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Drive sales with Microsoft CloudAscent

Gain insights into which customers are ready to purchase Microsoft products—and focus on delivering the solutions they need.

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Build long-term customer relationships

Get updates about your existing SMB customer base and identify new sales opportunities.

Identify strong customer leads

Gain insights from CloudAscent's machine learning, which aggregates customer data to help determine which organizations need your solutions.

Focus your sales efforts

Invest your high-cost sales resources in the customers who are most likely to make a purchase.

Reduce customer churn

Deepen engagements with your current customers and make informed product recommendations to drive success for their businesses.

Zero in on precise customer needs

Develop marketing campaigns that address customers' unique challenges and demonstrate how you can help them reach their goals.

Explore the impact CloudAscent has on partner growth

Partners are using this powerful tool to reduce churn and reach their business goals.

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"CloudAscent has proven to be extremely valuable, enabling Pax8 as an indirect provider to educate partners in how to use the data, provide dashboards to visualize the data and provide clear next steps, creating a customer pipeline within our partner's existing customer base. Coupled with tools such as Digital Marketing Content OnDemand, we're truly able to enable our partners to maximize every customer add, reduce churn, and accelerate growth. The partner response has been phenomenal, the results have been next level, and this will continue to be a key motion for us moving forward."

Mathew Batterbee, Global GTM Director at Pax8

Upskill with helpful video tutorials

CloudAscent empowers you to deliver the solutions your customers need. Access our video tutorials to explore the best ways to use this tool.

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Accelerate growth as an indirect provider

Review our video tutorial collection to learn how you can drive success with CloudAscent.

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Improve your sales tactics as a partner

Learn how CloudAscent can help you deepen engagements. Browse our video tutorial collection to get started.

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Discover how CloudAscent transforms data into insights

The framework gathers information about your customers' needs and business initiatives, then turns that data into an actionable monthly report.

Data-driven analysis

Web crawlers scan billions of signals from company domains, blogs, press releases, social media, and forums—and firmographics information is collected from internal and external sources.

Customer intent assessment

A machine learning model generates a structured data set of sales and marketing predictions for each customer by cloud product.

Monthly customer propensity reports

CloudAscent presents the data in a monthly report to help you understand which customers are ready to make purchases and to allow for more targeted sales and marketing efforts.

Strengthen your marketing strategy with CloudAscent data

Once you gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, you can use our solution plays and resources to market more effectively to quality leads.

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Engage with your SMB customers

Access purpose-built guidance that helps you support small and medium-sized businesses throughout their digital transformation.

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Elevate your business with fresh weekly campaigns

Build and optimize your marketing strategy with Digital Marketing Content OnDemand and access free campaigns designed to capture leads and save time for your team.

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FAQ

What is CloudAscent?

CloudAscent is an engine powered by AI, machine learning, and customer intelligence that takes internal and external Microsoft data to deliver customer targeting and insights for the SMB audience. CloudAscent collects billions of customer signals by pinging company domains and monitoring blog posts, press releases, social streams, and technical forums. Additionally, firmographics information is collected from both internal and external sources, including external technology profiles, Microsoft internal subscriptions, and transactional data.

The data collected is fed into a machine learning model that generates a structured data set of sales and marketing predictions for each customer by cluster and appending cohort/solution play.

Each customer is scored using a lookalike model to determine the customer's fit, as well as ML algorithms that integrate the customer's online behavior defined by buying signals. The scoring is merged into clusters that show a customer's propensity to purchase Microsoft cloud products.

Potential customers and growth customers are identified using the high propensity Act Now and Evaluate clusters. Marketing materials associated to the primary cohorts are available to drive engagement and close more deals.

How does CloudAscent benefit my organization?

The CloudAscent tool is designed to deliver data-driven insights into your existing SMB transacting customer base, empowering you to uncover new sales opportunities and drive growth. CloudAscent is particularly useful for aligning sales and marketing strategies with customer readiness, focusing on areas such as Modern Work, Azure, and Business Applications.

What is the SMB segment?

SMB stands for small and medium-sized businesses, and it's divided into three subsegments:

Upper medium businesses have 300-999 employees.
Medium businesses have 25 to 300 employees.
Very small businesses have 1 to 25 employees.

The upper medium and medium business subsegments are high-value customers for Microsoft and Microsoft partners. Because of their high value, these subsegments are the primary focus for driving growth in the SMB segment.

How do I get started with CloudAscent?

CloudAscent is available for all partners who have existing transacting customers with Microsoft. Log in to Partner Center and navigate to the downloads hub to view your existing transacting customers' propensity and cohort data.

What features does CloudAscent offer for predicting customers' likelihood to purchase?

CloudAscent provides many customer features, including:

Customer profile: Through the data collection process, we develop a customer profile. The firmographics data in this profile is shared with indirect and direct partners.
Customer propensity: The customer propensity by areas of demand (Modern Work, Azure, Dynamics 365 and Surface) is available to explain which of your existing transacting customers may be ready for upselling or cross selling another solution.
Customer cohorts: CloudAscent shares the cohorts' propensity by areas of demand (Modern Work, Azure, Dynamics 365 and Surface) for each customer. The cohort identifies the recommended scenario for which to target the customer and aligns with the the SMB go-to-market execution collection.

Where can I find documentation and tutorials for CloudAscent?

Explore the CloudAscent Microsoft Learn article, indirect provider tutorial videos, CloudAscent partner tutorial videos, and Digital Marketing Content OnDemand.