As a Microsoft Partner, you can’t sell Copilot in the way you sold Dynamics or a cloud migration, the licence goes to a person, not a project. Whether your aim is increase licence revenue or keeping your managed services clients close, the fix starts with one strategic decision, and creating content that sells help, not features.
You’ve probably built your marketing the way most Microsoft Partners traditionally have: by sector or by service. Dynamics into retailers and manufacturers, Modern Work into professional services, an on-prem to cloud migration, a case study per vertical, per service.
Copilot doesn’t sell that way.
The licence goes to a person, not an IT project. And that person might be an HR director, a finance lead, or someone on the shopfloor you’ve never marketed to in your life.
So, what’s the new playbook?
What follows is practical advice, gathered over a year of listening at ESPC, at ECS, in Copilot workshops, and in the work we do with clients who, like you, are grappling with exactly this challenge. It starts with a question that sounds obvious and mostly goes unasked: what’s your strategy?
But first, a story about Emma Thompson.
Dame Emma Thompson has strong feelings about Copilot in Word
The actor and screenwriter recently described, in a talk-show anecdote, what happens when she’s writing something in Word. Copilot now pipes up and asks her: “Would you like me to rewrite that for you?” Her full reply isn’t printable here (watch it yourself in this YouTube clip skip to 3:35). The gist is that she’d like it to stop.
There’s an Emma Thompson in every department of every organisation you’re trying to sell Copilot into. Rather than ignore her, these people are more useful to your Copilot licence revenue targets than you might think. We’ll come back to Emma later.
Why Copilot broke the sector-based Partner sales motion
But first, it’s worth noting why selling Copilot feels harder than your previous tech-stack plays. When you sold Dynamics 365 into a manufacturer as an upgrade from AX 2012, or moved a property firm off on-premise and into the cloud, there was a project.
It had a known challenge. An aim, clear parameters, known workflows. Stakeholder engagement, a proposed plan, a pilot, an implementation, a go-live. Your buyer was the CIO or IT lead, and while there were other stakeholders to bring along, your marketing spoke to the sector you knew, in the language your ICP already spoke.
Then along came Copilot. And it arrived differently.
Copilot Chat is now on, free, and available to everyone as standard. In effect, there’s no rollout to sell. Yet Microsoft is pushing AI adoption hard at your customer, and expecting you to upsell the paid licences on top of the E3s, E5s and D365s, help them find value in using them, and in some cases prove they’re actually being used.
Your CIO contact still approves Copilot, governs it, configures agents, cleans up data and sorts permissions. Familiar conversations you’re used to haivng. But they’re now under two new kinds of pressure.
From above, they’re being asked to prove value. Is that person using it? Is it saving them time? If not, what’s blocking them, and should the licence go to someone who’ll actually use it?
From below, the business has started building without them. AI tools spun up in an afternoon, agents vibe-coded by people who’ve never raised a ticket in their lives until now, when the ticket says “can you host this?” If that gives you 2020 flashbacks to Teams and SharePoint sprawl, the alarm bells are ringing for a reason.
Both pressures are real. Which one your content should speak to depends entirely on how you make your money.
First, decide your strategy
Before a word of content gets written, answer one strategic question: is your aim to sell more Copilot licences, or to keep hold of your managed services clients by helping them through this?
It sounds basic. But the two plays point at different audiences, with different worries, and content that tries to serve both at once ends up serving neither. Know your strategy, and then the audience follows. Once you know your audience, and the content writes itself. Well, almost. That last bit is where we come in.
Strategic decision one: you’re selling new Copilot licences. That means your problem is your audience.
If licence revenue is the aim, here’s the uncomfortable truth: your current IT audience alone can’t give you the uptick you want.
You’ve spent years marketing to IT. But it’s likely IT already has Copilot. The growth is everywhere else in that business: the finance team, HR, operations, the front desk and those people have never read a word you’ve written. Neither have the executives who sign off their licences.
If you want to sell more seats, you need a new audience: the rest of the C-suite, and the business roles the licences are actually for. Reaching them means telling the Copilot story several different ways, because a CFO and a COO buy it for completely different reasons. Here’s how to sell Copilot to each of the four C-suite buyers.
That’s not a tweak to your messaging. It’s a different readership, and it needs role-based content.
The evidence for this comes from the people closest to real users. In our recent Original Thinkers conversation, Alinea Partner‘s CEO, Leahanne Hobson shared what she learned training more than 30,000 Copilot users: they didn’t want Teams first, the tool every bill of materials says to start with. They wanted PowerPoint, then Excel. And the people saving hours a day weren’t the technologists, they were receptionists, HR managers and project managers, handed a new skill for the first time. Adoption specialists like Natasha Bradley at Empower M365 build their whole methodology around this: map Copilot to how each role already works, and show each person what’s in it for them before asking them to change.
Which brings us back to Emma Thompson.
Push Copilot into more of the business and you’ll likely meet resistance. At a Copilot workshop we sat in on in London this summer, change specialist Lucy Quick made the case that the reluctant user is a gift. Apathy is the real enemy, not resistance.
The person telling Copilot to clear off is telling you exactly where it hasn’t earned its place in her working day. Win her over and you’ve got the outcome story that persuades everyone else in that role.
So, what does role-based content look like in practice?
A “what Copilot actually does for your finance team” piece, built from insights from a real finance user. A CFO-facing case study that answers the question coming from upstairs: which of these licences are paying for themselves? A piece on winning over the sceptics that your IT contact can share internally, because content that takes the Emmas seriously helps in a way no feature tour ever will.
Strategic decision two: you’re an MSP and want to retain customers. That means your problem is arriving by ticket.
If licence volume isn’t how you earn your crust, your aim is different: stay indispensable to the IT teams you already serve. And their world has just got stranger.
The tickets you’ll be getting from them will tell the story. “Can you host this?” “Can you integrate this with our tenant?”, questions attached to an AI tool someone in marketing built last Tuesday.
Your customer’s IT team is fielding requests about apps they didn’t buy, or have a hand in building. And they can’t yet judge if they’ll work tenant-wide. That’s a new kind of headache, and it has your name on it.
So, your content should meet this new challenge for IT head on.
A plain-English explainer on how to tell whether a home-grown AI tool will actually work in your environment and what to check before saying yes. A “before you build that agent” checklist: the questions that give it a defined purpose and an owner. A case study on cleaning up after the rogue app you found, what data it had been reaching without anyone knowing, and what governed-and-useful looked like six weeks later.
And don’t stop at damage control.
The MSPs who stay indispensable are the ones helping IT discover what’s newly possible, not just policing what isn’t. Show them how to turn their SOPs into SharePoint skills, so the knowledge trapped in documents starts answering questions. Show them how to spin up a lightweight dashboard from SharePoint List data in minutes, not weeks. That’s the content that makes your IT contact think: these people are ahead of this, I’d better keep them close.
Whichever strategy you choose, the content has the same job
Notice what neither strategies mentioned above involve a tour of Copilot’s features.
Your customer can get the feature list from Microsoft. They’re being marketed at about it everywhere they turn. What they can’t get from that is proof that you understand what they’re grappling with, and evidence you’ve helped someone like them through it.
That’s what your content is for. It’s how you demonstrate your expertise before anyone signs anything: the case study that proves the ROI, the explainer that saves an IT manager a bad decision, the role-based piece a CIO forwards to their CFO.
Our advice is think strategy first: more licences or clients kept close? Then, audience second the C-suite you’ve never written for (more licence sales), or the IT team drowning in novel tickets (client retention). Then, and only then, the content.
Copilot has stopped being a traditional project you sell to a sector and become a capability you help real people use. Your marketing has to follow the value to where it lands.
So before you write another feature-led post, think, whose job got easier because of you, and can you prove it?
Questions Microsoft Partners ask us about marketing Copilot
Who should we market Copilot to, IT or business users?
Both, but for different reasons. IT still approves, governs and configures Copilot, so they stay in your audience. But if licence growth is the aim, IT can’t give it to you. The uptick comes from the wider business: finance, HR, operations, and the executives who sign off their licences. That’s a new readership, and it needs role-based content, not a rewrite of your IT messaging.
Why isn’t Microsoft’s ready-made Copilot marketing content enough?
Because your customer sees the same decks from every partner they talk to. Microsoft’s material proves Copilot works; it can’t prove you can make it work for a 200-person firm like theirs. That evidence, the case study with a named outcome, the explainer written from a real deployment, is your IP and the only content a competitor can’t copy.
Our customers keep asking us to host or integrate AI tools their employees built. Should our content address this?
Yes and before your competitors’ does. Those tickets are the clearest signal of what your customers are grappling with, and almost nobody in the channel is publishing about it. A plain-English guide to assessing whether a home-grown AI tool can safely run in a Microsoft environment does two jobs: it helps the IT manager today, and it positions you as the partner who’s ahead of the problem.
What’s the first step before creating any Copilot content?
Decide on your strategy. If the aim is licence revenue, your content targets a new audience: business roles and the C-suite. If the aim is keeping managed services clients close, your content helps their IT teams govern and get value from what’s already arriving. Content built before that decision usually tries to serve both and gets confusing.
Got Co-op funds sitting unspent?
The content that does this job, the role-based case study, the governance explainer, the proof-of-value story, is exactly what Microsoft Co-op is there to fund. And it’s evergreen: written once, it keeps working long after a campaign would have gone quiet. Most Partners have more of this budget than they think, and lose it every half-year for want of a plan.
Our ebook, The Smartest Way to Invest Your Microsoft Co-op Funds, shows you where to find yours, what Microsoft will approve it for, and how to put it into content that’s still earning next year.
Read other articles by Juliet Stott and connect with her on LinkedIn.
