The Sky’s the Limit program is an incentive program from Microsoft for MSPs to drive net new seats to office 365 and M365. Microsoft wants to drive adoption to the “modern workspace” and wants to pay you money to get your customers to the cloud. We are moving to OS as a service and taking our physical infrastructure and moving it to the cloud. Click here for the complete guide
The Sky’s the limit program allows you to gain up to $3,500 per new customer that you add to 365 and also up to $150,000 for your organization.
In this article I will give you a guide for the campaign and discuss how you can maximize your margins leveraging 3 oh Microsoft’s Incentive Programs:
1. Shift Campaign
2. Silver Competency
3. Sky’s the Limit
The examples i give allow you to gain up to 47% margin on your Microsoft seats by participating in these campaigns.
Microsoft's Shift Campaign
Program Details
- Microsoft Link to More Details
- Net New Seats to O365 Business Premium
- Upgrades from existing office365 to Microsoft 365 Business sku
- Additional 15% margin on top of your normal CSP margin for 1 year
- Offer ends May 31
Ideal Customers
- Hardware Renewals coming up
- Need to move to cloud for compliance and security reasons
- Customers who are looking to adopt Exchange Online
- M365 Business: Ideal for customers looking to decommission their on-prem infrastructure and move to a cloud only environment. Leverage Intune to replace Group Policy and Azure AD to replace AD DS
Silver Competency
Program Details
- You can think of competencies like a reward program from Microsoft.
- Achieving competencies is demonstrating that your organization is delivering more Microsoft solutions and meeting technical requirements to support your clients
- Click Here for the complete guide on Microsoft Competencies
- Small and Midmarket competency
- Acquire 4 net new customers
- Pay $1,670 fee
- Receive monetary kickbacks listed in table to right
- Ends July 31st
- 6% margin on 365 Products as a Silver partner
- 2% on CSP customer adds in Global Accelerators
- 2% on global strategic products such as M365 Business
- 10% on local accelerators M365 Business customer adds
Adds an additional 20% margin to your seats
Sky's the Limit
Program Details
- Incentive program to move more seats to 365
- All Up Customer Adds Target: new O365 Customer adds (any eligible SKU/ any Seat count)
- 50 or Greater Seats Customer Adds Target: new O365 Customer adds (any eligible SKU/ Seats count >50)
- Click Here for my complete guide including FAQs/Terms and Conditions
- Click Here for the Microsoft’s Marketing page on this
- No monetary commitment to enroll
- Maximum payouts of $3,500 dollars per customer
Putting it All Together
Highlights
- All 3 of these programs have a common theme you can leverage: NET NEW CUSTOMERS to 365
- Business Scenario: Bringing over 6 Net New customer to the M365 Buisness Plan with 10 seats per customer
- Billed Revenue for the Year= $14,400 (6 Customers x 10 seats x $20/seat x 12months)
- Shift Campaign: An additional 15% margin for 1 year (By May 31st)
- Silver Competency: An additional 20% margin (6% global rate, 4% Global Accelerator, 10% Local accelerator) (By June 30th). Pay fee of $1,670
- Sky’s the Limit: An Additional $1,000 ($50/seat/rate for 2 customers, $500+$500)
- Total of 47% margin + $1k from Sky’s the Limit
Now Lets Look at another scenario with Business Premium Seats
- Business Scenario: Bringing over 6 Net New customer to the Office365 Business Premium with 10 seats per customer
- Billed Revenue for the Year= $9,000 (6 Customers x 10 seats x $12.50/seat x 12months)
- Shift Campaign: An additional 15% margin for 1 year (By May 31st)
- Silver Competency: An additional 8% margin (6% global rate, 2% Global Accelerator) (By June 30th). Pay fee of $1,670
- Sky’s the Limit: An Additional $750 ($35/seat/rate for 2 customer max set by program $350+$350)
- Total of 35% margin + $750 from Sky’s the Limit
Recommendations
I would try to push for the M365 Business Skus to your customers as they move to 365. As I stated earlier, they can replace your on-prem infrastructure and allow you to have more heightened security and compliance features. If you need help getting acclimated to Intune for policy management, check out my Implementation Guide. These skus are the future of Microsoft licensing. The earlier you can adopt them for your customers the better. Please comment with any questions below.