Want to sell with hyperscalers?
You’re in luck. We’ve recorded a whole podcast episode with Mike Marzano from Contentsquare about the strategies and challenges of selling to these untraditional buyers in the cloud marketplace ecosystem.
From navigating procurement processes to educating buyers, our guest shed light on the steps he’s taking to empower buyers in leveraging platforms like Azure and AWS.
Tune in to learn more about:
Leveraging data from hyper scalers for co-selling success
Co-marketing strategies with Azure or AWS: what works and what doesn’t
Exploring multi-party private offers for optimized partnerships
Identifying key players responsible for nurturing relationships with channel partners and cloud marketplaces
#ChannelPartners #CloudMarketPlace
_________________________
Learn more about Channext 👇
https://channext.com/
Watch on YouTube ►
https://www.youtube.com/@channext
#channelmarketing #channelpartners
Want to sell with hyperscalers?
You’re in luck. We’ve recorded a whole podcast episode with Mike Marzano from Contentsquare about the strategies and challenges of selling to these untraditional buyers in the cloud marketplace ecosystem.
From navigating procurement processes to educating buyers, our guest shed light on the steps he’s taking to empower buyers in leveraging platforms like Azure and AWS.
Tune in to learn more about:
Leveraging data from hyper scalers for co-selling success
Co-marketing strategies with Azure or AWS: what works and what doesn’t
Exploring multi-party private offers for optimized partnerships
Identifying key players responsible for nurturing relationships with channel partners and cloud marketplaces
#ChannelPartners #CloudMarketPlace
_________________________
Learn more about Channext 👇
https://channext.com/
Watch on YouTube ►
https://www.youtube.com/@channext
#channelmarketing #channelpartners
Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about channel and partnerships on a weekly basis. My name is Efe and I'll be your host in this episode. I'm excited to announce our special guest, Mike. Mike, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well. How about yourself?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great. Yeah, thanks for asking. You know the weather is getting better, the days are finally getting longer, so doing very well. So I'm very excited for this episode because I think today we're going to discuss a very hot topic, very interesting topic for our audience, which is the how to sell with hyperscalers and the best practices around the cloud marketplaces. So, Mike, could you please give us an introduction? Who are you and what do you do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, thank you for again having me on, especially, you know to your point, as we're exiting the dark ages of the winter, here in New York, we're experiencing very similar warming and then longer days, which is good because I have a little kid at home who doesn't necessarily like to sleep, so any opportunity I have to get some sunlight really helps me survive these sleepless nights. So, mike Marzano, I sit here in New York. I lead cloud alliances for ContentSquare. Contentsquare is a digital experience analytics and product analytics suite who really help brands of all types retailers, auto brands, entertainment brands, travel and hospitality brands understand what their customers like, what they don't like and why they exit their digital experience. At ContentSquare, leading cloud alliances, that really covers everything from how we co-sell, how we co-market, how we co-build products with the hyperscalers. Specifically for ContentSquare, that's AWS and Microsoft, and so I've been with ContentSquare for about two years leading this program. The whole time Prior to that, I worked with Microsoft at a British consultancy on the retail side.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for that, Mike, and we previously had a conversation, I think not so long ago, I hosted Darren Sharp from Microsoft, from Azure, and we talked a little bit about the hyperscalers and the things that are going to how the landscape is evolving to sell to untraditional buyers through the marketplace, and by untraditional buyers I mean the buyers who may not be aware of how cloud marketplaces work, or maybe they don't know that their organization may have commitments.
Speaker 1:So could you share the challenges that you have with selling to these kind of untraditional buyers through Azure or AWS?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure, how long is a podcast? Because you know the challenges are plentiful. And that's the thing that's really interesting is, you know you hear a lot of talk about the importance of cloud, the importance of co-selling and aligning with hyperscalers, importance of kind of moving towards marketplace, but I mean a lot of what people in my position is yeah, but there's so many challenges and how do you overcome those? And if we look at the first thing that we see at ContentSquare is, generally speaking, our buyers on the marketing side. Our buyer sits within the office of the CMO and while certainly we're a product that sits on top of customer data the brand's customer data the chief data officer comes into that, maybe the CIO in certain cases.
Speaker 2:It really is an extension of our main buyer and the person who's going to you know realize the value in ContentSquare. So the biggest challenge that we have to overcome is how do you bridge that gap right? How do you help rationalize the business value that our buyer in the marketing side is going to see from leveraging ContentSquare, implementing our products in ContentSquare, and heap into their digital experiences with the economic value that they're going to see from an EDP side or a Microsoft Mac consumption side, buying ContentSquare through the marketplace, consumption side and buying content square through the marketplace. That's one of the things we've really had to level ourselves up on very quickly in order to make this work, especially when we're engaging with some of our largest value customers with basically the highest levels of Mac and EDP commitments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's very interesting because I see that in the future, I think cloud marketplaces are going to dominate as the channel to buy B2B software, and I think we're still early on in that curve because, as you mentioned, I think that maybe a few people within an organization are aware of how cloud marketplaces work, but I think the majority of buyers are still a little bit clueless.
Speaker 1:So I think there's a lot of work that we need to do. You know maybe us as the podcast host and you as the guest the people, the thought leaders in the space, the channel partners who are selling through the marketplaces, the ISVs, the hyperscalers themselves so there's a lot of education that I think we need to do to help buyers, you know, get the most out of the cloud marketplaces, and I think that. So, as you mentioned, I think that the current target ICP may not be so well educated on this topic, and I was curious and I think we also had this conversation before like what are the steps that you're taking to educate and enable your buyers to buy from cloud marketplaces?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know. Obviously you have to start with the value. What value are you bringing to them immediately, right? So you know, first thing, before we move into the conversations with procurement, really identifying hey, does this customer? Do you buy through the marketplace? Do you have any preferred marketplace you would leverage? Do you have a commitment that you either are underutilized or you're moving into your next negotiation phase and you want to get the best bang for your buck?
Speaker 2:You really have to start with selling the value of your product, and this goes in terms of both selling the customer, your value of your product.
Speaker 2:Of course, right, as a seller, anybody knows that you also have to help the cloud company understand that, whether you're talking to them at kind of a higher level to say, you know, hey, this is an industry-based solution for retailers, here's the value we provide, here's the gap in the market that we fill, here's how we complement your other messages and your other solutions, but then also doing that on a much more contained basis with individual sellers at these companies. So one of the key things I think most sellers will say is, yeah, there's a big difference between what value the customer is actually looking for and what marketing message is being attached to it sometimes, and that's really the job that me and my team we try and fill is to help really understand. How do we connect this to what is important to the cloud, both in terms of their general strategy within this industry, within this space, how it complements their products, but then also speaking to the seller at the cloud. Does it help them retire quota? Does it help them sell more cloud?
Speaker 2:Does it help them leverage underutilized services that the customer could really benefit from, that are complementing to your own and it's a journey right Because when you start out and you can really speak, at least to the foundation of saying, hey, cloud partner, we've got tons of pipeline, we've got a really good solution, we've been able to land a lot of great customer deals and win stories, hey, and also we're selling through the marketplace, you start to prime that environment for them to say, hey, this is a partner, one out of hundreds of thousands of partners that I should pay attention to because they're hitting all the different marks. Let's see how they do. And then, as you build into that, you start to have an advocate on the partner side who can help you walk through, setting the stage for the customer. Why does marketplace make sense? They're trying to get as many customers to move into marketplace as possible. It's the same goal that we share.
Speaker 2:I think the key thing for us is, once we have that initial value, sell to our end buyer is.
Speaker 2:Helping them make a bulletproof business case as to why they should go through the marketplace.
Speaker 2:Work with the cloud partner to help them identify that roadmap, to say who do we need to talk to within the organization? Who's going to realize the value of making that deal or making that purchase through the marketplace? Who owns the commitment, and oftentimes there's maybe two or three people steps chain in that, but sometimes there's one person that's just going to unlock that and that's going to be maybe somebody in procurement. If you talk to your seller and say, hey, we should go talk to procurement early on, they're going to say what, why would we want to do that? But if you could really illustrate the fact that, hey, these are the people that hold the keys to marketplace, they're people that can help rationalize the message of buying ContentSquare or heap through the marketplace. This is really the message that we want them to take, and so sometimes it's helping to really build that, like I said, bulletproof business case as to why content square is worth it and why buying it through the marketplace is really a great way to offset their organizational costs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and within your organization, whose responsibility is it to bring that up with the buyer and create that business case with them? Is it the AE?
Speaker 2:create that business case with them. Is it the AE? It is the AE. So, typically, what my team and what partner sales in our organization does, we help build that sort of messaging and help build a connected tissue, help not just put it into the right language but also help attach it again to different motions that our cloud partner is going to be able to utilize and say, hey, this is worthwhile.
Speaker 2:But building the actual business case, that's really where we provide inputs to that case and help. We've got templates that say, if you buy ContentSquare at this much against your EVP or against your MAC commitment, here's how it's going to look. You're going to get the value of content square and whatever sort of ROI calculator that we would do internally for you know, the business projects that they have with the. You know retirement against their spend commitments right, and it helps them be able to put this as a very clear report card. That makes a lot of sense. It's all there on paper and it's really something that they can go add their level of. You know, hey, I attest to this. This is what we're looking to do for the business. I have a level of budget I want to put to this and bring it forward to the people who can help make that transaction happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the question that all of our maybe listeners are wondering is that how are you incentivizing the salespeople to do that? Because it's an extra step. So, for example, if a deal comes in and they are worthwhile for their time because, like, the deal size may go up, the retention rate may be higher. So there are also all that kind of data that we need to look into there. But I think my first and foremost question is that how are you incentivizing those AEs to take that extra action?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you know simple answer is you know, remove barriers, don't create them. When you're introducing a new process, you're introducing a new avenue, you're introducing new stakeholders to the map that a salesperson has to engage on in order to make a sale happen, they're immediately going to be like wait what I don't know. I've done this for a while. I'm going to go the route I know I can go. If marketplace makes sense, we'll do it. At the end, that is not going to help you like, basically maximize the benefits of, you know, working with cloud partners. So what we have done is said how, what are things in our power right? What expectations can we set? I think that's that's a really good key thing is helping them understand what can we expect from a co-sell, what can we expect from a cloud partner within a sales cycle that looks like this, but then removing those barriers. So the first thing that we do is ContentSquare eats the transaction fee of both AWS and Microsoft, and that ranges from 1.5% on renewal in AWS up to 3% on a new business deal. 3% across the board within Microsoft, and that ranges from one and a half percent on renewal in AWS up to three percent on a new business deal. Three percent across the board within Microsoft. That you know. Luckily we're a high margin business, right Like we can make that happen. It doesn't really hurt us. We see the benefits of leveraging the marketplace is much higher than you know. The potential cost cut. But the key thing there is our seller knows if we are competing with our competitors on price. This is not something that's going to provide an additional blocker. The customer is not going to see that 3% added to the bill and our seller is not going to see that 3% deducted from their revenue recognition. Second thing that we do, sorry.
Speaker 2:The other thing and this is, I think, probably the most, one of the second most important pieces here is we actually incentivize individual deals. So if our sales rep goes through marketplace, we will pay them an additional step. If that deal is over a certain amount Like for us, a, that deal is over 60, is over 60 K it's going through the marketplace. It is software as opposed to, you know, being services or anything like that. Um, and then we also say hey, and then if you record a wing story and you share that out with the sales organization that's two to three minutes we will pay you an additional $500, right, easy money, right. And it really helps them say, hey, this removes another barrier. I'm a sales rep, I you know. Yeah, I want to make this happen, right, I don't want to add more barriers, but also I like getting additional sales compensation. This is a really easy way to help make that atmosphere as friendly for doing something different that you're going to find for a sales rep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that, to be honest, and I think that it's not only you internally in Sanctuary helping the AEs, but also they get the help from, for example, aws or Azure as well. Because you mentioned, for example. Then they may sometimes hop on a call together and then talk about some of the accounts, or maybe they can discuss if that organization has marketplace commitments or not. So maybe could you share a little bit about what kind of data does the hyperscalers provide to you? And then, what does that co-selling motion really look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I would say the first thing again getting back to the expectation setting is when you're starting out in a co-sell journey with the cloud partners, it's incredibly important that you expect to put in more than you get back. These cloud partners, like the way that they're incentivized is around. You know partners who are going to sell through marketplace. Partners who are retiring. You know Microsoft is called partner reported ACR, same thing with AWS. Commitment partners who are driving additional cloud consumption. These are the immediate ones that the cloud AEs are going to pay attention to because, hey, this is how their system is set up. But you have really good revenue. Retirement against marketplace. You're leaning into marketplace. You've got a great pipeline. You're going to quickly gain a lot of attention. As you start to win business and co-sell and retire it and run it through marketplace, retire it against people's quotas, that's when they really start to pay attention. So that would be kind of the first piece that I would say within this.
Speaker 2:As you start to get into these conversations, I think it's really important that you help your sales reps have these calls, you give them a script, but also you set their expectations. Here's what we can ask. Here's kind of the best practices, it's worthwhile saying, hey, we want to go through the marketplace. Here's the buyer, here are all the details of the deal. Is there any reason this customer should go to the marketplace? And as you start to get into these conversations, you're avoiding things that might necessarily say a cloud rep is going to say, hey, this is a new partner I've never worked with. Why are they asking me if this customer has a Mac? That's, generally speaking, a no-no. But as you, as both an organization and as sellers, build trust with that partner, they give you more and more access right. So as you start to work in this, you start to understand, hey, which customers have a cloud commitment? How can I leverage that within a sales cycle where I know the customer wants to buy our products? But this is going to give me an additional avenue to focus on. So I would say you know trust and time right and you need to build that up.
Speaker 2:And as you start to get this, you know what we've done is we basically pulled in all of the data we've mined from our cloud partners over the last two years, some other information that we're getting from, built with some information that we're able to put together from. You know hundreds of different spreadsheets and map that into our Salesforce. That says, hey, this is a Microsoft prioritized account, this is an AWS prioritized account. We know that they have a high propensity to buy through the marketplace. Or we might even know that they have a cloud commit based on conversations we've had with that cloud provider.
Speaker 2:And so what we try to do is say, hey, we're going to revisit the same customer, probably year over year, in certain sales cycles, next time around. We know all this information. We can route this as a marketplace transaction from the very first conversation we have with the customer and we can start building that value message to the customer hey, if he buys through the marketplace, here's the value you'll have. We know who the cloud team is right so we can go and engage with them and work with them to build that message as well yeah, that's very interesting.
Speaker 1:I like I learned a lot also when we had our conversation prior to this. I think I learned a lot from you because, like that whole call setting motion, like the things that you can ask to the hyperscalers I think that was all a bit new to me, uh. But I think the co-selling part it's interesting. I want to talk a little bit more about the co-marketing. How does the co-marketing work between an ISV and one of the hyperscalers? So, did you have any experience with that? What went well, what did not? And maybe what would you like to achieve in the future? Co-marketing with Azure or AWS? Yeah, again.
Speaker 2:I sound like a broken record here. But expectations right. Make sure you're setting your expectations, coming into the poll and saying, hey, we want you to sponsor this event that we're running for $100,000 or something like that, unless you've kind of hit a certain tier, you've got a really good, outstanding relationship with that cloud partner. Great, commit. All those things you really need to focus on. How do we, how do we, build more credibility around messages that we share with the cloud provider? How do we market win stories that we've done right, both in terms of customer solutions as well, as you know? How do we partner with the cloud around a message of deep importance to both of us and a customer who can really provide the level of visibility into what success looks like and how they achieve that success by leveraging our solution, by working on either a Microsoft or AWS platform. That would be the way that I view the most value from these.
Speaker 2:It isn't, you know, necessarily a MDF to fund an acquisition campaign, mdf to fund, you know, an event that we are co-sponsoring with the cloud. That's great. Branding is great, but it's about building additional credibility and spreading your you know, spreading your success wider. Right Like this is going to go in terms of both reaching your existing customers, adding credibility to that reaching new customers, but also reaching sales reps within the cloud partner. Well, you know, they're not certainly scraping information. For, hey, what partners should I be working with If they see these win stories with customers who they obviously have heard of but look like some of their own customers? This is going to give you additional criteria that, hey, contentsquare and Heath meet this criteria. They've got good prestige. They're working with us visibly. There are some other customers that we should engage on Again with time. Right, you've built up really good wins. You've got your best practices down from co-selling as you start to bring in thought leadership customer win stories.
Speaker 1:That's going to give you really great collateral to go and co-market with yeah, I love that and I I was, I think, talking to uh it's, it's a, an agency called pinch marketing. I was talking to their ceo, martin. I don't know, maybe you know them, but they also do a lot of these alliance campaigns with the cloud marketplaces and the isvs and I think it's also a hot topic. It's often mdf funded, uh, and maybe from time to time that it could be the case that I don't know the, the isv or the, their main they may not have dedicated marketing people who are taking care of that, so sometimes these agencies come into play as well. Uh, and another topic I'm gonna I'm gonna jump from that and, uh, I want to talk about multi-party private offers quickly because it's also a really hot topic right now.
Speaker 1:I don't want to get too deep into it because I am planning on doing a full episode or maybe even a webinar around it, but I just wanted to get your two cents about it. So, first of all, could you tell us what are multi-party private offers and how are you planning to use them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so multi-party private offers through both Microsoft and AWS allow a SaaS company like ours to work with a services or solutions agency partner who can go and deliver services on top of your solution as well as maybe potentially others, right? So there's system integrators involved in that. There's other, you know, maybe smaller agencies involved in this as well, but it's really about being able to leverage all of the mechanics and the value of the marketplace while delivering services. On top of that, being able to send a private offer where it has both content square and then services by SoftCap over to our customer and they can buy that all through the marketplace. Retire against the purchase from a software side of things, the cost from the software.
Speaker 2:That's a really valuable motion that Microsoft is just rolling this out in the UK. Actually, we're part of a beta with Darren at Lehoan kicking off right next month. It's something that we're really excited about. We haven't leveraged it to date but literally, if I look at my pipeline, I've got three or four rather large deals in three or four different regions that are going to utilize that motion.
Speaker 2:For us, what it represents is, again, core to our business is we know what we're good right, so we're really good at providing software, really good at building scalable software that you know, generally speaking, can be. You know it can be catered to what the customer is looking for, but that's through settings, that's not through building a custom product every time. Now, where services come involved is, of course, they can provide a level of expertise that you know that we're not going to have within an industry, within a segment, within a region. They provide a level of access to customers that we might have. They, of course, have trust, but they're adding value on top of what we're doing. So the thing about multi-party private offers that's so interesting and so exciting to us. It allows us again to focus on what we're good at and work with partners who we know are really great at delivering value on top of our solutions to customers who quite honestly need that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also one thing that I want to get your opinion about is within an organization, who do you think should be responsible for it? Because I think where I see multi-party private offers, it's also. It's a very mouthful word to say, by the way. I'll just say NPO just for short. Yeah, let's go. Npo come together. So who do you think like within your organization, or who do you think in an organization, should be responsible for, you know, creating those NPS with the channel partners, together with the cloud marketplaces?
Speaker 2:Where do you?
Speaker 1:see it happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it goes back. You know one of the things that I think where cloud partner plays a role in this and so for us, you know we have a cloud in this and so for us, you know, we have a cloud partner program. We have people who help on operations. We have people who help in terms of kind of opening doors within organizations, right Like going to the Terrence and you know the other leaders within Microsoft to help open up a wider opportunity, whether it's within a specific field or industry team. But we build programs right Like we want. Uh, industry team, um, but we build programs right Like we want.
Speaker 2:I always think about it. As you know, we are both the builders of the boat and the builders of the tackle that the um, you know sellers are going to use, the people that are then going to help the sellers. And I'm going to lean really full into the fishing analogy here. You know the fishing guide, right, that's our partner sales organization. These people are really helping to say the phishing analogy here. You know the phishing guide, right, that's our partner sales organization. These people are really helping to say here's the tactic you should take, here's the mechanisms you should leverage that we have within our toolkit over here. This is the avenue that we see really playing into. The multi-party private offer component is these are the people who are involved in sales cycles. These are the people who are involved in sales cycles. There's the people who understand what agencies and solution partners are best set up to deliver to this customer, and they're the ones who are also going to understand how do we package this and deliver that message with the support of the cloud partner.
Speaker 1:Well, nate. Thank you so much, mike. To all listeners, I will put Mike's LinkedIn in the description. If you have any questions about content score, if you want to learn about his amazing strategies, his amazing tactics around the Mike hyperscalers, please reach out to him. And, mike, before I let you go, we always ask our guests to invite the next guest on the podcast. Who do you think we should have next?
Speaker 2:I would say this, and I swear it is not a cop-out, but I'm going to say, because you already mentioned the first person I was going to invite here, a member of the Microsoft team, I'm going to say invite ContentSquare's head of partner sales, a guy by the name of Kai Payal. And again it goes to the very last thing we said Without partner sales you're not going to have the really crucial component to people who understand the partner programs, the mechanisms that exist, say with marketplace, the dynamics of solutions, partners and channel within the field that they're working. His team is the one that develops those plays and builds all those connections and they're really essential to say how do we drive better outcomes and more business? More source leads more better outcomes within our existing business than the partner sales organization.
Speaker 1:I missed the name. You have to repeat it again.
Speaker 2:Kai.
Speaker 1:Pyatt, kai, pyatt. Well, kai, if you're listening to us, then we would love to have you on the podcast and thank you for your time. Mike, do you have any final words for our listeners?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the only final words I would say is you know, working especially from a SaaS perspective, if you're not selling to the traditional buyers of a cloud, a cloud marketplace, it is a lift, but it's totally worth it, right Like more and more of our largest deals are going through the cloud marketplace every quarter. You know we can look at that evidence as, like you know, hey, this is worthwhile, even if it is a challenge. All I can say is start out. If you're hesitating because conditions aren't perfect, you're going to be really waiting for a long time. So get in there, start working with it and connect with other people who are doing it. So I'm always happy to connect. I know there's plenty of other people in the community who are as well.
Speaker 1:All, right, thank you so much. Well, today we discussed a lot about the hyperscalers, we talked about cost selling, co-marketing, and thanks for your time, mike, and see you in the next episode.