Delighted to spotlight Rodney Joyce, Managing Director at Cloudmonitor, who shared his insights. As a đ° Certified FinOps Professional with 10+ years of CTO experience, Rodney understands cloud intimately.
đ Journey and Marketplace Importance
"CloudMonitor was born in 2020 when we realized that every cloud customer was battling to control and visualize their cloud spend. Among key customers concerns was that they didnât want to export their sensitive cost data, so we chose the Azure Marketplace as a way of installing our product into their org, so no data leaves their tenancy.
The Microsoft Marketplace gave us massive reach which we could not have achieved without significant investment in marketing, advertising, and sales. Onboarding onto the Microsoft cloud was straightforward...
đšđ»âđ» We followed this Product Led Growth playbook:
1. Self-service installation directly from Marketplace
2. One Month Trial or Buy directly with no human assistance
3. Interactive, public product demo
4. Intuitive product UX with built-in help
5, Regular live demos
The lesson we realized is that PLG does NOT work well for relatively unknown companies selling enterprise cloud software above a certain threshold. At some point, potential customers want to talk to a human to validate trustworthiness that the product does all that it claims to do.
This led us to reassess our PLG approach and merge it with a sales-assisted motion, which meant switching from a purely tech company to one that included a growing marketing and sales department.
We have customers in 31+ countries which would cause forex nightmares if we were handling the billing relationship, but Microsoft takes care of that for us.
One of our biggest challenges has been the Co-Sell adoption. Our product lowers customers' Azure spend which is the opposite of many of MSFT seller KPIs. We have yet to figure out how to partner with Microsoft effectively.
đŻ Cloud Marketplace Learnings
Cloud GTM Leader course has reassured me that many people face the same challenges and given me a ton of content to take advantage of the marketplaces.
Our key insight is that the marketplace alone isn't enough for driving sales â you need to combine it with a sales and marketing. In hindsight, we were naĂŻve to think that if we built it and put it on the marketplace, they would come and buy it.
We underestimated the length of the enterprise procurement process. Customers already have billing relationships and Supplier Agreements in place with Microsoft. This expedites the buying journey without the need for long new vendor onboarding.
If we look at how the app stores revolutionized the mobile app space - the same applying to the cloud.
Having a marketplace presence is a must."
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đ Accelerate your Growth in Cloud Marketplaces
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