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Cloud Co Selling for Business Growth

Cloud co-selling is an amazing opportunity for business growth at scale
Cloud vendors leverage their position as trusted advisors to promote cloud services

By Yuval Chayu, May 01 2021
Cloud Co Selling for Business Growth

If you’re a technology company with a cloud-based product, you already know that creating something innovative and great isn’t enough. Without sales, you are left with a great idea that you couldn’t monetize effectively. Collectively, businesses spend billions of dollars each year on PR and marketing activities in an attempt to build the brand recognition they need to break through the noise and generate revenue.

For tech companies offering cloud-based products, co-selling is an invaluable tool used to build awareness among the target audience. Rather than using traditional marketing, demand gen, and sales enablement channels to build awareness and grow sales, in a co-selling environment the tech company partners with a cloud vendor like Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.

The cloud vendor leverages its position as a trusted advisor to its end customers to promote these cloud services, whom it calls Independent Software Vendors (ISV). The result is a win for everyone involved. Cloud vendors increase usage of their network, ISVs see an uplift in revenue and market share, and end customers have the software tools that come highly recommended, and they already know is compatible with their cloud provider.

Cloud Companies and the Co-Sell

Successful co-sell relationships are transformative for businesses selling cloud-based products.
Through their engagement with cloud vendors, they gain access to a world of globally qualified deals that they would otherwise be shut out of.

Cloud Co-selling is highly scalable through network relationships. Cloud vendors provide ISVs with a warm introduction to high-level decision makers, paving the way toward sales. They boost brand exposure through partnerships, which can be enhanced through mutual press releases that further brand awareness in the market and demonstrates an ISVs position in the market. Additionally, cloud vendors offer technical support and funds to ISVs.

Revenue generation through co-selling is easily measurable. Co-sell partners close deals 3.5 times faster, and those deals, on average, are 2.2 times larger.

Co-selling has developed into one of the biggest growth engines for tech companies. As 5G technology delivers even faster internet connection speeds, there’s no reason to think that business’ reliance on the cloud and its apps will ever slow down.

Breaking into Co-Selling

As powerful a tool as co-selling is, there are challenges businesses often face as they reach for these opportunities.

For starters, cloud vendors are remarkably large organizations. Getting noticed by account teams and channel managers requires relationship building so that they understand what your product does and the benefits it delivers to their end customers.

As part of that activity, ISVs need to understand what it is that motivates account teams. They must create targeted messaging to meet their needs and address barriers that might prevent them from promoting an individual product.

To overcome these challenges, successful cloud co-sellers often work with partners who are familiar with cloud vendor’s customer success teams. As a co-selling partner, they offer immediate support, improving time to market while smoothly navigating through existing partnership programs to maximize potential sales.

Additionally, they typically have a strong network within the organization. They have a cross-industry network of sellers and have relationships that they can leverage to guide ISVs to the right internal sales team.

A dream come true

For many businesses struggling to increase their annual recurring revenue (ARR), Cloud co-selling provides a stable sales environment. The opportunity to work with global brands like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon coupled with the technical and monetary support those cloud providers offer gives tech companies the lift they need to succeed.