Revenue Playbook: How Wiz Tackles Cloud GTM
Hear how Wiz started and scaled its Cloud GTM strategy and how they’ve grown revenue from their first listing to building operational excellence.
(upbeat music)
- A little bit about today's topic
where I pass over the mic to Stryker and Scott,
our goal is to really shed a spotlight
on the story of how Wiz scaled their Cloud GTM
while giving you some actionable tips
and best practices along the way.
So over the next 20, 28 minutes,
we're gonna cover a quick crash course
on what is Cloud GTM.
Share how Wiz built a foundation
for successful Cloud GTM growth,
scaling from one million in ARR
to hundreds of millions in record breaking time,
covering the challenges that they faced
and the women scaling and then how they overcame them.
And then last of all,
walk through the role that Cloud GTM has played
during the recent economic shifts
that we're all going through.
So, and probably a few more things along the way.
So without further ado,
I'll turn it over to Stryker to handle introductions
and leave the discussion.
Thanks, y'all.
- Thanks, Michael, appreciate that.
And I think that I agree with that five to one translation
between working at a normal software company
versus a startup Scott.
I think that you might agree with that as well.
- Yeah, as well.
- Let me get in here in the beginning.
I'm joking.
- Great to see everybody.
I'm Dave Stryker.
I lead the Cloud Go to Market sales team here at Tackle.
I've been with the company for just about four years now.
Most of that has been as an account executive
on our sales team.
And recently we have this new charter here
where my group is really focused
on facilitating the Co-Sail relationship between Tackle
and the hyperscalers.
So really excited to host the conversation today.
And Scott would love for you to introduce yourself
to the group and maybe a little bit
about your background as well.
- Sure.
So my name's Scott Sumner.
I lead the Global Strategic Alliance's here at WIS.
I have responsibility for all the hyperscaler partnerships
and all of the tech alliance partnerships.
They all fall underneath me.
So my background, I did a stint at CrowdStrike
and Palo Alto where I also did a similar function.
- Awesome.
So we got a real Cloud Go to Market OG here with us today.
So speaking of the term Cloud Go to Market,
what does that really mean?
And kind of what is Tackle's perspective
on what that means to the market as well?
Cloud Go to Market is really about the strategies
that a software company employs
is to leverage the cloud provider ecosystems
and ultimately drive revenue.
And the drive revenue portion is something
that we work tirelessly here at Tackle
to make sure is really the output metric
of the measurement of all that our customers
and prospects and software companies abroad
are doing on a day-to-day basis with the cloud providers.
And what we know and have come to understand
is that this is almost always going to be a mix
of people, processes and technology.
And we also know that it is always gonna be cross-functional.
Of course, it starts oftentimes in alliances.
There's a very, very quick connection there to sales,
marketing, operations and even finance.
So really Cloud Go to Market encompasses
all of those different functions
within the four walls of a software company
and how effectively they're able to align
on actually executing on this massive opportunity.
And that is really what our goal is at Tackle.
And that is to put our customers and our prospects
in the best possible position to execute on the opportunity.
And this is fueled by the consumption of cloud services,
continuing to go up into the right at a crazy pace.
And these ecosystems and these channels
are seemingly becoming more powerful
on a daily, by a daily basis.
And really in the nearly four years
that I've been working at Tackle,
the way that ISV's interact with the cloud providers
has evolved in a tremendous way.
And we're gonna dive into that a little bit more here.
Personally, I consider it to be a privilege
across my time at Tackle
to work with so many different software companies
with different approaches and products and target buyers.
And they've all played a role,
not only in shaping our product and service
and kind of helping us see around corners
of what comes next for our customers,
but also really holistically being bar raisers
for the market and really defining
what Cloud Go to Market is
and establishing all of the opportunity
in the software world to execute on these.
So without a doubt,
one of the companies that is joining us today, WIS,
is one of those bar raisers.
And we're gonna dive into a few different aspects
of their journey as a software seller
and selling through the clouds.
And really kind of looking at that at different phases.
So Scott, I know this goes without saying,
but thank you as always for the partnership.
It's been a great ride between our two companies
and I feel privileged to have had,
along with a cast of All-Stars at Tackle,
the ability to work with you guys over time.
- Yeah, thanks.
I really appreciate that.
Our partnership started way before I was at WIS as well.
So thank you for everything that you've been doing.
Yeah.
- Awesome.
I think as a way to get started,
I think it's useful to maybe go back to the beginning,
maybe chapter one at dollars,
zero of marketplace revenue for WIS.
We hear a lot about, you know, WIS was the fastest
software company to get to $100 million in ARR,
congratulations on that.
There were some recent press out that kind of shows that,
you know, nine months later, you were at $200 million.
So there's obviously been a lot of growth,
just to set the table in the foundation.
What did WIS look like when you walked in?
And this was really something that you guys
were just getting started with.
- Yeah, thanks for the question there.
So I joined in July of 2021.
We had no marketplace listings.
We had a contract with Tackle
and I specifically remember my boss,
and after we go through the onboarding saying,
if you could just get one marketplace listing up and running
in the first year, that would be amazing.
And I was kind of like one,
like we can crank these things out.
Having Tackle also made it super easy.
We were able to literally get all three marketplaces
built across the hyperscalers within hours.
So that was kind of us getting off to the races.
I remember setting up Google.
You called me the next day, said,
"Hey, we haven't signed a contract with you guys yet for Google."
So we immediately took care of that.
And literally within a few weeks,
we were educating our sales staff,
which I think was roughly 40 at the time.
And I wanna say that our first deal was a $1.3 million burn down
that happened roughly a month and a half later.
And from there, we were off to the races.
As of today, roughly 50 to 60% of all of our revenue
goes through the marketplaces.
So I think that the power is kind of evident.
I didn't share this with you,
but as we were building the marketplace listings,
I asked the marketing team to help out.
And I remember telling one of the marketing individuals
like how important this marketplace was.
I said, I bet next year,
we will be, I'll be calling you and telling you
that we transacted 25 billion.
We did that within three months, I think.
And just, it was an amazing thing
to be able to show the company the value of the marketplaces.
So that was it in a nutshell from the beginning
just to take off.
So with your--
- Awesome, yeah.
It's interesting to kind of see how fast things have grown
and kind of where it started
and where it's evolving too.
As you were starting to dive in,
you mentioned like how fast 25 million came for you guys.
Obviously there was an enterprise focus there
and, you know, Wizz does transact deals
in the tens of thousands.
They also, you know, transact deals
and seven, eight figures as well.
But as you were really building out
your go-to-market strategy through the clouds,
what were some key areas of focus that you wanted
to start with as kind of the foundation
for the way that you wanted to build?
- Well, we had to be able to make sure that it lying properly
with how we were compensating our sales individuals, right?
Because there was a lot of talent on our sales team,
but not a lot of marketplace knowledge.
So we wanted to make sure that they were comfortable
with how we were able to get them paid
whenever a deal would close.
And as most of us know on this call and the listeners,
it's kind of difficult sometimes
to, you know, show a booking that occurs.
So having technology in place to like tackle,
to be able to, you know, quickly give us the ability
to show a receipt and things like that really helped out.
So aligning it with the business.
And then as we grew the business,
we changed the way that we were going to market
and we have a three-pronged approach currently,
which is really going to business
or going to market with resellers,
going to market with hyperscalers
and going to market jointly with hyperscalers.
And traditional resellers.
- Yeah, it's an interesting path.
And when a lot of other tackle customers
are focusing on like that partner plus cloud provider approach,
what were some learnings that you had there
as like you're talking about a traditional channel
and then maybe the evolution towards
a relatively new age channel as well
and kind of bringing those two worlds together,
which I think that you guys have done pretty effectively.
Was there resistance in the beginning?
Like was there a lot of selling that you had to do
to get that off the ground?
- Well, you know, it's a long-term process, right?
It's like the landscape changes all the time.
You have to keep up with what the hyperscalers are doing.
And sometimes there's misinformation, you know,
originally the number one hyperscaler
that had this action was AWS and there was a fee
and a lot of traditional resellers were turned off
because of that.
So we have to go back and re-educate them
that the fee is no longer there.
So it's just a constant enablement that we do
with our partners and on both sides to help them understand
where both resellers and hyperscalers can meet in the middle
to do what's right for the customer
and be the best that they can be.
I firmly believe doing this with resellers
is something that is a bit of a game changer for us.
That allows us to open up doors
that we didn't even know were there
across both go to markets.
So.
- Yeah, a really good example also
of like the constant communication with the cloud provider
and like working with them to kind of clear the path
towards mutual success and they were fully bought in there.
So that's a really good example.
As we look towards the million dollars towards
and through a hundred million dollars in revenue,
you guys really started to change your mindset
and measuring marketplace,
not just in an overall dollar value goal,
which I know that you guys have,
but really communicating and talking about it
as a percentage of your overall revenue.
We believe this is totally the right way to approach it
and totally the right way to look at it.
But what are some key metrics
that you were finding in your early revenue
through marketplace that kind of draw not just yourself,
but also sales leadership and operations leadership towards,
wow, this is a really efficient way to sell our software.
And we wanna start to think of this
as we wanna do X percentage of revenue through marketplace
and not just an overall revenue number.
- So early on, whenever we had a small number
of really talented sellers and we were educating them
on the marketplace, I told one of our top sellers
about the burn down that customers get
if they have a commit contract.
And I remember the seller saying to me
that that's too good to be true.
Why wouldn't everybody be doing this if that were the case?
They just, again, it just shares, you know,
not the lack of knowledge, but the fact that people
are focused on different things
and you have to continue to enable them.
So sometimes we lose sight of this today.
We're now 850 people.
I don't even know how many sellers we have today,
but in order to maintain the level of knowledge,
we have to continue to go back
and tell them similar things over and over.
So I think that that's one facet of it.
And then you mentioned about getting zero to a 100 million ARR,
a third of that revenue came through the marketplace.
And we weren't even talking about the 100 million.
I feel like until a few months before we actually got there
because we had line of sight.
And I know that it was something that was also
because of the marketplace.
We would have gotten there eventually,
but the marketplace just allowed us to make that happen
much faster.
And then of course you mentioned some press out
the top as of yesterday that talks about
doing 200 million nine months later.
The marketplace was totally an enabler for that to happen as well.
So you start to get people that believe
that this is really something that can happen.
And then what dovetails into that is
whatever the hyperscalers start to lean in
and provide you leads and things like that.
The motion really starts to happen much, much quicker.
And then finally, kind of the good nail in the coffin
is whenever you have a CISO for a nine digit deal
you and your leadership, if you weren't in the marketplace,
you may be the best product, but I was not going to be able
to purchase you.
So those three factors kind of culminating at the same time.
I think we're instrumental in helping our leadership
see that this is really a great avenue to go to market
that we need to embrace and move forward with.
- Yeah, that's really good insight.
And like there's a few things that I think
are coming through there.
Like number one, like measuring and understanding
the value of doing the deal through marketplace
and the fact that it tends to close faster
for a larger dollar amount and for longer entitlement,
using that momentum to kind of fuel the interest with sales.
And then you mentioned around interacting
with the cloud provider from a co-sell perspective.
This is obviously such a huge area of focus
for the cloud providers.
It's been a huge area of focus for TACL
and the growth and development of our platform
services portfolio.
Tell me a little bit more about how those things
coming together to really help sales
execute in a better way.
Yes, we know that marketplace transactions
are more efficient from a revenue perspective.
Yes, we know that there is a path for us to interact
and co-sell with the cloud provider.
And that leads to your sellers leaning in
and actually buying into this process.
- So all the stats that we all know about
how it shortens cycles, they have budget,
all of the deals are bigger.
We have all of that in spades.
We can show the data to our leadership
and whenever the hyperscalers talk about it, it is true.
There's no if answer about that.
The part that I feel like doesn't get talked about enough
is the co-sell motion.
And if I had to do this all over again,
I would focus a lot more on the co-sell foundation.
We are doing quite well now with co-sell,
but talking with other companies
that have been doing this for a bit longer,
you can totally see a revenue jump in marketplace
with the amount of focus that a company puts on the co-sell
that they do with the hyperscalers.
We are born in the cloud.
This is born in the cloud.
All of our customers are in the cloud.
It makes sense that the more that we do
with the hyperscalers from a co-sell standpoint
is gonna drive the motion that we're looking for.
And I think everybody on this call,
all of the individuals out there know that the marketplace
is like the culmination of where all of the hyperscalers
would like the motion to go.
So leaning in on co-sell and making sure
that that's something that we do to the best of our ability
is gonna just increase the amount of marketplace
that we are the transactions that we have
through the marketplace.
- Awesome.
Yeah, and you mentioned this question came up
as well in the chat of around,
like are you a born in the cloud company?
Yes, like you are a cloud native company.
Your customers are cloud customers.
Something else that I think is interesting to note
is we kind of talk a little bit more and move towards
like your interactions with the cloud provider themselves.
You're in the cloud security space,
Wiz is fully leaning in from a product perspective also
to the AI movement and the migration of workloads
as part of those initiatives and activities
across the corporate world
and helping those migrations happen securely
as well.
So talk a little bit about like the alignment
that you have from product perspective
with the cloud provider and with the cloud providers,
I should say, and kind of the way that your conversations
with them have evolved from the beginning of the journey
to where they are now.
- Yeah.
This is probably instrumental as well
because being a technical company,
we're pretty product led.
I'm not sure this is the right motion for everyone
that's listening here,
but it's super important for us to be in lockstep
with what the hyperscalers are going to be releasing
from a product perspective.
And usually whenever you talk to them,
they're very open with you about like,
we're gonna build this.
So you don't build this as well.
You build something that can augment what we're going to build
to bring additional value to the customer.
'Cause let's face a lot of times they have to build things
to be able to compete in their space
and check boxes that are required for various reasons.
So I think it's super important for you to continually lean in
and try to figure out like,
what programs can I take advantage of
within the hyperscaler?
And a good case and point of this is the competencies.
The competencies actually provide a level playing field
for startups, right?
So if I'm a hyperscaler seller
and I get told by my customer
that I'm gonna purchase Wiz for instance,
they're probably gonna go back
and look at their competencies and say,
okay, so I've never heard of Wiz perhaps.
I'm gonna look across my competencies
and then they see, oh, Wiz is in the competency as well
as some of the larger competitors.
I'm gonna go ahead and bless this with the customer
because I don't have the capability to keep up with everything
but I trust that this competency of my hyperscaler
is the one that says that this product is good enough.
So I'm gonna go ahead and bless this for my customer.
I don't know if that's exactly where you were going
with the product piece, but I think it's,
from our perspective, it's super important
to be a lockstep with what's coming,
participating in what's coming.
A lot of times they need a partner to lean in
and help get something over the line.
We'll do things with the hyperscalers
even if it may amount to a very small thing,
a very small like go-to-market process in the beginning.
If you get to a point where you can do that with them,
I think that it comes back in spades
because normally you're on the radar as a partner
that they wanna work with and that changes the game as well.
- Yeah, that's super interesting.
I think it actually speaks to the experience
that you went through and what we hear all the time
from the alliances functions at software companies.
It's really pretty multifaceted.
Like yes, you have to have an ION cloud
and you have to have an ION go-to-market
and how you're gonna drive revenue
and leave flow through the clouds,
but also it's around product alignment
and what is the better together story between
that particular ISV and the cloud provider
and really what is the message
that you're gonna be coming to market with once you are
in those co-cell situations.
So really, really good insights there.
As your revenue started to grow,
as the volume of transactions started to increase,
obviously this puts stress on the system.
Wiz has been super willing,
I think at least from my perspective
to invest in the business
and like you have a team around you now
that helps facilitate co-cell in the field
and making sure this is all working,
talk a little bit about the operational toll
of a growing channel
and kind of the different or the combination
of the people process and technology
and really the need to scale efficiently.
Of course, you were able to add a head count,
like you weren't able to add 50 people.
So kind of talk about the way
that you manage that operational strain
as you started to grow.
- So initially it was all hands on deck, right?
There were several people on my team
that were building private offers as much as
we didn't have an operations person initially.
So part of the role was for everyone
to maintain the private offers
that were coming through the system
for their geographic location.
Now we have an operations,
a single operations person
that handles all of our private offers
and we do hundreds of millions of dollars.
The automation aspect was key.
Like had we not had the automation in place from day one,
it would have caused a ripple effect
of probably not being able to scale as fast.
And I say that because there's multiple components, right?
I talked a little bit about having the ability
to share with a salesperson.
You're gonna get paid like you've always been getting paid
because that's a huge thing, right?
If I'm a salesperson,
I get compensated on a biweekly,
which is what we did in the beginning.
They're gonna wanna make sure
that they still get their biweekly,
especially if these are nine figure deals.
So giving them the, you know, the feeling,
the knowledge that all of that's gonna be in place
for them is super important.
And then you have to work with the finance team
in order to have the finance team be comfortable
accepting these massive amounts of bookings
and in a format that they've maybe never seen before.
You remember this in the beginning,
our finance team was not aware of private offers
and how they function.
So getting to the point where they were comfortable
with how all of that worked,
you guys were instrumental in making sure
that that was something that they were comfortable with as well.
So you have to have those components in place.
The automation really makes that super important
because then there's less ways for things to fall
through the cracks and makes the finance people
much more comfortable.
And it allows you to scale much, much, much faster
and having the single person
that does all of our private offers today.
I don't wanna tell you that it's the end all be all state
'cause as we grow, we wanna push that down into the sales work
so that they can actually be the individual
to create the private offers themselves.
But as we move forward, we're always looking for more ways
to scale this automated even better.
And I think that a platform like yours
is actually what allowed us to do that.
So thank you.
Not to be a substance.
- Appreciate that level of feedback.
But I think it just speaks to how multifunctional this
actually is and you mentioned finance.
We love and finance is happy, especially at the end of a quarter.
So that's obviously something that's super important.
We have a few minutes left.
I'd like to kind of switch to a little bit of current events.
And like I think that everybody right now
that sells software for a living
is probably on some days looking up and thinking
that there could be easier things
that they could be doing with their life.
But we're still all committed to doing this thing
called selling software.
Even when that does mean we have to do it
in an economic downturn.
And talk a little bit about how Wizz's business
has been affected maybe over the last 12 to 24 months.
And the role and the level of focus
that your motion that you've established
with Cloud Go to Market has really affected
and kind of helped you guys get through that.
- Perfect.
So I would tell you we're fortunate.
We've been able to,
whether this economic downturn better than some
and the marketplace has played a big part in this as well.
Like we've seen a lot more credit card transactions
that maybe weren't taking place before.
Just being able to meet the customer
where they need to be able to purchase,
like they want your software.
They want the capabilities that you have.
Having all of these options at their disposal is fantastic.
The ability to go through a reseller is fantastic.
The ability to give them monthly, quarterly,
you know, we can get all kinds of crazy
on the billing aspects.
That flexibility, if we didn't have that,
I think some customers would potentially not be able to purchase
was in this type of economy.
So it's super important to be able to leverage
the market places in that manner.
- Yeah, of course you're referring to the ability
for a credit card to be linked to a marketplace buyer account,
which I think is speaking to the clouds really reacting
and making it as easy as possible
to buy software through marketplace.
So I think that that's a really, really good piece
of feedback there as well.
Just a couple minutes left, I want to put yourself,
and I promise like to the Whiz leadership team,
I'm not stealing Scott away,
but let's pretend you're a consultant for a second
and one of your good friends or peers
is starting to do this at a much smaller software company
and kind of starting from ground zero.
What are some things that you would recommend
that are must-haves or key takeaways
as you're advising one of your peers
on a way to get started with this?
- So I'm not, there's no pretending here
'cause some of my peers actually call me
and I do help them get their marketplace to send up.
So I would tell you one of my peers, good friend of mine
got the marketplace going and one of the hyperscalers,
they called me and said,
"Hey, nobody's coming to the marketplace to buy."
And I'm like, "No, no, that's not how this works."
We don't use our marketplace as an advertisement
to go to our marketplace and purchase there.
It's a transaction vehicle for us.
We do only private offers with bespoke offerings, right?
So that's our current model.
We may evolve that into something that's more or less bespoke,
but as it is today,
the marketplace is just a transaction vehicle for us.
And I think that that's how people should approach it
because putting all your eggs in the basket
that if you put something there, they will come.
That's not gonna be the case.
I don't know of anybody that has come to our marketplace
listing and said, "I'm gonna buy a whiz,
let me call them up and see how that goes."
That's just not something we even look for either.
So it's not a motion that we prescribe.
So I hope that that helps those out there
that are listening.
One negative information.
- Yeah, and at the last point to make there
is around co-selling early you and I
have spoken about that before,
like kind of building that into your foundation
from the good. - Super important.
- Yeah, super important.
- I appreciate that feedback.
Like speaks to their earlier point,
there's lots of different motions for marketplace.
Whiz is enterprise focused, private offer driven.
We have customers as well that are more focused
in the product led side and the marketplace
is presenting opportunities for all different.
Thank you, Scott.
Michael, I'll turn it back over to you.
- For sure.
Lots of words of wisdom right there.
Thanks for joining us y'all.
Y'all may be wondering now that the session's over.
What's next?
So I'm gonna drop a couple links in the chat.
If you'd like to learn more about tackles,
helping 550 plus ISV scale their cloud GTM strategy,
and then another link if you'd like to learn
about the great things that Whiz is doing.
So check it out in the chat there
if you'd like to learn more about tackle or Whiz.
But once again, huge thank you to Scott Stryker
for leaving the session.
And of course, thanks to all of you for listening in.
And we're grateful you chose to spend part of your day with us.
We'd love to bring us to you to join us in two weeks
as we have Dratas VP of business development.
Join us to share how you can scale your cloud GTM strategy
even in an economic downturn.
So yeah, thanks again, Stryker, Scott.
Hope everyone has a wonderful day
and we'll see y'all next time.
Thank you.
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