Co-selling in cloud marketplaces (CMPs) is one of the most effective ways for ISVs to increase their sales and grow their revenue. Essentially, co-selling in CMPs is all about partnering with your cloud provider to generate, nurture and close deals at a faster pace and greater volume. However, with an exponential increase in cloud selling and subsequent rise of ISVs, cloud providers find it difficult to offer co-selling in CMPs support to every ISV. Invariably, you might find yourself struggling to co-sell, despite fulfilling all requirements and eligibility considerations. Fortunately, you can now reinvent the wheel by adopting a new approach to co-selling which will push your cloud provider to take notice of your efforts and support you towards business growth. Let’s uncover how to reinvent co-selling in CMPs for 2023.
A twist to co-selling in cloud marketplaces
Co-selling in cloud marketplaces has often been a pull activity for ISVs. It involves waiting for leads from cloud providers and gradually nurturing them to foster sales. However, with fierce competition, ISVs need to supplement this pull with a complimentary push which involves getting direct deals to grab attention. Once the cloud providers take notice of your organic impact, they will see the potential of deals from the partnership, leading to higher co-selling opportunities. Thus, you need to reinvent your approach towards co-selling to achieve higher support from your cloud providers.How to reinvent co-selling in CMPs for 2023?
There are 4 major questions that you need to answer to reinvent co-selling in CMPs to create a value proposition for cloud providers to accept their co-selling status.1. How to divert deals from other channels?
To divert your existing deals from other channels and close them in the cloud marketplace, you need to create a value proposition for them with the ability to utilize pre-committed spends in the cloud marketplace. You can attain a co-selling status by encouraging your existing customers to purchase your offers from the cloud marketplaces instead of the conventional channels. The process is quite simple. During the sales process, your team can illustrate cloud marketplace as an option for the customer to purchase your offer from. Focus on highlighting the several benefits that come along when transacting through cloud marketplaces. Factors like ease of procurement, less paperwork, etc. can help create a powerful pitch for transactions through marketplaces. Initially, you should focus on shifting those deals to the marketplace which are more or less confirmed. This will create a perspective of high deal closure rate and the cloud providers will take greater notice of your existing in the marketplace.2. How to increase renewals for co-selling in CMPs?
Co-selling in cloud marketplaces is not only about landing new deals, but also about deal renewal. The bottom line is additional revenue realization that is routed through the cloud provider. Hence, any deals that you are able to renew with your customers in the cloud marketplace will also help you create a mark. There are two ways to get a co-selling status via renewals. First, focus on the deals that you have closed while co-selling in cloud marketplaces itself. Be it through organic outreach or diverting your deals from other channels, you focus on deals that are already in the cloud marketplace and which need to be renewed in due course of time. Their renewal in the cloud marketplace will be easier to achieve as they already have a proof of concept and have benefitted from the said transaction. Second, you may have existing customers in the other sales channels whose deal term or duration may be coming to an end in the recent future. You can take these deals and renew them for co-selling in cloud marketplaces. Follow the same value proposition as with new customers about benefits of these marketplaces.3. How to boost marketing efforts for co-selling?
Focus on your marketing efforts to gain co-selling status as an ISV in the cloud marketplaces by attracting leads organically. Right from defining your offer with the right keywords to leveraging marketing resources available in the marketplace, there are several steps to boost your visibility. Leveraging the right marketing strategies can have dual benefits to help you reinvent co-selling with AWS or Azure co-selling. First, you will be able to garner the attention of more customers organically leading to greater sales and revenue in the marketplace which will lead cloud providers to notice you. Second, your offer will become more visible to cloud providers as well, pushing them to notice your business and accelerate your co-selling in CMPs status.4. How to identify CSPs and other partners?
Reinvent what co-selling in CMPs means to you. You may see co-selling with AWS or Azure co-selling as a means to sell collaboratively with leads from the respective cloud provider. However, if you take a step back, you will realize that there are other partners in the ecosystem of your cloud provider that you can explore co-selling with. For instance, you may want to explore collaborative opportunities with CSPs, who sell specific cloud solutions to their customers and can add your offer as a value add. The objective is to identify opportunities of partnerships and co-selling beyond the conventional ISV-cloud provider relationship. Ultimately, your focus is to boost your sales and growth. Invariably, such partnerships will also help you get noticed by cloud providers as an ISV making sincere efforts and facilitating results. Thus, increasing your chances of gaining a co-selling status.How to leverage SaaS enabled platform to promote co-selling in CMPs?
Your cloud provider will provide you with a co-selling status when they have confidence about your offer. Unless they are sure that your offer will add value to the journey and business of their customers, the quality and volume of leads you will receive will be far from satisfactory. To ensure that you are able to leverage co-selling in CMPs to the maximum extent, you may want to collaborate with a SaaS enablement platform to take your offer to the cloud marketplace. One such solution is SaaSify, which can help you:- Take your solution to the cloud marketplace within days, without any engineering changes
- Create custom offers for your customers, and sell as they want to buy
- Manage all your public and private offers from a single dashboard
- Accelerate your branding and visibility with the option to create a customized landing page with your logo
