Drive revenue through AWS, Microsoft, and Google marketplaces
Are you familiar with cloud marketplaces such as AWS Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Commercial Marketplace, or Google Cloud Marketplace? If you are not, then you should be.
According to the analyst firm Forrester, one-third of all US business now flows through e-commerce, and 63% of that is through some type of online marketplace. On the business-to-business side, Forrester predicts that 17% of all transactions will be through e-commerce and marketplaces by 2023.
Audienz shares a similar perspective. We regularly hold discussions with independent software vendors (ISVs) and services partners in the cloud space and consistently find that quite a number of partners are considering onboarding their solutions to a cloud-based marketplace such as AWS Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Commercial Marketplace, or Google Cloud Marketplace. We’ve seen many that have already onboarded and are realizing the business value that these marketplaces provide.
What is happening here? Why are these companies moving to sell their services and software solutions on cloud marketplaces? What is driving the movement to cloud marketplaces?
Essentially, there is a shift happening to self-service purchasing in the software industry today. In fact, it’s a major paradigm shift in how mid-market and enterprise end-customers discover, evaluate, purchase, and deploy software and services. These customers are rapidly shifting to buying their IT solutions and services from cloud marketplaces in a self-service manner.
This shift creates an opportunity for sellers such as ISVs and services companies. The opportunity is that the marketplace creates a new distribution channel, or go-to-market channel, for software and services sales. This new channel can easily extend and augment an ISV’s existing channels, like direct sales or traditional distribution for example, and help to drive incremental revenue.
The economic value of selling through a marketplace can also help reduce go-to-market costs, increase margins, expand access to a broader set of customers, and literally accommodate any deal size from free trials to multi-million dollar software and services sales.
If you think selling via cloud marketplaces might be right for your company, please keep the following tips in mind as you explore the possibilities:
- Make sure your product or services offering is properly defined for the customer audience and market you are trying to reach through this channel to maximize sales potential.
- Assure that your firm’s business processes can accommodate selling in/via the cloud. Specifically focus on what potential changes might need to take place in business processes like support, operations, and finance to accommodate the channel.
- Get your sales and marketing efforts tuned to incorporate the marketplace as a distribution channel in a way that works well alongside your other go-to-market channels.
Doing the above will go a long way toward making the transition and onboarding process to whatever cloud marketplace you choose much simpler and more effective.
Of course, once you are onboarded, driving awareness and demand for your marketplace offerings is the next step. How to effectively do so will be the focus of a future blog post. Stay tuned!
In the interim, check out my in-depth marketplace podcast.
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