Trunal Bhanse: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Clazar podcast, where we have some amazing conversations with partnerships and cloud alliance leaders navigating the changing demands of tech procurement. Today, we are talking to Sarah Jackson. Sarah is Cloud and Partner Alliance Director at UserTesting, which is a super exciting study in cloud GTM growth. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Jackson: Hey, super happy to be here, Trunal. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to have the conversation today.
Trunal: Sarah, let's jump straight into the questions. I've been in this space for a while now, and I've seen lots of varied companies using cloud marketplaces for their GTM motion really successfully.
Traditionally, it has always relied heavily on the data, infrastructure, AI, and ML kind of players. But UserTesting is a very fascinating study. It's not a traditional infrastructure company. At UserTesting, how did you first discover that cloud partnerships had relevance for businesses beyond the typical AI, data, and infra cohorts? What was the trigger that led you to explore this further?
Sarah: It's a really great question. I think it's a kind of a misunderstanding a lot of companies have that you have to directly align with infrastructure, cloud, specific technical support, or solutions around AWS.
The truth is that the acceleration of digital customer experience really happened in the post-COVID era. Everyone's in the race to drive better experiences in their products, mobile apps, and websites.
From a business perspective, AWS, Google, and Microsoft might not have a specific stake in building tools around UI and UX … Yet, one of the principal things I know about Amazon and AWS is their customer obsession. They want to provide value and close that loop for their customers.
And the best way they can do that is through the marketplace, through partners like UserTesting that can help their customers drive those experiences. They're not going to be able to create and build a platform or solution for everything.
Trunal: You did say that sometimes a better-together story needs to be found. It is easier for some businesses than for others. As a business that might not have a technical or engineering value proposition synergy, how did you determine and communicate the value that you brought to the table?
Sarah: It's a really good question. AWS is our initial focus within the cloud marketplaces. It was a little out of the box, but again … aligned back to the fact that digital transformation, acceleration, growth, and scale matter to businesses. Being an AWS-architected organization, we do have people and leaders—like our CTO—across UserTesting who very much understand the importance of these key components of an AWS architecture.
That is a good reference point for us to drive some of those technical conversations. But more or less, that ‘better together story’ for UserTesting is primarily through our global platform … enabling customers to drive research and understanding, better experiences, and mitigation of risk, especially in their design process across the PDLC. Driving those experiences drives more consumption, and also drives more adoption of AWS and some of the other services and offerings that they have for their customers.
Trunal: To pull on that thread … you also talked about having a better together story, really driven by the goals and outcomes that drive the two organizations—UserTesting and the hyperscaler—together. What was the process that you applied to identify your positioning and messaging?
Sarah: Great question! The basis is – leveraging the power of AWS or GCP or Microsoft's cloud infrastructure globally. You need consider how your partnership can drive co-innovation, the culture of continuous improvement, and ultimately drive companies to build better products and deliver better experiences. This ends up being a win for the end-customers, a win for AWS—through the expansion of their services and their stickiness—as well as, a win for the new platform or offering, that's really closing a gap within AWS’ portfolio through the marketplace.
It provides your customers the confidence to choose you since you are already running on their preferred cloud platform, their infrastructure, that's easier for them to adopt, to leverage. Again, from an InfoSec standpoint, you come vetted by AWS, and they know they can easily deploy your solution and use it within their organization.
Obviously, there are also a lot of benefits from the marketplace in the backend, through cloud commitments, ease of transaction, invoicing, and all those other pieces. This ended up being a real story that resonated with AWS and really resonated with the leadership at UserTesting.
Trunal: Did you build a playbook to involve specific functional leaders to contribute towards a deeper partnership with the hyperscalers? Did you take a programmatic approach, or did your cloud motion grow organically?
Sarah: I think I came into a unique position. I joined UserTesting very recently, at the end of April, 2024. And they had already been thinking about operationalizing a marketplace play for several years. There had already been conversations organizationally.
UserTesting has been through quite a bit of change through acquiring our largest competitor and several other factors. So, it's always been top of mind, but we had been deliberating about how the actual execution should look like, and how it operationally impact the business.
We discussed the value statement and benefit to the company, aligning with internal stakeholders, and had a conversation about ‘why marketplace’, ‘why now,’ and what the advantages were. We also looked at our overall cost of deal acquisition, our legal resources per deal [redlining deals for a legal team is very expensive and very difficult to do at scale].
Ultimately as a customer-obsessed company, and a very customer-focused company, we wanted to meet our customers where they were. That's really the conversation that resonated across our leadership. It's not only about our products and making them easy to adopt and implement. It's also about meeting ultimately our customers where they buy and how they want to buy.
Trunal: What was the most difficult piece, for the organizations like yours, to get over the initial hump of launching a cloud marketplace motion?
Sarah: Like many others, I came in thinking it was legal. Legal is where you need to—getting an agreement on the DPAs, the MSAs, the EULAs—all of this stuff, when you are selling SaaS globally. In fact, legal was actually one of my easier hurdles to get through. Shout out to Roy Fox, VP Legal at UserTesting, for being amazing with that.
I think the most difficult part was – having to dig in as a new person in the organization and understand how do we sell, operationally manage a deal desk, approve deals, and the backend operational piece of – having all our internal stakeholders—from finance, to the tax team, to our backend integrations with Avalara with NetSuite—working together, and then actually recognizing revenue and taxes, and all of that fun stuff.
I'm sure sales folks are cringing now, but that was a big operational piece I had to dive into and understand as quickly as I could. Also, I think it is important to be really open, listen to, and understand what mattered and how I could drive value to all our teams, while respecting their existing processes, and only then, try to implement this cloud marketplace transaction process in an easy way. This helped me ensure that the cloud marketplace was not going to disrupt what they're currently doing and, ultimately, made their lives easier.
Trunal: Got it. So … really understanding their workflows, helping them understand the marketplace and educating them on the fact that it won’t disrupt their existing workflows, and instead add more benefits on top, helped you get alignment?
Sarah: Yeah. And it was also important to be respectful of their existing approval workflows. I had an advantage because we'd started the implementation with Clazar on automating the bridge between Salesforce, AWS, and our own processes.
We were able to get together a multidisciplinary group—including everyone from revops, finance, legal—across the organization in one room in a standing meeting every Monday. We dug in with a project manager, who's been a dream for me, to help wrangle and keep us moving forward.
This has really been essential. Because, everyone might not be enthusiastic and because change sometimes is hard, especially for operation folks that have a certain way of doing things.
But, I think, giving everyone a seat at the table, having them feel heard and involved was a really important part for us. It gave us the confidence not not only roll this out and make this happen from a revenue perspective, but importantly check all the backend boxes—lgeally, financially, taxes—all across the board so we could have buy-in from our operational folks.
Trunal: If someone is in your shoes right now, at a similar size company, and want to affect a similar kind of change, what kind of support system would you recommend for the program manager have on day one to be to increase their or maximize their chances of success?
Sarah: I think a lot of us kind of learn as we go. And I think there are probably different players and different people you might bring in at different points. But if I would have been here on day one of starting the marketplace listing and the conversations internally … I would’ve started with making sure your CRO, your sales organization, your leadership's on board. That they see the value and support this motion. And a part of why I’d do that is because they're going to give you visibility and access to the sales team.
You have to train the sales team, you have to enable them, you have to kind of walk them through the processes. And a lot of times there's some hand holding there to make sure they're comfortable on those calls with AWS or your preferred cloud partner.
The other piece that, I think a lot of people don't talk about is, getting through those hoops of co-selling and, really, co-innovating.
I had the ops team, the revops, finance, legal, sales buy-in. But we also needed to start thinking about how we could co-innovate. How do we think about our product roadmap? Where do we see those opportunities where we can lean into solution development or competencies? That's where I've started to gather a multidisciplinary technical team— engineering, product, product marketing—within the last few weeks, to have us start thinking holistically. And now that we’re moving quickly here to ISV Accelerate and getting through some of these hoops in partnership, how do we co-innovate? We think about our verticals, use cases, and how, again, we enhance that better together story with AWS through co-innovation.
Trunal: In the co-build ecosystem, how would you say specifically at UserTesting, what are some of the concrete examples that might be useful for someone in a similar space that you're able to share with the audience?
Sarah: I've been fortunate. Our CTO has moved to a CIO (chief innovation officer) role in the last week. He's going to be solely focused—with a lot of cloud engineering and architecture knowledge—on working with me, and is on board with doing that.
The first things that we've looked at is kind of where are the gaps for our customers or even for our sales organization? What are the toughest parts of the buying cycles? Where could this partnership and co-innovation with AWS support—either a vertical, or a relationship—that'll help us kind of deepen and give us some credibility as we grow into that space.
A great example for us would be healthcare, which is one of the primary verticals we're targeting. In this vertical, BAAs and HIPAA compliance are all very important, or top of mind for us. We need to think about how can meet the needs of healthcare companies or insurance companies with AWS, to bring them a co-solution that helps them innovate, drive great experiences and, do it all by leveraging the same cloud platform that they already trust all of their data with.
Trunal: And if AWS brings in a partner like a UserTesting, who is compliant with HIPAA and other key regulations, then their end-customers in healthcare are also much more inclined to be using more of AWS compute and staying with AWS as their preferred cloud provider. Is that a fair way to think about the co-build partnership?
Sarah: Yes! Also healthcare as an industry is a late adopter of cloud technology, especially because of their sensitive PII, HIPAA-compliant data. Which is why they still have a lot of on-prem software. This partnership might also see a lot of this on-prem moving to cloud, or will have contributed to businesses who have already partially moved to cloud.
That's a high-growth opportunity also for the marketplaces—AWS, Azure, or GCP—to lean in with partners, create these types of innovative solutions for healthcare as a vertical to drive more adoption or moving more software to the cloud at a more rapid pace. We can drive a lot of value for them and help make those further commitments towards cloud.
Trunal: I was chatting with Mike Marzano who works at Content Square and is a great friend of yours as well. Fantastic person. And I was talking to him and he was mentioning that he had a similar challenge on cloud marketplaces. They are not a deep consumption driver for the hyperscaler. But their co-sell motion helped unlock more verticals for the hyperscaler. ContentSquare was kind of a way for them to get into those new revenue streams. Is that a similar motion you are seeing at UserTesting?
Sarah: Absolutely! And I think that the thing a lot of people don't realize is, that AWS isn’t always privy to our projects – whether that is in UX research or in product. So it's extremely valuable for their CIO or CTO to understand how some of these projects might be aligned to initiatives that they're trying to drive. We can add to the conversations and value they’re trying to drive for their end-customers.
A great recent example was in the hospitality industry. The AWS account team and we were working with the same people in a particular account. AWS was trying to basically rectify a very large database of duplicate information.
On our side, we were working on a much more customer-facing data on – how do we take the new, cleaned-up profiles and personas, understand what matters most to them, and get their direct feedback on what would make them loyalty customers or card-holders as opposed to one-time buyers.
So, our projects were aligned with the same people, even though they were different by nature. But it created great synergy within the conversations and value we could exhibit together because our ability to drive usage and drive better data, was supporting the project that AWS already was solving for, from a technical perspective with the account.
Ultimately, AWS, Google, or Microsoft, are invested in seeing their customers succeed. So seeing these accounts grow and proactively and effectively deploy product, or mature as a business is completely in line with what they're looking to accomplish.
Especially with the world being a more digital now, helping their customers understand how to innovate and drive better experience is completely aligned with cloud consumption and driving more usage of AWS or whichever cloud provider it might be.
Trunal: Could you help us understand how the entire co-sell motion with AWS works in regards to larger, enterprise accounts?
Sarah: We had an eye opening call earlier. A large airline that's been an established customer for UserTesting, was also running on AWS.
And it is important to understand who your customers’ preferred cloud providers are, before you start these conversations or register those opportunities.
But we had an upcoming renewal, a potential expansion with the account. I registered the deal. We got on the phone with the account manager for the airline. And coincidentally, in that specific case, we were talking to the similar people and similar departments, and came to realize that AWS and the IT and the infrastructure side was supporting a large project to help them clean up and kind of de-duplicate their data in regards to their customers, their targets, their kind of marketing lists, their overall database. I'm sure most of us might have more than one email address, or maybe somebody gets married, names change. There were lot of duplications there.
We were also working with the airline on interpreting the cleaned-up data on how to drive better experiences. So once they started to understand who's a loyalty customer or who's our repeat buyer or who only flew with us once, we needed to identify how to better serve them now, after getting this more actionable, cleaned-up data that we can leverage from a marketing and product development perspective across the organization.
That was a really neat moment to that we were supporting in an initiative that AWS was driving in a different capacity. As the data was being cleaned up, we were working with the airline to ensure they really maximized the investments that they'd made, to drive better experiences and really drive growth overall, whether it was for a net-new customer or with customers that were within their loyalty program.
Trunal: When we were talking earlier, you quipped about how you need a Bachelors in Hyperscalers.
And I 100 % agree. I see that day in day out in the community. There's so much more to listing than meets the eye. And this reminded me of a conversation that I just had on our podcast just recently with Laura from Datadog.
She shared that when she was communicating her vision of cloud partnerships to her sales team—right after she joined Datadog—the sales leaders stopped her in the middle of the conversation and said, "we have no idea what you're talking about". Which is to say that Cloud GTM is a relatively new and highly technical space.
With that in mind, help me understand what was the starting point for you in terms of actual execution? Who and what were your resources? How did you help navigate the entire situation? And what was the sustenance phase after this motion?
Sarah: My bachelor’s has been unique. I've been selling SaaS before it was SaaS, back in 2000.
When you're going to your sales organization or different organizations in the company, you can't go in with any assumptions that they know about partnerships or support partnerships, or that they're going to instantly understand what this actually means.
I think the most important thing and what I leaned into was, UserTesting does a lot of ‘sales plays.’ That's a very structured format from battle cards, from resources, supports and tools that they develop, whether it's going after a new vertical, or whether it is a new product release.
I took to the same framework. If this is how we're already teaching our sales and cross-functional, and go-to-market teams about new concepts, how can I latch onto that and then structure AWS specifically around something that's already familiar to them?
But the important piece is making it as simple as possible. Salespeople and go to market teams today, have so much thrown at them. So, just telling them very specifically what it is, how it's going to impact them, and what's the value to them or the partner is essential. Like why would an AWS or a cloud partner want to work with us? And then what is that actual process? What could they do today?
So in this specific case, it was, I had uploaded through our partner widget in Salesforce, a very large list of all of the AWS customers. So they could go right into the tool they were working with, on a daily basis and see within Salesforce at the account or opportunity level, if It's an AWS customer.
That got them thinking or looking across our established customer-base and prospect list, about which of these accounts might run on AWS. Then from there, the next steps were – having them understand the next process, i.e. to register the opportunity, understanding the data that we needed to make sure was in Salesforce.
And it's going to be much easier as we're going live now with the Clazar integration, to just push that data to AWS. But the caveat is that the data's got to be good data.
I've been through every sales methodology, but always go back to my twenties. I didn't realize it at the time, but Miller-Heinman strategic selling is understanding everyone's personal win. For me, especially with sales, I'm thinking about what's going to matter to sales. What are they going to want to know about? What do they need to know? And what are the benefits for them?
I have multiple decks. It looks different from what I tell the ops team. It looks different from what I might tell our SE team or our CSMs, because I think aligning to, and bringing that message, since it is so complicated, to the most simple possible steps is important. What can they do today? What's the long -term opportunity and kind of what's in it for them and how it can help them be and their customers be more successful is an important aspect.
It's not a one size fits all where you build a deck, and pat yourself on the back. It's going to constantly be a new iteration. And if you're especially doing partnerships, there’s always new competencies, solutions and products that you roll out as well.
I think it's just being an active listener, getting to know kind of what the pain points are for your sales organization or CSMs, or what their KPIs are and what they're being tasked with, and then really trying to align that message to what they can do and how it's gonna possibly impact your business is important.
I've said over and over, that it's the internal partnerships that are oftentimes so much more difficult and so much more challenging to navigate than the external partnerships.
We've historically seen it done so many times. Like, hey, this company's partnered with this company, big press release, but what does it mean? What is it actually gonna bring back to the organization? How does it impact the way we sell or the way we support our customers overall?
So think it's really important that, you've got to keep your eyes inside, which, I know a lot of us—especially if you're on the revenue side or in a partnership leader role—you do have to kind of take a little pause there to think about how am I going to internally build the relationship as successfully as I'm focusing externally on that specific partner.
Trunal: On the tactical front, when you went to your sales leadership, did you go to all of them? Did you go to the leader? Or did you select your own champion within the sales team and got him or her bought into the motion?
Sarah: It was a combination of both. One of the first things I asked coming in—I'm sure a lot of people listening to this have done as well—you want to understand which kind of RVPs or sales leaders have leaned-in most to partnerships. That might be the best kind of warm conversation to kind of test it out. Also for me, it was about understanding more context as I got further in these conversations and one-on-ones with the RVPs and sales leaders. If they weren't bought into partnerships, why? What was their experience like? How could that be improved? What would a cloud sales blueprint look like in an ideal world? What would the north star metric be in how AWS or cloud marketplace motions could be different or better than what they've had in the past? So, it was about securing direct alignment. Also I was very proactive in finding AEs that leaned in as well. Because having them tell the story internally is always so much more valuable. If you can get somebody to stand up anc count your wins. Having them tell that story internally, that's where the real value comes from and building that alignment. But also it takes some scrappiness and it takes the work, especially being earlier on in the partnership, I know that building our pipeline in ACE, and putting our best opportunities and that best foot forward is super important. So, I do spend time understanding and asking our sales leadership, what are your key deals for the rest of the year? What are your key deals for in quarter? And I have a list of those. So I'm proactively registering deals that I know are important to the business and then making those introductions and closing those. And educating one by one as we get on the calls with AWS, making our sales team comfortable, understanding the value proposition, how to start to build that bachelor's degree and talking to a cloud. But I mean it definitely takes some scrappiness and regardless of how big your business are, if you're a small startup or an established company, we've all got to put in the work. You got to roll up your sleeves. You've got to dive in, register the ops and try to create the best partner experience you can, whether it is AWS, GCP, Azure, or any of the partners that you work with within your portfolio.
Trunal: Absolutely! And so much of it is also boils down to the quality of training that an organization is providing to the sales reps. s there anything specific that you've done that might be useful for the audience in terms of helping the AE's understand the value prop? And once they’ve understood it, what does reinforcement of the value-prop and constant communication from a partnership leader look like?
Sarah: It is an interesting small shop structure. I run a lot of this on my own. And I did learn this from my experience at ContentSquare. Dundamentally my message to them is that there’s is a lot to learn, but you're not in it on your own. I've given them a lot of structure and guardrails, for better hand-holding.
You know, once the opportunity is approved, here's the exact format of the email that you're going to send. It's going to have the context that's going to be consistent. And it's going to give the AWS teams that receive thousands of partner requests, the information they need to help us set up the call and to get the support that we're looking for on those opportunities.
Another thing that I was kind of adamant about is being on the calls with the AEs on their first call with AWS, with that partner. It is a lot of work, but it is worthwhile. So I'm always on, as a buffer, to make the introduction, to set up the call. It gives context on where we're at with AWS, that we run on AWS, that we are ACE eligible.
Then, we set them up in the best possible way to talk about what we do as a company, and then jump into the details of the opportunity and what our specific ask is so we can move forward. And it really does set the tone, especially since there are a lot of people on those initial AWS calls like PDMs, that offer support. Doing it the right way, setting that bar high and being consistent opens you up to getting lists of different accounts.
Let’s take it back to the example of the airline customers. You have a list of 15 other accounts that you can go potentially think about working on with them. So I think it's just setting the bar high, not putting too much in making, you know, your sales team feel like they have to figure it out on their own, but helping and putting the resources and the support in place that they are comfortable. They learn the muscle and learning it hands-on, oftentimes, especially for go-to-market teams is the best way where you can set a high-quality standard, but they feel like they're getting the support they need as well.
So I think it's just setting the bar high, not putting too much in making your sales team feel like they have to figure it out on their own, but helping and putting the resources and the support in place, so that they are comfortable.
Learning it hands-on, oftentimes, especially for go-to-market teams is the best way where you can set a high-quality standard, but they need to feel like they're getting the support they need as well.
Trunal: Today, there's two schools of thought. One is, that the sales team should create their own private offers, should handle uploading co-sell opportunities themselves, while the partnership team acts like a support function. On the other hand, you are on the other end of the spectrum where you go on calls with your AEs and the AWS account managers.
Is there ever a temporary motion where you are handholding each AE before eventually reaching a utopia where AEs do all the work themselves?
Sarah: Yes, we're headed there. Right now, we’re seeing if our messaging at UserTesting is resonating with the teams at AWS? So, I can further refine the message until I can pass off a lot more responsibility to our AEs. But this is the initial, temporary state, where I am trying to understand what we do well, where I need to build more resources, more training, and enablement, and where I need to put in more work.
So it's kind of that temporary initial state where yes, it's very controlled, but it also gives me a lot of data to make sure we're doing it right. We're setting ourselves up right. And we're building the best possible brand and internal branding with AWS or any future cloud partner.
Trunal: Thanks a lot, Sarah. That's a fantastic playbook. Initially you have to have this motion of almost brute forcing your way into a change. And then once that becomes a habit, then you can sort of move the motion to scale.
Sarah: 100%. I think a lot of it about getting those internal wins and having an AE or a sales leader go out and say – hey, we closed this deal into the quarter. We're able to get it through, because of this help from this partner, and having them share those partner stories. That's why it's also important to not be overly controlling. That's not the goal. But instead, it is to help us get the wins, to get the velocity, and to get the quality and understand what's working, what's not – to help us really drive at scale where I can say with confidence that I could sit back a little bit more, focus more on the more tactical parts of the relationship and partnership. And then, I also need to put in the legwork to help my sales teams be successful.
Trunal: Another esteemed guest – Alex Balcanquall of the Cloud Software Group – spoke about many of the overlooked operational aspects of the marketplace motion. These behind the scenes building blocks are so important, but hard to find resources on. How did you figure out these aspects like audit taxation, revenue conciliation?
Sarah: Yeah, it's such an important question. And I'm sure there's so many people listening that have gone down the road of reading a document, being referred to another document, that document's not there. I mean, it's really overwhelming. And especially, I think a lot of us on the partnership leader side of things, you probably haven't been in the depths of taxes and finance and all of these other aspects that come into play. Great opportunity to learn, not necessarily my favorite part of the job. So I think a lot of it is don't go at it alone. I think, you start to understand who's leading in the space. There's great, you know, newsletters out there. There's companies like Clazar that can help you that have already done this motion that understand what the incremental steps are to make sure you're successful and you're not making critical mistakes on your marketplace setup or on how you're going to plan to co-sell.
In addition to that, a huge plug on Partnership Leaders that has a whole group within their organization. If people aren't familiar with it, it's just global SaaS partner leaders, exactly that from everything from smaller ISVs up to an Adobe, you know, being able to have a Slack group that you can just send a question to and say, is anyone else ever run into this? I mean, it's really been helpful in preventing me from going down holes or investing a lot of time potentially in something where I could get a quick answer from somebody that's either in the throes of the same place I am in the process or a lot of companies out there that are much more mature in their cloud journey that can lean in and provide some guidance.
So it's tough on the cloud side because a lot of times you feel like you're on an island. I know internally so many people I talk to, everyone will say, just call somebody at AWS or call somebody at Google. It doesn't always work that way. It's got a structure specifically put in place and hoops you have to jump through before you get to that point. So I just encourage you follow the Jay McBains of the world, follow these people who have got that proven success and don't hesitate to reach out. I think anyone that's been through it is gonna really, really be open to helping, supporting and helping to educate someone for having a better experience perhaps than they did trying to set up this complex of a program.
Trunal: Absolutely. You took some names here like Partnership Leaders, fantastic community. Jay McBain, amazing leader to follow. Vince Menzione is another one that I have a lot of respect for as well. Roman is the other one. It's really fascinating to see all this help being available in this day and age that wasn't there, maybe literally like eight months ago. The community is growing, which is fantastic to see.
Trunal: From a tactical perspective, how and where does your marketplace motion fits in between, other channels like partnerships, direct sales and channel sales and how they all interact with each other?
Sarah: Specifically at UserTesting, a lot of what we do is direct. The other main secondary channel has been through value-added resellers, you know, a lot of times really more than a one-off capacity trying to meet the customer's need of especially globally, you know, by country or by complexity of getting that sale done that maybe had a preferred software, you know, company provider reseller that they wanted to go with. So there's been a lot of openness from an organizational standpoint to the marketplace play because it is a standardized process, right? We know the expectations of fees and how it works and that there's advantages, not only for UserTesting, but specifically for the customer.
So really as we look moving forward, I mean, our play, there's going to be always the direct component, especially till we get multi-cloud, you know, there's not going to be everyone running on AWS. But as much business as we can potentially drive is the goal through the marketplace is, you know, our number one and that kind of North Star guide that we're headed towards to make it easier for our customers, to make it easier from a vendor onboarding and some of the challenges and infosec that we run into, you know, and trying to close our initial contracts. So my goal, obviously on my side of the fence, I'd love us to be marketplace first on everything. But at this point, you know, that's the velocity that we look to drive the direct play with Marketplace being our primary and really kind of moving away from some of those more traditional reseller or channel models that have been leveraged in the past.
Trunal: Do you think where you are, where you envisioned you would be when you started the effort? And then where does UserTesting go from now in terms of their partnerships?
Sarah: I'm about three months in, right? So I have to think objectively, not with my perfectionist hat on. I'd say yes and no. I mean, so we're in a good spot of, over 100 opportunities currently registered. We've had six different marketplace, you know, private offers that have already been accepted and won. So we've got wins, we've got pipeline.
I'd say I didn't ever anticipate some of the operational challenges – again, back to that importance of those internal conversations. That's definitely lagged things from a velocity standpoint and caused some pause here and there. I would have loved to have been ISV Accelerate today, but we're very close now to getting there with that alignment to move forward quickly.
I think ultimately in the short amount of time to be able to get buy-in from sales leadership, operations, legal, have the motion that we're actively, you know, registering opportunities, having great conversations with Amazon, learning how to work with them. I think that's a win.
And to have five or six launched private offers under our belt, I think at this point, is a great place to be. But there's always a lot of and room for growth. So as of what's next for us, it's prioritizing ISV accelerate competencies and solutions that we really are leaning into with that co-innovation piece. And very quickly, I'm looking to move to a multi-cloud strategy for UserTesting.
Trunal: That's such a good point, Sarah. And Sarah, I feel so confident that UserTesting will do so well just because you are at the helm of the leadership. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was wonderful catching up. And good luck. And I'll see you around.
Sarah: Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
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