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

Cloud marketplaces have moved from experiment to expectation. 89% of B2B SaaS companies are now listed on AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplaces — but only 22% of them generate more than 20% of their revenue through these platforms (2025 State of Cloud Marketplace & Co-Sell Report). 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.

Barrier #1: No internal ownership or accountability

Many companies are listed, but no one owns the results — which means 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 without a unifying mandate, momentum dies in the handoffs.

Marketplace execution is inherently cross-functional — it touches finance (billing), ops (quoting and fulfillment), product (listing strategy), partnerships (co-sell alignment), and sales (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. They understand that execution won’t scale without someone responsible for driving it forward — across functions, systems, and teams. But ownership doesn’t just mean assigning a name; it means giving that person or group the mandate, visibility, and KPIs to drive impact.

What sets high performers apart is how intentionally they orchestrate cross-functional alignment. They embed marketplace responsibility into core revenue workflows — not as an overlay or experiment, but as part of the engine. For example, they ensure sales has clear guidelines on when and how to route deals through marketplaces. They align closely with finance and RevOps to operationalize quoting, billing, and reporting. They maintain active collaboration between not just partnership and sales, but also product, RevOps and finance to evolve listings and co-sell strategies in sync with business goals.

They also drive visibility and accountability through reporting. Top performers build dashboards that surface marketplace-sourced and -influenced pipeline, enable QBRs focused on cloud sales performance, and establish regular cadences to review what’s working and where support is needed. This clarity removes ambiguity and helps break down reactive silos.

However, not every company has the maturity or resources to stand up a fully staffed marketplace team from day one — and that’s okay. For organizations still in the early stages, it’s common to distribute ownership informally across partnerships or alliances. But even in leaner setups, leaders ensure that someone is 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, more mature companies invest in dedicated roles and pods. 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 — they’re treated 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, uncertain about co-sell attribution, or simply unaware of the benefits. Channel conflict concerns add another layer of 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 tasked with maintaining operational hygiene, supporting GTM motions, enabling forecasting, and delivering accurate reporting. Adding net-new marketplace infrastructure (across CPQ, CRM, quoting, billing, co-sell tracking, and more) is often viewed 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

High-performing operationalize alignment across incentives, systems, and workflows. First, they ensure AEs are compensated fairly for marketplace deals and understand how cloud commit budgets can help them accelerate and win enterprise opportunities. Sales enablement goes beyond process training; it includes equipping reps with co-sell playbooks and helping them frame marketplaces as a tool to close faster, not a source of friction or channel conflict.

Just as critically, they bring RevOps to the table from the start. These companies recognize that without systems support — from deal routing to billing automation to reporting — marketplace motions remain stuck in manual limbo. Rather than overloading RevOps teams already stretched thin, leaders provide resourcing, clear ROI goals, and tooling to support the motion. They often embed marketplace-specific workflows into existing sales processes, making it seamless for reps to engage.

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. Without clear guidance on when and how to involve cloud partners, or systems that track co-sell attribution and ROI, opportunities fall through the cracks. 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 operationalize co-sell within the systems their teams already use — integrating co-sell steps directly into their CRM, with fields and workflows that guide reps through qualification, partner registration, and joint account planning. These companies don’t rely solely on alliances teams to manage cloud relationships; instead, they create shared accountability across sales, partnerships, and RevOps.

They work closely with PDMs to prioritize joint pipeline and plan co-sell engagements proactively, rather than reactively. Strong PDM relationships — reinforced by regular syncs, shared metrics, and executive alignment — ensure that co-sell support is strategic, not transactional.

Most importantly, top performers use tooling 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 — a powerful incentive to embed co-sell execution deeply into their GTM engine.

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 — 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 anecdotal wins or reactive input from cloud reps, but fall short in building a structured system to surface and operationalize marketplace intelligence. This leads to stalled co-sell motions, vague ROI attribution, and poor feedback loops across sales, partnerships, and RevOps.

What leaders do differently

Top-performing teams pay close attention to hyperscaler engagement. This includes tracking how often field teams participate in joint calls, support opportunity sharing, or signal internal advocacy. Rather than treating these interactions as incidental, top performers integrate them into CRM fields, KPIs, and cadences — treating cloud reps as strategic actors in the sales process, not just optional allies.

They also measure deal velocity and close rates for marketplace-influenced deals, contrasting these metrics with their direct pipeline. This helps refine sales strategy and identify what types of deals — by vertical, geography, or buyer profile — benefit most from a marketplace-first approach. Over time, this becomes a self-improving feedback loop, guiding everything from ICP refinement to SDR outreach to sales playbook evolution.

And crucially, these companies tailor marketplace insights to the right internal audiences. Rather than flooding dashboards with raw data, they build custom reports for RevOps, Sales, Partnerships, and Finance, each one aligned to what matters most to that function. A platform like Clazar makes this scalable by offering role-based views, smart filtering, and automated reporting. It’s not just about having the data — it’s about delivering it to the right people, in the right format, at the right time.

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, and just 15% have automated usage tracking and submission processes. The rest are bogged down by fragmented systems, process bottlenecks, and a heavy operational lift that stalls momentum.

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. They systematize everything from offer creation to co-sell submission and revenue attribution—freeing up their teams to focus on driving pipeline, not pushing paper.

They build automated, intelligent workflows that trigger the right actions at each deal stage—whether that’s syncing a co-sell deal into AWS ACE or pulling reporting data directly into their CRM. 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.

And just like with data, automation isn’t one-size-fits-all. 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.

Scaling requires more than just a listing

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?
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