A Step-By-Step Guide to Streamlining Complex Contracts
Have you ever wondered what happens when a customer signs a multi-year deal in Azure Marketplace with varying payment amounts each year? They need to create separate offers for each year, with staggering dates.
That’s a lot of work! And what about the buyer? They have to accept multiple offers and manage multiple subscriptions. All of this adds unnecessary complexity to what should be a seamless experience.
At Tackle, we know that seamless execution is key to successful Cloud GTM strategies. Solving the challenge of multi-year private offers in Azure unlocks critical parts of the sales cycle and provides a more flexible marketplace experience.
With this approach, ISVs can offer customers multi-year contracts, continue to drive marketplace adoption, and ensure customers reap the benefits of marketplace (like MACC burndown). Additionally, this solution helps ISVs avoid potential billing errors from Microsoft when customers accept and subscribe to multiple offers at the same time.
Why do multi-year deals in Azure matter?
When we think about the different teams who work together to make our GTM strategies successful, we want the process to be as efficient and seamless as possible. Multi-year deals are a common requirement for many customers, especially those with long-term projects or budget cycles.
These deals provide stability for both buyers and sellers, ensuring predictable revenue streams and long-term partnerships. However, Azure’s current process for multi-year deals requires careful planning and execution to ensure a smooth experience for all parties.
By enabling multi-year contracts in Azure, ISVs can meet customer needs while driving consistent revenue and marketplace adoption. This not only strengthens customer relationships, but also positions your product as a strategic, long-term solution.
Now that we’ve covered the “why,” let’s dive into the “how” with a step-by-step look at how to execute multi-year deals in Azure.
Here’s how to set up multi-year deals in Azure Marketplace
1. Navigate to Microsoft’s Partner Center 🔎
Start by logging into Microsoft’s Partner Center, your hub for managing marketplace offers.
2. Select “Marketplace offers” ✅
From the dashboard, choose the “Marketplace offers” option to access your offers.
3. Go to “Private Offers” 🔒
In the left-hand menu, select “Private offers.” This will default to the customer private offer section.
4. Create a New Private Offer 🆕
Select “New private offer” to begin creating the first offer in your multi-year series.
5. Enter Offer Details for Year 1 ✍️
Fill in the offer information for the first year, making sure the end date is set to the month before the next offer’s start date. Submit the offer for publishing.
6. Repeat for Additional Years 🔁
Follow the same process to create offers for subsequent years, adjusting the payment amounts and dates as needed.
7. Associate Offers with Tackle 🚀
Once all of the offers are created, you can associate them back to Tackle using the Offer Details and Offer ID.
8. Extend Offers to Your Customers 🤝
From Tackle, you can extend each offer to your customer for acceptance.
9. Customer Acceptance and Subscription 🗂️
The customer can accept each offer up front but can only subscribe to the first offer (or offer with a start date of now).
To make this process clearer, let’s walk through a quick example of setting up a 3-year deal.
Let’s put it into action with an example
Let’s say you have a 3-year deal with payments increasing each year. Here’s how you’d structure it:
- Year 1: $5,000; Start Date: February 2025; End Date: January 2026
- Year 2: $10,000; Start Date: February 2026; End Date: January 2027
- Year 3: $15,000; Start Date: February 2027; End Date: January 2028
This approach ensures clarity and alignment for both you and your customer, making the process as seamless as possible.
While this process works, there’s a pro tip to keep in mind that will make it even more efficient for both sellers and buyers.
Pro Tip: Enable auto-renew for efficiency
Because Microsoft requires subscriptions along with the acceptance of offers, it’s efficient for both the seller and buyer to enable auto-renew when accepting and subscribing to the first offer.
This relieves the monitoring that would otherwise be required to ensure billing continues for the rest of the term/years. With auto-renew on, Microsoft will automatically roll the billing into the next year’s offer. Auto-renew can be turned off at the end of the final year if the customer is not renewing.
With the right approach, multi-year deals in Azure can be a win-win for both ISVs and their customers.
Now that you know how to do it, next step is to start executing multi-year deals in Azure
While the native functionality to create multi-year deals with flexible payments in Azure does not exist today, that does not mean that we bypass on getting deals across the line that fit the scenario. By following the process we laid out here, you can still close multi-year deals that meet your customers’ needs and drive marketplace adoption.
Looking ahead, it’s worth staying informed about updates on Azure Marketplace capabilities. Microsoft is continually evolving its platform, and future enhancements may simplify this process further. In the meantime, leveraging tools like Tackle and maintaining clear communication with your customers will ensure you can execute multi-year deals effectively.
Ready to get started? Begin by identifying opportunities in your pipeline and working with your Tackle team to build a strategy tailored to your business. Not a customer yet, but curious how Tackle can help? Reach out to us at sales@tackle.io.
