From Launch to Scale: Tackle’s Cloud GTM Maturity Model
Cloud GTM success requires a combination of people, process, technology, and cloud alliances, and it offers significant revenue opportunities for ISVs. Tackle created the Cloud GTM Maturity Model to help ISVs identify where they are on the path to scaling their co-sell and Marketplace strategies and the key actions to take to maximize value at each stage. In this session, get an overview of the model and how to use it.
>> Hi, Patrick.
>> Hey, Erin. Hello, everybody.
>> Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our session on our Cloud Maternity
Model.
Some of you who've been watching yesterday's sessions,
you saw the Cloud Maternity Model get mentioned a couple of times in the
sessions.
So Patrick and I thought it would be fun to actually go through it in
a little more detail with all of you on what is this maturity model that
Tackle keeps talking about.
So before we get started, we'll do quick intros.
I'm Erin Feiger, the VP of Coastal here at Tackle.
I joined the Tackle crew about 18 months ago through
the acquisition of my company Core Consulting,
where we've been helping ISVs go to market with the clouds for over a decade.
So excited to bring together CoSAL and Marketplace,
wrap it all with data and people to really help ISVs do this faster together
in how they're going to market with the clouds and turning that into a
meaningful revenue channel.
One of the things I'm working on right now,
I asked Patrick to say like, "Hey,
what's one thing you're working on that's fun at Tackle?"
Patrick and I are getting ready to work on a podcast, a video podcast,
that will be internal for our customers only to really help them continue to
skill up and go faster together.
I like that podcast. I don't think I've heard of that.
I'm not cool enough for that.
Thanks, Erin.
Patrick Riley, I'm coming to you today from what is still a calm,
will soon be a windy Raleigh, North Carolina.
I'm our Cloud Go-To-Market Principal here and I have the fun job of getting to
work with our customers
throughout our lifecycle, developing, refining and creating assets that bring
more value.
So the maturity model, some of our TAM analysis, our business cases,
and a lot of things that some of you might be familiar with.
So for me, I think the biggest thing right now I'm excited about is for this
quarter,
this Q2. We've got some cool new projects that we're implementing.
We've got a nice business case that wraps Tackle Prospect data into a TAM
analysis
that helps our customers understand where they can actually go realize value
and put a plan in place on how to go attain that.
So some of that you'll see here at the end of the presentation, but that's how
I'm working on that.
It's all nicely into helping our ISVs meet them where they're at in their
maturity model
and how they're going to market with the clouds.
So love that we're bringing to life some of those tools.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, well, let's dig in. What is this maturity model we keep talking
about?
So it's been a lot of fun over the last couple of months really putting this
idea down on paper
and bringing it to life, working with a lot of folks here at Tackle, and
specifically Patrick
and I working really tightly together on defining this and then helping
bring it to life and teach folks what we mean by the different maturity phases
and stages that
you can go through. And then what are some tools that you can use along with
our platform and our
people to really help you go from left to right in your maturity.
So in the first two sections you see this incubation and orchestration.
We're really talking about establishing that foundation and building adoption.
Typically when you're getting in these two phases, you have the alliance person
or the alliance team
that's really doing all of this incubating. We have this idea.
We believe that the clouds are going to help us and this could be a meaningful
revenue channel,
but we're not quite sure yet. So we're going to go incubate that over here and
we're going to create
some processes. We're going to create a strategy with our cloud provider.
We're going to start to establish a foundation around which customers inside of
our customer base.
Do we think the cloud partnerships can really help us with? So we really have
to know that
team that we're going to go focus on. And then once we understand the customers
, the why,
why are we going to share them? What do we want to do next so that we can
actually engage in a
meaningful way? And as you establish that foundation, that building the
business plan,
figuring out your joint messaging, figuring out the customers you want to go
focus on,
now you have to go start to build adoption and get a few of those wins under
your belt.
Get some sellers trained up on what this is and engaging in the model. And
starting to use
technology to help you. And at first, you might be using just tackle platform
as the cloud person
to really operationalize the partnership. But as you move from building to
driving adoption,
really then saying, okay, I've incubated this concept. I'm getting wins. I'm
getting traction.
We're starting to see about 10% of our revenue going through the cloud market
places. Now it's time
to take this and start to integrate it into our business and the way we do
business in the systems
that we do business in. If we're really going to get scale and drive scale and
create automation
around some of these processes that me, the alliance person or me, the alliance
team has been
doing. If I'm going to grow this, I need to start getting more of my team
members and the organization
involved in supporting it. And so now we're going to integrate it. And the
first way to integrate
it is to download the Salesforce app and start to extend these operational
processes that you'd
been incubating over here into Salesforce and start to bring that to life
inside of Salesforce,
which starts to drive more eyeballs onto the data that you have access to and
the processes that
you've created, the ability for more people to raise their hand and say, I want
to co-sell with
the cloud providers and give them the easy button to click and say, yep, and
engage. Connect me with
my cloud counterpart. I want to see the customers that are in marketplaces.
Which marketplace should
I go start to talk to my customer about? So using that propensity data. And
that's when you really
start to get that driving adoption phase. And then scaling adoption is when you
're like, okay,
this is working in one area. Maybe it's one business unit, one region. Now let
's go launch this like
multi-region where global organization, we have multiple products or multiple
BU's. Or just at
scale, like maybe we have one product, but now we just want to really make this
a part of like
the fabric of our business. So we're going to go create automation around some
of these processes.
So it just becomes, this is the way we do business. This is how we renew. This
is how we transact.
And it just becomes a natural part of how you're doing business. And that's
when you see the
alliance role really becoming more like the organization is leading. And the
alliance person
is there still helping support and drive and bring all of the nuances of
working with the cloud
providers and how the programs change and the systems change and bringing all
of those changes
back to the organization so that they can continue to evolve the way in which
they've built their
go-to-market engine around their cloud partnership so that they can keep that
thing moving fluently
and still creating and driving more and more revenue for them. So we see
different success
factors come into play. So you kind of have these stages and phases. It starts
off as alliance
led really heavily in the alliance department and then moves over into more of
the organizations
getting involved and leading it with the alliance supporting. A lot of times IS
Vs will ask us,
well, like, how long should it take us? Like, what should we expect? Can, you
know, should we start
to see traction, get to 10% of revenue or more, like within six months, nine
months, 12 months?
Like, what are we talking about here? And it's really hard to pinpoint that
specifically.
I can tell you that it definitely takes 12 to 18 months of like, we're going to
focus on this,
we're going to get dedicated resources, we're going to commit to this, we're
going to put some
rigor around it. Even if you're incubating it, you're still going to put all of
that discipline
around it to get that traction that you're looking for to see those success
indicators that say,
okay, let's keep investing, let's keep doing more. Things that I've seen make
this experience go
faster and getting traction both inside your organization as the alliance
person, you're trying
to get the organization rallied around it as well as you're out there working
with your cloud
partner and getting that strategy built and rallied around, right? So like, you
have to go both ways
internal and with the cloud partnership. And some of the things that have
impacted the speed and
made it faster is like that appetite to go all in. Like, how invested is the
organization?
I can remember working with a storage partner and they were like, we are
committed. And it was
great because they had it from the top down, the sales leaders were working
across their sales
teams to say, you will do this, you will engage with the cloud provider, you
will find out who
your cloud counterpart is. And they had that like all in commitment. And then
they had the pipeline
there. So between the commitment and the pipeline, and we put that all into the
system, their
partnership got a lot of traction really fast, right? So there are things that
can impact the speed.
Patrick, why don't you bring it to life a little bit more on some of the things
that you've built
that help you move, help the ISVs activate their strategies and move them from
left to right in
that maturity model. Yeah, thanks, Aaron. I think for me, one of the big things
I've learned
spent a time with a lot of our customers over the last six months or so was to
really first step back
and before we do anything else, take the time to put together and assess like
where are our actual
pains. So let's look at the organization and let's look at the maturity model,
how we broke that out
and let's define the problems that we're having. And some of the problems we
might not know, and
that's where you can leverage, you know, tackle or others to help you kind of
outline what those
look like, but bucket those into some themes. And so this is just, we're
showing some examples of
customers we've anonymized and data that we went through together. But you can
see there's not a
small list and a lot of these will generally fall into categories that many of
you are seeing as
challenges as well. And some of these will probably resonate. So for me, the
first thing that we want
to do to activate this is like, let's set our baseline and understand where we
are. And let's be
real about it. Let's not, let's not make this up. You know, when I came over to
tackle from Dell,
we had a lot of challenges. And part of the process we had to go through was to
get out of our own
way and identify what those were first. Yeah. And before, you know, once once
we've done that,
and we've identified those opportunities to improve, then we can assess, set
that actual
baseline for where we are, and align on some benchmarks for where we want to go
next.
Now these are like actionable benchmarks and let's set high level goals first.
Attainable goals, not, hey, I want to have 50% of my ARR from inbound leads.
Like,
that's that's something that we can't get quite yet. So let's start with
something attainable and
actionable to move from where we are to where we want to be. So here's another
customer example.
And again, this is kind of, hey, on the left hand side, write down where you
are, where you think
you are from a high level things you've accomplished. Over on the right, what
are those actions that
we can take from a high level? And then you're going to hear, right, Patrick,
and today is like
our practitioner day. So you're going to hear from a lot of customers who are
at different phases and
stages and the activities they're doing and the outcomes that they're getting
from that
in the stories throughout today. Yeah, absolutely. And be listening. As you
hear them,
you know, maybe it's a little fun exercise. Jot down where you think they are
in maturity.
I know I asked it in the chat and we got a bunch of secret squirrel responses
there. So I get
not everybody wants to share that. But take time and do the exercise yourself.
Yeah. So once we've, once we've figured that out, we want to validate our
opportunity. And maybe
you do this sooner and that's totally fine too. But generally what we like to
do with our customers
and our partners is validate that opportunity that we just talked through. So
we've identified the
the opportunities from pain. Now we've looked at what our next step should be.
Let's validate that
those align to our metrics and our goals and let's leverage our data to do that
. So, you know,
it's not only the operational and strategic next steps, but the actionable
revenue targets
that we want to go after. So now this was a cybersecurity company. They looked
at tackle prospects and
we identified the opportunity for them there. And then finally, you know,
before I run out of time
here, you know, we've done this a variety of different ways. Call to action,
run the assessment
on our website, do it live with a tackle SE, do it on your own, do it with us,
doesn't matter.
But out of that, we can help you put together a, you know, a successful
business plan that you
can go attain with kind of a 30, 60, 90 day target and help you move to the
next phase of maturity.
So yeah, and part of why we created that is we, we heard from all of you, Hey,
help, help me
either put together a business plan to go justify this investment, go get more
investment,
go prove out like why we're doing this and the impact and the potential that is
behind there.
Right. So we built these tools from listening to all of our customers in the
asks that they had
of us. Thank you. Have a great day. Sorry, I, I,
- Oh, yeah.
(laughing)
(buzzing)
[ Silence ]
This is a test comment.
This is a longer test comment to see how this looks if the person decides to ramble a bit. So they're rambling and rambling and then they even lorem ipsum.