Create a business profile to get Microsoft sales leads and help customers find you

Appropriate roles: Business profile admin | Referrals admin

Microsoft engages millions of customers every year through marketing, sales, and service efforts. Most of these engagements create opportunities for us to provide referrals to our partners in the form of sales leads.

As a qualified Microsoft partner, you can create a business profile to showcase your business to customers who are looking for your unique solutions and expertise to address their business needs.

Creating a business profile is the first step to getting referrals. We'll show your profile to customers who are searching for partners who can help them implement Microsoft products and solutions through these channels:

• Connect with partners. Potential customers can search partner listings on their own to locate partners who meet their search criteria.

• Referrals from Microsoft sales and service employees. Potential customers interested in deploying cloud-based technology solutions contact Microsoft for help with finding professionals who can meet their business needs. These Microsoft professionals can then refer potential customers to your company.

Create a profile

Create profiles for each region you're authorized to do business in.

1. Sign in to Partner Center and select Referrals.

2. Select Create a business profile.

3. On the Create a business profile page, select a region, then enter your profile information.

   Note

   Although Partner Center supports multiple languages, some elements, such as the description and free-form tags, may need to include text from different languages, as noted in this article.

Partner information

Introduce your company, adding a logo, a brief description, a link to your website and LinkedIn profile.

The logo can be a GIF, JPG, or PNG file, with a maximum width of 300 pixels. We recommend using square or wide aspect ratios with minimum 216Px * 216Px . Tall aspect ratios aren't recommended.

Your description can be up to 2,500 characters.

Here are some tips for a great description:

• Be brief. Lead with what's important. The first sentence or two should be the headline that catches customers' attention. In the Connect with partners search experience, we show the first line or two in the search results preview.
• Focus on your company's experiences with Microsoft-specific offerings. Customers searching for referrals are generally looking for partners with Microsoft-specific experience.
• Use bullets. Break up information into bulleted lists to make it easier to scan.
• Avoid jargon. Use simple, everyday language, naming your offerings for what they do, the business needs they address, or the task or objective they help customers accomplish.
• Don't worry about filling the description with search keywords. The customer search tools search for keywords generated in the Partner Expertise section, not the description.
• Keep your profile current. With each software or service release, update your profile, keeping it in sync with your company's website.
• Don't refer to another Microsoft partner company by name unless it's a subsidiary, is otherwise affiliated with your company, or you have a current agreement with that partner company to act in partnership and/or promote each other for shared work opportunities.
• For regions with multiple languages, consider including text from multiple languages in the description.

Partner expertise

The Find a Partner search tools look for expertise tags. Optimize these tags to help your profile gain visibility.

Start by adding your own tags into the Partner Expertise section.

Tags you can add:

• Industry focus tags
• Products, limited to Microsoft products
• Service type
• Solutions, skills, and capabilities. These provide you the ability to add search keywords that are unique to your capabilities.

Other tags used in search:

• Competency tags are earned designations that showcase your company's capabilities.

Customer preferences

Target size

You can opt out of referrals from businesses that don't meet your target customer size.

By opting out, you'll have more time to spend on businesses that are a match for the businesses that you prefer to work with.

Locations

You can add up to five of your company's top locations per country. These locations appear when customers search for partners by proximity.

Each location you add becomes a separate profile page. When updating profile pages, make sure that you update them for each location.

Indicate locations that are official company locations and can be validated. Pick locations that are central to the markets you serve and that best represent your company's ability to fulfill.

When you're finished updating the location info, select Save this location or Save this location and add another one (even if you're only adding one location).

To update a location's address, Delete the location first and then re-add it.

If you've created five locations and you need to change one, Delete an existing location first and then add the new location.

Contact

Add the contact details of the person who will act on the leads partner will receive from AppSource, preferably Referral admin.

Review your profile

After you publish your profile, updates appear in the Connect with partners searches within 24 hours.

Improve the visibility of your profile

• Respond quickly to requests. When you receive a customer referral, a faster response can lead to better results on the search pages for future customers.

• Be selective with your tags. It's better to have fewer tags that best represent your company's offers, solutions, value propositions, and unique position for which you can consistently demonstrate success. That will pay dividends in future search results.

• Earn competency tags through Microsoft to demonstrate your proficiency in our products.

Next steps

• Responding to referrals