7 best practices to align sales and partnerships for Cloud GTM success

Businesses are still grappling with the aftermath of the post-COVID economic downturn. With tightened budgets and extended sales cycles—longer by up to 3.8 weeks—GTM teams must exert more effort to achieve the same results. This challenge, coupled with the need to meet millennial buyer expectations, has transformed cloud marketplaces into a crucial revenue stream. However, as organizations allocate more resources to their Cloud GTM strategies, they often underestimate how collaborative this initiative truly is.

The success of your cloud partnerships hinges on your ability to - 

a) anticipate your customers’ needs to do more with less

b) understand how to entwine your capabilities with the cloud provider to build for this

c) help customers find, absorb, and get value from your solution

You need the all-star line of sales, partnerships, distribution, operations, product, marketing, finance, and beyond to work synchronously for the channel to build revenue predictability. And while the cross-functional nature of Cloud GTM needs clearly defined ownership and swimlanes, the credibility of the motion relies on the consistent coming-together of partnership and sales. As the overarching owners of the Cloud GTM motion, the partnership team is tasked with ensuring that it is a viable revenue source. And as the custodians of customer relationships, the sales team makes this a reality by routing deals through the marketplace, negotiating through POs, and actually driving revenue growth. 

Now to the million/billion dollar questions. How can partnerships support, empower, and excite the sales team to sell with and on the clouds? Along the road from buy-in to “I’m in” lies mindset, policy, and process change. Here are some curated best practices to make the ride smooth. 

1. Map cloud GTM impact to sales success metrics

We often speak about personalization in the context of prospect or customer experiences. Many partnership experts we’ve spoken to, including the likes of Airtable’s Nelson Wang, encourage you to apply this inwards as well. It is super important to communicate the need for and the potential impact of a new undertaking in terms that resonate with the audience - in this case the sales team. Mapping Cloud GTM to sales priorities, blockers and KPIs helps you speak their language and translate how the motion can help them achieve their functional goals as well as the broader organizational ones. Demonstrate how Cloud GTM can help faster deal closures, lower budgetary oppositions, reduce legal processes, grant access to key decision-makers, or unblock any other sales hurdle. 

As the channel picks up steam, you also need to create bespoke reports to help the sales team visualize the outcomes they are driving. This means identifying specific sales success metrics - we’ve listed a few below - and presenting the data for them from a marketplace perspective.  By presenting these metrics clearly, you can help the sales team see the tangible benefits of collaboration, reinforcing the importance of integrating marketplace strategies into their day-to-day operations.

2. Drive inside-out education from partnership to sales

Friend of the Clazar podcast and partnership leader, Neeti Gupta, said it best - “any pushback is often because there is a lack of understanding.” Like Neeti, every partnership leader and team needs to bring vision and education to the table to build strong sales alignment. This involves training sales on partnership benefits and instilling a deeper understanding of the cloud partnership dynamics. For example, explain the lift in performance, the timelines associated with co-selling efforts, and how to navigate platforms like AWS effectively. Remember - do not underestimate the cultural shift this requires. You are asking a team that has been doing something a particular way - very successfully - to adopt a whole new way of working. The point above will help them with the WHY. Education, training, and enablement will take care of the HOW.

We will examine this in detail later, but gaining early allies in sales can facilitate smoother integration. Keep the communication ongoing by using QBRs and team calls to reinforce this education and celebrate initial successes.

3. Reimagine your sales playbook right from discovery

Incorporate a marketplace-first mindset into the sales process right from the discovery phase, and not just at closing. Through your training cadence, build the right script into your sales playbook to help AEs identify deals that will benefit from going the marketplace route, and steer the sales cycle in that direction. Asking the right questions at the outset will preempt objections that the marketplace inherently solves and get your reps beyond the first call way faster. 

Use regular training sessions to keep success stories top of mind, ensuring that the sales team is continuously engaged and informed. When sales representatives recognize the value of cloud sales earlier in the cycle, the outcomes are quicker.

Questions to incorporate into the sales cycle

1. Have you identified where your budget is coming from for this project?
2. Have you purchased software via the marketplace previously?
3. Do you have unspent commits you’d like to use for this purchase?
4. Which cloud/channel partner can help get me access to a decision-maker?
5. Which C-levels are involved in purchasing with cloud spend?
6. What is your typical legal review process?
7. Where do you want your software to be deployed?

4. Build a conducive comp plan for marketplace-routed deals

‍In a recent webinar, Retool’s Head of Sales Eleanor Dorfman hit the nail on the head when she said that your compensation strategy implicitly tells your team how you want them to sell. Your compensation plans should align with the strategic focus on marketplace-routed deals. This will take exec-level alignment, but working towards a channel-neutral, full attainment compensation plan for Cloud GTM is the way to get your AE’s on board. NVIDIA’s Nima Badiey agrees, adding that incentivizing reps on deals after accounting for marketplace fees creates a disincentive to sell through this route. Creating this disparity between cloud and direct sales will be counterproductive, especially since the savings through cloud sales efficiency far outweigh the cost. 

From the top down, incentivize teams to prioritize marketplace deals by rewarding larger, more frequent transactions. Offering SPIFFs (Sales Performance Incentive Funds) is the best way to influence short-term behavior changes and get AEs to build this muscle.

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5. Keep the wins top-of-mind

Everyone loves a good success story. And nothing says “you are on the right path” better than your wins. So remember to communicate and celebrate wins regularly - stalled deals taken to closure, the biggest deal closed through the marketplace, your first inbound opportunity, great feedback on the deployment experience, all of it.  Make it a part of your GTM cadence to discuss and keep success stories and metrics visible. This reinforces the importance of the motion and motivates the sales team to pursue collaborative opportunities actively. 

6. Don’t take AEs out of their current tooling 

This is a HUGE deal. Pun intended. There is nothing AEs hate more than to be taken out of the CRM, and made to figure out whole new tooling and interfaces. Justifiably so, because they have enough on their plate. Selling through the marketplace necessitates interacting with the various cloud portals and uploading deal data into multiple locations. While this is essential to maintain collaboration and transparency with the hyperscalers, it also means more manual effort and room for human error. The cloud portals themselves need some ramp-up time to master. These are big asks from a team that already feels overwhelmed by the number of tools in their tech stack.

One of the best ways to break the adoption barrier is to ensure that new processes integrate seamlessly with existing workflows. The best way to accomplish this is by using a tool like Clazar that allows AEs to make and manage marketplace offers right from their CRM. Clazar’s bi-directional integration with tools like Salesforce and Hubspot allows AEs to extend and modify private offers, upload co-sell opportunities, and track everything from start to finish - right from their source of truth.

By maintaining existing rhythms while introducing new practices, you can foster a more collaborative environment without disruption.

7. Identify and leverage the support of early champions

“Identify successful reps in your organization. And then, try to figure out where there's some pipeline that you can identify as AWS, and then go try to bring them all together. Maybe go reach out through AWS to talk to the reps about what they know in an account and then bring your team in…”

Pete Goldberg

Director of Alliances - NSA  |  Own Company

The best way to get collective sales buy-in is by making inroads with the help of early allies. Identify reps who are either open to exploring the motion, or have had customer-initiated requests to transact through the marketplace.  Just like Pete Goldberg says, demonstrating how your partnership with AWS or the other hyperscalers can move the needle on a deal will help you sow the seeds of a strong partnership at the rep-to-rep level.  As the results compound, so will the trust in the motion, and so will the willingness of your champion’s peers to test the waters. 

While Cloud GTM has one clearly defined owner (the partnership leader), it has several influencers, the most vital of which is the sales team. Aligning sales and partnership teams is not just a strategic advantage; it is the lifeline of a Cloud GTM motion’s success. Remember that this is an ongoing journey. Stay committed to functional agility and embrace the power of partnerships, and you’ll be on the route to building a multi-million dollar marketplace motion.

If you need help  setting your teams up for success with the right tool architecture, schedule a personalized consultation with our experts here.