How Snyk Tackles Scaling Internally with a Cloud Marketplace Hotline featuring Rebecca Spataro

0:00

Tackle empowered myself and my team to be able to self-serve, right?

0:05

They educated, enabled, and I got to a point where I was an expert in

0:11

marketplace in CoSEL, and then it very much became tackle was that reliable

0:18

support partner.

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Welcome to Unlock Cloud Go To Market.

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The series where hosts Aaron Figer and Patrick Riley share the essential stages

0:29

of the Cloud GTM maturity model

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to start, optimize, and grow your company's revenue through the cloud.

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They've helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs of their Cloud GTM motion

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and in each episode, they're sharing those success stories from the people who

0:45

have put them into place.

0:47

Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future, and the future is now.

0:54

Hey everybody, on this episode of Unlock Cloud Go To Market,

0:57

Aaron Figer and I talk to Rebecca Spittarro from Snyk,

1:00

and we talk her through the maturity model, the multiple stages that she's

1:04

taken two different companies,

1:06

and we hear her feedback and best practices, specifically around how to build

1:10

that foundation,

1:11

and then what tools she's implementing to be successful at scale.

1:14

There are two things that you're going to want to stay tuned and listen for.

1:17

One is her marketplace hotline, and two is her sales play around renewals.

1:21

So stay tuned and learn more.

1:23

Hi, Rebecca.

1:25

Aaron, it's great to see you.

1:27

Thanks for joining us on our podcast Unlock Cloud Go To Market.

1:32

I'm very excited to be here.

1:34

Thank you for having me.

1:35

Yeah, absolutely.

1:36

Tell us a little bit about your professional career.

1:40

I know we can see it on LinkedIn, but I always love hearing the actual story

1:44

and the journey

1:45

and how it all connects together.

1:48

Absolutely, so like many folks in TAC, I started as an inside sales rep at a

1:55

resale partner

1:57

a long, long time ago.

1:58

So, you know, making 100 calls a day, trying to get those end users to have a

2:03

conversation

2:04

in book a meeting.

2:05

And I like to think that I graduated to now calling on cloud partners, partner

2:11

reps

2:11

that are, you know, always excited to hear from an ISV and start kind of

2:15

building that

2:16

better together story together.

2:18

Yeah, and before you were at Smeak, you were at Veeam.

2:22

Yeah, so I spent about two and a half years at Veeam and we were 100% join at

2:30

the hip

2:30

with Microsoft, got an entire education in Microsoft Azure, how those teams go

2:36

to market

2:37

and really how to build our backup and recovery story with the likes of Office

2:42

365 and, you

2:44

know, there were multiple sales plays.

2:46

But we got to be their partner of the year, three years in a row.

2:51

It was a really exciting time under the one commercial partner program.

2:55

And then when I made the transition to Smeak, along with my current CEO and so

2:59

many of our

2:59

executives at Veeam, it was transitioning and learning how Amazon and Google go

3:06

to market

3:07

and their CoSEL programs.

3:09

So it gave me a really well rounded view of how the hyperscalers go to market

3:14

with ISV

3:15

partners.

3:16

That's so awesome.

3:17

I think that's a great like segue right into our first question, which is the

3:21

things we

3:22

focus on and what we need in the beginning evolve as we build and drive

3:27

adoption and

3:29

move towards a more programmatic at scale go to market initiative.

3:34

This isn't your first time helping a software company build partnering with the

3:39

clouds as

3:39

a route to market.

3:41

You spent some time at Veeam helping them build their Microsoft partnership.

3:45

So you leave Veeam, you head over to Smeak to help them with their cloud

3:50

strategy and

3:51

partnerships.

3:52

This is your opportunity to help Smeak go faster.

3:55

So what were some of the things you knew you had to quickly go do at Smeak that

4:01

were

4:01

going to be instrumental in establishing and building adoption of your cloud

4:07

partnership?

4:08

If I think about my past life at Veeam and really what CoSelling and cloud

4:14

partnerships

4:15

was all about at the time, it was coming together and accelerating the time to

4:20

close

4:21

an opportunity.

4:22

It was CoSEL.

4:23

And just the last four or five years, we've all seen and lived the evolving of

4:30

CoSEL

4:30

into marketplace.

4:32

So it was the past like a nice to have, you know, if the deal eventually landed

4:37

in marketplace

4:39

and transacted via that route to market, it was more about the CoSelling and

4:43

the collaboration.

4:45

And while that's still obviously such a strong and powerful key component,

4:51

marketplace has

4:52

become that super exciting.

4:54

We see the growth numbers of end users leaning into marketplace and the growth

5:00

is exponential.

5:01

I think it was almost a luxury that I got to step into the role at Smeak at a

5:05

time where

5:06

marketplace was really taking over.

5:11

And as soon as they went through that process, it's like they would see the

5:14

light and they

5:15

would run and talk to all their peers and they would socialize how easy it was

5:19

to transact

5:19

in that nature.

5:20

So, you know, walking into my role at Smeak, it was very much enablement.

5:26

It's winning the hearts and minds of all of the sellers and the sales

5:30

leadership.

5:31

And you know, I know we'll get into it later, but you know, the other important

5:35

and impactful

5:35

stakeholders across the business.

5:37

But I would say number one, it was enablement.

5:40

It was starting small, but winning fast and socializing the heck out of those

5:44

wins.

5:45

Yeah.

5:46

And like going and getting your stakeholders and keeping those stakeholders

5:51

engaged as stakeholders.

5:53

Absolutely.

5:54

And if I think about Veeam, we weren't a SaaS solution at Veeam, right?

5:58

So it was really in the hands of the customers to pick up those workloads and

6:01

put them in

6:02

their cloud of choice at Smeak, we're 100% integrated SaaS solution.

6:07

So I knew day one, having the support of a company like tackle, I didn't know

6:13

how to

6:13

get started on marketplace.

6:15

I didn't know how to create a listing at the time.

6:18

Now you're at Smeak and it's like, we're going to lead with marketplace.

6:21

So you're like, okay, that's a new one for me.

6:23

That's a new muscle.

6:24

Got to go build.

6:25

Yeah.

6:26

So while I understood the value prop and the go to market strategy, I didn't

6:31

know anything

6:31

about the logistics, right?

6:33

And in the backend process and how that would work.

6:36

We linked up with tackle very early on as soon as we knew that we wanted to

6:41

list at the

6:41

time on all three marketplaces and tackle Coach Dus and walked us through what

6:46

those

6:47

listings would look like, got us on boarded.

6:50

And then to this day, access that backend engine to get our end users

6:55

registered on the product

6:57

so they can start using Smeak as quickly as possible.

6:59

But also at the time, the cloud companies weren't natively sending out those

7:04

notifications.

7:05

And we learned very early on how reliant we would be on those notifications to

7:10

book the

7:11

deals.

7:12

And from an internal Rev Wreck standpoint, accounting, finances, notifications

7:16

were so

7:17

incredibly important.

7:19

And that's what tackle brought us early on.

7:21

And so you're trying to build trust in this new route to market of using the

7:24

marketplaces,

7:25

you need visibility to what's going on.

7:28

So having those notifications really helped reinforce building trust in this

7:34

process and

7:35

this experience that then helped further endorse that onboarding and enablement

7:40

that you were

7:41

doing.

7:42

And speaking of visibility too, if you're talking about juggling to even three

7:48

public

7:48

marketplaces, it's a lot of toggling, right?

7:52

That's very, very confusing, inundating, and being able to have the tackle

7:58

dashboard, all

7:59

of the tiles.

8:00

So I'm able to easily go in.

8:02

My team is able to easily access that single pane of glass to, I can see all of

8:07

my offers

8:08

that are out there in historically, or I can drill down into AWS, Google or

8:13

Azure and

8:14

simply see in one place where all my transactions and where they pending or

8:19

they accepted.

8:20

So it's just, it's ease abuse.

8:22

Yeah, you need that hub to see across all the marketplaces in one central place

8:28

Rebecca, you mentioned the enabling certain teams within your organization was

8:33

crucial

8:33

for your building adoption phase.

8:35

Can you share some insights as to what teams those were?

8:38

And then specifically when it comes to like the back end, the Rev Wreck deal

8:42

desk finance,

8:43

how did you enable those type of teams as well?

8:45

I talked about early on enabling the sales org and so much of that message was

8:52

driven

8:53

by the ease and the quickness of marketplace, right?

8:57

It's easy and it's fast.

8:59

And I set an expectation at that time that, you know, when your customer is

9:03

ready to buy,

9:05

we can have a marketplace deal built out in minutes.

9:08

And I was really my own worst enemy in that statement because at the time I was

9:14

the single

9:14

shop, the one woman band for building private offers, right?

9:18

So if it was APJ or a Mia, that didn't leave a lot of time to sleep.

9:23

So I quickly found that the best way to go was to enable our field finance team

9:29

and our

9:29

deal desk.

9:30

So the global deal desk team became an extension of the cloud team focused on

9:37

private offers

9:38

in region, in time zone.

9:40

So we could really scale and bring our sellers and our end users the best

9:45

experience possible

9:47

as an extension of bringing in the deal desk and making them part of the

9:51

process.

9:52

We needed another Slack channel.

9:54

So we built out the marketplace hotline.

9:57

So you know, we've got our private offer request line and we've got a workflow

10:01

built

10:02

out in there for sellers that aren't super comfortable and confident in what's

10:07

needed

10:07

yet to create that offer.

10:09

You can't miss a beat.

10:10

You've got to leave us the billing ID or, you know, the account ID, the tenant

10:15

ID at

10:15

the time, what have you, there was a space for that.

10:18

Who is the contact responsible for accepting the offer?

10:21

What is their email?

10:22

Right.

10:23

So it was foolproof and that made it very efficient for us to then work as a

10:28

team, leave

10:29

a quick set of eyes emoji on there just to let the other teammates know that we

10:33

had

10:33

this one.

10:34

And right now we're in the last week of the quarter.

10:37

And you know, it's all hands on deck.

10:39

We're watching the line.

10:40

We're collaborating as a team.

10:42

Even though it's a different org, those are stakeholders that I heavily rely on

10:47

to keep

10:47

this train moving and not miss a beat at critical times like quarter end.

10:52

So enabling other folks.

10:54

Were there other stakeholders that you felt were critical that you needed to

10:59

get on board

11:00

when you're in that kind of beginning stages of establishing and building

11:06

adoption of your

11:07

cloud go to market strategy?

11:09

There's always the obvious folks, right?

11:11

You know, we're always so focused whether you sit in business development or

11:16

alliances

11:16

or the go to market, the sales org, you're so focused on sales and winning over

11:20

that

11:21

group that it tends to just take the majority of the focus sales leadership

11:27

revenue officer.

11:28

That group, we talked about deal desk and field finance and think about even

11:33

legal.

11:34

Who's not the obvious ones that you were like, Oh, that was a critical stake

11:38

holder that really

11:39

helped me unlock going to market with the cloud or like, unlock supporting my

11:45

partnership.

11:46

Legal finance and accounting, those were three that weren't obvious to me right

11:52

away as we

11:52

started to scale in our marketplace journey, right?

11:56

And we're starting to get the attention of other business units and they're

11:59

saying,

12:00

Wow, we're generating a lot of revenue here.

12:03

We need to put some additional eyes on this.

12:05

If you think about AWS, two going on three years ago when they came out with

12:09

their standard

12:10

contracts for marketplace, their SCMP prior to that new release, we hadn't been

12:15

using

12:16

their standard contracts.

12:18

Once that came out, getting legal involved and starting to really peel back and

12:22

look at

12:23

our maybe sub 50k business, right?

12:26

And in seeing the amount of time and friction that our sales org was spent

12:31

working with

12:32

legal and understanding that with some due diligence from that department, we

12:37

could embrace

12:38

this standard contract that's super familiar to so many of our end users and

12:43

start leaning

12:44

on that for efficiencies.

12:46

We see that too at tackle, right?

12:48

Like we talked to our head of legal and she's like, every time it goes through

12:52

the marketplace,

12:53

we save the company X amount of hours that results in X amount of money.

12:59

So like the more you can go through the marketplace, the more cost efficient it

13:03

is because you're

13:04

not tapping on legal to do these things.

13:07

Again, you always want the face of marketplace to be easy and user friendly for

13:13

the sales

13:13

org, you know, with the release of like vendor insights and, you know, just

13:19

tackles native

13:21

insights dashboard where we can see all the clouds.

13:24

We can see the fees and what's extracted there.

13:28

And when we started bringing them together with those teams and even at the

13:32

different,

13:33

you know, cloud and marketplace events, we've brought them to events.

13:36

And now, Erin, you got to meet our VP of field finance.

13:40

We're bringing these people out now and it's all about efficiency, right?

13:45

When you start having those financial discussions about the impact of

13:49

marketplace and these

13:50

are people you want to win over strategy and ops and your CFO.

13:54

So, you know, just sharing the love, creating as many allies as possible.

14:00

And if there's one learning, you know, what I had done it beam versus what I've

14:05

done here,

14:05

you know, I think it's easy to get caught up operating in a silo, right?

14:09

The Alliance team knows how to speak the language of the cloud partners and we

14:13

know the buzz

14:14

words, right?

14:15

But we can only get so far if you just keep it alliances and channel and cloud

14:22

partners

14:23

in that group, right?

14:24

But as you start empowering and bringing more people to the table and getting

14:31

other organizations,

14:33

other business units, empowered, comfortable, confident in the talk track, that

14:39

's where

14:39

you start to scale and win.

14:41

Yeah, I was going to say that's when you move from like building adoption to

14:45

really driving

14:46

and scaling adoption of this cloud partnership as a meaningful route to market.

14:53

I know I struggled to get legal and finance on my team.

14:56

I didn't have a great success coming out of that.

14:59

You've had success doing this.

15:01

Can you give some advice to those who may be in the establishing foundation

15:05

phase or

15:05

starting to build adoption on how to get out of the silo and specifically the

15:10

legal, the

15:11

finance, how do you get those personas on board?

15:14

Obviously, you brought them to events and you're bringing them around.

15:16

But how did you get them on board initially to buy into this process?

15:20

Back to the whole trial and error, right?

15:22

It would get too for us just because we didn't know at the time, right?

15:26

So it would be maybe a pain, right?

15:29

Would result in a success, right?

15:32

There was an impact.

15:33

So where I would have, you know, accounting or finance chasing me, it was, well

15:38

, there's

15:38

got to be a better way, right?

15:41

And just the sheer momentum and the scale, right?

15:43

When you're doing millions and millions of dollars through the marketplace,

15:46

people start

15:47

to take notice.

15:48

And other groups want to get involved and say, how can my org make this more

15:53

efficient,

15:54

automated?

15:55

If I even just go back to the beginning and we talked about how tackle got us

16:00

listed, tackle

16:01

was that back engine.

16:03

But tackle empowered myself and my team to be able to self-serve, right?

16:09

They educated, enabled, and I got to a point where I was an expert in

16:15

marketplace in CoSEL.

16:17

And then it very much became tackle was that reliable support partner.

16:24

Our support team is amazing, right?

16:26

Like the amount of support calls and being there for you, like that's one of

16:31

our super

16:31

powers is like, we want to be right there with you, lock stop, right?

16:36

Yeah.

16:37

And I mean, people just get so accustomed to marketplace just works and the

16:41

customer just

16:42

has to click accept.

16:45

Sometimes there's a snag.

16:46

Sometimes somebody's logging in with the wrong credentials into the wrong

16:50

buying account.

16:51

And I don't always have visibility into that, right?

16:53

So I can't tell you how many times it very critical times of the year and in

16:57

the sales

16:58

cycle.

16:59

I'm pinging tackle.

17:00

And I'm saying, can you just keep me honest, tell me if this is active.

17:03

Do you see this on your rent?

17:05

We got into a cycle for, I'd say, probably a couple of years that it was a very

17:11

reactive

17:11

relationship.

17:12

Like I need this tackle response.

17:15

And then it went from, you know, tackle is the teacher to tackle playing a

17:20

support role

17:21

to tackle now as an innovation partner.

17:24

And then we met at a re-invent a couple of years ago and you introduced tackle

17:29

prospect

17:29

and tackle CoSEL and it was, wow, okay, there's a next step.

17:35

I'm not good, right?

17:36

There's still so much more to do here.

17:38

I feel like we've kind of grown up together, right?

17:41

As we needed more, you built more.

17:44

As you are growing up and now you're moving out of the beginning stages into

17:48

the scaling

17:48

phases of maturity, there are new things to think about and new strategies to

17:53

play.

17:54

And I know you've done a couple cool things.

17:56

Could you talk us through a little bit around what's kind of next?

18:00

After we established the foundation, we laid the baseline, we enabled our teams

18:04

Now we're looking at how do we leverage more data?

18:06

How do we start to scale and drive more efficiencies?

18:08

What plays can we involve?

18:09

Can you talk us through like what that looks like in your business right now?

18:13

Yeah.

18:14

And you also like incubated some really cool ideas.

18:16

And so share with us like some of those ideas that you incubated.

18:21

The story I love the most is when you all gave me access to just being able to

18:26

dump thousands

18:27

of domains into tackle prospect in generating these three cloud scores.

18:31

What a fun new toy to play with.

18:34

I had marketing coming for me.

18:36

I had sellers coming for me.

18:38

Marketing wanted me to score all these accounts for ABM campaigns and different

18:43

target campaigns.

18:44

And sellers were coming to me one at a time saying, "Oh, you score my account

18:48

list."

18:49

And that created a whole additional need for enablement and what did these

18:53

scores mean

18:54

and what went into these.

18:56

But something we did at the end of 2022 is we were looking at our renewals

19:04

business.

19:05

And I had had our business development reps on the marketplace side at the

19:10

cloud partners

19:11

chasing me for what felt like forever to start putting renewals through

19:14

marketplace.

19:15

And at the time it just wasn't the best business decision for sneak given the

19:20

fees associated.

19:22

But just to proactively share our renewals wasn't where we were at the time

19:28

until fees

19:29

started to decrease.

19:31

So if we think about the amount of business we do through the AWS marketplace,

19:35

having

19:36

a very, very minimal fee to start creating a renewals engine seems like a

19:42

really cool

19:43

idea.

19:44

So that December 2022, I took all of our worldwide renewal pipeline for the

19:51

following year because

19:53

we knew we had access to future data agreements.

19:56

So how can we leverage marketplace functionality to close out these deals early

20:02

Because we know we can book them at time of acceptance.

20:04

So we scored the entire year's renewals and we have a renewals team.

20:11

So I took each rep, I sent them all their renewals with their scores.

20:15

And I said, we're simply going to do outreaches and we're going to very pro

20:19

actively ask for

20:20

the customer's billing ID.

20:23

And once they send that billing ID, we will turn around a private offer for

20:26

acceptance.

20:27

Now, if they say that's not their preferred route to market, so be it, right?

20:32

But we're taking a very proactive approach.

20:34

And we saw such a tremendous increase in our marketplace business by doing that

20:40

And we had really happy customers, right?

20:42

Because there's so much value for the customer to transact through the

20:46

marketplace.

20:46

So that's become just a routine engine for us.

20:51

And we're working with Tackle to find ways to really continue to automate and

20:56

make it

20:56

very, very simple to just send out offers proactively to customers under a

21:03

certain threshold.

21:04

I love that.

21:05

So things that helped unlock marketplace as a route to market for you was first

21:10

we needed

21:11

the cloud providers to lower their fees and give you the ability to do future

21:15

dated agreements

21:16

and flexible spending.

21:18

And then you use Tackle Prospect to then unlock which customers would we want

21:24

to reach out

21:25

to initially to see like, hey, we think that you're likely candidate to renew,

21:32

sneak through

21:33

the AWS marketplace.

21:35

And so you kind of incubated this whole motion.

21:39

I like to think about them as like campaigns, right?

21:41

You created a renewal campaign or a renewal route to market.

21:45

You're looking at like customers that are 50k renewal base.

21:50

And now you're integrating Tackle Salesforce app.

21:54

So you're going to be able to bring this play to life inside of Salesforce and

22:01

really like

22:02

scale it out to the entire organization.

22:05

Absolutely.

22:06

And what I love about the Salesforce integration piece is again, the whole

22:10

operating in a silo

22:12

in the past, right?

22:13

It was pulling these reports from Salesforce, doing bulk uploads, getting the

22:17

info out there.

22:18

And oftentimes sales reps would come back and feel like they have lost some

22:23

control in

22:24

the process, right?

22:25

Oh, you shared this.

22:26

I have a rep reaching out to me and I didn't reach out.

22:29

How do they know?

22:30

I think we've all kind of lived through some of these scenarios, especially

22:34

with those enterprise

22:35

accounts.

22:36

So I love that Tackle Co-Cell allows us to give that control back to the

22:42

sellers and

22:43

they're really owning that process.

22:45

And it cuts out so many steps in the middle, right?

22:49

Seller to seller and taking it from there.

22:51

So, yeah, you could take that renewal opportunity list view, set it up inside

22:56

of Salesforce.

22:57

It probably already exists inside of Salesforce, integrate tackle prospect data

23:03

right there

23:04

and like start to really bring to life this workflow in Salesforce and maybe

23:11

even work

23:11

with your Salesforce admins on like, we incubated this play.

23:16

Here's the process.

23:17

Now we have tackle Salesforce app inside of Salesforce.

23:21

How do we take this manual process and start to bring it to life inside of

23:27

Salesforce and

23:28

what are the intersection points where we could actually drive automation?

23:33

Like, could I set up a custom workflow that just automatically runs this

23:39

initiative and

23:40

gets it to a certain point so that I can take out some of that manual work but

23:47

also still

23:48

have the right intersection points to say, like, I need to review this.

23:51

I'm going to look at this or I need to do something here before we do the next

23:57

thing.

23:57

And I mean, as you talk through this, Erin, right, there's still so much more

24:00

work to

24:01

be done on our side.

24:02

We just had a call last week with our Salesforce admins and the tackle team,

24:07

right?

24:08

We've got executive sponsorship now, which is phenomenal saying, hey, we have

24:13

access

24:14

to all this cool stuff.

24:15

Why aren't we maximizing the value?

24:18

I feel like it was on us for a while to take further advantage of the tools

24:22

that we had

24:22

access to.

24:24

Now we're locked in and I'm just really excited to see how far this can take us

24:28

just unlocking

24:29

this automation and this efficiency.

24:31

Yeah.

24:32

And the amount of data you're going to capture now to all in one place, you can

24:35

start to

24:35

make additional sales plays around, oh, do we have competitive renewals and

24:39

what's her

24:39

win rate on competitive renewals that we've now taken through marketplace and

24:43

we can start

24:44

to get trends and spend more time with in the front end, analyzing as a sales

24:49

rep.

24:50

Hey, I know that this customer is likely to go through marketplace because I

24:53

can see it

24:54

on my opportunity and I can also see that if I run a renewal through and there

24:58

's a competitor

24:58

involved, we've got a 90% win rate.

25:01

And so for me, that's the exciting part is to see how you can take that further

25:05

going

25:05

forward.

25:06

So we'll be curious to see how that goes.

25:08

And I think that fits into like your theme.

25:10

You said you have a rock this year at sneak around automation and efficiency.

25:16

Yeah.

25:17

So if we think about renewals, enablement and partnerships are three core

25:23

priorities right

25:24

now.

25:25

And you know, obviously tackle plays a massive role in the partnership one,

25:29

enablement, the

25:30

team is always willing to step in and do additional enablement, join QBRs,

25:36

workshops, but the renewals

25:38

one and that's where we're really looking to turn this into a well oiled

25:43

machine.

25:44

Right.

25:45

How do we take the time we're spending today and just get smarter about how we

25:50

approach

25:51

this business?

25:52

We're not set up right now as a company to really leverage the self serve

25:56

options through

25:57

the marketplace.

25:58

So we're very much reliant on tackle to help us define what this looks like and

26:03

just drive

26:04

that efficiency with our renewal business.

26:07

Awesome.

26:08

Okay.

26:09

So we talked about establishing the foundation, building adoption, and now

26:14

moving over to

26:16

doing things more at scale and really driving adoption and creating that scale

26:23

motion, which

26:24

fits into like that automation and efficiency goals that you have at sneak.

26:30

You're having so much success with your cloud strategy.

26:34

What are some of the things you're focused on outside of this renewal plan?

26:38

What are some of the things you're focused on now to help you keep up with that

26:43

success

26:44

that you're having?

26:45

I joke that all the problems we have right now are great problems to have,

26:49

right?

26:49

It's just all about how do we keep up, but how do we continue to innovate and

26:54

take advantage

26:56

of all the programs out there, right?

26:57

Because it's one thing to keep up, but we need to keep getting better at the

27:01

same time.

27:01

That's where we're just heavily reliant on all these new technologies that

27:06

tackle offering

27:07

that maybe we haven't leaned into yet, right?

27:09

So we're just starting to dabble in the CoSEL and bridge that and we're going

27:14

through an

27:15

update process right now.

27:16

And if we think about the manual hours from teammates that go into the pipeline

27:22

hygiene

27:23

today, the management, the launching and closing of opportunities, the

27:27

registrations, right?

27:28

There's just so much of a manual strain on my team.

27:32

I can't even imagine once we fully unlocked the CoSEL and that's all just being

27:36

streamlined.

27:37

And something that I'm sadly and bizarrely excited about is just being able to

27:43

close

27:44

out ops, right?

27:45

You know, if it's closed in Salesforce, it's closed in Acer, Partner Center or

27:49

what have

27:50

you, right?

27:51

And just alignment, I think just continuing to bring folks together.

27:56

It can never hurt to forge a new relationship and start to drive, you know,

28:02

just new points

28:03

of view and perspective and new strategy together.

28:07

Yeah.

28:08

So you started with marketplace and now you're starting to really bring online

28:13

CoSEL and

28:14

really activate your CoSEL strategy inside of Salesforce using our Salesforce

28:19

app.

28:20

That's really going to help you take this CoSEL motion you've been doing

28:23

manually and

28:24

really start to do it at scale and more efficiently by using the tackle CoSEL

28:30

Salesforce app.

28:32

I love that.

28:33

Rebecca, there's a lot obviously on your plate and as you've gone through your

28:36

phases of maturity,

28:38

that continues to change where we started with on the single point of failure,

28:41

essentially,

28:42

I'm doing everything to now I have more cross functional support and then maybe

28:46

we get some

28:47

dedicated personnel.

28:48

Where do you see yourself and sneak in two, three years?

28:52

How does this operationally look to the partnership?

28:55

We've got deal desk managing functions.

28:58

You've got sales managing like the day to day, the private offers, CoSEL maybe

29:03

and then

29:03

you've got more time for the actual partnerships work that you signed on to do.

29:07

What does that evolution look like for you?

29:08

Like what's your vision for the next couple of years?

29:11

Sneak is very much leaning like so many into the ecosystem approach, right?

29:16

So as we continue to forge relationships with traditional channel partners, GS

29:22

Is really

29:23

triangulating the whole CoSEL approach, right?

29:27

So if we think historically it being ISV to cloud partner, well, how are we

29:31

rounding that

29:32

out and bringing in that solutions integrator right in the enterprise space?

29:36

How are we making it a more inclusive experience to drive the best outcome for

29:41

our end user,

29:42

right?

29:43

Because that's what's most important.

29:44

So I'm thinking about programs and sneaks committed in the next couple of years

29:48

to become immediately

29:50

a cloud first.

29:51

It's not like if a customer mentions it, right?

29:54

But it's a this is a conversation we're having early on in the discovery stage

30:00

of the sales

30:00

process because we've been very guilty, right?

30:03

Of marketplace coming in at the 11th hours, the hero to save a deal.

30:07

And we know that marketplace is incredibly strategic for our customers, right?

30:12

So we should be having these conversations early on.

30:16

So we're very much focused on the enablement that plays into adding efficiency

30:21

and strategy

30:21

just to that CoSEL process and really looking, you know, 2027, we're saying we

30:26

are going

30:27

to be a partner first organization, right?

30:30

So whatever that indirect route to market may be, GSI traditional channel or

30:35

marketplace,

30:36

that is how we're going to market on every deal.

30:40

And so now you're going to continue to build the muscle, but by integrating all

30:46

of these

30:46

operations, prospect, marketplace and CoSEL into sales force, you're now going

30:52

to take

30:52

this muscle and say, hey, I want to you do build this muscle inside of sales

30:57

force inside

30:58

the system that you use so that we can hit these goals that we have in 2027.

31:04

And you don't integrate this into sales force and get that muscle going in

31:09

sales force.

31:10

Your goals of being partner first marketplace heavy in 2027.

31:15

Like, I can't even imagine what that would look like if you had to do it

31:19

manually.

31:20

I'd like to ask one big question that I think would be super helpful for

31:24

everybody.

31:25

If you could go back, I'm having conversations with our sales team a lot of

31:29

times with our

31:29

customers and then pulling me in.

31:31

Our customers, a lot of them are bought in already and ready to go, but there's

31:34

a couple

31:34

that are still struggling to sell their leadership and sell the cross-

31:39

functional units on this

31:41

is a channel that we should be in.

31:42

And this is something I'm going to need your support in.

31:45

What's like the one or two things you think would be most impactful for an

31:49

alliances or

31:50

partnership leader who knows that there's value to be had there, but can't

31:54

quite figure

31:55

out the message to tell the rest of the business as to why we need to get here?

32:00

Two answers, one being specific to marketplace ISV and user in one specific to

32:06

tackle.

32:07

Just think about the value prop and just kind of some key happenings throughout

32:13

our journey

32:14

early on.

32:16

Eliminate the burden of the marketplace fees from your sales order.

32:20

I can't stress how important that is, right?

32:23

It is well worth it to the business because we know that this is how our

32:27

prospects and

32:28

customers want to buy.

32:30

So being able to meet customers where they want to transact and then not going

32:36

all in

32:37

with the EDP or the cloud commit story, right?

32:40

I think it's super easy for sellers to latch on to the, "Oh, do you have a

32:45

commit?

32:46

Do you want to buy through marketplace?"

32:48

And it's an easy, easy message.

32:50

I get that.

32:51

But if you think about at the end of the day, all the customers that transact

32:54

through marketplace

32:55

that don't have a commit, there's so many other use cases.

33:00

Right?

33:01

And I can't tell you, as we do more globally, when we think of things like

33:06

being able to

33:07

pay a marketplace invoice in another currency or being able to align invoicing

33:13

to a strategic

33:15

roadmap, you name it.

33:17

Just like there's discovery as part of the traditional sales process, there's

33:21

discovery

33:21

around why marketplace.

33:23

So I would just urge other ISVs to not lock on to that cloud commit story as

33:30

like a deal

33:31

breaker.

33:32

There's other reasons and use cases there.

33:35

From a tackle standpoint, I was guilty of dabbling.

33:39

Early on, it would be associating offers in tackle.

33:42

And then maybe I was just doing net new deals in the tackle dashboard and

33:48

platformer.

33:49

I got very comfortable with AWS, but I'd still go to the Google portal for

33:53

those, right?

33:54

And it was a bad habit.

33:56

And as I onboarded new teammates, the direction was do everything in tackle.

33:59

You want that to be your single source of truth, your one stop shop.

34:05

It makes it so easy if you do everything in one place.

34:08

And we are doing that now, right?

34:10

Whether it's an agreement based offer, whether it's a renewal, whether it's a C

34:14

PPO, right?

34:15

So I would say when you're onboarding, when you're bringing on new teammates,

34:20

do everything

34:21

in the tackle platform.

34:23

Because from a reporting standpoint, being able to have all your different

34:28

cloud specific

34:29

marketplace deals in one place is invaluable.

34:32

Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your journey.

34:38

It was so helpful for our audience to hear directly from their peers what you

34:44

're experiencing

34:45

and how you are trying to continue to unlock your cloud go-to-market strategy

34:51

so that

34:52

you can really continue to make that a meaningful route to market for your

34:57

organization.

34:58

It was a pleasure being here.

35:00

Thank you again for having me.

35:02

That was such a great session with Rebecca in hearing her story of how she

35:06

really implemented

35:08

a few key initiatives that helped her really unlock her cloud go-to-market.

35:13

I think one of them was probably the stakeholders.

35:16

What did you learn about the stakeholders?

35:18

Yeah, I loved that she went for the not-so-obvious.

35:22

Go get finance, go get accounting onboard.

35:25

And that really helped her in the earlier stages of building adoption so that

35:31

she wasn't a single

35:32

point of failure.

35:33

She really got key stakeholders involved early on so that it could really help

35:38

her continue

35:39

to unlock her strategy.

35:41

Yeah, and she needed help, right?

35:44

Selfishly, it's nice to hear, but she needed a resource like tackle and I was

35:47

in her position

35:48

I did too, but that was super cool to hear her say as well.

35:52

Yeah, I loved how she kind of broke the partnership with tackle into three

35:56

phases for her.

35:58

In the beginning, we were there helping her, enabling her and her team so that

36:02

she could

36:03

go enable others inside her organization.

36:06

And then it transitioned to a more of a supporting role.

36:09

We were there helping support her growth and her operations and then evolving

36:15

into being

36:16

an innovative partner.

36:18

So as we're innovating, she's then taking those innovations and continuing to

36:22

integrate

36:23

them into her strategy so that she can continue to drive more and more success

36:30

in her cloud

36:31

strategy.

36:32

Yeah, and it sounds like a lot of their scale now is going to hinge on like

36:35

sales.

36:35

And she talked about like a sales play and sales compensation and sales enable

36:40

ment.

36:41

It's kind of cool to see that.

36:42

And what did you think about when she talked around the sales organization

36:46

being one of

36:47

the key drivers for scale?

36:49

Yeah, and in order for that sales organization to be a key driver for her,

36:55

really integrating

36:57

the operations, prospect, marketplace and co-sell into sales force is really

37:04

going to

37:05

take them from that next level to really get to scale and automation and

37:12

efficiency that

37:13

they're looking to grow their company.

37:15

They have to implement these things in order to enable their entire

37:19

organization.

37:20

That goes back to those first two points where we need more people to do more

37:24

things.

37:24

She can't be the only one doing everything.

37:26

All right, everybody.

37:27

Well, thank you so much for listening to today's unlock cloud good market.

37:30

I'm your host Patrick Riley.

37:32

I'm your co-host Aaron Fager.

37:35

And we will see you next time.

37:36

So pull up a chair, grab a notebook and join us as we share the essential

37:41

stages of the

37:41

maturity model to start, optimize and grow your company's revenue using the

37:47

cloud.

37:48

For more resources on executing your cloud go to market strategy, you can visit

37:51

our website

37:52

at tackle.io.

37:54

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