Achieving a Microsoft Modern Work Solution Designations

I'm excited to share that The Partner Masters has achieved the Microsoft Modern Work Solution Designation (both SMB and Enterprise) in 3 months WITHOUT selling a single Microsoft license!

We talk to partners nearly every day that say achieving the Solution Designations is too hard and they don't have enough customers or certified people to achieve it any longer. They say that Microsoft has made the process too complicated. While I agree that this may be true, we have now proven that it's not as hard as you may think!

How did we do it? Here's the cheat sheet...

It really breaks down to two things. 1- You need to associate your customers. 2- You need to have people certified. Let's break both of these down.

Associating your customers does not mean that you have to sell every customer CSP licensing. There are many cases where a customer may purchase their own licensing. They could have purchased it from Microsoft.com, through an EA with an LSP or even possibly from another CSP partner. In whatever case (even if you sell the CSP licensing), you should still be doing your CPOR claims to highlight to Microsoft that you're working with the customer on helping them deploy the different workloads within Microsoft 365.In our case, we don't sell Microsoft licensing to partners. They receive most of their licensing from Microsoft as Internal Use benefits. However, we still associate CPOR with each of our partners to showcase that we're working with them to help them understand each workload and helping the partners with their usage.

Associating your customers will qualify you for the Net Customer Adds along with the Customer Success metrics. As long as your customers have at least 11 paid seats of a single workload for Microsoft 365, then they will qualify. Those same customers will qualify for the customer success metrics where they are increasing usage year over year for their workloads. And… if you are doing the CPOR claims, you receive twice the credit for each customer than if you just transact a CSP license. (There are many benefits to CPOR. Watch for my next blog where I cover this in complete detail.)

Next, you need to ensure that you have the proper certifications. With Modern Work, there is a need for intermediate certifications and advanced certifications. For intermediate, there is a list of certifications that qualify, but when you look closely, one of the qualifying exams is the MS-900 (Microsoft 365 Fundamentals) exam. This is really a sales person type of certification. Anyone that sells Microsoft 365 should have this on their radar to pass.

Then for advanced certifications, there is an option to have someone pass the Microsoft 365 Certified Administrator Expert OR you could have someone pass the Teams Meeting Technical Assessment. Yes, you read that right. You can take a 35 question online quiz (open book) to receive credit for the advanced certification. Everyone on your team should be able to take and pass this assessment. Even if you fail, you can take it multiple times.

Once you have your customers and your certifications, the rest should be pretty easy! One tip is to be patient with your customers showing up in Partner Center. Microsoft FAQ states that they update it by the 20th of each month, so even if you have many CPOR claims that you completed the month prior, you may not see them until the 20th of the following month.

It really is not hard to achieve the Modern Workplace Solution Designation. What's next for us? First, we now qualify to put solutions into Microsoft's Marketplace! We just submitted, so I'm looking forward to sharing our Co-Sell Ready solutions shortly. And... we'll be working towards our Specializations and preparing for our audit! Exciting times for sure!

If you need any help, support or coaching, please feel free to reach out to us! We're here to help make you successful with your Microsoft Partnership!

Justin Slagle

CEO & Co-Founder, The Partner Masters

Justin@thepartnermasters.com