Why should you start selling on Cloud Marketplaces?
✅ Increased deal closing velocity
✅ Higher customer traction rate
✅ Simplified selling experience
✅ Faster business growth
We @ SaaSify have listed and scaled over 200+ offers on Cloud Marketplaces (AWS and Azure) and have figured out a few crucial steps you should take before embarking on the journey.
Let’s dive right in!
1. Assess your product offering and value proposition
The first step to any journey is to get a clear understanding of the landscape that you are to tread upon. Without that knowledge, you’ll be pushing water uphill with a rake.
To develop an accurate picture of cloud marketplaces you’ll need to do a bit of research:
- Which cloud providers your current customers are partnered with?
- Which marketplace are your target consumers buying from?
- Which marketplace will serve your purpose and help you reap rewards?
- What is your competitor scenario in different marketplaces?
- What value proposition are your competitors offering?
- How can you differentiate yourself from them?
- Are customers making the kind of investment that your product demands?
Asking the right questions is important. This also includes product packaging (which is nothing but product feature adjustment to cater to your target group), billing models, marketplace transaction fees, custom or private offer options, lead generation strategy, support and help, etc.
Once you have the full view, you can go ahead and take the next step.
2. Get your marketplace vision & strategy in place
The cornerstone of marketplace success is a comprehensive strategy that aligns with your marketplace business goals and outlines all necessary steps to be taken. An effective strategy takes into account all the boxes to be ticked off that give you a competitive edge and improve the chances of discovery of your offering.
To begin with,
- First, you need to identify and assess your target audience in the marketplace.
- Second, develop an offer listing that attracts your audience — figure out your product positioning and messaging to maximize customer acquisition and retention (also consider if you need to adjust product features to align close to your TG).
- Third, analyze how you will navigate your marketing and sales activities to garner and drive more traffic to your listing through different channels and in collaboration with Marketplaces themselves.
In simple terms, your strategy should outline every step you will be taking to meet your set goals within specific timelines.
3. Assemble your dream team
Leveraging CMPs doesn’t require many operational expenses but organizing a team that is aware of what role they need to play to keep the marketplace strategy in motion and is ready to offer customers all and any support required is a very powerful resource in your arsenal.
Your dream team is a set of key players involved through every step of the buyer’s journey.
Roll-Out Phase: Core stakeholders involved —
- Senior Manager
- Chief Technology Officer
- Chief Marketing Officer
- Product Managers
- Channel Marketing Team
- Alliance Managers
Core stakeholders involved in the roll-out phase are: Senior Managers, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Product Managers, Channel Marketing Team, and Alliance Managers. Persons who’ll be involved post your offer going live and will be responsible for customer management include: Alliance Managers, Partner Success Managers, Marketing Officials and Sales Representatives.
Your marketplace team will focus on marketing your product, building strategies partner relationships, offering end-to-end customer support and delivering a wholesome buying experience.
Once your offer(s) is/are listed, gaining visibility and providing on-time help to prospects whether it is a query or a request for product/billing customization, can accelerate your growth.
4. Prepare your tools to start selling on Cloud Marketplaces
Agility is key to success. If you’re not prepared for playing for the long term, you’re not prepared at all.
Building a database from day 1 and developing a data-driven strategy will help you assess your marketplace standing every step of the way. Data pipelines will give you a competitive edge when it comes to delivering to your customers. Predicting trends, forecasting usage, assessing customer behavior will play a key role once you begin to scale.
Another aspect often overlooked is the cohesion between your internal teams that helps drive growth. Management, finance, legal, sales and alliances all need to come together to create a sustainable selling and scaling model. No information should go unattended.
SaaSify enables you to do it all efficiently. All the tools you need to expand your business are right here. Built-in customer tracking, customised offers, the ability to re-calibrate strategy — all from one dashboard.
Go to market with zero engineering efforts. Contact us.
5. Create guidelines that empower your teams: Monitor the right KPIs
Draw a clear roadmap for your team. Defining and keeping an eye on the right metrics is essential. Deal size, deal closing time, usage metrics, visits to conversions ratio and roadblocks are some of the KPIs you can pay attention to.
Evaluating KPIs regularly, taking customer feedback, delivering timely support should be pre-decided functionaries that your team needs focus on. Internal paperwork can enable swift communication between departments, creating a customer centric model.
6. Aim for long-term partnership building
Strategic partnerships can open growth doors you didn’t think would exist. From co-sell opportunities (learn more about co-selling here) to reseller partnerships to partner-to-partner lead sharing, marketing and sales alliances, marketplaces provide various paths to maximize lead generation.
With special emphasis on developing and nurturing relationships, you should be placing leaders who can move things in a favorable direction. Marketplaces and partners are easily incentivized to set co-selling in motion if your offer compliments their market strategy. Look outward and figure out how can you set sails on that trajectory.
Lead sharing, collaborative marketing, leveraging technical marketing are instrumental to marketplace success.
Taking care of these aspects before entering the marketplace gives you an advantage over your competitors. We provide end to end support so that you can start selling on commercial marketplaces with ease and generate revenue at 🚀 speed.
Marketplace success is just a click away.
This blog was originally published on SaaSify.
