The Five Conditions That Make Microsoft Sellers Bring You Into a Deal
This is the condition most partners get wrong. Co-Sell Ready makes your solution visible in Microsoft's internal partner catalogs. Azure IP Co-Sell Eligible creates a direct financial incentive for Microsoft field sellers to bring you in. The difference: at IP Co-Sell Eligible, sellers earn quota credit when they co-sell your solution. At Co-Sell Ready, they do not. Without that incentive mechanism, your listing is background noise to a seller managing their own number.
The four requirements for IP Co-Sell Eligible status:
Enterprise customers with Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACC) have already committed to spending a defined amount on Azure, often hundreds of millions of dollars over a one-to-three year window. When your offer is transactable and IP Co-Sell Eligible, enterprise buyers can purchase your solution and count it toward their existing committed Azure spend. They are not asking for new budget. They are spending money they are already obligated to spend.
This is the biggest procurement shortcut in the enterprise motion. Microsoft sellers actively seek MACC-eligible solutions to bring to their accounts because it removes the buyer's procurement friction. Non-transactable offers and offers that are only Co-Sell Ready do not qualify. Without MACC eligibility, you are a new-budget request competing against everything else on the CFO's desk, and you will lose to inertia.
One easy check most partners skip: Microsoft's "Request a private offer" button, which puts a direct ask-for-custom-pricing link on your live listing, is off by default even on offers that are already transactable. Turning it on and republishing takes minutes and opens a lead channel straight into Partner Center that most partners never activate.
Microsoft's field sellers are organized around specific solution plays, workloads, and industries. For a seller to bring you into a customer conversation, they need a story they can use in 90 seconds: what your solution does alongside Azure, which workload or industry it addresses, and why the customer should care. If a seller cannot pitch you quickly, they will not pitch you at all.
The minimum required assets are a one-pager and a pitch deck, uploaded on the Co-Sell > Solutions page in Partner Center. Beyond the minimum, the partners that generate consistent field engagement also maintain a "better together" narrative (how your solution drives Azure adoption or solves a named Microsoft solution play), qualification questions for sellers, and a clear warm-referral next step.
One of the most consistent patterns in partner co-sell failures is the gap between what partners expect and what the motion requires. The expectation: Microsoft will push leads because you are listed and invested in the relationship. The reality: Partners must be the proactive party. The partners that generate the most inbound referrals are the ones that submit the most outbound ones. Co-sell is a reciprocal motion, not a one-way channel.
A note on attribution: if you cannot distinguish Microsoft-sourced pipeline from Microsoft-influenced pipeline, your internal reporting will understate the motion's value. Sourced-vs-influenced tracking is the foundation for the conversation with your CFO about co-sell ROI, and one of the most common gaps in partner alliance operations.
Microsoft's partner ecosystem spans hundreds of thousands of partners. A very small fraction have a dedicated Partner Development Manager. Most partners never get one. But every Microsoft account team has account executives, partner technology strategists, and customer success managers who decide daily which partners to bring into their accounts.
Building a working relationship with even one person in the field, specific to your target territory or solution area, changes the dynamic from cold-start to warm introduction. The partners that consistently appear in customer deals are the ones that sellers know by name, trust to deliver, and have tested on real opportunities.
Relationship-building that works: bring a prospect the seller cares about; show how your solution moves their account metrics; make the co-sell paperwork frictionless by doing most of it yourself. Relationship-building that does not work: activating a PDM only when you need something, or meeting with Microsoft executives once and expecting deals to follow.
Where most partners actually are
Very few partners have all five conditions in place. A significant share do not yet have a transactable marketplace offer, which is a prerequisite for Conditions 1 and 2. Of those that do, many remain at Co-Sell Ready status because they have not yet reached the $100K trailing-12-month ACR or MBS threshold for IP Co-Sell Eligible. And of those that qualify on paper, most have not yet built the proactive engagement behaviors and field relationships that sustain a referral motion. The gap between "we invested in the Microsoft partnership" and "Microsoft sellers are actively bringing us into deals" is almost always one or more of these five conditions, not budget or intent.
Measure where you stand across all five conditions.
IMS offers a co-sell readiness diagnostic that scores your Microsoft partnership across six dimensions and identifies the specific constraint blocking your deal flow. The assessment is free. The constraint-first readout is a 60-minute working session with an alliance operator who has run this motion.