When Should ISVs Start Selling in Cloud Marketplaces?

By Salini Shajeev

08 November 2022

7 minutes

Whether or not you should start selling in cloud marketplaces can be a question that you may have for your ISV business. On the one hand, you may be unsure if you are ready for the cloud marketplaces. On the other hand, you might find yourself unsure if the time is right to start selling in cloud marketplaces. You are not alone in your uncertainty. Most ISVs selling SaaS products find themselves unsure. While the benefits of selling in cloud marketplaces are many, whether or not you should be doing it now can be a struggle to answer. To help you make an informed choice, our marketplace experts are here to help you out. Before you move on to understanding when you should start selling in cloud marketplaces, explore our 5 Point Checklist to Start your Cloud Marketplace Journey to validate your preparedness.

5 moments to start selling in cloud marketplaces with SaaSify

If you are wondering when is the right time to start selling in cloud marketplaces, it will be difficult for anyone to tell you exactly when you should. However, based on our experience of working with ISVs and marketplace experts, we have identified 5 moments which are ideal or will give you the right opportunity for selling in cloud marketplaces and how SaaSify can help augment the timing for each.

1. When you want to scale

Pro tip: Leverage SaaSify’s zero engineering to scale quicklyYou should start selling in cloud marketplaces when you want to scale your business growth, both geographically and in terms of the customer base. Research shows that Canalys estimates that by 2025, sales through the cloud marketplaces will account for approximately US$25 billion. This clearly indicates the scale which you will be able to achieve and the opportunity you can disrupt once you start selling in cloud marketplaces. At the same time, SaaSify’s zero engineering platform further enables selling in cloud marketplaces. You can go-live within days, making scale an associated output. With the ability to create unlimited transactable offers, without any engineering changes or the need to worry about fulfillment APIs, SaaSify helps you scale, quickly and easily, adding to the agility of selling in cloud marketplaces. Furthermore, the ease and comfort of cloud marketplaces is pushing buyers towards them, making them an attractive platform for sellers to explore sales opportunities. At the same time, the surge in cloud adoption over the last few years is encouraging businesses to transact through the cloud, which makes it the place for ISVs to scale their SaaS operations.

2. When you have customers there

Pro tip: Leverage white-labelled solution SaaSify to create brand recall Second, you should consider selling in cloud marketplaces when you already have customers there. If you do a quick poll of your existing and potential customers, you will realize that a significant proportion of them are already buying solutions through cloud marketplaces. In such a situation, you need to move your business to where the buyers are, making it an opportune moment to start selling in the cloud. However, if you have customers in cloud marketplaces, you need to get there quickly, but also with your brand positioning. As a SaaS enablement platform, SaaSify enables ISVs to leverage its white labelled functionalities for instant brand recall for new and old customers. You can use your own logo, brand guidelines and tailor-made email templates that enrich the buying experience for your customers and boost your brand visibility. This can help you capture your existing customers instantly. If you overlook this opportunity, you might lose your customers who may want to exclusively transact through cloud marketplaces. Invariably, your competitors who have a thriving presence in cloud marketplaces will poach your customers, leading to a significant revenue loss for your ISV business. Furthermore, it might hamper your public image as an ISV unable to keep up with customer demands.

3. When you want to access pre-committed spends

Pro tip: Create transactable offers for pre-committed spends with SaaSifyIf you want to access pre-committed spends of your customers like Microsoft Azure Committed Consumption (MACC), you should start selling in cloud marketplaces. Buyers, especially large enterprises, have long standing contracts with some of the top cloud providers with committed budgets. If you start selling in cloud marketplaces, you can become a contender to secure these budgets for your SaaS products. You can easily access pre-committed cloud budgets with transactable offers created with SaaSify. Right from taking care of all technical requirements to providing you with deal assistance and pricing strategy, our marketplace experts have helped 100+ ISVs publish transactable offers. You can easily create new or convert your contact me offers to transactable with SaaSify and access pre-committed budgets easily. Since these budgets are already committed by the enterprises to cloud providers, the chances of you closing bigger deals for a longer period of time becomes easier. As organizations don’t have to get additional budgetary approvals, they are willing to commit to your solution for a longer period of time. Furthermore, some of your existing customers might also have such commitments and selling in cloud marketplaces can help you access the same.

4. When you want to explore co-selling

Pro tip: Automate private offer creation for seller partners for better co-sellingIf you look closely, cloud marketplaces are more than another channel for ISVs to sell their SaaS products. They offer several opportunities for partnership and collaborations to facilitate co-selling with different partners, which can help you take your solution to a diverse audience, beyond your network. On the one hand, you can explore co-selling opportunities with your cloud providers like the AWS ACE Program or Microsoft Co-selling to capitalize on their cloud users and take their help to get leads and connections. On the other hand, you can also explore partnerships with other cloud partners out there. For instance, you can partner with many CSPs who are selling Microsoft licenses and subscriptions to their customers. In addition, many of them also sell third-party solutions to provide composite offers.However, co-selling can be time consuming, especially when you have to create private offers for your partners. But, SaaSify Salesforce Application can automate the private offer creation process from within Salesforce which you can use for creating Channel Partner Private Offers (AWS CPPO) or Multiparty Private Offers (Microsoft MPO), seamlessly, adding to co-selling efficiency.Thus, if you want to leverage the benefits of co-selling, you should definitely start selling in cloud marketplaces.

5. When you want to close deals faster

Pro tip: Use SaaSify to convert Salesforce opportunities to offers to shorten sales cyclesFinally, you should start selling in cloud marketplaces if you want to accelerate the pace at which you are closing your deals or wish to achieve a shorter sales cycle. When you transact through conventional channels, your buyer must undertake a due diligence process and several vendor empanelment formalities to get you onboard as a solution vendor. This can be extremely time consuming and operationally frustrating for the buyers. However, when you sell through cloud marketplaces, your buyers will have the confidence that you have already undergone the necessary due diligence by the cloud provider.With SaaSify, you can easily automate creating private offers for enterprise customers, which generally takes more time. If you have to toggle between your CRM/ Salesforce and cloud marketplaces, you end up spending a lot of time in manual data entry, leading to loss of productivity and missed opportunities. With SaaSify, when you start selling in cloud marketplaces, you can simply convert your Salesforce opportunities into private offers and extend them to your customers, without leaving Salesforce’s system of record. Thus, this further accelerates your sales cycle significantly.Furthermore, the time taken to receive budgetary approvals also gets decreased if you can access their pre-committed spends. Overall, the time spent in closing deals reduces significantly since the transaction takes place through the cloud provider.

Start selling in cloud marketplaces with SaaSify

If you believe that you are at one of the 5 golden moments mentioned above, you must start selling in cloud marketplaces. To help you sail a smooth journey, SaaSify can help you with end to end Saas enablement. With SaaSify’s zero engineering platform, you can take your SaaS solution to cloud marketplaces within a week with all the necessary APIs to deploy your private and public offers seamlessly. Book a demo today to know more.

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When Should ISVs Start Selling in Cloud Marketplaces?