWS RDS, AWS Rekognition, AWS Redshift, AWS S3, Azure
Data Catalog, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, Azure Storage, Azure DocumentDB, Azure SQL Data
Warehouse, Azure Import/Export, Azure HDInsight, Azure Machine Learning, Azure SQL Database, Azure
Search, Azure Cognitive Services, Cassandra, Cloudera, Cognos, Cortana Intelligence, Data warehouse,
Database, DB2, Excel, Flume, IBM Bluemix, Hadoop, HBase, Hive, Hortonworks, Machine Learning, MapR,
Microsoft R, ML, MongoDB, MariaDB, MySQL, NoSQL, Oracle, Oracle Exadata, Oracle SOA, Pig, Power BI,
PostgreSQL, Python, QLik Tech, Revolution R, SAP HANA, SAS, Spark, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server,
SQL Server IaaS, SQL Server Integration Services, Sybase, Tableau, TSQL
Programming/Scripting Languages: R, Scala, Python, DMX, DAX, MDX, SQL, T-SQL, Java
Certifications
Certified Analytics Professional (CAP), Certification of Professional Achievement in Data Sciences, Cloudera
Certified Professional: Data Scientist (CCP:DS), edX Verified Certificate in Data Science Curriculum, EMC Data
Science Associate, MCSE Business Intelligence, MCSE Data Management and Analytics, Revolution R Enterprise
Professional, SAS Certified Data Scientist
Project Experience
Types/Qualities
Advanced analytics (including machine learning), automating data munging, building visualizations, machine
learning modeling, distributed training, training on large data sets, operationalizing models, significant
challenges

Recruiting Resources
Resources Top 10 Sources to Find Skilled Labor and What
to Look For
Sourcing skilled labor can be a challenge. In our recent survey
with MDC of 1,136 Azure partners, we found that referrals and
LinkedIn rank among the top source of candidates.
See the table below for the top 10 sources to identify skilled labor:
Total
(n=1136)
SMB
(n=886)
Enterprise
(n=250)
Referrals from employees or
partnerships
70% 69% 73%
LinkedIn 59% 57% 66%
Posting on website 47% 45% 54%
Local Universities 38% 36% 46%
Local Technical Communities 36% 35% 43%
Recruit from competitors 30% 29% 36%
Meet ups 29% 29% 30%
GitHub 8% 8% 7%
Stack Overflow 8% 8% 7%
Other job posting sites 6% 6% 4%

Now that you have an understanding of where to look, what are the most important factors you should be examining about your potential
hire’s skillset? In the Microsoft Cloud Practice Development Study, we asked the Azure partners this question. What they told us was the
top three most important factors were work history, cultural fit and years of experience.
Total
(n=1136)
SMB
(n=886)
Enterprise
(n=250)
Work history 69% 68% 74%
Cultural fit 43% 40% 53%
Years of experience 42% 41% 47%
Professional certifications 32% 34% 22%
Referrals 28% 29% 26%
Professional training received 20% 21% 16%
Reputation through community 16% 15% 19%
Formal education 13% 14% 11%
Contract to hire or other means to test skills
"hands-on"
13% 13% 13%
Publications 3% 3% 2%
Awards received 2% 2% 2%
Attitude 0% 0% 1%
Other 4% 4% 4%

Recruiting Resources
Resource Compensation
Beyond sourced skilled labor, it’s important to know the “going rates”—what should you pay
a given resource in a region.
In our recent survey of 1,136 Azure partners, we found the following annual media cost for each resource by region:

Train Your Business Team
Resources
RESOURCES
 Optimize your operations
ebook
 Successful Cloud Partners
 Cloud Platform University
Online
 Partner Learning Paths
 Microsoft Inspire Conference
Recordings
 edX Courses from Microsoft
Training is Good for Business
Best Training Practices
Sustaining and growing a Cloud Practice requires investment in skill development, and per
research our most successful cloud partners are doing just that. Some of the training areas
you should consider include:
Use standardized tests, such as exams, to test aptitude in new,
often junior, hires to place them in the right role and set them
up for success.
As long as new hires are ready and willing to learn, the rest can come with experience,
education, and ongoing learning. However, to be successful, this approach requires
structure. First, you need a predictable way to identify potential. This is where standardized
tests come to play. Next, you need a formal skill development plan that’s based on role. This
plan must have milestones along a path of logical progression to becoming fully proficient.
Underlying these efforts, your management staff and team members will need to play a part
in helping entry-level staff move up the ladder.
Have structure and invest in skill development to keep
experienced employees sharp on the latest technologies.
In addition to ensuring everyone is properly trained in the day-to-day work, you also need to
keep their technical and delivery skills sharp. It is hard to carve out time for ongoing
learning, but if you make it part of the daily, weekly or monthly work rhythm and work
culture it will happen. The key is to make the learning extremely relevant. If you are able to
increase skills and knowledge, you are typically also able to increase billing rates.
Avoid being overly reliant on single staffers with key
knowledge. Build and maintain deep knowledge across the
organization.
With today’s cloud-based focus on solution development, projects tend to be short-lived
and a greater influx of new customers enter the fold, requiring technical staff to be more
versatile than ever. Versatility may not come easily to everyone. Expect some staff to weed
themselves out. At the same time, the opportunity to become more versatile has a strong
value proposition for many people. You need structure to foster versatility, but you don’t
need to go overboard. Start with determining the focus areas that make most sense for your
business, then identify champions that will lead the charge. By doing these things not only
will you have a more profitable Cloud Practice, you will increase employee retention and
satisfaction, and give personnel skills that can expand their career opportunities. Microsoft
provides numerous resources for self-guided training. The following resources are important
sources to consider when looking to address your training needs.

CLOUD PLATFORM UNIVERSITY
Cloud Platform University Online is an interactive, scenario-
based training resource to equip you with the foundational
elements of selling and supporting Microsoft cloud and
enterprise technologies.
C+E PARTNER CURRICULUM GUIDE
The C+E Partner Curriculum Guide provides you with sales and
technical curriculums for each of the Specialization areas that
you may consider focusing on. It describes the Readiness
Programs and Engines and resources available to you in order to
build your skills around selling, deploying and architecting
Cloud Infrastructure and Management, Cloud App Dev, Data
Platform and Data Analytics, Security and Mobility solutions.
MPN LEARNING PATHS
Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Learning Paths provide step
by step guides displaying training opportunities and certification
options, organized by products, competencies,
exams/accreditations and business focus.
MICROSOFT INSPIRE CONFERENCE RECORDINGS
Even if you missed the annual live event, the Microsoft Inspire
Conference provides many of its sessions as recordings you can
view at anytime—no WPC conference pass required.
PARTNER COMMUNITY EVENTS, CALLS & WEBINARS
The Microsoft Partner Enablement Blog maintains a schedule of
trainings available to partners, visit often and plan your training
calendar.
SMART PARTNER MARKETING
Leverage the Microsoft Smart Partner Marketing site as your
starting point for training your marketing resources.
For guidance on training your sales team on selling Azure, see
Azure Sales Training within this playbook.

Build staff on-boarding and mentoring plan
Resources
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Virtual Academy
 IT Pro Cloud Essentials
 IT Pro Career Center
 Microsoft Azure Certification
and Training
Preparing and Training IT Staff for the Cloud
For IT staff to function as change agents supporting current
and emerging cloud technologies, their buy-in for the use and
integration of these technologies is needed. For this, staff
need three things:
 An understanding of their roles and of any changes to their current position
 Time and resources to explore the technologies
 An understanding of the business case for the technologies
IT staff members may feel anxious about their roles and positions as they realize that a
different set of skills is needed for the support of cloud solutions. Agile employees who
explore and learn new cloud technologies don’t need to have that fear. They can lead the
adoption of cloud services and help the organization understand and embrace the
associated changes.
 Azure Skills provides a free online training option and great deals on certification,
including significant discounts for Microsoft Exam vouchers for Azure certifications.
Microsoft and partners offer a variety of options for all audiences to develop their
skills with Microsoft Azure services. The Microsoft Learning MOOC Catalog, a
component of Azure Skills, provide in-depth courses with labs, office hours and
tests. After taking a MOOC (massive open online course), IT staff should have the
hands-on skills they need to be able to deploy, build and architect solutions on
Azure.
 Microsoft Virtual Academy (https://mva.microsoft.com/product-
training/microsoft-azure) offers training from the people who helped to build
Microsoft Azure. From the basic overview to deep technical training, IT staff will
learn how to leverage Microsoft Azure for their business.
 Microsoft IT Pro Cloud Essentials (https://www.itprocloudessentials.com) is a free
annual subscription that includes cloud services, education, and support benefits.
 IT Pro Cloud Essentials provides IT implementers with hands-on experience,
targeted educational opportunities, and access to experts in areas that matter most
to increase knowledge and create a path to career advancement.
 The Microsoft IT Pro Career Center (https://www.itprocareercenter.com) is a free
online resource to help map your cloud career path. Learn what industry experts
suggest for your cloud role and the skills to get you there.
 Follow a learning curriculum at your own pace to build the skills you need most to
stay relevant. We recommend turning knowledge of Microsoft Azure into official
recognition with Microsoft Azure certification training and exams.
(https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/mcsd-azurearchitect-
certification.aspx).

Complete Training
Technical Training
Whether you need to fill a skills gap or are looking to constantly improve your teams skill
surface area, technical training is critical to your success.
In our research, we found conferences and paid online training
are the most common learning mechanisms.
Source: Microsoft Cloud Practice Development Study, MDC
Research, November 2016
Moreover, in this study we found that partners spend a median
of 8.5% of technical resource time on training.
Source: Microsoft Cloud Practice Development Study, MDC
Research, November 2016
There are many on-demand training resources available, some
require subscription fees and others are free for your resources.
The following is a selection of in-person, instructor led and, self
guided technical training resources:
AZURE SKILLS
Whether you’re new to Azure or already a cloud professional,
training is one of the best investments you can make in your
career. Azure Skills provides a free online training option and
great deals on certification, including significant discounts for
Microsoft Exam vouchers for Azure certifications. The Microsoft
Learning MOOC Catalog, a component of Azure Skills, provide
in-depth courses with labs, office hours and tests. After taking a
MOOC (massive open online course), IT staff should have the
hands-on skills they need to be able to deploy, build and
architect solutions on Azure, along with a digital certification of
completion.
MICROSOFT CONFERENCES
Microsoft Ignite and Microsoft Build are first party conferences
that provide hands-on learning, industry insights, and direct
access to product experts.
SAFARI
O’Reilly Safari provides subscription access to more than 40,000
books, videos, and interactive tutorials from over 200 of the
world’s best publishers, including O’Reilly, Pearson, Harvard
Business Review, and Packt. They also offer live online training
courses led by instructors from O’Reilly’s network of tech
innovators and expert practitioners.
PLURALSIGHT
Pluralsight is a key Microsoft partner offering Azure training.
Find more than 40 beginner, intermediate, and advanced
training courses on Azure. If you are a Visual Studio subscriber,
use your benefits to access Azure training.
OPSGILITY

Opsgility is a key Microsoft partner offering Azure training. Find
more than 70 online classes focused on Azure with full-learning
paths for Azure certification. Opsgility also offers a full set of
instructor-led trainings for Azure focused on Architects,
Developers, DevOps, Operations, Sales and Decision Makers.
PARTNER COMMUNITY EVENTS, CALLS & WEBINARS
The Microsoft Partner Enablement Blog maintains a schedule of
trainings available to partners, visit often and plan your training
calendar.
MICROSOFT VIRTUAL ACADEMY
MVA provides live and on-demand virtual training for your
technical team, with new courses arriving weekly. Also includes
access to a comprehensive assortment of e-books from
Microsoft Press.
EDX COURSES
edX courses, taught by Microsoft experts, let you learn through
hands-on experience with broad reach, cutting-edge
technologies in areas including cloud services, mobile
development, and data sciences. Specific courses on Azure are
available.
CLOUD PLATFORM UNIVERSITY
Cloud Platform University Online is an interactive, scenario-
based training resource to equip you with the foundational
elements of selling and supporting Microsoft cloud and
enterprise technologies.
MPN LEARNING PATHS
Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Learning Paths provide step
by step guides displaying training opportunities and certification
options, organized by products, competencies,
exams/accredications and business focus.
MICROSOFT INSPIRE CONFERENCE RECORDINGS
Even if you missed the annual live event, Microsoft Inspire
provides many of its sessions as recordings you can view at
anytime—no conference pass required. To access these
trainings, all you need is to be an MPN member.
AZURE SKILLS
Whether you’re new to Azure or already a cloud professional,
training is one of the best investments you can make in your
career. Azure Skills provides a free online training option and
great deals on certification, including significant discounts for
Microsoft Exam vouchers for Azure certifications.
MICROSOFT LEARNING ON DEMAND COURSES
Microsoft Learning offers a wide variety of official curriculum on-
that, let you learn through hands-on experience with broad
reach of Azure technologies.
TECHNET VIRTUAL LABS
Immerse yourself in a virtual hands-on lab and experience the
product first hand, or try our guided experiences, and click
through a tour of the various product features.
ATTEND A MICROSOFT AZURE COURSE
Microsoft Learning Partners can help you achieve your training
goals, by offering a breadth of solutions to suit your training
needs, from classroom training to online learning.
MICROSOFT AZURE EBOOKS
Download several free eBooks from the Microsoft Virtual
Academy. Additional eBooks are available through the Microsoft
Press Store.
CHANNEL 9
If video-based learning is a more effective tool for you or your
team, Channel 9 offers a variety of content from the community
of experts behind the products. There is a section on Azure,
containing videos from webinars, online TV shows, and events.
AZURE DOCUMENTATION
For examples based on building applications for Azure, using
popular development frameworks such as .NET, Node.js, Java,
and Python, be sure to check out the Azure Documentation.
New content is regularly added, and readers are able to leave
comments, or even contribute to the documentation for certain
topics.
STACK OVERFLOW
This wildly popular and active community of IT professionals,
developers, and product team members is a great resource for
those looking for help or advice.
MICROSOFT LEARNING PARTNERS
Microsoft Learning Partners are available world-wide to help
enable your team for Microsoft Azure via live instructor-led
training. Instructor-led can be scheduled as a dedicated delivery
at your location or virtually using remote learning technologies.
Many courses are scheduled as open-enrollment courses which
allows you to not have to schedule a dedicated class.

Complete Certifications
Resources
RESOURCES
 MCSA Cloud Platform
Certification
 MCSA Linux on Azure
Certification
Solutions Associate Certifications
Your team should complete certifications in alignment with
your plan to meet Microsoft Partner Network Competency
requirements, but that’s not the only reason to get certified.
Sixty-four percent of IT hiring managers rate certifications as having extremely high or high
value in validating the skills and expertise of job candidates. (CompTIA, Employer
Perceptions of IT Training and Certification, January 2011). Certification, training, and
experience are three of the top four most important characteristics when selecting a
candidate for a cloud-related position. (IDC/Microsoft, Climate Change: Cloud's Impact on IT
Organizations and Staffing, November 2012).
Currently there are six Azure specific certification paths that can lead to an MCSA or MCSE
certification.
MCSA: CLOUD PLATFORM SOLUTIONS ASSOCIATE
Demonstrate your expertise in Microsoft cloud-related technologies to reduce IT costs and
deliver more value for the modern business.
Required Exams
 70-532: Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions
 70-533: Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
MCSA: LINUX ON AZURE SOLUTIONS ASSOCIATE
This certification demonstrates your ability to design, architect, implement, and maintain
complex cloud-enabled Linux® solutions that leverage Microsoft Azure open source
capabilities. It also validates your Linux system administration skills to show that you are
fluent in today’s cloud-native world.
Required Exams
 Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator

Resources
RESOURCES
 MCSE Cloud Platform and
Infrastructure Certification
 MCSE Data Management
and Analytics Certification
Solutions Expert Certifications
Currently there are two Azure specific solutions expert certifications.
MCSE: CLOUD PLATFORM AND INFRASTRUCTURE
The Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE): Cloud Platform and Infrastructure
certification validates that you have the skills needed to run a highly efficient and modern
data center, with expertise in cloud technologies, identity management, systems
management, virtualization, storage, and networking.
Required Exams
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate – Window Server 2016
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate – Cloud Platform
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate – Linux on Azure
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate – Windows Server 2012
Choose one of the following Azure Exams:
MCSE: DATA MANAGEMENT AND ANALYTICS
Demonstrate your broad skill sets in SQL administration, building enterprise-scale data
solutions, and leveraging business intelligence data—both on-premises and in cloud
environments.
Required Exams
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Architect – SQL Server 2012/2014
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Architect – SQL Server 2016 Database Administration
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Architect – SQL Server 2016 Database Development
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Architect – SQL Server 2016 Business Intelligence
Development
 70-473: Designing and Implementing Cloud Data Platform
 70-475: Designing and Implementing Big Data Analytics Solutions

Resources
RESOURCES
 MCSD App Builder
Certification
 MCSD Azure Solutions
Architect
Solutions Developer Certifications
Currently there are two Azure specific solutions developer certifications.
MCSD: APP BUILDER
The Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD): App Builder certification validates that
you have the skills needed to build modern mobile and/or web applications and services.
Required Exams
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) – Web applications
 Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) - Universal Applications
 70-487: Developing Microsoft Azure and Web Services
MCSD: AZURE SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT
Note: This certification is retiring March 2017.
Required Exams
 70-534: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions

Setup Azure for internal use
Azure Credits
Providing access to Azure for your technology professionals is
one of the key first steps to preparing for a successful Azure
practice. Microsoft provides several ways for your organization
to have access to Microsoft Azure for development of new
services, testing workloads, learning in general, or for delivering
services.
Members of the Microsoft Action Pack program receive monthly
credits of $100 of Azure at no charge. Join the Microsoft Action
Pack.
Flexibility with Azure Credits
Any taxes which may result from receiving
services at no charge are the sole
responsibility of the recipient.
The choice is now yours on how you use your Azure credits. Use
them on any Azure service based on your needs including,
Virtual Machines, Web Sites, Cloud Services, Mobile Services,
Storage, SQL Database, Content Delivery Network, HDInsight,
Media Services, and many more.
Use the pricing calculator to estimate how much you could use
with $100 per month. Here are a few usage scenarios that
consume no more than $100 per month:
 Run 1 small Virtual Machine instance for the entire
month, or
 Store 400 GB of data in Storage, or
 Develop and test a web application using Cloud
Services, with 3 web roles and 2 worker roles on small
instances, for 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, or
 Run a 30GB SQL Database for the entire month
Please see additional terms and conditions here.
VISUAL STUDIO
If your organization has Visual Studio subscriptions, you should
know that each subscription has a set amount of Azure credits
built in that the subscriber can use. The credit amount varies
depending on the type of subscription purchased
$50/MONTH $100/MONTH $150/MONTH
Visual Studio
Professional –
annual
Visual Studio
Professional with
MSDN
Visual Studio Test
Professional with
MSDN
MSDN Platforms Visual Studio
Enterprise –
annual
Visual Studio
Enterprise with
MSDN
Visual Studio
Enterprise with
MSDN (BizSpark)
Visual Studio
Enterprise with
MSDN (MPN)
Keep your internal Azure costs down by maximizing your use of
Azure credits and benefits.
RESOURCES
 Cloud Platform Competency
 Partner Azure Benefit
In addition to providing Azure credits, you can also use MSDN
software within your MSDN subscription on Azure Virtual
Machines for development and test at no extra charge. The rate
you will pay does not include any licensing costs even virtual
machines with SQL Server, SharePoint Server, or other software
that is normally billed at a higher rate.
With Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin in 2016, Xamarin is
included with all editions of Visual Studio 2015 and above. This is
great news for mobile and cross-platform developers who wish
to achieve between 75% and 100% code reuse between
platforms.
MICROSOFT PARTNER NETWORK
As a member of the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) you may
be entitled to Visual Studio licenses and even additional Azure
credits for internal-use based on your competency. Check the
Cloud Platform Competency page to see if you are eligible:
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/membership/cloud-
platform-competency.
CSP SANDBOX
Make sure you are taking advantage of the CSP sandbox
capability. Every Microsoft partner on-boarded in CSP has access
to $200 of test accounts for every subscription they provision.

Set up Azure for internal use
Resources
RESOURCES
 Purchasing an Enterprise
Agreement
 Azure EA Portal
 Azure Free Trial
Ways to Purchase Azure
There are three primary ways you can purchase Azure.
EA AGREEMENTS
Another option for getting access to your technical professionals is to purchase an Enterprise
Agreement. This arrangement is ideal for larger organizations that require the ability to
create subscriptions for different departments and even implement charge back based on
the department. Azure subscriptions within an EA agreement are managed through the
Azure EA portal and allow for delegated administration and the ability to set quotas at the
department or subscription level.
PAY AS YOU GO AND TRIAL ACCOUNTS
Another option is to create a free trial with Azure and allow it to convert to a pay-as-you-go
subscription. An Azure free trial is valid for 30 days and allows up to $200 in Azure credits.
After the initial 30 days, any Azure usage is billed directly to you on your credit card.

Identify and enroll into Azure Sell Incentives
Resources
RESOURCES
 Digital Partner of Record
Attaching a Digital Partner of Record (DPOR)
DPOR automates how partners are attached as the Partner of
Record for the subscriptions you are actively managing for
customers.
These include subscriptions for Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online,
Microsoft Intune, Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), and Microsoft Azure.
As a partner, you are crucial to customer success in selling, implementing, deploying, or
managing solutions based on Microsoft cloud services. At Microsoft, we strive to ensure
every customer has the level of partner support they need to maximize their business
outcomes from these solutions.
The customer’s Global Admin for each cloud subscription can designate their lead services
partner as the DPOR through their admin portal, which identifies the key services/lifecycle
support partner who’s engaged in providing ongoing support. DPORs have access to
important information necessary to fully support customers and will be the contact for
FastTrack services.
DPOR allows partners to:
 Support customers’ cloud services, helping to deliver strong business outcomes
and high ongoing services levels for the customer.
 Qualify for MPN cloud competencies that will help you grow your business and
unlock benefits, such as unlimited cloud support, sales and technical training to
develop your expertise, internal software use rights, and other special offers.
 Gain insight into your customers’ cloud consumption and usage, allowing you to
monitor and proactively engage with your customers, implement solutions, and
help them reach their desired business outcome. This insight can also be leveraged
for cross-sell/upsell opportunities, and allows partners to proactively engage
customers at risk for non-renewal.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
The key to receiving incentives for digital partner of record (DPOR) is to obtain the Silver or
Gold Cloud Platform Competency. Each competency has a minimum about of Azure
Consumption you must reach through DPOR before you will receive incentives. To get
started, all you need do is ask your customers to add you as the DPOR on any of their
subscriptions that you manage. For instructions on how to add a DPOR to a subscription, see
Digital Partner of Record (DPOR) User Step-by-Step Video.
MULTIPLE PARTNER SUPPORT
With DPOR, multiple partners can be recognized for the value they add to customers’ cloud
subscriptions, and everyone benefits. Please be aware that only one partner can be added as
a DPOR on any given subscription.

Identify and enroll into Azure Sell Incentives
Resources
RESOURCES
 Enterprise Agreement
 Software Assurance
Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA)
Any Enterprise Agreement customer can add Azure to their
EA by making an upfront monetary commitment to Azure
Get the best pricing, discounts, and added benefits designed to support server and cloud
technologies.
 Get the best savings by deploying a common IT platform across the organization.
 Get 24x7 technical support, planning services, end-user and technical training, as
well as unique technologies with Software Assurance.
 Minimize up-front costs and budget more effectively by locking in pricing and
spreading payments over three years.
Respond to the rapidly changing technological landscape by accessing the latest versions of
cloud and on-premises software.
 Meet the unique requirements of your organization based on its size and
technology needs.
 Automatically access the latest software and technologies with Software Assurance.
 Choose from Microsoft cloud services, on-premises software, or a mix of both and
migrate on your own terms.
Streamline license management with a single organization-wide agreement.
 Simplify purchasing with predictable payments through a single agreement for
cloud services and software.
 Manage licensing throughout the life of your agreement with the help of a
Microsoft Certified Partner or a Microsoft representative.
 Move to a pure per user licensing model and simplify licensing with no more device
counting.

Identify and enroll into Azure Sell Incentive
Resources
RESOURCES
 Become a Cloud Solution
Provider
 CSP Indirect Provider
Incentives Overview
Incentives Guide
 CSP Indirect Reseller
Incentives Overview
 CSP Indirect Reseller
Incentives Guide
Incentives Resources
 CSP Direct Partner Incentive
Overview
 CSP Direct Partner Incentive
Guide
 CSP Direct Incentives
Resources
Cloud Solution Provider
The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program enables partners to directly manage their
entire Microsoft cloud customer lifecycle. Partners in this program utilize dedicated in-
product tools to directly provision, manage, and support their customer subscriptions.
Partners can easily package their own tools, products and services, and combine them into
one monthly or annual customer bill.
CSP DIRECT
The CSP Direct model is great for partners who have the infrastructure in place to do it all. If
your business meets these requirements and you are ready to go, enroll today.
CSP Direct requirement checklist
 Services business model
 Customer support infrastructure
 Customer billing and invoicing capabilities
 Ability to scale
Key benefits for this offering include:
 You are the first point of contact for your customers’ needs
 You own and control the billing cycle
 You sell integrated offers and services – one sales motion to drive services, attach, and
upsell
 You receive in-product tools to directly provision, manage, and support your customers
In order to qualify for CSP direct you can either build the capability yourself or recruit
needed capabilities from CSP turn key enablement companies who provide commerce
platform, support organization services and business plan and go-to market frameworks
usually via revenue sharing model.
CSP INDIRECT
Spend more time with your customers and provide specialized service offerings. If you’re not
interested in building an infrastructure to provide customer support and billing, get
connected with an Indirect Provider.

Identify and apply for Azure Investment
Programs
Cloud and Enterprise (C+E) Investment Programs
The C+E Investment Programs utilize business investment funds (BIF) to accelerate
opportunity and deal velocity supporting both the near and long-term strategies and
priorities for the C+E business.
OBJECTIVES
 Support strategic priorities for your business
 Drive deal velocity to meet your revenue and consumption goals
 Generate customer and partner references through defined solutions and design wins
 Support competitive opportunity wins, migrations and upgrade scenarios 
See the Leverage Investment Resources in this playbook for details on the available programs.
It is important to talk with your Microsoft representative to understand what programs are currently available in your region.

Build materials to support sales and
marketing efforts
Resources
RESOURCES
 MPN Sales & Marketing
Understanding Push vs. Pull Marketing
When considering the materials to support your sales and
marketing efforts, it’s important to be clear on how each
approach yields customers.
When making a purchase, customers flow thru as many as seven stages when it comes to
their knowledge about your offerings. They may stop at any one of the stages:
1. Awareness: is the customer aware (at the highest level) of what you offer?
2. Consideration: is the customer considering your offer?
3. Preference: is the customer preferring your offer against the competition?
4. Choice: is the customer choosing to go with your offer?
5. Purchase: is the customer purchasing your offer?
6. Experience: does the customer have experience with your offer, having purchased
it?
7. Recommendation: does the customer recommend your offer to others?
Obviously, the best success comes in getting a customer all the way down to
recommendation- they have not only fully explored your offer, but they have purchased it,
used it and are actively recommending to others.
The efforts behind each of these stages nets different levels of conversions. For example,
awareness efforts yield the smallest conversion as your message, once broadcast, may simply
not meet what the customer is searching for. However, recommendation yields significant
conversion as prospective customers involved in conversation with your existing customer
have already expressed their interest and have selected- your customer’s recommendation
pushes over the choice hurdle quickly.
With this understanding in mind, let’s examine the different approaches you use that favor either the top of the funnel or the bottom.

Approaches such as advertising, mass email and telemarketing are all examples of approaches that push customers towards you, primarily
by increasing their awareness.
For an offer based strategy, awareness and consideration come from being on the radar of your prospects. Preference and choice come
from your dedicated sales motion, and purchase and experience come from efforts like your sales engineers and freemium models.
Approaches such as your website, marketing collateral, sales hotline are examples of pull approaches that draw customers in. For an offer
based strategy your product is an entry point, make it easy to buy from a portal (no sales staff should be required). If you do so, you are
making it easy to recommend.

Build materials to support sales and
marketing efforts
Resources
RESOURCES
 MPN Sales & Marketing
Sales and Marketing Resources
The Microsoft Partner Network makes it easy for you to find
professional, personalized marketing resources that will help
you to market your business. Save time, save money, and get
the tools and support you need to reach your customers.
CAMPAIGNS
Use customizable marketing and sales content.
WEB CONTENT
Keep your website up to date with customer facing dynamic content.
MARKETING SURESTEP
Get step-by-step guidance to help build your marketing plan.
SERVICES
Find a marketing service provider to help with your marketing.
DIGITAL STRIDE
Run a digital marketing program to boost your website traffic.
MICROSOFT COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
Educate local businesses on current technology solutions.
LOGO BUILDER
Differentiate your business with customized logos.
For access to these resources, lessons on the why, what and how of marketing as well as best
practice examples form partners doing it today, see the Partner Marketing Center and the
Smart Partner Marketing sites.

Create key contracts
Resources
RESOURCES
 SOW
Key Contracts for your Practice
Azure practices need to use a set of legal documents. Your
practice need to have these documents ready. At minimum
your practice should be ready with these documents.
SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT
A Service Level Agreement or SLA is a contract between a service provider and the end user
that defines the level of service expected from the service provider. SLAs are output-based in
that their purpose is specifically to define what the customer will receive both in terms of
service levels and in form of compensation should service levels not be achieved.
MASTER SERVICES AGREEMENT
A Master Services Agreement (MSA) is a contract reached between parties, in which the
parties agree to the most common terms that will govern future transactions or future
agreements. For example, it may detail standard rates from a the practice rate chart, services
provided, standard payment terms and terms for liability, ownership of intellectual property,
and the dispute resolution process.
STATEMENT OF WORK
A Statement of work (SOW) is a document that defines what work or deliverables will be
provided to the client, including a brief description of the project, delivery milestones, costs
and payment schedule. This document typically references the MSA that is already in place
with the customer and is intended to allow the quick agreement on, definition of an effort
with minimal additional contractual paperwork.
MUTUAL NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT
A mutual non-disclosure agreement (MNDA or NDA) is a document that defines the terms
for the handling of confidential information exchanged between the vendor and customer.
A mutual NDA is recommended because it fairly addresses the confidentiality needs of both
parties and as such is often the first document signed before any detailed discussions begin
(usually well before any of the other contracts listed on this page). An NDA (the non-mutual
kind) is variant of the MNDA that is specifically authored to favor the confidential
information disclosure of one party.

Setup Tools & Systems
Resources
RESOURCES
 GitHub
 Visual Studio Team Services
 Microsoft Project
 Microsoft Dynamics 365 for
Project Service Automation
Project Management
Having selected an implementation process, how do you keep
track of the progress of a project both in terms of progress
against a project plan as well as with respect to project
budget? Here are some tooling options.
GITHUB
Provides the hosted environment for developers to version control and share their source
code both privately (e.g., internally to a team) and publicly (e.g., an open source project) and
collaborate on development projects.
VISUAL STUDIO TEAM SERVICES
Provides various tools from running agile teams, from support for Kanban boards, work item
backlogs, scrum boards, source control, continuous integration and release management.
Source control functionality provides Git support which enables integration with GitHub if
such integration is desired.
Visual Studio Online provides a hosted team services environment on a subscription-based
fee model.
While Visual Studio Team Services will help you manage the technical aspects of your
project, cost-containment requires a different set of tools.
MICROSOFT PROJECT
The de facto standard in project management software. Product options include hosted and
on-premises, according to your needs. Use Project to keep your projects, resources, and
teams organized and on track. Features include pre-built templates to help you hit the
ground running, powerful scheduling options, optimized task management, resource
management, seamless integration with collaboration tools like Skype for Business and
Yammer, project reports, and add-ins to expand functionality.
MICROSOFT DYNAMICS 365 FOR PROJECT SERVICE AUTOMATION
Provides users with capabilities required for setting up a project organization, engaging with
customers, project scheduling and costing, managing and approving time and expense, and
closing projects. It is specially targeted to address the needs of a Project Services based
practices, as it is designed for professionals who manage projects and the associated
customer engagement process end-to-end.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Teams
 Yammer
 OneDrive for Business
 Skype for Business
 Surface Hub
Collaboration Tools & File Sharing
Collaborating with customers through the lifecycle of a project
or the duration of a managed services agreement is critical.
There are several services that are available to make it easy to
share project plans, or setup lists for shared data such as
project plans or feature lists.
MICROSOFT TEAMS
Microsoft Teams is the latest collaboration tool from Microsoft and is designed to make your
content, tools, people, and conversations available in a single location.
YAMMER
Yammer is an enterprise social network collaboration offering to allow teams to collaborate
and share files with each other.
ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS
OneDrive for Business is an enterprise file sharing service that is designed for automatic
synchronization of files between your computer and the cloud. OneDrive makes it easy to
share files with your customers or partners.
SKYPE FOR BUSINESS
Skype for Business is an enterprise online meeting and conference service designed for
business.
SURFACE HUB
Skype online integrated collaborations device, or “meeting room in a box” if you like. In
addition to the built-in team experiences like Skype for Business, Microsoft Office and
Whiteboard, Microsoft Surface Hub is customizable with a wide array of applications.
Universal apps built for Windows 10 shine on Microsoft Surface Hub and scale to the large
screen. You can also connect apps from your personal device and drive them from Microsoft
Surface Hub.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Dynamics 365
Customer Relationship Management
Manage the customer data of your business.
CRM solutions streamline processes and increase profitability in your sales, marketing, and
service divisions. A strong CRM solution is a multifaceted platform where everything crucial
to developing, improving, and retaining your customer relationships is stored. Without the
support of an integrated CRM solution, you may miss growth opportunities and lose revenue
because you’re not maximizing your business relationships.
Imagine misplacing customer contact information, only to learn that your delay pushed your
client into the arms of a competitor. Or, picture your top two salespeople pursuing the same
prospect, resulting in an annoyed potential customer and some unfriendly, in-house
competition. Without a centralized program where your people can log and track customer
interactions, your business falls behind schedule and out of touch.
CRM tools make the customer-facing functions of business easier. They help you:
 Centralize customer information
 Automate marketing interactions
 Provide business intelligence
 Facilitate communications
 Track sales opportunities
 Analyze data
 Enable responsive customer service
Running a successful business is no simple task. When marketing campaigns, data analysis,
meetings, customer care, and more all happen simultaneously, you need a powerful CRM
solution to bring all these functions together in one place.
Dynamics 365 delivers the full spectrum of CRM through five individual
apps— Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, and Marketing —
that work seamlessly together. You can buy just what your business needs now, and add
others as those needs grow.

Support Ticket Setup and Tracking
Resources
RESROUCES
 Microsoft Dynamics 365 for
Customer Service
Customer Support
Setting up tickets, tracking issue resolution and managing
customer success are fundamentals of your practice.
Providing support to your customers from your practice is a non-trivial, omni-channel effort.
We suggest the following service which can help you quickly setup and start managing your
customer support efforts.
MICROSOFT DYNAMICS 365 FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service: is designed to manage the efforts of your
customer support teams. It provides licensed users with access to core customer service
capabilities for a significantly lower price than comparable offerings from other vendors,
including Enterprise case management, Interactive Service Hub, Unified Service Desk, SLAs
and Entitlements, and other Service group management functionality
CREATE CONSISTENCY AND LOYALTY
Provide the seamless service your customers expect by meeting them where they are with
the information they need, every time.
 Give customers great service on their channel of choice.
 Make Help easy by providing relevant, personalized service.
 Proactively address issues by detecting customers’ intent and social sentiment.
MAKE YOUR AGENTS' JOBS EASIER
Give your agents complete information—in a single customer service software app—to
make smart decisions and provide great service.
 Reveal customers’ case histories, preferences, and feedback.
 Provide guidance on entitlements and service-level agreements.
 Display it all in a single interface tailored to their job and skill set.
GET AN ADAPTIVE ENGINE
Respond quickly to customer and market changes within an agile, cloud-based environment
that has digital intelligence built in.
 Adapt and customize easily using configuration, not code.
 Extend your functionality through a single interface.
 Rely on advanced analytics and a trusted cloud platform.

Decide on a Solution Marketplace
Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure Marketplace1
 Microsoft Azure Certified
 How to publish an offer in
the Azure Marketplace
Azure Marketplace
Microsoft provides multiple channels thru which you can
promote your services and sell any packaged solutions you
offer. The Azure Marketplace should be one of the first you
consider.
Azure Marketplace is an online store that enables ecosystem partners to offer their solutions
to enterprises and Azure customers around the world. Within a single, unified platform,
customers can easily search, purchase, and deploy your solutions on Azure with just a few
clicks.
The source for thousands of software applications and services certified by Microsoft to run
on Azure. The Azure Marketplace supports offers that include Virtual Machines, Developer
Services, and Solution Templates.
The Azure Marketplace provides your solutions exposure thru the marketplace page and the
listings deeply integrated with the Azure Portal. For example, HDInsight Applications are
integrated into the steps users take to deploy an HDInsight cluster (so users could layer on
your application atop their HDInsight cluster), but are also available via the Marketplace
blade of the Azure Portal.
The process of getting your solution listed in the Azure Marketplace is referred to getting
Microsoft Azure Certified—this comes with benefits, many of which includes select benefits
from the Silver Cloud Competency from the Microsoft Partner Network
CERTIFY APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES
Solutions sold in the Azure Marketplace must be Microsoft Azure Certified. This provides
assurance to your customers that your offers have been tested for usability, readiness, and
compatibility with Azure.
 Access broad-reaching Microsoft marketing channels, and receive co-marketing
assistance and promotion outside of your Azure Marketplace listing.
 Leverage technical and business planning support to help you maximize your ROI.
 Utilize a self-service portal that contains ready-to-use marketing resources to
enhance your communications and messaging.
 Take advantage of resources such as the Sales Accelerator Toolkit and credits for
display and search advertising to help drive customer adoption.

DEVELOP YOUR SALES CHANNEL
With the Azure Marketplace, you can easily bring your solutions to market and build a sales channel that connects you to Azure customers
and channel partners around the world.
 Merchandise your solutions to our enterprise customer base, including 80% of Fortune 500 companies and many of the world’s
leading developers.
 Instantly access 87 global markets and sell your solutions in 60 local currencies.
 Integrate your offer into Azure, simplifying customer deployment and delivering a more consistent user experience.
 Maximize customer awareness by having your solutions accessed online at azure.microsoft.com/marketplace or directly in the
Azure management portal.
OPERATIONALIZE
The Azure Marketplace handles metering, billing, reporting and management of customer accounts, freeing you to focus on product
development and marketing.
 Streamline customer acquisitions by enabling customers to easily search, purchase, and deploy your solutions on Azure.
 Utilize marketplace features such as free trials to help generate leads and increase customer adoption.
 Take advantage of flexible pricing models that align to your business model and strategy.
 Simplify billing and reduce friction by having Microsoft manage billing for Azure Marketplace purchases.
When you publish your solution to the Azure Marketplace, you can establish any number of pricing tiers. You have complete flexibility in
naming these available plans, adding a description, and setting the price. A good strategy for increasing your customer adoption rate is to
do a combination of free trials and multiple pricing models. However, don’t be confused between offering a free pricing tier and a free
software trial (Try it now). The free tier is perpetually free, and you are not required to establish a payment instrument (like a credit card).
The free software trial is free for a limited period of time, after which the customer will start being charged.
There are several options for establishing your product pricing. For instance, if you wish to handle licensing on your own, outside of the
Azure Marketplace, you can use the BYOL Model (Bring-your-own-license). In this instance, you charge the customer on your own
platform. Simplify your billing and reduce customer friction by having Microsoft manage billing for Usage-Based and Monthly Fee
payment options. Microsoft will pay you quarterly via Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) at the latest, if not sooner.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Cortana Intelligence Gallery1
 How to Contribute to the
Cortana Intelligence Gallery
Cortana Intelligence Gallery
The Cortana Intelligence Gallery enables developers and data
scientists to share their analytics solutions.
The gallery contains a variety of resources including:
EXPERIMENTS
The Gallery contains a wide variety of experiments that have been developed in Azure
Machine Learning Studio. These range from quick proof-of-concept experiments that
demonstrate a specific machine learning technique, to fully-developed solutions for
complex machine learning problems.
JUPYTER NOTEBOOKS
Jupyter Notebooks include code, data visualizations, and documentation in a single,
interactive canvas. Notebooks in the Gallery provide tutorials and detailed explanations of
advanced machine learning techniques and solutions.
SOLUTIONS
Quickly build Cortana Intelligence Solutions from preconfigured solutions, reference
architectures, and design patterns. Make them your own with the included instructions or
with a featured partner.
TUTORIALS
A number of tutorials are available to walk you through machine learning technologies and
concepts, or to describe advanced methods for solving various machine learning problems.
COLLECTIONS
A collection allows you to group together experiments, APIs, and other Gallery items that
address a specific solution or concept.
COMPETITIONS
Competitions provide an exciting opportunity to compete with the community of data
scientists to solve complex problems using Cortana Intelligence Suite.

AppSource
AppSource provides a marketplace for your
Software-as-a-Service offerings.
AppSource offerings range from complete applications to add-
ins and extensions to Microsoft and Partner solutions. It is
intended as showcase for your apps that work with Azure,
PowerBI, Dynamics, Office and more. Customers can try out your
app in a self-service fashion or enable them to request a trial
from you. As a Partner, you can also be listed in the Partner
listing to market your practice services to customers.
Power BI
Power BI offers two mechanism for
partners to present their solutions.
POWERBI.COM SOLUTION TEMPLATES
If you are developing BI solutions using Power BI, consider
capturing that as intellectual property that can be offered as
Solution Template on PowerBI.com. These Solution Templates
provide end customers a self-service installable mechanism for
deploying the solution into their own Azure Subscription, but
leave room for the Partner to help the customer tailor the
implementation to meet their needs because partners are
recommended right alongside the Solution Template.
POWERBI.COM PARTNER SHOWCASE
The Partner Showcase enables you to show the BI experience
you have developed in Power BI as means to demo the end
product of the services you can provide to end customers.
Enthused customers can contact you directly from your Partner
Showcase page.
RESOURCES
 AppSource1
 PowerBI.com Solution Templates
 PowerBI.com Partner Showcase
Increase your visibility
Once you identify and select the Marketplace to target for
promoting or selling your services, plan your strategy to enroll
and increase your visibility. Be sure to leave plenty of time- most
marketplace efforts take weeks to months, so do not expect
yourself to be listed overnight.
Each marketplace is different in their approach to performing
the integration that gets you listed, but you should be aware
that there are generally these phases you will need to follow:
1. Create the commercials: This involves putting the
basic contracts in place, and providing information
about your company and the descriptions about the
product or service you will list. In some cases, you may
first need to wait to be approved and on-boarded
before you can proceed.
2. Package and Integrate: In this technical step, you
work with the marketplace API’s to integrate your
offering, as appropriate to your service or the
marketplace offering. At this stage you are typically
able to test your marketplace offering and make sure
everything works as expected and looks correct.
3. Submit for Approval: Once your integration is
complete, you will need to submit your integrated
package for review, before it is made publicly available.
You may need to iterate on this step as you get your
package compliant with the marketplace requirements.
4. Share: A Marketplace can help increase your visibility,
but without additional effort to call attention to your
listing in the marketplace, customers finding you in the
most popular marketplaces may be like them finding
the proverbial needle in a haystack. Make sure you
publicize this offer, list it on your website, and ensure
that your existing customers are all aware of it so they
can help point others to it.

Create Engagement Checklists &
Templates
Standardize Customer Engagement
Repeatable processes make for profitable practices. Use the following example checklist to
kick start your own checklist to use when executing a new engagement.
 Conduct initial requirements meeting
 Identify product owner/manager(s)
 Follow-up meeting to clarify and establish next steps
 Discuss MVP (minimal viable product) criteria
 Establish development process (Agile, Scrum, etc.)
 Identify milestones and tasks; share with customer
 Provide cost estimates for development, cloud services, and ongoing maintenance/support
 Address customer objections to proposed technology and services
 Acquire data (or sample of data) for initial data assessment and proof of concept development.
 Host project artifacts (issues, code, etc.) to share with internal team and customer (e.g. Visual Studio Team
Services)
 Follow up with customer and provide status/demos on a regular basis (e.g. 2 week sprint)
 Conduct a final handoff to customer
 Conduct project debrief with customer
 Conduct internal project post-mortem
 Customer conducts acceptance tests

GO TO MARKET PAGE 128
Go to Market

Executive Summary
Go to Market
In the previous section, we reviewed how you should hire, train
and equip your staff, as well as prepare the operations side of
your practice by providing the right systems, tools and materials.
In this section, we will help you in going to market by providing
guidance on how to define your sales process, and launch your
digital marketing activities. A key point we make here is to
consider leading both your sales and marketing efforts with the
notion of providing digital transformation to your customers.
With your awareness activities in place you are well positioned to
engage with customers and prospects. We will explore how you
should effectively represent your practice through a well-
thought out website and social media interactions, expand your
brand awareness and find new customers or new talent by
building a community strategy that includes attending meetups
and conferences, writing publications and blog posts. To make
things easier, we provide you with a recommend bill of materials
you should create as a part of your go to market efforts.
In this section, we provide guidance to help you find your first
customer, as well as how you can continue the on-going process
of acquiring customers. You will
learn how you can create initial
engagements with customers by
providing services like cloud
readiness assessments or a cloud
migration plan.
As you start to acquire customers,
you should be concerned about
how you create long term
customer relationships that
provide stable revenue for your practice. We provide guidance
on how you can learn to perform nurture marketing that helps
keep you top of mind with your customer as a valuable partner
in their business.
Measuring your customer adoption and engagement becomes
important the moment you start to acquire customers, and we
conclude this section with some guidance on how you can
measure engagement by leveraging a marketing automation
platform.
.
Top 5 things to do
Get your practice off the ground by
finding new customers, but don’t stop
there. Build lasting relationships with your
customers by nurturing and investing in
them. These are the top 5 things you
should do to keep the momentum going.
 Define your customer’s buying journey
 Launch a modern website and digital
marketing activities
 Find your first customer through
Microsoft’s resources and nurture the
relationship
 Build a presence in the community
 Invest in marketing automation tools

Define your sales process
Resources
RESOURCES
 Planning your Cloud
Business Transition: Sales
Video
 Strategies for Unlocking
Digital Transformation
 Customer Journey
Plan your customer’s journey to buying
Selling is the business. Until you close a sale, you don’t have
capital to work with, customers to serve or a business to
consider. Microsoft knows it is critical to get your sales and
marketing in alignment and ready to represent your Azure
Practice.
Define your value proposition and tell the world why to do business with your company.
Everyone in the company is in marketing. Make sure they are prepared to represent the firm
with key consistent messages.
Every unique individual has a journey to go through to buy from you. And today’s buyer is
exceptionally educated with regards to their needs. The secret is knowing where the
customer is in the journey and providing education that meets the need.
As many of your customers embark on their own digital transformation journeys, keep the
principle of customer lifetime value in mind. In other words, focus not only on the initial sale,
but on growing the average revenue from a customer over the typical lifetime of their
relationship with you.
The customer journey to buying is a multi-step process: Explore, Evaluate, Purchase, Expand,
Renew and Advocacy. Learn much more about Customer Journeys here.
See also Engaging with Customers in this playbook.

ADVANCE ANALYTICS CUSTOMER DECISION FRAMEWORK
An important consideration when defining your sales process, is defining whom to target. For Data Platform and Analytics practices, the
sales conversation should predominantly center around the line of business decision makers and increasingly centralized IT is less involved
than in the past. The following diagram summarizes the key roles to be aware of, their concerns and their purchase triggers when making
advanced analytics purchase decisions.
Observe that the line of business purchase criteria puts most importance on the vertical specificity and cost of the solution, followed by
criteria such as compatibility with existing infrastructure and long solution shelf life, low solution maintenance. The buyer’s journey for
advanced analytics should come as no surprise, your practice needs to target and work with the Line of Business to ensure to ensure they
can discover your offering, and know how it uniquely helps them. IT only enters the discussion at the last phases of the evaluation, as they
decide how to provide the technical and infrastructural resources to implement, deploy or support the solution. The line of business
decision maker ultimately makes the buying decision with the input of all four parties.

Launch digital marketing activities
Build a modern, discoverable
website
Your website is all-important.
A web site is still where customers most frequently go to learn
about your business, products, and services. The Smart Partner
Marketing website from Microsoft offers many resources on
building an effective web site. Ensure you build compelling
content and lead capture mechanisms mapped to the customer
journey. Ensure tracking is in place to track leads and pull them
into your CRM for lead tracking and scoring.
To be discoverable in the major search engines, you will need to
spend time on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Additionally,
you will want to carve out your keyword niche, by identifying
those strong keywords that customers are likely to use to search
for your services and ensure these are the words that are
consistently used throughout your website. With a keyword list
in mind, you should also consider making targeted ad buys on
the major search engines. This is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
and along with SEO represents the minimum you need to be
nurturing for your website to succeed.
SOCIAL MEDIA
While your website may be where customers go to learn about
your business, social media (like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter)
is where customers discover and recommend your business and
you need will need to have a presence there. Microsoft has
created a three part video series you can watch to learn the
basics of Creating a Compelling Profile, Growing Your Network
and using Social Media for Marketing.
CONTENT CREATION
Content is King and Context is Queen.
Survey your customers, ask them about their experience as they
moved through the buying journey with your company, what
did they like, what would they fix, what do they recommend? Be
sure to visit the Partner Marketing Center for ready-made
content you can customize.
You must understand your customers through research and
experience. You watch your customers and learn about what
compels them and when they are ready to make a positive move
towards buying.
Content should be made available for each stage of the
customer journey. For instance, content for early interest in
Azure would be very educational and level 100. You might also
want to create early content that reflects the business value of
Azure. At level 200 you’d have case studies, feature/benefit drill
downs and more advanced content. At the point a prospect is
ready for the purchase, your content should be very directive.
You should lead customers to the buying process. You should
connect the prospect with someone who can close the sale –
direct or through another partner. The most effective content
marketers are dedicated to the task. Content decisions and
creation should be led by an assigned team that understands the
key target audiences. Don’t make content an afterthought or
small component of your strategic marketing plans. Ensure the
right authors are creating pertinent information for every stage
of the buying process.
Engaging with your customers means finding out where they
spend their time. It is learning where they gather information.
Who do they listen to? A few of these “places” are covered here.
Keep in mind there are many other places/online locations users
gather.
DIGITALSTRIDE
Help your prospects and customers discover and engage with
your company solutions online with Microsoft DigitalStride,
allowing you to turn prospects into loyal customers who stay
with you for years to come. Use our Digital IQ assessment to
evaluate your online presence and determine which package fits
your needs best. In addition to maximizing your discoverability,
DigitalStride will provide you the necessary consulting, support
and recommendations to help you succeed. We’ve worked with
thousands of Microsoft partners over the last eight years and are
award winning Microsoft Gold partners ourselves. Services
available in English, Spanish Portuguese, German and French.
Learn more about DigitalStride.
RESOURCES
 Smart Partner Marketing
 Search Engine Optimization Video
 How to Build a Website
 Customer Journey
 Partner Marketing Center
 Digital Stride

Digital Transformation with Azure
Resources
RESOURCES
 Digital Transformation on
MPN
 Digital Transformation Blog
Leading with Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is a broad, expansive concept with
many nuances that seem to pop up everywhere.
Many enterprise companies (such as Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente, and Hewlett Packard) are
advocates and proprietors of digital transformation. However, increasingly so are smaller,
scrappy startups, ISVs, and partners just like you. With digital transformation, smaller
businesses are now better able to identify a customer need and use scalable technology to
help new customers in amazing ways.
THE FOUR PILLARS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INCLUDE:.
1. Empower your employees: Employees need to be empowered to do their best work from
anywhere, at any time, on any device. I challenge you to think about how you can empower
your customers with the technology you use every day to focus more on business growth
and spend fewer hours on less valuable business operations. Keep in mind that with this new
ability to access information from anywhere, protecting your data, wherever it goes, also
becomes a priority.
2. Engage your customers: Customers are expecting new levels of connections with the
businesses they partner with and purchase from. In this digital age, customers are
experiencing deep personalization and interactive marketing, as well as enjoying the ability
to connect with businesses easier than ever before. With constant connection and
personalized interactions, you can build loyal, profitable customer-relationships. By
automating these processes, you can further boost your sales and service teams’
productivity.
3. Optimize your operations: Optimizing your business process often starts with your IT
infrastructure. Once you’ve divvied up what information you can store where, you can
greatly reduce the cost and complexity of IT management with new resources like the cloud.
With data backup and recovery, you can be back online in minutes without losing the time
and effort you had put into your work. Finally, you can reduce risk, with easier compliance, if
you choose solutions which prioritize safeguarding your business.
4. Transform your product: If you innovate with agility, and are open to the consistent
changes we see in today’s business landscape, you will be able to adapt quickly to changing
business needs. For example, with new data analytics services, you can turn your data into a
business asset. Data protection and security is tied to all four pillars and is critical to
reinforce, and sometimes lead with, when having a customer conversation around these
messages. This is all about making sure that your data is protected everywhere on all devices,
that efficient and effective data backup and recovery solutions can bring you back online in
minutes, and risk is mitigated with easier compliance services and solutions..

How enterprises make this work
Digital Transformation
Essentially, digital transformation implies leveraging new tools and technologies to change the way your business functions, from product
development to customer interaction. In the Digital Transformation panel at the 2016 World Economic forum chairmen and CEO’s (from
HP, Kaiser Permanente, Alcoa, Schneider Electric and Salesforce) discussed what digital transformation has meant for them, the challenges
they’ve faced, and advice to other companies about executing their own digital transformations.
Their stories span from innovation in building and quality testing products, to new ways of interacting with their customers. Meg Whitman,
CEO of HP, discussed moving to the cloud as being a key step in their digital transformation and has helped them keep up with the fast-
paced tech market. Bernard Tyson, Chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente, mentioned a new patient-relationships strategy called “Care
Anywhere”, which allows patients to connect with clinicians digitally. The opportunities are truly endless..

If we…
 Stand proudly on the strength of the
Microsoft Platform
 Follow the vision of CEO Satya
Nadella “To Empower All
Stakeholders”
Then, together with integrity, we will
transform the cloud possibilities into
unlimited realities for work, home, worship
and play and together we will build a
better world for All Stakeholders.
Richard Jorgensen PhD (hc)
The AwareComm Vision®, The Partners United Reality
“
“

Digital Transformation with Azure
Resources
RESOURCES
 The 4 Steps to Creating Your
Ideal Customer Profile
 Creating Your Targeted
Accounts List
 Making Sense of Digital
Transformation
Account Based Marketing (ABM)
Account based marketing is the technique of marketing to
each customer as a separate entity.
You do not use a standard marketing plan for all customers. Instead you create a unique
plan for each enterprise to best capture their attention and move them through the sales
cycle.
It is critical to develop a profile for each of your enterprise accounts so that you can conduct
ABM. Begin with The 4 Steps to Creating your Ideal Customer Profile and Creating your
Targeted Accounts List with Sales and Marketing.
Customers want to feel that you are uniquely suited to help them achieve their business
goals, and using an ideal customer profile (ICP) will help to ensure your messages resonate
more effectively. Tailoring your unique value proposition, targeted marketing strategy
and ongoing support around a customer profile that you are ideally suited to serve will
ensure that you not only attract customers that you are better equipped to support, but that
you also retain and grow those customers into larger accounts. To get you started, here are
four steps to help you create your ICP, as outlined in a Blog post by Alex Sessoms, Microsoft
Senior Partner Marketing Manager, on 26 July 2016:
Self-Evaluate
Your organization’s self-evaluation should be grounded in realism. Your ideal customer
should be perfect for who your company is now, not who you’d like it do be. You might be
amazing at helping small retail shops improve their point-of-sale technology and manage
their ongoing IT needs. In that case, you probably shouldn’t list Wal-Mart as your ideal
customer. Your success stories from the past won’t resonate well and you’ll be setting
yourself up for pain or even failure if you do manage to land a customer outside of your
ideal profile spectrum. With that in mind, your ideal customer should also have the capacity
to grow along with your company’s progress. Maybe your ideal customers now are smaller
businesses that have high growth potential to mature as your service offerings and support
capabilities also grow.

These are a few specific things you identify about your company as you
define your ideal customer:
Baseline: We all want to be bold and visionary and so it’s easy for us to talk about where we see ourselves going in the future.
However, an honest and clear depiction of where your company stands now will help you find customers who can help you reach
your goals. Make sure you know what metrics you will be using to measure progress along the way. You may want to target IT
decision makers, but how are you measuring that those are the folks receiving your message? Make sure that prospects from the
right verticals or industries are coming to your site and that the content you present to them (and the tone of your messaging) is
appropriate to drive the desired behavior.
Current Capabilities: Again, this is all about realism. It’s important to be realistic about what can be done to meet potential
customers’ needs. Here is where you consider the maturity of your product, the experience and size of your team, your
technology, and every other aspect which dictates what your company CAN do. If you go after very large accounts, are you set up
to market to and reach the large number of stakeholders involved in the buying process? Are you ready to work with large
procurement departments and potentially have to customize your offerings to meet those customers’ demands? Or are small and
midmarket customers in a certain geography a better fit for your company? Consider these points carefully to help ensure your
marketing pulls in customers as close as possible to the profile you outlined.
Adaptability: With your company’s current resources and experience, are you able to meet a customer’s needs as they develop
and grow? At what stage in your company’s life cycle will your relationship most benefit them? At what point, will your product or
service no longer be capable of supporting them? For example, one company I was working with took on a large nationwide
client, only to find that having to be on-site in multiple locations across the country stretched their staff too thin and was costing
them more than expected, stunting growth within other accounts. After opening a second office in Boston before establishing the
core capabilities that made their first office successful, they soon realized this customer was outside of their ideal customer
spectrum and mutually cut ties, but not before experiencing a costly lesson in the importance of having a clearly defined ICP.
GET TO KNOW YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS
It’s possible that you’ve already found some ideal clients that you can learn from. Take an inventory of their demographics (industry,
geography, company revenue, etc.) and decision maker psychographics (personality, how they make decisions, preferences). Take note of
how you acquired those customers and ask them why they chose you. Use that information to market to more customers like them.
Incentivize those existing happy customers to write a review of why they enjoy working with you on your website and other sites that
potential customers frequent. Finally, document the challenges you solve for your current customers and use those stories across your
channel strategies.
USE PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
Does just reading the phrase predictive analytics scare you? Don’t let it!
Mick Hollison, CMO at InsideSales.com asks you to “imagine the ability to accurately predict not only who your best leads and prospects
will be, but when and how will be the most effective ways to reach them and then to engage. This ability alone will empower marketers and
salespeople in the coming seasons to be radically more productive and profitable than they are today. Used properly, it can transform the
science of sales forecasting from a dart-throwing exercise to a precision instrument.”
With predictive analytics tools now more pervasive and affordable, they can be of great support to your ICP selection process. Our goal is
to learn more about our current key accounts, better understand why they bought from us, and find more customers who have similar
attributes.

Most predictive analytics solutions in the market have features that help you with look-alike modeling to identify target accounts. These
then help you target the few accounts that will potentially drive the largest part of your revenue. Microsoft’s internal SMB marketing team
uses these tools to extract data related to current top customers from CRM and marketing automation solutions. This information can then
be combined with external data sources about customers to construct an “Existing ICP” data model. You can use this model with a host of
providers to then run your “Existing ICP” data model against prospects already in your CRM database, social media analytics sources and all
other 3rd party resources you can get your hands on. This then gives you great insights and ability to identify the accounts that resemble
your existing ICP.
DIG DEEPER
Once you have defined a few different situations, and have a good understanding about where you and your current customers stand, you
can begin conceptualizing your ICP. Here are some additional questions, traits and scenarios that will help you identify the ICP when you
are engaging with potential leads:
 What is the customer challenge or pain point that needs solving?
 Are they aware of that challenge; are they actively searching for solutions?
 Do they have a sense of urgency about solving the challenge?
 Does your solution and its current capabilities solve the pain points?
 Does your solution or service integrate with their existing investments?
 Do you understand their procurement process; does it match with how you sell?
 Can you offer the support that they are expecting both while onboarding and on an ongoing basis?
 Do you have access to the decision makers in the customer organization?
Doing this exercise will give your team a good idea about where you are and where you want to go, as well as where your ideal customers
are and where they are willing to go. Knowing the ins and outs of who you are targeting, where you can find them and they can best
benefit from your offering will make fleshing out marketing campaigns and knowing who to ask for referrals from much easier.
Just as you expect your business to change and grow, your ideal customer profile must remain equally agile. After you think you’ve
identified your ICP, be sure to occasionally pull metrics to reassess your course of action if needed. By treating your ICP as a living,
breathing prototype, your business (a living, breathing entity itself) will remain healthy and profitable.

Engage with Customers & Prospects
Resources
RESOURCES
 Meetup.com
Meetups
Getting in Front of the Customer
Meetups are generally more local and smaller sized groups. They come together around a
common interest and regularly talk. They usually meet in person in a limited geographic
area. A great example of a meetup is the Boston Azure Meetup. You can learn about Azure
with like-minded peers.
This meetup is your opportunity to speak to an audience that wants to hear your message.
Do you have a recent case study you can discuss? Maybe you’ve had a breakthrough with
the technology? Maybe you are just good at talking about the benefits of Azure. Be sure to
understand the nature of the meetup – is it technical or business focused? This obviously
determines the content you will deliver.
More than just getting in front of perspective customers, meetups are a great place to
practice your public speaking. Whether you have little experience, or you just want to try
out some new ideas, meetups are very forgiving venues.
Conferences
Maximizing Your Time At Conferences
Conferences are a mainstay of the technology industry. Look at Microsoft’s technical events
– Ignite, Build, etc. all provide a place for learning. Getting the opportunity to speak at such
a conference is very difficult. However, you can sponsor a booth, signage, event, etc. at the
conference. This is your opportunity to reach a captive audience interested in what you are
“selling”. Make sure you have a messaging framework for all representatives of your
company for the event. Everyone should be telling the same story about your offerings. This
helps build brand awareness.
There are opportunities to do side types of sessions – outside the main stages. You should
look at those first to get started with the event. Many times, they have chalk-talks or
industry birds-of-a-feather type activities to exchange knowledge. Again, you build
awareness and you might also walk away with a new customer.

Engage with Customers & Prospects
Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure Blog
 ZDNET Microsoft Blog
 Satya Nadella Twitter
Publications
The written word still matters.
Once the lifeblood of the technology industry, publications take a backseat to bloggers and
tweeters these days. With so much information to consume, a reader must decide where to
spend time gathering information. Printed publications are all but obsolete. You will find a
few, but most are on line today. This makes the demand for more frequent new information
even more important. This opens doors for you to write. You can contact a publication and
find out what they look for in submissions. Rarely do you get paid for this work. Instead you
are doing it to build awareness of you and your product or service. You need to consider
your blog a publication today – a very critical one. Blogs are not only followed by individuals
but also picked up by reporters. Your blog posts are today’s articles. See the video the Basics
of Blogging for a crash course.
Even your very short tweets can lead to more emphasis on your topic. Moreover, you can
publicize news about your blogs with social media and use these shares to increase
awareness. While ramping up on your blog, do not forget about creating a press release if
you have something newsworthy to say about your practice (see Basic Public Relations for
tips on writing a good press release). Anything written – online or off – today is a publication.
Webinars and Podcasts
Content is King
Webinars and podcasts are nothing new. They are however more sophisticated. The
technology to make them happen for the end user is simple to use. The presenter has little
to learn to be successful. It is very different presenting via webinars and podcasts instead of
in front of people. It takes some practice to get good. Don’t forget to allow that preparation
time.
Webinars vary in length. The best webcasts are far less than 30 minutes. If appropriate for
the audience and the tools, allow time for live questions and answers. Always record your
presentation for future viewing. Make the most of the time by putting your webcast on your
web site, YouTube and other venues that invite this type of content. You can also share a
link to a short webcast to a prospective customer email.
Video content marketing in general is very popular. Every marketing plan should include a
provision for video. In less than a minute you can deliver powerful messages that keep the
audience attention. Today’s viewer is used to small interactive chunks of information. They
need to get the point very quickly, leave a positive impression and then move on. And
hopefully moving on means buying your product.

Engage with Customers and Prospects
Bill of Material (BOM)
Customer-Ready Material for your Offering
A BOM is a critical part of launching your cloud practice, new
offerings, IP, etc. You need to carefully think through what your
customer requirements will be in terms of information to make
the purchasing decision. The BOM can vary widely. And it is
often necessary to create multiple BOMs – for internal audiences
as well as customers. Microsoft recommends you be prepared
with the following items in your customer BOM. This material
should be developed largely by the Product Management team
with assistance from Development, Sales, Support, and others. If
you don’t have the material below ready at launch time, it is
important to ask yourself if you are ready to start talking to
customers. As mentioned in other sections, information is
critical today. Flashy commercials and cool videos only get you
so far. Your job is to educate potential customers on the
benefits of your product or service as well as how it will solve
their business needs.
Suggested Bill of Material Components
 100levelservicescustomerreadypresentation(awareness) – This
presentationislargelyintroductoryandaroundcreatingawareness.
Don’tunderestimate the needhowever. Youwilluse this100-level
deckmore thanyouthink,especiallywithbusinessdecisionmakers
andbusinessusers.
 300levelofferingscustomerreadypresentation– The 300-level
presentationisdeep. Receiversofthispresentationare learningnot
onlywhytheyneedyouroffering,butwhatitis,howitisbuilt,
technologyfeaturesandmore. Thistype ofpresentationwilloftenbe
givenatatechnicaltrade show. Youcanalsothinkofthisdeckasthe
one fortechnicalusersanddecisionmakers.
 Pitchdeckforsalesopportunities–Thisisthe thirdpresentationyou
willneed. Thisisthe shorterpresentationofallyourdecks. Thisisthe
presentationyouuse toclose the sale. The emphasisisonvalue
proposition,pricing,customersupportpost-sale andclientsuccess.
 Demo-professionallyrecordedandscriptedforotherstopresent– A
demoiscritical. Youneedtocreate arecordeddemothatcanbe
watchedfrom awebsite,YouTube,atrade show,etc. Youalsoneed
toscriptthe demosoanyonegivingitcanbe ontaskwiththe
messaging.
 Frequentlyaskedquestions(FAQ) -everythingyoucanthinkofthat
willbe askedbycustomers– AFAQ ismeanttobeaninternal
document. Allthe informationinthe documentismeanttobe
spokentoprospectsandcustomers. Thisisacollectionof
informationyouhave learnedovertimemightbe ofinteresttothe
customer. Youwanteveryone inthe companytohave the same
answertoproductandothercompanyquestions.
 Positioningandmessagingaboutofferingsincludingvalue
proposition– Amessagingdocumentensureseveryone isspeaking
the samemessagestothe customer. Thiswrittendocumentwould
notbe handedtothe customer. Allthe language inthe documentis
customerreadyandusedinmarketingvehicles.
 Understandingofcompetitionandcustomerreadymessaging–
YourBOMmustemphasize the competition. Youmusthavea
mappingoffeaturesinthe competitionversusyouroffering. This
mayormaynotbe customerready. Thisisadecisioneachfirm
shouldmake.
 White paperdetailingservices,offer,businessvalue andtechnical
depth– Asyouare offeringatechnicalproductorservice,youneed
toexplainthose aspectstosomeone whowantstoknow. The white
paperisalook“underthe covers”athowthe productorservice was
built,technologiesusesandcoveringbusinessvalue.
 Datasheetdescribingofferinginconcise way– Thedatasheetis
oftenconsideredaleavebehind. Thisisthe one pagerthatcovers
quicklythe factsacustomerneedstodecide toaskformore
information.
 Company/Offeringwebsite– Websitesare stillthe numberoneplace
people come forinformationonyourcompany,managementteam,
productsandmore. Youneedamodernwebsite todisplayyour
offering.
 Socialmediachannels(andparticipationinchannelsotherthanyour
own) – Settingupsocialmediachannelscannotbe overlooked.
Todaysocialmediaisthe mostinfluentialchannelforinformation
exchange,especiallytechnicalproducts. Youneeddedicated
resourcestothiseffortandample contenttobeeffective.
 Videosforpromotingyourofferingbyaudience viewing–Videoasa
marketingtoolisverypopular. Youneeduptotwo-minute videos
thatshowoffyourproductoroffer. Thisisasellingandawareness
tool.
 Creative-establishedlookandfeelforallcustomermaterial– Your
companyandofferingsmusthaveasimilarlookandfeelwhen
displayedpublicly. Youneedprofessionalguidance toensure every
time someoneencountersyourcompany,theyare seeingthe same
type oflookandfeel.
ThisisjustashortBOM. Youcangetmuchmore detailed. ThisBOM
willgetyoustartedinthe rightdirection.

Define Technical Community Strategy
Resources
RESOURCES
 Using the MTC
Engage with Workshops
Many of the partners interviewed have significant success
through face-to-face customer interactions via workshops.
WORKSHOPS
Workshops typically involve high level hands-on training of either the technology or a proof
of concept demonstration based on the technology geared towards your solution. These
workshops allow direct discussion with business and technical decision makers that allow for
deeper discussion and solution selling.
MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY CENTERS (WHERE AVAILABLE)
Technology initiatives can transform your business, but they can also stall or end in disaster.
How can you ensure your technology investments payoff by creating new businesses,
enabling your employees to be more productive or open new channels to engage with your
customers?
With over 40 locations around the globe, the MTCs bring together the right resources to
help you explore the potential impact of cloud, mobile & social solutions to your business.
 People: The MTC staff are experts in Microsoft solutions. Their tenure in the
industry ensures they will effectively guide your team to rapidly find solutions to
your technology challenges.
 Partners: The MTCs have formed alliances with industry leaders who provide
comprehensive resources, including hardware, software, and services to explore
during your engagements.
 Place: The MTC environment provides rich interactive and immersive experiences
for you to learn first-hand how Microsoft and partner technologies can help you
take on your most difficult challenges. Keeping your eye on the ball while
performing a deep dive on the start-up mentality to derive convergence on cross-
platform integration.

Execute Nurture Marketing Efforts
Resources
RESOURCES
 MPN Marketing Resources
Creating Long Term Customer Relationships
Nurture marketing means staying in front of your customer by
providing them valuable content.
Nurturing customers is a must in the noisy messaging world of today. You must start with
your existing customers. You must ensure they understand what they bought, how to be
most successful and what other offerings you have. Nurturing new customers is equally
important. You will create journeys for each type of prospect with the content that fits
where they are in the buying cycle.
You create these long-term customer relationships through nurture marketing. Nurture
marketing is positioning your company as an expert, delivering relevant content at the right
time using tools like whitepapers, news articles, webinars, and delivering them in a
structured way.
WHY NURTURE?
Simply put, nurture marketing yields significantly more leads, increased revenue and
improved customer satisfaction- all things critical to growing your practice.
Invest in relationships
Nurture campaigns are a clear investment in your customers. It is a commitment to learn
where they are in the buyers journey and deliver the right message when they need it. Did
you know a sales rep needs to touch someone 7 times before a purchase. Most reps give up
after 2-3 calls. Keep the following in mind that is true about prospects 6 months after the
prospect expressed interest:

Nurture marketing is often associated with email marketing. It is
related. However, nurturing customers is not simply sending out
a generic email blast periodically. Nurturing is understanding of
your customer needs and behaviors. Nurturing is ensuring the
customer gets just what they need when they need it to make a
buying decision in your favor.
The five keys to successfully nurture prospects are as follows:
AUTHENTICITY
 There is no substitute for knowing what it is like to
stand in the shoes of your customer
 You must sound like you have true business insight
 The language you use is key
 A vertical focus is usually critical
 Get this wrong and your message will be ignored
RELEVANCE
 Speak to known business pains (as opposed to
technical)
 Speak to where in the buying cycle the prospect is at
 Remain consistent to your core value proposition
 Speak to the emotional triggers (focus on the “why”)
including fear, gain/greed, curiosity
VARIETY
 “Feed” the prospect’s hunger for information
 Find the right cadence and frequency
 Do not overwhelm or they will unsubscribe
FOLLOW-UP
 The handoff to sales is critical, but it must happen at
the right time
 Track buyer engagement to determine optimum
timing by monitoring the frequency of interaction and
the level of interest based on lead scoring
AUTOMATION
 Timing, consistency, and frequency matter
 The only way to ensure the thoroughness of timing,
consistency and frequency is with the use of marketing
automation software

Engage Technical Pre-Sales in Sales
Conversations
Selling is Technical
How to be sure you talk to the technical and business decision maker.
From the very start of your engagement with a prospect, you need to be aware of the need for technical pre-sales assistance. Many times,
you are dealing with business decision makers during the buying cycle. In that case, you are less likely to have a need for technical
assistance. However more than ever before, technical staff are a part of decision making with Azure practices. When the customer has one
or more technical resources on the purchase committee, you need to engage technical pre-sales.
Your technical pre-sales staff should be very experienced users of your products and services. These employees need training or
experience as a user of your products. Former support employees often make good technical pre-sales staff. The technical pre-sales staff is
in place to explain technology, how it works, how it meets a business need and to answer any other questions. The business benefits can be
left to the sales and marketing staff. This is where they shine. The technical staff should excel at the more complex issues that come from
prospects. Technical staff should be dedicated to pre-sales. They should work together with sales efforts. One without the other cannot
be effective. You need the sales staff to speak to business decision makers. Equally, you need pre-sales to answer all technical inquiries.
Examples of technical probing questions to ask during presales conversations supporting a Cloud Application Development Practice:
 Where does your data reside?
 What on-premises or cloud data stores do you currently leverage?
 For our area of interest, what is the volume of data?
 How often is it updated or is new data received?
 Is the data highly variable in schema?
 What application development and technologies are within your existing team’s comfort zone?
 What application platforms would you like to target? Web, mobile, desktop, IoT, etc.
 Do you have any compliance or regulatory requirements that pertain to the handling of your data?
 Can you walk us thru the high level of where data enters your system and how it is ultimately consumed?
 Across what geographies is your data stored and from which regions is it consumed?

Find Your Customers
Resources
RESOURCES
 Smart Partner Marketing
 SMB Partner Insider
Community
 Microsoft Community
Connections
Find Your First Customer
Microsoft provides these resources to help you find your first
customer
The Microsoft Partner Network makes it easy for you to find professional, personalized
marketing resources that will help you to market your business and find new customers.
Save time, save money, and get the tools and support you need to reach your customers.
Build the foundations you need to reach your first customer by following the Smart Partner
Marketing program, which provides what you need to know for marketing Microsoft
solutions in a Cloud first world: assess your status, learn smart marketing principles, and
execute marketing tactics.
Project LeadGen is a great way to find your first cloud customer. Project LeadGen is a
comprehensive sales and marketing program to help Microsoft partners develop sales
opportunities built on Microsoft cloud solutions. Utilizing key assets from Microsoft
Community Connections, this 5-part training series includes instructional videos, event
assets and personal coaching. This program is for partners who would like to learn about
Seminar Selling and how they can leverage Microsoft branding to build business leads.
Project LeadGen can be used to acquire new customers as well as address existing loyal
customers. Remember informing your existing customers of new services is appreciated by
your clients. Coming from a trusted source, they are more likely to show interest that leads
to a sale. You can download Project LeadGen from the SMB Partner Insider Community
website or directly from here.

Qualifying Your Leads
Before getting a project started with a customer, you should complete the following:
Find a business sponsor
Acquiring an executive sponsor is crucial. A sponsor not only helps confirm the seriousness of the customer, but will be key throughout the
process. A bought-in executive can champion the project and help guarantee success.
CONFIRM THE BUDGET
Some companies may ask for free projects or proof of concepts, but it is important to ensure that the customer has a defined budget for
the product. You should know that once the PoC is complete, there will be a budget for full implementation,.
DETERMINE USE CASE
It is crucial to understand the customer's pains and businesses objectives and to have an idea of the appropriate solution. Research the
customer to understand what the objectives of the LOB decision makers.
ENSURE CUSTOMER READINESS
Only customers who are already using analytics will see value of advanced analytics. Especially target SAS install base as they see the value
of advanced analytics, but more probably than not, are not happy with their vendor.

Find Your Customers
Resources
RESOURCES
 Marketing Automation
Video
 Microsoft Dynamics
Marketing
Targeting Advanced Analytics
For Demand Forecasting, Predictive Maintenance and
Personalization prospects, consider the following guidance.
DEMAND FORECASTING
Focus on B2C (business-to-consumer) companies over B2B (business-to-business)
companies. Businesses that sell to consumers typically have thin margins and have a much
greater desire and need to accurately forecast demand.
In order to build robust, accurate demand forecasting models, organizations need to have
three things:
1. Rich Transactional Data: Several years of historical transactional and cost data at
the SKU level with consistent reference information.
2. Relevant External Data: Census, weather, competitive and any other information
that seems potentially relevant to the company’s industry and customer base.
3. Flexible Analysis Environment: An ability to flexibly store, process and analyze
existing and new data, including a data science capability that can be used to
create demand forecasts.
PERSONALIZATION
Personalization solutions are especially impactful for healthcare facilities, financial services
and retail companies that have a significant brick-and-mortar presence as well as a digital
marketing group focused on customer engagement. A strong account:
1. Is in an industry where personalization is making transformative changes – think
online services or anything delivered through mobile apps
2. Has several C-level marketing roles including CMO and CIO
3. Has built a revenue driver around generating highly targeted marketing offers and
may be looking to improve
4. Has or is looking to build a profitable practice around recommendation services
5. Has large and heterogenous groups of customer
PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE
Focus on manufacturing/large operations companies. In order to build robust, accurate
Predictive Maintenance models, organizations need to have three things:
1. Failure History: Failure events can be found in maintenance records and parts
replacement history or anomalies in the training data can also be used as failures as
identified by the domain experts
2. Maintenance/Repair History: detailed maintenance history of the asset containing
information about the components replaced, preventive maintenance activities
performed, etc
3. Machine Conditions: we expect the data to contain time-varying features that
capture this aging pattern and any anomalies that will lead to degradation.

Find Your Next Customer
Keep your momentum going. There are a range of benefits to assist with your Go-To-Market
activities. Here are some key resources to help you be successful.
SUCCESSFULLY DRIVE YOUR SALES AND MARKETING EFFORTS
Campaign Finder - Go to market faster, reach the right customers, and grow your profits with these customizable sales and marketing
materials. Explore the latest featured campaigns or select one based on the solutions you sell to customers.
DIGITALSTRIDE
Microsoft DigitalStride offers partners a packaged set of digital marketing services at a low price, including Search Engine Optimization
(SEO), which can help potential customers find their website at a lower cost per acquisition. The services also include the improvement of a
partner’s Microsoft Referrals profile helping to generate new cloud opportunities and more business transactions. Some of the additional
benefits of developing your digital marketing capability through DigitalStride include:
 Driving net new revenue at a fraction of the cost of adding a new sales representative
 Building personalized contact points with potential customers
 Easily monitoring the sales pipeline and measuring return on investment (ROI)
 Taking advantage of a more cost effective way of reaching customers compared to traditional media
 Deliver content syndication and the ability to dynamically update content based on new campaigns and launches
WEB SYNDICATION
Keep your website up to date with customer facing dynamic content. Visit our new and improved content syndication experience.
Welcome to Marketing SureStep - Marketing is like a road trip. Lots of fun and surprises, but fewer bad surprises if you have a map. A
marketing plan is like that map. Our step-by-step marketing plan template helps you drive your marketing in the direction you want.
Case Study:
KLOUD
LearnhowKloudisoptimizingtheirsalesandmarketingstrategytoincreaseprofitability.
Watchnow

With Azure, our clients see an immediate
ROI and business impact from technology
expenditures.
Sam Ibrahim
VP Sales, Hanu Software“
“

Engage Customers
Resources
RESOURCES
 Enterprise Cloud Strategy E-
Book
 Azure Virtual Machines
Readiness Assessment
 Azure Channel Pricing
Calculator
 Azure IaaS Cost Estimator Tool
 Operations Management Suite
Application Dependency
Monitor
 Prioritization is key to a
successful hybrid cloud strategy
Assessing for Customer Readiness
Start by offering a cloud readiness assessment
2016 marks the inflection point for cloud adoption for both SMB and enterprise customers.
Most customers today have already started taking cloud seriously. However, not every
customer is savvy enough to build a robust cloud strategy. Many don’t have granular
visibility into their IT infrastructure – and are not able to quantify the benefits in cost, agility,
speed, and time to market that cloud brings. Others, while aware of the benefits, don’t know
where to start from – and are unsure of how ready their staff, systems, tools, and processes
are for public cloud. This is why most managed services engagements and significant cloud
migration projects begin with a cloud assessment. A cloud assessment determines which
workloads are ready to move to Azure, and in what fashion (lift-and-shift, re-platform, or
replacement with a new deployment model). Customers require a partner who can provide
the proper roadmap and guidance to optimizing their workloads in Microsoft Azure.
Some of the key customer challenges and questions you may face include the following:
 How do I get more speed, agility and performance for my IT assets?
 How do I decide between hosted private cloud vs public cloud deployments?
 How do I factor in both for my short to medium term IT strategy?
 How do I decide the first apps to take to cloud?
 Do I need to train my staff again after a cloud migration? What other changes do I
need to make in my IT staffing?
 How do I control ‘shadow IT’, or ‘zombie apps’ or workloads that are consuming
more resources than the value they are delivering?
A cloud readiness assessment usually covers topics such as:
 What the estimated ROI for migrating workloads to Azure would be
 The readiness needs of the customer to support the workload in Azure
 Which applications and workloads should stay on-premises
 Hybrid cloud connectivity requirements

Engage Customers
Resources
You’ve assessed your customer’s
environment, workloads,
applications (and their
dependencies). You’ve painstakingly
planned their cloud migration
strategy. Now it’s time to put that
preparation into action.
RESOURCES
 Azure Site Recovery
 Azure Application Architectures
 Azure App Service Migration
Assistant
 How to get moving in your
migration to the cloud
 Using Azure AD Domain
Services for Migration
 Azure Import/Export Service
 How to get moving in your
migration to the cloud
Creating a cloud migration plan
After a successful cloud readiness assessment, the next logical
opportunity is the cloud migration plan.
There are several questions your customer will want answers for when planning a migration
including:
 What application components am I migrating?
 Are they storage data, web servers, databases, single virtual machines, N-tier apps,
or entire datacenters?
 Will this be a lift-and-shift migration or will this involve any degree of re-
platforming or code factoring? Which Azure region(s) will I migrate to?
 What kind of availability, scalability, security, and auto scaling patterns should I
introduce in the apps?
 Will the entire migration process be automated or will it be a combination of
manual and scripted effort?
 What automation tools will I use?
 How will I test the apps in cloud for performance and availability before turning
over?
 How do I use my existing software licenses when migrating to Azure?
 How will connectivity back to on-premises be handled (if any)?
A migration offering would look holistically at a migration plan that works through
everything from moving workloads to virtual machines to establishing connectivity using
site-to-site VPN or ExpressRoute.
Ensure that your migration plan includes the following:
 Creating a plan for migrating servers or virtual machines to Azure (sizing, costs,
moving data, project schedule)
 Migrating data
 Network capacity planning
 Architecting for availability
 Architecting for security
At this point, you’ve assessed your customer’s environment, workloads, applications (and
their dependencies) and you’ve painstakingly planned their cloud migration strategy. Now
it’s time to put that preparation into action.

Migration Planning
Once you’ve determined what workloads will move to Azure, you need to come up with a migration plan that considers all the key steps of
the migration process.
There are several key things to keep in mind while planning a migration:
1. What application components am I migrating? Are they storage data, web servers, Databases, single VMs, N-tier apps, or entire
datacenters?
2. Will this be a lift-and-shift migration or will this involve any degree of re-platforming or code factoring? Which Azure region(s)
will I migrate to?
3. What kind of availability, scalability, security, and auto scaling patterns should I introduce in the apps?
4. Will the entire migration process be automated or will it be a combination of manual and scripted effort? What automation
tools will I use?
5. How will I test the apps in cloud for performance and availability before turning over?
6. How do I use my customer’s existing software licenses when migrating to Azure? Can I make use of programs like Azure HUB
or License Mobility?

Below are overviews of some of the key approaches to consider when migrating workloads to
the cloud. Each approach has its pros and cons but may also offer additional opportunities.
DECOMMISSION LIFT-AND-SHIFT
 Shut down inefficient or obsolete business applications
 Retaining access to the historical data
 Decommissioning has many steps that need to be
followed for security and compliance purposes
 As-is migration of applications and data from an on-
premises datacenter to Azure
 Often immediate benefits in cost, scalability,
availability, elasticity, or management features
REARCHITECT SUSTAIN
 Right-sizing” resources running an application
 Opportunity to consolidate various app tiers (when possible)
or re-architect the app for platform as a service (PaaS).
 Your customer’s app is integral and efficient enough to
continue in its current on premises deployment
 No migration necessary
 Often most mission-critical, data sensitive apps are last to
move to cloud
NEW DEPLOYMENTS RE-PLATFORM
 MSPs provide deployment, POC and provisioning assistance
for new apps that are written for Azure
 Includes dev-test, staging and testing in the desired IDE
 Architecture design and solution design assistance
 Minor architect or code changes on an application to
work on a different platform
 Often minor code changes are required to remove
performance bottlenecks and increase an app’s
operability on Azure
DECOMMISSION ORCHESTRATE
 Shutting down inefficient or obsolete business
applications
 Retaining access to the historical data
 Decommissioning has many steps that need to be
followed for security and compliance purposes
 Orchestrate how the various app components will interact
and move in the migration process
 Important for complex apps or for entire data center/rack
migrations
NEW DEPLOYMENTS APPLICATION LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
 MSPs provide deployment, POC and provisioning
assistance for new apps that are written for Azure
 Includes dev-test, staging andtesting in the desired IDE
 Architecture design and solution design assistance
 End to end management of application development
lifecycle including governance, development, and
maintenance of apps

Measure Customer Adoption &
Engagement
Resources
RESOURCES
 Marketing Automation
Video
 Microsoft Dynamics
Marketing
Measure & Track
Marketing Automation Today
Marketing automation, an essential part of your marketing strategy, refers to software
platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more
effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.)
and automate repetitive tasks. Marketing automation is much more than just email but
frequently thought of that way. Microsoft recommends you invest in marketing automation
tools to effectively engage customers, nurture them through the buying process and
measure/track adoption.
Investment in marketing and the use of marketing automation is pivotal to success for
today’s Cloud practice. Today’s customer requires information and education to make an
informed purchase decision. Only through nurturing your prospects and existing customers
with appropriate content will you find your pipeline full.
One of the key features of marketing automation is lead scoring. This feature allows scoring
or grading of leads based on their interaction with your marketing content. Your sales force
can stay focused on only those prospects most likely to purchase. You can measure number
of visitors, company they come from, behavior on web sites, reaction to emails and what
links the prospect clicked on.
All this intelligence allows you to follow up with an informed perspective. Customers
appreciate you taking the time to know what is important to them and presenting that
material upon contact.
Some of the popular marketing automation platforms include Microsoft Dynamics
Marketing, Adobe Marketing Cloud, ClickDimensions, Marketo, Eloqua and Hubspot.

Close & Execute
Deals

Executive Summary
Close & Execute Deals
In previous sections in the playbook, we covered topics from
how to build your practice from selecting products or services to
specialize in, to building and training your team to make your
ideas a reality, to bringing your special offering to market and
finding and keeping great customers. What is there left to do? In
this section, we cover some strategies to compel potential
customers who may be sitting on the fence when considering
your offer, to select your business proposition. One way to do
this is by writing a winning proposal. Another way is to build a
proof of concept or prototype of your product or service
offering, which could help a prospect understand what it is
you're offering, or to solidify their vision of what you can make
possible. Microsoft is committed to helping your business grow,
and provides both co-selling and co-marketing opportunities.
Your success is driven by several factors, one of which is knowing
how to sell Azure solutions as part of your offering and how to
negotiate deals. We provide training resources to assist with
these presales efforts. Another factor is your ability to work
efficiently and to use proven methods that help ensure
successful delivery. To assist, we highlight the various
development processes available so you can choose the right
process for your practice and team. Then we discuss strategies to
improve upon the requirements discovery and clarification
process by holding architecture design sessions, and building
proofs of concept.
It has been said that our current
customers are our best
customers. The transformative
world of cloud brings
expectations and opportunities.
Expectations from your customers
that you will support your IP with
continued maintenance, for
example. Opportunities for
building your recurring revenue by offering levels of support,
aided by a Digital Partner of Record (DPoR), as another example.
On the topic of support, we link to Azure-specific best practices,
technical guidance, and troubleshooting resources to guide your
development/architecture team, and to assist your support team
in this area.
Finally, we'll talk about some Microsoft investment resources you
can leverage to help fund your and your customers' journey to
the cloud. Microsoft provides various funding pipelines that help
accelerate Azure usage. These funds range in use from funds
that can help you win the deal by delivering proof of concepts,
to funds that aid you in building deployment plans, performing
competitive migrations or help drive additional Azure
consumption by your customer.
Top 5 things to do
Add value to your practice and turn your
prospective customers into lasting ones.
These are the top 5 things you should do
to close and execute deals.
 Identify opportunities to co-sell with
Microsoft
 Write a winning proposal and be
prepared to negotiate
 Conduct an architecture design session
and build a proof of concept
 Provide ongoing support to your
customers
 Leverage Microsoft investment funds

CLOSE & EXECUTE DEALS PAGE 158
Develop Customer Adoption &
Onboarding Plans
Maximize customer lifetime value
Through our research, we heard a number of best practices focused on how partners are setting
themselves up for success to maximize customer lifetime value including the following
investments across people, process and technology:
PEOPLE
 Hire a customer success manager to look after the customer’s usage, look for opportunities to cross-sell and upsell new services
and build plans to ensure customers are adopting and deploying the services they have purchased.
 Create train the trainer sessions with super users and IT staff. These engagements tend to increase satisfaction and adoption.
 Assign a cloud business owner on the leadership team of the customer to get all different parts of the business aligned and
excited about adopting the new technology you are implementing
 Reward customer retention and loyalty – renewals, product and services attach
 Infuse a customer focused strategy and culture
PROCESS
 Understand your customer’s business pains and needs to drive usage by helping them solve those business pains.
 Sell it right and take a staged approach to cloud deployment to increase adoption rates.
 Build a customer adoption plan that includes goals, expected outcomes, adoption metrics and rollout projects.
 Add managed services to your offering and become your customer’s outsourced IT department.
 Increase customer value by identifying upsell and/or cross-sell opportunities and next logical purchases. Leverage Microsoft cloud
roadmap to introduce new opportunities.
TECHNOLOGY
 Deploy CRM Online to manage and track your customer relationships and opportunities. Leverage your internal use rights!
 Build an adoption focused portal. Leverage Microsoft resource sites such as IT Showcase and FastTrack as a source for adoption
focused content, training videos and email templates.
 Establish yourself as Partner of Record and leverage active usage and consumption data in the Cloud Services Partner Dashboard
to understand your customers’ usage and where incremental support is needed to drive adoption.
 Leverage 3rd party tools to streamline and automate deployment and adoption.
 Measure customer ROI and satisfaction – how much you have saved your customer, what benefits they have received.

Identify Opportunities to Co-Sell with
Microsoft
Resources
RESOURCES
 Go To Market
 Identify and Apply for Azure
Investment Programs
Closing the Sale Together
Microsoft is committed to helping your business grow. With a
focus on co-selling and co-marketing opportunities, Microsoft
can help your business reach new customers and markets
worldwide
The foundation of co-selling success is our ability to scale business through a
knowledgeable extended sales force, our partners. It is business critical to reinforce the
importance and value-add of our partners in our sales efforts, therefore WW has decided to
rebrand our program to use terms more relevant in a sales capacity.
P-Seller (Partner Seller) will be the new name for the extended V-TSP program, which now
includes both P-TSP and P-SSP resources. The name V-TSP is now being retired.
The objective of the P-Seller program is to scale our Microsoft selling capability to our
Enterprise and Corporate Account customers, through leverage of qualified Partner selling
resources. The P-Seller name is now the umbrella term for two types of Partner resources:
 Partner Technology Solutions Professional (P-TSP), is akin to the V-TSP from the
FY13 V-TSP Program and managed by SMSP (PTS) and EPG (TSP).
 Partner Solution Sales Professional (P-SSP) is a new role that has been added to the
WW P-Seller program designed to aid deeper pro-active co-selling capability.
The Microsoft Virtual Technology Solution Program (V-TSP) is a select group chosen from
the elite in Microsoft’s partner community, whose focus is to augment Microsoft’s internal
Technology Specialist team. Their primary role is to communicate the value of Microsoft
Solutions to customers and to provide architectural guidance for Enterprise Integration
solutions. The Microsoft VTSP program was designed to create a deeper relationship with
Microsoft Partners, the Product Teams at Microsoft Corporate, and Regional Microsoft
Offices, in order to provide highly skilled solution specialists to Microsoft customers. It is
designed to enable a high performance team of partner-based resources to deliver pre-sale
activities and resources to empower customers and help them meet their solution and
integration needs.

Develop Proposal
Resources
RESOURCES
 Proposal Template
 Million Dollar Consulting
 Technical Presales Assistance
 Submit Advisory Request
Write winning proposals
Customer proposals are a cornerstone of your Azure Practice.
You must put together a compilation of information and data
compelling enough to move your prospect to a sale. When
you get to the proposal stage, you should be very well poised
to close the business.
When writing a proposal, there are a few key things to keep in mind. First, you should have
already discussed what you are proposing with the customer—never rely on a proposal for
negotiation. Second, write your proposal so that the customer is provided a choice of
“YES’s”. After reading your proposal the customer has multiple paths to move forward, and
the path to not moving forward is not attractive. Third, structure your proposal so that the
material that is most readily agreed to comes first then gradually layer in the items that
might introduce friction. A simple example of this is—do not put the proposal fee or
estimate at the beginning.
A proposal template is available for use with your practice. For more suggestions on writing
successful proposals, see the book Million Dollar Consulting: The professional’s guide to
growing a practice.
During your pre-sales process, note that Microsoft has resources to assist you. Gain a
competitive advantage to win more deals by connecting with Microsoft experts for
personalized remote technical assistance during the presales phase to help you position
Microsoft solutions, overcome customer objections, demonstrate the value of solutions, and
present solutions to your prospective customers, including:
 Proof-of-concept guidance
 Business value proposition
 Competitive assistance
 Feature overview and comparison guidance
 Request for proposal (RFP) questions
 Technical licensing recommendations
For a request outside of the qualified Technical Presales Assistance core benefit, partner
advisory hours are deducted from benefits.

Negotiate and Close Deals
Resources
RESOURCES
 Partner University Programs
& Training
 Technical Presales and
Deployment Training
 Partner Enablement Blog
 MPN Learning Paths
 Video: Win More Deals
Be on point with Azure Sales Training
As more platforms migrate to the cloud, Microsoft Partners
should understand the growing opportunity for solutions built
on Microsoft Azure, and how to sell them. Below are sales
resources that will help you learn how to sell it and how it’s
licensed, and to become familiar with high level deployment
considerations.
TRAINING RECOMMENDATIONS
These recommendations for self-paced training will introduce you to and deepen your
understanding of Azure. You can also use the Hot Sheet to find upcoming sales training.
 Hot Sheet Training Schedule
 Microsoft Azure, Your Customers, Your Future webcast series
 Partner Enablement Blog
Be sure to take advantage of the role-play, objection handling and sales training resources
available to you as a valued Microsoft Partner at the Microsoft Partner Network’s Learning
Paths site. Also, be sure to use Microsoft Partner Technical Services in helping you with
technical presales efforts- just submit an Advisory Service Request using the My Support
drop down on that page.

Pitch Perfect Conversation Checklist
Resources
RESOURCES
 Pitch Perfect - Microsoft
Secure
 Pitch Perfect - Azure
Selling Azure Solutions
To be successful with selling, a Partner needs to discuss the
customer’s business environment and industry confidently
and offer new perspectives that contribute to the unique value
of the combined Microsoft and Partner solution. Below are
some value tips for a pitch perfect conversation.
 Demonstrate knowledge of the customer business climate.
 Discuss the short/long-term business implications of industry trends around the
cloud.
 Ask questions to validate understanding and/or uncover the account’s business
drivers and critical business goals.
 Ask more probing questions to fully understand the BDM’s problems/needs,
potential business value if problems are solved and/or implications if the problems
are not solved and actions that have been taken to solve problems.
 Position the business value of the Microsoft Azure vision without immediately
communicating the product/specific features.
 Explain how the end-to-end Microsoft Azure Vision can provide business value to
the BDM in his/her context.
 Use competitive knowledge to position Microsoft/Partner solution strengths.
 Effectively handle BDM objections.
 Share a relevant Microsoft Azure workload story to solve business challenges
and/or satisfy business needs that the BDM is facing.
 Skillfully integrate a demonstration that articulates the key elements of the
solution. Demonstration should successfully integrate a demo that reinforces how
it solves the commercial customers’ business challenges.
 Close with appropriate next steps.
Microsoft has two Pitch Perfect courses available on Partner University
Pitch Perfect – Microsoft Secure (Published July 1)
Pitch Perfect – Azure (Published Sept 8)
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PARTNERS
Before accessing any content, a partner must be both associated to his/her company’s MPN
ID and must have onboarded or logged into Partner University for the first time. The
partner-facing instructions for completing both steps can be found on CloudDAM here.

Deploy/Implement Solutions
Resources
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Modern Partner:
Optimize Your Operations
Execute Efficiently
Focus on working smarter, not harder.
Think of your projects like products on an assembly line: focus on providing your services
with precision. That means using standardized, repeatable “components” and appropriate
automation to streamline the processes and enhance quality. Be mindful of deploying the
right skills for each task in order to maximize productivity and profitability. For example,
small increments of a high cost senior resource can be spread across a number of projects to
oversee complex steps and mundane tasks can be delegated to third-party tools that are
readily available.
As you progress, take note of processes and methodology you could codify and repeat. Take
the time to document them for review and potential implementation later. Make sure all
team members always looking for ways to optimize their efforts whether by automation or
process standardization.
In the heat of project delivery, be sure to minimize exceptions, and strive to deliver items
repetitive work products in the same way, in all circumstances.
Finally, be willing to say no. Saying no is a reasonable response to requests that deviate from
your standard solution.
See the Standardize Customer Engagement Checklist for an example checklist you can use to
frame your solution delivery.

Architecture Design Session
An architecture design session is a working session between your experts and the customer.
This intensive, two-day session delivers in-depth technical information on integrating data from across your customer’s entire organization
and delivering it in an analysis-ready form. Presentations, demonstrations, and whiteboard discussions are customized to address your
customer’s needs. In many cases, the design session is used to identify candidate proofs of concept. Here are some potential topics that are
covered during an architecture design session:
 Server topology: To plan and deploy your customer’s business productivity solution, it’s necessary to understand the required
server topology.
 Integration platform: The Azure services work seamlessly together and can also be integrated with third party and LOB
applications. The ADS will endeavor to fit diverse systems together.
 Social computing: Companies need to leverage their employees’ ability to make business connections and create, share, and
evaluate content in a natural way.
 Secure framework: Companies can create experiences that are both user based and role based. Choose from a range of options
for restricting sensitive information, and deliver the most relevant experience while meeting industry standards and enterprise
security requirements.
 Virtualization and cloud computing: Extending your customer’s enterprise by leveraging cloud resources or virtualization reduces
the cost of hardware and additional resources.
PRIMARY AUDIENCE
 Architects
 Developers
 Test and quality assurance (QA) engineers
 Technical staff
Phases of a successful architecture design session
BEFORE THE ADS
 Schedule a time for the design session – normally 1-2 days
 Schedule a location: ensure you have whiteboards and a projector
 Schedule resources: experts from your team, and a cross-cutting panel of technical and business stakeholders from the customer
 Build an agenda: establish milestone goals in advance sot that the ADS doesn’t get consumed discussing a single topic
 Prepare preliminary documentation and architectural diagrams. Even if you only have the basic building blocks, it’s good to come
prepared with something you can modify during or after the session
DURING THE ADS
Begin by reviewing requirements with your customer. As you conduct the design session, whiteboard the requirements and proposed
solutions, and arrive at a consensus for each major topic. During this time, be sure to capture photos of the whiteboard so as not to lose
your notes.

There are typically the following phases during an architecture design session: Discovery,
Envisioning, and Planning:
DISCOVERY
 Review the customer background and business technology strategy
 Project background and its drivers/aims
 Functional and non-functional requirements
 Usage scenarios
 Technology landscape
ENVISIONING
 Key functions and capabilities
 Components of the solution
 External connections and integration points
 Security considerations
 Abilities considerations
 Map requirements and scenarios to components
PLANNING
 Establish proof points
 Exclusions, risks, and issues
 Pre-requisites
 Deliverables
 Resources
 Escalation, communication, and long-term plans
AFTER THE ADS
During the ADS, you and your customer planned a high-level architecture framework and conceptual design for a solution that addresses
their organization’s business goals and technical requirements. In addition to a summary of the engagement, you’ll deliver information
about:
 Special areas of concern to your customer’s organization, such as security, compliance, and compatibility.
 Deployment scenarios that map to established deployment and practices and that cite specific examples where
 applicable.
 Familiarity with the Microsoft technologies proposed for the solution, in addition to any trade-offs among the differing
technology options.
 The capabilities of your solution to deliver business performance on premises or in the cloud.
The outcome should be polished architecture diagrams that can be reviewed and signed off on by the customer. If one or more proof of
concepts are desired, provide a plan and a timeline to deliver.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Microsoft Modern Partner:
Optimize Your Operations
Implement Proof of Concepts
The ability to quickly provision infrastructure and managed
services makes it much easier to stand up a proof of concept
and use it for demonstrating a concept to key stakeholders.
The acceptance criteria for a proof of concept should be chosen early and short but clearly
defined milestones should lead the way to a successful proof of concept.
Some common best practices that can help you as you and your customer go through the
journey of an Azure PoC.
 Start small by identifying the minimum problem you are trying to solve and focus
on it
 Look for high value but low risk opportunities when getting started
 Take advantage of the platform. Azure can replicate some of the best technology in
your datacenter but it can also do much more. Consider PaaS services that can
accelerate your milestones and lower your overall burden from manageability and
support.
 Treat each PoC as a continuous learning and improvement process. As your skills in
Azure improve so will the way you approach a PoC.
 After you prove the concept, test it for performance, security, usability and
supportability.
PROOF OF CONCEPT HIGH LEVEL FLOW

HOW TO PERFORM A PROOF OF CONCEPT?
Proof of concepts (PoC) serve several purposes. One of the primary aims is to overcome customer objections by
demonstrating that the solution will solve the problem it’s being designed for.
The PoC also can serve as evidence that your practice can use for future engagements with the same customer or
with new customers. Many times, the output of a PoC can be added to your practices intellectual property list for
demonstrations or used to accelerate future solutions. Proof of concepts are one of your key tools when trying to
displace the competition by rapidly showing value and hopefully a quick return on investment. See information
about MTCs in this playbook).
DEFINE SCOPE
A proper PoC is one that is defined with a clear and concrete scope. Conduct an application design session (see
ADS in this playbook) to level set and align business and technical requirements and set clear goals. This should
include:
 Identify workloads and features to demonstrate
 Determine what you want to prove and which objections need to be overcome
 Clearly demarcate responsibilities and setup organization
 Setup Azure subscriptions and define who pays Azure and perform cost estimates of the PoC
 Agree on the next step if success criteria are met
POC EXECUTION
The first step in execution is to identify the technical resources needed for the PoC. This will include the technical
implementation team as well as project management for tracking the progress of the engagement. Beyond
identification of resources, you will need to ensure all members of your team and your customers technical team
(if they are participating) are clear on responsibilities. During the PoC it is important that the initial design follow
best practices and is designed for production (just scaled down) from the beginning.
Communication is critical, so ensure that the progress of the PoC is communicated to all stakeholders on a regular
basis.
NEXT STEPS
At the end of the PoC, a report should be created that explains the overall status of the PoC and any issues
identified during the PoC. The report should elaborate on the pros and cons of the delivery and clearly explain
the value prop of moving forward with a real implementation to the stakeholders along with expected
production costs over time.
Assuming the stakeholders agree to move forward a plan should be put into place to implement the learnings
from the PoC in production.
COMMON PROOF OF CONCEPTS FOR DATA PLATFORM AND ANALYTICS:
In our research, 60% of partners having a Data Platform and Analytics practice indicated that offer proof of concept services—in fact it was
the most popular project service offered across the partners we surveyed. Some example Proof of Concepts include:
 Single dashboard or report showing key performance indicators important to the customer, but with mock data
 Lightweight end to end data pipeline simulating the customer’s actual pipeline
 A polished demo user interface using simulated results from a mock or lightly trained machine learning model
Simulated load against the data store(s) under consideration

Transition to Managed Services
Resources
RESOURCES
 FastTrack
 Digital Partner of Record
Pass the customer off to your managed
service team
This is the stage where transitioning to the service delivery
management team. Depending on what was delivered this
could be a simple as validation of expectations. However, in
the transformative world of cloud there are expectations and
opportunity at this stage.
EXPECTATIONS
If you delivered IP (SaaS) then there is an expectation that you will maintain and support this
IP. This paves the way for charging for maintenance, which is typically a recurring revenue or
annuity revenue stream. It is recommended your handle this stage as an upsell unless the
maintenance was agreed upon prior to/or during delivery.
OPPORTUNITY
Even if you did not deliver IP to the customer there is an opportunity to build your recurring
revenue by offering levels of support (if you company business model supports this). This is
where the Digital Partner of Record (DPoR) conversation can happen for annuity, or your
company can establish levels of support on your own cost structure.
DIGITAL PARTNER OF RECORD
Customers benefit from adding a Digital Partner of Record. Doing so provides the partner
with access to usage and consumption data, which allows the partner to better serve the
customer and help them perfect the use of Microsoft services for their desired business
outcome. This partner will also be automatically contacted for any FastTrack services
questions or issues.
More information on see Digital Partner of Record

Best practices for running an Azure project
Deploying or creating a solution in Azure can cover a broad surface area of technologies and services that are used. A common problem
for customers implementing solutions on their own is not following established best practices and existing reference architectures. It is
our recommendation to ensure that your team is aware of and takes advantage of established best practices from Microsoft where
possible. We have compiled a list of best practices resources as it relates to deploying infrastructure in Azure or for hybrid deployments.
DOCUMENT OVERVIEW
Azure Guidance from Patterns and Practices Checklists for availability, scalability, security for a broad list of
topics and services in Azure
Azure Reference Architectures A collection of documented best practices for deploying virtual
machines and VPN connectivity in Azure.
Performance Best Practices for SQL Server running in Azure Performance tuning SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines
Azure Resiliency Technical Guidance Best practices for building resilient solutions in Azure
Azure Security Best Practices and Patterns Best practices and patterns
Data Partitioning Guidance Strategies that you can use to partition data to improve scalability,
reduce contention, and optimize performance.
Patterns for Designing ARM Templates Best practices with template design and deployment
Developing Big Data Solutions This guide explores the use of HDInsight for scenarios such as
iterative exploration, as a data warehouse, for ETL processes, and
integration into existing BI systems. It also includes guidance on
understanding the concepts of big data, planning and designing
big data solutions, and implementing these solutions.
Best practices for Azure App Services Best practices for deploying, monitoring and troubleshooting
Azure App Service deployments.
Instrumenting applications using Application Insights Using Application Insights to instrument applications for
troubleshooting, monitoring and telemetry capture.

Troubleshooting Resources
To assist your support team, we have compiled several resources to assist with
troubleshooting the related services your team may use as part of delivering services in this
practice.
DATA PLATFORM & ANALYTICS TROUBLESHOOTING RESOURCES
SUBHEADER TITLE
Troubleshoot HDInsight Troubleshoot Azure SQL Database
Troubleshoot SQL Data Warehouse Troubleshooting DocumentDB
Troubleshoot Stream Analytics Troubleshoot IoT Hub
Troubleshoot Data Lake Analytics Jobs Troubleshooting Azure Redis Cache
Troubleshooting Azure Storage Troubleshooting Azure Data Factory
Troubleshooting Azure Machine Learning Troubleshoot SQL Server Stretch Database
Troubleshooting Power BI Troubleshooting Azure Notification Hubs
End-to-End Storage Troubleshooting

Leverage Investment Resources
Resources
RESOURCES
 SQL Server Deployment
Planning Services
 Azure Deployment Planning
Services for Public Cloud
Consumption Investment Funds (CIF)
Microsoft has allocated funds to pay you to help your
customers accelerate their usage of Azure.
The explicit purpose of CIF is to activate and accelerate Azure services usage via Microsoft
Consulting Services and/or partners. CIF is for funding Microsoft services or partner
engagements to accelerate Azure services usage, for example, by funding Proof of Concept
or pilot efforts. It can also be used to fund the execution and delivery of Azure consumption
plans supporting deployment and migration efforts.
CIF funds can be used during pre-sales delivery as deal support or as post-sales support for
driving Azure consumption and adoption.
DEAL SUPPORT (PRE-SALES)
For deal support investments, there are specific return on investment (ROI) and funding
requirements. Partners who receive CIF for deal support are required to complete the
projects within 90 days of approval or they may risk losing the funds as they may be re-
allocated to drive other opportunities.
DRIVING CONSUMPTION & ADOPTION (POST SALES)
For these investments, there are specific return on investment (ROI), funding requirements
and the end customer must be participating in an Azure Consumption Plan that captures the
agreed upon growth in Azure usage over the next 12 months. Partners who receive CIF for
driving consumption and adoption must complete and invoice their projects within 120 days
approval or they may risk losing the funds as they may be re-allocated to drive other
opportunities.
DEPLOYMENT PLANNING SERVICES FOR DATA PLATFORM & ANALYTICS
Microsoft partners with Gold Competencies in Data Platform or Business Intelligence can
enroll to provide Microsoft-sponsored structured consulting engagements and build custom
deployment plans for customers. Work with Software Assurance customers looking to create
a business intelligence solution or migrate to the latest version of SQL Server or begin their
journey to the cloud.
To learn more about CIF, any ROI and funding requirements you will need to contact your
Microsoft representative.

Resources
RESOURCES
 Safe Passage Competitive
Migration Funding
Safe Passage
Safe Passage funding is for compete migrations in which the
customer will lift and shift off of a competitor’s platform.
There are a few migrations programs provided within Safe Passage that focus on specific
opportunities, including:
 Competitive Platform migration from VMWare including upgrades to Windows
Server 2016 and System Center.
 Competitive mobility migration from AirWatch or MobileIron to EMS.
 Competitive data warehouse migrations from Oracle, Teradata, AWS Redshift to
SQL Server, Analytics Platform System (APS), Azure Data Services or Azure SQL Data
Warehouse.
 Complete migrations of mission critical workloads from Oracle, DB2, Sybase or
competitors to APS to SQL Server, Azure, Azure SQL Database, APS.
 Competitive migration from AWS or VMWare to Azure.
Projects must be completed within 120 days of approval. To learn more about Safe Passage,
you will need to contact your Microsoft representative

Resources
RESOURCES
 Azure Everywhere
Azure Everywhere
Simple funding for kick-starting targeted workloads.
AZURE EVERYWHERE
What is it that makes Azure so compelling but also challenging for partners
to sell? Is it about generating customer interest? Articulating the right
solution? To successfully overcome the sales challenges of the Cloud, we
have designed an Azure Everywhere program; to help you articulate, position
and sell and migrate some of the most common on-premises solutions to
Azure.
DELIVERY FORMAT
The Azure Everywhere program is delivered through a series of 150 minute
webinars allowing you to increase your Azure Technical readiness through an
easy to understand and step-by-step approach. The program starts with the
Azure IaaS foundation course for IT Pros and Modern App Development for
developers and continues with specific scenarios like Dev/Test, SQL server
and SharePoint on Azure IaaS.
 Please register to watch the recordings or to watch the webinars in the
series.
Azure Access
Azure trial accounts to support customers or partners.
Azure Access has two variants that differ according to project size.
 Small POC: Provides Azure passes that offer up to 3 months of credit and up to
$1,500 USD in credit.
 Large POC: Provide Azure passes that last 4 months or longer with up to $10,000 in
Azure credit
To learn more about Azure Access, contact your Microsoft representative

OPTIMIZE & GROW YOUR PRACTICE PAGE 174
Optimize & Grow
Your Practice

Executive Summary
Optimize & Grow Your Practice
Previously covered by this playbook are strategies for building
your data platform and analytics practice, finding and keeping
customers then providing them with ongoing support, and
leveraging Microsoft investment funds. In this section, we focus
on ways you can continue to grow your practice, tweaking
things as you evaluate your place in the market and whether
you're meeting the needs of your current and prospective
customers.
Are your customers satisfied by your services and products?
Learn how to collect feedback, then use that feedback to
optimize delivery and look for opportunities to document and
improve processes and automate tasks. Gain additional vantage
points about your successes and shortfalls by conducting a
project post-mortem, or retrospective. Learn from your
experiences to improve upon your process for greater chances
of success in the future.
Use the land and expand strategy by looking for opportunities to
provide incremental project services to your happy customers. A
satisfied customer will likely be open to purchasing additional
services from you, especially when you are able to offer solutions
to needs you identified while delivering past services to them.
Discover ways you can focus on improving your value
proposition by asking your customers specific questions about
how you can do better. This might also open an opportunity to
create a case study to highlight your success with the customer,
and use that along with a marketing plan to break into new
vertical markets. If you are able to
expand your customer base and
can point to successful
deployments like this one, it may
be worthwhile to perform market
and customer research to select
an appropriate vertical to match
your business maturity level.
To effectively grow your business,
you need the funds to invest in
pre-requisites for growth, like hiring special skills, buying a
company, or renting more office space. We'll cover various key
performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your success, so you
can maximize both efficiency and profit to provide the funds to
fuel growth.
We end off by discussing how nurturing your partner
relationships can help reduce your costs of going to market,
increase your reach, optimize your sales model, and expand your
customer base. Partners can help fill knowledge gaps in new
vertical markets, or provide you with access to the right decision
maker in a new vertical. Our studies show that the group of
partners who associated a large amount of their revenue with
partner-to-partner collaboration were also the ones who were
growing the fastest.
Use the strategies we provide in this section to optimize and
grow your practice.
Top 5 things to do
Learn from your customers and
experience to optimize your practice,
and expand to new markets through
strategic partnerships. These are the top
5 things you should do to optimize and
grow your practice.
 Gather feedback from your customers
 Learn from your project successes and
failures
 Create case studies and a marketing plan
to expand into new vertical markets
 Maximize your efficiency and profit to
fuel growth
 Establish and nurture strategic
partnerships

Collect Feedback
Resources
RESOURCES
 Net Promoter Score
The Basics
Satisfied customers have no reason to change cloud suppliers,
but of course you won’t know how satisfied they are unless
you ask them.
It is critically important to have a mechanism in place to solicit feedback from your
customers on a regular basis. You don’t want to bombard them with requests to fill out
surveys, but you do want to provide ample opportunities to tell you how you’re doing.
If you provide managed services, this might involve asking users about their level of
satisfaction with the service they receive. If you are more focused on providing project or
professional services, consider sending out a satisfaction survey at the end of a project or
meeting with the customer in person to collect feedback.
Consider using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a primary measure for satisfaction. The NPS
is calculated based on responses to a single question: How likely is it that you would
recommend our company/product/ service to a friend or colleague? Those who respond
with a score of 9 or 10 are called promoters and are likely to remain customers for longer and
make more referrals to other potential customers. Those who respond with a score of 0 to 6
are labeled detractors and are less likely to remain as customers in the long term. You
subtract the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage of promoters
to arrive at the NPS score. Companies that use this method strive for a score of 50 or higher.
In addition to soliciting a quantitative measure of satisfaction, you should also provide
customers with the opportunity to tell you why they are satisfied or dissatisfied.
Regardless of how you measure customer satisfaction, it is important to act on the feedback
you receive and follow up with customers to demonstrate you are taking measures to
address their concerns. If your customer is dissatisfied, get to the root cause and fix it. And
then tell/show them how you fixed it.
If you provide project services, another technique to learn from is to conduct a post mortem
of the delivered project. Here you should involve both the technical project team and the
customer success manager to enumerate what went well, what went wrong and what could
have been done better. Focus on the latter two for opportunities to improve your solution or
your process.

Collect Feedback
Resources
RESOURCES
 Optimize Your Operations
eBook
Use Feedback to Optimize and Grow
Take the feedback you have collected from the customer and
your customer team to optimize delivery and look for
opportunities to document and improve processes and
automate tasks.
Work to identify opportunities to optimize the costs incurred in delivering the solution.
Often times, this will lead you to either opportunities for IP creation or for the creation of
repeatable processes you can use with your next round of customers.
Many people automatically associate Intellectual Property (IP) with software, apps, and
technology tools, but standardized and repeatable processes can also be your secret sauce.
When you document the steps involved in completing a job or create templates for
deliverables, you are creating intellectual property.
It is very common to get caught up in delivering projects and solutions and never get to the
task of documenting what’s been done and the lessons learned along the way. But unless
you build in the time to take a breath and take stock of what worked well and what didn’t,
you will never be able to develop repeatable methods and processes. You need to make
harvesting repeatable work products a standard task and hold staff accountable (or reward
them) for completing it.
Think broadly about your repeatable processes. Go back and look at your last 20 or 30 or
even 50 projects and see what they have in common. You may be surprised by how many
times you have completed a type of project or specific task over and over again. And if you
have done something often enough, chances are you have a latent specialization. Successful
partners take this discovery to the next level, by wrapping that depth of experience up as a
“product” that can then be sold, publicized and marketed as a differentiated skill or service.
DON’T FORGET THE CASE STUDIES
With a satisfied customer in hand, now is also a good time to think about putting together a
case study about the effort that you can promote and feature the solution you built for the
customer. This is an ideal opportunity to build up your reference base. We’ve shared many
examples of Microsoft created case studies, but in building your own consider the following:
Get 2-3 memorable quotes from the customer.
For example, one describing how choosing your company to deliver the solution was the
best decision they could have made, or how your solutions has impacted their business
positively, or how it has benefitted the productivity of their staff.
Provide a story
Just like the story of the child’s book, a case study should tell a story about the customer’s
success working with you. It should begin with an introduction of the customer, their
business, their particular challenges, how you helped them overcome those challenges and
the results attained. Be sure to sprinkle the customer quotes throughout the story and
wherever possible highlight results with concrete statistics.

Collect Feedback
Resources
RESOURCES
 Deliver Customer Lifetime
Value eBook
 Cloud Services Partner
Dashboard
What is a post mortem?
A project post-mortem, also called a project retrospective, is a
process for evaluating the success (or failure) of a project's
ability to meet business goals.
A typical post-mortem meeting begins with a restatement of the project's scope. Team
members and business owners are then asked by a facilitator to share answers to the
following questions:
• What worked well for the team?
• What did not work well for the team?
The facilitator may solicit quantitative data related to cost management or qualitative data
such as perceived quality of the product. Ideally, the feedback gathered from a project post-
mortem will be used to ensure continuous improvement and improve the management of
future projects. Post-mortems are generally conducted at the end of the project process, but
are also useful at the end of each stage of a multi-phase project. The term post-mortem
literally means "after death." In medicine, the term is used to describe an examination of a
dead body in order to discover the cause of death.
Use of a Net Promoter Score can be very helpful to get a clear depiction of the customers
view of success of the project.
The Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness
of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others. It is used as a proxy
for gauging the customer's overall satisfaction with a company's product or service and the
customer's loyalty to the brand.

Land & Expand
Resources
RESOURCES
 Deliver Customer Lifetime
Value eBook
 Cloud Services Partner
Dashboard
Growing Scope
With a successful customer engagement behind you, at this
point you will want to understand how you can increase the
scope of the services you provide to your customer.
We call this the land and expand strategy. In this strategy, you want to look for opportunities
to provide incremental project services with goal of driving stronger usage of your services.
You should look for opportunities to cross-sell and upsell incremental solutions to customers
based on needs identified during service delivery.
For example, if you are the digital partner of record on your customer’s Microsoft
subscriptions, you have access to their cloud solution usage and consumption data via the
Cloud Services Partner Dashboard. You can use it to identify areas where you should be
encouraging deeper and wider usage of Azure, as well as areas where the customer may
benefit from incremental project or advisory services..
Here is an example of Land & Expand in the Data Platform & Analytics Practice
LAND
Say for example the customer brought your practice in to help them address performance
issues with their Azure SQL Database. You successfully tune their database performance by
making recommendations on needed schema changes, indexes, stored procedures and
query patterns.
EXPAND
Using the knowledge gained about the customer’s data, you are in a strong position to make
recommendations that improve the customer’s situation and enable you to deliver added
value. For example, you might propose changes that might suit specific workloads better
(e.g., such as implementing Memory Optimized tables), suggest enriching their data pipeline
to move transactional data to a SQL Data Warehouse for analytics, improve their
understanding of their data via improved visualization and reporting capabilities leveraging
Power BI or surfacing hidden insights by utilizing Azure Machine Learning or SQL Server R
Services using the existing data to train the models.

Refine Customer Value Proposition
Resources
RESOURCES
 How to Tell Your Story: Value
Propositions Video
Refine Customer Value Proposition and Offer
Focus on what you could do better and communicate
Having delivered to your customers, work with your customers, staff, partners and others
with whom you engaged to better understand how you can improve your value proposition
by asking them how you could do better, ask them The Four Magic Questions:
1. What do your customers love about your company?
2. What would they change?
3. What keeps them awake at night that we solve?
4. What are competitors doing they wish you did?
Take the answers to these questions and refine your value
proposition, and if necessary your offer.

Expand to Similar Customers
Vertical Customer Play
Each vertical market is unique, but may be familiar.
All partners are looking to grow their customer base from time to time. One of the best moves you can make is to make advancements in
new vertical markets. Some of the vertical markets to consider include: Retail, Financial Services, Healthcare and Public Sector.
Partners may consider using marketing campaigns and featuring case studies to show success in other industries. You should be prepared
to offer a free engagement, advice or proof of offering to break into a new industry.
At the time, you begin to consider growing your pipeline with vertical market plays, you need to ask some questions. Is the business ready
for additional customers? Do you have capacity on your bench or other areas? Answers to these questions help define which verticals you
want to explore. Market and customer research can help you answer which vertical to focus on to match your business maturity level.
Lastly, appropriate content by industry is critical. You will be wise to commission a collection of marketing to use for your marketing
automation, web site, proposals, direct emails and more. Having the correct content for the market instills confidence in your business.

Optimize Costs
Resources
RESOURCES
 Modern Partner Optimize
Operations
Efficiency, Profit and Growth
Optimize profit to fund growth.
We all want to have profitable businesses and IDC’s research shows that those that are
heavily invested in cloud do better than their peers with respect to profitability. But profit
doesn’t happen automatically just because of cloud. You need to have the right processes
and methods in place to drive the efficiencies that reduce costs while still delivering high
quality services. If you are able to achieve that balance, profit should follow.
Source: IDC eBook, sponsored by Microsoft, The Modern Microsoft Partner Series, Part 1: The Booming
Cloud Opportunity, 2016
But, it doesn’t stop there. If you have efficiency and profit, you have also created the fuel for
growth. Your profit provides the funding to invest in pre-requisites for growth, whether it’s
hiring special skills or buying a company or renting more office space.

Metrics that matter in a cloud business
To determine if your cloud business is performing to the best of its ability, you need to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to
measure your success. Here are some metrics you should consider using:
 Staff utilization: The amount of time spent on billable work divided by the number of billable hours per person per year
(typically 1500 to 1700 hours, taking statutory holidays, vacation, and training into account).
 Billable markup rate (BMUR): This measures the profitability of billable resources. It is calculated by taking the hourly charge-
out rate of the individual and dividing it by their loaded cost (salary, variable pay, benefits) per billable hour. Best-in-class partners
score 2.5 on this metric, while 2.0 is the generally accepted baseline.
 Backlog. This is the total amount of work you have outstanding in days (including project work, support work, and ad hoc work
with clients) divided by the total number of billable resources. Anything beyond 120 days indicates a strong pipeline of work;
anything less than 30 days may be problematic.
 Rate of customer acquisition. The number of new customers acquired per month, quarter or year.
 Average revenue per user (ARPU). Total revenue divided by the number of users.
 Average revenue per customer (ARC). The average amount spent per month among customers who subscribe to managed
services offerings.
 Direct sales cost. This measure determines the value a seller is providing to the company. In the cloud, 8-10 percent is ideal and
15 percent is acceptable, but anything beyond that means either their quota is too low or their income is too high.
 Percentage of billed revenue spent on marketing. It’s common to see less than1 or 2 percent of revenue being spent on
driving net new demand. However, some of the most successful partners spend anywhere from 8 to 10 percent.
 Renewal rate. This is the percentage of customers that renew their cloud subscriptions. Typically, you’re looking for something
less than 8 to 10 percent per year of annual churn.
 Attach rate of secondary offerings. The value of secondary offerings sold in addition to the solution sold as the first step in the
engagement (e.g. Office 365). IDC research shows that the average partner sells $4.14 of their own offerings for every $1 of
Microsoft cloud solutions they sell. Partners with more than 50% of their revenue in the cloud attach $5.86 of their own
offerings. (Source: IDC eBook, sponsored by Microsoft, The Modern Microsoft Partner Series, Part 1: The Booming Cloud
Opportunity, 2016)
 Services attach rate. This is the percentage of active customers paying for managed services in addition to core product
offerings. You want to aim for a 70% or higher attach rate if managed services is a primary focal point for your business.
 Percent of revenue from recurring sources. Ideally, a partner starting their journey to the cloud should aim to have 15 percent
of revenue from these sources by the end of year one, 33 percent by year two, and 45 percent or more by year three.
 Gross margin by offering. For project services, striving for 30 percent or more gross margin is important; managed services
should return at least 40 percent and IP over 50 percent.
 Efficiency factor. The measure of how much work you’ve already done that can be repurposed, packaged, and resold as IP.
 Average calls per customer. The average number of calls per customer in a given month for managed services. It’s reasonable to
expect lots of calls in the early stages of the customer relationship, but over the long term, call volume should subside.
 Average case duration. The amount of time it takes to field the call, work, resolve, and document a case ticket.
 Services rep utilization. This is calculated as the average hours annually spent per representative actively working cases, divided
by the number of available hours.
These measures aren’t new - in fact, they’ve been around for as long as services businesses have been in place. The challenge is how you
manage them. Are these metrics being tracked on a regular basis? Do you have process and cadence for reviewing them? What is your plan
if your results fall below the baseline?

Revisit Partnerships
Resources
RESOURCES
 Enterprise Cloud Strategy
eBook
 The Booming Cloud
Opportunity
Grow Partnerships
Nurture your partner relationships.
Identify new partnership opportunities to reduce costs of going to market, increase reach,
optimize sales model, increase share of wallet with customers.
Microsoft partner, Intervate, found that much of the demand for their products came from
vertical markets that they were not equipped to serve. Instead of trying to develop all the
vertical expertise in-house they began to work with other partners to complete vertical
solutions that were outside of their expertise.
If you have horizontal intellectual property (IP) or unique skills, you may be able to
differentiate by working with partners with vertical expertise. You can decide how the
relationship works on a partner by partner basis. For instance, you may just need a partner
to introduce you to the right decision maker in a vertical. If you don’t speak the language of
the vertical, you may need a partner to take on the sales consultant role. You may want the
partnership to extend to scoping the requirements for a vertical or to jointly build a vertical-
specific version of your IP.
There are many ways that a Partner to Partner (P2P) relationship may help you specialize.
You probably will need separate partnerships for each vertical focus. If one or two verticals
become dominant, consider developing your own internal expertise.
Working with other partners can also be an effective method of expanding your geographic
reach or to provide ongoing customer support more efficiently than you can yourself. In
most scenarios, working with other partners allows you to focus on your own core
advantages.

PLAYBOOK SUMMARY PAGE 185
Playbook Summary
There are many ways that a Partner to Partner relationship may help you specialize. You probably will need separate partnerships for each
vertical focus. If one or two verticals become dominant, consider developing your own internal expertise.
Some partners recommend positioning yourself as a trusted technology AND business advisor which can lead to introductions to most
functional leaders in the company, creating a great base for expansion.
Use your own experience as the basis for best practices for your customers. Start by identifying small, incremental initiatives that will make
a visible impact for the customer. If you haven’t done this kind of project before, recruit a ‘friendly’ customer for a proof-of-concept.
Successful partners have created their version of differentiation by being on the bleeding edge of technology. There is a bit of self-fulfilling
prophecy in this. If your company is known as an early adopter, you will get more projects that deploy new technologies.
You should invest upfront to have the basic understanding of the new technologies to get a project.

PLAYBOOK SUMMARY PAGE 186
Playbook Summary
Thank you for taking the time to review this playbook. We hope you have gained new insight
on how to add the cloud application development practice, and how to successfully grow
your practice by taking advantage of unique offerings from Microsoft, engaging with your
customers, and forming strategic partnerships.
Our goal, when creating this playbook, was to organize
resources and provide insight that you can use to quickly
accelerate or optimize your Azure focused practice. To this end,
we laid out the practice's opportunity, then provided relevant
information on business strategies and technical topics to
capitalize on the opportunity, within five sections that you can
review in order, or individually at any time.
In the first section, Define Your Strategy, we helped you
thoroughly define the strategy upon which your practice will be
built. The key actions we prompted you to take are: Identify your
unique value proposition, define and price your offer, build your
business plan, leverage the Microsoft Partner Network, and plan
your support options.
In the second section, Operationalize & Get Trained, we
focused on the importance of hiring the right team, and then
providing appropriate and ongoing training and certifications.
We also suggested various tools and resources for obtaining an
Azure subscription, building your product or service, managing
your customers, and reviewing the marketplace. The top five
things we suggested you do are: Hire, train, and certify your
team, setup Azure for your practice and become the Digital
Partner of Record on your customer's Azure subscriptions, setup
your CRM, project management, collaboration, and support
tools, build your sales, marketing, and legal materials, and
evaluate your marketplace options.
The third section, Go to Market, emphasized getting your
practice off the ground by finding new customers, and then
nurturing and investing in them to build lasting relationships.
The key takeaways were: Define your customer's buying journey,
launch a modern website and digital marketing activities, find
your first customer through Microsoft's resources and nurture
the relationship, build a presence in the community, and invest
in marketing automation tools.
The fourth section, Close & Execute Deals, showed you how
you can add value to your practice and turn your prospective
customers into lasting ones, by working efficiently, selling Azure
solutions as part of your offering, and negotiating deals. We
prompted you to take action on the following: Identify
opportunities to co-sell with Microsoft, write a winning proposal
and be prepared to negotiate, conduct an architecture design
session and build a proof of concept, provide ongoing support
to your customers, and leverage Microsoft investment funds.
The final section, Optimize & Grow your Practice, stressed the
importance of learning from your customers and your
experience in providing solutions to them, to optimize your
practice, and expand to new vertical markets through strategic
partnerships. The top five actions we provided for you in this
section were: Gather feedback from your customers, learn from
your project successes and failures, create case studies and a
marketing plan to expand into new vertical markets, maximize
your efficiency and profit to fuel growth, and establish and
nurture strategic partnerships.
Feedback
Share feedback on how we can improve this and other
playbooks by emailing playbookfeedback@microsoft.com

Data Platform & Analytics OpenSistemas MSFT Playbook

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Data Platform & Analytics OpenSistemas MSFT Playbook (20)

More from OpenSistemas (18)

Recently uploaded (20)

Data Platform & Analytics OpenSistemas MSFT Playbook