5 Point Checklist to Start your Cloud Marketplace Journey

Have you been exploring alternative sales channel to provide your customers with quick and easy access to your services with the resources they might already have? Well, establishing your SaaS business in the Cloud Marketplace, is one of the best ways to achieve your objective. Invariably, many enterprises today have large cloud credits or reserves on different Cloud Marketplaces like Amazon, Azure, etc. You might want to check out the several advantages that are promoting ISVs to take their offerings to the Cloud Marketplaces.

However, simply jumping on the move without reflecting on your readiness for the move may not lead to the results you desire. Therefore, you need to pause and gauge on whether you are ready to be listed at the Cloud Marketplace or not. Our comprehensive checklist will enable you to validate your preparedness for creating a presence on the Cloud Marketplace. Answering these five questions will help you measure your position on the market ready spectrum.  

Have you performed market research? 

The first step to gauge whether or not you are ready for the Cloud Marketplace is to check if you have performed comprehensive market research. While there might be several factors that come under market research, you need to direct your focus primarily towards your potential and existing customers. This suggests that you need to map if your existing and potential customers or target audience for your products are already engaging with Cloud Marketplaces.

The major idea for this step in your checklist is to understand whether or not there is a demand for your SaaS product on the Cloud Marketplace. For most ISVs, this is a no brainer. In fact, chances are, that the major force guiding your move to the Cloud Marketplace will be a push from your customers. Your existing customers are likely to have committed to annual or multi-year plans in the Cloud Marketplace, which they might want to use in exchange for your services.

Furthermore, other potential customers might have a similar demand. One of the major benefits here would be the considerable reduction in the transaction time for your customers. Thus, the first step in your checklist is to understand which of your customers are already there and what are the several benefits you can leverage by providing such an experience.  

Do you understand the value add? 

Undoubtedly, there are several benefits and advantages that selling your products on the Cloud will bring along. However, to ensure you are market ready, you need to have a coherent understanding of why you are moving to the Cloud and ensure that all key stakeholders align with the same. The idea is to explicitly gauge the value add which you are likely to achieve when you start your Cloud Marketplace journey.  

For most ISVs today, the key objective to move to the Cloud Marketplace comes from their customer expectations who might already be transacting through the Cloud Marketplace for other products and services. Here, your value add could be greater customer stickiness, lower transaction and payment cycles, multi-year engagements (in case your customer has committed multi-year agreements with the Cloud Marketplace), among others. 

Invariably, you can provide alternative sales channel to your customers and not wait for the conventional long-drawn approval cycle for budget sanctions. Thus, a major reason for this move could be faster realization of revenue in a way that aligns with your customer expectations.  

Furthermore, in the absence of such an understanding, you will be unable to have a clear view of what KPIs to measure. Invariably, monitoring progress or tracking the return on investment will become difficult. Thus, having a clear vision statement or understanding will help you and your team members align on the right KPIs that you should monitor as a measure of success. Therefore, you must identify the top advantages that selling on the Cloud will bring to your business and identify a few which align well with your core objectives as a part of your process to be market ready.  

Are your teams ready? 

Moving to the Cloud Marketplace with a vision and customer presence, but without a well prepared team might cut your impact short. Starting your Cloud Marketplace journey cannot be a siloed move. It requires comprehensive support, commitment and action from all your team members.

On the one hand, you need to facilitate a team buy-in and convince everyone that this move will facilitate sustainable and scalable business impact. Identifying the key value add will be of use here. On the other hand, you need to ensure that your team members have the right skills and competencies to support the move.  For instance, your sales team will have to change the way they sell.

First, an understanding of how the Cloud Marketplace functions will be extremely important. Second, they will need to learn and explore the best practices to actually leverage what this new ecosystem has to offer. Simultaneously, you need to give them the key KPIs that can help them adapt to new performance ways and means. While some of your team members will focus on transforming their roles, you might also need to onboard a few new roles. Here, someone to manage Cloud alliances and partners will be key. Therefore, as a third tick in the checklist, you need to be sure that your team members are aligned, ready and committed to the move. 

Have you selected your cloud partners? 

The fourth point in the checklist is to see whether or not you have selected your Cloud Marketplace and cloud partners. Today, there are three major Cloud Marketplaces that most ISVs focus on, including Amazon’s AWS Marketplace, Microsoft’s Azure store and Google Cloud Marketplace. Each of these Marketplaces have partners to help you make your journey seamless. These partners will not only guide you on the right path, but will also help you in co-selling solutions, thus, augmenting revenue channels for your business.  

Therefore, you should identify partners for different Marketplaces. Furthermore, you should focus on building an understanding of how the partnership will work to ensure that you enter the playing field with all the facts in hand.  

Is your solution cloud marketplace ready? 

Finally, the last tick mark in your checklist holds utmost importance. Your product needs to be ready and calibrated for the Cloud Marketplace to ensure that your offering gets maximum visibility and sales. The Cloud Marketplace requires you to make some changes or modify your API for seamless integration. Here, one of the best practices is to collaborate with a platform like SaaSify.

Essentially, SaaSify will integrate with your Cloud Marketplace account and help you deploy your transactable SaaS offering with a branded landing page within days. This zero-engineering platform can provide you with necessary tools and integrations to simplify selling on marketplaces and drive business growth. With this final tick, you will be ready with an agile Go-To-Market solution.  

This five point checklist can help you ensure that you don’t miss out on any key consideration when moving to the Cloud Marketplace. You can powerpack your growth in the new ecosystem if you simply answer these questions. At SaaSify, we have been empowering several ISVs to start their Cloud Marketplace journey with our capabilities and industry expertise. If you have any questions on your readiness or want to brainstorm on your readiness strategy, get in touch with us today. If you have the motivation, we have the means to turn your Cloud Marketplace vision into a reality. 

This blog was originally published on SaaSify.