Member Spotlight: Cloud GTM Leader Course - Alex Balcanquall

Meet Alex Balcanquall, a standout 🗽 member of our Cloud GTM course, who shared key insights that led to achieving success in cloud marketplaces.

Alex is accomplished Sr. Director of Marketplace Strategy & Operations at Cloud Software Group with wealth of experience from Citrix, Microsoft and EMC.

📈 Why Marketplace?

☁️ Marketplaces support our key selling motions:

they help our sellers gain access to wallet share that was previously inaccessible, provide pricing advantages due to customers keenness to use the marketplace, and decrease time to deal closure.

Key Insights:

💎 Ensure your solutions are aligned with generating cloud consumption

No cloud marketplace is interested if your cloud control plane drives $10k of cloud consumption and $100k of on-prem consumption per customer.

💰 Sort out seller compensation early

If you have traditional sellers and channel, it is important that marketplaces don’t change their wallet share - or they will fight against you at every step of the way. Comp neutrality is the minimum requirement.

👀 If you build they will come - is a myth

It is possible to get ‘lucky’ and have something so good you get word of mouth growth - but no customer uses the marketplace to discover your products or make purchase decisions. You are still responsible for demand generation.

🎯 High quality opportunities are more important than every opportunity

Keeping the marketplace opportunity portals up-to-date is hard - only focus on high quality inbound and outbound opportunity mapping - you will be ignored if you have hundreds of low quality opps.

💡 Learnings about Cloud Marketplaces

No plan survives contact with the enemy. Your customers are not your enemies - but they will surprise you. Whatever your plan for Marketplaces is, 12 months after your first sales, it will be very different.

✔️ Don’t overplan, start with a single product

Target one set of customers and their preferred marketplace. As you learn, expand to more products and marketplaces. This will ultimately be a faster route to success than having a ‘grand plan’

📊 Future of Marketplaces

Cloud Marketplaces have a major drawback - you can’t sell everything through them and customers cannot purchase everything. This will drive:

Continued importance of distributors and their marketplaces, e.g. ArrowSphere. Distribution and channel is not going away - just evolving.

Increasing pressure on Cloud Marketplaces to allow more transaction types (services, hardware, on-prem software) and multi party private offers.

There will continue to be multiple channels we all have to consider. And if you are not using them all - you risk your competitors taking advantage of that whitespace.

🏆 The Cloud GTM course

It gives access to key industry thought leaders who will share their real world experiences. This will help you decide what direction to take and how to prioritize.

I thoroughly recommend it.

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📈 Accelerate your Growth in Cloud Marketplaces

Transform your marketplace strategy with first-hand insights from Cloud GTM leaders in our 5-week cohort course. Learn in a community of great alliance leaders. Join 100+ alums from companies like GitLab, Darktrace, IDC and others.

Join Cloud GTM Leader course