How Sales Leaders Use Tackle Offers to Streamline Cloud Marketplace Operations

In our latest Office Hours discussion, we invited a couple of special guests to talk about their Marketplace journey. Victoria Celis, Cloud Marketplace Manager for CrowdStrike, and our own Emily Carpenter, Director of Revenue Operations for Tackle, are well-versed in the Private Offer sales motion. They shared their experience and answered questions on automating the seller workflow and how they have scaled to support the growing businesses over time. We’ve captured the highlights of that discussion here.

How Tackle Uses Tackle

At Tackle, we are big fans of drinking our own Kool-Aid (or champagne—pick your favorite drink)! Roughly 90% of our deals get done through the Cloud Marketplaces, so automation of the sales process is just as crucial to our team as it is to our customers. Emily shared her perspective on how Tackle uses Tackle, noting that the recent Tackle Offers improvements save her time and manual work.

“When I started creating Private Offers for Tackle, it took me about 15-25 minutes. Now with the recent improvements we made in the product, it’s taking me somewhere in the range of 3-5 minutes,” she said.

Tackle Offers, the centerpiece of our seller workflow, reduces the number of steps needed to complete a Private Offer and ensures that Emily, her sellers, and their stakeholders have deal visibility at every stage with automated, real-time notifications. 

Visibility is Key

Visibility is a common pain point expressed by both buyers and sellers. Victoria, who has played a vital role in CrowdStrike’s tremendous Marketplace growth, has seen the sales process evolve over the last few years. 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. Tackle took over their Marketplace integrations, re-platforming them in 2020. 

“Tackle gives us a lot more visibility into the status of the Private Offers our team creates,” she noted. “We can see all Marketplace sales activity in one dashboard, and our team appreciates the notifications and Slack integration, so we know immediately when a deal has closed. It’s a better sales experience, improving adoption of the Marketplace while reducing the friction in the buying process for our customers.”

Private Offers at Scale

We also addressed the topic of scale with these two growing Marketplace sellers. Victoria watched her Alliances support team grow from two people to ten. “We started adding Marketplace operations support after our 100th Private Offer, and once we reached 1,000, we fully built out the team. Ultimately, we want to have operations support in each region to support the growth.”

As Emily also looks to expand her team to support Tackle sellers, she expressed her excitement for the upcoming Salesforce Connector. Highly anticipated and often requested by our customers, this feature is in Beta and will be available to all Tackle customers before the end of the summer. The Connector will pull opportunity data from Salesforce into the Tackle application. Eliminating unnecessary data entry, the Salesforce Connector will allow sellers to continue working in their system of record while extending existing direct sales processes to Marketplace opportunities. 

Seller Enablement for the Win

Enablement has been key to CrowdStrike’s growth. “Even though we have seen success with Private Offers, it’s a relatively new process,” Victoria said. “It’s an ongoing effort to educate our teams about the Marketplace, its value, and how to sell there effectively.”  

Echoing Victoria’s comments on the importance of continuous sales enablement, Emily noted that we encourage sellers to introduce Marketplace early in the sales process. Capturing the technical buyer’s goals and cloud spend commitments helps us understand how to optimize the deal for both buyer and seller. 

Please register here to join us every 2nd and 4th Thursday for Office Hours. And if you like what you’re reading, schedule a demo to see how Tackle can help simplify your Private Offer sales process.