​​Digital Selling in Software: Cloud Marketplaces, Tackle, and Accelerating the Pace of Innovation

It has been an amazingly fun and fast five years since we got started at Tackle. Over the last 18 months, we have raised our Series A, Series B and now a pre-emptive C, all with the focus around helping software sellers scale revenue more efficiently through the Cloud Marketplaces. We have been aggressively scaling our team, tripling in size this year, to meet the demands of our customers, partners, and the market. This new incremental capital will allow us to continue to accelerate our pace of innovation and growth globally as Cloud Marketplaces go mainstream.

We started with the hypothesis that the clouds would leverage Marketplaces to change the way that software was sold. Since then, we’ve seen the Cloud Marketplaces take real shape and become a meaningful component of the go-to-market system for software companies of all sizes. We are now seeing more startups being born not only cloud-native, but Marketplace-native and all software companies are looking to align their products towards cloud buyers. Cloud agility has moved from a technical enabler to a business requirement.

But as the entire world has worked through the global pandemic, we’ve started to see something new, something greater than we originally expected. The pandemic has shifted all consumers from ecommerce for convenience to ecommerce by default and this transformation is making its way to B2B. But it is particularly difficult for software companies.

B2B buyers and sellers want and need to engage more through digital experiences and there are very few tools that enable this to happen. The cost of acquiring customers is usually the most expensive part of a software company and the combination of Cloud Marketplaces and Tackle provide an easier starting point for both top down and bottom up selling. 

Our mission is to continue to innovate to enable software companies to seamlessly evolve towards a digital selling future. Let’s dive in a bit deeper to what that means.

Where are we today: Cloud Marketplaces speed up buying and selling

In our consumer lives, we buy through Marketplaces daily and we are rapidly racing to this state in our B2B lives. Why? Marketplaces speed up both buying and selling. There are a few reasons why.

• For Software Buyers:
  • Buyers want value and solutions and they want them fast. The days of homegrown or complex integrations are rapidly going away as we move towards the SaaS delivery model for everything. Marketplaces enable speed.
  • Buyers want to consolidate spending wherever they can whether for convenience or a better overall value. 
  • Buyers are buying more software than ever and this trend is only accelerating as Forrester predicted there to be 1M software companies by 2027.
• For Sellers on Marketplaces: They want access to customers, access to budget, the ability to deliver value fast to their cloud buyers and ultimately access to more efficient revenue growth.

A new budget flywheel is forming where we are seeing cloud budget and enterprise software budgets become one based upon the value to buyers and sellers. This trend has accelerated tremendously over the last two years based upon the investments being made by all the Cloud Providers.

Where is the world going: The future is digital selling

Digital selling is bigger than just Marketplaces and we are seeing a wide array of signals leading that way. Product-led growth, usage-based pricing, and Cloud Marketplaces are all signals of this future. In all instances, software companies are looking for ways to meet their buyers in a seamless and efficient way.

We believe a few things will be true as the world of Marketplaces and digital selling evolve. 

First is that buyers will continue to buy where it is convenient and seamless to get started and we believe the big Marketplaces will win at scale, but there will be a growing variety of Marketplaces available to both buyers and sellers over time. This will increase complexity for sellers to meet their buyers.

Second, sellers will seek to help buyers buy digitally via seamless digital experiences. We are in the earliest days of this digital selling transformation; it will continue to accelerate over the next decade and we believe will have many phases:

• Phase 1: Cloud GTM (today): Early digital channels complement traditional ways of selling and all companies have or are planning to implement Cloud Marketplaces as part of their strategy—67% of survey respondents in our 2021 State of Cloud Marketplaces Report said they plan to invest more into Marketplaces in 2022. Marketplaces have moved mainstream in 2021.
• Phase 2: Digital selling (emerging): Evolving direct sales towards digital channels will form a new more seamless and cost efficient GTM system. We are already seeing customers with exponential growth in their Cloud Marketplace businesses as more buyers decide to buy digitally.
• Phase 3: Digital selling integration into existing tools (emerging): ISVs will look to more closely align these digital Marketplace channels towards the systems that drive their company. This will require new capabilities to bridge the gap between this new world and traditional ISV systems.
• Phase 4: Digital selling driving a complete redesign of the way software companies operate (future): As digital selling grows, the existing tools and processes that run software companies will need to be rethought to meet the needs of a multi-channel ecommerce world. Sales systems like CRM, CPQ, Marketing systems, Commision systems, Finance systems, Pricing and ERP systems will all need to evolve.

With most software companies spending 50% of their revenue on acquiring and maintaining customers, there is a huge opportunity to streamline and optimize this experience to deliver more value to buyers and more efficiency for sellers. We see decreasing the cost of acquiring customers as our long term opportunity to deliver value.

Tackle’s role in all this? Speed, scale, and efficiency

If Marketplaces are about speeding up sales, Tackle is about speeding up Marketplace. Tackle makes the Cloud Marketplaces a business decision versus a product and engineering prioritization problem. 

Speed:

When you’ve got a buyer on the line who wants to buy through the cloud, you can’t wait 3-6 months for your team to prioritize and attempt to build out your integration. You need to launch immediately to capture revenue in real time. We allow you to launch your Marketplace business at the speed of revenue via our no-code platform getting you started selling fast. 

Scale:

Once you list and sell, we have the tools and team to help you scale your cloud GTM. You do not need to overthink it at the start—we have the tools for Alliances, Sales, Finance, and Engineering to use as the Cloud GTM channel scales in significance, all delivered via our platform. 

Our team is also here to help you every step of the way on how to build a Cloud GTM, execute on your first transactions seamlessly, and align this new business with your existing processes and tools.

Efficiency:

We work with hundreds of ISVs from seed stage startups up to the largest cloud sellers in the world. We learn from every customer, every transaction, every hiccup in the buying and selling process and we embed all of our learnings into the platform to save you time and ensure efficiency. We bring the collective experience of the community together into our platform to provide an enterprise grade experience.

How will Tackle continue to help bring to life Marketplaces and the digital selling revolution?

With this capital, we will continue to strive to set the pace of innovation for Cloud Marketplaces and digital selling. Here is a rollup of what we released in 2021 and our roadmap for 2022 is even BIGGER! Our key areas of focus in 2022 will include:

Enabling Scale for Sellers

• Evolving co-selling with the clouds from being a human endeavor to a platform driven solution
• Building a first class experience in Salesforce for sellers to cosell and Marketplace in a scalable way
• Focusing on enabling seamless partner sales through Cloud Marketplaces
• Enabling more enterprise integration capabilities to make Marketplace more scalable for large sellers (more APIs and integrations like NetSuite)
• Investing in internationalization and global support

Helping Sellers Sell More, Faster 

• Helping bridge Marketplaces closer to where buyers discover software
• Continuing to extend to where software buyers want to buy (this will mean more Marketplaces over time)
• Investing in data to help sellers better target their cloud buyers

Lowering Barriers to Entry for Startups

• Creating new packages and offerings for early-stage companies to build your GTM Marketplace native

Teaching the World How to Sell Digitally

• Investing in content and community to help all sellers evolve towards the future of digital selling
• Sharing the success of our customers with the community to accelerate this movement

Already on a Marketplace journey without Tackle? Why go it alone?

2021 was the year where we saw the debate about build vs buy disappear. When we delivered the first version of our platform in 2017, our main competition was companies attempting to build it themselves. As we evolved to support multi-cloud, the build conversation changed to be predominantly buy and now today we have sellers who built at-scale Marketplace businesses converting to Tackle as they need enterprise software to run their enterprise Cloud Marketplace businesses. 

Check out this session where Jessica Alexander, VP of Cloud Alliances at CrowdStrike talks about why they decided to buy Tackle. No one wants to build software to sell software and our plan is to ensure that no ISV ever has to again.

Finally, thank you to all of our customers and partners. We are excited to continue to innovate, learn, and share with you all into 2022 and beyond.

If this blog hits home with you, follow Tackle on Twitter or LinkedIn as we will be doing more to build and grow the community around digital selling.

If you would love to be part of bringing the future of digital selling to life, check out our open roles at Tackle. We are hiring across all functions for those inspired by changing the way software is sold.

Thanks, and if you have questions or comments please reach out!

John Jahnke, CEO, Tackle

Dillon Woods, Founder and CTO, Tackle