5 ways RevOps can accelerate sales through cloud marketplaces

By 2028, software business sales through cloud marketplaces are expected to hit $85 billion; this is more than the combined annual revenue of—Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, and Shopify—the top 5 businesses in the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, in FY24. For RevOps leaders, this represents both a massive opportunity to launch a revenue motion in a high-velocity channel… and a significant operational challenge.

While cloud marketplaces promise to streamline quote-to-cash workflows by consolidating pricing customization, multi-partner collaboration, and transaction processing into a single platform, they also introduce a stream of new workflows and systems that leave RevOps leaders with gargantuan tech debt, operational gaps, and a backlog of manual tasks. This overwhelm often prevents them from making more strategic contributions to business growth.

"RevOps has the data and the insights to guide entire GTM organizations, yet we’re still seen as a tactical cost center for the business. The result? You have to scrap and beg for the tools and headcount needed to drive real growth."

Sarah Browne

Serial RevOps leader and Global VP of Revenue Operations|  |  Trackforce Valiant

Traditional RevOps frameworks—built for direct sales and basic channel partnerships—are struggling to adapt to marketplace-driven selling, where deals span multiple systems, stakeholders, and processes. This raises a few challenges and inefficiencies:

Yet, multimillion-dollar businesses like Atlan continue to find tremendous success—building efficient operations, creating private offers in under 60 seconds, accelerating their co-sell opportunity creation by 8X—on the marketplace, by simply reinforcing a through the right strategies and approach.

In this article, we'll explore how forward-thinking RevOps teams navigate the cloud marketplace revolution, automate their operations, and help their business generate outsized revenue outcomes by leveraging the full extent of capabilities presented by the marketplace.

Step 1: Integrate the marketplace partner portal and your own CRM

RevOps teams face unprecedented tool sprawl. BetterCloud's 2024 research reveals enterprises manage 1300% more SaaS applications than a decade ago, despite recent stabilization in adoption rates.

For cloud marketplace sales, this complexity compounds. Cloud providers mandate opportunity tracking in their partner portals while sales teams operate exclusively in their CRM. This system disconnect creates four critical problems:

1. Manual data duplication across platforms
2. Increased opportunity tracking errors
3. Limited visibility into deal progress
4. Reduced marketplace adoption by sales teams

The key to solving this challenge lies in system unification, i.e., integrating your cloud portal with your own CRM—so that your sellers don’t need to leave your Salesforce or HubSpot environment to:

• Send and update opportunities on your cloud portal
• Issue and receive routine updates like – deal status changes and customer information – for marketplace opportunities
• Generate, append, or close marketplace deals
• Share deal context with your marketplace partners for co-selling better

Building an effective integration

Integration between CRM and the cloud partner portal presents unique challenges. Each cloud partner portal collects data in distinct opportunity fields that do not align with the opportunity field structure within your CRM.

This surfaces two critical concerns about CRM data integrity for RevOps practitioners and sales leaders:

1. Software providers typically build extensive automation around specific CRM fields and need granular control over field modifications
2. Vendor sales teams track opportunity progress differently than cloud providers, requiring selective data synchronization between Salesforce/HubSpot and marketplace systems

Therefore, bi-directional sync must preserve standard fields and objects in your opportunities.

Impact: An effective integration delivers:

• Real-time bi-directional information exchange
• Flexible custom field mapping between CRM and cloud partner portal
• Resilience against cloud provider backend changes
• Data integrity through custom objects rather than standard field modification
• Native co-sell opportunity and private offer creation within CRM

Step 2: Provide enriched deal context through marketplace-generated data

Beyond access to intentional buyers, cloud marketplaces deliver valuable sales intelligence. When partnered with your prospects' cloud providers, you gain access to the same buyer insights available to their sellers and support teams—intelligence that can significantly impact your deal outcomes.

Such sales intelligence is already reported to increase deal sizes by four or five times and offer 26-50% better win-rates. However, these benefits diminish when misaligned data forces your sales and partnership teams to manually collect information from hyperscaler field sellers.

By implementing precise data mapping and context absorption, RevOps teams can directly influence deal metrics, demonstrate concrete revenue impact, and elevate their strategic role in organizational growth.

This intelligence flows through multiple channels:

• AWS provides buyer intent scoring, enabling sales teams to prioritize high-probability opportunities, with other marketplaces developing similar capabilities
• Co-sell opportunities surface critical account data, including a view of influential stakeholders and marketplace field sellers with established relationships

This data significantly empowers your sales organization, offering instant account visibility, engagement opportunities, and direct access to deal support resources.

As a RevOps expert, your primary responsibility is automating this intelligence flow—taking data generated in cloud partner portal opportunity fields and mapping it precisely to your CRM opportunities.

This requires implementing rule-based routing that:

1. Monitors changes in cloud partner portal opportunity fields
2. Creates corresponding custom Salesforce/HubSpot objects
3. Links these objects to relevant opportunities

Critical to this process is ensuring marketplace field seller records automatically populate in your CRM as new contacts, enabling swift collaboration when needed.

Impact:

• Increase win rates through better opportunity prioritization
• Up to 40% reduction in sales cycles by identifying in-market buyers early
• Maximize team efficiency through data-driven prioritization
• Easy access to external collaborators to secure a deal

Step 3: Automate data mapping to simplify opportunity creation

Proprietary data from Clazar finds that inaccurate data in shared opportunity covers 20% of all opportunity rejection from the cloud providers. This is because, the complexity of marketplace opportunity management continues to grow as organizations adopt multi-modal sales processes.

Efficient marketplace operations hinge on automated opportunity creation and structured deal registration. This automation functions through two key pathways:

Automating data population during manual opportunity creation

Your sales and alliance teams need the ability to create co-sell opportunities directly from their CRM instance. This typically deploys through a specialized widget that appears as a dedicated panel within the opportunity view.

When creating opportunities from your CRM, automated workflows populate customer details by drawing from:

• Internal database fields
• External data providers like ZoomInfo and Apollo
• Validated marketplace partner portal hierarchies

This automation eliminates hours of manual review work and dramatically accelerates opportunity submission timelines.

Automating bulk opportunity creation through rule based triggers from your CRM

Success here begins with implementing automated triggers based on deal characteristics and standardized templates for different deal types.

Enabling bulk registration capabilities while maintaining consistent data capture across all deal sources allows RevOps teams to minimize manual intervention without compromising data integrity.

Deal enrichment automation plays a crucial role in this process. New opportunities should automatically:

• Populate with relevant historical data
• Trigger structured workflows based on sales motion type
• Maintain clear audit trails for compliance
• Initiate appropriate approval workflows
• Alert relevant partners when co-sell opportunities are created

Impact:

• Cut opportunity creation time from days to minutes
• Increase partner engagement through automated registration
• Improve deal visibility with standardized tracking
• Accelerate sales cycles through automated workflows
• Enable scalable co-sell operations without additional headcount

Step 4: Set-up guardrails through role-based access to avoid accidental process violations

As marketplace operations scale, maintaining process integrity becomes increasingly complex. Without robust controls, RevOps teams risk unauthorized discounts, non-compliant offers, and process violations that can delay deals or trigger compliance issues. The challenge lies in implementing these controls without creating sales process bottlenecks.

Role-based access control (RBAC) forms the foundation of effective marketplace governance. This approach ensures team members—from sales representatives to RevOps managers to executive approvers—have appropriate access levels for marketplace opportunities.

When implemented correctly, RBAC should operate invisibly while maintaining strict process controls. This requires:

• Granular permission levels for different roles
• Approval workflows aligned with organizational hierarchy
• Role-specific marketplace data views
• Temporary access delegation protocols

In conjunction with the cloud alliance manager, the RevOps team can assume administrative responsibilities, assign viewer, editor, and reviewer access to individuals on a blanket, or ad-hoc basis. Also, having a composite view of access, helps create an audit trail of controls and streamline future user additions/removals.

Automated validation rules form the second layer of protection against process violations. These rules should be configured to automatically check deal parameters against established guidelines. For example, discount levels should be automatically validated against approved thresholds, contract terms should be checked against standard templates, and pricing modifications should trigger appropriate approval workflows based on the magnitude of change.

Process standardization represents the third critical component, mitigating risks through custom workflows that trigger standard offer-creation based on pre-defined CRM field thresholds.

Documentation and audit trails complete the governance framework. Every system interaction—modifications, approvals, or exceptions—should automatically log to the opportunity record, enabling both compliance verification and process optimization.

Impact:

• Accelerate approval cycles by standardizing key processes
• Eliminate unauthorized modifications to deal terms
• Maintain compliance without sacrificing deal velocity
• Enable scalable operations with consistent controls
• Improve audit readiness with automated documentation

Step 5: Track channel performance more effectively through holistic reports

Marketplace success depends on data-driven decision-making. However, RevOps teams frequently encounter fragmented reporting across platforms, obscuring their comprehensive view of marketplace performance. This poses significant challenges when tracking partner influence, measuring channel effectiveness, and demonstrating ROI from marketplace investments.

Each marketplace generates reports on different schedules, forcing RevOps experts to aggregate multiple datasets, deal logs, and accounting reports to produce actionable insights for leadership.

For RevOps professionals, the solution lies in creating a unified reporting framework that consolidates data from:

• Your CRM
• Marketplace portals
• Partner systems

This consolidated view should track beyond basic metrics like revenue and pipeline to enable seamless revenue recognition by mapping each disbursement to its corresponding CRM object. This automatic mapping ensures every dollar received can be traced to specific buyers without manual reconciliation.

This means maintaining detailed reports on:

• Billed revenue
• Disbursements
• Collections

… all accessible in real-time across cloud listings through a single interface. This consolidation eliminates platform switching while ensuring data accuracy.

Modern platforms like Clazar, that are designed to support cloud sales, go a mile further by looking beyond basic tracking. They also present rich visualizations, dynamic chart and graphs to help teams identify trends, spot anomalies and make better, data-driven decisions.

These platforms also offer the ability to download analytics reports in various formats (PDF, CSV, and more), and scheduled report deliveries to ensure marketplace insights are ready for periodic audits.

Impact:

• Reduce reporting time through automation
• Data-driven strategy adjustments with real-time insights
• Improved forecast accuracy with comprehensive data mapping
• Streamlined revenue recognition and reconciliation
• Clear marketplace ROI demonstration for stakeholders

Building future-ready revenue operations for cloud marketplaces

The transition to cloud marketplaces represents both an opportunity and a challenge for RevOps teams. While these platforms offer access to significant buying power—with over $370 billion in cloud commitments available for software procurement—they also will quickly transform partner-led selling at scale. This demands a transformation in how software vendors build their operational infrastructure, and support their GTM, finance, legal, and product teams to work more cohesively.

When managed effectively, cloud marketplaces can significantly unblock RevOps bandwidth by streamlining software sales from opportunity to quote. RevOps leaders who proactively establish systems, automate processes, and embrace this transformation will position their organizations to capture the immense potential these platforms offer.

Want to take control of cloud marketplace operations?