Listing on cloud marketplaces but not seeing results? Here’s how a cloud GTM platform can help

By the end of 2023, at least four software businesses crossed $1 billion in sales by listing on cloud marketplaces. While that is a solid testament to the benefits of listing on cloud marketplaces, it isn’t the complete story. After all, you wouldn’t buy a cookbook and call it dinner.

As of today, at least 400,000 sellers are listed on the Azure marketplace alone. And not all of them find equal success. That’s because, despite the tremendous value-add they bring to your business, cloud marketplaces are also very technical.

The reason why some businesses are more successful than others on cloud marketplaces is the realization that getting listed is only the premise of cloud GTM success, not the outcome. You also need to:

• Maintain and manage your listing
• Optimize and effect changes every time you update your product, branding, pricing, and more
• Help your channel partners drive shared success through cloud marketplaces
• Re-deploy resources and bandwidth every time you want to expand into a new marketplace
• Track key metrics on individual cloud platforms and build reports for FinOps, SalesOps, and more
• Identify and update opportunities on partner platforms of the cloud providers
• Manage relationships with key channel stakeholders who can help influence deals

… I could go on, but you get the point.

Behind every successful cloud GTM is a cluster of sales operations, partnerships, and engineering teams working tirelessly. Or, if you’re lucky … a specialized cloud GTM platform that does all of that for you.

Confused? Here’s how pairing your public listing with the right cloud GTM platform can help you drive more success:

1. Keep your marketplace listing iterative and updated

Every SaaS business must respond to changing market and business stimuli or risk losing out to competitors. This is reflected in the fact that more than 94 percent of business leaders surveyed by Paddle reportedly iterated on pricing at least once a year.

Your marketplace listing is a public representation of your business to buyers with cloud commits. Therefore, every time you effect changes, either in your own pricing/packaging, go-to-market/product narrative, or any customer-facing detail, it must immediately reflect on your marketplace listing.

If you’ve already launched on a hyperscaler – AWS, Azure, or GCP – marketplace, however, you already know that it is easier said than done. Like listing on cloud marketplaces, making changes is also a technical exercise.

AWS alone contains at least six API triggers required to make updates to your existing marketplace listing.

On the other hand, changing different value fields requires you to stay abreast of the different technical guidelines related to each field, making the process complex and time-consuming (e.g. updating a listing on the Azure marketplace requires you to follow multiple disparate guidelines).

On the other hand, a bespoke cloud GTM tool offers you the ability to make changes directly to the fields on the platform without worrying about multiple backend API integrations, update flows, or disparate rules.

Clazar, for example, allows simple point-and-click mechanisms for updating the various fields (description, usage unit, plans, branding, and more) straight through the app with a turnaround time (TAT) between one to two days.

If you’re a multi-entity business, you can choose specific listings to update, edit the relevant fields, map new ones, and even preview how it might look before it is published.

A modern cloud GTM platform offers complete control over your listings without the natural pressures of having to restructure and customize your backend. It also allows you to review your listings in a controlled environment, A/B test conversions, and optimize for better acquisition flows.

2. Reduce multi-cloud costs and effort

According to its 2023 Marketscape report, IDC believes that “products and services are increasingly deployed in the cloud and across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.”

This means that in order to spread the net wider, sellers on cloud marketplaces must also progressively move to a multi-platform listing strategy. Your cloud go-to-market strategy ultimately depends on your business and customer behavior.

For example, if you find that your expanded target addressable market (TAM) has a high density of Azure-native businesses with cloud commits (MACC), it is reasonable to launch a new listing on the Azure marketplace to attract more business.

Operationalizing a new listing in-house needs fresh reinvestment of effort, time, and cost to get you live. On the other hand, handling expansions into new marketplaces yourself is not scale-friendly since it penalizes your product focus by keeping engineers and sales operations experts engaged in housekeeping for your listing.

Instead, choosing to buy a cloud GTM platform for your sales goals can massively improve management efficiency and reduce strain on your in-house resources.

3. Simplify multi-listing management to capture expansion revenue

It is natural for scaling businesses to find more avenues to drive revenue ahead. According to Patrick Campbell, founder of Profitwell – “the way that you increase that ARPU or that ACV further is basically by adding more products … and so it kind of created this thesis of being multi-product. And we’ve taken this on really early in our life cycle.”

If your business has multi-product aspirations, you will typically need to plan for multiple listings, each with separate configurations, pricing, product descriptions, and more. Doing this in-house is not a future-proof method since you might end up spending a lot of time managing each individual listing, defining ownership, and implementing platform changes to all of them.

A platform like Clazar, on the other hand, takes away the stress of listing on cloud marketplaces and makes it as self-serve as possible. This makes customizing terms, pricing, POs, FPS schedules, EULA, and contract initiation dates simpler and, in turn, offers your buyers the flexibility they need to grow alongside your business.

4. Upgrade to partner-assisted selling motions with ease

According to HubSpot, “almost 93 percent of sales leaders report that their reps are collaborating with partners to close deals. Most leaders believe that partner-attached deals are at least 26-50% more likely to be won than average.” For long-term success on hyperscaler marketplaces like AWS, building a Co-Sell motion is crucial.

For example, Clazar automatically enriches all Salesforce instances with accurate stakeholder details from the hyperscalers, tracks partner-assisted opportunities through the stages and ensures data sanctity. This enables business teams to have an accurate view of high-converting opportunities. It also helps them maintain a book of records on specific details (e.g., deal size, stakeholder, company name, etc.), so collaboration and conversion happen faster.

5. Accurately track value derived from your marketplace listing

Any partnership/sales leader trying to convince the leadership to launch a cloud GTM is faced with the same problem – the lack of complete visibility into the outcomes.

“We don’t have a lot of visibility into the sites,” Dan Rosanova, Head of Product Management at Confluent Cloud earlier told SiliconAngle. “It’s hard for us to justify marketing spend that takes you to a site that we don’t own, and we can’t tell how successful it is.”

However, contemporary cloud GTM platforms are able quite simply, to circumvent any such challenges. In order to provide users a complete view of how a cloud GTM fits into their revenue acquisition framework and also to exhibit their own value as sales magnifiers, cloud GTM platforms come packed with advanced data and audit reports.

Platforms like Clazar also help track the full breadth of listing actions by providing Buyer-360 reports – a dynamic list of events taking place across each listing, including transactions, renewals, potential drop-offs, and potential expiries.

This offers a host of real-time actionable information on the performance of every listing. Dashboards that can quantify the ROI of cloud marketplaces as a channel are further resourceful for partnership/sales leaders in driving org-wide conviction on their cloud GTM.

Scale your cloud marketplace listing with Clazar

Circumvent the issues of frequent API and rule changes by cloud marketplaces, build complex modules, and go from launch to scale in days with your cloud marketplace listings powered by Clazar.

Having powered cloud revenue for multiple businesses (hypergrowth and enterprise), Clazar brings cloud-native expertise and support to help you go from strength to strength.

Migrating your listing, integrations, and operations to Clazar is also made near-instantaneous and free of data-loss risks by Clazar Lift n’ Shift – a 30-minute program to upgrade your cloud GTM game.

Want to learn how businesses like Momento, Acryl Data, and more power their cloud GTM? Write to us at hello@clazar.io or speak with an expert!