Under Mike's leadership, Contentsquare has just been awarded the prestigious 2024 Marketplace Partner of the Year award from Microsoft.

Mike’s top Cloud GTM insights: Focus on marketplace impact as success metric, “make weight” to get cloud attention and map processes to implement change management.

Mike Marzano leads global cloud alliances for the Experience Intelligence Platform, Contentsquare, relying on his superpowers of Co-Sell & Marketplace.

Over the past two years, he has been instrumental in accelerating Contentsquare's cloud co-sell programs with AWS and Microsoft, successfully scaling marketplace billed revenue from zero to over $30 million.

With nearly 20 years of experience in enterprise SaaS, Mike exemplifies the principles of creativity and collaboration, always with the end goal delivering outstanding customer outcomes.

Mike shared what it takes to get traction grow on cloud marketplaces:

Prediction: Cloud marketplaces are set to grow further

The recent moves by several of the Hyperscalers to increase the opportunity to leverage Private Offers with multiple partner offerings attached, show us the potential of these marketplaces will continue to grow.

Customers want to leverage marketplaces - they NEED to optimize their spend while getting maximum value from SaaS and the solutions partners who can help them realize the greatest ROI as quickly as possible.

Marketplace Success Metrics: Use “Impact of cloud partners” on your sales cycles

If you are a SaaS business selling to enterprise marketers, cloud partners are going to fail at delivering pipeline off the starting line.

Success by this mark could take 12-18 months, but focusing on the IMPACT of cloud partners within your sales cycles will help you refine best practices while creating the best outcomes for your commercial teams and customers.

IMPACT is your metric for larger deals, with longer terms and potentially shorter sales cycles.

Co-Selling & Getting Cloud Attention: A great value proposition isn’t enough, you need to “make weight.”

Focus on how you “make weight,” because a great solution and value proposition is not enough.

You need to show the hyperscalers that your solution is not just great at delivering value to their customers, but you have the pipeline, a history of success and you are willing to put numbers on the board to prove it.

Change Management: Map current and future state and find dominos that will drive others

Any person tasked with change management will tell you (or show you by the deep stress lines etched in their forehead), that trying to implement a major change to the way people work is hard.

You need to really map this out, understand the existing norms, build out a realistic timeline, a domino effect and set realistic expectations.

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