+ Title: Growth lifecycle for your app

+description: Learn to plan growth lifecycle for your Teams app

+ms.localizationpriority: high

+# Growth lifecycle for your app

+Growing your app is a journey. It's a process thatΓÇÖs not overnight and goes through various stages. A typical growth lifecycle of a collaborative app on Teams looks like depicting critical barriers that once crossed puts the app into the next orbit for even higher growth:

+- **Build stage**: In this stage, developers plan, envision, design, build, and publish their collaborative app on the Microsoft Teams marketplace. The Teams developer platform documentation is the one-stop shop for platform features, best practices, and developer guidance. Strategic developers can join an invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program on this journey.

+- **Launch stage**: After the collaborative app is published on the Teams marketplace, launch marketing initiatives are executed for the app to announce the availability of the app for existing and new or prospective customers.

+- **Traction stage**: This stage has dual purpose and focus:

+ - Building awareness for the app through impactful customer and seller marketing channels.

+ - Building readiness of product, sales, customer success and support functions for the appΓÇÖs upcoming adoption, growth, and ROI realization.

+ Most growth and GTM activities during this stage are pilots to discover effectiveness, learning and execution rhythms. When the app crosses the *traction barrier*, one can say it has achieved product market fit in Teams marketplace and ecosystem.

+- **Scale stage**: This stage encompasses scaling in the market on the back of activation in existing customers who use the SaaS app outside Teams and selling to new customers through product-led, sales-led, and channel-led initiatives. Growth and GTM activities become more programmatic at this stage. When the app crosses the scale barrier, often also referred to as the *growth barrier*, one can conclude the apps is ready to deliver on the business goals and starts to deliver ROI on engineering and GTM investments.

+- **Succeed stage**: The final stage of the Teams collaborative app lifecycle is where the app moves from being a product integration built on Teams into a full-fledged strategic product line just as the core SaaS product for the web browser or native apps for Windows or mobile phones.

+ The activities at this stage include:

+ - Building public references for the impact of the collaborative app among customers to directly drives SQLs and MQLs

+ - Optimizing customer sales and conversion based on PQLs

+ - Investing further in more user-valuable scenarios or experiences inside the app

+There may be examples of developers short circuiting the lifecycle to jump across stages, for example, directly starting to monetize their app after launch using their version 1 experience itself. It's recommended that you follow a stage-by-stage approach as a best practice that most developers follow to derive the best ROI from their Teams app journey.

+## Review the Teams partners GTM guide

+Get started first by reviewing (and sharing with your GTM leaders) this high-level visual [Guide to ISV success with Microsoft for Teams Partners](https://aka.ms/teamsappsGTMguide) flipbook. This resource orients you about how to plan and strategize your Teams app offering, insights about key industry-wise personas and trends, how to define your appΓÇÖs value proposition, create content to maximize your appΓÇÖs reach among customers and sellers, access various partner benefits available to you, how to visualize a simplistic customer journey with your app, how to align your marketing activities with key opportunities from Microsoft and how to sell your app via MicrosoftΓÇÖs global marketplace. As you can see from the flipbook, Microsoft partners with app developers once theyΓÇÖve launched their apps on the marketplace by offering select, programmatic GTM investments depending on the appΓÇÖs maturity in the market. You're encouraged to get in touch with your Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives before spending cycles on your app growth planning and execution, so that you can get the most appropriate guidance youΓÇÖre eligible for.

+## Step-by-step guide to grow your app

+It's time now to expand on the preview provided by the flipbook above! The following sections offer a stage-by-stage descriptive guide elaborating on the various growth initiatives developers can plan and execute and where Microsoft can help.

+Developers are encouraged to follow the guidance here to grow their app and drive success for their investments on the Teams marketplace and ecosystem. However, the guidance provided can't be considered comprehensive. It's recommended that developers must always adapt these growth initiatives in the context best known to them based on:

+- The nature of business.

+- The app theyΓÇÖve launched on Teams.

+- The target customer personas.

+<!--

+You can plan your app's growth through the app lifecycle:

+- [Build your collaborative app](build-app.md)

+- [Launch your collaborative app](launch-app.md)

+- [Gain traction for your collaborative app in the market](gain-traction.md)

+- [Scale your collaborative app](scale-app.md)

+- [Succeed with your collaborative app](succeed.md)

+-->

+## Next step

+> [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+> [Building your collaborative app](build-app.md)

+<!--

+### Building your collaborative app

+LetΓÇÖs briefly go over what initiatives are the most impactful during the build stage.

+#### What should you as a developer do during the Build stage?

+- Alignment on business drivers, success metrics and path to liquidity for your collaborative app.

+- Commitment to build a high-quality and sticky collaborative app on Teams and monetize the app via transactable SaaS subscriptions on the marketplace.

+- Adherence to platform fundamentals and collaboration apps design principles.

+- Executive commit for multi-quarter app roadmap and GTM investments.

+- Identification of and agreement with pilot customers to get feedback on the app and adopt once published.

+#### Where can Microsoft help?

+- Access to proven best practices to build a differentiated, collaborative Teams app.

+- In-depth developer documentation with elaborate platform features to build a high quality app.

+- White gloved PM, dev, design support from Teams Engineering for strategic developers through the invite-only build-with partner program.

+- Support for customer inclusive app design and development for strategic developers through the invite-only build-with partner program.

+### Launching your collaborative app

+By now you're aware that the core focus at this stage is to announce the availability of the app for existing and new customers. HereΓÇÖs a rundown of various initiatives and growth levers at your disposal:

+#### What should you as a developer do during the Launch stage?

+- **Invest strategically into your app store listing, landing page and documentation**

+ Make sure youΓÇÖve links to your Teams app handy for use in your landing page, documentation, marketing materials and so on Refer here: Promote your app on another site to fetch the link to your app inside the Teams in-product marketplace. For AppSource link, head over to Microsoft AppSource and search for your app in the search box. Pick the URL from the browserΓÇÖs address bar.

+ | Growth Lever | Recommendation | Resources and examples for inspiration |

+ | | | |

+ | App store listing | This is the description and metadata that appears on the public Teams marketplace and is the most important piece of text that conveys what your app can do and the value users can derive out of it. The app store listing appears within the App Store in Teams clients as well as on the AppSource public marketplace on the web. HereΓÇÖs some key guidance: <br> ΓÇó Call out specifically what your app can do inside Teams vs focusing on your core SaaS product. Users are hiring your app to do a job in Teams, not in your web SaaS app for the browser or native mobile clients and want to certain it can deliver value inside Teams. It will be awesome if you can call out the degree of overlap in terms of supported scenarios between your core SaaS product and Teams app. <br> ΓÇó Use bullet points and emojis to break the wall of text and achieve better readability <br> ΓÇó Include screenshots in your listing that show the appΓÇÖs experience and underscore the user value inside Teams. <br> ΓÇó Include a video in your listing that shows the appΓÇÖs experience inside Teams. Generic, marketing videos that talk about the user problem your app is solving or one that simply gives an overview of your entire SaaS product aren't meaningful, donΓÇÖt convince the user to install your app and often set inaccurate user expectations leading to dissatisfaction. <br> ΓÇó Make sure to include links to public references and success stories to build trust that your Teams app has already benefited customers. This will instill confidence in new customers looking to acquire or try your app. | Your app store listing must meet the validation guidelines and Teams marketplace policies to be published. <br> Detailed guide for optimizing your app store listing is here: Chapter 2 in Best Practices Guide <br> See store listings of Polly, Zoho, Atlassian and so on |

+ | Landing page | This is the landing page for your app hosted on your website. You can use this page to talk about your Teams app in full detail ΓÇô the value delivered inside Teams, personas targeted, key scenarios, details of subscription or pricing, customer testimonials and so on You can use this page to receive traffic from your core SaaS product or periodic digital or social campaigns. HereΓÇÖs some key guidance: <br> ΓÇó As youΓÇÖve built a collaborative app inside Teams, avoid labelling this as a ΓÇ£Teams integrationΓÇ¥ page and linking it under the ΓÇ£IntegrationsΓÇ¥ section in your website header, navigation menu or footer. <br> ΓÇó Your Teams collaborative app deserves a top-level link in your website header, navigation menu or footer. Make it easy to discover ΓÇô more traffic is the first step to increased acquisition. <br> ΓÇó Use the recommended app store CTA arts on multiple places on this page prominently to direct users to acquire your app. <br> ΓÇó Include beautiful video, animated gifs and artful screenshots of your real Teams app on this page for an impactful storytelling. Your goal should be to get everyone who lands on this page to try out your Teams app immediately. <br> ΓÇó Make sure to include links to public references and success stories to build trust that your Teams app has already benefited customers. <br> ΓÇó ItΓÇÖs a good practice to include a FAQ section where users can quickly find answers to their most common queries related to your Teams app for example, scenarios, features, any additional cost or pricing, which SaaS subscription plans of yours support the Teams app and so on <br> ΓÇó Include download links to on-demand webinars or sign-up links to scheduled trainings or webinars or events for your Teams app on this page. Remember these are all valuable marketing qualified leads for your app. <br> ΓÇó Include a section on this page to collect user feedback about the Teams app including new feature asks. You can also use the landing page to frequently showcase the planned roadmap for your Teams app and upcoming features that can be upvoted or downvoted against by users. <br> ΓÇó This page must link to public pages as well as host downloadable copies of various bills of materials for your Teams app (see bill of materials section later on this page) that is, Technical solution datasheets, Teams app one-pager, IT admin guides, end-user facing app usage guides and so on <br> ΓÇó Your detailed public Support or documentation page for the Teams app (see Documentation section below) must also be prominently discoverable on this page as users typically stumble upon the appΓÇÖs landing page via search results. <br> ΓÇó Add a link to this page in your core SaaS product (for example, web app, native mobile apps) and from periodic digital or social campaigns targeted at users who may be using Teams. <br> ΓÇó You have a support chatbot available on your website to help visitors find the right information or get human assistance sooner, make sure to deploy and tune the same for visitors coming to this page for your Teams app. | Detailed guide for your website landing page is here: Chapter 3 in Best Practices Guide <br> You must use the following badge on your landing page to direct users to acquire your app from AppSource or the Teams in-client marketplace: <br> :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/app-badge.png" alt-text="Badge to acquire app from AppSource or Teams in-client marketplace."::: <br> See good examples of landing pages from Polly, Zoho, Atlassian and so on |

+ | Documentation | Coinciding with your Teams app going live, you must ensure the following public documentation hosted on your website: <br> 1. Support page for Teams collaborative app: This page must contain any setup and configuration instructions required for the Teams app in your SaaS backend, app rollout and governance guidelines for IT admins, troubleshooting steps and so on for both IT admins and users if or when they run into specific problems, support FAQs, how to raise support requests for your Teams app, SLAs promised and so on Include links to download your appΓÇÖs technical solution datasheet and IT admin facing guides on this page as well. <br> 2. Usage guide for Teams collaborative app: This is a highly recommended page to handhold new users in getting started with your app. ItΓÇÖs an opportunity to show how users can immediately get value by using your app inside Teams. Include links to download the Teams app one-pager and tend-user facing app usage guides on this page as well. We highly recommend adding a Share to Teams button on this page so that users who found this resource helpful can easily share this with their colleagues. | See good examples of support pages from Polly, Zoho, Atlassian and so on <br> See good examples of additional documentation pages from Wrike, Slido and so on |

+- **New social media posts announcing the Teams collaborative app**

+ You can generate interest from both existing and new customers as well as drive traffic to your appΓÇÿs landing page or directly to the appΓÇÖs listing in Teams Marketplace through social media posts and paid campaigns executed on your social channels. DonΓÇÖt forget to include media such as a video or an animated gif in your post to make it rich and interactive. Tag @M365 and @MicrosoftTeamsi in your posts as well as use the hashtags #Teamsapps, #MicrosoftTeams, #TeamsISV throughout the year in social media posts for your collaborative app to extend exposure and flag MicrosoftΓÇÖs social team for a potential retweet.

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ Connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to seek guidance for your social media campaign, possible collaboration with Microsoft for execution and the success metrics you should measure for example, number of views or clicks on your social posts, number of visitors on your landing page, number of MQLs generated on the landing page, number of visitors to the appΓÇÖs listing in marketplace, number of Teams app installs post launch and so on.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/social-media-posts.png" alt-text="Social media posts":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+- **Public blog post announcing the new Teams app**

+ Blog posts help communicate the value of your app and its integration with Microsoft Teams to your audience. Use your blog to introduce your Teams app, how to use it and communicate the value prop for your users including use cases, scenarios, customer stories. Include logos, animated gifs, screenshots, quotes, URLs, and information pertinent to promoting your app.

+ > [!NOTE]

+ > When using your blog channel to drive press or media coverage or to request Microsoft quotes, please refer to MicrosoftΓÇÖs Press Release guidelines for reviews (see the press release section). Example blog posts: Wrike, Adobe Creative Cloud, MeisterTask, MindMeister, Workday.

+- **Press Release announcing the new Teams app**

+ Use PRs to publicly announce the application you've built and your collaboration with Microsoft. Note that press releases and quotes must be reviewed by Microsoft representatives. Connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to avail of the service to review your press release draft and get a quote from Microsoft. Once you publicly post your press release, evangelize through other channels. Microsoft doesn't post partner press releases. Example press releases.

+- **Banners in web SaaS app to announce the new Teams app**

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ Include in-product CTAs prominently in your web SaaS product to let users know about your new or updated Teams collaborative app. You can leverage transient banners, notifications bar, whatΓÇÖs new notifications inside the SaaS productΓÇÖs UI for all users or push notifications to relevant users such as those belonging to your customer organizations who use Microsoft 365. The banner or notification CTA can direct users to your appΓÇÿs landing page or directly to the appΓÇÖs listing in Teams Marketplace.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/in-product-banner.png" alt-text="In-product banner":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+

+- **Free and extended trials for new Teams users**

+ Since your goal at this stage is to achieve product-market fit for your app, itΓÇÖs critical to learn how users are perceiving your new app and if theyΓÇÖre getting the intended value by using the app. If not already done for your core SaaS product, offer free trials to users who sign up for your app (and SaaS service) through the Teams channel. If you already offer trials for your SaaS product and your standard free trial period is 15 days, consider extending the trial period for Teams users to 30-60 days. Given youΓÇÖve built your Teams app for collaborative use cases, you'll naturally want trial users to invite their colleagues as well to use your app in shared context inside Teams. An extended trial facilitates collaborative evaluation of your app and increases the likelihood of these users converting to paid and sticky customers.

+- **Launch offers and promotions to acquire users for Teams app**

+ To acquire new customers for your Teams collaborative app, consider offering a little extra incentive to Teams users over and above whatΓÇÖs available for your core SaaS product.

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ If your app requires paid subscriptions, consider offering launch period discounts. Even promotions such as 1:1 product demos, customer success consultations, invite-only webinars, trainings for the entire business unit or team using your Teams app can go a long way to differentiate your app and accelerate customer acquisition. If you've already listed your transactable SaaS subscriptions for the Teams app in the marketplace, make sure to price them at a discount to encourage users to purchase your offer directly from the Teams marketplace.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/trials-store-listing.png" alt-text="free or extended trials in app store listing and FRE flow.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+- **Announce Teams app to your entire customer base**

+ The first time your Teams app goes live on the marketplace as well as for major subsequent updates, consider outreach to your entire customer base announcing the availability of the app. While social media posts, public blog post and press releases are for the entire world audience, to-customer emails are the best channel to drive awareness about your app within existing customer organizations. Make sure to introduce your Teams app, how to use it and communicate the value prop for your users very briefly including use cases, scenarios, customer stories via animated gifs, screenshots, quotes, and CTAs to your appΓÇÖs public landing page and install links to the Teams marketplace for those willing to get started immediately.

+- **App Bill of Materials: Pitch deck, value prop, demo, datasheets, and so on**

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/app-bill-a.png" alt-text="App bill material":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ To help MicrosoftΓÇÖs customer-facing teams talk about your app, we encourage you to develop Go-to- Market Bill of Materials (GTM BOM) that enable thousands of Microsoft customer-facing personnel to successfully discuss and demonstrate the benefits of your app when meeting with customers.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/app-bill-b.png" alt-text="App bill of materials":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+ | GTM BOM asset | Description |

+ | | |

+ | One-page overview | Provides an overview of what your app does and the core value proposition of using the app inside Microsoft Teams. |

+ | Customer pitch deck | A customer-shareable PowerPoint presentation that demonstrates the value of your app integrated within the Microsoft Teams platform. The presentation details the core benefits, features and capabilities of your app and includes a story of a customer successfully using your app. |

+ | Demo video | A 60-second video that demonstrates the features of your app and how it adds value to your customer. |

+ | Global contacts list | A list of contacts within your organization across regions that Microsoft customer success, sales and engineering teams can engage to facilitate app deployment and onboard new customers. |

+ | Customer success story | A one-page PowerPoint slide that shares how a customer is successfully using your app in Microsoft Teams and the benefit they're receiving from it. |

+ | Customer support for end users and IT Admins | An overview of how customers can get support for any issues they encounter using your integrated Microsoft Teams app. |

+ | IT Admin - App Config and Rollout Guide | A guide for IT admins of customer organizations to configure and rollout the integrated Microsoft Teams app for their users. |

+ | End User - Getting Started and Usage Guide | A guide for end users on how to get signed in and use the features of your integrated Microsoft Teams app. |

+ | Technical solution datasheet | Provides an overview of the architecture, APIs, data handling and compliance aspects of your Teams app. This document is helpful for IT admins as well as Microsoft sales and customer success engineers when rolling out an overall solution into a customerΓÇÖs organization. |

+ | Adoption templates (emails, flyers) | An email both your customers and MicrosoftΓÇÖs customer-facing employees can use to drive awareness of your app within the customer organization. |

+#### Where can Microsoft help?

+- **Support for launch content asset development**: Connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk and request access to co-branded marketing templates and branding guidance for use in your Microsoft Teams marketing activities. Review the template(s) or guidance provided and upload your drafted GTM BOM asset(s) and request form(s) to your custom SharePoint folder for Microsoft to distribute internally.

+- **Teams app store listing optimization**: Improve your solution listing in Teams marketplace

+- App store marketing toolkit - Apply best practices and leverage templated campaign collateral to customize marketing for your Teams app

+- **Partner press release and blog content review**: Publicly announce your Teams app by leveraging this service to review of a press release you draft and get a quote from a Microsoft representative.

+- **Amplify partner press release and blog on social**: Microsoft can help Teams customers gain awareness of your new or updated collaborative app by including your app in the Commercial Marketplace ΓÇ£WhatΓÇÖs NewΓÇ¥ blog as well as amplifying your blog or PR on social channels.

+- **Microsoft Teams TechCommunity Blog Post**: Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to discuss the possibility of publishing a dedicated blog post on Teams blog such as this.

+- **Features placements in AppSource and the Teams in-product app store**: Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives or connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to feature your app in AppSource and or or the Teams in-client app store merchandising sections. Please note that the Microsoft Teams store editorial team determines the prominence and location of an app within the editorial sections such as promo banner on the Teams store based on ranking parameters described here.

+- **Co-present in Teams app-focused public webinars hosted by you**: Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to request their participation in to-customer webinars youΓÇÖre planning to announce and evangelize your Teams collaborative app.

+### Gaining traction for your collaborative app in the market

+As a reminder, youΓÇÖll now want to gain mindshare for your collaborative app among top customers and build readiness to scale adoption, growth and start realizing return on investment. Here are the various initiatives and growth levers at your disposal:

+#### What should you as a developer do during the Traction stage?

+- **Upskill Customer Success team on your new Teams app**:

+ Your collaborative app for Teams is just another product line or channel for your customers to use your SaaS service and hence, training your customer success personnel on the Teams app, especially how to get customers started with the app, high value scenarios and use cases, how to get the most out of the app and so on is of critical importance. For new customers who use Microsoft 365, your customer success team must lead the conversations with your Teams collaborative app as it will offer unique, differentiated value to users through collaborative workflows beyond the high value scenarios powered by your core SaaS product. For existing customers who use Microsoft 365, your customer success team must immediately set up time to introduce your new Teams app to these customers, demo the experience and then work out a plan to activate these overlapping customers on Teams. To achieve product-led growth, you must strategically upskill your customer success teams to access and monitor product acquisition, engagement, task completion and value realization metrics or milestone for customers using your collaborative Teams app to perform outreach and intervention at the right time to assist users in their journey with your app. Also establish a process to channel customer feedback from this team to inform roadmap planning and growth experimentation for your Teams app. It will be a good idea to have your customer success team conversant in day-to-day usage of Microsoft Teams and up to speed with all topics in the Teams admin-facing public documentation sections ΓÇ£Third-party apps in Microsoft TeamsΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£Admin controls to govern appsΓÇ¥ since your customers will need this expertise.

+- **Upskill Customer Support staff on new Teams app**:

+ Similar to Customer Success teams, it's imperative to train your customer support team on the Teams app, frequent user scenarios, common queries, guidance w.r.t. troubleshooting, any pre-configuration required, app rollout and governance of the Teams app in customer organizations. Your support team may get fairly nuanced queries about your app in Teams and to continue delivering a delightful experience for your customers, you must ensure the team has basic understanding of Microsoft Teams, Teams apps in general, nuances about your Teams collaborative app, security, compliance and permissions for your Teams app, app management and governance features in Teams among other things. It will be a good idea to have a support team thatΓÇÖs conversant in day-to-day usage of Microsoft Teams and is up to speed with all topics in the Teams admin-facing public documentation sections ΓÇ£Third-party apps in Microsoft TeamsΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£Admin controls to govern appsΓÇ¥ as your customers will need this expertise.

+- **Showcase Teams app in your annual customer conference**:

+ Your own flagship annual customer or partner conference is the perfect opportunity to announce and showcase your new or updated Teams collaborative app to the world and get immediate traction going. Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to request their participation in to-customer webinars youΓÇÖre planning to announce and evangelize your Teams collaborative app.

+- **Drive awareness of the app in select customer orgs**:

+ While at the launch stage youΓÇÖd announced the availability of your new Teams app to the entire customer base, itΓÇÖs time to build traction by going targeted. Identify a shorter list of existing customers of your SaaS product who use Microsoft 365 and then drive awareness among these customers through your customer success team. Your customer success team must set up time to introduce your new Teams app to these customers, demo the experience and then work out a plan to activate these overlapping customers on Teams. These activation motions will allow your customer success and customer support teams to learn how to drive programmatic adoption, tackle common customer queries and build real-world expertise on the Teams app.

+- **App activation in pre-identified pilot Teams customers**:

+ Before shipping the Teams app on the marketplace, you would have identified 3-5 pilot customers with whom you reviewed the envisioned app scenarios and design mocks to build confidence towards the product youΓÇÖre building. ItΓÇÖs now time to leverage your customer success team to activate those select 3-5 customers. This won't only lead towards product-market fit but also serve as a source of rich customer feedback to improve the app in future versions.

+- **Share overlapping customer orgs to plan co-activation**:

+ For large, strategic enterprise customers that use your SaaS product as well as Microsoft Teams, MicrosoftΓÇÖs customer-facing resources can partner with your sales and customer success teams to drive co-activation of your app in the customer organization. Note that Microsoft evaluates co-activation opportunities for apps based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (sold seat size in customer account) and so on among other criteria. Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to request potential, co-activation of your Teams collaborative app in strategic enterprise customer accounts.

+- **Commerce transact integration to make your Teams app monetization-ready**:

+ One of the goals of the Traction stage is to build readiness for future adoption and ROI realization from your collaborative Teams app. Once you start seeing sticky adoption and positive feedback for your collaborative app among the pilot and significant customers, you can begin planning monetization for your app on the Teams marketplace. Get started here.

+- **M365 Certification to make Teams app enterprise-ready**:

+ The Microsoft 365 Certification is designed to show customers that your collaborative app has been vetted against controls derived from leading industry-standard frameworks and that strong security, privacy and compliance practices are in place to protect customer data when the app is in use. Since most Teams customers are large enterprises, having your app M365 certified aids in building trust with the IT admins (see how here) as well as result in smoother, faster adoption in customer organizations. Find more here.

+- **Drive traffic from web SaaS app: ΓÇ£Use in TeamsΓÇ¥ CTA and ΓÇ£Share to TeamsΓÇ¥**:

+ While during the launch stage, you leveraged transient banners, notifications bar, whatΓÇÖs new notifications inside the SaaS productΓÇÖs UI for all users to announce your Teams app. ItΓÇÖs time now to nudge users who may be using Microsoft Teams to start using your collaborative app for scenarios that are better together in Teams vs your core web SaaS experience.

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ Surface deeplinks within your browser-based web SaaS experience to transport users to specific views inside your Teams app (for example, personal app, tabs, conversational bot or meeting extensions with shared meeting stage or in-meeting tab) and implement the highly recommended Share to Teams control within your browser-based web SaaS experience to enable users to share and start collaborating around a content or object from your SaaS product inside Teams with their colleagues.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/drive-traffic-saas-app.png" alt-text="Drive traffic from your SaaS app.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+ To get maximum ROI, surface these nudges contextually for scenarios which are inherently collaborative over chat or in meetings as those are best delivered inside Microsoft Teams through your app.

+#### Where can Microsoft help?

+- **Teams App Store merchandising: Editorial Articles**: The Microsoft Teams store editorial team curates editorial sections on the in-product app store based on various ranking parameters.

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ Editorial articles provide a list of app suggestions to users within the store that meet specific scenario objectives with a clear call-to-action to install the app while reading the article. Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives or connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to feature your app in these Editorial Articles.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/editorial-articles.png" alt-text="Editorial articles.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+- **On-demand access to digital marketing content**: Digital Marketing Content OnDemand service provides go-to-market content in fresh weekly campaigns at no cost to Microsoft partners. Unlock expertise that can drive customer engagement and elevate your business. Connect your social media accounts and email lists to select, customize, and share content with automatic updates that push to your companyΓÇÖs social media accounts or send direct email communication to customers.

+- **Joint webinar to existing and new target customers**: Participate in a joint webinar with Microsoft and other partners to showcase the value of your Teams collaborative app to customers. You can connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to find opportunities and execute.

+- **Include app in Microsoft-run digital campaigns**: Highlight your Microsoft Teams app in a Microsoft-led digital campaign based on specific industries or contemporary themes for example, hybrid work. You can connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to find opportunities and execute.

+- **App availability shared internally with field and CPMs**: Drive awareness of your published Microsoft Teams app to the customer-facing roles within Microsoft such as the field or Teams EngineeringΓÇÖs customer PMs. Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives or connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to make use of this opportunity. Please note that Go-to-Market Bill of Materials (GTM BOM) for your app is a pre-requisite for this.

+- **Engineering support for app monetization in Teams marketplace**: Strategic developers who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program get access to robust technical guidance and best practices from engineering to build transact SaaS and new, pilot features to improve the purchase funnel for their apps. You can also unlock additional GTM benefits and CSP channel partnership programs for early-bird apps with live transact SaaS offers.

+- **Share best practices for customer app rollout and activation**: Strategic developers who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program get access to several time- and market-tested best practices to drive faster adoption of your collaborative app in customers. Do not forget to upskill using the Teams admin-facing public documentation sections ΓÇ£Third-party apps in Microsoft TeamsΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£Admin controls to govern appsΓÇ¥ to aid during app rollout, activation, and governance.

+- **Invite to present in internal platform growth forums**: Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to feature in invite-only collaborative app growth forums where you can showcase your app to customer-facing teams within Microsoft, train them on value proposition and high value scenarios and so on to have impactful conversations with existing or new prospective customers for your app.

+### Scaling your collaborative app

+To reiterate, this stage is all about putting learnings from previous ad-hoc, pilot motions to use in programmatically activating existing customers and selling to new customers via all possible initiatives. The following growth levers are pertinent at this stage:

+#### What should you as a developer do during the Scale stage?

+- **Become CSP channel ready for the Teams app**:

+ Listing your SaaS subscriptions on the Teams marketplace gives you access to 90,000+ reseller partners (called cloud solution providers or CSPs) around the world who already manage a significant customer install base. You can scale your business through this channel without making a full investment in solutions, experts, salesforce, and events - but instead get to market faster and at exponential scale compared to selling solely through your own sales motions. To scale your app, become CSP channel ready (see here: CSP Channel Readiness Guide for Teams app ISVs). Once your app becomes CSP ready, it will get featured on this landing page to appear in Teams apps that have become CSP Channel Ready public handbook.

+- **Onboard CSP resellers to extend appΓÇÖs sales reach**:

+ Once you become CSP channel ready by completing the pre-requisites detailed here, browse through the CSP list on the Partner Center to find resellers you can get in touch with to negotiate a partnership. You can find detailed partner profile information in the Partner Center or using the public partner finder on AppSource.

+- **Tailor SaaS offers for customers and CSP resellers**:

+ Teams marketplace allows you to create private offers that is, time-bound pricing of your SaaS subscription for Teams app with customized, pre-negotiated terms for CSPs. You can also create private plans for targeted customers to offer negotiated pricing. Help your sales team secure large new customer deals leading with your Teams collaborative app and offering private pricing to your customers via the Teams marketplace ΓÇô leaving tax remittance, payments, and subscription billing to Microsoft.

+- **Digital webinars for existing customers and new prospects**:

+ Host digital webinars at regular cadences to showcase the value of your Microsoft Teams app to customers. Your customer success team and pre-sales or sales team must funnel relevant existing customers and new prospects as leads to target these webinar invitations to. Make sure to include the links to sign-up for these webinars on your appΓÇÖs landing page on your website and also in your app store listing to attract new, exploratory users who may be interested in learning more about the app. Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives to request their participation in hero instances of these to-customer webinars.

+- **Digital ad campaigns to target customers for app install and use**:

+ Generate interest from new customer accounts and drive traffic to your collaborative app listing in Teams marketplace with paid media campaigns executed on your social channels. Connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to seek guidance for your digital campaign, identify target customer accounts and personas, collaboration on paid media plan, possible budget funding and agreeing on the success metrics you should measure for example, click through rate, cost per click, # of clicks, no. of MQLs generated on the landing page, # of visitors to the appΓÇÖs listing in marketplace, resulting # of Teams app installs, and so on.

+- **Publish customer demand and appΓÇÖs impact story**:

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ Share real customer stories of increased employee productivity by using your collaborative app inside Teams with a 4ΓÇô5-minute video that can be used for demand generation, digital marketing campaigns or showcased on public pages. Nominate a customer and gain their commitment to participate in the story. Work with the customer on the narrative and be sure to include the benefits derived from your collaborative app, as well as the added productivity gains seen by the customer (quantifiable gains are preferred).

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/customer-story-isv.png" alt-text="Customer story on the landing story of ISV website.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+ Once developed, you must host one or more of these customer stories prominently on the landing page of the Teams app on your website and promote it via paid, earned media or social media posts to highlight the success of the app.

+- **Showcase Teams app in leading industry events**:

+ While building traction, you showcased the collaborative app in Teams during your annual customer conference. ItΓÇÖs time to expand the coverage to well-known public industry events where you've a prominent presence or conferences which you sponsor. Your executives can include the Teams app in their keynote or showcase your innovation centre-stage, which is bound to attract both existing and new prospective customers.

+- **User re-targeting and re-engagement basis app analytics**:

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ A core product-led growth initiative, use signals from your app analytics to re-target users whoΓÇÖve recently engaged with your app in Teams but haven't reached a value realization milestone defined by you. Users whoΓÇÖs not visited your app or churned recently can be re-engaged to bring back to your app.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/remarket-retarget.png" alt-text="Re-market via emails and re-target using Teams notifications.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+ Remember, your goal is to get users to frequently experience value by using your collaborative app, so that they can convert to sticky, habitual users and eventually convert into paying customers.

+- **Co-activation in mutually identified existing customers**:

+ Based on the list youΓÇÖve shared with your Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives while building traction, itΓÇÖs time to execute co-activation and adoption of your collaborative app in customer accounts with significant seat sizes. Your customer success team will play a major driving role in this motion working alongside business decision makers, IT decision makers and end-users that is, employees of the customer organization who are going to use your app inside Teams. Just enabling the app inside Teams won't be enough ΓÇô instead, adoption and change management practices led by your customer success team through org-wide emailers at regular cadences, flyers, retention campaigns, user trainings, identifying and scaling through app champions in each team and constantly keeping an eye on app usage metrics within the customerΓÇÖs tenant is required to form a habit among users.

+- **Growth hacking via in-product scenario experimentation**:

+ Continuously monitor whatΓÇÖs happening inside your collaborative app through analytics and measure the value end-users are obtaining. To positively impact product and business metrics such as # of app installs, activation rate, task completing, new user retention and churn, referrals and so on, a rapid, always-on experimentation work-stream allows byte-sized tweaks to your app experience, resulting in more control and lesser risk compared to monolithic, big changes spaced far apart. Make sure to instrument code and track analytics for your app right from the very first version and have your dedicated Teams app crew or your existing SaaS product growth team of PM, Dev, Design upskilled on Teams platform to take ownership of this work-stream to derive maximum ROI.

+#### Where can Microsoft help?

+- **Co-activation in mutually identified existing customers**: Note that Microsoft will evaluate co-activation opportunities in large customer accounts based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (sold seat size in customer account) and so on among other criteria.

+ :::column span="3":::

+ - **Support joint customer success story development** Connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to seek guidance and execute. You will be able to leverage Microsoft slide templates, customer story intake form, customer interview template, and vendor video production or copy writing services. Introduce the creative team to the customer and facilitate the interviews and review processes until the story is approved by all parties. The Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits team will make sure your customer story is published to the internal Microsoft Teams Platform Resource Library and the Transformed by Teams portal.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/customer-success-story-1.png" alt-text="Teams customer success story.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+- **Select, area-specific marketing to local Teams customers** Your Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives will reach out to include your collaborative app in specific, local subsidiary-drive GTM opportunities focused on Teams customers located in the subsidiaryΓÇÖs market.

+- Best practices for analytics-driven app engagement - Strategic developers who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program get access to best practices based on data signals for your app to improve acquisition, activation, engagement, retention and virality of your app on Teams. Teams engineering will bring in PM, UX design and developer support resources to work alongside your crew on the next set of app enhancements.

+- **High-touch support for select, joint new customer pitches**: Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives to discuss potential joint customer pitches. Note that Microsoft will use discretion to partner on such opportunities based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (seat size in prospect customer account) and so on among other criteria.

+- **Include app in global outreach to Microsoft sellers**: Expose your solution to Microsoft field sellers and executives through an on-demand webinar featuring your speakers and content. Microsoft will post your on-demand webinar to an internal site and promote it to Microsoft sellers. Share the internal Microsoft on-demand webinar link with your Microsoft contacts as well. Connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to check eligibility, seek guidance and execute this motion.

+- **Host customer roundtables to promote the app**: Participate in a customer roundtable session with Microsoft to highlight the value of your Teams app to customers. Connect with the Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to check eligibility, seek guidance and execute this motion. Subsequently, a Microsoft Marketing Program Manager will reach out to you about participating in a customer roundtable session based on campaign alignment.

+### Succeeding with your collaborative app

+To wrap up, your collaborative app is now becoming a full-fledged strategic product line similar to your core SaaS product for the web browser or native apps for Windows or mobile phones. To maximize success for your customers and ROI for your business, here are the initiatives and growth levers you must leverage:

+#### What should you as a developer do during this final stage?

+- **Wider TAM coverage across existing and prospect user base**:

+ Continue to increase the usage of your collaborative app on Teams through existing customer activation and new customer acquisition via the Teams marketplace or through sales-led customer deal wins leading with your app.

+- **Report and celebrate customer activation, deal wins and revenue**:

+ Share notable customer wins, customer success stories and resulting revenue from user acquisition or deal wins attributed to your Teams app with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives so that Microsoft can selectively drive executive visibility for your app and explore any possible GTM or marketing-drive acceleration for your app.

+- **Convert PQLs from Teams app into active sales pipeline**:

+ A core product-led growth initiative, capture Teams marketplace trials, trials sign-ups coming from your Teams app or freemium users as potential leads to be converted into paying customers. Remember to monitor the usage patterns, user retention and product value experienced by the trial or freemium users to determine which customers ca be converted through sales, customer success or direct product interventions (for example, upsell, upgrade prompts).

+- **Convert PQLs from Teams app into active sales pipeline**:

+ A core product-led growth initiative, capture Teams marketplace trials, trials sign-ups coming from your Teams app or freemium users as potential leads to be converted into paying customers. Remember to monitor the usage patterns, user retention and product value experienced by the trial or freemium users to determine which customers ca be converted through sales, customer success or direct product interventions (for example, upsell, upgrade prompts).

+- **Continuously reduce churn via product and analytics-led insights**:

+ Retaining users by providing them a sticky experience is key to growing your Teams app and realizing economic value from your product and GTM investments. Make sure youΓÇÖve implemented robust and granular analytics for your Teams app that serves your need to measure when and which users have churned or likely to churn from your app. You can them re-engage and re-target them via outreach channels within or outside your product.

+- **Invest in richer and more impactful user scenarios**:

+ Innovation, grounded in customer needs, is the key to sustainably grow and succeed with your app on Teams.

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ Make sure to keep monitoring reviews for your app on the marketplace, user feedback coming from in-product surveys, user behavior insights and app engagement analytics youΓÇÖve implemented in your app and customer inputs relayed by your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to continue investing in new scenarios and enhanced user experience for your app. You must also keep an eye on your competitors and other leading SaaS apps in your segment to continuously learn from the market and evolve your appΓÇÖs strategy and roadmap.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/feedback-teams-app.png" alt-text="Collect user feedback within the developerΓÇÖs Teams app through contextual, micro-surveys.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+ :::row:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/app-capability-1.png" alt-text="Teams app capability 1.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="3":::

+ Since Teams marketplace is public, you can leverage your product team can at the minimum leverage the M365 developer tenant to experience other apps. Strategic developers who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program can get early access to new and latest cutting-edge collaborative features on Teams app platform - an opportunity for you to deliver unparalleled value to customers as well as leverage global GTM and marketing moments, being an early adopter to showcase new innovation on Teams.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::row-end:::

+- **Share feedback to enrich the Teams platform**:

+ Microsoft Teams app platform is ever-evolving with newer features that provide even more opportunities for developers like you to deliver unique, differentiated and collaborative scenarios of value to customers. Leverage your Microsoft field, account, engineering representatives to share feedback or product ask on Teams platform. You can as well post product feature suggestions here.

+- **Share deeper app metrics and data-backed insights**:

+ Strategic developers who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program can share aggregate-level user engagement and behavioral insights with Microsoft PM and UX design team who, armed with a vast experience or working with app developers and best practices of designing, developing and growing apps on Teams, can collaborate with you on experience enhancements, hypotheses-driven growth experimentation and roadmap planning for your Teams collaborative app.

+#### Where can Microsoft help?

+ :::column span="3":::

+ - **Case Study on MicrosoftΓÇÖs public customers portal**: Impactful case studies of how investing a Teams app resulted in growth for your SaaS business and how customers using your app got impacted can be published on the following customer-facing sites: M365 ISV Benefits Program Success Stories and Customer Stories on Microsoft.com. Connect with your Teams engineering representatives or Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk to check eligibility, seek guidance and execute this motion.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/isv-site-success-story.png" alt-text="Modern work ISV site showing customer success stories.":::

+ :::column-end:::

+- **Expand customer co-activation and joint new pitches**: Microsoft will evaluate co-activation opportunities in large customer accounts based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (sold seat size in customer account) and so on among other criteria. Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to discuss potential joint customer pitches in large customer accounts.

+- **Include in Microsoft exec blog or flagship event endorsement**: Get the power of the Microsoft executive team behind your next leadership blog or big event. Review your plans for blogs or events in which you'll be participating. Develop ideas on how a Microsoft executive can help to promote your commercial marketplace offer in a blog or at an event. Reach out to Microsoft 365 ISV Marketing Benefits to request Microsoft executive endorsement, where your eligibility will be checked and subsequently, the team will work with you to find a Microsoft executive (Director level or above) to help endorse your Teams collaborative app available on the marketplace.

+- **Share top customer feedback to shape app updates**: Strategic developers who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program can learn from Microsoft PM and UX design team about incoming feedback from customers specifically about their collaborative apps or feedback at large about the segment ΓÇô all of which are great inputs to plan customer-grounded future roadmap of product enhancements.

+- **Early access to unreleased Teams Platform features**: Microsoft-offered Developer Preview for Teams is a public program for developers, which provides early access to unreleased features in Microsoft Teams. This allows you to explore and test upcoming features for potential inclusion in your Teams app as well as share feedback about the feature. Strategic developers who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program not only get early access to new and latest cutting-edge collaborative features of the Teams platform, but additionally have a direct line to work together with Microsoft engineering to use these features in their apps.

+- **Quarterly Business Reviews with ISV for app growth**: Strategic developers who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program enjoy the additional benefit of a quarterly rhythm of business with participation from product, engineering, business development and GTM leaderships from Microsoft as well as partner side to take a stock of the appΓÇÖs growth, resulting business outcomes and jointly agree on next wave of business impact milestones and partnership investments.

+Each app in the Teams ecosystem undertakes this journey ΓÇô in all likelihood, starting from a point solution to becoming a full-fledged collaborative app on Teams. Building, launching, gaining traction, achieving scale, and finally succeeding are phases that help you plan and execute your appΓÇÖs go-to-market journey resulting in robust growth for your SaaS business on the Teams marketplace.-->

+ Title: The build stage for your collaborative app

+description: Learn what you can do during the build stage of your app to grow your app

+ms.localizationpriority: high

+# Build your collaborative app

+LetΓÇÖs briefly go over what initiatives are the most impactful during the build stage.

+## What should you as a developer do during the Build stage?

+- Alignment on business drivers, success metrics and path to liquidity for your collaborative app.

+- Commitment to build a high-quality and sticky collaborative app on Teams and monetize the app via transactable SaaS subscriptions on the marketplace.

+- Understanding of and adherence to [platform fundamentals](../../../../app-fundamentals-overview.md) and [Teams app design principles](../../../../design/design-teams-app-overview.md).

+- Executive commit for multi-quarter app roadmap and GTM investments.

+- Identification of pilot customers and getting their agreement to provide feedback on the app and adopt once published.

+## Where can Microsoft help?

+- Access to proven best practices to build a differentiated, collaborative Teams app.

+- In-depth developer documentation with elaborate platform features to build a high quality app.

+- White gloved support through PM, development and design experts from Teams Engineering for strategic developers through the invite-only build-with partner program.

+- Support for customer inclusive app design and development for strategic developers through the invite-only build-with partner program.

+## Next step

+> [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+> [Launching your collaborative app](launch-app.md)

+ Title: The traction stage for your collaborative app

+description: Learn what you can do during the traction stage of your app to grow your app.

+ms.localizationpriority: high

+# Gain traction for your collaborative app in the market

+In the Traction stage, youΓÇÖll want to gain mindshare for your collaborative app among top customers. You will build readiness to scale adoption and growth, and start realizing return on investment. Here are the various initiatives and growth levers at your disposal:

+## What should you do during the Traction stage?

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Upskill customer success team on your new Teams app</summary>

+- Your collaborative app for Teams is a key product line or channel for your customers to use your SaaS service. For this reason, training your customer success personnel on the Teams app is of critical importance. It can include how to get customers started with the app, high value scenarios and use cases, how to get the most out of the app, and so on.

+- For new customers who use Microsoft 365, your customer success team must know how to lead the conversations with your Teams collaborative app. Through collaborative workflows beyond the table stakes scenarios powered by your core SaaS product, it will offer your users unique and differentiated value.

+- For existing customers who use Microsoft 365, your customer success team must immediately set up time to introduce your new Teams app to these customers and demo the experience. Then, they must work out a plan to activate these overlapping users on your Teams app.

+- To achieve product-led growth, you must strategically upskill your customer success teams. The aim is to access and monitor product acquisition, engagement, and task completion. They must also monitor value realization metrics or milestones for customers using the app, so that performing outreach and intervention at the right time becomes possible to be able to assist users in their journey.

+- In addition, establish a process to channel customer feedback from this team. Use this feedback to inform roadmap planning and growth experimentation for your Teams app. It will be a good idea to have your customer success team conversant in day-to-day usage of Microsoft Teams. It also helps if your team is up to speed with all articles in the Teams admin-facing public documentation sections [Third-party apps in Microsoft Teams](/microsoftteams/overview-third-party-apps) and [Admin controls to govern apps](/microsoftteams/customize-apps). Your customers will benefit from their expertise in these areas.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Upskill customer support staff on new Teams app</summary>

+Similar to customer success teams, it's imperative to train your customer support team on the Teams app. Upskill them on frequent user scenarios, common queries, and guidance for troubleshooting. It's also useful to train the team for any pre-configuration required, app rollout and governance of the Teams app in customer organizations. Your support team may get fairly nuanced queries about your app in Teams.

+To continue delivering a delightful experience for your customers, ensure the support team has basic understanding of:

+- Microsoft Teams.

+- Apps on Microsoft Teams, in general.

+- Nuances about your Teams collaborative app.

+- Security, compliance, and permissions for your Teams app.

+- App management and governance features in Teams.

+

+It will be a good idea to have your support team conversant in day-to-day usage of Microsoft Teams. It also helps to be up to speed with all articles in the Teams admin-facing public documentation sections [Third-party apps in Microsoft Teams](/microsoftteams/overview-third-party-apps) and [Admin controls to govern apps](/microsoftteams/customize-apps). Your customers will benefit from their expertise in these areas.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Showcase Teams app in your annual customer conference</summary>

+Your own flagship annual customer or partner conference is the perfect opportunity to announce and showcase your new or updated Teams collaborative app to the world and get immediate traction going. Contact the Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to request their participation in to-customer webinars youΓÇÖve planned for announcing and evangelizing your Teams collaborative app.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Drive awareness of the app in select customer organizations</summary>

+While at the launch stage youΓÇÖd announced the availability of your new Teams app to the entire customer base, itΓÇÖs time to build traction by going targeted. Identify a shorter list of existing customers of your SaaS product who are also Microsoft 365 customers. Drive awareness about your app among these customers through your customer success team.

+Your customer success team must set up time to introduce your new Teams app to these customers and demo the experience. Then, they must work out a plan to activate these overlapping customers on Teams. These activation motions will allow your customer success and customer support teams to learn how to drive programmatic adoption, tackle common customer queries and build real-world expertise on your Teams app.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>App activation in pre-identified pilot Teams customers</summary>

+Before shipping Teams app on the marketplace, you'd have identified three to five pilot customers with whom you reviewed the envisioned app scenarios and designed UX screens or user journeys to build confidence towards the experience you were building. ItΓÇÖs time to use your customer success team to activate those select three to five customers. It won't only lead towards product-market fit but also serve as a source of rich customer feedback to improve the app in future versions.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Share overlapping customer orgs to plan co-activation</summary>

+For large, strategic enterprise customers that use your SaaS product and Microsoft Teams, MicrosoftΓÇÖs customer-facing resources can partner with your sales and customer success teams to drive co-activation of your app in the customer organization. Microsoft evaluates co-activation opportunities for apps based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (sold seat size in customer account), and so on, among other criteria.

+Contact your field, account, or engineering representatives from Microsoft to request potential co-activation of your Teams collaborative app in strategic enterprise customer accounts.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Commercial marketplace transact SaaS offers integration to make your Teams app monetization-ready</summary>

+One of the goals of the Traction stage is to build readiness for future adoption and ROI realization from your collaborative Teams app. Look for sticky adoption and positive feedback for your collaborative app among the pilot and significant customers. Once achieved, you can begin planning monetization for your app on the Teams marketplace. After youΓÇÖre convinced [why you should transact](https://cloudpartners.transform.microsoft.com/practices/modernworkisv?tab=monetize-your-app) your Teams app on the Microsoft commercial marketplace, you can learn more about the product and commerce monetization capabilities for Teams apps. For more information, see [Monetize your app](../../prepare/monetize-overview.md).

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Microsoft 365 Certification to make Teams app enterprise-ready</summary>

+The Microsoft 365 Certification is designed to show customers that your collaborative app is vetted against controls derived from leading industry-standard frameworks. It also showcases that strong security, data storage, privacy, and compliance practices are in place to protect customer data when the app is in use. Since most Teams customers are large enterprises, having your app Microsoft 365 certified helps in building trust with the IT admins.

+For more information, see [Microsoft 365 certification](/microsoftteams/overview-of-app-certification#microsoft-365-certification).

+To find Microsoft 365 certification results in smoother, faster adoption in customer organizations, see [here](https://cloudpartners.transform.microsoft.com/practices/modernworkisv?tab=certification).

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Drive traffic from web SaaS app: 'Use in Teams' CTA and 'Share to Teams'</summary>

+While during the launch stage, you used transient banners, notifications bar, whatΓÇÖs new notifications inside the SaaS productΓÇÖs UI for all users to announce your Teams app. ItΓÇÖs time now to nudge users who may be using Microsoft Teams to start using your collaborative app for scenarios that are better together in Teams vs. your core web SaaS experience.

+Surface [deep links](../../../../build-and-test/deep-links.md) within your browser-based web SaaS experience to transport users to specific views inside your Teams app (for example, personal app, tabs, conversational bot or meeting extensions with shared meeting stage or in-meeting tab). You can implement the highly recommended [Share to Teams](../../../../build-and-test/share-to-teams-from-web-apps.md) control within your browser-based web SaaS experience to enable users to share and start collaborating around a content or object from your SaaS product inside Teams with their colleagues.

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/drive-traffic-saas-app.png" alt-text="Drive traffic from your SaaS app." lightbox="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/drive-traffic-saas-app.png" :::

+To get maximum ROI, surface the nudges contextually for scenarios that are inherently collaborative over chat or in meetings. They're best delivered inside Microsoft Teams through your app.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-traction-stage)

+</details>

+## Where can Microsoft help?

+<details>

+<summary>Teams App Store merchandising: Editorial articles</summary>

+The Microsoft Teams store editorial team curates editorial sections on the in-product app store based on various ranking parameters.

+Editorial articles provide a list of app suggestions to users within the store that meet specific scenario objectives. It includes a clear call-to-action to install the app while reading the article. Contact the Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives or connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to feature your app in the editorial articles.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>On-demand access to digital marketing content</summary>

+[Digital Marketing Content OnDemand](https://partner.microsoft.com/solutions/digital-marketing-content) service provides go-to-market content in fresh weekly campaigns at no cost to Microsoft partners. Unlock expertise that can drive customer engagement and elevate your business. Connect your social media accounts and email lists to select, customize, and share content with automatic updates that push to your companyΓÇÖs social media accounts or send direct email communication to customers.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Joint webinar to existing and new target customers</summary>

+Participate in a joint webinar with Microsoft and other partners to showcase the value of your Teams collaborative app to customers. You can connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to find opportunities and execute.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Include app in Microsoft-run digital campaigns</summary>

+Highlight your Microsoft Teams app in a Microsoft-led digital campaign based on specific industries or contemporary themes, for example, hybrid work. You can connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to find opportunities and execute.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>App availability shared internally with field and CPMs</summary>

+Drive awareness of your published Microsoft Teams app to customer-facing roles within Microsoft, such as the field or Teams EngineeringΓÇÖs customer PMs. Contact your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives or connect with the [Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Service Desk](mailto:ModernWorkISVPartner@microsoft.com) to make use of this opportunity.

+> [!NOTE]

+> Go-to-Market Bill of Materials (GTM BOM) for your app is a pre-requisite for using this opportunity.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Engineering support for app monetization in Teams marketplace</summary>

+Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program, get access to robust technical guidance and best practices from engineering to build transact SaaS. They also get access to new, pilot features to improve the purchase funnel for their apps. You can also unlock other GTM benefits and CSP channel partnership programs for early-bird apps by building the transact SaaS capability in your app.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Share best practices for customer app rollout and activation</summary>

+Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program, get access to several time-tested and market-tested best practices. It helps to drive faster adoption of their collaborative app in customers.

+Remember to upskill using the Teams admin-facing public documentation sections [Third-party apps in Microsoft Teams](/microsoftteams/overview-third-party-apps) and [Admin controls to govern apps](/microsoftteams/manage-apps) to aid during app rollout, activation, and governance.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Invite to present in internal platform growth forums</summary>

+Contact the Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to feature in invite-only collaborative app growth forums. You can showcase your app to customer-facing teams within Microsoft, train them on value proposition and high value scenarios, and, so on. It helps them in having impactful conversations with existing or new prospective customers for your app.

+</details>

+## Next step

+> [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+> [Scaling your collaborative app](scale-app.md)

+ Title: The launch stage for your collaborative app

+description: Learn what you can do during the launch stage of your app to grow your app

+ms.localizationpriority: high

+# Launch your collaborative app

+The core focus at this stage is to announce the availability of the app for existing and new customers. HereΓÇÖs a rundown of various initiatives and growth levers at your disposal:

+## What should you do during the Launch stage?

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Invest strategically into your app store listing, landing page and documentation</summary>

+Ensure that youΓÇÖve included links to your Teams app on your landing page, documentation, marketing materials, and so on. For more information, see [Promote your app on another site](../overview.md#promote-your-app-on-another-site) to fetch the link to your app inside the Teams in-product marketplace.

+To get the public AppSource link, visiy [Microsoft AppSource](https://appsource.microsoft.com/marketplace/apps?exp=ubp8&page=1&product=teams) and search for your app in the search box. Pick the URL from your browserΓÇÖs address bar.

+Focus on the following with respect to your app store listing, landing page and documentation at this stage:

+- **App store listing**: It's the description and metadata that appears on the public Teams marketplace. It's the most important piece of text that conveys what your app can do, and the value users can derive out of it. The app store listing appears within the App Store in Teams clients and the Manage Apps section in the Teams Admin Center. It also appears on the AppSource public marketplace on the web.

+ HereΓÇÖs some key guidance:

+ - Call out specifically what your app can do inside Teams vs focusing on your core SaaS product. Users are hiring your app to do a job in Teams, not in your web SaaS app for the browser or native mobile clients and want to be certain it can deliver value inside Teams. It helps if you can call out the degree of overlap in terms of supported scenarios between your core SaaS product and Teams app.

+ - Use bullet points and emojis to break the wall of text and achieve better readability.

+ - Include screenshots in your listing that show the appΓÇÖs experience and underscore the user value inside Teams.

+ - Include a video in your listing that focuses on showing the appΓÇÖs experience inside Teams. Generic marketing videos that talk about the user problem your app is solving or one that simply gives an overview of your entire SaaS product aren't meaningful. It leads to higher customer satisfaction if you set accurate expectations for your app's value and user experience inside Teams.

+ - Ensure to include customer testimonials or quotes directly in your description and links to public references and success stories to build trust that your Teams app has already benefited customers. It will instill confidence in new customers looking to acquire or try your app.

+ **Resources and examples for inspiration**

+ Your app store listing must meet the validation guidelines and Teams marketplace policies to be published.

+ For more information on optimizing your app store listing, see [Chapter 2 in Marketplace Best Practices Guide](https://aka.ms/marketplacebestpracticesguide).

+- **Landing page**: It's the landing page for your app hosted on your website. You can use this page to talk about your Teams app in full detail. It must include the value delivered inside Teams, personas targeted, key scenarios, details of subscription or pricing, customer testimonials, and so on. You can use this page to receive traffic from your core SaaS product or periodic digital or social campaigns.

+ HereΓÇÖs some key guidance:

+ - As youΓÇÖve built a collaborative app inside Teams, avoid labeling it as a ΓÇ£Teams integrationΓÇ¥ page and linking it under the ΓÇ£IntegrationsΓÇ¥ section in your website header, navigation menu or footer.

+ - Your Teams collaborative app deserves a top-level link in your website header, navigation menu or footer. Make it easy to discover ΓÇô more traffic is the first step to increased acquisition.

+ - Use the recommended app store CTA arts on multiple places on this page prominently to direct users to acquire your app.

+ - Include beautiful video, animated GIFs, and artful screenshots of your real Teams app on this page for impactful storytelling. Your goal should be to get everyone who lands on this page to install and try out your Teams app immediately.

+ - Ensure to include credible customer testimonials (with their permissions of course) and links to public references and success stories to build trust that your Teams app has already benefited customers.

+ - ItΓÇÖs a good practice to include a FAQ section where users can quickly find answers to their most common queries related to your Teams app. It can include scenarios, features, any other cost or pricing, which SaaS subscription plans of yours support the Teams app, and so on.

+ - Include download links to on-demand webinars or sign-up links to scheduled trainings, webinars, or events for your Teams app on this page. Remember all of these will result in valuable marketing qualified leads for your app.

+ - Include a section on this page to collect user feedback about the Teams app including new feature asks. You can also use the landing page to prominently showcase the planned roadmap for your Teams app. Your users can use this page to upvote or downvote upcoming features. Users are more likely to pick your app over competition if they see continuous investments in the product.

+ - This page must link to public pages and host downloadable copies of various bills of materials for your Teams app (see the bill of materials section). It can include technical solution datasheets, Teams app one-pager, IT admin guides, end-user facing app usage guides, and so on.

+ - Your detailed public support or documentation page for the Teams app (see Documentation section) must also be prominently discoverable on this page. Users typically stumble upon the appΓÇÖs landing page via search results.

+ - Add a link to this page in your core SaaS product, for example, web app, native mobile apps, from periodic digital or social campaigns targeted at users who are likely to be using Teams.

+ - If you have a support chatbot available on your website to help visitors find the right information or get human assistance, ensure that you deploy and tune the same for visitors coming to this page for your Teams app to assist them at priority.

+ **Resources and examples for inspiration**

+ For more information on guidelines for your website landing page, see [Chapter 3 in Marketplace Best Practices Guide](https://aka.ms/marketplacebestpracticesguide).

+ You must use a badge on your landing page to direct users to acquire your app from AppSource or the Teams in-client marketplace:

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/landing-page.png" alt-text="Badge to acquire app from AppSource or Teams in-client marketplace." lightbox="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/landing-page.png":::

+- **Documentation**: Coinciding with your Teams app going live, you must ensure the following public documentation is hosted and discoverable publicly on your website:

+ - **Support page for Teams collaborative app**: This page must contain any setup and configuration instructions required in your SaaS backend for the Teams app to function. Among other things, it must also include the following:

+ - App rollout and governance guidelines for IT admins.

+ - Troubleshooting steps for both IT admins and users should they run into specific problems.

+ - Support FAQs.

+ - How to raise support requests for your Teams app.

+ - SLAs promised.

+ Include links to download your appΓÇÖs technical solution datasheet and IT admin facing guides on this page as these help existing and new prospective customers evaluate your app.

+ - **Usage guide for Teams collaborative app**: It's a highly recommended page to handhold new users in getting started with your app. ItΓÇÖs an opportunity to show how users can immediately get value by using your app inside Teams.

+ Include links to download the Teams app one-pager and end-user facing app usage guides on this page. We highly recommend adding a [Share to Teams](../../../../build-and-test/share-to-teams-from-web-apps.md) button on this page so that users who found this page the resources contained here helpful can easily share it with their colleagues.

+ If you have a support chatbot available on your website to help visitors find the right information or get human assistance, ensure that you deploy and tune the same for visitors coming to this page for your Teams app to assist them at priority.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>New social media posts announcing the Teams collaborative app</summary>

+You can generate interest from both existing and new customers and also drive traffic to your appΓÇÿs landing page or directly to the appΓÇÖs listing in Teams Marketplace through social media posts and paid campaigns executed on your social channels.

+Remember to include media, such as a video or an animated GIF in your post to make it rich and interactive. Mention **@M365** and **@MicrosoftTeams** in your posts. Use the hashtags #Teamsapps, #MicrosoftTeams, #TeamsISV throughout the year in social media posts for your collaborative app. It aids in extending exposure and flagging MicrosoftΓÇÖs social team for a potential retweet.

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/social-media-posts.png" alt-text="Social media posts." lightbox="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/social-media-posts.png" :::

+Connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to seek guidance for your social media campaign and possible collaboration with Microsoft for execution. You can also seek help with the success metrics you should measure, such as:

+- Number of views or clicks on your social posts.

+- Number of visitors on your landing page.

+- Number of MQLs generated on the landing page.

+- Number of visitors to your appΓÇÖs listing in the marketplace.

+- Number of Teams app installs post launch.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Public blog post announcing the new Teams app</summary>

+Blog posts help communicate the value of your app and its integration with Microsoft Teams to your audience. Use your blog to introduce your Teams app, how to use it and communicate the value prop for your users including use cases, scenarios and customer success stories. Include logos, animated GIFs, screenshots, quotes, URLs, and information pertinent to promoting your app.

+> [!NOTE]

+> When using your blog channel to drive press or media coverage or to request Microsoft quotes, refer to MicrosoftΓÇÖs Press Release guidelines for reviews (see the press release section).

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Press Release announcing the new Teams app</summary>

+Use PRs to publicly announce the application you've built and your collaboration with Microsoft.

+> [!NOTE]

+> Press releases and quotes must be reviewed by Microsoft representatives.

+Connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to avail of the service to review your press release draft and get a quote from Microsoft. Once you publicly post your press release, evangelize through other channels. Microsoft doesn't post partner press releases. <!-- // Example press releases. // -->

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Banners in web SaaS app to announce the new Teams app</summary>

+Include in-product CTAs prominently in your web SaaS product to let users know about your new or updated Teams collaborative app. You can use transient banners, notifications bar, whatΓÇÖs new notifications inside your SaaS productΓÇÖs UI for all users.

+You can also use push notifications to relevant users, such as those belonging to those customers of yours who use Microsoft 365.

+The banner or notification CTA can direct users to your appΓÇÿs landing page or directly to the appΓÇÖs listing in Teams Marketplace.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Freemium experience, free trial and extended trials for new Teams users</summary>

+Since your goal at this stage is to achieve product-market fit for your app, itΓÇÖs critical to learn how users are perceiving your new app and if theyΓÇÖre getting the intended value by using the app. If you have a freemium SaaS offering, offer a limited feature set in your Teams app for free. If not already done for your core SaaS product, offer free trials to users who sign up for your app (and SaaS service) through the Teams marketplace (that is AppSource or Teams in-product store). If you already offer trials for your SaaS product and your standard free trial period is 15 days, consider extending the trial period for Teams users to 30-60 days.

+Given youΓÇÖve built your Teams app for collaborative use cases, you'll naturally want trial users to invite their colleagues as well to use your app in shared context inside Teams. An extended trial facilitates collaborative evaluation of your app and increases the likelihood of these users converting to paid and sticky customers.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Launch offers and promotions to acquire users for Teams app</summary>

+To acquire new customers for your Teams collaborative app, consider offering a little extra incentive to Teams users other than whatΓÇÖs available for your core SaaS product. If your app requires paid subscriptions, consider offering launch period discounts.

+Consider promotions, such as 1:1 product demos, customer success consultations, invite-only webinars, trainings for the entire business unit or team using your Teams app help to differentiate your app. Such promotions help accelerate customer acquisition.

+If you've already listed your transactable SaaS subscriptions for the Teams app in the marketplace, ensure that you price them at a discount. It encourages users to purchase your offer directly from the Teams marketplace.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Announce Teams app to your entire customer base</summary>

+The first time your Teams app goes live on the marketplace and for every subsequent major updates, consider outreach to your entire customer base announcing the availability of the app. While social media posts, public blog post and press releases are for the entire world audience, direct-to-customer emails are the best channel to drive awareness about your app within existing customer organizations.

+Ensure that you introduce your Teams app, its usage, and its value proposition for your users. You must include use cases, scenarios, customer stories via animated GIFs, screenshots, quotes, and CTAs to your appΓÇÖs public landing page. Also, add install links to the Teams marketplace for the benefit of those users who are willing to get started immediately.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>App Bill of Materials: Pitch deck, value prop, demo, datasheets and so on</summary>

+To help MicrosoftΓÇÖs customer-facing teams talk about your app, we encourage you to develop comprehensive Go-to-Market Bill of Materials (GTM BOM). This bill of materials enables thousands of Microsoft customer-facing personnel to successfully discuss and demonstrate the benefits of your app when meeting with customers.

+ :::column:::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/app-bill-a.png" alt-text="App bill material." lightbox="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/app-bill-a.png" :::

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column:::

+ :::image type="content" source="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/app-bill-b.png" alt-text="App bill of materials." lightbox="../../../../../assets/images/app-fundamentals/app-bill-b.png" :::

+ :::column-end:::

+| GTM BOM asset | Description |

+| | |

+| One-page overview | Provides an overview of what your app does and the core value proposition of using the app inside Microsoft Teams. |

+| Customer pitch deck | A customer-shareable PowerPoint presentation that demonstrates the value of your app integrated within the Microsoft Teams platform. The presentation details the core benefits, features and capabilities of your app and includes a story of a customer successfully using your app. |

+| Demo video | An under 90-seconds video that demonstrates the features of your app and how it adds value to your customer. |

+| Global contacts list | A list of contacts within your organization across regions that Microsoft customer success, sales and engineering teams can engage to facilitate app deployment and onboard new customers. |

+| Customer success story | A one-page PowerPoint slide that shares how a customer is successfully using your app in Microsoft Teams and the benefit they're receiving from it. |

+| Customer support for end users and IT Admins | An overview of how customers can get support for any issues they encounter using your integrated Microsoft Teams app. |

+| IT Admin - App Config and Rollout Guide | A guide for IT admins of customer organizations to configure and roll out the integrated Microsoft Teams app for their users. |

+| End User - Getting Started and Usage Guide | A guide for end users on how to get signed in and use the features of your integrated Microsoft Teams app. |

+| Technical solution datasheet | Provides an overview of the architecture, APIs, data handling and compliance aspects of your Teams app. This document is helpful for IT admins as well as Microsoft sales and customer success engineers when rolling out an overall solution into a customerΓÇÖs organization. |

+| Adoption templates (emails, flyers) | Emailer and poster templates both your customers and MicrosoftΓÇÖs customer-facing employees can use to drive awareness of your app within the customer organization. |

+Once built, you can host the same bill of materials on your app's public landing page, support and documentation pages for handy distribution and easy reference for customers.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-launch-stage)

+</details>

+## Where can Microsoft help?

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Support for launch content asset development</summary>

+Connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) and request access to a comprehensive set of [bill of materials templates](https://microsoft.sharepoint.com/:f:/t/ModernWorkPartnerGTM/EpRZF5EvTHJDiBbEkekahiwBbkP7HvmRFu7af_syDipzRw?e=YlXPZM) and branding guidance for use in your Microsoft Teams app marketing activities. Review the template(s) or guidance provided and upload your drafted GTM BOM asset(s) and request form(s) per instructions for Microsoft to distribute internally.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Teams app store listing optimization</summary>

+Improve your solution listing in Teams marketplace by following the best practices [here](/azure/marketplace/gtm-offer-listing-best-practices).

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>App store marketing toolkit</summary>

+Get free, customizable marketing and sales resources, such as data sheets, presentations, and more collateral to customize marketing for your Teams app [here](https://partner.microsoft.com/asset#/?type=marketing-campaigns&area=mrkt).

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Partner press release and blog content review</summary>

+Publicly announce your Teams app by leveraging this service to review of a press release you draft and get a quote from a Microsoft representative. Watch this [short video](https://partner.microsoft.com/asset/detail/spm-20-how-to-write-a-press-release-mp4) to learn how to create an effective press release by using eight key pointers and connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) for using the offer.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Amplify partner press release and blog on social</summary>

+Microsoft can help Teams customers gain awareness of your new or updated collaborative app by including your app in the Commercial Marketplace ΓÇ£WhatΓÇÖs NewΓÇ¥ blog as well as amplifying your blog or PR on social channels. Connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) for using the offer.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Microsoft Teams TechCommunity blog post</summary>

+Contact the field, account, or engineering representatives from Microsoft to discuss the possibility of publishing a dedicated blog post on Teams blog. Here's an example of a [blog post](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/salesforce-brings-sales-and-service-data-into-microsoft-teams-to/ba-p/2521221).

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Features placements in AppSource and the Teams in-product app store</summary>

+Contact your Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives or connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to feature your app in AppSource and the Teams in-client app store merchandising sections. Ensure your app experience is free of bugs to boost your chances of getting promoted on the store.

+> [!NOTE]

+> The Microsoft Teams store editorial team determines the prominence and location of an app within the editorial sections such as promo banner on the Teams store based on ranking parameters.

+>

+> For more information, see [Microsoft Teams store ranking parameters](../teams-store-ranking-parameters.md).

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Co-present in Teams app-focused public webinars hosted by you</summary>

+Contact your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to request their participation in to-customer webinars youΓÇÖve planned for announcing and evangelizing your Teams collaborative app.

+</details>

+## Next step

+> [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+> [Gaining traction for your collaborative app in the market](gain-traction.md)

+ Title: Overview for planning, strategizing, and executing growth for your app

+description: Learn to plan, strategize and execute growth for your app

+ms.localizationpriority: high

+# Strategize and execute growth for your app

+Shipping your app on the Teams marketplace is just the beginning. After shipping, you must meticulously plan how to grow your app and make it a successful product on the marketplace. It drives intended business metrics and helps you realize returns on the investment you made into planning, designing, and building the app.

+This document provides high-level guidance about:

+- How you should strategize and execute growth for your app?

+- What decisions you need to make?

+- What levers you can pull?

+- What programs, resources, and guidance you can utilize?

+It also includes some proven best practices from the team that crafted the Teams platform and the commercial marketplace itself to make your app successful.

+ :::column:::

+ > [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+ > [How much can your app grow?](#putting-your-apps-growth-potential-into-perspective-how-much-can-your-app-grow)

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column:::

+ > [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+ > [Understanding growth models](#options-for-growing-your-app-understanding-growth-models)

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column:::

+ > [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+ > [WhatΓÇÖs needed to grow and succeed on Teams marketplace?](#whats-needed-to-grow-and-succeed-on-teams-marketplace)

+ :::column-end:::

+## Putting your appΓÇÖs growth potential into perspective: How much can your app grow?

+YouΓÇÖll probably not be surprised to hear that not all apps are equal on any marketplace. Teams apps are diverse in terms of use cases fulfilled, personas served, end-user user experience, and user value delivered. As a developer, you can:

+1. **Just test waters**: Take a *foot-in-the door* approach where your SaaS backend is used to provide an elevated, ephemeral end-user experience using [link unfurling](../../../../../messaging-extensions/how-to/link-unfurling.md) feature to show rich, informative and actionable preview cards whenever URLs from your domain are shared inside Teams, even when the user doesn't have your app installed.

+1. **Build a complementary, companion experience to your core web SaaS**: Build your Teams app serving as a point solution that can be called *add-in*, *plug-in*, or an *integration*. You can build them for select, frequent, isolated and lightweight use cases relevant to be achieved inside Teams.

+1. **Build a *collaborative app* product line**: Provide Teams users a unique, differentiated, rich, familiar, end to end and deeply immersive experience ΓÇô all contained in Teams and centered around collaboration versus individual productivity. [Collaborative apps](https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/blog/2021/11/02/stay-in-the-flow-of-work-with-new-collaborative-apps-for-microsoft-teams/), a new app pattern, which is designed to bring people, processes, and data together to help users thrive in the hybrid workplace are positioned to transform how people in every organization do more together with the help of ubiquitous software in the flow of work. Collaborative apps offer an experience thatΓÇÖs preferred by the user over other channels where the SaaS app exists and often use one or more of Teams-only platform capabilities such as meeting extensions, Live Share, Graph APIs, message extensions, and so on, to deliver significant user value, on top of table stake scenarios.

+Needless to say, the strategy you'll adopt among the options described above will determine:

+- The resulting user value your app delivers

+- The economic opportunity for your app

+- How you can maximize the ROI from your investments into the app

+You aren't necessarily constrained by picking only one out of the above approaches ΓÇô your investment can start from (a) and move towards (b) and eventually culminate at (c). This document assumes youΓÇÖve taken a strategic view of your Teams investment by developing a *collaborative app*. In such an app, the user is able to get designated *jobs* seamlessly and preferably done in the flow of their work with full context, without leaving Microsoft Teams. Collaborative apps are the best positioned to win new customer deals for you and upsell or cross-sell to your existing customers. For this reason, this investment has the potential to deliver the highest net new economic opportunity for your business.

+Using the guidance in this document, you can grow your collaborative app on Teams and expand differentiated scenarios further. You can also incorporate Teams-first or Teams-only use cases, and devise a go-to-market model that is led by your Teams collaborative app - consequently building a growth flywheel for your business.

+## Options for growing your app: Understanding growth models

+You can use one or all the three predominant types of SaaS business growth models:

+1. **Sales-led growth**: Potential customers or *sales-qualified leads (SQLs)* interact with a sales representative or a customer success representative. It can be through every stage of the buying journey. The interaction can start from understanding your SaaS appΓÇÖs feature or seeing a demo, result in purchase of your product and last through post-purchase setup and config, sales-led user onboarding, and training by customer success reps regarding how to use the app.

+1. **Marketing-led growth**: Prospective customers sign up for a product demo after building perceived value of your product. They consume marketing narratives such as, advertisements, content resources such as, blogs, videos, or downloadable e-books. As a result, a *marketing-qualified lead (MQL)* is generated for your sales team to convert. Customer retention and monetization are driven by marketing channels, content, and outreach.

+1. **Product-led growth**: Your SaaS product itself is the main driving force behind customer acquisition, activation, retention, revenue growth, virality, and expansion. It's possible by offering self-serve freemium or free trial options and a straightforward frictionless onboarding process to users. Users can start using the product right away and experience direct product value first-hand with minimal sales, marketing, or customer success personnel from your side interacting with them on the way. *Product-qualified leads (PQLs)* that is users who have experienced meaningful value using the product are the ones more likely to become paying customers either directly or through upsell or intervention by your salesforce.

+As a developer of a collaborative app, you'll benefit from devising a well-rounded strategy that employs all three SaaS business growth models. It helps you grow your Teams app among hundreds of millions of Teams users.

+More than point solutions (that is, *add-ins* and *integrations*), Teams collaborative apps offer you an opportunity to apply a solid growth strategy to a product line. It's just as you'd do for your core SaaS product for the web browser or native mobile apps.

+## WhatΓÇÖs needed to grow and succeed on Teams marketplace?

+As noted earlier, your Teams collaborative app requires sustained and continuous investments on multiple fronts:

+- [Product Investments](#product-investments)

+- [Growth Experiments](#growth-experiments)

+- [Go-to-Market Investments](#go-to-market-investments)

+- [Monetization Investments](#monetization-investments)

+Let's understand why each of these investments matter, what impact it will have on your customers and your business and how you'll execute these at scale.

+### Product Investments

+Product investments encompass feature planning and enhancements to your collaborative app in Teams at regular, committed, and predictable cadences.

+ :::column span="":::

+ **Why should you do this? What impact will this have?**

+ - Teams users consistently get unique, differentiated, and collaborative value through newer, elevated experiences in your app. The value and experience of your app is better inside Teams vs outside Teams.

+ - YouΓÇÖre able to deliver a high-quality, bug free experience to end-users and action on incoming user feedback faster.

+ - For core, relevant and tablestakes use cases, youΓÇÖre able to deliver feature parity between your collaborative app in Teams and core SaaS app experience you offer in the browser and native mobile clients (or use Teams app as your offering for mobile audience).

+ - YouΓÇÖre able to go beyond parity and leverage the unique context and surface area inside Microsoft 365 to deliver an enhanced, better together productivity experience.

+ - YouΓÇÖre able to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. You can use the latest, cutting-edge platform features released to public or in developer preview by Microsoft.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ **How will you do this? What resources are required?**

+ - Have dedicated PM, development, and design resources who are upskilled on Teams platform to take ownership of your collaborative app.

+ - Ideally, have the same team or part of the same team that builds your core SaaS app for the browser take ownership of your collaborative app.

+ - Continuously plan and groom your Teams collaborative appΓÇÖs roadmap.

+ - Tap into known best practices, scenario envisioning muscle, and product-led growth playbook from Teams engineering via developer docs, blogs, and videos.

+ - Be on the lookout for new Teams platform features that can impact your appΓÇÖs end-user experience positively.

+ :::column-end:::

+### Growth Experiments

+Growth experiments encompass being agile and continuously making hypotheses-driven tweaks in your collaborative Teams app and GTM execution to positively impact specific success metrics.

+ :::column span="":::

+ **Why should you do this? What impact will this have?**

+ - Continuously monitor whatΓÇÖs happening inside your collaborative app through analytics and measure the value end-users are obtaining.

+ - Impact product and business metrics positively. It can be number of app installs, activation rate, task completions, new user retention and churn, referrals, and so on.

+ - Use your collaborative app in Teams as a test bed to rapidly ideate, build, release experiences, measure feedback from users and impact on metrics. Then, graduate the app's functionality to your core SaaS app.

+ - Rapid, always-on experimentation allows byte-sized tweaks to your app experience, resulting in more control and lesser risk compared to monolithic changes spaced far apart.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ **How will you do this? What resources are required?**

+ - Make sure to instrument code and track analytics for your app right from the first version.

+ - Upskill your dedicated Teams app crew or your existing SaaS product growth team of PM, development, and design resources on Teams platform to take ownership of this.

+ - Continuously plan and groom your Teams collaborative appΓÇÖs growth experiments backlog with product and growth marketing teams.

+ - Tap into comprehensive repository of growth experiment ideas, experiment best practices and product-led growth playbook from Teams engineering via developer docs, blogs, and videos.

+ :::column-end:::

+### Go-to-Market Investments

+Go-to-Market investments encompass strategic planning, marketing to build awareness, existing customer activation, new prospects, sales through Teams app and converting marketing and product-qualified leads at scale.

+ :::column span="":::

+ **Why should you do this? What impact will this have?**

+ - Make your collaborative app in Teams successful as a product with direct impact to your business metrics. It's just as you would do for your core SaaS product or app.

+ - Acquire new leads, establish footprint in enterprises, increase customer stickiness and renewals, monetize by selling your SaaS subscriptions, build competitiveness in market vs competitors, and launch new, cool, differentiated features through your collaborative app.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ **How will you do this? What resources are required?**

+ - Strategically determine the role of the Teams collaborative app in your product portfolio and lay down specific business metrics for the success of this product line.

+ - Plan go-to-market and execute across launch, traction and scale stages of growth. Grow your collaborative app on Teams marketplace directly and in association with MicrosoftΓÇÖs go-to-market and field teams.

+ - Drive awareness of your collaborative app, generate marketing-qualified leads to convert into sales deal wins.

+ - Pilot a product-led growth business model to grow your collaborative app in Teams and learn best practices. Use your collaborative app in Teams to generate product-qualified leads, onboard users through the marketplace and convert leads in paying customers.

+ - Plan and agree with Microsoft ISV Success program marketing team ahead in time for your GTM strategy.

+ - Utilize GTM playbook, detailed product-led growth and marketing guidance as well as programs from Microsoft.

+ :::column-end:::

+### Monetization Investments

+Monetization investments encompass defining role of Teams app in your business and revenue strategy, building product and UX to sell on the Microsoft marketplace and make channel investments to scale revenue growth.

+ :::column span="":::

+ **Why should you do this? What impact will this have?**

+ - Use your collaborative app in Teams for direct revenue through the Microsoft commercial marketplace. It connects you to consumers, enterprise buyers, and a global network of 90,000+ Microsoft cloud resellers, while transacting on Microsoft paper.

+ - Expand your sales by selling subscription plans directly from your Microsoft commercial marketplace listing. Offer free trials or freemium experience to get more customer leads and use in-app purchases to upgrade customers. Recurring renewals via the marketplace establish an ongoing revenue stream for your business.

+ :::column-end:::

+ :::column span="":::

+ **How will you do this? What resources are required?**

+ - Clearly decide how Teams collaborative app fits your business strategy. Also decide if or when you'll monetize the Teams app product line. Remember that your app must offer unique, differentiated user value to successfully monetize on the Microsoft commercial marketplace

+ - Understand how offers on Microsoft commercial marketplace can help deliver business goals through your app.

+ - Build transactable marketplace SaaS offer associated with your Teams app. Offer free trial or a freemium experience with in-app purchases to generate leads and optimize conversions.

+ - Become channel ready and negotiate reseller partnerships to tap into the global network of Microsoft CSPs for growth.

+ - Tap into the robust technical guidance and best practices from Teams engineering to build transact SaaS and new, pilot features to improve the purchase funnel via developer docs, blogs, and videos.

+ - Unlock more GTM benefits and CSP channel partnership programs for early-bird apps with live transact SaaS offers.

+ :::column-end:::

+<!--

+| Investment type | Why should you do this? What impact will this have? | How will you do this? What resources are required? |

+| | | |

+| **Product Investments** encompass feature planning and enhancements to your collaborative app in Teams at regular, committed, and predictable cadences. | ΓÇó Teams users consistently get unique, differentiated value through newer, elevated experiences in your app. <br> ΓÇó YouΓÇÖre able to deliver a high-quality, bug free experience to end-users and action on incoming user feedback faster. <br> ΓÇó YouΓÇÖre able to deliver feature parity between your collaborative app in Teams and core SaaS app in the browser. <br> ΓÇó YouΓÇÖre able to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. You can use the latest, cutting-edge platform features released to public or in developer preview by Microsoft. | ΓÇó Have dedicated PM, Dev, Design resources who are upskilled on Teams platform to take ownership of your collaborative app. <br> ΓÇó Ideally, have the same team or part of the same team that builds your core SaaS app for the browser take ownership of your collaborative app. <br> ΓÇó Continuously plan and groom your Teams collaborative appΓÇÖs roadmap. <br> ΓÇó Tap into known best practices, scenario envisioning muscle, and product-led growth playbook from Teams engineering via developer docs, blogs, and videos. <br> ΓÇó Be on the lookout for new Teams platform features that can impact your appΓÇÖs end-user experience positively. |

+| **Growth Experiments** encompass being agile and continuously making hypotheses-driven tweaks in your collaborative Teams app and GTM execution to positively impact specific success metrics. | ΓÇó Continuously monitor whatΓÇÖs happening inside your collaborative app through analytics and measure the value end-users are obtaining. <br> ΓÇó Impact product and business metrics positively. It can be number of app installs, activation rate, task completions, new user retention and churn, referrals, and so on. <br> ΓÇó Use your collaborative app in Teams as a test bed to rapidly ideate, build, release experiences, measure feedback from users and impact on metrics. Then, graduate the app's functionality to your core SaaS app. <br> ΓÇó Rapid, always-on experimentation workstream allows byte-sized tweaks to your app experience, resulting in more control and lesser risk compared to monolithic changes spaced far apart. | ΓÇó Make sure to instrument code and track analytics for your app right from the first version. <br> ΓÇó Upskill your dedicated Teams app crew or your existing SaaS product growth team of PM, Dev, Design on Teams platform to take ownership of this. <br> ΓÇó Continuously plan and groom your Teams collaborative appΓÇÖs growth experiments backlog with product and growth marketing teams. <br> ΓÇó Tap into comprehensive repository of growth experiment ideas and experiment best practices. You can also get access to product-led growth playbook from Teams engineering via developer docs, blogs, and videos. |

+| **Go-to-Market Investments** encompass strategic planning, marketing to build awareness, existing customer activation, new prospects, sales through Teams app and converting marketing and product-qualified leads at scale. | ΓÇó Make your collaborative app in Teams successful as a product with direct impact to your business metrics. It's just as you would do for your core SaaS product or app. <br> ΓÇó Acquire new leads, establish footprint in enterprises, increase customer stickiness and renewals, monetize by selling your SaaS subscriptions, build competitiveness in market vs competitors, and launch new, cool, differentiated features through your collaborative app. | ΓÇó Strategically determine the role. Teams collaborative app in your product portfolio and lay down specific business metrics for the success of this product line. <br> ΓÇó Go-to-market planning and execution across launch, traction, scale. Growing your collaborative app on Teams marketplace directly and in association with MicrosoftΓÇÖs go-to-market and field teams. <br> ΓÇó Drive awareness of your collaborative app, generate marketing-qualified leads to convert into sales deal wins. <br> ΓÇó Pilot a product-led growth business mode to grow your collaborative app in Teams and learn best practices. Use your collaborative app in Teams to generate product-qualified leads, onboard users through the marketplace and convert leads in paying customers. <br> ΓÇó Plan and agree with Microsoft 365 marketing teams ahead in time for your GTM strategy. <br> ΓÇó Utilize GTM playbook, detailed product-led growth and marketing guidance and programs from Microsoft. |

+| **Monetization Investments** encompass defining role of Teams app in your business and revenue strategy, building product and UX to sell on the Microsoft marketplace and channel investments to scale revenue growth. | ΓÇó Use your collaborative app in Teams for direct revenue through the Microsoft 365 marketplace. It connects you to consumers, enterprise buyers, and a global network of 90,000+ Microsoft cloud resellers, while transacting on Microsoft paper. <br> ΓÇó Expand your sales by selling subscription plans directly from your Teams marketplace listing. Offer free trials or freemium experience to get more customer leads and use in-app purchases to upgrade customers. You can also provide an ongoing revenue stream via recurring renewals. | ΓÇó Clearly decide how Teams collaborative app fits your business strategy. Also decide if or when you'll monetize the Teams app product line. <br> ΓÇó Understand how offers on Microsoft marketplace(s) can help deliver business goals through your app. <br> ΓÇó Build transactable marketplace SaaS offer associated with your Teams app, offering free trial and in-app purchases to generate leads and optimize conversions. <br> ΓÇó Become channel ready and negotiate reseller partnerships to tap into the global network of Microsoft CSPs for growth. <br> ΓÇó Tap into the robust technical guidance and best practices from Teams engineering to build transact SaaS and new, pilot features to improve the purchase funnel via developer docs, blogs and videos. <br> ΓÇó Unlock more GTM benefits and CSP channel partnership programs for early-bird apps with live transact SaaS offers. |

+-->

+## Next step

+> [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+> [Growth lifecycle for your app](app-growth-lifecycle.md)

+ Title: The scale stage for your collaborative app

+description: Learn what you can do during the scale stage of your app to grow your app

+ms.localizationpriority: high

+# Scale your collaborative app

+In this stage in the app growth lifecycle, you use the learnings from previous ad-hoc, pilot motions to programmatically activate existing customers and sell to new customers via all possible initiatives. The following growth levers are pertinent at this stage:

+## What should you do during the Scale stage?

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Become CSP channel ready for the Teams app</summary>

+Once transact SaaS enabled, listing the SaaS subscriptions for your app on the Teams marketplace gives you access to 90,000+ reseller partners (called [cloud solution providers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X33C-RV9dZc) or CSPs) around the world. These CSPs manage a significant customer install base. You can scale your business through this channel without making a full investment in solutions, experts, salesforce, and events. You can instead get to market faster, and at exponential scale, compared to selling solely through your own sales motions.

+To scale your app, become CSP channel ready (see [CSP Channel Readiness Guide for Teams app ISVs](https://aka.ms/TeamsMonetization/CSPChannelReadyGuide)). After that, your app appears on [Teams apps that have become CSP Channel Ready](https://aka.ms/P2PeBook) public handbook. Apps successful on the marketplace may have an opportunity to get featured on this frequently promoted public [landing page](https://cloudpartners.transform.microsoft.com/practices/modernworkisv?tab=monetize-your-app).

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Onboard CSP resellers to extend your appΓÇÖs sales reach</summary>

+After you become CSP channel ready by completing the pre-requisites, browse through the CSP list on the Partner Center to find resellers to negotiate a partnership.

+You can find detailed partner profile information in the Partner Center or using the public [partner finder](https://appsource.microsoft.com/marketplace/partner-dir) on AppSource.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Tailor SaaS offers for customers and CSP resellers</summary>

+Teams marketplace allows you to create private offers, that is, time-bound pricing of your SaaS subscription for Teams app with customized, pre-negotiated terms for [CSPs](/azure/marketplace/isv-csp-reseller). You can also create [private plans](/marketplace/private-plans) for targeted customers to offer negotiated pricing.

+Help your sales team secure large new customer deals leading with your Teams collaborative app. Offer private pricing to your customers via the Teams marketplace, leaving tax remittance, payments, and subscription billing to Microsoft.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Digital webinars for existing customers and new prospects</summary>

+Host digital webinars at regular cadences to showcase the value of your Teams app to customers. Your customer success team and pre-sales or sales team must funnel relevant existing customers and new prospects as preferred leads for targeting webinar inviations to. Ensure that you include links to sign up for the webinars on your appΓÇÖs landing page on your website and your app store listing. It attracts new, exploratory users who may be interested in learning more about your app.

+Get in touch with your field, account, or engineering representatives from Microsoft to request their participation in hero instances of these direct-to-customer webinars.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Digital advertising campaigns to target customers for app install and use</summary>

+Generate interest from new customer accounts and drive traffic to your collaborative app listing in Teams marketplace using paid media campaigns executed on your social channels. Connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to seek guidance for your digital campaign, identify target customer accounts and personas, collaboration on paid media plan and possible budget funding. Check with them for the success metrics you should measure, such as:

+- Click-through rate.

+- Cost per click.

+- Number of clicks.

+- Number of MQLs generated on the landing page.

+- Number of visitors to the appΓÇÖs listing in marketplace.

+- Resulting number of Teams app installs.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Publish customer demand and appΓÇÖs impact story</summary>

+Share real customer stories using a four to five minute video. Nominate a customer and gain their commitment to participate in the story. Work with the customer on the narrative. Ensure that you include the benefits derived from your collaborative app, showcase resulting increased employee productivity (preferably quantifiable gains) and how customers prefer to use your SaaS service inside Teams as a collaborative app. Use this video for demand generation, digital marketing campaigns or showcase on public pages.

+After developing it, host these customer stories on the landing page of the Teams app on your website. Link this video in the marketplace listing of your collaborative app. Promote it via paid, earned media, or social media posts to highlight the success of the app.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Showcase Teams app in leading industry events</summary>

+While building traction, you showcased the collaborative app in Teams during your annual customer conference. ItΓÇÖs time to expand the coverage to well-known public industry events where you've a prominent presence or conferences which you sponsor. Your executives can include the Teams app in their keynote or showcase your innovation centre stage. Doing so is bound to attract both existing and new prospective customers.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>User retargeting and re-engagement basis app analytics</summary>

+A key product-led growth initiative, use signals from your app analytics to re-target users who have recently engaged with your app in Teams but haven't reached a value realization milestone defined by you. Users who haven't visited your app or churned recently must be re-engaged to bring back to your app.

+Remember, your goal is to get users to experience value at the earliest by using your collaborative app. By converting your user who tries your app into a sticky, habitual user is eventually going to result in paying customers.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Co-activation in mutually identified existing customers</summary>

+Based on the list youΓÇÖve shared with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives while building traction, itΓÇÖs time to execute co-activation and adoption of your collaborative app in customer accounts with significant seat sizes. Your customer success team will play a major driving role in this motion. They can work alongside business decision makers, IT decision makers, and end-users, that is, employees of the customer organization who are going to use your app inside Teams.

+Remember, just enabling the app inside Teams won't be enough. Instead, adoption and change management practices led by your customer success team such as organization-wide emails at regular cadences, flyers, retention campaigns, user trainings, identifying and scaling through app champions in each team, gamification and constantly keeping an eye on app usage metrics within the customerΓÇÖs tenant is required to form a habit among users.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Growth hacking via in-product scenario experimentation</summary>

+Continuously monitor whatΓÇÖs happening inside your collaborative app through analytics and measure the value end-users are obtaining. To positively impact product and business metrics, such as number of app installs, activation rate, task completion, new user retention and churn, referrals, and so on, a rapid, always-on experimentation work stream allows byte-sized tweaks to your app experience. It results in more control and less risk compared to large changes spaced far apart.

+Ensure that you [instrument code and track analytics](../../../../design/overview-analytics.md) for your app from the first version. Upskill your dedicated Teams app crew or your existing SaaS product growth team of PM, development, and UX design on Teams platform to take ownership of this work stream to derive maximum ROI.

+[Back to top](#what-should-you-do-during-the-scale-stage)

+</details>

+## Where can Microsoft help?

+<details>

+<summary>Co-activation in mutually identified existing customers</summary>

+Microsoft will evaluate co-activation opportunities in large customer accounts. Evaluation is based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (sold seat size in customer account), and so on, among other criteria.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Support joint customer success story development</summary>

+Connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to seek guidance and execute. You'll be able to utilize Microsoft slide templates, customer story intake form, customer interview template, and vendor video production, or copy writing services. Introduce a creative team to the customer. Help facilitate the interviews and review processes until the story is approved by all parties. Microsoft team will make sure your customer story is published to the internal Microsoft Teams Platform Resource Library and the Transformed by Teams portal.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Select, area-specific marketing to local Teams customers</summary>

+Your field, account or engineering representatives from Microsoft will reach out to include your collaborative app in specific, local subsidiary-drive GTM opportunities focused on Teams customers located in the subsidiaryΓÇÖs market.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Best practices for analytics-driven app engagement</summary>

+Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program, get access to best practices based on data signals for your app to improve acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, and virality of your app on Teams. Teams engineering will bring in PM, UX design and developer support resources to work alongside your product crew on the next set of app enhancements.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>High-touch support for select, joint new customer pitches</summary>

+Get in touch with the Microsoft field, account or engineering representatives to discuss partnering during pitches you make to new customers. Microsoft will use discretion to partner on such opportunities based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (seat size in prospect customer account), and so on, among other criteria. Microsoft will primarily help land the value of the overall Teams collaborative app platform, letting you own your app or solution pitch.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Include your app in global outreach to Microsoft sellers</summary>

+Expose your solution to Microsoft field sellers and executives through an on-demand webinar featuring your speakers and content. Microsoft will post your on-demand webinar to an internal site and promote it to Microsoft sellers. Share the internal Microsoft on-demand webinar link with your Microsoft contacts as well. Connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to check eligibility, seek guidance and execute this motion.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Host customer roundtables to promote the app</summary>

+Participate in a customer roundtable session with Microsoft to highlight the value of your Teams app to customers. Connect with the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to check eligibility, seek guidance and execute this motion. After that, a Microsoft Marketing Program Manager will reach out to you about participating in a customer roundtable session based on campaign alignment.

+</details>

+## Next step

+> [!div class="nextstepaction"]

+> [Succeeding with your collaborative app](succeed.md)

+ Title: The succeed stage for your collaborative app

+description: Learn what you can do during the final stage of your app to grow your app

+ms.localizationpriority: high

+# Succeed with your collaborative app

+To wrap up, your collaborative app is now becoming a full-fledged strategic product line, just as your core SaaS product for the web browser or native apps for Windows or mobile phones. To maximize success for your customers and ROI for your business, this section covers the initiatives and growth levers you must use. The following growth levers are pertinent at this stage:

+## What should you do during this final stage?

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Wider TAM coverage across existing and prospect user base</summary>

+Continue to increase the usage of your collaborative app on Teams through existing customer activation. You can continue new customer acquisition via the Teams marketplace or through sales-led customer deal wins leading with your collaborative app.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Report and celebrate customer activation, deal wins and revenue</summary>

+Share notable customer wins, customer success stories, and resulting revenue from user acquisition or deal wins attributed to your Teams app with the Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives. Microsoft can selectively drive executive visibility for your app and explore any possible GTM or marketing-drive acceleration for your app.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Convert PQLs from Teams app into active sales pipeline</summary>

+A core product-led growth initiative is capturing Teams marketplace trials, trials sign-ups coming from your Teams app or freemium users into potential leads to be converted into paying customers. Remember to monitor the usage patterns, user retention, and product value experienced by the trial or freemium users. Use them to determine the customers that can be converted through sales, customer success, or direct product interventions (for example, upsell, upgrade prompts).

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Deepen investment into Teams-app driven growth engine</summary>

+This stage is ripe to further sales, customer success and product-led initiatives to grow your SaaS business leading with the Teams collaborative app product line youΓÇÖve built. Consider making further investments into your sales, customer success, marketing and product teams who are responsible for the Teams app so that you can win more customer deals, collaborate with Microsoft on GTM and realize net new economic value through purchases and renewals on the commercial marketplace.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Continuously reduce churn via product and analytics-led insights</summary>

+Retaining users by providing them with a sticky experience is key to growing your Teams app and realizing economic value from your product and GTM investments. Ensure that youΓÇÖve [implemented robust and granular analytics](../../../../design/overview-analytics.md) for your Teams app. It should serve your need to measure when and which users have churned or are likely to churn from your app. You can them re-engage and re-target them via outreach channels within or outside your app.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Invest in richer and more impactful user scenarios</summary>

+Innovation, grounded in customer needs, is the key to sustainably grow and succeed with your app on Teams.

+Ensure that you monitor reviews for your app on the marketplace, user feedback coming from in-product surveys, and user behavior insights. You must also monitor app engagement analytics youΓÇÖve implemented in your app. Also, monitor customer inputs relayed by your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives. It helps you to continue investing in new scenarios and enhanced user experience for your collaborative app.

+Keep an eye on your competitors and other leading SaaS apps in your segment to continuously learn from the market and evolve your appΓÇÖs strategy and roadmap. Since Teams marketplace is public, your product team can at the minimum use the [Microsoft 365 developer sandbox](https://developer.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/dev-program) to experience other apps.

+Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program, can get early access to new and latest cutting-edge collaborative features on Teams app platform. It's an opportunity for you to deliver unparalleled value to customers and use global GTM and marketing moments, being an early adopter to showcase new innovation on Teams. However you can always discover and use Microsoft Teams platform features that are in [public developer preview](../../../../../whats-new.md?pivots=dev-preview).

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Share feedback to enrich the Teams platform</summary>

+Microsoft Teams app platform is ever-evolving with newer features that provide even more opportunities for developers like you to deliver unique, differentiated, and collaborative scenarios of value to your customers. Use your Microsoft field, account, engineering representatives to share feedback or product ask on Teams platform. You can also post product feature suggestions publicly [here](../../../../../feedback.md#feature-request-and-general-help).

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Share deeper app metrics and data-backed insights</summary>

+Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program, can share aggregate-level user engagement and behavioral insights with Microsoft PM and UX design team. This team can collaborate with you using their vast experience of working with app developers to share best practices of designing, developing, and growing apps on Teams. You can get expert guidance on feature enhancements, hypotheses-driven growth experimentation, and roadmap planning for your Teams collaborative app.

+</details>

+## Where can Microsoft help?

+<details>

+<summary>Case Study on MicrosoftΓÇÖs public customers portal</summary>

+Impactful case studies of how investing in a collaborative app resulted in growth for your SaaS business and how customers using your app got impacted can be published on the following customer-facing sites: [Microsoft 365 ISV Benefits Program Success Stories](https://cloudpartners.transform.microsoft.com/practices/modernworkisv?tab=success-stories) and [Customer Stories](https://customers.microsoft.com/search?sq=&ff=story_industry_friendlyname%26%3EPartner%20Professional%20Services%26%26story_product_categories%26%3EMicrosoft%20Teams&p=5&so=cam_rank%20desc) on Microsoft.com. Connect with your Teams engineering representatives or the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to check eligibility, seek guidance, and execute this motion.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Expand customer co-activation and joint new pitches</summary>

+Microsoft will evaluate co-activation opportunities in large customer accounts based on customer interest, adoption opportunity (sold seat size in customer account), and so on, among other criteria. Get in touch with your Microsoft field, account, or engineering representatives to discuss potential joint customer pitches in large customer accounts.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Get included in Microsoft exec blog or flagship event endorsement</summary>

+Get the power of the Microsoft executive team behind your next leadership blog or event. Review your plans for blogs or events in which you'll be participating. Develop ideas on how a Microsoft executive can help to promote your commercial marketplace offer in a blog or at an event. Reach out to the [ISV Marketplace Success Rewards Program team](mailto:rewards@microsoft.com) to request Microsoft executive endorsement. If eligibile, the team will work with you to find a Microsoft executive (Director level or higher) to help endorse your Teams collaborative app available on the marketplace.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Share top customer feedback to shape app updates</summary>

+Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program, can learn from Microsoft PM and UX design team about incoming feedback from customers. You must specifically learn about your collaborative app or feedback at large about the segment your app belongs to. Such feedback is great input to plan customer-grounded future roadmap to enhance your app.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Early access to unreleased Teams Platform features</summary>

+Microsoft-offered public [Developer Preview for Teams](../../../../../resources/dev-preview/developer-preview-intro.md) is a public program for developers, which provides early access to unreleased features in Microsoft Teams. It allows you to explore and test upcoming features for potential inclusion in your Teams app and share feedback about the feature. While the program is open for all Teams developers, strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program, have a direct line to work together with Microsoft engineering to use these features in their apps.

+</details>

+<br>

+<details>

+<summary>Quarterly Business Reviews with ISV for app growth</summary>

+Strategic developers, who are part of the invite-only Teams engineeringΓÇÖs build-with partner program, can benefit from a quarterly rhythm of business with participation from product, engineering, business development, and GTM leadership from Microsoft, and partner side. It helps to together take a stock of the appΓÇÖs growth, resulting business outcomes and jointly agree on next wave of business impact milestones and partnership investments.

+</details>

+Each app in the Teams ecosystem undertakes this journey, in all likelihood, starting from a point solution to becoming a full-fledged collaborative app on Teams. Building, launching, gaining traction, achieving scale, and finally succeeding are phases that help you plan and execute your appΓÇÖs go-to-market journey resulting in robust growth for your SaaS business on the commercial marketplace.

+## See also

+- [Plan, strategize and execute growth for your app](overview-app-growth.md)

+- [Growth lifecycle for your app](app-growth-lifecycle.md)

+* ***February 20, 2023***: [Plan your app growth in Teams.](concepts/deploy-and-publish/appsource/post-publish/app-growth/overview-app-growth.md)