Level-Up Your Cloud Marketplace Game
Leadership from DataStax and StreamSets talk about their journey from digital-selling newbie to Marketplace champ.
It’s the 4th quarter for most of us in the software business. If you’re a software Sales Org, this is your Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Superbowl all in one. Years will be made. Quotas will be exceeded. Commissions earned and earned again. All of which come with the requisite amount of stress, scrambling, and obsessing over every last deal and detail. Your friends from Tackle are in the same boat – and we’re here to help. Those of you who have an offset fiscal calendar can still benefit from the tips below – just with less December-centric stress on your heads ;).
As we all look for angles and advantages, there is no better avenue to explore than leveraging Marketplaces to drive deals. Looking to grow a deal? Looking to save some churn? Looking to find some hidden budget dollars? Follow us, friends. To help ensure your year-end is full of joy (and success), we’ve compiled a list of some Marketplace tips – enjoy the read and give us a call if you need help running any of these plays. Tackle has your back.
It’s no secret that companies are voting for the hyperscale Cloud Providers with their wallets. Every year, organizations you are selling to are dedicating budget dollars to their Cloud Provider of choice (AWS, Azure, GCP)…and there is goodness in that for you. Why? Because committed spend is generally use it or lose it. Better, when companies commit 50M, 100M, 200M to a Cloud Provider, there is rarely a concrete plan to consume all of those dollars. With many of these agreements expiring in Q4, there is often an excess of dollars left unspent. Purchases made through Cloud Marketplaces help to burn down committed spend, which means you can help your buyer meet their contractual obligations.
If ARR is the lifeblood of a SaaS company, churn is its kryptonite. How about some churn insurance? Renewing your customers who are in danger of churning (because they lost budget or had budget cut) by bringing their renewal through a Cloud Marketplace can offer your buyer access to a different budget. Budgets shrink, we get it. You know what budgets continue to grow? Cloud budgets.
One trend we are seeing as top Marketplace sellers really scale their business is extra attention on how Marketplace fees are accounted for. This also frequently comes up as a compensation discussion around keeping channel and Marketplace deals “comp neutral.” If you are closing a deal worth $100k and a hypothetical 7% Marketplace listing fee, are you booking $100k or $93k? To make the point, are you leaving $7k out of your top line, your quota achievement, and the resulting commission payment?
Savvy ISVs are making a change and shifting listing fees into cost of goods sold (COGS), driving up their top line performance and reducing any related friction to embracing Marketplace selling in their field organization. Your organization likely has a very good reason for how the dollars are allocated.
There is no better influencer with the Cloud Providers than successful customer outcomes and related use cases and reference architectures. You have Q4 pipeline hanging in the balance and want the Cloud Providers to help you get those deals across the finish line. Guess what, so does every other ISV in the ecosystem. Why you? Simple answer: Because the solution you are offering delivers real customer value, as documented by your win at ACME Corp, who had a very similar use case, or was in the same vertical market, or saw a successful co-sell motion with a peer at that Cloud Provider.
By understanding the mechanics of your customers’ agreements with the Cloud Providers, leveraging the flexibility of Marketplaces, designing smart incentive plans, and/or making sure you’re clearly communicating your value to the right teams within the Cloud Provider ecosystems, you should be able to do what hundreds of your peers are doing in Q4: leveraging the Cloud Providers and Cloud Marketplaces to increase your chances of success and tap into the power of digital selling to smash your quota!!!