Nominate for the Microsoft IMPACT Awards – Tool is open!

Microsoft’s success as a company depends on great partners, and the IMPACT Awards allows us to recognize those partners who have aligned their efforts with customer excellence, and who have created innovative solutions leveraging Microsoft products, services and technology.

Winning an award is a great way to attract new customers, strengthen relationships, gain media attention, and recognize the hard work of your employees.

The IMPACT Awards are available exclusively to Canadian partners who are enrolled into the Microsoft Partner Network. These awards are in addition to the Microsoft Inspire Partner Awards, which are available to all Microsoft partners globally, and have already launched on February 28 and will be open until April 11, 2019. Canadian partners can submit entries for both awards.

For 2019 we have made some tweaks to the IMPACT Awards. We have put a greater focus on industry solutions, created new sales awards and separated our Data and AI awards. Below we have included an overview of our growing list of the IMPACT Award categories for this year.

Awards focused on Solution Areas
1. Modern Workplace Innovation
2. Data Partner of the Year
3. AI Partner of the Year
4. Innovation with Hardware
5. Hardware
6. Business Applications
7. Infrastructure Innovation

Industry Focused Awards
8. App Innovation – FinTech
9. App Innovation – Manufacturing
10. App Innovation – Retail
11. App Innovation – Healthcare
12. App Innovation – Education
13. App Innovation – Government

Sales and other award categories
14. Modern Marketing Innovation
15. Commercial Enterprise Partner of the Year
16. SMB Scale Direct Partner of the Year
17. SMB Scale Indirect Partner of the Year
18. SMB Regional Partner of the Year
19. Breakthrough Partner of the Year
20. Living the Mission
21. Winning Together
22. New Acquisitions Champion
23. Sales Excellence Award

Finalists will be notified in June and Winners will be announced during the Canadian Regional Keynote and Welcome Reception at the Inspire conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sunday, July 14.

IMPACT Award Benefits

Customized logos and web banners, public relations templates, trophies, congratulatory letters, photo opportunities.
The IMPACT awards finalists’ dinner will take place on Tuesday, July 16 at Picasso Restaurant.

How to submit a nomination for IMPACT Awards 2019:

 

6 tips to get you started:

1. Answer every question. The judges are looking for responses for each question.
2. Create a compelling story that clearly defines the challenge and how your solution has aligned to achieve customer excellence.
3. Showcase your solution, how is it innovative, and what has the customer gained because of your solution. Your solution must have been deployed within the last 18 months.
4. Prove your customers’ success, including metrics where available. And how has it grown your business too?
5. Include customer evidence with links to supporting materials such as case studies, whitepapers, other awards, videos or anything else that helps document you and your customer’s success. Make sure have your customer’s approval to use any of their content, although entries will not be disclosed without your consent.
6. Submit for more than one award! Your solution may fit into more than one category. Increase your chances of winning by considering all award categories.Each year Microsoft Canada receives a large number of award submissions, and some very incredible solutions and stories from our partners. While this is great to see the wonderful efforts from our partners and the success they are driving, it makes the judging very challenging to pick just two finalists for each award category.

 

If you are looking for a little help with your award submission, Gail Mercer-Mackay has worked on over 150 award submissions for both the IMPACT Awards as well as the Global Inspire Awards. You can read Gail’s blog, watch this on-demand webinar, on how to write an award-winning submission.