How Cloud Marketplaces & Co-sell Are Changing the Game in 2024
Partnerships leaders at Cloudinary & Rapid7 share how Cloud Marketplaces and co-sell offer complementary value props that support seamless transacting and scalable deal flow.
(upbeat music)
- Hi everyone, I'm Erin Feiger,
the VP of Co-SAL here at Tackle.
I joined Tackle about just over a year ago
through the acquisition of my company, Core Consulting,
where we started Core over 10 years ago
to really help ISVs figure out how to utilize
all these great partner programs and tools
that the cloud partners offer us.
And over the years, as each cloud provider
launched their Co-SAL program as a way to programmatically
at scale, engage with their sellers,
we started to help ISVs figure out how to integrate Co-SAL
into their go-to-market strategies
so that they can really sell to that cloud partner
to then be able to sell through and sell with.
So I'm excited to have Cloudinary and Rapid 7 here
to share their stories.
I'm gonna pass it off to TJ.
I'll let you introduce yourself first.
- Sure, thank you very much.
I'm TJ Schmidt.
I'm the director of cloud partnerships here at Rapid 7.
Overseeing our global strategy around working
with our cloud partners, which right now is basically AWS.
We made look to expand into the future,
but right now our main focus and my team's time
is all dedicated to partnering with AWS.
- It's great.
Gary.
- Great. So I'm Gary Bellabio.
I'm the VP of technology partnerships for our cloudinary
and I'm essentially covering or overseeing our cloud partnerships
and I've been doing this since the day I started
that cloudinary.
I've been a cloudinary for about six and a half years now
and I'm looking forward to getting into the details
of everything we're working on.
- That's awesome.
Well, we thought we would set the stage
for today's conversation with a little context around.
We recognize that all ISVs are kind of going
through this journey of building their cloud go to market team
and their cloud go to market strategy
and maturing both internally in their organization
how they get their cloud go to market
to be as natural way of selling as it is to sell direct
as well as how your overall partnership
with your cloud partner is evolving and maturing.
So at Taco, we kind of launched this cloud go to market maturity
model that frames up where you're at
and when you're in this phase in your journey
what are the things we need to really focus on
to help us build adoption, drive adoption, scale adoption
and really get that cloud go to market
as a natural motion inside of our organization,
inside of our systems and our business tools
that we're using to manage the business
and really turn that partnership
into a meaningful revenue channel
and a strategic partnership for our organization.
So today the stories you're gonna hear
from both Gary and TJ are going to be about
their experiences internally in the company
the things that they've been working on
to mature and evolve to really drive adoption
and get that cloud go to market going inside of their company
and the results that they're seeing
and the impact that it's having on the business.
All right, so my first question
and I'm gonna gear it to you Gary
and then I'll have TJ answer.
Can you talk about your company's cloud go to market journey
so far like when you came in six years ago
where would you say your organization was at
in that maturity model and what are some of like
where would you say you are today in that maturity model?
>> Okay, sounds good.
So be as a company,
Cloud and I started working with AWS early on early
in its life.
So probably around 2013, 2014 was when the company really started.
I joined the company in 2017.
But I would say when I joined,
I would say we were having some really good conversations
with people inside of AWS.
We had some competencies that we had.
And then, but that was pretty much it.
That was basically the limit of the interactions.
We had AWS sponsored one of our customer conferences
a few times and we said some really good interactions.
But I would say in 2019 was when we started
to take the partnership itself more seriously ourselves
and really lay the groundwork,
well, just lay the ground from an investment standpoint.
That's when we hired a full-time employee to work with AWS.
And that was her full-time job was to essentially build,
build our partnership and build us up
in the AWS ecosystem essentially
and just drive us higher and hopefully get us to a point
where we could be a strategic partner for AWS.
And that is a long journey to take on.
And I would say we did a good job.
And I think it takes longer than we actually thought it would.
- Doesn't it always?
- I would probably be like, it's sneaky,
it's sneaky hard and sneaky time consuming
and takes longer than you think it's going to.
- Yeah. And so like taming expectations internally
is really important and making sure,
when you're going through it,
that there is an understanding for what the value
will be from this partnership
when you actually get it to scale.
So we sort of learned that brutally along the way actually.
- Those are like key elements for building adoption phase
of like getting the person in place,
getting key stakeholders rallied around you,
building the evidence, getting up higher inside
of your partnership with the cloud partner.
Like you've got to kind of do those things
in that building adoption phase.
If you're really going to then get to driving adoption.
- 100% right.
And it's so important to follow the steps,
follow the guidelines that they provide
in the very beginning and just start to go after it.
Start to go after all the predications you need,
like everything you need to submit, like there is a lot.
And we're still seeing, I would say it's worth it.
And we're still seeing the benefits of it.
Hopefully we see more, but there's,
where we're starting to, so I'll tell you a little bit more.
So we, it was about in the middle of last year
is where I would say we really turned a corner
with our partnership with AWS
and really started to see much more investment
from AWS with our partnership,
which motivated us even more to do things,
take things a bit more seriously.
And starting down the path in your slide
of being more programmatic.
So registering more deals in an automated way.
So then that's on a co-sale side.
And we're also, we're down the path
of educating our sales team still,
about the value of selling through marketplace
and customers buying through marketplace.
And that's a journey in itself too.
Just understanding the dynamics of marketplace
is a lot for even the partner manager
who's runnygatedly us to understand,
much less the salesperson at your organization
who's got a thousand other things going on, right?
So there's still work to do for us there,
but we really accelerated our efforts operationally last year.
So for the partnership.
- We're gonna come back to that
'cause you've said a couple of things
that I wanna circle back on for sure.
And I wanna get TJ an opportunity as well
to kind of share, you know,
where you came in to go to marketing your company,
where you think they were in the maturity
and what were some of the key things
that you've been doing to do?
- Yeah, sure.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So Rapid 7 had actually done quite a bit
as far as establishing themselves with AWS.
We had participating in an SCA.
We had already achieved multiple competencies.
We were pretty far along in the journey,
but the thing that I noticed when I started two years ago,
the expectation,
and this came up earlier,
Gary mentioned it,
taming the expectations is very important.
The expectation was that,
you know, we do these things with AWS
and they're just gonna send us opportunities,
opportunities, opportunities.
And, you know, in the big ecosystem of things
that's very hard to do
when you're competing against mind share
with sellers that have 18,000 partners in their ecosystem.
So over the past two years,
what I've really been trying to focus the attention on
is getting our team to think differently,
getting our leadership to think differently
about how AWS works.
And, you know, when you do the things that AWS
is asking you to the Co-Cell motions,
bringing marketplace into discussion,
it unlocks all of these different investments
and different programs that you can leverage.
And I think the key to our strategy,
what I'm putting in place this year
is leveraging those programs
to do the thing that we need to do.
You know, we've looked at a lot of the investment
and kind of just gone through and done the motions
and hoped for the best and seen some good results.
Don't get me wrong, we've definitely seen some good results,
but I think there's a better way
that we can utilize these investments
and these programs to attain our goals
all while still, you know,
meeting the things that AWS puts out
as being important in the partnership level.
So I'd say we're still kind of right past that adoption phase
and kind of on the edge of kicking it off
and really, you know, having that ball
start rolling down the hill.
We've done a lot of operational things
up until July, August of last year,
all our private offers,
every marketplace transaction was done by me.
And so we actually have not even really trained our team,
our company on how to leverage marketplace.
We've focused a lot on CoSEL,
but for a single individual globally
to work with almost 600 sellers,
a lot of stuff falls through the cracks.
And so, yeah, I was able to get some support.
So we now have a deal operations team
that is focused on driving our private offer,
creating our private offers.
And through all of those efforts across last year,
I was able to get investment from the company level
where we actually hired five alliance managers
two in the US, one in Amia, one in Singapore
and then one in Australia.
And so we're growing that team
and focusing our efforts on the CoSEL motion,
the marketplace values,
while we strategically figure out how to leverage
all of this investment and programs at AWS
is bringing it to the table to meet our goals of the company.
- Yeah, that's so great.
I mean, in order to go from building adoption
to driving adoption and get to scaling adoption,
you're doing all of the best practices
that we see across the other software companies,
which is starting to build out those teams,
taking it from alliance-led,
meaning alliances is doing all the work,
they're incubating the processes,
they're executing those processes,
they're doing all of the work
to then starting to get the rest of the company
and the organization around supporting that
and going more alliance-supported.
So getting a team for marketplace transactions
and operations, getting alliances
in their really driving field seller enablement
and co-selling and relationship
and go to market activities into the field,
you've got to build out those teams.
And in order to build out those teams,
your company must have seen some ROI
on the things they were doing
to then see it worth investing in this channel.
When you were kind of in that building adoption phase,
what percentage of your revenue,
do you think that it was either going through the marketplace
or was the partnership was influencing it?
And it doesn't have to be exactly,
but what does your gut say you were
and what are your goals for this year
as far as percentage of revenue through the marketplace
or the partnership influencing the revenue for Rapid7?
- Yeah, I think our co-sell revenue,
what we looked at as supported was pretty good,
but marketplace wise, we were below 5%
of our total revenue was going through the marketplace.
Our goal is to get to what AWS actually told us
is a material number, which is over 10%.
So our goal is to drive that up to 10%.
I don't think we'll get there this year,
but I think we will be able to get there
in the next one and a half to two years.
- Yeah, well, I mean, it sounds like you're doing
all the right things, you're integrating technology
into your systems, you're investing in the people
to help operationalize it and execute it
and then drive field engagement.
So, Rapid7 might surprise themselves.
- I would love to see it.
We're looking at some of the metrics now.
Our goal this year is a 20% growth in marketplace transactions.
And the way that we look at it for my team is more,
what can we influence, right?
We're not hard selling the marketplace,
but we wanna make sure that our customers know
that it's an option and understand the value of utilizing that.
And then by co-selling with AWS,
allowing them to have those discussions with customers as well
and with our team, it's gonna continue to drive that.
So I think that 20% growth is gonna get there for sure.
And we may surprise ourselves, you never know.
- And it sounds like at Rapid7,
you guys started with CoSEL
and really leaning into activating a CoSEL strategy
that then activated the marketplace.
- Yeah, and not necessarily on purpose,
but when again, having a single person with 600 sellers,
you know, we were doing 100,
and I think we created 150 private offers one year
that was all to me.
And so by design, we couldn't teach the value
of the marketplace because if we did it,
if we did it well, it was gonna overwhelm.
And we're a true product company, right?
So our end of quarter, end of month is a hockey stick.
So you could go a month and a half
with not a single private offer coming through
and then all of a sudden you're getting 10 a day.
So it was done by design to not talk about marketplace
as much, but to really do the CoSEL side.
And the way that I've tried to look at it
and we're implementing this in Amia and APJ
is the gain mind share with AWS,
the big thing is the CoSEL side, you know,
marketplace, yes, that is going to help,
but you got a CoSEL first to get the marketplace in my head.
You know, if you're doing marketplace,
you really should the CoSEL-ing.
And ultimately, let's leverage AWS
to help us do more marketplace transactions.
So what I've been asking my team to do
and what the approach that I had originally was,
let's overwhelm them with just so much CoSEL
that they're going, wait, who is this company?
Where all of a sudden there's so much in our pipeline,
I need to understand who Rapid 7 is.
And so my first year with the company,
we made that initiative and we started having different teams
of ISMs and different PSMs reaching out and saying,
hey, you guys have all come up as a very important partner,
a focus partner, we need you to come in
and teach our team what you do.
And we've seen that across the board,
so it has worked well for us.
- That's such a great share because, you know,
you saw the impact that it has.
Like a lot of times ISVs will come to us and say,
like, how do we get their attention?
And we're afraid to share our pipeline
and really sharing through CoSEL creates a megaphone for you
to really put your brand out there
and get people to understand
or give you the opportunity to tell your story
of who you are and what you do.
Like, who is Rapid 7 that they just flooded all of our reports
because they put in their CoSEL opportunities,
they flooded all of our reports with, like,
they're in all these accounts, they're doing all these things,
they've closed all these deals, like,
I need to learn more about Rapid 7
and how can we, 'cause that's what the cloud providers
are really there and motivated to do,
which is they want to put fuel on the fire, right?
You created the fire, they're there, their programs,
their tools, their sellers are there to help fuel that fire
and how can they help you?
And then over time, they'll bring you new business
and it will start to impact your net new,
but initially it's you putting all that in there
because you gotta go get their attention
and the best way to get their attention
is with data and your pipeline is your leverage
to create that data to get their attention.
So Gary, you said something earlier,
which was last year you saw them pivot towards you,
it's like you turn the corner is what you said,
you turn the corner, what do you think it was
that turned the corner?
Was it CoSEL-ing, was it that you also started to,
like, at Ringer invest in CoSEL-ing
or like what was your thing that you've found?
Or maybe it was a couple of things
that made the relationship turn the corner?
- Yeah, so for us, I would say, by the way,
it's interesting to hear.
Ah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that.
It was interesting to hear TJ just talking about
starting with CoSEL-ing and I think that's a great strategy
for, and it makes complete sense
and I've seen it play out as well, just like that.
So, Kudos, TJ, good mention on that.
And just in terms of like the turning the corner last year,
so, yeah, in the middle of last year,
it's, like I said, it's been definitely a long journey.
We've gotten some great support from AWS through the years.
We have some great people that we work with
who really have helped us along the way.
And that really just, from an AWS standpoint,
like I said, we saw the investment pick up on their side.
And it came to a point where it's like,
we need to match that investment that they're making
into us actually.
So, that was, I would say, AWS really saying,
like, hey, we want you guys to do more,
but instead of you doing more first,
we're gonna put it more,
is essentially what happened.
And so, it's essentially as a response to that,
investment from their side,
and attention that they were giving us on their side,
we just started to crank up our,
what you said, providing them way more data
than we had in the past.
So, automating the deal registration
and really improving our communications internally
about why, you know, why we're doing it,
how it's going to help the sales rep.
And we're starting to see a better interaction
from a field team standpoint.
And what's interesting is we're seeing AWS lean in
even more into us and our work,
our business essentially, you know, and helping us grow.
And I do think that's a key thing.
I mean, and you mentioned it earlier, Aaron,
just in terms of AWS,
they have these partner programs
because they want to see you grow on their platform
and they want you to spend more money on AWS, of course, right?
So, you know, so it's in their best interest
to make sure you thrive
and they have a lot of thriving customers.
So, and it honestly, like once you actually get
into the program, you know, you reach escape velocity
with it.
I mean, it's definitely gets you a pretty nice return.
So.
>> Yeah, I know so many times we were like,
what motivates the cloud?
What's their metrics this year?
And how do sellers get paid?
I'm like, listen, you don't have to worry about any of that.
It comes down to like,
do you drive cloud consumption for them?
Do you drive utilization of their products and services?
If yes, like then you need to invest in a go-to-market strategy,
implement tools to help you,
bring on a team to help you
and really think about your cloud go-to-market strategy
because it's going to influence something they care about,
which is their consumption of their utilization and tools.
And okay, so in order, like to respond,
AWS is leaning into the partnership.
They want you guys to do more.
And in order to respond,
you had to start investing more.
And what we saw from the tackle side
was both of your organizations starting to really take
from doing these operations yourself manually,
maybe in the tools natively,
to really starting to leverage the tackle platform
to help you operationalize
so that you can get to driving and scaling.
So we saw you guys start to implement our Salesforce app
and start to use our APIs, not just for marketplace,
but for Co-Cell.
Can each of you share,
like your, 'cause you're still kind of,
we're all still early days into getting Salesforce,
really tightly integrated into Salesforce and the automation.
Can you share some of your initial learnings
with the audience around
how you approached your Salesforce implementation
and like where you're going with it next?
DJ, you wanna start first?
Sure, sure.
Yeah, so we had a home-grown integration
with ACE originally.
It was done with workato
and our Salesforce automation.
And it worked well for our original volume.
When we first started doing this,
we were sharing 500 to 900 opportunities a year
and things were fine.
But once we really ramped that up in 2022,
we shared, I think, 2000 opportunities.
And AWS made some changes that,
and this is just what AWS does, right?
Something changes are always innovating
and we weren't aware of it and actually broke our integration.
So we spent all of 2023 manually launching
I think we won over 900 opportunities
that we co-sold in 2023.
And so it made for a big mess.
And so what we did was we sat down
and kind of looked at, okay, here's our options.
And when we looked at our team's capabilities
to move at the pace of AWS,
to continuously update and make these changes
so that our integration goal stayed relevant,
it just made sense to partner with tackle.
And as we looked through all of the capabilities,
we needed help with Marketplace,
we needed help with Co-Cell,
we needed help with our prospecting aspects,
getting our team to understand,
one of the big questions our team had said is,
I don't know when to share an opportunity with AWS
and sharing all of them wasn't good enough, right?
That was my answer to share everything.
But they wanted to have some data.
So we looked at the ability to prospect using tackle,
we looked at the Co-Cell motion
and then ultimately the Marketplace motion
and it just made a lot of sense.
And so we've been, I think we're in what we're calling
the optimization phase right now with tackle.
And basically we're looking at what our capabilities are,
what our needs are,
and starting to automate and create a lot of,
we'll call them shortcuts.
So right now to Co-Cell and opportunity,
we basically have narrowed it down to
four clicks of a button that our reps need to do
and they're legitimately,
Co-Cell, click to Co-Cell,
radio button here, radio button here, submit.
And that's all our team needs to do
to submit a Co-Cell opportunity now.
And we're looking at the Marketplace side
and even still with the Co-Cell side,
how can we make this even simpler?
And we think that there's so much available to us
and so many capabilities that we can make this extremely simple
to Co-Cell and create private offers with our team.
- Yeah, two things that I just have to add on
to your story there.
We see that too.
Like when you decide to go to market with the cloud partners,
it's unique enough that you do need to have
your own people, processes, tools,
kind of supporting that route to market
because the cloud providers are big, huge organizations.
You've got to learn how to navigate them.
They are innovating rapidly.
You've got to stay on top of that
or things break, right?
And so, and they speak their own language
and you've got to know how to interpret all of that.
And so it's unique enough that it requires its own
dedicated like people, processes, technology
to really support that route to market.
And then the other thing you said
that really like triggered for me was
when you go to do sell like any kind of sales force
or business automation,
you've got to kind of break it into two steps.
First get it in there and just get the automation going,
get the flows working, understand the data
and how you're engaging with it.
And then you can think about how can we take this
to the next level and start to build
additional automation processes layered on top
of the tackle automation that's there.
So tackle will have automation.
We'll continue to include automation as we also develop that.
But you can also layer in your own automation
based on how your business functions,
your sellers are selling and how to make things
as simple as possible,
given your CRM system, your sellers,
what you're trying to do, right?
- Yeah, we rolled out what we called like tackle
out of box functionality.
And then we tested it amongst like a Tiger team,
myself and a few others.
And basically we would meet with our project manager
who is running our engineering and our automation
and say, hey, we wish that we could do this.
We wish that we could do this.
And we created a list to kind of roll out of last quarter
and into this quarter
and that got us to the optimization phase.
And the team seemed to find it was very easy
to automate a lot of these things, which was great.
I think it took them, I don't know, 48 hours to,
and it's Brent who to automate the things
that we needed to automate.
And now we took a nine step process
that required some math or MRR,
required industries and a bunch of different information.
We've automated all of that to pull it all directly
out of our Salesforce and automatically calculate
the MRR grade of us and do all those functions.
So we're very excited to see what other optimizations
you can come to and make this even easier for everybody.
- And you're able to think about that
because you don't have to worry about the base automation
and the base automation working
because tackle is doing that for you.
It's what we do day in and day out.
We live and breathe this.
We've got the foundation so that you can continue
to build on top of that
and think about all those automations.
I love it.
Gary, tell us a little about your experience
in building in more automation and integration
into your Salesforce.
- Yeah, so last year we made a decision
to start picking up our registrations
and we're doing it more proactively.
So more of the Alliance team.
So the Alliance team is driving that right now.
And we were registering dozens to upwards of 100 deals
per month or so.
And my poor operations person, God bless her.
She was busy and we had automated.
So it just came down to like,
we're taking this seriously.
At the time we were on doing a portion actually
of our deals at a certain stage
and then started registering them.
And so we were just absolutely committed to doing that,
but we're also committed to actually automating
it to free up her life a little bit.
And so that's so that's.
- And it sounds like to share more.
Like you were also controlling volume
in order to save your people time,
just like he was controlling his marketplace volume
because of the people time it takes, right?
- Yeah, exactly, exactly.
So we actually looked into the AWS Salesforce integration first.
We had some challenges on the implementation of that.
And then we went to use tackles integration
and it was pretty easy actually.
It was like amazing.
We went through all the steps
like within like hours on the AWS side.
And whereas like it was like taking us weeks,
going like directly to AWS.
So that was nice.
And then every single time my observation
just like clicks the button to register.
I think she just loves life.
It's just like this is just,
everything she's dreamed about, right?
It's just like there it is.
So that was really a huge time saver for her.
And now there's other projects
we're gonna have her focus on too, but.
- Exactly, right?
It brings you up now to think about all these other things
that you couldn't have gotten to.
It's like lost opportunity cost by, yes,
you could do these things,
but we can help you and take off your plate.
And even if you do the AWS automation,
who was going to be there to manage the ongoing,
it's one thing to implement an API.
It's another thing to then set up the workflows
and then manage and maintenance
and handle the error handling and all of those things
that go with managing an API once it's there.
It's like great, you created it now what?
- Yeah, it's very much worth it.
- Yeah. - Absolutely.
- That's awesome.
- Gosh, I love both of these stories so much.
- They're true.
- They're so great.
What would you say your goals are for this?
Like you're kind of still in the beginning, right?
You both had calendar year fiscal,
so we're only starting month two of our new fiscal year.
What are some of the goals you have
in your cloud go to market strategy
that you're looking forward to doing?
Both operationally inside the company
and revenue based as far as percentage of your revenue
you think you're gonna get to go through that marketplace
or through that or the cloud partnership
is going to influence.
We'll start with you guys since TJ took a break.
- TJ, take a break for TJ.
Okay, so yeah, so for this year,
one of the, I mean, the number one thing
is really helping our team understand specifically
the sales team doing a better job
with helping them understand how marketplace transactions
and marketplace deals can actually help them
with the deals that they're working on,
how it could help them potentially reduce the sales cycle,
how it could help them potentially get access
to more budget or funding.
There's a lot of nuances there
that on the surface, I think a lot of sales reps
that I've encountered are just kind of like,
why are we doing this?
We really have to be doing a good job
of educating them of the benefit
and how they can take advantage of it.
And that's going beyond some of the headlines
of like, get access to the cloud budget, right?
I mean, that's great and all,
but like, what do you do about that?
And there's intricacies there to understand.
And so just making sure that our teams understand
what those intricacies are with respect
to the AWS commitment, how the marketplace spend
applies to the commitment.
And what the return is for the end customer
when they're growing their marketplace spend, right?
So understanding all those dynamics,
in addition to the commitments that the customer has to AWS
and then seeing how buying through market was will help
help the buyer and also help us
when there is an opportunity on the table.
So that's a big area.
- How are we in the environment?
- Yes, exactly. - How are we in the environment?
- I think that's also something like we underestimate too, right?
As Alliance folks, when we take on this role
inside our companies, we're like,
oh, we're also signing up for like ongoing seller
enablement forever and ever and ever
until you decide you no longer want to have a partnership
with that cloud provider.
- Absolutely.
So that's probably the, you know,
one of the biggest items that we're taking on this year,
as well as even being more, so secondly to that.
So once we get that, this is me with the stretch goal,
is to be more proactive on when we're thinking about
account planning and thinking about who we want to sell to,
figuring out, you know, who are the ones
that actually buy through the marketplace?
And can we just start leveraging
or thinking about that right from the get go?
So, you know, registering the opportunity maybe
if we have an opportunity and start working
with the cloud teams early on and even just identifying,
you know, those ourselves instead of, you know,
trying to talk to the account team or asking the customer
the question to, you know, to dig for it,
kind of have that information already upfront.
Like we know like they're buying a lot through
the marketplace, there's probably a benefit here to them.
And, you know, we should incorporate that to our strategy.
So that would be the second thing, I would say.
- Yeah.
And that's a good point too, 'cause, you know,
at TACO we talk about, you know, cloud go to market,
there is a flywheel and there are components in that flywheel.
And how data is a key component to really driving that flywheel
and how can we use data to help shine a light
in a certain area, be our compass,
make us, help us to have more data driven decisions
around our strategy or which customers and why and when.
And so having TACO prospect data there to help you
be that compass or shining light on these customers
with this cloud partner, now you have a higher confidence level
for the seller to go kick off a co-sell motion,
both like co-sell with the cloud provider
and get the cloud seller on the same page
and also start to have that conversation with the customer,
hey, this, you know, you can buy our product
through the marketplace and you have a higher level
of confidence having that conversation
because the data is telling you
this customer is already buying in the marketplace.
Maybe this particular contact that you're working with
hasn't yet, but the organization knows how to do this
and they've done it before.
So it's not going to, it might be new for each of you,
but it might not, it's not going to be new for the company.
Right?
- Yep, I totally agree.
And just figuring out that flywheel
and you know, that's really, you know, the aha moment,
at least for your company.
And I think every company is going to have a little bit
of a different experience, you know, as they go through this.
There's something about it for your company,
your market, the air going after the deal size
that you have, right?
All that, you kind of need to figure out your sweet spot
of what's going to get the most benefit for you
in terms of working with the cloud provider.
So.
- Yeah, that's so great.
All right, we're going to wrap up this question with TJ
and then we're going to go to Q&A.
- Perfect.
Yeah, we kind of look at the way that I look at the overall
co-sell motion is almost like, let's keep the light on.
Like that's how we keep AWS at the partnership level
that we have and keep the momentum going.
Really all that is said to shorten the sales cycle
both ultimately get to a marketplace transaction
to provide all of those values that are coming from that.
The larger deal sizes.
We found shorter sales cycle, larger deal sizes,
longer term contracts and an extremely high win ratio.
Whenever we involve AWS, and then especially when we get
a marketplace transaction.
So there's a tons of intrinsic value
that comes from our sales reps
and we're really trying to push that out to them.
So enablement is the number one
that we're trying to do right now.
But at the same time from my seat,
one of the things that I'm trying to do is really take
full advantage of the capabilities around marketing
to drum up new business.
The way that when I said like, keep the lights on,
we want AWS to be happy.
We want to share opportunities.
We want to keep them working with us
and creating Mindshare.
But really all of that I'm doing to keep collecting money
in the different programs from AWS.
And from our E staff,
being able to walk into them and say,
hey, by the way,
post-selling with AWS has done all of these great things.
It's also created Mindshare where a rep to rep
for sharing opportunities and AWS has sent in,
some new deals our way and helping us close your new goals
and et cetera.
But also here's all this money that we've collected
from AWS and all these different programs.
And building that plan to actually go out
and capture net new business
that we weren't talking to previously
without our AWS partnership.
And then putting that back into the Co-Thil Motion
and creating that giant flywheel
is really what I'm super focused on this year.
It's actually one of our company OKRs objective
and key results.
So we have six and one of them is partly marketplace
and in our AWS partnership.
So I think we have a ton of momentum moving this year
and focusing that attention to achieve our goal
while meeting the goals at AWS
is set for us is key this year.
>> Yeah, that aligns with what we are also hearing
in our state of the cloud marketplace report
that we just published.
That 44% of the people that responded said
that they're really wanting to get 5% or more
of their net new pipeline being influenced
or assisted through Co-Cell.
And really using that as a way to help with that net new
and trying to get 5% or more of their net new pipeline
coming from Co-Celling with their cloud partners.
Your marketplace goal, you said 10%.
Gary, I just want to circle back with you.
Do you have a percentage like in our state
of the marketplace report,
we're seeing like 53% of our respondents
are putting a target around 15%
of the revenue marketplace deals
are being influenced by Co-Cell
and just getting their revenue going in general.
So what kind of goals have you set for yourself and the team?
>> We haven't actually assigned a goal for percent of AR,
or a percent of new deals or anything like that
through marketplace.
We just not that sophisticated
in terms of our lifecycle just yet.
But I would say within the next two years
we're probably going to be approaching on 10% actually.
So we're pretty much on track.
We saw a 50% increase in marketplace transactions
year over year from 22 to 23.
So we're on a really good pace.
And that's a lot of that is organic.
A lot of that are the market forces,
driving customers to buy through marketplace.
And a little bit of us,
me driving the understanding of what the value is,
and then the sellers then adopting that as a strategy as well.
>> Yeah, that's a very interesting number
because that's the almost the exact same number
that we saw organically grow.
So that is an indicator of the market change.
So.
>> Yeah.
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