Cloud Marketplaces: The $250B B2B Sales Channel You’re Missing Out On
Tackle.io explain how Marketplaces can increase the size of Cloud deals by 30% and reduce their sales cycle by up to 50%.
The first and foundation step into the world of Cloud Marketplaces is listing on the exchange.
Tackle.io is a vendor specializing in accelerating the Cloud marketplace onboarding journey and helping with this approach, what they describe as a ‘Cloud Go To Market Strategy‘.
The Tackle Cloud Marketplace Platform enables a zero-engineering approach to listing, integrating, and managing your Cloud Marketplace business.
First they set the overall scene in this blog An Ecosystem Primer, explaining how Cloud marketplaces exist within the overall trend of the emergence of partner ecosystems.
They describe their history, strategic context, how they will impact ISVs and how best to successfully embed them into your partnering sales campaigns.
Co-Selling
Listing on the marketplace should be combined with AWS co-selling practices, as marketplaces alone don’t address the full scope of customer engagement and selling that is still needed.
They streamline the procurement but there is still as ever the requirement to build brand, capture and excite attention and ultimately drive adoption. In this blog they provide a detailed introduction to co-selling with AWS, where they decompose the process and identify the stakeholder engagement patterns.
“84% of ISVs said driving co-sell with the Cloud Providers is important or very important to their business priorities in the next 12 months, and 74% said that unlocking co-sell opportunities was the number one reason for listing on a Cloud Marketplace.”
In this Netskope case study provide an example of how this opportunity has been prosecuted, where their engagement with Tackle doubled their growth in the third quarter of 2022 on AWS Marketplace.
State of the Cloud Marketplace
In this SaaStr webinar John Jahnke, CEO of Tackle.io, and Nicole Wojno-Smith, VP of Marketing, highlight some of the most important conclusions from the Tackle.io report on the State of the Cloud Marketplace. This was as a result of compiling data from hundreds of B2B software customers and suppliers.
From 2m:49s John takes over to explain how Tackle is positioned to reflect the transformation of selling enterprise software. Cloud Marketplaces are a new, more efficient way of selling.
Tackle makes it simple to list on these new markets such as the AWS Marketplace, guiding customers like Hashicorp, Druva and New Relic among many others, through the process. It represents B2B app stores where cloud customers can buy third-party software to run alongside their cloud infrastructure and have it go directly on their cloud bill.
With the high number of marketplaces that exist, their focus is on the three hyper-scale cloud providers which are Microsoft, AWS and Google. These marketplaces accommodate the ability to sell complex software with simple click to deploy options. A rapidly accelerating percentage of their customers are starting to use the marketplace to transform software procurement.
Factors Driving Digital Buying
Marketplaces (6:54) are a win-win channel for both buyers and sellers. They accelerate, direct and channel sales efforts that you already have in place. For sellers, the marketplaces are going to offer an efficient path to customers. They provide access to new budgets and revenue. They are going to accelerate your sales cycle and help get cloud sellers paid as well.
On the buyers’ side marketplaces are going to allow you to quickly procure and deploy software and consolidate all your spend into one single bill.
Marketplaces offer a faster and easier buying experience to cater for these trends. Buyers like buying in the marketplace because they want to save their time and money, they relieve the headache with procurement teams when purchasing software by already having a contract with your organization. Cloud marketplace allows you to get the software you need and you still get to consolidate all payments into a single billing contract.
