Five barriers to marketplace scale and how to break through each one

 Our State of Cloud Marketplace & Co-Sell Report found that 89% of B2B SaaS companies are now listed on AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplaces. However, only 22% of them generate more than 20% of their revenue through these platforms. This gap points to a common reality: while marketplace adoption is high, maturity is not. Listing is easy. Scaling takes strategy, alignment, and execution.

Here are the five most common barriers holding companies back, and what leading teams are doing to break through.

TL;DR

Most SaaS companies are already listed on AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplaces but very few have actually scaled marketplace revenue. This blog breaks down the five biggest barriers holding marketplace programs back:

• No clear ownership across sales, RevOps, finance, and partnerships
• Sales and RevOps misalignment around marketplace workflows
• Co-sell motions that rely on manual processes and individual relationships
• Marketplace data that’s collected but not operationalized
• Lack of automation across quoting, reporting, attribution, and co-sell execution

It also explains what the teams winning on cloud marketplaces do differently to overcome these barriers.

Barrier #1: No internal ownership or accountability

Sometimes, companies are listed, but no one owns the results. So there’s no accountability for enablement, revenue tracking, or pipeline growth.

This isn’t unique to cloud marketplaces. According to Forrester, “emerging channels often fail not due to lack of potential, but due to lack of defined responsibility.” When ownership is fragmented across alliances, sales, or ops teams, momentum dies in the handoffs.

Marketplace execution is inherently cross-functional. 

• Finance has to control and manage billing
• Ops teams must stay on top of quoting and fulfillment
• Partnership teams build co-sell alignment
• Sales focuses on closing deals

Without someone to orchestrate that complexity, teams remain reactive and siloed. Before anything else, ISVs need a solution to their people problem.

What leaders do differently

The most successful marketplace programs solve the ownership problem early. Here are the specific things they do to clarify (and operationalize) ownership. 

• Assign real ownership. Ownership comes with mandate, visibility, and measurable KPIs. Someone is accountable for outcomes like pipeline, revenue, and co-sell execution, not just activity
• Build it into the revenue engine. For example, they ensure sales have clear guidelines on when and how to route deals through marketplaces. Finance and RevOps align on quoting, billing, and reporting
• Create active collaboration between cross-functional teams. They ensure that not just partnership and sales, but also product, RevOps, and finance teams are actively working together to achieve goals
• Create visibility and enforce accountability. They track marketplace-sourced and -influenced pipeline with dashboards, while quarterly business reviews keep cloud sales in focus. They also regularly review what’s working and what needs support. This way, there is no ambiguity, and teams stay aligned

Early-stage startups can’t invest in a fully-staffed marketplace team right off the bat, and that’s okay. Ownership could be distributed informally across partnerships or alliances. What’s important is to have someone explicitly accountable for marketplace outcomes, not just activity. 

Over time, as results grow and internal momentum builds, leading ISVs evolve their structure further.

At that point, some appoint a full-time Cloud alliance lead, reporting into the CRO or Head of Ecosystem, with metrics tied to revenue, enablement, and co-sell impact. 

Others form a cross-functional “growth pod” that brings together sales, ops, finance, and partnerships, with shared goals and structured collaboration. 

These setups require budget and executive buy-in, but they also reflect a mindset shift: cloud marketplaces aren’t treated as side channels but as strategic routes to market.

Ultimately, solving for ownership is the first domino.

Barrier #2: Sales misalignment and RevOps bottlenecks

Sales resistance is one of the most common internal barriers to marketplace success. Many reps hesitate to route deals through cloud marketplaces because they’re unclear on compensation or co-sell attribution, or simply unaware of the benefits. 

Channel conflict concerns add more friction, especially when partner sellers are involved or when deals risk being perceived as “owned” by someone else.

But there’s a deeper layer to this challenge: RevOps.

RevOps powers your marketplace motion like a neural network — integrating systems, ensuring compliance, building workflows, and producing visibility. Yet, only 29% of companies in our research say their RevOps teams are fully bought in. 

RevOps teams are already busy maintaining operational hygiene, supporting GTM motions, forecasting, and reporting. To them, adding net-new marketplace infrastructure  often appears as a strain on already-thin bandwidth.

Without a clear mandate and visible impact, RevOps deprioritizes marketplace adoption — and without them, the motion stalls in friction.

What leaders do differently

Teams doing well in cloud GTM have learned to align teams across incentives, systems, and workflows. They do this: 

• Ensure AEs get fairly compensated for marketplace deals, so they don’t feel a need to deprioritize them
• Educate Sales about cloud commits. They help them see how cloud commit budgets can help accelerate and win enterprise opportunities
• Embed cloud-first workflows into existing sales processes 
• Enable Sales to effectively co-sell and use the marketplace to close faster. This helps them see marketplaces as channels for growth rather that a source of conflict
• Involve RevOps right from the start to create essential systems such as deal routing and automated billing, to reduce friction
• Support the team with the necessary resources, tools, and ROI goals 

Barrier #3: Co-Sell without a system

While 71% of companies in our study say they’re actively co-selling with hyperscalers, more than half (51%) still identify co-sell execution as a barrier to scale. 

This disconnect highlights a critical issue: participation in co-sell programs doesn’t automatically translate to pipeline impact. 

In many organizations, co-sell is still ad hoc — driven by individual relationships, reliant on manual processes, and lacking visibility in CRM systems. As a result, co-sell momentum often stalls in the handoff between sales, alliances, and hyperscaler field teams.

Even motivated sales reps struggle to engage effectively when workflows aren’t embedded into their existing motion. Opportunities are lost because there’s no clear guidance on when and how to involve cloud partners, or systems to track co-sell attribution and ROI. 

And without strong alignment with Partner Development Managers (PDMs), companies miss out on joint selling opportunities and executive amplification.

What leaders do differently

Top performers don’t treat co-sell as a side motion. Instead, they build it into how their revenue teams already work. This means that they:

• Embed co-sell into the CRM. Reps don’t have to switch contexts or figure things out on the fly. The process is already there, with clear steps for qualification, partner registration, and joint account planning
• Involve all teams because co-sell must be a shared activity. Sales, partnerships, and RevOps all have a role to play and are all accountable for outcomes
• Work closely with hyperscaler partners to build joint pipeline. That means regular check-ins, clear target accounts, and alignment on priorities. They invest in strong PDM relationships
• Systematically track what’s working. This is the most important step. Top performers use tools to track co-sell engagement and its impact on pipeline velocity and win rates. This feedback loop not only proves value internally but also helps strengthen relationships with hyperscaler partners

The payoff is clear: 58% of respondents report higher win rates on co-sold deals. That’s a powerful incentive to embed co-sell execution deeply into the GTM engine.

See how Rootly automated and scaled co-sell submissions with Clazar.

Barrier #4: Underutilized marketplace data

Even while growing investment in cloud marketplaces and co-sell programs, most companies are still leaving one of their biggest advantages untapped: the data. 

Critical signals like buyer intent, hyperscaler engagement, partner influence, and revenue attribution often go untracked, uncaptured, or unused. Without these insights, GTM teams are essentially flying blind. They are making strategic decisions based on guesswork rather than the actual behaviors happening within the marketplace. 

The result? Slower cycles, misaligned messaging, and missed opportunities to accelerate growth.

Many teams rely on word-of-mouth wins or random advice from cloud reps instead of building a clear system for marketplace data. This leads to stalled co-sell motions, vague ROI attribution, and poor feedback loops across sales, partnerships, and RevOps.

What leaders do differently

The teams that get this right don’t just “do more”; they pay attention to the details that actually move deals forward. This means that they:

• Pay close attention to hyperscaler engagement. They track things like joint calls, deal sharing, and internal advocacy — and bake it into their CRM, KPIs, and team rhythms
• Look at how marketplaces change deal outcomes. They also measure deal velocity and close rates for marketplace-influenced deals, contrasting these metrics with their direct pipeline. This makes it easier to see where marketplaces actually add value
• Double down on what’s working. Over time, patterns start to show — which industries, regions, or buyer types respond best to a marketplace-led motion. Strong teams use this to refine their ICP, sharpen outbound, and evolve their sales playbooks‍
• Make data usable. They tailor insights based on who needs them (RevOps, sales, partnerships, finance), so each team sees what actually matters to them. They set up structured, repeatable reporting with the right filters, views, and automation in place

Pro Tip: A platform like Clazar makes this scalable with role-based views, smart filtering, and automated reporting.

Barrier #5: Lack of marketplace automation

Even as more companies embrace cloud marketplaces, most are still stuck in manual mode. Submissions are handled one at a time, CRM updates lag behind, and co-sell workflows have to be replicated across internal and cloud platforms. 

According to our report, only 21% of companies have achieved a high degree of automation in analytics and reporting. Just 15% have automated usage tracking and submission processes. The rest are bogged down by fragmented systems, process bottlenecks, and  operational drag.

Without automation, teams waste valuable time on admin instead of selling. Worse, they lose visibility. Pipeline isn’t tracked properly, deal data isn’t flowing back to cloud partners, and attribution gets muddy. 

That’s a recipe for both inefficiency and erosion of trust—internally and with hyperscaler teams.

What leaders do differently

Top-performing companies treat automation not as a “nice to have,” but as a foundational layer of marketplace GTM. This means that they:

• Systematize everything from offer creation to co-sell submission and revenue attribution. This frees up teams to focus on driving pipeline, not pushing paper
• Build automated workflows that trigger the right actions at each deal stage. With automation in place, sellers aren’t chasing status updates or manually logging activity—they’re spending more time engaging the field and closing deals
• Don’t force one setup on every team. High performers use platforms like Clazar to orchestrate workflows across RevOps, Sales, and Partnerships, with the ability to customize how each team interacts with cloud systems

For example:

• Sales gets a co-sell widget in the CRM
• RevOps has automated usage tracking and clean attribution
• Partnerships can manage hyperscaler workflows from one place

This level of automation isn’t just about speed, it’s also about scalability. It allows these companies to build a repeatable, reliable cloud revenue engine that doesn’t break down under volume or complexity.

Also Read:A Complete Guide To Cloud GTM

Build and scale your cloud marketplace GTM with Clazar

The top 22% of marketplace performers are proving that execution > activity. Listing is step one, but scale requires structured GTM, sales alignment, co-sell systems, and data fluency.

Want the complete benchmarks and co-sell insights?
Download the State of Cloud Marketplace & Co-Sell Report — built from survey data and firsthand conversations with GTM leaders shaping the future of cloud sales.

Top FAQ's

1. Why do most SaaS companies struggle to scale revenue on cloud marketplaces?

Most SaaS companies struggle because they treat their marketplace listing as a checkbox rather than a GTM motion. Without clear ownership, sales alignment, RevOps support, co-sell systems, and data visibility, marketplace programs remain reactive and underperform.

2. What is the biggest barrier to cloud marketplace success?

Lack of ownership. Many companies list on AWS, Azure, or GCP but assign no one to drive revenue, enablement, or cross-functional execution. Without a responsible stakeholder or team, progress stalls across sales, RevOps, partnerships, finance, and product.

3. Why does RevOps become a bottleneck in marketplace GTM?

RevOps manages systems, data, quoting, billing, and forecasting. Marketplace motions add new requirements across CPQ, CRM fields, co-sell reporting, and billing reconciliation. Without resourcing, clear goals, and tooling, RevOps deprioritizes marketplace work.

4. How do top performers operationalize co-sell?

They integrate co-sell processes directly into CRM, collaborate proactively with hyperscaler field teams, track co-sell attribution, and use tooling to automate submissions and feedback loops. This improves win rates and pipeline velocity.

5. How do cloud marketplaces accelerate enterprise deals?

They help customers burn cloud commits, simplify procurement, shorten legal cycles, and unlock hyperscaler co-sell support. This results in faster close rates and larger deal sizes for marketplace-aligned vendors.

Download the Report