Smarter referral submissions are here!

On this page8 sections

1. Details
2. Driving partner success with a smarter referral experience
3. What's available to Partner Center
4. Phase 1 - now available as of January 2026
5. Key features
6. Next steps
7. Questions
8. Additional information

Impacted audience

All Microsoft co-sell partners who submit referrals via Partner Center UI for Small, Medium, Enterprise, and Channel (SMEC) and Enterprise opportunities.

Partner Center will offer a modernized referral submission experience designed to accelerate partner success

Details

These enhancements will streamline opportunity qualification, eliminate redundant manual steps, and enable faster deal progression, empowering partners to submit referrals with greater speed and precision while strengthening connections with sellers.

Driving partner success with a smarter referral experience

Partner Center will deliver an automated referral qualification process that accelerates opportunity creation and strengthens seller engagement. By streamlining prequalification checks and ensuring completeness upfront during the referral submission process, partners benefit from faster processing, and improved data quality.

These enhancements will enable real-time insights, quality scoring, and intelligent routing, helping partners create high-value opportunities with confidence.

What's available to Partner Center

There will be a phased approach to the launch of the referral submission enhancements:

• Smart prompts to validate Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline (BANT) by improving missing or low-quality details, resulting in stronger referrals
• AI-driven smart prompts to help articulate Customer Need - improving relevance and reducing time spent typing
• Suggestions for using Campaign ID to improve deal tracking for Microsoft-hosted campaigns
• Enhanced experience that suggests product names as you begin typing in the list.

Phase 1 - now available as of January 2026

Inbound co-sell referrals now undergo automated completeness checks as part of the enhanced submission experience. This update introduces validation to ensure only high-quality referrals progress, without requiring any additional action from partners.

Key features

• Estimated deal value: Must be realistic; placeholder values like "0 USD" or "00 million" will trigger a warning.
• Estimated close date: Must be a future date; past dates or dates within the next seven days are invalid.
• Customer need: Must be clearly defined, including product/service need and business context. AI-based auto-notes generation will be available.
• Customer contact information: Valid contact details must be provided, or partners must select the consent checkbox to share information later.

Next steps

• Communicate changes to your teams.
• For more information on these updates, review the article Manage co-sell opportunities.

Questions

If you have any questions, submit a support ticket via the Partner Center Support page.

Additional information

• In Partner Center Learn documentation, see: Add deal details in the article "Manage co-sell opportunities"
• No partner action required; changes are embedded in the submission flow.