265 – From First Click to $1B: Winning in the Cloud Marketplace Era

Recorded Live at Ultimate Partner LIVE in Redmond, WA

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Is your business ready for 2026?

Welcome back to the Ultimate Partner® Podcast.

Join industry leaders John Janke of Tackle.io and Shane Wilson of Cohesity as they delve into the transformative power of cloud marketplaces. This engaging discussion explores the evolution of marketplace adoption, from its early pioneering days to its current status as a multi-billion dollar opportunity. Discover how buyer behavior is shifting, the increasing importance of channel partners, and the strategies that winning ISVs are employing to achieve unprecedented scale in the cloud go-to-market.

We’re curating the very best of these moments—fireside chats, expert panels, and executive insights—so you can stay ahead of the curve and fully aligned to where Microsoft and the industry are heading.

And this is just the beginning.
More sessions. More voices. More of what you need to know.

If you’re not yet part of the UPX Community, now’s the time to join us. Access exclusive content, events, and strategies that keep you in front of what’s next.

Thanks for being on this journey with us.
— Vince

https://youtu.be/kydm0sEq6ac?si=XbuyStK3opiB-i6e

• KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• The cloud marketplace has evolved from a niche concept to a multi-billion dollar ecosystem, with projections to reach $100 billion by 2026.
• Buyer behavior is shifting, with a significant increase in buyers utilizing cloud marketplaces for procurement across all software and partner types.
• The role of channel partners is becoming increasingly critical, with marketplace strategies shifting from ISVs to channel partners who own the buyer relationship.
• Successful ISVs are integrating marketplace and co-sell motions into a unified company-wide cloud go-to-market strategy, encompassing sales, product, rev ops, and marketing.
• The concept of “storefront evolution” is emerging, where buyers discover products in new places beyond traditional marketplaces, leading to more specific solutions and bundles.
• Consistency in strategy, execution, and celebrating wins is paramount for navigating the evolving cloud marketplace landscape and achieving long-term success.

If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community.

At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.

https://youtu.be/s33fltuizEo

Key Tags:

Cloud go-to-market, cloud marketplace, ISV, channel partners, co-selling, procurement, software sales, digital transformation, B2B software, multi-party offers, ecosystem, strategic partnerships, revenue growth, sales motion, alliances, rev ops, marketplace operations, product-led growth, SMB, enterprise, storefronts, cyber resiliency, Microsoft partnership, NetApp, Amazon, CrowdStrike, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Wiz, PAX8, Ingram Micro.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] John Janke: Another big, and this I think trend will be next year. It’s happening right now, but it’s still really early, is this idea of evolution of storefront. So if you want to change buyer behavior, you have to meet buyers where they show up.

[00:00:14] Intro: We believe this time is like no other. We believe we refer to these as the tectonic shifts, all the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together, managed services will be one and a half times larger

[00:00:26] Vince Menzione: because it is the customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models

[00:00:33] Intro: until we have data quality, the effectiveness of AI cannot be realized, and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized.

Can you figure out first, what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership.

[00:00:52] Vince Menzione: Welcome to The Ultimate Partner. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you.

Achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. We just came off Ultimate Partner Live at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, our most powerful event. Yet, over two days, we gathered top leaders to tackle the real shifts shaping our industry. If you weren’t in the room, this episode on marketplaces featuring John Yanke, the CEO of Tackle.

And Shane Wilson from Cohesity brings us right to the edge of what’s next. Let’s dive in and we’re gonna have some other leaders in the room to talk about marketplace. Uh, in fact, we’re very pri privileged to have both. I. As sponsors, but also really partners in driving the success working with the Marketplace organization.

Some of the top organizations that understand Marketplace better than anyone, they’ve been at it the longest. I’m privileged to have John Yanke, the who’s been a great friend, a great supporter of Ultimate Partner, the CEO of Tackle io, and Shane Wilson from Cohesity, who’s also been around this partner partnering, co-selling.

Marketplace world that we, we know and love so much. So great to see you again my friend. Good to you. Great to see you, Shane. James, how you doing? Thank you. Good to have you both on stage today. So is the world to have you make the trip and to support us. Good to be here. So great to have Cy on stage too, right?

So I know you’ve been around, uh, John, you’ve been around this marketplace thing. We’ve been calling it the marketplace moment for some time. Shane, I know you as well from the ISV side, so I thought maybe we take a moment to have you both introduce yourselves. Maybe just spend a moment. I did a little bit, babe.

Didn’t do it justice. Maybe a little bit of your background and Sure. And what you all do and, and why you’re here today.

[00:02:36] John Janke: Uh, hey everybody, great to see so many friends, familiar faces. Uh, Vince, thank you for all the work putting this event on. I think it’s, uh, tremendous to be able to focus on Microsoft and everything they have going on.

So, I’m John Yanke. I’m CEO of Tackle. I’ve been with Tackle since the beginning. We started the company in 2016 with the idea that the clouds would change the way that software was sold and marketplace represented the initiation point of that. That was long before. Really anyone was buying that way.

Anyone was selling that way. We were working with some of the 2016 and there were some really early adopters who kind of saw the world the same way and were struggling to figure it out, and we just happened to be able to meet some of those large partners back then and help them find a way to. Launch their businesses and not only launch, but sell and sell repeatedly and then integrate that selling motion into their system.

So, uh, I’m a lifelong se. I grew up in se, which is like my default persona. So if you encounter me like either at a customer or at an event, I tend to be just super curious. I call myself a nerdy cloud go to market guy, which kind of route goes back to my se heritage and uh, I mean tackle. We really live to serve the ecosystem and, you know, support not only ics, ICS channel partners as as the marketplace moments.

I think it’s been a lot of moments, a lot of moments, you know, the time series of moments is, uh, interesting to see how it’s evolved. But, uh, it’s, it’s not just for ISVs. It’s really all partner types will go to market this new way, and it’s not just about one partner. Working with Microsoft, it’ll be about all the different partners and how they come together and how solutions get integrated together and just how we make that whole process easier.

And AI is like obviously dramatically increasing the quantity of software. So yeah.

[00:04:26] Vince Menzione: And I have some questions for you as well about what you’ve seen along the way. So we. I know, I know you’ve done some research on this, but super, super. I do wanna give Shane a moment to talk about his background and why he’s up here on stage as well.

’cause you’ve been at this a long time, Mike. We’ve known each other for a number of years.

[00:04:39] Shane Wilson: Yeah. Thanks Vince. It’s, uh, nice to see you in town. I’m glad you’re doing, you’re doing well. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

[00:04:44] Vince Menzione: It’s, uh, getting much better. Much better.

[00:04:45] Shane Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. So, Shane Wilson, for those who I haven’t had the chance to meet yet, uh, I run, um, Cohesity’s Cloud, cloud business, and, um.

Yeah, like John, I’ve been at this for kind of since the beginning of the marketplace, co-sell, sell with, you know, motion, call it like 13 years ago maybe. Um, you know, I got my start sort of working with Clouds, ISVs at NetApp actually. And, um, I was just chatting with John backstage about this, but we were trying to figure out how to put NetApp into the cloud with Amazon and with Microsoft and, and everybody really.

Um, and that was more of a, a build with motion of how we’re gonna partner with. Ias PAs and do something new in the market that’s meaningful for customers and for partners. And um, but since then, co-selling marketplace has become a major motion. Right. And so I’ve spent my time post that at a bunch of ISVs, as small as, um, you know, a 50 person, 40 mil, a CB company, um, up to up to, you know, 10,000 plus.

I was gonna say some of the largest

[00:05:42] Vince Menzione: up there as well. Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:43] Shane Wilson: Yeah. So I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of, uh, great partners and, you know, had the experience of. Trying things and failing and then trying things and winning huge multiple partner of the year awards and all that with the different clouds.

And with Microsoft in particular, I’m really passionate about, um, the partnership potential and really the, uh, the selling potential in the field because Microsoft has such a leadership position when it comes to co-selling, engaging with, with ISVs and all partner types, and really helping people evolve how software is bond sold.

So. Well,

[00:06:14] Vince Menzione: so great to have both of your perspectives and expertise, John. So 2016, like marketplace wasn’t even a thing, in my opinion. Right? It was just really, you, you, you clipped it right at the very beginning. You started off early. Uh, I wanna talk to you about like what you’ve seen, and I know that you spent an inordinate amount of time on the.

Understanding what’s going on in the marketplace. And I come to you every year and ask like, what’s happening? What’s changing? I know you, you’ll have, we’ll talk a little bit more about your event that’s coming up. I’d love to get your perspective. We’ve talked about this a hundred billion dollar moment that was, that is, uh, still playing for 2026.

Uh, a lot of, uh, ingestion, I would say a lot of organizations getting past that 1 billion Mark. Love to get your perspective on what you’re seeing right now in the marketplace and, and what partners in this room and others need to understand and how they need to embrace it differently.

[00:07:03] John Janke: Yeah, it’s been, I mean, it’s been really interesting.

We started in 2019 to write research on cloud. Back then it was just marketplace cloud go to market as a term wasn’t pioneered yet. Uh, and we did that because no analysts were covering the space. Yeah. And you know, back then the thing we would hear from partners was like, how big is this thing? Like how like are people selling?

Is buyer behavior changing? Are partners thinking about this? And we really tried to. Think about what research we could do that would just help. At that time, mostly ISVs build their justification to create these routes to market. And, uh, we’ve done that. We published the state of cloud Go to market report every year.

It’s a really fun research report. People are like, oh, who do you have? Write that. I mean, it’s my co-founders and I write it. Uh, we, we create the survey. We listen to our customers and what they wanna talk about. So if you ever are like, Hey, we’d really love to hear about these trends, please tell me ’cause we’ll, uh, weave them into state of cloud, go to market.

And back then it was. Very little dollars were flowing like we were, this was probably, we were in maybe hundreds of millions of dollars were flowing through the cloud marketplaces back in 19. Um, and we played it forward just based upon a lot of different research and, and you start to think about the trillion dollars of B2B software sold, let alone the other trillion dollars of.

B2B software sold to the SMB, which is different. Uh, all of that starting to migrate to the cloud. Similar to how infrastructure, like you think back to 2006 or 2007 when the primitives of cloud were created, people are like under, you said the underestimate overestimate in two years, underestimate in 10 years like that, that was kind of the scenario.

With, with marketplace back then. Um, and I think a couple years later, we built this a hundred billion dollar prediction for 2026, and it was bold at the time and a lot of people were like, that’s crazy. But when you go back to that $2 trillion of software, it’s really only 5% of software migrating to the clouds and all data points signal that that’s coming through.

And there were a handful. Of linchpin moments to enable that volume of dollar shift to start to happen. And I think for a lot of years it was the pioneers who were creating this new movement. And I put Shane in that pioneer category, uh, both with small and medium and large companies pushing the envelope.

Uh, like changed the way that you sold along the way and your company sold? Uh, it, it was that pioneer moment, but along the way, that pioneer moment led to larger companies acknowledging the shift and starting to say, wow, something’s happening here. Uh, and as those larger companies started to. Embrace the shift that led to even larger companies and, and I think the thing for me over the last two years, we’ve seen this huge shift from this is not just about cloud technical categories.

This is a change in procurement and it’s across all software and partner types. Yeah. So, and there were some big moments. I remember like thinking back in 2018, what would be. A, a, a bellwether moment for the industry. It’s like when the largest software companies in the world start to sell this way. And CrowdStrike was a long time customer tackle.

Yeah. We worked with them and they were always the one who kind of set the standard and then someone like Salesforce shows up and Workday shows up and ServiceNow shows up and you’re like, whoa, something’s changing. Uh, not only are they. Monstrous companies with huge ecosystems and large go-to-market systems, but they saw this movement as a way to continue to grow.

Yeah. And they were business applications. They weren’t like security, DevOps, storage, infrastructure, so that business applications, large companies showing up. And then I think the multi. Partner, like the evolution of channel has been a huge, and we’ve talked about this consistently over the last few years, but it’s still like the, the quantity of dollars now flowing through channel, with marketplace is, it’s huge.

Is staggering. It’s growing faster than direct, which I think is a, a big thing. Um. And it’s still early. Like I think it’s like there are, there are, and there was a recent, a channel partner recently announced they processed a billion dollars through Marketplace, which was I think the first time a partner talked about that the same way a lot of software companies do.

And it wasn’t

[00:11:15] Vince Menzione: the largest reseller partner out there that did it, right. It was a company that was a little bit smaller, but a little bit more agile and nimble in terms of the way approach to it. So

[00:11:23] John Janke: that, that’s a, a second part. And then the third part is like we’ve, buyers do not. Buy on marketplace, which may sound a little controversial, if you’re not really close to this market, it’s, it’s still more of a fulfillment vehicle.

Um, that behavior is starting to change and it’s the intersection of everyone’s trying to figure out what is their PayGo product-led growth strategy to complement their traditional selling motion, and then how do they, if cloud. Marketplace has become a component of their system. How do they not only have their like enterprise motion aligned to it, but their kind of user discoverable free trial, PayGo style motion.

So that’s been like last year it had started mostly with startups. That is trickling into all companies are thinking about, yeah. This, which I, I do think signals buyer behavior change. I mean, we’ve seen 400% increase in buyers over the last couple of years. So massive number of buyer increase, and that’s wide across the distribution of buyers.

So unpacked a lot of data there. Yeah. Uh. Yeah. Happy to dive in deeper as we go. Yeah. And you’re, you

[00:12:30] Vince Menzione: know, tackle’s gonna be leading a workshop after, after the main sessions on stage here, so there’ll be some great opportunities to get face-to-face with you and your leadership team. Yeah.

[00:12:38] John Janke: Shout out to Colton and Rebecca, who are probably in the audience, who are two practitioners on our team who support large ISVs as they go on this journey.

So this will not be me talking about high level. Uh, kind of industry stuff. It will truly be the people who help partners figure this out leading that workshop.

[00:12:55] Vince Menzione: Well, there’s still a lot of high level, but I want to give Shane an opportunity here. ’cause you’ve been at the forefront of this marketplace opportunity and, and done it at many organizations that were at the early days of doing it, right?

Like kind of a Yeah. The pioneers, I guess, for lack of a better term. Yeah.

[00:13:09] Shane Wilson: We, we failed in many ways and one in many ways. And I, I do wanna pick up on the, the partner, uh, reseller, billion dollar milestone too, because, um. When I, I was familiar with this partner, uh, from a couple years ago when they first made their billion dollar commit.

Uh, at the time, I think it’s when it was actually Amazon, but when they made their, their billion dollar commit, um, it was the first time I’d really heard about a channel partner, um, going deep right with that. And I was like, really? A billion. You could do it. You got some big contracts and, uh, you know, it was a multi-year commit and they actually hit it faster than than expected.

So they, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s probably the first and the biggest, but also they got there faster than they were, they were, um, expecting to, it just speaks to the, not just the volume, but the velocity right behind it all. Um, and then, yeah, from an is SV perspective, uh, yeah. I think if you wind back the clock, I even six, seven years ago, right?

Uh, you know, ISVs, were just trying to figure out how to do their first, uh. Yeah. Their first deals, right? Yeah. How to start cashing that cloud, GTM, check how to cash in on the Mac. Uh, that was even before the Mac was, was as big as it is. Um, but I remember doing our, our very first marketplace deal at, uh, it was a, a startup mid-size ISV.

And, uh, this is before we were actually working closely with, with tackle, uh, and, uh. It was hard. Yeah. We were, we were literally taking customer demand who wanted to buy software, uh, you know, on the marketplace. Yeah. And trying to figure out how to get it done. So working with engineering and PM to get things listed like a day before we needed to close the deal.

And it was one of the largest, um, retailers, uh, in the, in the us. And, uh, so we got it done. It was very challenging and that was the early, early days. But you fast forward to, to the last 3, 4, 5 years and, and yeah. What, what I’ve seen is, um, ISVs that actually. Didn’t have any real meaningful engagement with clouds.

Um, start to connect the sales motion, and not just for marketplace, but for co-sell, right? And doing it with, uh, with tackle and core. And, and there’s some history there, like getting, getting sellers connected early stage Yes. Start to get leverage. And there’s so much to unpack behind that, but that, that’s such a meaningful motion where, you know, I took ISVs from essentially zero impact, zero lift with, uh, cloud providers to 500 mil a CV impact annually, right?

Getting walked into accounts. By the hundreds every quarter. Right. Um, now it takes, takes work. Um, there’s a lot of things you gotta do from a company buy-in perspective to get there, but, um, yeah, there’s a lot of upside and that’s, that, that’s sort of the ISV story. And then I think what’s more interesting now beyond ISVs is the partner element to it, because where I see the future opportunity is actually with partners doing NPO, uh, together.

And so I think that’s more exciting for everyone across different segments and across different, uh, reseller. And even Disney communities. Right. We’ll see how the, the, you know, that, that market evolve. Well, you bring up an

[00:15:57] Vince Menzione: interesting point too, because in the very early days, it was really just the largest ISVs that had their own direct selling organizations.

They would utilize a core solution or tackle solution together, and they would do face-to-face coverage with the partner sellers and, but that’s not necessarily where the customer buys. And so there were these resellers and we could mention all of their names. A lot of them are here at our event, a lot of ’em are watching today.

Uh, that would go after that market. And you would, you would have this tug, this tug of war going on too, like a customer. You’d be educating the customer saying, Hey, you could, you could burn down against your Mac agreement, you, your Microsoft commitment. Uh, and then the, you have a seller on the other side trying to sell a different way because they get paid a different way.

So you had this. This tug of war that was going on back in the days and that those seem to be going by the wayside. You, you heard Cyril on earlier right in this conversation saying, we’re gonna do away with that challenge that we have today. We’re gonna get out ahead of it. And John, you saw, you know, you talked about this, uh, you talked about this moment.

I guess you’re right, we’re in a series of moments. I think we’re at the next moment, in fact, beginning of the next moment. Um, what, what else in perspective that you wanna share here with regards to. You know, we talked about some of the largest ISVs and some of the smaller ISVs, both you and Shane, probably this conversation here in terms of, uh, uh, you know, the balance of ISVs selling in larger ones can do their own and then channel partners.

What, what does that balance look like?

[00:17:20] John Janke: Yeah, I mean, maybe, um, pros and cons with success is there’s a lot more competition for attention. Like, uh, cloud sellers have a lot in their bag already. Yeah. Uh, so if you’re a small ISV and you’re showing up, uh, you have to compete with not only the core things that they care about, but all the other ISVs who’ve established precedent with success in the market.

Um, so I think. You know, and then there’s, even in the Microsoft world, there’s the managed versus unmanaged, and That’s right. Like your perspective as a partner as to how do you approach Microsoft when you operate in those two camps and they’re different and, and it really does just come down to work.

There’s ways to be successful. The playbooks are slightly different. Uh, you probably, if you’re smaller, have to do more work to stand out and you have to be really thoughtful. About the work that you do and when you do it. Um, and a lot of times I, ’cause I, I think there’s still this misnomer in, you know, having been at this closing in on 10 years, it, it’s surprising to me sometimes that people are like, if I list people don’t just buy.

Like, I thought that’s the way these marketplace things works, field of dreams. I, I would love for that be true. It’s still not true. Um, but if. If you can refactor that to be like, that’s the starting point in the journey and not the destination, and then what work do you have to do to go build your brand?

Help your early customers. ’cause there’s a clear and compelling value prop that you can use independently to go help your customers. That then allows you to show up with the clouds and be like, Hey, I’ve got something to say and the something I have to say is good for you and it’s good for our joint customers and it’s good for me, and why can’t we just do more of that?

Yeah. So I think that like. You gotta own it. If you’re small and you gotta put the work in. And if you’re big, you really have to understand like the what works and how to scale it. Where do you focus? ’cause there’s so much, Shane and I were talking backstage about all the, there’s a lot you can take on, uh, at any given time and really like what is the best layer of the go-to-market stack to focus on?

A lot of people try to figure out. Like especially large companies, how do I do the bigger deals? How do I tap into the big customers? That seems like the easiest spot to spin the dials. And then how do I layer channel in? If I can add channel to that, then I can maybe double that. And then how do I think about international?

How do I think about product-led growth, like SMB? There’s all these different layers of the stack, but you have to prioritize ’em based upon what’s important to you and what’s gonna have the biggest impact for the cloud partner, uh, and not try to do everything at once.

[00:19:54] Shane Wilson: Yeah. And I think from a, from a small ISV perspective, um, marketplace sort of is the channel, right?

So, and historically they were like, if you’re a small SaaS company, yeah. I just want to get scale at this thing. I wanna list, list and, and sell. Right? Um, so sometimes that’s a more of a challenge for, it’s, it’s an opportunity for the isv, but it’s more of a challenge for say, the partner community at large, right?

Yeah. But if you get into this mid-market or enterprise ISV space, the winning opportunity is very clear. Um, you, I think you and I were talking a couple days ago, John, about, okay, the first wave of CrowdStrike hitting a bill was, hey, doing a lot of direct business. But guess what? They’ve accelerated even more and faster by pushing everything.

The channel partners and you look across the ecosystem of. The ISVs winning or not, are not doing it in this direct model. They’re doing it in conjunction with channel partners. So, um, so when I look at the segment on a smaller ISV, yeah, you can get scale, uh, through the marketplace and that’s essential.

You get relevance with, uh, the cloud sellers as well from Microsoft. But you know, if you’re really looking to go from say, a hundred mil to a billion or more, right? This is where, hey, all this business is channel first and channel best, right? Yeah. And that’s, I think the, the future together.

[00:21:01] John Janke: I mean, you, you had an interesting comment where you’re like, is the marketplace.

A channel or not, right? Yeah. And I think to some people it is. To some people it is. I’d be like, it’d be interesting just for you to share some of that perspective. ’cause I think there’s probably a wide range of points of view in the audience. Well, there is,

[00:21:16] Shane Wilson: and even internally per ISVI think there’s, uh, dialogue around is this direct or not direct.

And, um, I’ve started to use language, which is like one tier versus two tier. Um, because. The reality is, um, I’ve been using direct so far today, but I, I like to use one tier and two tier because at least then it, it gets everyone internal to a company. It helps you get buy-in from stakeholders that matter, whether that’s legal or finance or operations, sales, right?

You go across the stack of getting company buy-in to go do it. It’s helpful to progress the dialogue if you start talking about one tier and what that means on a per region basis. Mm-hmm. Like one tier in the US maybe it’s not that hard, but if I’m an ISV trying to scale and trying to go. Across Europe or a PJ, uh, basically outside the us Yeah.

One tier is hard, right? It is. And so you, you absolutely need the channel partners in there to, to scale the thing. Um, and uh, so yeah, for me, like I said, it’s, it’s a partner game. And, uh, yeah, I, that’s what I try and promote with all of my ISVs to think about being world class is like. Never, never cutting avar out of a deal.

Always gr putting a growth plan together with them. And that’s, that’s where you get the, well, it’s multi, well, it’s presumptuous too. We think,

[00:22:25] Vince Menzione: like we own the customer, whether it’s us or the, you know, we’re the gateway, the mark marketplace becomes the gateway to the Microsoft seller. Yeah. But neither of you own the customer.

The customer makes his own buying decision. And that might be on the third party. That’s why the multi-party offers come into play here. Right.

[00:22:38] John Janke: And I, I think that this, some of these signals when you think about what’s happening, yeah. The last three years, the ISV has owned the channel strategy for Marketplace and really kind of pioneered Who are the partners I work with?

Yes. Help them figure it out. That’s gonna flip like in the next year or two. That’s right. Where the channel partner will actually own the marketplace strategy for the buyer. Where they own the buyer. That’s right. Which is a change. And I, I, I was talking to someone on Shane’s team and she was like, I spend a lot of time educating our channel partners on how to work this way, which is again, further signal they’re, they’re learning to work in this new way.

So some have punched through, the early adopters have punched through and been like, this is a material new business for us. But I think that’s gonna be for all the ISVs in the room, that’s gonna be a shift for all of us where we somewhat relinquish control to be like, okay, you got it. Now what? What target are you gonna drive and we’re gonna manage that differently.

[00:23:33] Vince Menzione: And what and what I hear from ISVs, the largest ISVs, in fact, is that they need help building out their channel strategies. Some of them are here, in fact, for those conversations, because it is a multi-party solution that is being offered, the customer is making a decision, not just on the one solution.

They’re thinking about a complete solution set, right? If we were talking about data and ai, we’ll have data and AI up here. Next we’ll talk about governance. We talk about all the components of data and ai. It’s not just one vendor that’s coming in to solve for that. Shane, I want to get your perspective on some of that.

[00:24:02] Shane Wilson: Yeah, I think multi-partner is huge, right? I, I, uh, I think it’s a little early, but I’m intrigued by the potential, um, of having a couple different ISV segments wrapped into, um. Uh, you know, a multi, multi-party offer, right? That a channel partner can put together. And it, it’s already happening to a degree. I don’t think it’s happening at scale, like it has the potential to, but, you know, being in the space that I am, we’re in, um, sort of a data security space, and the security ecosystem is broad, right?

And so there’s a lot of different aspects of cyber resiliency that matter, uh, for our customer base. And there’s nothing we wanna see more than, whether it’s Presidio or CDW, or, you know, you pick here. You, you pick your channel partner then actually putting together a really strategic offer for, you know, their customer, leveraging the Mac to go get the deal done right.

And then bundling multiple solutions together, uh, in a portfolio sale for the, for the customer. Yeah. Um, it’s, you know, it’s what they’ve done with Disti in the past, right? Yes. Yes. It’s, but the reality is there’s a lot of mutual value exchange with the Mac, with the Microsoft sellers for the customer, with procurement.

Now that buying motion has just evolved, right? And so, um. Yeah, there’s, there’s so much upside for this multi-partner aspect of it.

[00:25:10] Vince Menzione: Agreed. Agreed. John, I know you’ve got your event coming up in another week, and I, I don’t want to take away any of the excitement around some announcements that things are going on.

What are some of the trends you’re starting to see? I.

[00:25:21] John Janke: I mean, a lot of what we talked about is we do this cloud, go to Market xp. It’s a digital event, uh, where we bring, you know, kind of the cloud providers, ISVs practitioners. We break ’em down into categories. Uh, so that’s next week we do a day on strategy.

So the first day is really about where the market’s going. The second day is practitioner grade, so there’s a rev ops track and an alliances track because for cloud go to market, to get the super scale, you gotta get the alliance team, the rev ops team, and the revenue team to work together to drive an outcome.

And that is what the people who get to a billion dollars do and do well. And then they think about, you know, how many of my reps know how to win this way? Uh, you know, Wiz was an interesting one where they, they published last year, 99% of their sales reps knew how to win with marketplace, which, like that was, they were kind of born cloud go to market native, uh, which was.

Really fascinating to see, but that’s a lot of what we’ll focus on next week is kind of that intersection between rev ops, alliances and revenue and thinking about, ’cause there’s a lot of discussion around automation, like how, how do you automate this process? How do I integrate it with systems and automation is totally important, but.

Revenue generation is more important. They’re like, that’s what people actually want. Uh, and I, I was talking to an ISV last week and they were like, Hey, you know, we, we did some automation, but we’re not getting the results we were looking for. How can we rethink that? So we’re gonna really try to continue to share examples of people who have cracked the code on not just learning how to win and setting up the infrastructure, but win win repeatedly.

Win at scale. Shane, any

[00:26:56] Vince Menzione: insights from your side on what you’re starting to see as we enter 26?

[00:26:59] Shane Wilson: Yeah, I, I think I’ll take the trend topic and talk about kind of what. What’s most important, which is like the, the trend is that winning ISVs that do it, right. Um, pull the whole company together in one strategy around cloud go to market.

And so it’s, it’s, you know, it’s a dovetail on what John was just talking about. Yeah. But if you don’t have sales product, rev ops right? The whole company, even marketing right. Really geared around this motion, it’s gonna be challenging. And so, um, I can share a couple things that I’ve done at a couple companies now to build out teams to sort of, um.

Fast track that in and make it more possible, which is, you know, when I think about how to like create partnership teams that matter, it’s like, yes, you need the alliances team in there first. Um, but then you also, I like to have my hands on the actual marketplace operations motion of it too. ’cause how companies do quote to cash.

Um, and process orders matters a lot. And, you know, reps aren’t gonna sell in the marketplace if it’s hard. And so we need to be able to make things field turnkey to field sellers. Um. To get to that 99%. Like Wiz, we’re not there yet. ’cause we’re born there we’re, I’m, I’m coming from, uh, hey, no one’s ever done this before, to, Hey, we’re gonna go win in this space.

So, yeah, it’s important to get everyone on board. And so it, when I think about how to build an organization, a winning organization structure around this, it’s like the I, the Alliance team comes first, but beyond that, like I need to get a marketplace operations. You know, e either on the team or super, super tight, um, dialed in.

And then beyond that, there’s a go to market element of, of selling, right? And so that’s the sort of the third wheel of, I think real successful ISV partnerships is do you have folks focused on the motion helping en enable all the broad, the broad sellers to. You know, do the motion correctly, not to make too many mistakes on first calls with Microsoft and go cash that Mac check.

Right. Um, and it sometimes it’s hard to get the internal stakeholders to believe in that quickly. Right. So, but I, I, I’m happy to chat with folks more post session as well on this, right. But I, the, the three legs of the stool are super key with alliances and then the actual marketplace sales motion to make it real turnkey and easy, um, operationally inside the company.

And then actually have go to market specialists, right, to go and, and push that. So. Um, if folks wanna talk about your, your company, about that with me, I’m happy to. Yeah, that that’d be great that you offered

[00:29:07] Vince Menzione: that time.

[00:29:07] John Janke: I like this workflow shift where this used to be about like, Hey, how do I help a deal?

How do I win with a customer? Yeah. And it really, I, I had an, you know, again, I, I get to spend a lot of time with ISVs who are. Pioneering this and just really learning from them and then trying to apply those practices to the company and the ecosystem. But someone was talking about from lead to renewal, like that’s really the process that cloud go to market needs to be aligned to.

And if you break down your lead to renewal process and then you look at all the different touch points, and then how do you inject, you know, people, process, technology into that entire lifecycle. It will. Change the way you think about this because a lot of people are like, Hey, why don’t I get more leads?

That’s right. And when you, when you boil down your lead to renewal process, if you skip all the way to leads and you haven’t done the work in the middle of the funnel to go build a brand, to enable you to go tell a better together story to co-market, I mean, you’re never gonna get the leads. Like, so I think that’s a, a good framing just for all of us to, as we think about the business and where we’re at, like lead to renewal.

’cause you can use a lot of different tools in there.

[00:30:12] Vince Menzione: I want to touch on, ’cause you talked about this a little bit earlier too, in terms of the, the framing was, you know, it used to be the largest organizations that had the largest commitments that went after it. Understood it. Uh, in the beginning you had to teach them how to go buy off of it.

Right. It seems to be moving down market. Right. And this is, some of this is the channel coming at it. Some of it’s also we’re gonna have PAX eight and Ingram Micro on stage here the next two days. People that have kind of stayed away from marketplace. Right. But in a way saying. Even the smallest customers need access to the same sets of tools and capabilities, and they want to purchase modern technology the same way.

And so it seems to be changing things. I know, John, you’ve had it some perspective on some of this as well.

[00:30:54] John Janke: Yeah. A, a big, another big, and this I think trend will be next year, it’s happening right now, but it’s still really early, is this idea of evolution of storefront. So if you want to change buyer behavior, you have to meet buyers where they show up, uh, and.

Like today, storefront, think Azure Marketplace or AppSource, those are the storefronts, but that’s not where people organically discover. So how do you initiate those buying moments where people organically discover? And that’s gonna be some sort of refactoring of storefronts. Uh, and Jay McBain has talked for years about how they’ll be more marketplaces and more storefronts.

That’s right. And, and I actually think that’s really starting to come to life. And PAX eight to me, I think is a great example of that, where they’re a marketplace for MSPs focused on s and b. And they’re gonna need specific solutions that their MSPs can package up to deliver value to their SMB customers.

But that’s gonna need to somehow connect to Azure Marketplace and AppSource. That’s, that’s right. Which is like a, a, a fuel system. So I, I think it’s a good signal of this change that’s happening like more storefronts. More marketplaces, more specificity around solution and bundle and what do people need?

So I’m, I’m excited to hear more from, I’m excited as well.

[00:32:06] Vince Menzione: I also think there’s a level of sophistication happening down market. I call the MSP market that wasn’t there even a year or two ago, right? These were organizations that were used to break fix and now getting involved in a much clearer, uh, ways in terms of driving a complete solution set in ways that they didn’t before.

Really, they weren’t involved in that level.

[00:32:27] Shane Wilson: Yeah, I would, I would double click on the, um, the storefront idea, right? Because folks are finding products in new places and trying to buy products in new places. So that’s a real deal, um, coming from a security and infrastructure perspective, um, even in today’s world of, hey, there’s a cloud buyer out there and there’s procurement that buys cloud stuff, and we’re attaching to that a, a major part of the motion that we actually have to put.

Time and investment into learning on is what I call building a bridge and building a bridge between say, a traditional buyer of software to whoever’s gonna click by on the deal. Uh, who owns, say the, the Azure tenant. Right. For a giving you customers you’re selling to. And so there’s, there’s, there’s topics like, Hey, how is budget attributed across the different, you know, lines of business inside this, toward the Mac?

Yeah. And then there’s the very sort of tactical process of like. Does the person that needs to accept the offer even know about what we’re doing in the deal, right? So there’s a lot of bridge building you have to do from an ISV and partner. That’s where partners play a huge role too, is like helping build these connections in and build a bridge early in a campaign, right?

In order to have success. So you can actually transact easily when you’re trying to get the deal done, but it goes to the point of, hey, the demand and purchasing, um. You know, center of gravity is changing, right? Yeah. So,

[00:33:39] John Janke: and every ISV, whether you think you have a marketplace or you don’t, most people would say, I don’t have a marketplace.

But everyone on their website has a tech ecosystem page that shows all of your partners. That’s right. And it shows your technical partners, and it shows your channel partners and your system integrator partners. And effectively that is a catalog and that catalog. Has zero actionability. All it does is you click on it and it takes you to your partner’s website.

So if your website is where all of your buyers discover you, why wouldn’t you want to enable them to take some action? Yeah. This is what storefronts will be, and that will not just be your storefront, it will be all your channel partner storefronts, and they’ll all connect together like that. This is a big wave that I think will really play out over the next 24 months.

Yeah, I think

[00:34:22] Vince Menzione: we’re starting to see that in a big way and, uh. Everyone’s gonna embrace it.

[00:34:26] Shane Wilson: Well, you see a consumer grade, right? It’s gonna move from consumer grade on, uh, say social media, buy a thing right into the enterprise space, uh, dramatically, I think the next two years.

[00:34:33] John Janke: Yeah. Shopify did this in B2C, like when Shopify and there, there’s really interesting like, um, story where when they were, I.

Early raising money. And they talked about how like in B2C e-commerce, there would be thousands of new storefronts and everyone’s like, no way. Like Amazon and Walmart Got it locked up like, this is never gonna happen. This company’s going nowhere. I mean, Shopify’s a hundred billion dollar company now.

’cause they created hundreds of thousands of storefronts for small businesses and entrepreneurs like. I think B2B will look very different than that, but that’s, it’s like B2C always trickles into B2B over time.

[00:35:10] Vince Menzione: So, final advice for our partners watching, listening, being in the room here today, and we, I know we’re gonna have some more time for you to talk with them.

Uh, appreciate you making time to do that. But any final advice for them as we finish this new fiscal year with Microsoft? We get into 26. And for the, the partner ecosystem in general, how they, you know, you talked about a few things, a few trends happening. Uh, what do you both have to share with this amazing audience?

[00:35:33] Shane Wilson: I mean, I’ll kick us off. I think consistency is most important, right? Yeah. So it’s one thing to, um, uh, you know, get a couple wins or, or, you know, know a play, but consistency across the organization and starts at like the C-suite down to the shop floor, right? Uh, of how you’re operating your strategy, how you’re executing on your strategy, and then also how you’re sharing wins.

So, ’cause this is a journey, right? And it’s not always, um, say the first month or first quarter that you get all the results that you want. But it’s really critical as a leader in a company to be able to help articulate what the stepping stones and the milestones look like to get to greatness and then to celebrate those wins all along the way.

And do that internally and also do it externally with Microsoft and with the partner community broadly. Right? So I would say consistency, that rhythm of business, just being very thoughtful around that is, is, is super important. And then, um, with that, just leveraging. The community. Right. Um, so events like, like up Right.

And just, you know, I’m happy to share any of my secrets to success with anyone in the room. Right. But just le leveraging the community and, and folks like tackle and others, right. That have so much experience in this space as well. So,

[00:36:36] John Janke: yeah. I, I think the, um, kind of back to the time series of marketplace moments, there is, uh, people who started in 2018.

A lot of people failed in 2020. People started. A lot of people failed in 2022, maybe less people failed, but still lots of failures. And there’s some PTSD in the industry around some failures. Like, I thought this was gonna work. I thought lots of people were gonna buy, I was gonna get all these leads. Oh my gosh, co.

I was gonna co-sell and I was gonna help my deals go faster and maybe it didn’t happen. The thing I would say is like all of these moments compounded lead to. A difference of experience, and that is like if you’ve struggled, take a step back and be willing to be like, Hey, the market is evolving and there’s ways to take a step back, look at the success or failure you had and refactor your strategy for the future.

So I would say, um. And, and it’s fun. It’s really fun to talk to ISVs who are hitting an unlock moment. Like I was talking to someone this morning and they’re like, Hey, like we, we had this major unlock moment. And like things have kind of taken off. ’cause a lot of times in the journey you end up with this like 10 x factor that happens.

You struggle consistency’s such great advice. Um, like you set a goal your first quarter, it doesn’t happen ’cause you’re, you’re still like. Trying to teach people second quarter, maybe a little bit happens and you’re like, oh my God, is this actually not gonna work? And then in the third quarter it starts to snap into gear like that consistency’s required and how do you get to that 10 x factor?

’cause they’re there. And this is a little bit about our event. I mean, if you’re interested in joining. A little bit of a

[00:38:11] Vince Menzione: segue for you, Jen.

[00:38:12] John Janke: Yeah, we’ll have, I mean, we’ll have, uh, and, and again, like on the practitioner grade day, we’ll have some folks from Microsoft joining us, Michael Clark, who owns the co-sell, uh, engineering organization.

Ryan, who’s been a long time part of the marketplace organization will join Adam Boyle or head a product just as we talk about how do we, I. Industrialize this for enterprise grade scale. Vince is gonna be on yeah, kind of doing a highlight reel of this week. ’cause there’ll be so much to share with the ecosystem.

Uh, and then a lot of really interesting customers telling stories, uh, throughout it that I think, you know, we’ll, we’ll get to take snippets of those and share ’em with the ecosystem. But, uh, if, if you register, you get access to all the content remotely asynchronously as well, so you don’t have to actually show up full time.

[00:38:54] Vince Menzione: That’s great. And I do think during this time of rapid change and transformation, it’s important. We had to stay, we had to lean in. We had to continue to lean in. We’re just at the early days of change. Right. We talked about many moments. Yeah. So, so great to have you both here. Um, thank you for making time as well, uh, networking with some of our community here.

I know that tackle’s gonna be leading a session, a workshop as well. So Shane, thank you for making time for us as well. Thank you, Vince supporting us. Yeah. Thanks Vince. Great everybody. Thank you. See you through the day. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Ultimate Partner.

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