Most partners don't have a lead problem. They have a sameness problem, and it shows up as a lead problem.
Sorry - let me put that more plainly. If your marketing sounds like every other Microsoft partner's marketing, you'll generate activity, not leads. Webinars nobody remembers. A newsletter that gets opened and forgotten. A LinkedIn page posting Microsoft's launch graphics three days after Microsoft posted them.
So before we get into channels and tactics, we need to sort the foundations. Then we'll go channel by channel, and finish with how you tell a real lead from a name on a list.
First, let's de-jargon the thing
Three words get muddled together constantly, and it causes proper confusion when you're planning.
Prospecting is you going out and finding people. Outbound. You start the conversation.
Demand generation is you creating the want. Most of the people you reach aren't looking for you yet, and this is the work that makes them care.
Lead generation is capturing the people who are interested, and getting enough information to do something useful with them.
Most partners jump straight to the third one. They build a gated whitepaper, run some ads at it, harvest fifty email addresses and wonder why sales won't touch them. Of course they won't. Nobody downloading a PDF on Copilot readiness has agreed to buy anything.
Get all three running together and the maths changes. Demand gen warms the market, prospecting picks off the ones worth a direct approach, and lead gen catches the hands that go up.
Nail the proposition before you spend a penny on channels
Here's the uncomfortable bit. No channel fixes a weak proposition. Paid ads just help you waste money faster.
Go and look at your own homepage. How much of it could be lifted, word for word, onto a competitor's site with nothing more than a logo swap? "Trusted Microsoft partner." "End-to-end cloud solutions." "We put people at the heart of technology." The same broad claims, the same safe language, the same vague talk about expertise.
A proposition with bite does three things
- Says who it's for. Not "SMBs and enterprise" - that's everyone, and everyone is nobody.
- Says what changes for them. In their words, not Microsoft's product names.
- Evidences it. A named customer, a number, a before-and-after.
We practise this ourselves. Resultful only proactively works with Microsoft partners. That's a very deliberate decision, and yes, it means we turn work away. It's worth it, because every piece of content, every conversation and every example we reach for is aimed squarely at one audience who recognises themselves in it. That's the whole job of value proposition development and audience-led messaging.
Niche down, please. You cannot be the go-to partner for manufacturing, legal, housing associations, the NHS and financial services simultaneously. Pick the two where you've genuinely got the war stories, and let the rest come inbound.
Know exactly who you're talking to
Two audiences, and partners routinely blur them.
The end customer. Usually a mix of people rather than one buyer - an IT director who cares about migration risk, a finance lead who cares about the run cost, an ops lead who just wants the thing to stop breaking. Same product, three completely different reasons to care. Your content should speak to each of them separately rather than mushing them into one "decision maker".
Microsoft themselves. Your Microsoft contacts and Microsoft's own sellers pass work to partners they can describe in one line. If they can't repeat your proposition accurately, you're not on the shortlist when a customer asks "who do you rate for this?". That's the point of marketing into Microsoft.
That second audience is the one partners most often neglect, and it's free.
The channels, and what actually works in each
None of what follows is exotic. The difference between a channel that produces pipeline and one that produces a report is almost always how well it's run, not which one you picked.
LinkedIn and organic social
This is where your buyers are, so it's earned its place. The trap is treating it as a broadcast channel for company news.
What works: your people posting, not your logo. People buy from people, and a post from a named consultant who's just come out of a messy tenant migration will out-perform anything your brand page publishes.
Give them something to say. A short opinion, a thing that went wrong and what you learned, a plain-English explanation of something Microsoft announced badly. Don't be afraid to have a point of view - that's what sets you apart.
And please, no ChatGPT-flavoured wallpaper. If Google can already answer it, it isn't insight.
Content and search
Search is where the intent lives, but only if you target the right queries. "Digital transformation" isn't a buying query. "SharePoint migration cost per user" absolutely is.
Build around problems, not products. Three types are worth your time: problem-aware pieces like "why our Teams rollout stalled after six weeks", which catch people before they've decided what to buy; comparison and cost pieces, the ones buyers search for at the exact moment they're picking a supplier - uncomfortable to write, brilliant for pipeline; and proof pieces, case studies with real numbers in them. Not "improved efficiency". Say what improved, by how much, over what period.
One deep, genuinely useful page beats ten thin ones. Always has. If that's the gap, it's a content strategy and SEO job, not a volume one.
Email and outbound
Outbound isn't dead, but spray-and-pray is. The partners getting results treat a list of 200 well-researched accounts as more valuable than 20,000 scraped addresses.
Keep it short. Reference something true about their business. Ask for a conversation, not a demo. And accept that the first email is rarely the one that lands - it's the third, when they've also seen your consultant's post and your name in a Microsoft conversation.
Events and webinars
Still the fastest route to a real conversation, and still the most wasted.
The mistake is treating the event as the campaign. It's the middle of the campaign. The four weeks before it and the two weeks after it are where the leads are. If your entire follow-up is one "thanks for attending" email with a recording link, you've paid for a room and thrown the value away.
Smaller is usually better. Twelve of the right people round a table beats 200 registrations and 30 no-shows.
Microsoft: co-sell, marketplace and the account teams
This is the channel unique to you, and the one most underused.
Get listed properly on the commercial marketplace. Get your offers into a state a Microsoft seller can actually put in front of a customer. Build relationships with the Microsoft people in your orbit and give them something quotable about you - straight from the horse's mouth beats a PDF they never open.
And if you've got MDF or co-op funds sitting unspent, spend them on the campaign you'd run anyway, done properly, rather than a one-off tactic that leaves no trace. The Microsoft Co-op Funds Hub covers what qualifies.
Referrals and customer advocacy
Your happiest customers are your cheapest channel and almost nobody asks them. Not for a testimonial quote - for an introduction, a joint webinar, twenty minutes on a podcast.
Ask specifically. "Who else in your network is wrestling with this?" gets a name. "Do you know anyone who might need us?" gets a polite nothing.
What makes a lead sales-ready
Here's where the handover breaks down in most partner businesses. Marketing counts downloads, sales counts opportunities, and both sides quietly think the other is useless.
Fix it by agreeing - in writing, in a room, with both teams present - what a sales-ready lead looks like.
A sales-ready lead has all four
- A problem they've described in their own words.
- A timeframe, even a rough one.
- A person who can either buy or walk it to the person who can.
- Fit - they look like the customers you're best for.
Anything short of that isn't rubbish, it's just early. Send it back into nurture rather than burning a salesperson's goodwill on it.
Measure the few things that matter
You don't need a wall of dashboards. You need to know how many genuine conversations started this month and where they came from, how many became qualified opportunities, how long the whole thing takes start to finish, and what it cost you to get one. That last one is the number that ends most arguments about budget.
Be honest about attribution too. Someone read a blog in March, saw a consultant's post in May, came to a roundtable in June and filled in a form in July. Your form says "web". It wasn't web. Ask people how they heard about you - the free-text answer is often more useful than the tracking.
If you're starting from a standing start
Ninety days, roughly.
Weeks 1-3
Sharpen the proposition and pick two target segments. No new campaigns yet.
Weeks 4-6
Build three proof pieces and get two consultants posting weekly.
Weeks 7-9
One small event or roundtable, with a proper build-up and follow-up.
Weeks 10-12
A tight outbound push into the accounts that engaged, and agree the sales-ready definition with sales.
Busy is not the same as well directed. Doing four of these properly will beat doing eleven of them badly, every single time.
The partners who win at this aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who decided who they're for, said something worth hearing, and kept saying it long enough for the market to notice. If you'd rather hand the running of it to a team that does this every day, that's what our embedded marketing team and operating models are for.
Nathan, Founder & CEO, Resultful