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Selling in cloud marketplaces: A powerful business case for CEOs, COOs and CFOs

By Manesh Raveendran Pillai
03 May 2023
9 minutes
Selling in Cloud Marketplaces
Whenever making a business decision, you need to view it from three lenses, i.e. efficiency, revenue and scale. If your decision is unable to justify a return on all three or at least one of them, you may want to think again. To understand whether selling in cloud marketplaces is a good business decision, we engaged in a detailed discussion with the executive leadership at Spektra Systems, including our CEO, COO and CFO. Each one of them gave us some golden nuggets on how selling in cloud marketplaces aligned with the three aforementioned business parameters. Let’s quickly take a look at their understanding of the business case for publishing and transacting SaaS offers through cloud marketplaces.

Selling in cloud marketplaces with SaaSify

SaaSify can help you capitalize on transactable offers and co-sell opportunities, unlocking full revenue potential of cloud marketplaces with:
  • Self-service portal to list, manage, and transact your SaaS offerings on Cloud Marketplaces
  • White-glove onboarding and guidance by Partner Success Managers for public/ private offer listing and initial transactions
  • No-code public offer listing of SaaS products for public cloud users to discover and purchase
  • Private offers with special pricing tailored to specific customers
  • MS Teams/Slack integration to receive notifications and alerts for Cloud Marketplace transactions in Microsoft Teams or Slack
  • Deal assistance from Spektra marketplace experts to guide your cloud sales journey
  • Marketplace reporting and insights for real-time visibility into sales, payments, subscriptions, and margins with advanced reporting and reconciliation capabilities
  • Co-sell readiness and advisory to make your listing ready for co-selling with cloud providers for higher deal closure
  • CRM integration (HubSpot, D365, Marketo) to sync your CRM systems with SaaSify to maintain consistent deal status across all platforms
  • Salesforce App & integration (Quote to Cash) to create and transact Private Offers directly within Salesforce using the SaaSify Salesforce App

Business impact of selling in cloud marketplaces: What Spektra leaders have to say

Like any other executive leadership, when it comes to business growth, our leaders have left no stone unturned to identify new sources of revenue, augment operational efficiency and explore avenues to scale footprint and impact. Therefore, when asked, all of them agreed that selling in cloud marketplaces is the perfect intersection for these three objectives for any SaaS business that seeks to embark on a journey of exponential growth globally. Let’s take a look at how.

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Operational efficiency at its best: Amit Malik, COO, Spektra Systems

Research shows that companies lose up to 30% in revenue each year due to inefficiencies. Invariably, augmenting efficiency is a key prerogative for any COO. According to our COO, Amit Malik, believes that selling in cloud marketplaces unlocks unparalleled operational efficiency that can be very difficult to achieve in conventional sales channels. To put things in perspective, there are a variety of reasons supporting this claim.First, when selling in cloud marketplaces, SaaS Independent Software Vendors have a chance of capturing pre-committed cloud budgets for many customers. Since these budgets are already allocated, the turnaround time for approvals and deal closure reduces significantly. This results in shortening of the sales cycle, which is an operationally efficient way of closing deals.Second, any ISV in cloud marketplaces undergoes comprehensive due diligence in the very beginning. This ensures that if customers are satisfied with the product, they don’t have to indulge in any kinds of extensive background checks. They can simply look through the documents and certificates shared on your listing, preventing hours of work on both sides of the agreement.“Over the last few years, I have seen how ISVs who are selling in cloud marketplaces have significantly optimized their operations. The teams need to spend less time on manual paperwork or repetitive tasks and are able to utilize resources on drumming up new business and focusing on value-added work.Often, a lot of back and forth, delays in negotiations and unnecessary iterations lead to a zero sum game, where neither party gets their way. By standardizing a lot of these operational tasks, cloud marketplaces have accelerated pace of partnerships.”- Amit MalikThird, for any deal, operational inefficiencies or unnecessary time wastage creeps in while final contracts and negotiations. However, when selling in cloud marketplaces, there are standard end user license agreements that both parties can rely on. The miscommunication from verbal negotiations to written contracts is eliminated. While both parties can mutually amend the standard contracts if needed, however, in most cases, this ensures a high level of operational efficiency.

New revenue, faster realization: Renjini Girija, CFO, Spektra Systems

Now coming to the financial and revenue driven side of the story. For any CFO, any business move only makes sense if it brings in more revenue or reduces the outgoing cost. Our CFO, Renjini Girija, strongly believes that selling in cloud marketplaces brings in both these opportunities in a myriad of ways.First, selling in cloud marketplaces gives you the opportunity to reach out to a wider audience base and create a global footprint. When you sell through AWS, Azure or GCP marketplace, you can sell to millions of active customers, who may not discover your product otherwise. Thus, there is a direct revenue benefit because your audience increases exponentially.Second, most customers on cloud marketplaces have pre-committed budgets that you can capture by selling there. On one hand, this will help you close deals faster. On the other hand, the deals you close can be significantly higher in value than conventional sales channels. This gives you a clear picture into future cash flows and a healthy revenue pipeline, something every CFO strives for.“Selling in cloud marketplaces definitely opens up new revenue sources for ISVs, which were earlier unthought of. Additionally, the very low cost of transaction, which stands at only 3% now ensures a great return on investment. From a cost-returns lens, the expenses incurred in cloud marketplace listing and transacting are easily surpassed with the sales and profits generated due to new customers, pre-committed budgets, shorter sales cycle and higher deal sizes.”- Renjini GirijaFurthermore, for financial stability, it is not just about closing deals, but also about revenue realization. This factor also gets a boost when selling in cloud marketplaces. Transactable offers are routed through the specific marketplace, be it AWS, Azure or GCP, which ensures that ISVs receive their payments on time, without any haggling or delays. Invariably, cloud marketplace selling not only increases the total revenue, but also ensures so in a timely manner.

Scale and partnerships for business growth: Manesh Raveendran, CEO, Spektra Systems

Looking into almost every aspect of the business, for any CEO, the melting point stands at scale for business growth. The ultimate goal is to achieve sustainability and scalability to unleash unparalleled growth in terms of revenue, customers, profits, ecosystem and everything else in between. Fortunately, cloud marketplaces help achieve all these fuelled by the power of co-selling and partnerships.As an ISV, if you feel that once you publish your offer on cloud marketplaces, you are on your own, you need to think again. Cloud marketplaces unlock several partnerships and collaborative opportunities for business scale and growth. In fact, research shows that 57% of organizations use partnerships to acquire new customers, which is exactly what cloud marketplaces can help you achieve.First, you can leverage co-selling opportunities presented by different cloud providers. Invariably, each cloud provider has its own co-selling program in which their field sellers and co-selling teams help ISVs deepen their marketplace presence. For instance, the AWS ISV Accelerate Program is a robust co-selling program that you can explore. Such programs enable ISVs to get featured in exclusive blogs and articles, joint-selling opportunities, access to co-sell team to help position SaaS offer which aligns with customer needs and much more.Second, in addition to co-selling with cloud providers, selling in CMPs also enables you to build partnerships with others in the ecosystem. These can be other providers, resellers, channel or consulting partners, etc. Let’s take a few examples here. Microsoft runs the CSP program where these providers sell Microsoft products to their customers. As an ISV, you can partner with CSPs to offer your SaaS product to their customers in the form of a bundled offer or a value add to the Microsoft offerings. Similarly, AWS runs the CPPO program, where ISVs can create private offers for particular consulting or channel partners to sell to their customers. In either of these cases, you are building partnerships which result in increased sales, revenue and overall business scale.“Achieving scale is one of the most peculiar but important aspects in the ISV lifecycle. Selling through conventional sales channels in silos can only take your growth to a certain level, post which it will become stagnant. However, selling in cloud marketplaces enables you to build global partnerships that can help you expand your footprint, without any additional investments.Scaling your business by expanding your team size or pumping in more investments is a move of the yesteryear. Today, if you want to scale, you need to build strategic partnerships with cloud providers and other ecosystem vendors and partners, who can open new networks for you and even help you navigate through customer expectations and assist in building credibility.Overall, selling in cloud marketplaces addresses business growth and prosperity from all lenses of efficiency, revenue and scale, which any business leader or CEO aspires to achieve.”- Manesh RaveendranThese insights from Spektra System’s executive leadership clearly illustrate how selling in cloud marketplaces holds the golden key to ISV business growth. Get started with SaaSify today to accelerate your selling in cloud marketplaces. To know more, book a demo with our marketplace experts!

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