Cloud providers’ main goal is to increase cloud consumption, so helping you with your co-sell is in their interest. That’s one of the reasons why co-selling can be such an amazing business opportunity. However, in order to make the most of it, it’s important to understand the various co-sell layers, choose the right strategy, and leverage the entire cloud platform ecosystem to your advantage.
Yet the cloud provider organizations are complex, and it isn’t always easy to understand how each layer can help you achieve your goals. We’ve broken it down to make it easier to make the most of what the cloud providers have to offer.
Seller-engaged sales
This strategy focuses on engaging with the cloud provider teams that work directly with the cloud platform’s end customers, who are the ISV’s potential customers as well. These teams are usually divided by industry or geographic area and are responsible for a group of accounts in the same category. By engaging with these sales teams, you can expose them to what you have to offer and encourage them to utilize their existing relationships with customers to promote your solution.
The potential of this strategy is enormous because the cloud platform sales teams include huge numbers of sellers all around the globe, all of whom are connected to one another through a common network. But in order for this bottom-up approach to succeed, it’s important to remember that the cloud provider sales teams have their own goals and co-sell is only one of several tools in their toolset. It’s up to you as an ISV to convince them that your solution is worth their effort.
The way you approach the sales team can make a big difference. In many cases, the strongest relationship is between an Account Manager and his or her contact in a specific customer account. That relationship can be leveraged to gain direct access to decision-makers in accounts that are of interest to you. It’s also scalable since one field seller is responsible for several accounts in the same industry or area and one connection can lead to another, or even to a connection with another seller. The challenge is that the sales team members and the customers have to be approached one by one.
Partner-to-partner (P2P) sales
Cloud providers aim to increase cloud consumption. In addition to selling their own products and third-party solutions (ISVs), they work with partners such as big consulting firms, system integrators, value-added resellers, and others who drive significant cloud-related projects on the platform’s behalf, giving them major scale.
Cloud platform sellers can connect relevant ISVs to these partners in order to help the partners bring more value to end customers, increase cloud consumption, and overcome competition. It’s a win-win—the ISV gets a warm intro to top partners that can promote the ISV solution to major customers, and the partner expands its offering. This strategy can be an excellent way for you to scale if you’re able to connect to the right partner.
Direct customer sales in the cloud provider marketplace
Major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and AWS have massive marketplaces that serve as middlemen between the cloud platform’s huge ecosystem of end customers (basically, any company that uses the cloud) and ISVs. The cloud platforms invest significant resources in promoting these transaction arenas, as they earn commissions when a sale is made.
The cloud providers support all marketplace users to encourage transactions. First, the cloud field sellers are compensated for selling through the marketplace via quotas and soft targets. The end customer is also compensated for purchasing in the marketplace—the cost of any purchase is subtracted from the customer’s prepaid cloud consumption commitment. In addition to getting exposure, ISVs can also receive significant funds and support from the cloud provider to close deals in the marketplace.
Cloud provider marketplaces offer ISVs massive global reach to end customers—for example, the AWS Marketplace has four million monthly users in 140+ countries. Since both the end customer and the ISV already have a relationship with the cloud platform, the administration behind deals is reduced dramatically as the charge flows through the cloud.
However, like in all large marketplaces, the challenge is how to stand out from the crowd. With so many sellers in the same arena, it can be difficult for any one ISV to gain the attention and trust of potential customers, which is why most co-sellers can’t rely solely on direct customer sales.
Developing your sales strategy
A comprehensive ISV sales strategy should weigh the benefits and challenges of each of the layers described above, and the way in which they relate to your solution, goals, and capabilities. We recommend combining a bottom-up and top-down approach with the cloud provider. It’s a good idea to have a presence in the marketplace, create traction in the field, and interact with the field sellers, while also trying to land executive sponsorship from partners.
All the cloud provider layers can be valuable resources in your sales funnel. It’s all about connecting with the right ones, at the right times, with the right messages.
As always, we’re here to help.