Grow Your Startup with Microsoft Commercial Marketplace

Kristin Bourassa:
Looks like our attendees are coming in. We’ll give it a few minutes and then we’ll get started.

Kristin Bourassa:
Hey, Tom. Good to see you. I owe you a follow-up email.

Kristin Bourassa:
And Jared, you are the only one on my screen, by the way. So it’s just you and me at this point.

Jared Prins:
Got it. Yeah. I just changed over to gallery view, so I can see everybody’s beautiful face.

Kristin Bourassa:
Nice. I’ll change mine too.

Kristin Bourassa:
All right. Now I can see everyone. That’s much better.

Jared Prins:
Yeah. We’re not alone in this.

Kristin Bourassa:
Although I kind of liked it being the two of us, Jared. Me too, Tackle Startups. Me too. I’m super stoked for this.

Kristin Bourassa:
So let’s give it to about 1:03 and then we will kick it off. I feel like that’s a good number. Darren, Paul, what you think?

Paul Horn:
300%

Kristin Bourassa:
Year over year growth with marketplace. Is that where we’re going with that 300%?

Paul Horn:
300? Yes, it’s accurate.

Kristin Bourassa:
Pretty soon, I’m just going to start cracking marketplace jokes.

Jared Prins:
That’s awesome.

Kristin Bourassa:
That’s really what this webinar is about.

Paul Horn:
So same from college days, five minutes after, for sure, you’re free and clear [inaudible 00:02:41]. Thankfully, we’re all here on time.

Kristin Bourassa:
Oh, man. Casey, you’re putting me on the spot. You want to hear marketplace jokes?

Jared Prins:
Marketplaces are like opinions, everybody has them nowadays.

Paul Horn:
Oh, that’s a good one.

Kristin Bourassa:
That is a good one.

Paul Horn:
I can’t even imagine. I can’t think of one that would beat that. That was actually just…

Jared Prins:
That’s not from me. I heard that from somebody, so I need to give them credit.

Paul Horn:
Nice. Nice.

Jared Prins:
[inaudible 00:03:22] early on. Yeah.

Kristin Bourassa:
Jared drops the mic. You just dropped the mic on us, Jared. Like we can’t.

Paul Horn:
Yeah. That was it.

Kristin Bourassa:
No. Done. All right. It’s 1:03. So since we did agree that 1:03 is when we’ll get started, let’s go ahead and kick it off.

Kristin Bourassa:
So good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for taking the time for this webinar. My name is Kristin Bourassa and I manage the global Microsoft partnership here at Tackle. So hopefully, you signed up for this webinar and you’re in the right webinar. But the purpose of this session today is to explore how you, as a startup, can make the most out of your journey with marketplace and with Microsoft.

Kristin Bourassa:
And so for those of you who aren’t familiar with Tackle, or you don’t know who we are as a company, we’re a software company that’s dedicated to helping other software companies make the most out of their marketplace journey through our platform and our people. So I’m actually joined today by three, really, really experienced individuals. And so let’s do a round of intros, and we’ll do round robin starting with you, Jared.

Jared Prins:
Awesome. Thanks, Kris, for kicking it off, and Tackle, for hosting this. My name’s Jared. I work at Microsoft in the Microsoft for Startups Organization as a business program manager. And our main goal is to help generate business opportunities for startups, and to help them get connected into the marketplace, as we see that as a great strategy to open up, again, sales opportunities and to position yourself across the Microsoft field, our partners, and directly to customers. So I’m excited to be here and talk about marketplace a little bit more today.

Darren Yetzer:
Hey, everybody. My name’s Darren Yetzer. Thanks, Kristin. Thanks for the intro. And thanks, Tackle, for hosting this webinar. Very excited to be here. I work at Algolia. Algolia is a SAS-based hosted API first cloud company, search company. And so we focus on delivering better search results, better recommendations, better results for our customers. And my job is to oversee everything we do from a cloud perspective. So it’s cloud partnerships and cloud marketplaces as well. And I’m excited to be here to share some of my best practices.

Paul Horn:
That’s a wordy slide, but my name is Paul Horn. I appreciate Tackle for hosting. Thanks, Kristin, for thinking of us. Nasuni is a longtime Microsoft partner. We are a cloud file data platform that sits on top of Azure and we’ve been successfully transacting in Marketplace for several years now. Looking forward to sharing our experience and hopefully providing some insights as you all are looking towards your Marketplace journey as well.

Kristin Bourassa:
Fantastic. So for my first question, this goes to either you, Darren, or you, Paul, and whoever wants to start definitely can. So what has each of your cloud Marketplace journeys looked like? And what’s your role been in that journey? So Algolia and Nasuni are both… you guys have been around for quite a while, so I’d love to hear your perspective.

Paul Horn:
Yeah. So I’m happy to jump in quick on this. Nasuni is, like I said, longtime Microsoft partner, but in Marketplace, we’ve been active for just over two years. So we actually launched our Marketplace offering right as the pandemic was hitting in 2020. And so as you can imagine, right, customers were going through some interesting times. So we had a slower start, but we started really hitting our stride about six to eight months in and saw some customers really looking at the value behind it, looking at the ease of transaction, and certainly have now we’re at the point where we’ve transacted quite a bit through Marketplace, millions of dollars of business over the past, basically two and a half years. Over two years, that we’ve had a solid presence there.

Kristin Bourassa:
Fantastic. Darren, what about you?

Darren Yetzer:
Yeah, for sure. Ours is similar to Paul. We started about a year ago and we kind of aggressively weren’t thinking about the marketplaces, but we started thinking… well, hearing from our customers, is they wanted to transact through the Marketplace.

Darren Yetzer:
So we were a strong Microsoft partner, engaged in a lot of the Microsoft startup programs and a lot of other Microsoft initiatives around the world. So we were learning about marketplaces, but then several of our customers, again, wanting to… the desire to transact through the Marketplace, get the benefits of the Marketplace transaction, they came to us and said, “Hey, it’d be helpful if you guys could get into the Marketplace as quickly as possible.”

Darren Yetzer:
And that’s when Microsoft actually reached out and connected us to Tackle and Tackle helped us to get our Marketplace up and running in a matter of weeks, not months. And so it was one of the quickest, I would say, launches that we had in our company history, to be able to transact a completely new channel within a matter of weeks. And then over the last year, a little over a year, we’ve had the company’s largest transaction go through the Microsoft Marketplace, and we’re continuing to just add more and more transactions on a regular basis. So we’re very happy as a company that we did this and we look forward to continuing to grow our Marketplace business.

Kristin Bourassa:
Fantastic. Yeah. I think the status, like 95% of Fortune 500 companies build on Azure. So that, to hear just the progress that you guys have had over the past one to two years is fantastic. Now, do you think that if you… Have you ever thought about where you guys would be, had you started your Marketplace journey earlier?

Paul Horn:
Yeah. I mean that’s always a good question. I mean, it’s really, I feel like from Nasuni’s perspective, we started… I think we were probably one of the more earlier ones on Azure Marketplace. I’ve only seen just an incredible growth of focus on Marketplace. So this is initially, programs and initiatives start within Microsoft. You start with the idea, you start building it out, you gain mindshare across the business within Microsoft, and it’s hitting critical mass right now.

Paul Horn:
And then customers are also… That’s where you know, like it’s here to stay. It’s very significant part of Microsoft’s business going forward, because customers are now asking for this. This is no longer a, “Hey, we have options.” It’s the customer guiding us to Marketplace, to Azure Marketplace, to transact because they’re getting a lot of benefit through potential commitments that they’ve made with Microsoft, through discount levels, through whatever it is. And then the Microsoft field sellers are also looking at that as a path to accelerate business versus potentially having to jump through some procurement hoops.

Paul Horn:
At the end of the day, I feel like we latched onto it pretty early. We’re usually early adopters of this stuff, but I will tell you, I mean, it’s just like, now’s the time.

Kristin Bourassa:
Awesome. Yeah, I was… Oh, sorry, Darren.

Darren Yetzer:
I would agree with Paul. I think now is the time. We entered about a year ago. And like I said in my intro, customers were asking for it. So in the world we all live and everybody wants to do everything faster, quicker, get into market as soon as possible, it took us some time to get there. But when we did it, by listening to the customers and understanding why they wanted to transact through the Marketplace for all the reasons that Paul just said, and Jared can probably elaborate on some others as well, it just made sense.

Darren Yetzer:
And so as soon as we did it, not that we had customers knocking on our door, but the customers that we were engaged with in a sales cycle, it was very nice and helpful to be able to present the opportunity or the option for them to procure through the Marketplace.

Jared Prins:
Yeah, that’s awesome, that both of you guys had success in that, and seemed to be early adopters as everything was transitioning. As Microsoft seeing how business, in a way, enterprises are buying solutions, and they’re looking for that Microsoft Marketplace transactability, as Paul mentioned, for them to be able to detriment their cloud commitment, if it’s an Azure and device solution and the speed of procurement, increasing sales velocity, all those kinds of things, that also benefits you guys as a startup and just makes that easability in the procurement process as well.

Jared Prins:
As Microsoft for Startups, I mean, our whole goal is to make startups successful at every phase of their journey. And so we see that working with early stage startups, in the ideation phase, whether they just have a business plan and going through development and then a growth phase and scale phase where we’re really trying to get them implemented and integrated in the marketplace. We have programs and personnel there to support them in that marketplace journey, trying to make that transition as smooth as possible for them, because we see immense opportunity, and just the opportunity that they have as a sales channel, and to be able to tell their Microsoft story, position them well with their own value proposition, and utilize Microsoft in the marketplace to enhance their business.

Jared Prins:
So we’re incredibly excited about the momentum that’s going on with our customers. Again, looking for those Marketplace transactable options and solutions. And it seems like Paul and Darren are on the right track there with their startup. So we’re incredibly happy.

Kristin Bourassa:
That’s great. And the reason I was asking is because viewers on the webinar today might be wondering, “Oh, when is it time for me to start my Marketplace journey?” Right? So just hearing your perspectives on where you’ve been is very helpful and then had you started earlier. So thank you for answering that. Now, what do you think might be one of the biggest mistakes a startup might make, whether on their journey to Marketplace or their journey with Microsoft? So I’ll start with you, Darren, what do you think?

Darren Yetzer:
I think first and foremost, not taking advantage of the marketplace. So not being in there is a mistake, particularly where we are today and with customers looking for different procurement avenues and angles and things like that, plus everything that Jared just mentioned, where the customer can benefit a lot with transactions going through the Marketplace. So first and foremost, that’s probably the biggest mistake. That’s the first decision and then you come down the decision tree, the next most important thing is to get into Marketplace, I’ll say, as quickly as possible. Again, this is where Tackle can help. They can simplify all the backend coding and integration and alignment that you need to integrate and take advantage of everything that the Microsoft Marketplace has to offer.

Darren Yetzer:
And so we just look at it as an additional storefront. And so we’re able to, with Tackle’s help, go through and update our offering and get into the Marketplace as quickly as possible. The reason I think Tackle and the whole process is so beautiful, is it just condenses that timeframe to get something into market? So it enabled us to start selling the Marketplace almost instantaneously and get our sellers on board. And so that, the second thing like I mentioned, is to get into Marketplace as quickly as possible. And then the third is make sure you have executive support as you do this. Make sure ever who in the company is responsible for the Marketplace, it’s a senior leader because the Marketplace cuts across most of the functional areas in the company. You need to think about how to market it. You need to think about how to transact. You need to think possibly about engineering resources.

Darren Yetzer:
And so the more it’s done at a senior level, the more it becomes part of the company’s DNA. And we had that executive support. Our CEO and downwards are big proponents of Marketplace. And so our CEO, her name’s Bernadette Nixon, she constantly taps on my shoulder and other people’s shoulder, just making sure that we’re doing everything we can from a Marketplace perspective.

Kristin Bourassa:
So Darren, executive support is extremely crucial to Marketplace success. How would you recommend someone kind of win over executive support, if they don’t have it already?

Darren Yetzer:
Yeah. I think the first is, I would encourage each of the executives, if these are startups, to understand the Marketplace and the potential and look at some of the data that Tackle and Microsoft and other Marketplace research firms are providing in terms of the number of customers, the trends and everything like that.

Darren Yetzer:
So part of being a good business executive is you need to understand the bigger picture and understand all of that data. For me in my role, it’s putting together a business case and understanding the number of transactions that would be accelerated and the number of transactions that might not even happen if our marketplace listing was not live. It was, we got some very strong feedback from senior people, and a lot of our customers saying, “Hey, if you can’t procure through the Marketplace, we can’t buy your solution right now.” And so that’s very black and white and it’s very easy to quantify.

Darren Yetzer:
So putting together that business case of here’s the upside that’s associated with a number of transactions and then that just sort of breeds success. And so it becomes a channel that can continue to grow and grow faster.

Kristin Bourassa:
That’s great advice. Paul, what do you think?

Paul Horn:
Yeah, I mean one of the things that I think you have to take into account here is the fact that Marketplace is not necessarily a, if you build it, they will come type of model, right? So it’s, you need to have it, for sure. But you also need to ensure that you are driving a strong co-sell motion with Microsoft and, thankfully, that’s something that’s part of Microsoft’s DNA is partnering and driving co-sell in the field, ensuring you’re driving customer value, but also making sure that you’re tied off with Microsoft account teams and everything.

Paul Horn:
And having a Marketplace offering is going to make that easier for you. So I think that really goes hand in hand. I think that’s a critical piece to all of this, is to ensure that you’ve got marketplace, you’ve got a co-sell motion, and you’re off to the races.

Kristin Bourassa:
Fantastic. Jared, is there anything-

Jared Prins:
[inaudible 00:18:05] add onto what Paul and Darren said, just to amplify it. That’s extremely important to have that executive buy in and that strategy around the Marketplace. You can’t just set it and forget it, and assume business is going to come, as Paul mentioned, that you definitely have to put resources behind it and continue to build that trust across Microsoft, in your own Marketplace journey and build those relationships out. And that’s where you’re going to see a ton of success throughout co-sell.

Darren Yetzer:
And related to that is inside of each of your organizations, do you want to make sure everybody’s educated on the Marketplace? So the sales motion with Marketplace might be slightly different than without the Marketplace. And so you need to make sure that you’re bringing the internal teams along. It’s often, I think as sellers, we get excited and start facing externally with our partnerships and looking at customer opportunities, that you really need to bring all the sellers along so they can position the benefits of the partnership and the benefits of hearing through the Marketplace. Because they’re the ones that are talking on the front line with either the customer or with the Microsoft account executive.

Kristin Bourassa:
Jared, did you have anything you wanted to add there?

Jared Prins:
Yeah. All great. All great stuff.

Kristin Bourassa:
So my next question is for you, Jared, what advice would you give to a startup who’s looking to start their journey and list their solution on the marketplace. I know you alluded to some of it earlier, but are there any other tips and tricks you could provide?

Jared Prins:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would encourage, if you’re a startup, no matter what phase you’re at, if I could just plug Founders Hub, it’s a great platform. It’s this digital platform that we built in Microsoft for Startups to really enable you to grow and build out our ecosystem of support for startups internally, again, as we’re helping you build your product, test it, and then as we’re helping you get on the Marketplace and help you influence your business in that direction, as well as support you in your onboarding and understanding what it takes to get listed and transactable in the marketplace and all the benefits that come from that. And as well as with that Founders Hub, you also get opportunities and access to Azure Credits, first and third party offers that we have, a massive mentor network within Microsoft, where you have Microsoft sellers, maybe net mentoring, startups. And again, that can provide tons of opportunities as you’re looking to build your Marketplace presence and network across our account teams, obviously start building that trust, you’re able to provide.

Jared Prins:
It’ll look into your business a little bit deeper, share that value and the business opportunity, and not just the cool, innovative product, but what’s the value that you’re really bringing to that account and to that customer, something that’ll go a long way. So all that kind of tied together, just as a launchpad from our Founders Hub platform, as you’re looking to accelerate your business, is super important, And I think something that we would encourage all startups looking to connect with Microsoft, to join Founders Hub, and begin to tell their Microsoft story and put out their own value proposition through our platform and lean on us and the support programs and personnel and teams that we have to kind of help influence your business and get you off in the right direction.

Kristin Bourassa:
Fantastic. Now, Jared, Paul and Darren have mentioned co-sell multiple times. Does Founders Hub do anything in regards to co-sell? Is there anything that viewers might need to be aware of when it comes to that from a Microsoft-

Jared Prins:
Yeah. We’ll rely heavily on our Marketplace team in terms of helping with the co-sell motion and getting you listed on the Marketplace, but we definitely have the enablement, the collateral, the things that are needed and best practices and scenarios that are helpful to get you prepared for that co-sell conversation, how to go prepared and reaching out to those account teams, and as well as other programs across the aisle within our Marketplace support to kind of help you as you kind of venture off on that journey within the Marketplace.

Jared Prins:
I don’t know if Paul and Darren, you want to speak firsthand into your experience, maybe with launching on the Marketplace and working with our teams that kind of helped set you up for success there, since that would be your direct… You guys probably had direct knowledge and opportunity there in that area. But we’ll definitely at least get you connected through from Founders Hub and kind of platform you out as you utilize our network and get you connected across our teams.

Darren Yetzer:
Two things I would add to that is Microsoft provides a plethora of best practices and documentation and stuff like that, so one, make sure you’re prioritized. So think about what you’re trying to do with Microsoft in a co-sell motion and the Marketplace. Now it’s not, I think Paul mentioned at the beginning, it’s not a building, your customers are going to come type thing to get started. And so you have to be little laser focused on, “I’m going after a specific customer segment. I’m going after a specific geography. I’m going after a specific solution. And then how can Microsoft help me with that?” And, and having very clear asks of Microsoft, if you’re engaged in a co-sell motion.

Darren Yetzer:
I think where I’ve seen it go awry is if I’m on a call with Microsoft and there isn’t clarity, and there isn’t precision around what Microsoft can do to help, Microsoft is not going to go in and close a deal. Microsoft is not going to go in and connect me to a purchaser or a senior decision maker. I have to do most of the selling work, and I need to rely on Microsoft to be the big partner and to help educate the customer on why choosing a Microsoft vendor or a Microsoft partner makes sense, and then why purchasing through the marketplace makes sense. So knowing roles and responsibilities is extremely important, and setting those expectations internally is also equally important.

Paul Horn:
And the only thing I would add on that is actually, in addition to the foundation of the co-sell motion, which depending on your journey, right, you may already be doing today, or you might need to bring that to the table. In our case, we were a strong co-sell partner, co-sell partner of the year, five years ago. And so we had that foundation, and adding Marketplace to it kind of was second nature.

Paul Horn:
But there is something that a lot of partners, from what I’ve seen, don’t leverage, and that is the Marketplace Rewards. And so as you get deployed in Marketplace, you get access to different things, blog posts, to collateral content creation opportunities, and greater visibility opportunities. And that’s, in our experience, in my opinion, we’re under utilizing that. We’re going to be changing that this year, but that’s a big one, and there’s a lot of value out there that will help you mature that model more quickly.

Kristin Bourassa:
Yeah. We’ve been working with Marketplace Rewards too, and it’s a really, really awesome benefit that’s offered to companies, that list their product on the Marketplace. So, Darren, have you had any experience with Marketplace Rewards?

Darren Yetzer:
We have. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, one of our first and largest transactions was through the Microsoft Marketplace and the Microsoft Rewards are tiered based on dollar amount, based on those transactions. And so we had quite a bit of an executive visibility. We had internal win wires. There was quite a few things that we’re able to do with senior folks within Microsoft and then do more grassroot campaigns. And so it’s for real. Sometimes you see these lists of things and you’re like, “Is this list really for real?” And everything that was on the list we’re able to, and continue to take advantage of. We continue just to double down in strengthening our Microsoft presence as a partner.

Darren Yetzer:
So I think that’s also important to keep in mind that there’s a Marketplace, but then there’s also being a good partner of Microsoft. And so making sure that we’re continuing to build and evolve our solution with Azure and other integrations with Microsoft and things like that, those things are important. And the more you can tell that connected story, the more attention you’ll get from the Microsoft sellers and the stronger we, with Microsoft, can talk to the customer. So it’s exciting and it’s for real, too.

Kristin Bourassa:
So to just recap, the three programs that we’ve covered so far, Founders Hub is one that makes sense for a startup to apply for, Marketplace Rewards is a great benefit that happens when you list or publish your solution to the commercial marketplace, and then co-sell is another program that Microsoft’s created to allow you, as an ISV, to develop your relationship with the Microsoft field.

Kristin Bourassa:
Now, guys, is there anything from like that a startup might forget when they’re starting their Marketplace journey that you could think of and to kind of say, “Hey, here’s a gotcha that you might run into when you go and start your partnership with Microsoft or even publish to the Marketplace” that we haven’t covered yet?

Paul Horn:
So, I mean, from Nasuni’s perspective, I think one of the things, and very thankful we did this, but it was, we actually removed some of those gotchas from the equation by working with a company who has done this so often, like Tackle, right? I mean, that’s… Not to have a big Tackle commercial, but that actually helped to remove some of the risk and actually created a more seamless process. And so we didn’t run into those because we were working with someone who had already done this, does this day in and day out. And so that was a big help.

Paul Horn:
The only other thing I would say is that there are some interesting features within Marketplace that are not in big flashing lights, like things like turning on a one month free trial or offering out a potential longer trial for customers, right? There’s different effects that those can have on the business. And those are whole other conversations that we didn’t even start getting into until the past year. And so it took us about a year in Marketplace to even figure out that kind of stuff was there and capable, and it could potentially change your selling and buying behavior.

Paul Horn:
So I think that’s probably what I would look at from… just make sure you’re reading [inaudible 00:28:13]. There’s so much out there and the functionality continues to get richer on a daily basis.

Kristin Bourassa:
So you alluded to something there. How did marketplace adoption go with Nasuni’s sales team?

Paul Horn:
So initially, it has been viewed as just another route to market, right? And pretty simple actually, where it’s we work with reseller partners on a daily basis and here’s marketplace, right? And so it was, they had the capability to close either way.

Paul Horn:
Now, we have evolved that. And so now, it’s actually become a part of our rhythm. Like we’re asking upfront in engagements with customers, how do you want to purchase? Or when we get to that point, it’s, we’re trying to take that off the table sooner, so we know the purchase route. Because the other thing that’s really important to consider here is margin. And so a traditional reseller model, you’re looking at anywhere from 10, 20, potentially as high as depending on your model, 30 points of margin, for a deal that goes through a reseller partner, and Marketplace is three points.

Paul Horn:
And so the faster you know that in a deal, the faster you can do all your margin calculations and you know which price points you can hit for your business and for your customer to try and get that through faster. And so at the end of the day, now that that’s evolved, we’re seeing our teams latch onto it even more. So we actually had some interesting feedback. One of our sales teams rolled this over to me, actually, just a couple weeks ago. We had a customer that told us that buying through marketplace was easier than ordering takeout. And I was like, there it is.

Kristin Bourassa:
That is such a good analogy.

Jared Prins:
Need to Tweet that out.

Paul Horn:
Right? Exactly. Oh yeah, we’re working on it, but I mean, that just gives you the perspective of where we are, right? And so as a result, right, it started as something simple, a separate route to market that… and now it’s evolved, we’re using it as part of our engagement motions earlier. We’re seeing customers latch onto it faster because they know that it could be a potentially shorter procurement process. Microsoft sellers love co-selling with Marketplace incentivized solutions. So it’s a win, win, win.

Kristin Bourassa:
Darren, I know you alluded to this earlier about having support across the organization. What about you?

Darren Yetzer:
Yeah. I would echo a lot of the stuff that Paul said. The earlier you can triage any opportunity and you think of a Marketplace and a Microsoft partnership as a route to market, that does a lot of things. One is it helps frame the opportunity slightly differently and you can make sure you’re delivering what the customer’s looking for. So that’s first and foremost. Second, presenting options to the customer is incredibly important, particularly when it comes to buying and the different buying options and stuff like that.

Darren Yetzer:
Jared made a comment that a lot of customers like to purchase through the Marketplace, because it can de depredate their enterprise agreement. Microsoft calls it a MACC, but a lot of customers we’re finding, just want a single bill. Like they’re trying to streamline procurement. They just want a single bill from a single vendor, sort of buying something on a credit card, you get your monthly credit card statement and it lists out all the vendors and services that you purchased or procured over the last month. A lot of customers are looking for the exact same thing.

Darren Yetzer:
So the more you can bring those pieces earlier into the conversation and talk to the customer and the procurement side of the house, in addition to the business side of the house and connect those dots, Microsoft has been a big company, has a lot of overlay resources. And so they have people focused on here’s how to take advantage of Marketplace transactions. They have Marketplace sellers, they have account executives, they have sales specialists. And so there’s a lot of different resources that you can pull in.

Darren Yetzer:
And the more triaging you do up front, the smarter you can be to when you do a co-sell of bringing in those right people to help you based on where you are in the co-sell process. So this is where I think going back to… double down on what I said earlier, like have an executive buy-in is so extremely important because you need to have somebody thinking about it at a very senior level, connecting all those dots, everything from customer success and our business as a renewal component or a SAS solution.

Darren Yetzer:
And so making sure that the customer success and the renewals team is part of the marketplace conversations, the net new business, the resellers, as Paul was talking about. There’s sophistication when you bring in other resellers and stuff like that. And the Microsoft Marketplace handles it all. So it’s incredible. Like every option and every permeation is there. That’s what they know Microsoft does really well. I think they’ve thought through every different angle of how to make it easy for the customer to purchase.

Kristin Bourassa:
Nice. Now, you mentioned the channel. I know that Microsoft has… They advertise that there’s the CSP program, which has 90,000 participants. Like, do you think that Marketplace is a good vehicle for scale? So if you’re a smaller startup looking to get your product to market, do you think you can leverage the Marketplace to like extend one’s reach or kind of, what are your thoughts there? We’ll start with you, Darren.

Darren Yetzer:
The short answer is yes, but with anything that has immense scale, the most important thing is to start in a focused, I would say a small, I don’t know if pilot’s the right word. It’s word I kind of use when I’m starting something small, and try to figure out what motion works for your company based on if it’s a product-led or a sales-led, sales motion that each of the companies for the attendees that are participating today have as their mainstream. And so you want to build on a motion that you’re good at within your company. And then look to scale that out.

Darren Yetzer:
I think sometimes with Microsoft, too much choice can cause paralysis. And so what you really want to do is look at it from your point of view, you running the business and then looking at different pieces that you can augment on the Microsoft partnership and the Microsoft platform and the Microsoft programs, the Microsoft Marketplace. I don’t think Microsoft is impressed if you do all 50,000 permutations. They would rather, you have more success with just the one or two. And so scale is great, and you should have a plan to think about scale, but I wouldn’t have a scattered brain approach to scaling. I would think about how you scale based on what you do well, and just continue to add fuel to that fire and just grow, grow, grow that way.

Kristin Bourassa:
So what you’re saying is they shouldn’t publish their solution to the Marketplace and then activate all CSPs and say, “My solution’s available.” It goes back to-

Darren Yetzer:
Yeah, I’d probably like tap on one CSP’s shoulder and say, “Hey, would you want to try this?” And then you can kind of see, does that model work? And then go to the second and the third one. And before you do all CSPs, because that’s a worldwide complexity automatically sets in and you have different things like currencies and stuff like that. So you can get ahead of yourself really quickly.

Darren Yetzer:
And so thinking about it in a thoughtful approach of, “Hey, here’s how we’re going to expand. And here are some of the territories or solution areas that we want our CSPs to be part of.” And Microsoft allows you to pick and choose. You can actually name the CSPs that you want to see your solution, that you want to have visibility to your solution. And so taking advantage of that flexibility often requires you to build a plan and do the work up front and then execute against that plan.

Kristin Bourassa:
Paul, do you have anything to add?

Paul Horn:
Well, and I would just say, if you’re looking at leveraging the CSP model, it’s important to understand what markets or segments you’re going to be focusing in, right? If you’re going to be focusing on enterprise or that SMC, Microsoft SMC segment, or SMB, right? If it’s going to be SMB into SMC, CSP is a no brainer. But to Darren’s point, it’s really, test it out, right? And that’s where there are gotchas, and then there’s you find these pads where you can streamline it out and land it.

Paul Horn:
And so you want to just… You don’t want to roll it out to 90,000 CSP partners and find out you had a gotcha in the mix. That’s going to be 90,000 gotchas, right? But I mean, we’ve dabbled in that a little bit with CSP. I mean, our market is solidly enterprise and SMC. And so for like for our business, it hasn’t been a big thing for us to be looking at, but it’s certainly growing the opportunities definitely there. Microsoft does a great job of building out their CSP partner network. And if you can leverage that, I mean, by all means, do it, but start small, grow up big, and I think you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can scale.

Darren Yetzer:
This is one thing Tackle does really well. I think Tackle has some great best practices and Tackle does a lot of the heavy engineering work that if you were going to build your own Marketplace listing, your company would be on the hook to do all the engineering and the test everything, build everything, deploy everything, but Tackle has all the modules and makes it very easy just to, I’ll say, as simple as plug and play.

Darren Yetzer:
So it’s easy to build out a plan or a model and test it for a period of couple weeks and then revise it, change it, update it, all that kind of stuff. The cost of Tackle subscription, I think, is incredibly cheap for what you get and having real live people to pick up the phone and chat with you around the business side of it, but then also the implementation and the deployment and the billing side of it, which is sort of unrelated, but they have to come together when you’re building out the picture.

Paul Horn:
Yeah. And by the way, just to add onto that, I just saw a question that came in about CSP and how it transacts through Marketplace. It’s the transaction, I believe, is still it’s on the CSP agreement, right? So again, this is one of those things you want to dig in on. You don’t necessarily get the insight on who the end user customer is. So if you need to have that for your business, that can be a challenge. You want to definitely develop a relationship with that CSP so you can get that kind of information.

Paul Horn:
And then for the value to the customer, buying through marketplace, there’s different values that the customers will get. If a customer has a MACC or a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, typically they’re enterprised SMC space and may not be purchasing on CSP, but if they do purchase via CSP, they do not decrement their MACC, as of today. If they don’t buy via CSP, then they would. Again, there’s a lot of variables in that question, I’m kind of hitting it at a high level, but that gives you some… Hopefully that provides a decent answer.

Jared Prins:
That’s great. Just to reiterate what Paul and Darren were saying earlier. I think Marketplace provides that opportunity for immense scale, and with a few clips. You can open up to the 90,000 CSP partners that we have, but I think it’s important to do the crawl, walk, run, style approach, take it with those first few partners, working with the kinks, have your strategy, figure out where the success is and pitfalls are, and then from there, be able to expand and land your approach.

Jared Prins:
We have seen to be successful with startups as well. And again, a lot of opportunity out there, a lot of things that’ll continue to be improved upon and things that will continue to be adding to the mix as well and enhance the features and benefits of Marketplace. So we’re incredibly excited and it’s great to hear from Paul and Darren on the successes that they’ve seen, what they’ve also learned in the process and how to better position their business for scale and just more opportunity.

Kristin Bourassa:
Yeah, absolutely. And guys, that’s great feedback, start small, but know that there is a world of opportunity out there just waiting for you. So with that in mind, is Marketplace a good channel for a smaller ISV? So we talked about CSP, we talked about scalability. Like if I’m a small ISV, is Marketplace a potentially good solution for me?

Darren Yetzer:
Absolutely. I would say you have to have it, but you don’t have to dedicate a tremendous amount of resources to it. It’s almost like I often think about it buying something with cash or credit. Like you want to have a credit card, you want to have that option, but you’re not going to build out a whole different sales cycle and invest a tremendous amount of resources. That’s again, that’s where Tackle helps, because I think Tackle can kind of offsets some of those internal investments that you might have to make on your own if you’re running a small company. Push Tackle to help make those decisions and things like that. But just having that flexibility and that option there. If you think of your own daily life, if you went somewhere and someplace didn’t take credit cards, there’s a good chance you might not go back to that place.

Darren Yetzer:
And so just having that ability to like, yes, you can buy through the Marketplace and just, it’s an insurance blanket and it’s going to continue to be more and more mainstream as the world we live in, like every single thing is with credit card today. So I think that’s the analogy that we kind of think about it internally inside of Algolia.

Kristin Bourassa:
Yeah. Paul, what about from your perspective?

Paul Horn:
Yeah, I mean, it’s at this point, our business and with our partnership with Microsoft, I mean, it is 100% critical that we have marketplace transactability. I mean, it’s just, you look at where Microsoft is focusing on, you look at the big, for lack of a better way to say it, but there basically is a check box of do you have this? Do you have this? Are you driving X number of dollars of revenue of Microsoft ACR? Do you have a Marketplace offering? Are you a SAS solution? Like you just go down this list of where they’re going to allocate their time and their resources, and marketplaces on that list. You got to have it.

Paul Horn:
Whether you’re doing big transactions or not, right, you’re doing it… You just need a couple to get them through the door. I think that’s going to be a requirement going forward for Microsoft partnership, especially from an ISV perspective.

Paul Horn:
The other thing though, to take into consideration here is what does your business model look like? How do customers deploy your solution, right? Is it as easy as a couple of clicks and you’re standing up in instance in Azure, or is there a little bit more to it? And I think that can also help direct your path, but either way, you got to have Marketplace, for sure.

Kristin Bourassa:
So what I’m hearing is you should sign up for your Azure credit card, your Azure Marketplace credit card today. Awesome. So, Jared, is there anything you’d like to add there or…

Jared Prins:
Yeah, I mean, I think we’re still early. I know adoption is accelerating of marketplaces, but I think it’s still early on. So whether you’re small, big, especially if you’re small, I mean, there’s still time for you to build up your Marketplace presence, to build your strategy, to execute well in it, crawl, walk, run. And by the time it is mainstream, as Darren was saying, maybe in a few years or later this year, depending on how fast the market shifts, you’ll be ready to take on the opportunities and have a better position for yourself and your company moving forward. So never too early.

Kristin Bourassa:
So guys, before we open it up to Q & A, we have about 15 minutes left. So do you have anything you’d like to add? Any closing thoughts? Anything we haven’t covered that you think a startup should know when they’re considering starting their partnership with Microsoft or looking to publish their solution to the commercial marketplace?

Darren Yetzer:
One thing that we’re contemplating now is having multiple Marketplace listings. So we think of the Marketplace catalog, go and search on multiple different solutions, multiple different services, multiple different geographies. And so we’re investigating now like, would it make sense for us as we move forward to have, as I mentioned, like we search and recommendations in that space? Would it make sense possibly to have just a search solution or just a recommendation solution for something that’s maybe more geographic or vertically focused, like a financial search versus a retail search?

Darren Yetzer:
And so I think that’s one of the nice things about the marketplace and the marketplace catalog is… and with Tackle too, it’s just easy to sort of pick up and drop and rename and create a brand new Marketplace listing. And then you can even sort of AB test them and see which one’s working better and all the stuff that you would do as a digital marketer.

Kristin Bourassa:
Fantastic. That’s a good one that one. Definitely missed that initial question. So that’s awesome. Thank you. Paul, do you have anything?

Paul Horn:
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing I would look at is the trending on partnership progression that Microsoft is looking at, right? Whether you’re a smaller startup, to a larger company, you look at the co-sell evolution over the years with Microsoft, and we’ve seen this shift from developing the solutions and capturing them, and this old solution catalog that Microsoft has used for years, and now that’s moved into Partner Center, right? So if you’re in Partner Center, you can take a look at your co-sell solution listings and put the necessary documentation up there to show that you’re co-sell ready. And then basically make the ask to be co-sell incentivized, right?

Paul Horn:
And then what we’re also seeing is this merge of Marketplace coming into the mix here. And so basically Marketplace being an easier path to going through the co-sell process and making it more interesting for Microsoft sellers. And I know there was a question out on the Q & A about how are Microsoft sellers incentivized to work with partners on Marketplace or through just a co-sell motion. There’s news coming out next week, I’m sure, with the Microsoft’s Inspire Conference. So there’s not a lot out there right now on exactly what that looks like publicly, but that’s something, take a look at those and look at where Marketplace fits in. And I can tell you, I’ve been hearing Marketplace is going to just get bigger.

Paul Horn:
And so being able to have a Marketplace offering, transacting on Marketplace, and co-selling with Microsoft, Microsoft sellers are going to see benefit in some way, just a matter of what that exactly looks like. But I would say that you’ve got to do it, without question. It’s looking at the trending. This year, for this new Microsoft fiscal year, which started in July 1st, and I’m sure moving forward, it’s just going to continue to be a major focus area.

Kristin Bourassa:
Fantastic. Jared, would you agree?

Jared Prins:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Ditto to everything he had said.

Kristin Bourassa:
All right, guys. Well, let’s dive into Q and A. Let’s see what we got here. So our first question is… All right. It looks like Erin asked, what demand gen activities are you doing to drive marketplace visibility and transactions? Any particular activity you are seeing better results around?

Darren Yetzer:
Inside of our company, inside of Algolia we have a sales-led motion and a product-led motion. So an SLG and a PLG motion. So demand gen on the sales-led side is creating case studies, it’s creating sales tools, it’s creating heroes out of people that have won a marketplace transaction. And so it’s spreading the word in a thoughtful and connected way. So that, we’ve seen getting that first win and getting that first win publicized. We had a public case study with our big first win. And so things like that definitely help on the SLG side.

Darren Yetzer:
The PLG side, there’s ways you can drive demand with Microsoft. So some of these, the Marketplace Rewards and things that we’re talking about earlier, to drive demand to the Marketplace, because Microsoft is going to continue and is driving demand to its own Marketplace. So driving demand to the Marketplace. The other is including the Marketplace in any outbound demand generation or trials that you’re doing, and you can have the customer directly trial from the Algolia site or from the Microsoft Marketplace, Microsoft Azure site.

Kristin Bourassa:
Very cool. Paul, do you have anything you want?

Paul Horn:
Yeah. I mean, from our perspective, yeah, we include that in some of our existing go to market activities, whether it’s webinars or marketing campaigns that we’re doing to drive new customer interest. If they hear that there’s an option to transact in Marketplace, they may jump on that faster. We’re also looking at some things like… Right now, we’re kind of using them more as deal acceleration opportunities, which kind of include in GTM, just further down the sales process.

Paul Horn:
Things like being able to provide one month free trial for customers. That helps to take the initial sting out of it, right, where they have a month to kind of check it out. And within that 30 days, if they don’t want it, they cancel the order. But then beyond that, then they’re locked in, moving forward. And that’s actually become a good tool for us. And I think we’ll see more of that moving forward. So right now, that’s kind of what we’re leveraging.

Paul Horn:
But then you’ve got all the, as I mentioned, Marketplace Rewards, right? There’s a lot of capabilities in there that I know. Again, we’re not doing enough and we’re going to be doing more, but I highly recommend looking at those. And that’s things like, when you hit a certain revenue transaction threshold in Marketplace, all up, you get a blog post, you get a prime listing on the front page for a couple weeks. Like that kind of stuff will help as well.

Kristin Bourassa:
Fantastic. And it looks like Bruce asked, are these discussions here primarily for the Azure Marketplace or also AppSource? And Bruce, to answer your question, it’s for the commercial Marketplace, right? So Paul or Darren, are you… Like does Algolia or Nasuni do anything with AppSource? Is AppSource something that makes sense for your business?

Paul Horn:
Yeah. I mean, AppSource, it’s been around a long time. And initially, it’s just a way to capture those mono workplace solutions, dynamic solutions, as well as services. And so with Azure marketplace, you actually, today, you can’t transact professional services. It’s software only. And so that’s definitely a delineator, whereas AppSource is more of a listing… kind of listing, getting it published, getting it out there that you’ve got an offering. And I think some of those, you can transact, but a lot of them are, contact us for more information kind of scenarios. But with Azure Marketplace, very transactional, very… allows for that scale. And I see AppSource more as a lead gen opportunity as well as focusing in different solution areas. That’s just been my personal experience.

Kristin Bourassa:
Awesome. Darren, do you have anything to add on that one? No?

Darren Yetzer:
We’re not in AppSource, so I guess I would echo everything Paul said. And then we’re focused more on the Azure commercial Marketplace.

Kristin Bourassa:
So Bruce, both Nasuni and Algolia are on the Azure Marketplace. So to answer your question, this was a little more focused towards Azure.

Kristin Bourassa:
And then, let’s see. I believe, Paul, you already answered this. But it was, for CSP deals, the docs say that you could extend the offer to the CSP, but then the CSP sell outside of Marketplace. Is that right?

Paul Horn:
That’s correct. Yeah. So the CSP… And Jared, maybe, I don’t know if you want to answer since you’re the official Microsoft person here. But that’s the way the model works, is that the CSP then transacts on the CSP agreement using your… and to be very clear, your public offer. So you cannot send customized private offers. It has to be public, as of today. Hopefully that changes soon. But that’s the model today. And then the CSP then collects the billing. All the billing funnels back through the CSP to you as the public listing partner, and then the CSP theoretically can actually charge whatever margins or provide whatever discount they want beyond what you’re already providing to them through the Azure Marketplace.

Jared Prins:
Yep. All correct.

Kristin Bourassa:
Awesome. Well, if there aren’t any more questions, I’m going to give everyone seven minutes back in their day. Real quick, let’s just see if we have anything else.

Kristin Bourassa:
And thank you all so much for your time. This has been, at least very, very beneficial for me. And it’s always good to see you guys. Hopefully, the audience was able to take away some nuggets.

Kristin Bourassa:
To recap everyone, three programs that are definitely worth investigating as you start or continue your journey with Microsoft in the commercial Marketplace is co-sell, Marketplace Rewards and then Founders Hub, which is a great program that Microsoft’s created for startups at any stage of their journey, to receive benefits and support from Microsoft. And if you need anything, just reach out to us here at Tackle, and we’re happy to help. So have a wonderful day and thank you so much.

Darren Yetzer:
Thanks, Kristin. Thanks everybody.

Jared Prins:
[inaudible 00:54:32]. Appreciate it.