Hi, I’m Roman from Partner Insight,
Welcome back to my newsletter, where I explain the latest Cloud GTM strategies and key 2024 trends in rapidly evolving cloud marketplaces.
Our recent panel discussion at the 'How to Win in Cloud GTM in 2024' event, brought to you by Cloud GTM Leader course, focused on revenue growth strategies in cloud marketplaces. It featured insights from some of the industry’s top cloud GTM leaders:
Maureen Little - Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances at Okta
Neeti Gupta - Head of Hyperscaler Partnerships (Microsoft) at Broadcom VMware Cloud
Nick Holden - Vice President, Global & Strategic Partners and Co-sell at Cisco
Rob Weidner - Director, Cloud Alliances (AWS/Azure/GCP) at SingleStore
Each panelist brought a unique perspective, deeply rooted in their extensive experience in cloud alliances. Their insights offer a roadmap for leaders looking to navigate the evolving GTM via cloud marketplaces in 2024. Let's dive in.
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What Led to Cloud GTM Successes in 2023
Our panelists shared the drivers of their success, offering insights into what shaped their strategies.
Team Dynamics and Sales Leadership Alignment
Maureen Little from Okta emphasized the crucial role of the team and sales leadership alignment, highlighting their transition from internal convincing about Cloud GTM to driving massive growth.
“We had a fighting year, convincing everybody internally that this matters. Then we had the building year, and this was really the massive growth year, and it's absolutely the team. It's not just hiring the right people, but also making sure that we set them up for success…”
Maureen stressed the importance of the team and the efforts in training and supporting them with the necessary resources.
The alignment with sales leadership was another crucial turning point in 2023, when their sales leaders started to view Cloud GTM as a comprehensive strategy that includes co-sell, co-build, and transaction paths.
Watch key insights from the panel:
Customer-Centric Transformation
Nick Holden from Cisco, which recently won the AWS Global ISV Partner of the Year 2023 award, underscored the importance of a customer-centric approach. As Cisco shifted from hardware to software and SaaS, it was essential to meet customers' evolving purchasing preferences. Nick Holden highlighted Cisco's focus on "new routes to market" and adapting business processes to cater to customer preferences to buy via marketplaces.
“One of the routes that they [customers] have said they want to buy our technology is through the marketplaces. So we've had to, in some cases, reinvent our business processes. In other cases, we've had to augment our business processes…”
He also stressed the central role of co-selling and collaboration with hyperscalers in delivering customer outcomes.
“The actual selling is co-selling. It's sitting down with the AWS team covering your account and ideating at the whiteboard around how to solve a business issue for a customer together, and letting the customer decide whether they want to procure through the marketplace and burn down their EDP, or whether they want to buy through an alternate route. In either case, co-selling becomes super important because it's solving that business outcome together with AWS, with Microsoft, or GCP, which is really the key there.”
Partner Empathy and Goal Alignment
Neeti Gupta highlighted the significance of aligning objectives with those of hyperscalers.
"Understanding who you are partnering with, what their goals are, and aligning your top line goals, which is, of course, revenue for us…Once we were able to achieve that, that just accelerated, because there was alignment and we could do that top down, as we did the bottoms up," she shared.
This alignment, combined with a comprehensive strategy across co-build, co-market, co-sell as a flywheel, helped to accelerate VMware's revenue on the Microsoft marketplace into triple-digit territory.
Co-Sell Collaboration and Co-Marketing Strategies
Rob Weidner highlighted the importance of setting clear expectations with sales management and aligning objectives across sales teams and clouds.
"Defining those objectives is important. What I do is have a QBR between AWS management and my C-level team, CPO, CMO, CFO, and CRO…to make sure we're tracking against those goals."
He emphasized the value of co-sell collaboration, not as demand generation but as a strategy to close opportunities more effectively.
"We see the value as SingleStore being successful in their go-to-market strategies, their marketing, and then using the cloud sellers to collaborate on that account and have them help close that opportunity."
Finally, Rob highlighted the effectiveness of co-marketing with cloud providers, leveraging MDF for collaborative events like webinars, where cloud providers and ISVs can co-present. This approach, showcasing complementary solutions, has reportedly doubled engagement compared to their solo efforts.
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Aligning Co-Sell Strategies with Cloud Sellers
Nick Holden from Cisco shared insights from his in-depth experience in Co-Sell - after all, 92% of Cisco revenue is driven by partners.
Explaining effective co-selling, he outlined two distinct co-selling types. The first is cloud co-selling, where companies integrate into the co-selling programs of cloud providers like GCP, Microsoft, and AWS. This approach is primarily about fitting into the cloud provider's sales processes, especially as hyperscalers now incentivize their sales teams for successful co-selling.
The second model is Cisco’s own ecosystem co-selling. This involves partnering with ISVs, consulting firms, and other partners that might not directly transact with Cisco but contribute intrinsic value in solving customer-specific business problems. These partners might have expertise in niche verticals or relationships with customers that Cisco doesn't directly engage with, allowing for a more comprehensive solution offering to the client.
Holden emphasized the importance and significant opportunity for engaging partners in both models, especially in complex processes like migrating clients to the public cloud. This migration involves a variety of challenges, including workflow redesign and architecture planning, where partners can create profitable revenue streams. Cisco's strategy involves leveraging both models to provide holistic solutions to their customers, ensuring that channel partners remain integral to the go-to-market strategy.
Field Alignment with Cloud Sellers
Effective engagement with cloud sellers, according to Nick Holden, starts with having technology built on their platform, aligning with the cloud provider’s interest in selling consumption and service capabilities. He highlighted the importance of a programmatic approach to partnering, especially for a large organization like Cisco with thousands of salespeople. Creating a clear and mutually beneficial value proposition for all parties involved - the cloud provider (like AWS), Cisco, any channel partners, and ultimately the client - is also crucial.
“What's in it for the AWS seller? What's in it for the Cisco seller? What's in it for the partner that's in the middle of that, if there is one, a channel partner? And at the end of the day, what's the value proposition for the client? You've got to have that very crisp, as crisp as you can get it, to get to the point where the AWS rep and the Cisco rep are sitting down at the table, getting to the whiteboard, ideating around solving a business issue for that customer.”
The process requires clarity in what each party gains from the collaboration and how it addresses the client's business needs. Tracking engagement through systematic tools and processes is vital to provide visibility and manage the sales cycle effectively.
Maximizing Impact Through Strategic Hyperscaler Engagement
Rob Weidner from SingleStore emphasized the importance of demonstrating to cloud sellers, like those at AWS, how customer purchases from SingleStore generate substantial cloud usage, thereby contributing to their revenue.
Addressing how to communicate marketplace fees to CFOs, Rob recommends highlighting their cost-effectiveness, likening them to transaction fees, and noting their benefit in streamlining invoicing and procurement processes. He pointed out that using cloud marketplaces for transactions ensures prompt payments, reducing issues with late payments that many finance departments deal with. This may well justify the additional small fee to cloud providers.
Rob also detailed their approach to deal registration, where SingleStore sellers are trained to identify the primary cloud relationship of each customer. Their strategy ensures that deals are registered with the most relevant cloud provider, incentivizing cloud sellers to collaborate on these deals due to the potential compute consumption they would generate.
Lastly, Rob discussed giving SingleStore sellers the discretion to engage with cloud reps based on the specific dynamics of each deal. In situations where a deal involves competitive products from the cloud provider itself, sellers might choose not to engage the cloud rep. This approach requires coaching of the sales team to navigate the complexities of cloud partnerships and customer relationships effectively.
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Internal Alignment and GTM Transformation
Talking about internal alignment, Maureen Little shared Okta's transformation journey in cloud GTM, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer purchasing behavior and aligning with cloud partners like AWS.
Initially, Okta was focused on direct sales with little emphasis on ecosystem partnerships. The shift involved comprehensive research on customer buying patterns, including in different country markets, which informed their strategy to engage with cloud marketplaces and partners.
"We started looking and researching how our customers purchase... How are they buying? Where are they cutting costs? How are they using SIs and resellers?” she detailed.
Maureen also highlighted the challenge, common at the start, of convincing internal stakeholders to invest in marketplace and partner strategies. This is especially true for a company that was thriving with direct sales. This process required several proposals to management and a demonstration of potential financial benefits and new market opportunities. The biggest internal hurdle was convincing the CFO, who was initially naturally skeptical about investing more money in cloud marketplaces given the company's strong growth and already high spending with cloud providers.
"The biggest hurdle was actually our CFO... You have to come with a multifaceted strategy and plan," she explained, emphasizing the need to present a well-rounded strategy that accounts for financial implications and growth opportunities.
The panel also touched on the broader theme of change management, as Nick Holden from Cisco resonated with Maureen's experiences.
End-to-End Cloud GTM Alignment with Workshops
Neeti Gupta emphasized the critical role of change management, given the multifaceted nature of cloud GTM transformation:
"Change management is the name of the game when it comes to partnerships because the transformation is happening at multiple levels," she explained.
This comprehensive change spanned from product development to aligning with cloud strategies, to co-marketing and co-selling with hyperscalers. To manage this complexity, VMware employed end-to-end go-to-market workshops, bringing together cross-functional teams for intensive 2-3 day sessions. These workshops were pivotal in creating a shared vision and detailed plan from product to GTM and revenue.
"Doing these end-to-end go-to-market workshops and then a monthly check-in gave us a structure to make sure that we were engaging and driving change where it needed to," Neeti described, highlighting the effectiveness of this approach.
Through these structured workshops, VMware was able to achieve in months what might have typically taken years. This accelerated process was not only about swift execution but also about creating a culture of continuous learning and adaptation.
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Navigating Cloud GTM: Strategic Focus for 2024
As we focused on identifying priorities for future growth via cloud GTM in 2024, the insights from our panelists showed the varying approaches and focus areas for different organizations.
Maureen Little from Okta emphasized the importance of self-awareness to our audience, understanding the impact your products have on cloud providers like AWS, and the value they bring to the table.
"Be really clear about how you drive consumption and impact for the AWS team," she advised.
Additionally, Maureen underlined the necessity of deal registration, despite its challenges, as a crucial part of the cloud GTM strategy.
Nick Holden from Cisco spoke about the importance of scale, particularly focusing on CPPO in the channel and distributors. With Cisco's transformation into a software company, he stressed the importance of a comprehensive approach involving a strong value proposition, industry-specific use cases, and a focus on profitable routes.
Neeti Gupta from Broadcom shared her focus on top-line revenue generation as a key success metric in partnerships. She advocated for creativity in partnerships to contribute significantly to business impact, emphasizing the need to move beyond just activities to deliver tangible results.
Rob Weidner from SingleStore brought up the trend toward industry alignment and outcome-based solutions. He also highlighted the strategic collaboration agreements (SCAs) with AWS as their primary focus. These agreements include co-sell, co-market, and co-build motions and are crucial for long-term strategic growth with cloud GTM.
Leveraging Partners for Cloud GTM Success in 2024
We also explored the critical role of partners, like system integrators (SIs), in effective Cloud GTM in 2024.
Nick Holden from Cisco emphasized the fundamental value of SIs, particularly for large, global accounts navigating cloud migration. Cisco has worked to incorporate channel partners into their business processes, ensuring mutual profitability for both Cisco and its partners. This integration has been crucial in accelerating Cisco's growth.
“The biggest thing for us was in our success… was changing our business process to accommodate the channel partner in the marketplace motion, [it] was non-trivial and we solved for that. And that's when we really started accelerating in our model.”
Maureen Little from Okta shared that while Okta is still exploring the best ways to leverage system integrators, they recognize the importance of these partnerships. She shared plans to focus on cloud teams within system integrators, recognizing their critical role in areas like cloud migration and zero trust.
Rob Weidner from SingleStore, discussing his experience with partners and system integrators, highlighted the significant role they play, especially for smaller companies. At SingleStore, they engage in the AWS Tri-Party Initiative and acknowledge the importance of cultivating strong relationships with GSIs. Weidner believes in the synergistic effect of combining efforts with GSIs and cloud providers to accelerate growth.
Embracing Cloud GTM with Enthusiasm & Recognizing Hyperscalers' Influence
Wrapping up, Neeti Gupta offered crucial advice for navigating the cloud GTM landscape in 2024. She emphasizes the importance of understanding your own key priorities as well as those of your partners.
"It has to be top-line revenue for your company, otherwise you will not have a seat at the table in six months, 12 months, or 18 months, right? So I would say step back, look at the market, look at your priorities and your partner's priorities and your customer priorities, triangulate and create that shared understanding to have the impact for your organization." - Neeti advises, highlighting the need for a focus on driving significant revenue impact.
Maureen Little encouraged embracing the Cloud GTM journey with enthusiasm, suggesting that we’re still early in the cloud GTM and that being involved in cloud marketplaces is an exciting career opportunity. “Get on it. Do your research, become an expert," she says, underscoring the exciting opportunities and career growth potential in mastering cloud go-to-market strategies.
Nick Holden from Cisco echoes the sentiments of his fellow panelists, with a focus on the influence that hyperscalers have accumulated and the need for effective partnerships with them.
“We should not as a community underestimate the influence these cloud companies have with our customers… I was at re:Invent, 60,000 plus customers all listening to a cloud migration story and Gen AI story from AWS. I think we've got to learn how to partner well with the cloud companies.”
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