Azure Marketplace Sales Lead Configuration and Management (Lead Generation)

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Good business today is built around customers. If you want to achieve good sales conversion, your marketing personnel must be focused on directly building and maintaining customer relationships, and this is why generating high-quality leads will become an important tool in your sales cycle. Azure Marketplace provides just such a tool.If a customer deploys your product on Azure Marketplace, you will immediately receive their contact information through programmable methods.This article explains how these leads are generated and how to link them to your Azure Table or SalesForce CRM system, as well as how to integrate them into sales channels.

Azure Marketplace leads are customer details for your products deployed on Azure Marketplace.When a partner publishes an image or ARM template on Azure Marketplace, if they have configured lead management for a product (see the Virtual Machine Image Publication Guide and ARM Template Publication Guide), if a user deploys your product on Azure Marketplace and accepts your lead agreement, you will be able to receive the customer’s lead information.In this document, the terms “sales opportunity” and “lead” have the same meaning, but “lead” is generally used to refer to more specific content.

1. Lead configuration

Azure Marketplace allows you to save leads in the “Azure Table” or “SalesForce CRM System”.Of course, you must have an account and subscription in Azure Portal or an account in the SalesForce system, and you must generate the connection string in Azure or SalesForce.

1.1 Get an Azure Table connection string

This section explains how to set up Azure Table and get a connection string, so that Azure Marketplace can provide you with leads. In general, we recommend using Azure Table as your first choice.

1.1.1 If you do not yet have an Azure account, please get one using the Azure Trial Request Form.

1.1.2 Log on to Azure Portal using your Azure account, then generate a storage account as shown below.See Storage Pricing for details of storage prices.

1.1.3 Copy the connection string, as shown in the image below

You can use Azure Storage Explorer or any other tool to view data in the storage table.

1.2 Get a SalesForce CRM connection string

1.2.1 Select the “Setup” menu

1.2.2 Generate a lead form that includes the connection string

On the navigation bar, select “Build->Customize->Leads->Web-to-Lead”, select the corresponding items, then select “Generate” to generate the “Web-to-Lead” form.

1.2.3 Get the required connection string

As shown in the “Web-to-Lead” form below, the “value” corresponding to “oid” is the required connection string. Please copy this string.

1.2.4 View a list of existing leads in the SalesForce CRM

Go back to the homepage, select the “Leads” menu, and choose “All Open Leads” to view all sales leads.

1.3 Configure connection strings in Azure Marketplace

See the VM Image Publication Guide and ARM Template Publication Guide for information on how to configure sales lead connection strings for products.For images or ARM templates that have already been submitted or published, you can edit the “Sales Lead Management” field on the image management page of your account.

2. How to get leads

As shown below, the customer agrees to share their details after pressing the “Deploy Now” button. This is the initial sales lead in which the customer expresses interest in the product. After you obtain authorization from the customer, we will record this interest in your designated location, which represents the top of the interest funnel data.

Leads are very important, but are only supported on Azure Marketplace at this time; support is not yet available on the Azure portal.

If you have set up leads correctly, we recommend that you incorporate these leads into your current sales and marketing strategy and your operating processes. We are very interested in learning more about your overall sales process and receiving feedback from you, and we would like to work closely with you.

3. Lead data content and formats

3.1 Lead Source

The main fields in a lead are Source, Action and Offer.

3.1.1 Source includes the following fields

“AzureMarketplace”,
“AzurePortal”,
“TestDrive”, 
“SPZA” (acronym for AppSource)

The Azure China Marketplace currently only supports entering “AzureMarketplace” in the Source field.

3.1.2 The Actions field is explained below

  • “INS” – installation.This occurs when the customer presses the “Deploy Now” button to obtain your product.

  • “PLT” – a partner’s lead try.This occurs in AppSource when the customer presses the “Please Contact Me” button.This is not currently supported.

  • “DNC” – do not contact.This only appears in AppSource.This is not currently supported.

  • “Create” – this means the moment that a customer buys your product in the Azure portal.This is not currently supported.

  • “StartTestDrive” – this is used in “Test Drives”, but is not currently supported.

3.1.3 The Offers field is the ID of your product/service, within which the content before “.” represents the publisher and the content after “.” represents the name of the product/service.

“arraynetworks.ArrayLoadBalancervAPV”,
“yungoalbj.redhatredhatenus730”,
“yuntalk.joomlazhcncentos”

3.2 Customer Info

An example is shown below:

{
    "FirstName":"Dashan",
    "LastName":"Liang",
    "Email":"ldashan@microsoft.com",
    "Phone":"1234567890",
    "Country":"CN",
    "Company":"Microsoft",
    "Title":"CTO"
}

Note that you will not necessarily be able to get data for all fields in each lead. Please contact us if you have any questions.