Thrilled to introduce Rolf Heimes, exceptional advisor, board member and mentor in our Cloud GTM Leader course and community. His superpowers include GTM alignment, 📊 translating ecosystem language into KPIs the C-Suite and Board cares about, and scaling marketplace business.
Rolf is experienced in running global ecosystem (channel & alliances) teams globally, including in companies like Talend, Informatica, McAfee, and creating engines to provide vendors with growth at scale.
Rolf shared his insights on setting up a winning go-to-market with cloud marketplaces and answered some of most important questions, including executive buy-in and KPIs:
🗽 For those new to cloud marketplaces, what are the essential first steps to take advantage of these opportunities?
In my experience, the first steps are where the most grave mistakes can jeopardize your journey. [Roman: that’s why learning from experienced mentors adds so much value]
Start with the simple question ‘WHY’ and write a quantitative response!
Working with your leadership to answer ‘why and how much’ will force everybody to think more strategically and also help you with buy-in! Do not only ask the CRO; involve Marketing, Finance, Product, and Customer Services!
With respect to the ‘number,’ it’s a stake in the ground that you develop together. Don’t go crazy overboard but also don’t be afraid of a daunting number – remember, this process facilitates executive buy-in, so you won’t be alone!
📈 How will your GTM Strategy support your growth expectations and allow for marketplace-sourced opportunities?
Everybody starts with a shift from other routes to market (RTMs) to marketplace. It’s an evolution and you need to go through a maturity curve in order to learn and align the buying processes between the marketplace and your internal systems.
Having done that, we defined marketplace as its own RTM with its own strategy and ensured alignment between the company GTM and how marketplaces fit in to allow ‘lift’.
We then chose a very narrowly focused model (in our case mid market financial services with 3 use cases) and created end-to-end marketing initiatives with AWS and select channel partners to drive new business.
👔 How to gain Leadership support along your journey?
Remember where I said earlier you need to quantify AND an answer to WHY? Well, this is your anchor point to create leading and lagging indicators that translate into C-Suite and Board ‘language’.
On your journey you will be doing some heavy lifting on milestones that make sense to you – but not to the leadership team! In our case, we partied, gaining our first competency. Our leaders couldn’t understand.
Once we translated it into a leading indicator to build out our GTM strategy and built further KPIs around this our communication and presentations with the leadership team went much smoother.
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