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When Should ISVs Start Selling in Cloud Marketplaces?

By Amit Malik
08 November 2022
5 minutes
Start Selling in Cloud Marketplaces
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 

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.  

1. When you want to scale 

You 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.  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 

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.  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 

If 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.  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. Since 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 

If 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. You can create private offers exclusively for them and increase your sales collaboratively. 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 

Finally, 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. 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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