Most partners open Microsoft's FY27 incentive guides, read the parts the sales team cares about, and leave it there. Fair enough - they're dense, they're built for the deal desk, and nobody got into marketing to read investment terms.
But if that's all you do with them, you're leaving the most useful part behind.
Buried in those three FY27 guides - AI Business Solutions, Cloud & AI Platforms, and Security - is something marketing teams almost never get handed for free: a map of exactly what Microsoft wants sold, which conversations it's paying to have, and where it's putting real money behind the customer's first step.
Read like a marketer, that's the closest thing to a free brief you'll get all year.
Read the priorities as your positioning
Every one of the FY27 guides opens with the same four priorities. Accelerate Frontier transformation. Differentiate toward customer growth. Reward measurable, high-impact outcomes. Keep the ecosystem healthy.
Strip out the polish and it's telling you where the whole channel is about to point. Frontier - Copilot, agents, Azure AI - is the headline, and everything's being pulled under one banner Microsoft's calling Frontier Accelerate, with a single path through the incentives across every solution area.
Why should you care? Because when Microsoft lines up its money, its sellers and its co-marketing behind a theme, the tide moves with it. You can either build your messaging to ride that - or spend the year explaining why you're rowing the other way.
Align your language to the priorities and you're swimming with the current. Simple as that.
Turn the funded engagements into offers
Here's the bit that should make a marketer sit up.
Across all three guides, the money lands in the same three shapes: an Envisioning & PoC engagement before the sale, a Deployment Accelerator after it, and a Conversion Bonus when you win a customer off a competitor.
In plain English - Microsoft will help fund the customer's first step. The workshop. The assessment. The proof of concept. The pilot.
Now think about what that does to your call to action. "Book a chat with our team" is weak. "Book a funded AI envisioning workshop, scoped to your business, at little to no cost to you" is a far stronger offer. Same activity, far more pulling power.
The incentive is what lets you make an offer people actually say yes to. Build the campaign around that funded first step and your top of funnel gets a whole lot easier.
So what's actually on the table?
Fair question - and the figures are worth knowing, because they tell you where to aim. Here's one worked example from each guide (these are FY27 maximums, and they flex by customer size, market and region - the investment terms carry the fine print).
AI Business Solutions - Frontier Accelerate for Copilot
Up to $25K to fund a pre-sales Envisioning & PoC, then up to $50K on the Deployment Accelerator once the customer's live. Copilot investment is up 130% year on year, so this is where Microsoft's leaning hardest.
Cloud & AI Platforms - Frontier Accelerate for Azure
Up to $25K for a pre-sales Assessment & Proof of Value, up to $150K on the Deployment Accelerator, and up to $37.5K as a Conversion Bonus for shifting a workload off AWS, Google, BigQuery, Aurora or RDS. Azure's up 35% year on year, with data and agentic AI paying richest of the lot (up to 2x and 1.75x the rest).
Security - Frontier Accelerate for Security
Up to $15K for a Security Envisioning & PoC, and post-sales money that's jumped fourfold - led by a refreshed Sentinel Deployment Accelerator worth up to $112.5K (up 80% on last year), with up to $75K behind Microsoft Defender for Cloud on top.
Look at those three side by side and your FY27 priorities pick themselves.
Match your content to the customer journey
Look closely and every guide lays its engagements out along the same five stages - Inspire and Design, Empower & Achieve, Realise Value, Manage and Optimise.
That's a content plan if you want one.
Inspire and Design
is your top of funnel - envisioning content, thought-leadership, the "here's what good looks like" workshop. This is where the pre-sales funding sits.
Empower & Achieve / Realise Value
is deployment and adoption - case studies, migration stories, "we got you live and actually using it" proof. This is where the Deployment Accelerators sit.
Manage and Optimise
is retention and upsell - the quiet, unglamorous nurture that keeps customers using what they bought.
Most partner marketing crams everything into that first stage and goes quiet after the sale. The FY27 guides are practically begging you to market the back half of the journey too - because that's where the bigger post-sales money now lives.
Follow the money to your niche
Not every workload is funded equally, and that's the point.
The clearest signal this year is post-sales. Security has seen the biggest step-up of the lot. Azure's rewarding data and agentic AI more richly than the rest of the stack. Copilot funding is up sharply year on year.
You don't have to chase all of it. In fact, please don't. Niche down.
Point your marketing at the workloads where two things are true at once: Microsoft's leaning in with funding, and you've got the real capability to deliver. That overlap is where your campaigns get the most air cover - from the field, from co-marketing, and from customers being nudged the same direction from every angle.
Spreading yourself thin across all three guides is how you end up sounding like every other partner. Pick your lane.
Lead with the switch story where it's strongest
One more that's easy to miss - the Conversion Bonuses.
There's extra funding this year for winning customers off the competition: moving data workloads off AWS or Google, replacing a rival security stack, shifting productivity seats across. If a "why switch to Microsoft" campaign was ever going to earn its budget, this is the year to run it.
The catch, as always, is proof - customer attestation, before-and-after evidence, the boring paperwork. Build that into how you run the campaign from day one and it's a non-issue.
The one thing not to do
Don't market the incentive.
The co-funding is the mechanism - it's how you fund the motion and sharpen the offer. Keep it there. Your customer doesn't buy "up to fifty grand in deployment funding". They buy fewer breaches, faster month-ends, and employees who get an hour back in their day.
Keep the money behind the curtain doing its job, and put the outcome on the poster.
The FY27 guides will sit in a SharePoint folder all year, read by three people in sales and nobody in marketing. That's the miss. Read them as a brief - what's being pushed, what's being funded, where the journey wants content - and you've got the backbone of a year's campaigns already written for you.