Navigating the Cloud Alliances GTM Journey
In an increasingly cloud-centric business landscape, technology vendors have turned to cloud alliances and Marketplaces to win customers more effectively. This Cloud GTM strategy, however, can prove challenging for alliances leaders to align stakeholders, stand out in a crowded ecosystem, and establish scale for significant results. This in-depth webinar, co-presented by Tackle and Symbio, lays out the pathway for organizations at any stage of the journey to navigate the critical milestones for Cloud GTM success.
(upbeat music)
- Today's topic, Navigating the Cloud Alliance's GTM journey.
You're all here because you know
that building a Cloud GTM strategy can be challenging.
So the goal for the next 40 minutes
is to walk you through how with the right strategy,
you can align stakeholders, stand out,
and scale your operations to drive results.
So without further ado, let's get to our panelists today.
We have Justin and Gary here,
and then Patrick, we wanna join the stage too as well.
And we'll start with you, Justin, to introduce yourself
and tell us a little bit more about you and your company.
- Hey everyone, thank you for the introduction, Michael.
It's great to be with you.
I'm the founder of Symbio.
We're excited to be presenting today.
Symbio is a cloud alliance's go-to-market agency
and we help ISVs and SIs with their co-marketing
and co-selling with cloud alliances.
So it's great to be with you.
- Thanks, Justin.
Gary, you wanna hop in?
- Yeah, thanks, Michael.
Hey, Gary Young here.
Nice to meet everybody.
I'm a partner at Symbio.
My background really is cloud provider and ISV.
So hopefully I can share some of my experiences
and in both sides of this journey.
So nice to meet everybody.
- Thanks, Gary.
Glad to have you here.
And then Patrick, last but not least,
our own tackler, Patrick,
for introducing yourself and then share a little bit more
about why Symbio and Tackler are partnering together.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Hey, everybody, Patrick Riley.
I'm Tackler's cloud go-to-market principal
and co-founder of our maturity model,
which we'll be learning a little bit more about today.
And hopefully we can give you some good context here
as to why we are together.
So the partnership between Symbio and Tackler
is really a holistic solution for you,
for ISVs to provide both tools and support
to navigate the complexities within this growing
and ever challenging cloud go-to-market space.
And combining our two companies together,
we're really hopeful that we can give you
not only the cloud marketplace readiness and procurement
and streamlined processes that Tackler provides you,
but also helping you to be more proficient
in partner marketing, co-cell acceleration,
and all the things that come with that
from a Symbio perspective.
So we're really kind of making five key pillars
out of this partnership.
The first is we wanna make this a faster time
to market for you all.
Not only with the listings and streamlined procurement,
but also an enhanced marketplace presence.
So we wanna have higher quality marketing content,
targeted campaigns, leveraging Tackler prospect data
with best practices from Symbio,
increased awareness with the cloud providers.
So that's our joint messaging,
those better together stories that we always talk about
and really making sure that we're aligned
with that first party message.
The fourth one is our enhanced sales strategy.
So we always talk about sales enablement here at Tackler
and we do a lot to help enable our sellers
with leveraging the prospect tools
and getting ready to co-cell.
But we don't really go deep into personalizing
that customer content and aligning that content
to be targeted.
And so that's where Symbio is gonna be an excellent partner.
And then from an operational efficiency standpoint
is kind of the fifth pillar there.
That's our seamless integration with the corporate systems,
advanced reporting capabilities,
and really trying to make marketplace simpler for everybody.
So Michael, that's why we're here today.
Hopefully everybody takes away some value
or some value with at least one of those pillars
on our partnership.
- Awesome, thanks Patrick for the level set there
and really the why behind the webinar today.
So let's dive in a little bit deeper.
I'm gonna share up on your screen,
it'll be the type of maturity,
called GTM maturity model.
So to dive in a bit deeper, Patrick,
can you walk us through
and just give us an overview of this maturity model, please?
- Yeah, so we've been using this for quite some time.
This is a proof of concept that came out a couple years ago
and is really just a testimonial to our customers.
We took a look across all of our customers
and even those that weren't our customers
that were either having success
or struggling in the marketplace.
And really we were needing a place
to benchmark everybody so that we could say,
hey, this is where you are today.
These are the things that you've done to get here.
These are the things that you're struggling with.
And here's what you need to do to go move on
to the next phase of maturity or the next scale.
We were able to break that out into four key categories here.
And you'll see that the beginning half starts out
as a very much a transactional activity.
Marketplace is coming in as either something
that one of the business units needs
because the customers are asking to procure that way.
Maybe even the board came and said,
we want to start Marketplace, but it's really early.
We're really leading with alliances.
We're not seller led yet.
We're leading with manual processes,
bandating things in place,
getting adoption across the teams.
And that's really our foundational key to stages,
which is establishing foundation and then building adoption.
Where we're trying to make Marketplace
a very strategic activity and something
that's a extremely valuable part of our business,
but we're still in the business transformation phase.
This is really a huge transformation exercise.
And so these two stages are the foundation laying
of that transformation.
Then we have this kind of strategic chasm here
where we shift and we see that ISVs
who start to see some success
have done a number of key indicators.
And we'll talk about some of those in a little bit,
but that's really where we move into
the driving adoption stage,
where the sellers are starting to lead the conversations.
Alliances are starting to support them.
We're doing less transactional activities
and more proactive partnership and sales led motions.
And then when we get to scale,
that's where we start to actually automate things.
You see the crowds of the world
who are automating and implementing processes
and adding people and really starting to scale
and get the true leverage of the Marketplace behind them.
So hopefully that gives you a quick overview
of how we look at the maturity of customers
and prospects within the Cloud Go to Market space.
And today we'll talk a little bit about each of those two
transactional versus strategic phases
and how both tackle and symbiote can be better together for you.
- Love that, thanks Patrick.
So without further ado, let's jump into the first section
right here.
So Patrick, you wanna just share with us
how tackle looks like success across the first two
transactional stages of maturity, please?
- Yeah, absolutely.
And then I promise Gary and Gary and Justin are gonna talk
and give us some deep insights here.
So the first phase is here.
Obviously I talked a little bit about them,
but from a tackle perspective,
this is where we're really looking at,
we've got a listing set up,
we've built out our readiness, right?
So internally we've gone to try to go get buy in,
we're leveraging all the resources that we have internally
to get additional stakeholders to be brought in,
marketing, ops, legal, so forth,
to get to that point where we can actually get a listing,
a beach head for the Marketplace, right?
So this is usually where your product is built on.
That's like the first piece of the puzzle
that we all have to get.
It's like the listing, it's table stakes at this point.
And so we see that as the first indicator
of where we are in success.
Then we move on from there,
and there's a lot of processes behind this,
such as are we using data to inform
who we're gonna go target Naxxed?
And obviously a lot of our customers
are using the tackle prospect tool to do that.
But once we've identified that strategy
and we've really started to say,
this is our phase one initiation.
Here's our test or our pilot of this process,
we're gonna go CoSEL.
And so we wanna make sure that we've checked that box
and we start to do that.
But there's some things that we need to do
that the guys here are gonna tell you about
in order to be ready to even have those CoSEL conversations.
And then obviously we wanna have
a baseline level of reporting here.
So in our establishing foundation phase
for from a tackle perspective,
there's a number of checklist items that we look for,
but just to highlight these are three pillars
that we really try to make sure everybody has done
this, we've gotten ready, we've put our listing up,
we started the CoSEL process and we understand
from a RevRec perspective how to close the loop
on our quotes cache process.
We've got that at least down so that if we take
a transaction through, we know what we're doing.
And then in the building adoption phase,
that's when we're starting to manage these a little bit more.
Okay, now we've gotten that baseline, those bricks laid,
we are starting to CoSEL more,
we're providing more value to the cloud providers,
we're being consistent in those activities
and you can check out more of the CoSEL content
when it comes to what those best practices are,
but we're following those now.
And now we're getting to the point where customers
are trying to procure through the marketplace
in a volume or a manner which exceeds
what our current capabilities usually are.
So alliances at this point is probably like,
"I need more help, I'm doing CoSEL,
"I'm doing deal desk operations,
"I'm trying to manage the partnership activities,
"I'm also kind of our marketing person right now."
And it's a lot for one person to handle.
But at this phase, this is kind of the edge of the fence,
the top of the fence here, if you will,
as far as, are we gonna lean into more of a strategic motion
or are we gonna keep this as a transactional vehicle
for our company?
And so from a tackle standpoint,
this is kind of those first two phases,
but behind all of those,
there's a lot that needs to be built within your company
and a lot that needs to be analyzed
with the data that we provide you and the cloud providers.
And that's where Simbio can help step in and say,
"Hey, we are gonna take this a step further now.
"There's a lot of strategy that we can inform here
"so that we can move the needle and hop over the fence
"and become more of a strategic partner
"to the cloud providers."
- Definitely, thanks Patrick.
So Justin, I'd love to hear from you,
some of the Simbio perspective and best practices
that ISVs can take in these first two phases.
- Yeah, thank you.
So to walk through this similar
to how Patrick talked through these stages,
we have a similar maturity model
that aligns with tackle's maturity model.
And so we've kind of blended these two together.
And Simbio, across these two stages,
we often see partners coming to us
that are just kind of starting out
and they're listing in the marketplace
and they're wondering,
"Well, where's all the business?
"Where's all the deal flow?"
I thought I was gonna be on marketplace
and everyone's gonna discover me.
And so that's kind of a misconception about just listing
and then you'll be discovered
and folks will start transacting.
We view the marketplace as the transaction
and the fulfillment, the procurement method,
but there's a lot more to prime and bring deal flow
and make this into a significant revenue channel.
And so at that foundational level,
a big part of what we do and encourage clients to do
is they're joint messaging and positioning.
And we're gonna get into this a little bit deeper
in a moment, but at a high level,
that's defining how we fit into the cloud narrative.
How do we fit into our hyperscaler partner's story,
the workloads, the personas, the verticals and so forth?
Because we're trying to message to that ecosystem,
both internally and externally,
we need to know where we fit.
What are the priorities for them
and what's our story aligning ourselves?
And the best way I've thought about this
from hearing from others is how can we make ourselves
look and feel as much like a first party service
as possible alongside the cloud?
And so once we have our joint messaging position,
then we can start building content based on that,
makes it a whole lot easier
if you're building seller facing content
or customer facing content,
if you already know what your joint value proposition is,
what vertical you're speaking to,
what kind of sales compensation you run into,
what kind of additional cloud consumption you drive,
all of that kind of gets baked into your content.
And so at this establishing foundation level,
you'll be building content at a solution level,
probably a little bit more generic or more horizontal
to show how you can support the cloud workload,
support the cloud use cases within their narrative
and how you can speak to that to your sales team as well,
helping your sellers to understand how they need to start
using cloud go-to-market as a strategy.
And so what we're working towards,
as Patrick kind of mentioned,
is going from an alliance led where you as alliances leaders
or even partner marketing leaders need to be pushing
every go-to-market motion and working on every deal
to a situation where sellers are the actual,
actually the ones proactively driving the deals,
they understand the strategy,
they know how to work with the cloud,
they know what to say, what to bring,
how to help them and where they help help.
All of that is what you're building up to.
So the first kind of foundational level,
you're enabling internally on your direct sell side.
Moving over to adoption,
that's where we can start then building more targeted content
and more targeted campaigns.
And what we're working towards there is,
in order to get to the sales led or even cloud led,
go-to-market motions,
we need to have winwires and stories in case studies
and success to point to.
And so taking a very targeted approach to campaigning
and a targeted approach to content
will help us see quicker wins, right?
So we don't need to boil the ocean yet,
we don't need broad awareness at this point.
We often will help our clients to specifically go get some wins
to point to success and show the value is there.
And so building very pointed campaigns,
very pointed content will help us to get those quick wins
a little bit faster than trying to just go drive awareness
or drive leads even.
The co-sell enablement at this point,
you're starting to, as you're working with tackle
to operationalize co-sell,
think about enabling sellers with more of that content
that you're building in ways that they can start now
and engaging their counterparts
with better together stories and better together content
for those specific accounts.
And so we're helping our partners to create content
that will help them work with their counterparts
at the cloud hyper-scalers.
And so this really starts to get you a foundation
where you have your story together
and you have some wins to point to
and now you're ready to start operationalizing even further
so that it's more in the hands of the sellers
and less on the shoulders of the alliances teams directly.
- Justin, I know you talked about the better together story
here and you went in some detail on the establishing foundation.
Something I hear a lot,
and I'd be curious to see your thoughts on this,
but I hear a lot from some of our ISVs,
we've already got a better together story.
And when we look at it, it's really their product story,
like how are they, what are their features and functions
and why is that helpful for going on the cloud provider?
And it doesn't really tell the story of,
"Hey, cloud AE, here's how I help you
survive and thrive every day."
And here's how us plus the cloud
are gonna be better for the customer.
Can you talk about it?
Is that something you see a lot
and what's the importance on actually having
that joint messaging that's aligned
on kind of a more broad level
than just the features and functions discussion?
- Yeah, so there's layers to these joint messaging
and positioning frameworks.
We'll touch on our approach to it
and some of the larger buckets that we like to work on
and make sure that they're filled out, but absolutely.
This is a common sort of thought processes.
Well, we know our value proposition,
we know our verticals, we know our personas,
and that's all kind of done.
Of course, it's done for your direct marketing efforts,
but when it comes to your alliances
with the cloud hyperscalers,
it's almost a redo of that,
trying to fit yourself again into their narrative.
And there's two audiences.
There's their customer audience
and there's also their internal stakeholders,
or sales audience.
And some of those really couldn't care less
about most of your verticals.
They maybe just have one vertical that they work on, right?
So if that vertical is something
that you do have a story on,
but you're not really telling it
in the context of that vertical
and you're still telling it broadly
because you're worried, hey,
we're missing out on these other verticals,
we're agnostic or we're horizontal solution.
That's okay that you're a horizontal solution,
but building a story and building some content
around the vertical will help you resonate
and land that message much better
for those audiences who really need to know
how you fit into financial services or healthcare
or so forth, because that's really all they're gold on.
And so that's actually very powerful,
not only for internal, but also externally, of course,
we can use that in much more targeted campaigning.
So it's, it is, and one of those exercises
where you sometimes have to take a step back and say,
well, let's make sure that we have the foundation
of the strategy of how we're trying to position ourselves
and it will end up increasing the output,
but it takes a little bit more time, so absolutely.
- Thanks, Justin.
I love the point you said earlier
about how it's important to amplify
and ensure those wins.
I know we'll get into that a little bit more
in the driving and scaling adoption portion,
but in the meantime, let's move on to joint messaging
and positioning framework.
So we're gonna pass the mic over to Gary.
We'd love to if you'd jump in and share more about this one.
- Yeah, I know, thanks Michael.
I know Patrick and Justin has mentioned this quite a few times
and this is that critical.
This is the start of your better together story.
This is why we're double clicking
of the importance of getting this right.
And this is the building block of the story
and the joint value proposition.
At Symbio, we actually follow this framework.
As you can see, it's fairly detailed.
I'll go into each one kind of talk through
what to really prepare for and look for
in each of the sections.
So the first one we start with
is horizontal solutions and workloads.
So this is really you, the ISV,
trying to figure out how your solution
fits into the cloud providers, horizontal solutions, right?
There's workloads and their product suite.
Does your product directly integrate
into the cloud products, right?
Are there any overlapping products?
So in this section, you wanna have to identify
and really know which products tightly integrate,
which products overlap and understand
the differences between the two.
So the second section really talks about vertical solutions.
And then we all know here,
if you've worked with any cloud provider,
a lot of them now are verticalizing on their sellers,
the product sets, their solutions.
So this is very, very important to understand
how your solution and products
and how does it affect and really align
with each vertical?
You've gotta understand which each verticals,
challenges, objectives and use cases.
And hopefully you'll have customer examples
in each vertical and use cases, right?
So this is really what strengthens your message
and strengthens your, and amplifies your product.
The third section, biopersonas,
aka ideal customer profile.
You gotta understand who you're targeting,
specifically which titles you're targeting.
You gotta identify those and really be specific, right?
This is how you're gonna get through
and cut through the noise,
really understand these biopersonas
and understand their challenges,
each persona's challenges.
This is objectives and also their own use cases.
What do they care about?
'Cause you gotta talk to them.
This is, there's a lot of stuff coming at everybody, right?
And everybody's questions to us at least is,
"How do I get through?
"How do I cut through?
"How do I get my message across?"
This is how you do it.
You've gotta really talk to that biopersona.
So the next section is,
this is really very, very critical in dealing
and talking to the cloud provider, right?
You gotta understand the seller and internal,
what's in it for them, right?
Really what that means is how do they get paid?
You gotta understand,
you gotta understand how they get their compensation,
their incentives,
you gotta understand how your solution directly
or indirectly affects cloud consumption.
You gotta be able to message that,
especially if it does directly affect it,
you gotta measure that,
you gotta have some metrics to associate that.
That really is gonna get people's attentions
at the cloud providers, right?
You gotta understand the programs,
what's available to you, are you in them, right?
Are you eligible for them?
That will help you with funding,
that will help you with resources,
and that will help you with just getting involved
and being in this ecosystem of,
within the cloud provider, right?
And the most important thing for this section
is you gotta share customer wins,
winwires, you gotta have winwires.
So that's really what's gonna drive,
I know questions we get asked a lot is,
cloud provider doesn't care,
they don't really understand my service,
the winwires will cut through that, right?
That's what they're gonna ask for first thing.
The next session, all this builds up
to your differentiation pillars, right?
What sets you apart from others,
what sets you apart to the cloud provider
and to your customer, right?
And then the very, very last section
is now you write your JVP,
what is your joint value proposition,
what is your story?
And hopefully this is very concise,
you wanna have your 20 second, 30 second pitch,
you wanna make this as tight as possible,
and as clean as possible,
but you take this framework
and you build into your joint value proposition.
So you don't really start writing your JVP first,
you wanna build all the pieces to it
and then combine and then write a very concise message.
This is how, this is the building block.
This is your better together story
or at least the start of it.
Hopefully once you build this framework,
follow this framework and then build some examples,
then you're on your way
and we'll go through the other further stages
as you mature into the process.
- Gary, I think a good takeaway from me from this
is also that this isn't a one person job, it sounds like.
We've got a lot of unique personas within our business
that can help us build this out.
You know, we need to take product, we need to take sales,
we need marketing, we need everybody working together
to help put this together
because it's not something simple.
When I put in the chat,
I tried to do this in my previous life
and directly the lack of effort directly impacted
my co-sell business.
And so, you know, that was a big lesson learned there.
- Yeah, thanks for bringing that up.
Definitely the stakeholders involved in this,
obviously the alliances team, right?
You're gonna be driving this,
but your marketing teams are gonna be involved,
your product experts are gonna be involved,
your executives are gonna be involved,
sellers are gonna be involved,
finance is gonna be involved,
and also the cloud provider side is going to be involved
in creating and building this thing.
So there's many stakeholders into this thing.
It is a process and you may have to kind of build
some of these pieces out.
And hopefully you'll have a customer in here
involved in this story.
That's really how it's gonna make it more powerful
when you present this.
So I appreciate that Patrick, yeah, you're right.
- Thanks, y'all, and thanks Gary.
Now that we've covered establishing foundation
and building adoption,
we're gonna move into the next stage of maturity model.
So we'll be covering driving and scaling adoption.
So Patrick, starting with you,
what should partners be doing to operationalize for scale
and what data should partners be using
to lead their GTM efforts?
So kind of two-part question there,
but yeah, we'd love to hear your take.
- Yeah, good question, Michael.
So I think this is where we come over the fence.
This is where we become more strategic in nature.
But to get there, obviously, we need those foundational blocks.
We need to have those stories.
We need to have our business value propositions.
We need to have already laid all that groundwork.
Once we've started to build out a brand
that is working within the cloud providers
that we're actively engaged with
and within those partnerships,
then we can start to see, all right,
we're gonna lift and shift our focus and priorities
from this alliance-led activity
to starting to get some of those other stakeholders
internally engaged.
Now, maybe we've got some dedicated resources.
We're some part-time resources
that are helping us say from a marketing perspective.
They're leaning in on all these campaigns
or we've got a partner like Symbio
that's helping us take us through this.
And now we've gotten to that phase
where I can focus on other activities.
And so here's where the sales team
needs to start driving these activities
from the ground level.
It's involved in their sales methodology.
So maybe it's MedPIC, maybe it's MedIC.
They're working through and asking the right questions
to the customers early to define
which cloud providers are the ones they're on
or which ones do they prefer to procure through.
And those conversations lead to a very early discovery.
And we're starting to speed up the sales cycle
in this process now.
So we're becoming more efficient,
not only from a customer-facing perspective,
but also internally from an operations standpoint.
I now have sellers telling me
or maybe they're doing it,
co-sell registering or co-sell submitting
to the cloud provider of choice
and sharing the opportunities that we've now discovered
are likely to either end up procuring through the marketplace
or even if they don't,
the customers on, let's say AWS or Microsoft or Google,
and we wanna go co-sell with those providers
to help us get a little extra lift.
So from an efficiency standpoint,
we're starting to either change who is doing that work
or automating those processes.
And you can do that by leveraging the data
that we have going through.
Okay, we know now from the first two phases
that customers that look like this,
you're kind of defining an ICP really,
customers that look like this,
that buy these types of products from us
in this stage of the sales cycle
at this deal threshold from a price standpoint,
we're automatically gonna register those deals for co-sell.
And then we are going to be from a first offer
opportunity standpoint,
creating a marketplace offer for these customers
is the first thing we wanna go do.
Before we even talk about any other possible ways to procure,
this is the first one.
And by doing so, we're gonna have sales team
driving enablement there.
So for us, the driving adoption phase is really,
when you start to see those fundamental shifts
and obviously tackle likes to help enable those activities,
connecting to the API's using the Salesforce app,
leveraging the prospect data built into that application,
connecting through the cloud providers,
like these are all things that start to turn the tide.
And then when you get to the scaling phase,
this is like your best of the best.
This is when we've got integration across many of the clouds,
we're leveraging API's not only with tackle,
but other third party providers,
you're integrated with your RevRec,
your entitlements, tools, internally,
it's a smooth process.
There's no copying and pasting PDFs
and saving them into drive files
so that you have an audit trail
for RevRec deals through marketplace.
Like these are all now connected things.
And so for us, those are the key foundations and fundamentals,
I'll say, to becoming a partner at this size.
And it's really a cloud led or a sales led activity now,
where we're getting more engagement
and it's not one way anymore.
- As I was all on mute there in my bed.
Thank you, Patrick, appreciate you sharing there.
Justin, we'd love to hear the symbiote perspective
and just hearing some of the most effective marketing efforts
that you can have at these stages.
- Yeah, thank you.
So at this level, we're really starting to shift,
again, the strategy to the sellers to the cloud.
What we mean by cloud led,
and that's a term, if that wasn't clear,
where you're starting to navigate invited
to cloud led campaigns or initiative for go to market,
that they are leading out,
where they're promoting that either internally and externally.
So that's something that you can aspire to,
where there's more invitation
to exclusive kind of a campaigning,
which, as we all know, there's thousands and thousands
of partners in these ecosystems
and how do you get to that level?
Well, you have to start kind of the foundation,
you're working your way up.
So these joint case studies in the driving adoption,
that's the best form of sales enablement
and awareness that you can get, in my opinion.
So at my time at Google working in CoSEL,
the number one thing I could do to get my partners
more visibility to the sales team was point to winwires
and point to how others were hitting quota,
working with my partners.
And so having case studies or win stories,
or however you can build them either internally,
anonymously, externally, those are extremely powerful.
That's one form of content that we're trying to develop
at this point to help us to get more broader awareness
and adoption and engagement from the sellers
on the cloud side, as well as obviously your own sellers.
So building out those stories,
also you can use more broad awareness campaigns
and lead generation campaigns.
At this point, you may have MDF that you're using
and you can help build out those campaigns
using those funds.
A lot of partner teams, this partly why we exist,
it's one to maybe two people,
maybe one alliances person and a partner marketer
or a sales person who really just don't have the bandwidth
to cover all of this.
If you can achieve the level of MDF,
then you can kind of invest further in creating this content
and promoting it and getting more support and bandwidth
to focus on the strategic level conversations.
Those, the other part here of this built driving adoption
was the internal campaigns.
And we just kind of referenced that as internal awareness,
being aware of how many reps know who we are,
how we collected kind of emails,
do we have any kind of metric of how many reps have engaged
with us on opportunities who have worked with us,
who've gotten a good attainment,
are we starting to measure that and grow that as a KPI as well?
So that we know that we're driving more and more inroads
into this ecosystem.
So shifting over to scaling adoption,
now you're getting to the,
what we refer to as a strategic partner,
you may be a strategic solution partner,
you're getting invitations to first party led,
cloud led initiatives and programs and campaigns.
You can start to scale your new geographies
and to enable the channel partners or the SIs
that may be working with you in the cloud.
And at this point, you should have mechanisms to automate
a lot of CoSEL enablement.
I think Michael's question of what helps partners
stand out the most is in our experience,
everything, the best performing content,
the best performing activities are very pointed
to specific accounts, specific verticals,
as I mentioned before.
So we take a very account based approach
and we have kind of a framework for a virtuous cycle
of how that works that we can kind of touch on in a moment.
But having an account based approach to this
is really the, what we find to be the best way
to get sellers to start opening their eyes and saying,
okay, I hear from thousands of partners,
I'll be like, I get bombarded from go to market opportunities.
But now I see how your company applies to my account
specifically and I have content related to that
specifically that I can go and share with the customer.
So if we advance to slide seven here,
this kind of touches on that framework.
If you kind of zoom out then on this,
what we're trying to implement is a virtuous cycle of CoSEL.
And we've included co-marketing and the activities
across the co-marketing funnel that we can do.
But on the right hand side,
when you have account based sales engagement
and account based marketing or ABX feeding CoSEL,
then you start this virtuous flywheel, if you will,
of accounts are getting engaged,
accounts are getting content from us,
we're opening up meetings,
we're opening up our opportunities in conversation.
That is the priming the pump for us to get in front
of the cloud sellers.
If we don't really have anything in there,
just on a wish list,
then that's less useful of a conversation
to go talk to a cloud seller, right?
But if they're already in conversation with us,
there's an opportunity.
Now we can register those.
Now we can work with the cloud providers,
get in touch of it, get in front of the reps
who we connect with, who we enable,
who end up getting quote-doubtament with us.
And those become our advocates who can then kind of repeat
the cycle, tell their friends,
ask for a repeat with a different account.
And now you see more partner or cloud-originated opportunities,
cloud-originated pipeline
that doesn't have to come from outbound selling
and co-marketing on the left-hand side,
but more from the organic, if you will,
discovery and sales referrals to other accounts.
And so this is what we try to implement
and help customers to do to stand out
is taking an account-based approach
in conjunction with their co-marketing efforts.
- Awesome, thanks, Justin.
And I'd love to drill down and take a look
at the Co-SOL portion here.
Gary, how should partners approach Co-SOL at this stage?
- Yeah, I'm just gonna share some best practices
that I've seen working with clients today
and during my time at Google as well.
Honestly, the ISVs, they have to lead
with the Co-SOL portion.
Don't wait for the cloud provider to lead this.
ISVs will have to lead and drive this virtuous cycle.
We already talked about the nailing
your joint messaging and positioning.
Very, very important.
That is the beginning of that better to render story.
We gotta align your content with the cloud's joint,
file value proposition and create that joint value proposition.
You have to start automating and your integration
with the cloud marketplaces.
This is to manage your sales pipeline,
account mapping and such.
Has to be automated.
Keeps everything more efficient.
And now you have a better visibility
into what you're doing with the cloud provider.
Definitely create personalized content.
We prefer an account-based approach.
Really cuts through some of the noise
that everybody gets inundated with daily.
And the last piece really from a best practices perspective
is you gotta create forcing functions.
So that could take in many shapes.
Could be customer events.
You could drive webinars together,
lunch and learns together.
You could do enablement sessions
with the partner and a customer.
Leverage conferences and industry events.
Really very helpful.
But driving and forcing, having a forcing function
really keeps you top of mind.
And if you constantly do that throughout the year,
they're never gonna forget you
'cause you're always in their face about something
and something of value.
So this is really what drives this virtual cycle
that Justin was mentioning earlier.
So thanks, Mike.
- Yeah, and just to add to that,
I think Gary wisely touches on events
and there's a lot of channels
that in a lot of approaches you can take.
So just showing up, showing up in every way possible.
This requires buy in across the company.
So Cloud GoToMarket has to be a strategy
that everybody's bought into.
If you show up, you're investing,
everybody sees that and over and over,
it turns into more goodness that comes back to you.
So it really does require some initial investment
than to see the virtuous kind of reciprocation.
- Definitely, thanks, Justin.
And we'd love for you all to kind of jump in
and share customer success story on yours and Symbio.
So Justin, feel free to jump in and share here.
- Yeah, so this just to talk about for a second,
an example of a partner named Sonotype,
working with AWS who's somewhat new
to the Cloud Alliance GoToMarket with AWS.
Getting listed on the marketplace,
had some revenue targets, starting out,
I think they had a great relationship
with looking for how to set the proper foundation.
And so we started at the beginning
with the joint messaging and positioning framework
and building on content and then taking that
into pointed kind of one-to-one campaigning.
Like we said, driving those two conferences
and events that they were sponsoring or co-hosting
with the Cloud provider.
And so things like a webinar and reinvent in this case.
And that in and of itself gave them the proof points
that they needed to be able to invest
and keep going in the partnership
and show that there was results here.
And so from that initial kind of campaign
and foundational content, they were already able
to develop these proof points or KPIs
that you see on the business results
of hundreds of leads and opportunities
and they ended up with private offers
being submitted and accepted.
And so they have some now, some success to talk to internally
and to the partner to take it to the next level.
And so this is an example of just starting
in that foundational level, taking the time
to build out the joint messaging and positioning,
doing some pointed campaigning,
leading that into Co-Cell to have some actual revenue
and opportunities to look to was a great win.
Admittedly, this was, I think, a little easier
than I would want to set expectations for everyone.
They had results within the first four or five months,
revenue results.
So that was fantastic.
And we always, if you're just starting out,
we always also encourage, like,
start with the lowest hanging fruit that you can
to get some momentum, to get folks excited about.
And so if you have opportunities to go to market
with renewals or with open source or free accounts,
things like that, whatever you can do
to get some traction, that's the best way to go.
So this was a great example of a client
that needed to get started from scratch
and how we can help them go from zero
kind of to that one first bucket of go-to-market maturity.
- Awesome, thanks, Justin.
Looks like we're getting a little close on time here.
I'll be fully honest.
I really think Goldcast is gonna keep us
letting us continue this event,
but just in case it cuts us off short, which I doubt,
I wanna go ahead and give a quick call to action for y'all
and then we can jump into questions.
So yeah, if you'd like to learn more about Symbio,
get an assessment of your Cloud JTM maturity.
Are you just getting in touch at contact@ SymbioHQ.com?
If you'd like to learn more about tackle,
there's a little button, hopefully,
on the top of your screen that says,
talk to a Cloud JTM expert.
But yeah, feel free to contact Symbio right there
or when you click there to talk to tackle,
we'll have someone reach out to you.
But in the next couple of minutes here,
let's go and cover some of the questions.
So it looks like we have one to initially jump into,
but if you all have other questions,
feel free to go to the Q&A portion
and fill them up from there.
So let's jump into the one from Nate.
So Nate said, "My understanding is that
co-sell support from the Cloud providers is only possible
when you have much of your infrastructure running on them.
Any ballpark estimates on how much is necessary
to qualify per Cloud provider?"
Who wants to jump into this?
- Maybe I can touch on this
and Patrick could be able to add,
but we often refer to this in our engagements.
It is somewhat changing.
And so I avoid putting it out there
because it's gonna always shift
and I don't wanna have something that's legacy
that's outdated.
Every cloud provider is gonna have a different program.
They're gonna have different thresholds.
This is key.
If you're running on that Cloud provider,
it will help you tremendously.
And so when you're doing commits,
if you're committing to a Cloud,
use as a negotiation leverage for MDF
or for co-sell inclusion in programs like this,
it absolutely is helpful and key.
- Sweet.
- Yeah, good, great point.
I think for me,
the biggest thing we need to consider initially,
at least, is that we need to know how they get paid, right?
So we need to understand that they're not only paid
on growing their accounts with consumption
or services, as you mentioned,
but they're also gold or incentivized in each Cloud various
on co-sell wins, marketplace transactions.
So it's not just a consumption story,
but yes, that's a very important story.
And we need to remember,
co-sell's still a relationship building exercise.
So how do we help build our brand as a consistent sharer?
This is a sales rep who's got a pipeline
they've got to build.
So how do we help them become the person
who's sharing a consistent pipeline
and helping them ultimately get to their numbers,
even if it's not consumption?
And next week, we have a webinar on the consumption story,
but in short, we have to consider that our software
will in some way cause growth in the end-user systems.
There's no reason why it wouldn't.
If we grow their business, then their business
creates more consumption or need
because they've got more data.
So what's that story?
Can we find a story that makes sense
and isn't just some loose-agoose,
not well thought out story?
Or do we need help from a new one
who can help take your tenant on tenant solution,
containerize it, deliver it as SaaS on customers tenants
and use some kind of third party there?
So I would say just let's not think of this
as a only, hey, they only care if I'm drawing consumption.
Yes, that's why they're here.
That's why they all make the big bucks.
But it's also a relationship building exercise
and we have to tell good stories.
And I think if you learn nothing else
from the symbiotean today,
like we all can do better at telling stories
and we need to do better at building those
for everything from co-sell and better togethers
to marketing and sales campaigns.
Like, and all of that needs to be done under the lens
of what's cloud marketplace and how's it matter
to the end user?
And it's a tough story to shift from what we're used to today
and we can all use some of what symbiote provides
to help us put that in the right context.
Yeah, and how that we didn't end up,
that's exactly, that's a great, great answer Patrick.
It's not 100% about you running on their cloud.
It is very useful to know how much consumption
you are driving though.
Even outside of your own spend directly,
how much do you uplift customer spend
if they adopt your solution?
And so part of our exercise is understanding
what are those workloads?
What are those meters that are gonna start spinning faster
because the customer bought your solution?
If that's not the case, then we also need to work on
what are the deals that you're unblocking?
What are the deals that we can close faster
or larger because we're working with you
that where there's maybe a feature gap
or a use case gap that you fill?
So there's work to be done if you don't necessarily
run on that cloud or you don't drive consumption.
There's a couple layers deeper we can go,
but those are two big levers
that we definitely wanna push on.
So good question, thanks for sharing.
- Thanks Justin.
It looks like they've been still going
as little people here.
So if you don't have any more questions,
I'll go and wrap us up here.
You'll probably see a ticker on your screen.
If you wanna learn more about that,
what Patrick was saying about how you can
build your own consumption model
and how consumption is important to Co-Self,
feel free to click there and register.
But one more time, huge thank you Gary,
Justin, Patrick for sharing your insights today.
And of course, all of you for attending
and sharing your comments, questions
and contributions to today's session.
Be on the lookout for the webinar recording
in your inbox shortly.
In the meantime, have a wonderful day
and we'll see you next week hopefully.
Bye y'all. - Bye.
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