Microsoft Partnership Masterclass:
Achieving Microsoft Solution Designation for SMBs

On this episode of what is a Microsoft partnership, today we're going to talk about how to earn your internal licenses, where to earn your incentives and rebates, how to make the most of those programs, and what you need to be aware about when you're trying to earn a solution designation. So, January 2022nd of 2025, Microsoft has gone end-of-life with the golden and silver program, as well as the action pack. They're also starting to crack down on the fact that if you're purchasing your Microsoft license for your internal tenant from a distributor, they will audit your CSP and have the option to revoke it.

So, you're kind of at a crossroads of where do you stand, what do you do to earn your internal licensing? They have released a few new programs, and today we're going to talk about what you'll need to know about each one to make sure you're covered when it comes to licensing your team correctly, as well as making sure you're earning money for your solution designation or your incentives. So, the first step would be taking a look at what licensing you need.

If you know that you only need a couple licenses, you're not going after a solution designation, the partner benefits program is going to be great for you. And the reason for this is these are discounted licensing, but you do get quite a bit of value when it comes to each one of them. Now, most partners that I've worked with do sit in the partner success core benefits one. The reason for that is you get 25 business premium licenses, you'll get some bulk credit for Azure spend, you will get technical support, as well as two escalated incident support tickets.

So, that's Microsoft's way of saying if you're going to utilize this program, we will be here to support you for any internal problems that do come up. But then again, you would you have the option to purchase any of these if you do choose to fit your company that way. But the requirements to purchase these is you just need to be a partner admin within your tenant and putting your credit card on file, purchasing those licenses, you'll get the product key and you're off and ready to deploy those to your internal users.

This program is specifically built to just give you internal licensing. You will not get your incentives or rebates through this program. So, this is a great way to replace the action pack is what Microsoft is looking to utilize this for. I do believe in the most recent update they have added Copilot to the partner success core benefits and the expanded benefits, which I think is super helpful if you're trying to utilize AI and grow your business and becoming more the managed intelligence provider.

But again, these are just internal licenses and this will be one of the new ways you'll be able to purchase it. Now, speaking of ways to purchase your licenses, the next route would be going through Microsoft direct.

And that is going to your purchases tab within the partner center and then going to the store or their yeah, their web store and purchasing whatever licenses you would need there. That is also an option that you will have. They're not limiting you from doing that. That will come at full retail cost. So, the benefit to using one of these programs is it is going to be discounted. You can see the highlighted retail value there at the bottom.

It is going to be a lot cheaper if you go this route to be able to purchase those licenses. But when you go to your Microsoft partner page, this will pop up for you if you're looking into utilize one of these programs. Just make sure you're picking out which one fits best for your company. Now, the second option would be to purchase through a solution designation. So, the solution designation is actually going to replace your gold or silver legacy programs.

Now, what these solution designations give you is your internal licensing. It's a status symbol. You're able to put your badge on your website, kind of flex the muscle that you are a Microsoft partner, and you have earned the right to be able to say I'm part of their partner program. As well as you'll get to your incentives and rebates, which is where you're going to be able to get paid from Microsoft for purely managing the licenses and working around their solution.

So, there's a couple things that we'll talk about getting into a solution designation here in a little bit. I will be diving to what you'll need to actually do to enroll into it. But one thing I always suggest is check out the solution partner designation benefits that I have linked here right where my head I guess is covering me. But what that allows you to see is the full breakdown of what licenses you will get per solution designation you unlock.

So, then again, opening up the modern work solution designation does not give you access to all the let's say Azure licensing that you would get with the Azure solution designation, but you will still be able to earn your incentives and rebates for the CSP licensing you buy. Just know when you're looking at that breakdown, all the modern work licenses will come with the modern work solution designation. You would need to unlock the specific one for those licenses if you did need some from the other ones specifically.

The last thing that you also will earn with the solution designation is the ability to earn money towards a co-op. So, your Microsoft co-op is going to be where they're going to be able to help you fund to reinvest into your company. Meaning if you want to do knowledge enablement by test taking, you want to go to Microsoft events, you want to put on a Microsoft hosted event, they will actually refund you for your spend as long as you have enough money in your co-op bucket to be able to put on those events.

So, that's that way it's not coming completely out of pocket. On the next episode, I will show you a little bit more of a deep dive into the designation benefits and what you get per designation, as well as some different areas to utilize your co-op with. But just know this is all linked on Microsoft's website. Super easy to find by just going to partner.microsoft.com and they'll have that all listed there for you as well.

So, before I dive into a solution designation, especially the one we're going to talk about today is going to be your modern work. I do want to talk about a new avenue that Microsoft is opened up to earn incentives purely. So, that's going to be your 25 PCS or your partner capability score. The reason I have another one on there is cuz this is a new program and it seems like they're releasing new ones every day.

So, this is something that you want to keep in mind. To earn a solution designation, you will need to earn 70 out of 100 total PCS points. We will talk about what is required to do so here in a second, but for earning this 25.1, you need to earn 25 total points within one of the three areas that you'd be eligible for. So, modern work, security, or Azure. To be able to do that, there's three different totem poles of points you can hit.

So, one is going to be net new customer ads. The second would be scaling and then the third is going to be more around consumption base of the products you're deploying. For this to work, you need to maintain that 25 points month over month. The moment you drop below 25 points, you'll become ineligible for that month to earn incentives for that one area, but the moment you jump back over, your incentives will kick back in. Achieving the 25 points seems like it might be a lot.

There's actually some ways that you can work around this and one being if you're looking at the modern work one, the skilling portion alone will get you to 25 points. So, think if I want to reinvest in my you know, my internal technicians, I want them to take tests. Maybe look at taking the MS-700, the Teams Room and Teams Meeting technical assessment. Things that's going to help enhance their day-to-day. But in the back end, anytime you guys then sell Microsoft licensing, you guys will earn some incentives and a payout for just doing as such.

So, for the 25 PSC, or PCS, all you need to do is make sure you're earning it towards the Modern Work and Azure or Security Solution area. You are part of the CSP 2 program specifically. Build direct CSPs are not eligible and CSP 1 partners that I mentioned in the last talk we had would be only eligible for a solution designation. So, CSP 2, this will be your bread and butter if you're thinking the 70 points that you need to earn might be a little too much.

This is a great way to continue to earn your incentives and rebates on the back end while maintaining that growth to work towards the 70-point one. Cuz at the end of the day, we want to make sure everybody's at 70 points so that way you can earn, you know, that badge to be able to put on your website as well as all your co-op funds and your incentive your internal licenses. This is just going to give you the ability to earn your incentives on the back end as well.

So, let's talk about the solution designation. On the screen, what you'll see here is we have the six core solution designations. By the time this airs or maybe a little bit after, you'll see that Microsoft's adding a Copilot specific one as well. These solution designations are going to be where you'll earn your incentives and rebates, your internal licensing, as well as gain that status symbol, the badge you'll be able to add onto your website, to any Microsoft event that you go to that says I am a partner or AI Cloud Partner Program member.

It's very hard to achieve, so being able to utilize this and show that will gain you more of the audience saying, you know, these people know what they're doing with Microsoft. They have an established practice with it. It's something that Microsoft really wants the partners to utilize to say we should be the forefront of who you want to work with when it comes to you setting everything up, getting enrolled, and making sure your practice is secure.

But, to earn a solution designation, today we're going to focus on the modern work SMB area. So, the modern work SMB is one of the two paths for modern work. Obviously, there's going to be an enterprise route that you'd be able to go to. The way that this is differentiated is going to be between the customers that you've added to your partner center.

So, the only way to get points for the modern work is by adding customers, upskilling your internal team, and then creating a sort of usage growth plan for those customers. So, what this means in the performance section is any new customer that you add to your customer list, they do not need to be new to Microsoft, needs to be between 11 to 300 users. That's what Microsoft will count as an SMB company. From there, anything over 300 will count it as enterprise, and anything underneath it will not be counted until it crosses over that 11 user threshold.

Again, these companies do not need to be new to Microsoft, they just need to be new to you as a partner. By creating that new create new relationship button in your customer list, that will start earning you credit for having them as a customer. The net customer adds, you can max that out at 10 for a total of 20 points. It's two points per customer, and this is a rolling 12-month. So, the moment that you add that customer on, that 12-month period starts for them.

The moment that one year hits, those net customer points will fall off, and you are need to or you will need to continue to grow that number time and time again cuz the point of this program is year-over-year growth. You want to continue to add customers, but you want to do it in the right and feasible way for your company. So, one thing to point out is that you do not need to max out every single one of these boxes you see on the screen.

You need to hit 70 out of 100 total points, but one point needs to be scored in each individual box. So, maybe one year if your net customer growth isn't going to be your main focus, but you want to look at the usage growth and deployments, you're focusing more on that area, those would be the boxes that you want to max out. I would always suggest max out the skilling. That is something that's very attainable and very easy for your team to make sure you're covering because you can control that.

The skilling area, you need two intermediate certifications and one advanced. The intermediate certifications, the same person cannot take both tests. It needs to be two separate individuals.

If you've already passed some of the tests and you just need to link that to your partner center by clicking on that view details button, you will be able to go to your partner center from there and link that user to it. That way you can earn the points for the tests they've already taken. For the advanced certification, depending on which one you take, it might have a prerequisite required. Just take a look at the tree when you click into the link at the or the link at the bottom for the test, it will show you what prerequisites you need to take ahead of time.

If you are going to take the one that has a prerequisite, make sure it lines up with the intermediate one that you're taking ahead of time so you're kind of knocking both of them out at once. I always suggest taking the Teams meeting and meeting room technical assessment for the advanced certification. It is a an assessment for a reason. You will be able to have your notes up. It's a little fun fact there. But that's going to be the one that'll knock out those 15 points for you there.

So, that is 30 35 pretty easy attainable points or 25 easy attainable points there for you as well.

Now, deployments and usage growth is going to be where most people struggle to earn points. The reality of it is this is going to be the best difficult part for because when it comes to deployments, you will not get any net new deployment points for anything a previous MSP has done for that customer. Meaning when you take a look at deployments of the workloads, things like Exchange, SharePoint, Teams meetings, Teams phone, if all that's already been previously set up, you won't earn the points for a unique deployment for that customer.

You need to find new workloads to then go deploy. All the workloads will be listed directly under that deployment button on the view details, but by clicking on the pull report and activity at the top of that CSV that will download will show you what they've already generated points for. So, know moving forward for that customer, you need to look at their workloads, figure out what they haven't used, and go ahead and deploy those products for that customer.

So, some of the caveats to deployments though is that it does need to reach an active usage rate of 40% of the users in the tenant or more to count as a unique deployment. Which means the way that I always looked at it was if you had 20 users in the tenant and the first time you setting up a SharePoint site is for that customer is going to be when you guys have took them over, eight of those users need to generate some sort of usage growth or usage within that SharePoint site month after month to earn a deployment point.

So, think hey, everybody needs to go drop a picture of their favorite dog or we're not using Dropbox anymore. We need to move all of our files and do file sharing through SharePoint now. Just things to generate the growth and the usage within SharePoint, but it needs to be eight of those users at a minimum to be able to go generate that one usage or that one deployment point for you there. Usage growth kind of ties in hand-in-hand with deployments because what this allows you to do is as you deploy more products, this is going to give you the ability to generate more usage growth between the products that the customers are using.

So, this is taking a look at 1 year ago from the day that you open this up, are the products that you currently have in place for those customers getting utilized more versus what they were a year ago? If yes, that number is going to generate and actually populate more for you there. If not, this will drop that number for you. So, this is all around creating stickiness towards your customers, making sure that they're utilizing the products that you guys have put in place for them, as well as if you are implementing new things like, you know, Intune or if you're going to set up SharePoint site or Teams phone, they're not reverting back to their old systems, they're utilizing the ones that you have through Microsoft.

So, this is going to take a look at if you add new users, are they utilizing the products you have in place or the existing ones are they continuing to use those products and not go back to what they previously had?

So, what I do want to show is where you can find a couple different things in the Partner Center, just so you know where to look when you're looking at your incentives and rebates, where to kind of generate some numbers as well as where to take a look at where you're at towards your solution designation. So, on the screen to find your solution designation, you're going to come to membership. From here, this is going to be your membership overview.

So, the partner launch benefits, partner success core, all those are going to be listed right here. Clicking on learn more will then take you to the area to then go purchase them. So, if you wanted to use those as your internal licenses, that's where you'll do this from. Your solution designations are going to be right here. Now, I'm not going to click into them just because again, it's sensitive information for our company's sake, but the modern work one that I was talking about will live right here.

If you click on that will then show you where you're at towards your points. It will track you towards that 100% but again, you only need to get to 70. That's going to be the main focus there for you. To check on your incentives payouts though, by clicking on here and going to where it live right here. Like I said, I don't have the permissions for it. There's going to be an incentives tab for you.

If you don't have that, which I don't, all you need to do is go to your user permissions and add the incentives admin. But, from there, once you have that tab up there, even if it was there, I wouldn't click on it cuz that's again personal information to the company. That's where you'll be able to check what your payouts will look like month after month. So, just know between the customers insights tab, there'll be an incentives button.

You'll click on that. That's where you're going to be able to track your payouts each month. So, then again, that is your solution designation. That's what you'll need to do to work on it. There's any questions, by all means reach out to us here at Enforce you. We're happy to help. But, if you work through distribution, they do have teams fully focused around this as well to make sure you're utilizing these programs. Thanks again for coming to episode two and tune back into episode three when we talk about some different use cases, how to optimize this to the max and make sure you're getting fully paid out.

Thank you.