Create engaging partner-specific trial and onboarding experiences

Enabled for	Public preview	General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts	Mar 1, 2023	Apr 1, 2023

Business value

Today, resellers of Business Central spend a lot of time creating trial environments for potential customers. This process involves a CSP relationship to be established between the reseller and the potential customer and manual work in creating the trial environment, adding country or region-specific and vertical-specific demo data, third-party apps, and so on. With 2023 release wave 1, a new way to create trials will be available. Partners can start a Microsoft (partner-unmanaged) trial directly from their own website. This trial can include the partner's own apps and pivot experiences based on prospect profiling. It can enable digital trial and onboarding experiences with no hands-on from the partner until the moment when the lead is qualified or wants to become a customer.

This will save partners many hours of manual work and create a more qualified lead pipeline.

Feature details

In previous releases, unmanaged trials can be started from the Microsoft.com website. These trials aren't connected to any partner, and it's up to the prospects to get in touch with a partner. Therefore, we only offer a plain, vanilla trial, because the context of the signup is the Microsoft.com website. Starting in 2023 release wave 1, a new signup context feature will enable partners to create unmanaged trials (no CSP relationship with the prospect) from their own websites. The signup context feature is part of the trial initialization URL, determined by the call-to-action on the partner's website.

The signup context also supports prospect profiling, so that partners can profile prospects on their websites and feed the outcome of the profiler into Business Central, enabling their app to pivot the experience based on the profiling answers. This gives partners the ability to create very customized, tailored experiences for various customer segments, verticals, and industries.

The intention is that partners build digital trial-plus-onboarding scenarios (apps) that will welcome the user at the first sign-in after trial creation. The scenarios should provide experiences that show the most relevant features to the prospect for their type of business, matching their desired intentions for evaluating a business solution. Ultimately, these experiences would take the user through the evaluation, buying, and onboarding experience, pushing the CSP relationship downstream to the point where the prospect actually wants to become a paying customer.

This helps partners save time and enable digital journeys for their customers that would normally have involved a lot of manual work. Partners can better qualify their funnel of potential customers by making sure prospects can reach out to the partner from inside the product. Partners determine where these points of contact should reside, for example in the checklist, based on evaluation and setup progress.

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See also

Create customer-centric onboarding experiences using SignupContext (docs)