Are you a B2B software company?
Are you built on, for, or with the cloud?
Are the majority of your customers embracing cloud or using your products on one of the clouds?
How do you sell? Direct? Traditional VAR/Channel model?
So, if your products are built for cloud and run in the cloud, why not sell via the cloud?
Most of the time when we ask software companies this question, they don’t have a great answer.
It is inevitable that all products and services will eventually be bought via the cloud. This is true for everything from office supplies to B2B software. If that’s the case…why is everyone still defaulting to selling their software direct?
If you are a CEO, CRO, VP of Alliances, or really anyone at all that cares about B2B software revenue, this blog and our company, Tackle.io, are for you.
So who are we?
We are privileged at Tackle.io to not only help software companies embrace selling via the cloud, but we also use our platform to sell the same way. Our company is made up of career Enterprise and B2B software sellers, Operators and Technologists. We’ve lived the “build a direct” revenue model at many companies – small and large – and believe that the Cloud Marketplaces are fast becoming a new default go to market strategy. We make it easy for software companies to embrace this movement.
Our customers include companies like New Relic, PagerDuty, CyberArk, Druva, Tenable, Cylance, Unifi Software, ParkMyCloud, and many others. We use our SaaS platform to make it fast and easy for these companies to sell via the cloud. Our customers and many others have embraced what we believe to be the next major trend in Cloud. Check out Tackle.io on the AWS Marketplace!
So you want to sell via the marketplace. Where should you start?
You should start with the AWS Marketplace.
Did you know any company with an AWS contract can buy your software through the AWS Marketplace?
- You can list all kinds of software – SaaS, Machine Image, Clustered Software, Containers, Machine Learning Models, Business Applications. . . the types of software delivery models are growing rapidly!
- AWS offers a variety of business models to enable you to align to the way your buyers would like to buy: metered, hourly, monthly, annual, and SaaS.
- Most enterprises do not buy “off the shelf,” so AWS created the ability to do Private Offers, which can be customized to enable ISV’s to sell faster to their enterprise buyers. Private Offers allow for the extension of buyer-unique terms (eg. special legal terms, incentive pricing, etc.).
- ISV’s that are embracing Private Offers are seeing explosive growth. To learn more, you can read up on our series of blog posts about Private Offers written by Our VP of Customer Success, Christine Maxey.
- Many buyers are establishing multi-year agreements with the Cloud Providers and you, as an ISV, can take advantage of that budget for your software. Purchases made via the Marketplace consume annual spend commitments.
- Procurement is starting to look at how to consolidate relationships and, as more and more progressive buyers make cloud-first commitments, we are seeing vendors excluded because they are not in the cloud Marketplace.
- AWS compensates their field sellers on Marketplace transactions, so there is an incentive for them to help and include your software in larger, more complex transactions (eg. embedding your software as part of a Data Center migration initiative).
You as a Seller Win – Faster time to revenue, ecommerce channel, bigger sales distribution force. Immediately garner the attention of a much larger sales team (AWS).
The Buyer Wins – Get what they want where they want it, meet their cloud commitments.
AWS Wins – More software bought through the marketplace likely lands on AWS core services as it is the easiest place to run software.
AWS Seller Wins – Get compensated when their customers buy through marketplaces.
It really is a win, win, win, win situation.
Once laid out this way, it may seem intuitive but if you weren’t aware of all of this, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Generally, when I walk revenue-focused executives through this talk track, they are aware of the Marketplace, but lack the context on how to truly take advantage of this (relatively) new channel to drive sales.
So how do I get started?
#1. Compliment your business model Day 1 with the AWS Marketplace.
We are using this model inside of Tackle. We default to Marketplace as our primary distribution model. Our salesforce knows Marketplace decreases time to revenue and allows our sellers to focus on value, rather than term negotiation.
Our team has been able to close deals in less than 1 day when they go through a Private Offer via the marketplace. Any time we engage in a Direct Agreement, the negotiation takes weeks, if not months.
Our platform + Process can help you open this channel fast.
#2. This new channel requires (seller and buyer) education
There is a learning curve for your Field, Business Operations, Finance, Legal, Customer Success, Product, and Executive Teams. We believe the best way to learn is to Do, and we provide a guide from Tackle to make this learning-via-doing process simple.
The Tackle team helps your team stay focused on the desired outcomes – revenue and value to your clients – and avoid getting tangled in the nuances of Marketplace.
If you want to get started with AWS Marketplace or to hear more about how to change the way you sell via Marketplace, we would love for you to reach out to us at hello@tackle.io to get started – or follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for the latest in Marketplace content, customer stories and Marketplace specific events. We are seeing huge acceleration toward cloud Marketplaces being THE place to buy software. Will you be ready?
