Why double down on selling via cloud marketplaces? Because EVERY single strategic customer of Microsoft Azure is already 💰 buying on its marketplace, and other clouds show similar trends.
A staggering 85% of Microsoft’s customers with Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) are purchasing via MSFT marketplace today. Consider the magnitude of their budgets for a moment, given that MSFT has $100Bn+ in customer commits.
💎 This means that customers can use these $100B to buy your product. It's a quick win for everyone involved, accelerating procurement timelines from months to days.
And there's the bonus of simplified billing for the customer - one invoice from MSFT with your product neatly listed among other services.
Cloud marketplaces are not an upcoming trend, they are already here, moving from early adopters to mainstream.
💳 Why do customers gravitate towards marketplaces?
It starts with their organizations signing multi-year, multi-million cloud commitments to get attractive discounts. Now that every dollar is under scrutiny, they can use these commits to buy your product via hyperscaler marketplaces.
Once customers realize they can buy your product with commits and they teach their procurement how to do that, there’s no going back.
Procurement is much happier buying pre-vetted software, using standard contracts from hyperscalers and consolidating purchases into one straightforward bill.
💻 Why do software vendors flock to marketplaces?
From the software vendor perspective, marketplaces offer an accelerated sales cycle, boosting sales by over 50% over time, because of the above.
They also offer flexibility of sales options from Public Offers with standardized terms, to personalized Private Offers (where 80% of money is today).
Imagine tapping into Microsoft's ecosystem of 4M customers across 141 countries and 17 currencies.
Finally you get access to hyperscalers’ sales team, which can help with introduction to right accounts and people, given that you know how to work with them.
🎯 If this sounds too good, the cloud GTM in fact is very nuanced
Every single speaker in our “Foundation to Advances” course on cloud marketplaces highlighted that relying solely on listings is a pitfall.
You need to think through the entire cloud GTM, learn identifying and pitching your superpowers. Not to mention aligning with hyperscaler (sales) teams, thinking in cloud consumption terms and learn how to co-sell, co-market and eventually co-build with them.
It’s a multi-year journey that none of the software companies today can ignore, because of the magnitude of the market they may miss otherwise.
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