How CrowdStrike and Tackle work together to scale their AWS Private Offer volume
The AWS Seller’s Experience event, hosted by Tackle and AWS, brought together hundreds of experts and top Marketplace sellers to discuss a variety of Cloud Marketplace topics. Representatives from CrowdStrike, A Cloud Guru, F5, AWS, and Tackle shared best practices, cloud journey experiences, and go-to-market strategies.
One of the more popular sessions featured Jessica Alexander, VP of Cloud Product Sales & Alliances for CrowdStrike, and Tackle’s own Director of Product, Brian Levenson. While CrowdStrike has found incredible success in the Marketplace today, Jessica pointed out that it wasn’t always smooth sailing. “Cloud Marketplace is a multi-year journey,” she said. “It’s not going to be overnight that you suddenly have thousands of organic orders from brand new personas you’ve never talked to before. Our CEO George Kurtz was our first executive sponsor, and from day one, he evangelized how important it was to look forward and not plan for tomorrow, but plan for five years from now.”
Initially, CrowdStrike opted to build and maintain their own Marketplace integrations but quickly realized it would take more valuable engineering resources than they could part with to scale and meet their needs. “We brought in Tackle, and they were able to get us fully re-platformed in a couple of weeks,” Jessica shared. “Our old process was heavily email-driven and required manual searches for backend screenshots to validate orders, causing a lot of internal angst and time burn. Now we not only have a resilient platform that Tackle supports, but we also can track our Private Offers.”
We’ve got a great partnership with AWS. It cuts the sales cycle down when we use the AWS Marketplace by almost 50%. —George Kurtz, CEO, Crowdstrike
Understanding that their customers were becoming more cloud-aware, had large cloud contracts and responded well to Private Offers, CrowdStrike grew their team, adding more than ten full-time employees to manage the Marketplace sales volume.
Later in the session, Brian demonstrated how Tackle Offers enables their Cloud Alliance sellers to extend Private Offers, walk buyers through the process, and see how each deal progresses from creation to acceptance. Tackle is committed to simplifying the seller workflow for Private Offers, and CrowdStrike has been an invaluable design partner, participating in Beta testing and providing feedback.
Jessica is optimistic for the future of their Cloud Marketplace business, sharing that they will continue to invest in this go-to-market strategy and the AWS co-selling programs that helped them find success over this five-year journey.
Check out this informative session from CrowdStrike and Tackle. To learn more about Tackle Offers, watch a short video or reach out to us for a live demo.
