Top 5 Cloud Marketplace Selling Challenges and How to Solve Them

As an ISV, if you start selling in the cloud marketplace or are contemplating your move there, you are likely to come across a series of challenges. In our experience of publishing 100+ solutions for ISVs from across the globe, we have been able to identify that there cloud marketplace selling challenges which are common to all.

However, if you are able to navigate your way through them, you can accelerate your growth in the cloud marketplace. To help you grow your SaaS business in the Azure marketplace (AMP) or AWS Marketplace (AWSMP), we have created a list of challenges that you may face and some of the best ways to solve them.   

Unpreparedness for Azure marketplace or AWS marketplace 

One of the first cloud marketplace selling challenges that you might face is the lack of knowledge, resources or technical expertise to get started. There are several technical and operational requirements that need to be taken care of. At times, these requirements like having the right API integration, customizing your software for the cloud marketplace, etc. can seem too complex or time consuming, demotivating you and your team from selling in the cloud marketplace.  

To address this cloud marketplace selling challenge, you can collaborate with a SaaS enablement platform like SaaSify and leverage its zero engineering platform to publish your solutions in the cloud marketplace.   

Lack of brand recall 

Once you reach your destination, one of the next cloud marketplace selling challenges that you are likely to come across is establishing a brand identity and brand recall. This is especially important from a recurring sale and brand development perspective. Unless you have a branded landing page which helps the customer connect your solutions with your brand, your customers will have a tough time to come back, leading to serious cloud marketplace selling challenges.  

Fortunately, creating a brand recall in the Azure marketplace or AWS Marketplace is quite easy and not as overwhelming as it looks. You can leverage a white labeled solution like SaaSify. With SaaSify, you can host your offers on a custom domain name with your own brand logo and user experience, thereby, boosting your brand visibility. 

Complex customer management 

As an ISV, another set of cloud marketplace selling challenges that you are likely to face come in the form of customer management and business management. You have to ensure that you are seamlessly able to manage the optimizing, listing, selling and management of your SaaS solutions. Furthermore, there are aspects of billing, provisioning, management, monitoring, reselling, administration of your SaaS solution. To add to this, there are likely to be changing cloud marketplace norms and regulations that you need to keep pace with. Managing all these together can be tedious. 

However, if you have the right  partner to take care of these operational aspects of customer and business management, you can focus on reinventing customer experience with improvements in your solutions and making it aligned with market needs. You can achieve the same with SaaSify to address the cloud marketplace selling challenges. It will enable you to manage all your potential and existing customers from one dashboard, right from communication to  offering expert support and technical guidance for a pleasant buying and selling experience.  

Inability to provide transactable offers 

If you seek to sell in the Azure marketplace or AWS marketplace, you need to convert your contact me offers to transactable offers where the customers can directly transact and get access to your solution. If you are missing out on this opportunity, this is definitely one of the top cloud marketplace selling challenges standing in the way of skyrocketing your revenue. Furthermore, for a long time, ISVs also struggled with a heavy transaction fee charged by the cloud marketplace, making selling there not the first choice.  

Fortunately, now you have a way around both these cloud marketplace selling challenges seamlessly. On the second challenge, Microsoft recently reduced the transaction fee to only 3% which is almost equivalent to any platform or transaction fee that might come along with a sale. You can easily absorb it as a sales expense. Even solving the first challenge is easy when you have the right enablement partner by your side. With SaaSify, you can easily publish transactable offers or even convert your existing contact me offers to transactable. We take care of all the technical knowledge and resources that are needed and can help you publish your transactable solutions without any significant engineering changes to your software.  

Customizing offers for customer needs 

Finally, the last of the key cloud marketplace selling challenges that you might come across revolves around the customer need for custom public or private offers. While you might have a standard solution available for all customers in the cloud marketplaces, you are bound to receive customization requests especially in terms of cloud usage and the deal size. On the one hand, some of your customers might need your solution for a shorter or longer period of time than you normally offer. On the other hand, their requirement might be of a larger deal size, hence, the need for discounts, which you may not want to publicize for everyone. Either way, you need to adhere to the custom needs.  

You can address this cloud marketplace selling challenge by selling the way your customers want to buy. You can seamlessly cater to specific selling requirements by integrating custom subscription offers across different usage meters by using SaaSify. Leverage our platform to bill your customers the way you prefer be it hourly or monthly or any other way, customizing for each customer along the way.  

Solve cloud marketplace selling challenges with SaaSify 

As you move to the cloud marketplaces, you can count on SaaSify to help address any cloud marketplace selling challenges that you come across. With SaaSify, you can:  

• Go to market quickly and accelerate your revenue generation in a matter of days 
• Create your brand experience and boost your brand visibility 
• Ensure hassle-free customer management with all customers from one dashboard  
• Customize your public & private offers to sell as your buyers want to buy 

Get started with hassle free cloud marketplace selling by leveraging SaaSify.

Book a demo today!

This blog was originally published on SaaSify.