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How do I implement my go-to-market strategy with my Cloud Partners? How do I get buy-in from my executives, sales team, and others in my organization? How can I get the right attention from the Cloud Providers?
Questions like these, and many more, arise when you’re trying to build relationships with the Cloud Providers and accelerate your revenue journey through the cloud. Welcome to ‘Unlock Cloud Go-to-Market,’ the series where hosts Erin Figer and Patrick Riley share the essential stages of the Cloud GTM maturity model to start, optimize, and grow your company’s revenue through the cloud. They’ve helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs of their Cloud GTM motion, and in each episode, they're sharing those success stories from the people who have put them into place. Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future. And the future is now.
Matt Arsenault [00:00:00]:
I think you have to understand which customers you're trying to go after and what your internal customer acquisition cost is for those, right? So using the marketplaces, whether it be Amazon for North American software providers, right? Do I understand what my customer acquisition cost and my success rate? So understand where I'm at in the key strategy I'm trying to understand so that I can then compare.
Patrick Riley [00:00:29]:
Welcome to Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market, the series where hosts, Erin Figer and Patrick Riley, share the essential stages of the cloud GTM maturity model to start, optimize, and grow your company's revenue through the cloud. They've helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs of their cloud GTM motion, and in each episode, they're sharing those success stories from the people who have put them into place. Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future, and the future is now.
Patrick Riley [00:01:02]:
Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market. I'm your host Patrick Riley. Here today with me we've got some awesome folks from Jamf. So usually we do the introductions, but today because I sound like an aggressive bear, I'm going to let Matt and John each give an introduction of themselves and then we'll dive into the topics. So Matt, why don't you kick us off and tell us a little bit about your role at Jamf and then we'll hand it over to John.
Matt Arsenault [00:01:32]:
Matt Arsenault. I lead our strategic alliances team here at Jamf, which includes our marketplace strategy and overall kind of channel sales as it relates to the key ISV kind of programs that are out there. I think one of the main reasons I'm on this call is I started my career at Ernst and Young and so was an and went through FP&A at both EMC, GE and really take a financial view of some of the ways that things are justified or scaled out. John, over to you.
John Eisele [00:02:10]:
John Eisele. I'm the Alliance Manager for AWS here at Jamf and then I also have some expertise within GoToMarket. I have managed cloud partnerships and alliances for over a decade now and I really focus in on making sure that everything just works, so that means working cross functionally, working with the teams to ensure that just a deal can come in and we get paid. It's just that easy.
Patrick Riley [00:02:33]:
Great. Thank you both. I know we've had a lot of discussions over the past few months and folks who are listening maybe heard some of our previous podcasts and a lot of the times we're talking to the johns, we're talking to the Alliances, managers, and a lot of times those folks are focused more on what, what can they do specifically to increase their partnerships. Well, the unique thing about Jamf and both John and Matt's roles is that they take a finance focused view on cloud go-to-market, so when they were evaluating Marketplace, they didn't just do it the same way everybody else did and kind of take AWS or Microsoft or Google's Word for the return on investment that they're going to achieve. They wanted to dive deep into figuring out what does that look like for me from an ROI perspective. What's the deal velocity. Let's talk about CAC versus ltv and we really want to understand what this could look like and build a strategy around that.
Patrick Riley [00:03:29]:
So today that's a little bit about what we're going to talk with them further on and we're going to get some insights into both AWS and Azure strategies that they are pursuing over there at Jamf, so without further ado, we're going to start with why Marketplace? So I'm going to start with you Matt. From your perspective, where does cloud go-to-market? What does that mean for finance leaders?
Matt Arsenault [00:03:55]:
I'll ask a follow on to that. I think that the key piece for us and one of the reasons that we had to go through this analysis is we have a pretty robust, even for a small company channel strategy already, so we have resellers, we have SIS, we have MSPs that are on top of our platform. And so what we are looking at when we're trying to make a decision of shifting some of our channel effort or opening up a new channel is ultimately that ratio of lifetime value, LTV and customer acquisition cost, right? The interesting thing is the cloud marketplaces offer incentives and upside on on both of those, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:04:39]:
Being able to use the commit that an end customer has with Amazon or Google or Microsoft allows for us to to talk through how much additional value being in that program is. We believe that there's less price sensitivity because they're using a commitment that they've already made as opposed to negotiating with us as a direct third party or, or through some of our key partners like CDW or Insights or SHI, so we believe that the marketplaces offer an opportunity to expand lifetime value and at the same time give us better reach, so yes, we have a major kind of partnership that we have already established in that channel, but the customer acquisition costs are lowered in areas where we don't have deep penetration. So a lot of the analysis we did is we have really strong presence in North America. The cloud kind of providers don't get us much more expansion within North America. So we really had to think about where their points of presence were, where their sales teams were strong, and how they could lower acquisition costs for us around the world outside of our core market.
Patrick Riley [00:05:56]:
That's a great way to look at it. And I think the trend that we're starting to see, especially within Tackle and even at the cloud providers, is when they're trying to bring more companies in, they're trying to get more ISVs to engage in Marketplace. And what that means for co sell is the finance teams are really making and drawing a line in the sand and saying, hey, wait, I'm not just lifting and shifting my business here. I need some more value out of what's going on. And we need to take a deeper look at this and Tackle. You know, we're seeing that every day in our sales cycles as we're talking to more of you, Matt, and trying to have those conversations. So I think that's definitely critical. And those are good points that you made.
Matt Arsenault [00:06:36]:
Yeah, and I think that the key there is there's three layers of investment that you're making when you're turning that on, right? One is the Tackle subscription, the other is the marketplace fees. And the third, which is actually a really significant investment for a lot of ISVs, is becoming multi-cloud. So taking your hosting and moving it from only or primarily being on one of the three providers and allowing for it to go across, that was one of the biggest things that we looked at is can we increase the lifetime value or lower the customer acquisition cost enough to justify the replatforming costs? Because that was the kind of secondary decision we had to go to. Microsoft Azure was based on that piece because we were primarily an AWS shop. So when you start to think about that, there are multiple layers and decisions of financial commitment that you have to go through. So just to take a customer that was buying directly from you at a 3% commission for the cloud provider and add a Tackle subscription on top of it. If that's all I'm doing is shifting my channel, that doesn't have the value that you need to justify those investments.
Patrick Riley [00:07:52]:
Speaking of value. So John, how do you translate that cloud go-to-market motion into measurable outcomes for the finance teams? Like, what are you looking at? ARR growth, improved deal velocity. How does that measure for you?
John Eisele [00:08:08]:
You always love to look at new logo, but with 76,000 customers and we were seeing a lot of expansions from our existing customers, we had to Take a deeper look at some metrics. The first and foremost one, the primary one we use is growth ARR. So did this customer increase their spend? And so, you know, we're not necessarily looking at the total deal size. We are looking at just what they added on. So we call that GAR internally. So did the GAR grow? And that's an easy one to measure. It's an easy one to track, but the next one that I want to take a look at and that I've really started digging in and then comparing it against other channels is gross renewal rate.
John Eisele [00:08:45]:
So are they renewing at 100% or less? More or less than that. So let's, for example, they had $100,000 worth of software usage. They renewed at 108. That's fantastic. They renewed at 108% of what we would have expected them to renew at. So how do we compare that against other channels? And anecdotally, as we're growing out here, we are seeing a larger gross renewal rates for Marketplace than we are for other channels. We have a great gross renewal rate across our business, but that's an area that we're specifically looking at. And then I can pinpoint and dig into that to say I didn't just move it to cloud, we actually grew it by moving it to cloud and they added more products, more seats, and they probably did that because of their PPA or lots of other reasons, but I can actually use that to dig into accounts to find out when and where we saw increased value from an opportunity.
Matt Arsenault [00:09:39]:
And just to underscore kind of coming back to our financial metrics, both of those are very much focused on the lifetime value of the customer, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:09:46]:
Can we increase the dollar per year that they are giving us or extend the life of that customer so that renewal extends the life that we would expect of that customer and the GAR is increasing the value per customer that we're seeing.
Patrick Riley [00:10:02]:
What other metrics are you all looking at? What other metrics do you see that resonate with finance stakeholders? So for you, Matt, as outside of the big two there, is there anything else you're looking at? You know, maybe it's time to market or something like that?
Matt Arsenault [00:10:16]:
It is. It's time to market, but this is where we have struggled a little bit with our strategy right now is in that new logo capture. Now, new logo capture is hard all around, right? Whether it's through the Marketplace channel, direct sales, new logos and changing people over right now is, is a hard job where the finance teams are looking at this is they're trying to say, okay, how do I decrease my cost of acquisition, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:10:47]:
And part of the reason that they're looking so hard at this is my reference earlier of I have to pay a marketplace fee, I've got to pay a Tackle fee and those two fees are increasing my current CAC, right? It is truly just another layer of expense on top of my direct rep or my partner commission that I'm going to have. So you're starting off with a finance team saying I've got to invest an additional 3 to 5% per deal in closing it. Well, why now coming back to some of the key productivity metrics, you're, you're there, right? Rep productivity. How many more deals am I closing as a rep? What is that time to closure, right? Is it accelerated because the marketplace listing. One of the other arguments that we made is the efficiency in billing, right? So not having our accounting teams have to do as much rework or, or our accounts receivable teams, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:11:49]:
Once it goes through the marketplace it's kind of guaranteed. So you're, you're chasing and collections and payments are handed back off to your key cloud providers. So we've taken a full cost view all the way down to some of the operational steps to say yes, it is a fixed 3 to 5% that we're paying in addition, but we do believe that it's getting us deals we would not have gotten before. It is closing those deals a bit faster and more readily and then the burden from close to collect has been shortened. And that has been a key argument for us internally to say you don't need Obviously again with 70/000 customers, there's departments out there, but they're dealing with this. For all of our direct sales where the seller closes a deal and yes, they signed it, but do you know if they're ever going to pay? Right. Like that? Certainty to payment has been a real enhancement on our side as we're talking to the finance teams to say, you know John, you had a story about a customer that signed went into bankruptcy and we still got paid as a result of Amazon.
Matt Arsenault [00:13:00]:
Can you just go through the details on that? Because that was one of the key pieces for our finance team was taking away that collections risk and the collections.
John Eisele [00:13:09]:
Process we have so far, we've closed over 450 deals through Marketplace. We have received payment on 450 deals and that is, you know, just kind of unheard of. And again we did have a customer who unfortunately had some financial issues and went into bankruptcy. AWS is a very strong creditor. They are going to go out and so are Microsoft and so are Google. And so they were able to go out and do things that we, as one of their potential, many other creditors weren't able to do. And they, we got paid and we were able to get that delivery of those fees. And that just is the percent and how quickly we're getting paid is just unrivaled with the cloud marketplaces.
John Eisele [00:13:50]:
And that is a fear of finance leaders. The fact that they take that out of their hand. I'm not responsible for invoicing, I'm not responsible for billing, but as we've gone through that, they felt more and more comfortable because it just is happening, it's happening regularly with aws. We're being paid the day after AWS being paid. So a lot of those things really kind of calm down of yes, we're not in control of it. And that ends up being an okay thing because it just happens anyways.
Matt Arsenault [00:14:13]:
And I think that that is even further strengthened as we've gone outside of the U.S., right? So again, because our teams are so focused on, on North American sales and our understanding of those cultures, billing in Korean won in Korea or pulling through, you know, know, deals that are in Norwegian Krona, those are not things that our teams are as comfortable with. So now that they are comfortable with the process in North America, we can say, oh, and the added benefit to you is you're getting that same service, whether it's Norway, Korea, anywhere that the marketplaces are operating that you would have in North America. And the teams really do look at that as additional leverage that they can get in markets that we couldn't serve otherwise.
Patrick Riley [00:15:02]:
You touched on a couple things and a couple key pieces of your strategy kind of anecdotally, but John, you guys are in aws, you're in Azure, but you handle them and you look at them differently. And especially from a finance perspective, you made a decision to approach each marketplace differently because of how they look.
John Eisele [00:15:24]:
Yeah.
Patrick Riley [00:15:25]:
Can you talk to us about that and like, what's that difference for you all and how'd you arrive there?
John Eisele [00:15:29]:
Yeah, the AWS was really kind of a no brainer. We had been a AWS customer for a decade. We had moved to the cloud. We started on Prem. Like many companies who started in the early 2000s, we migrated to the cloud, so we were already a large AWS customer. We were very comfortable with them. We have very strong cloud practices with them.
John Eisele [00:15:48]:
So by the time we got around to looking at should we go down A cloud marketplace. The noise and the in the market was quite loud about we need to be on cloud, we should be on cloud. Marketplaces are moving. Once we evaluated that it was a very easy motion. We were already kind of hit all of the metrics that we needed to do to jump in to the cloud marketplace. We used tackle to help us stand up, manage our listing, so it was really fast from that perspective. We already have 76,000 customers.
John Eisele [00:16:14]:
We can use these cloud marketplaces and all the benefits that customers see to expand those customers and secondarily go after new logo. That's not the case when we are re platforming a product. We took our flagship product, Jamf Pro, our management solution and we replatformed it for the sole purpose of going after customers that for whatever reason or whatever their tech stack looks like, they prefer a Microsoft environment, they prefer to use Microsoft solutions and they prefer to purchase through Microsoft, so by doing that we are going after an entirely different segment of customers we don't have because as I mentioned we were an AWS customer. Through our acquisitions they ended up being more AWS hosted solutions, so we are specifically going after customers that we hadn't gotten before and we're not interested in just replatforming existing customers over. There's time, effort, energy on that and it isn't necessarily getting us anything, so we're going after a new customer base, a new customer prototype that we're going after.
John Eisele [00:17:15]:
And so we are looking at that very differently. How can we co sell very strong with Microsoft? They have a very strong ecosystem globally, they're strong in different regions than aws, so we can use both of their co sell models, both of their programming and both of their tech stacks to go after a different customer archetype.
Matt Arsenault [00:17:35]:
And I think that on the go-to-market side people really have to go back to the history of these different clouds. Right now I'm going to put on my professor history hat for a little bit but Amazon, the reason that they started AWS was because of Black Friday, right? They had to build capacity for a single day of traffic and they had to rent that capacity out. And every year they would put an extra couple billion into infrastructure for a single day of the year. And Amazon was first so they had a really good entry with a lot of the SaaS applications early. Microsoft, on the other hand, the way Azure really came about was about the virtualization of the SQL servers, right? So instead of having my own database where I have a SQL Server on it that I'm querying, I can do that on a public cloud, right? So you actually have two different populations. And when you start to think about Google, they were a late entry that was trying to disrupt and offer a better solution, right? They offered additional technology with Kubernetes and some of those other things, but because of the way that the three major clouds were kind of created, you actually have strengths of each of those with their customer bases, right? So Amazon is, is very strong with innovative companies who are cloud native and cloud first high tech professional services retailers that want to tie into their base. Microsoft is really strong with those customers who had legacy deployments, right? Manufacturing industrials, folks who really had to deal with that SQL Server problem.
Matt Arsenault [00:19:17]:
And the Google community is a bit further behind when it comes to enterprise sales, but they are really looking for those disruptors, those folks who are trying to be innovative and out in that market, so you actually do have a different customer base. You are going after with each of the main providers and understanding those strengths. Understanding those pieces and making sure you're differentiating your go-to-market strategy around those strengths is really important to be successful when you are making that multiple million dollar investment to replatform on one of the other platforms.
Patrick Riley [00:19:57]:
From this segment, I think hopefully people have learned when you evaluate your decisions on where to go from a cloud provider perspective, we always talk about the obvious things, but what John and Matt have talked about is really focusing in on which of those marketplaces align to your customer segment, which of those marketplaces fit where your customers are. Do the analysis from a financial perspective to look at, am I actually getting CAC reduction here? Is this going to help with ltv? Are we looking at this from a finance lens and not just a hey, they're trying to give me this great partnership discount and I need to go do Amazon or I need to go partner with Microsoft. I need to step back and evaluate it more financially so that we can have more long term success. And speaking of that success, you all have been doing quite well and going very fast in marketplace. John, for you in particular. I know with us here at Tackle, you played a key role definitely internally with Jamf at helping position tackle inside of your organization. What value did you see out of that as far as it relates to your marketplace efforts for Azure?
John Eisele [00:21:16]:
I personally have used tackle at a couple of different organizations and early on listing management like getting on to marketplaces that removes any barrier that I have with product. Getting the say so there, that's table stakes, so we knew that that was there as well as the registration and offer management process again, that is offered in there. And there are ways that I could have done that natively within the tech stacks, within Microsoft or aws, but where I saw the massive value is Tackle Prospect as well as the Tackle coaches and the expertise that exists within your organization, so with Tackle Prospect, you know when you are launching a new channel and you already have successful channels internally, you say, hey, ask your customers, are they interested in AWS Marketplace? I just added another discovery question on top of 80 discovery questions they already had. And that may or may not in their mind have been the reason why they could close that deal, but with Tackle Prospect, I was able to say, ask these customers in your pipeline this question.
John Eisele [00:22:20]:
They have a high propensity to buy. Ask them specifically if they do. And if they say they don't know, make sure they go talk to FinOps, Cloud Ops or Procurement, because we have information that they have used this marketplace before, so I find that as I'm rolling out anything new, I need to tell you what's important and when it's important. And I was able to do that with Tackle Prospect and be very, very surgical on the deals that we wanted to go after quarter after quarter. And so we were able to start getting that, as AWS likes to say, that flywheel going by, getting some wins, getting those deals that are coming in and the other option, so I already knew that we had that as we were going to market, but I have been working with AWS for over a decade.
John Eisele [00:23:04]:
I have not been working with Microsoft for that long, but the cloud marketplaces and the benefits, they're very similar, but the languages are different. If I speak Spanish, it's French, it's close, but it's not quite close enough that I could have done everything on my own. And Tackle really was the guide there. They were able to go in and say, this is exactly what we need to do here in Partner center vs Ace. This is what you have to do. Here's how the transaction is different, so I was able to not only when I'm setting things up, go through and make sure that I knew that I was checking all the right boxes and I could go back to the team and feel very confident that what I had done was the right thing.
John Eisele [00:23:43]:
I could also then leverage you all as training resources internally so that everyone felt comfortable through the process. And so it wasn't just me saying, here's what it is, that you guys have great onboarding processes and everything else. When we launched this, I was able to bring in my channel operations team and they were able to ask those questions to help closing out offers that are just different in Microsoft versus AWS, so it's that translation is that expertise in addition to prospect. That really was what I kept talking about internally and championing and internally.
Matt Arsenault [00:24:17]:
And to underscore there a lot of what John said now my finance brain is translating into. You can't just hope that CAC goes down right like the team running tackle. The team running the marketplaces has to be intentional about enabling the sales team with the key pieces, giving them the data, making sure that you are working on that flywheel because you are asking them to change the way they are doing their job. You are asking them to make that change. So the prospect reports, that talk tracks the enablement and content. It is an investment you have to make, but again, from a finance perspective, that is a very minimal additional ask into the marketing teams, into the sales enablement teams in order to make sure that you're unlocking the customer acquisition cost key here. And so that has been a really important part of this is you can't just sign the contracts and hope that the flywheel starts.
Matt Arsenault [00:25:23]:
You have to start greasing the skids, you have to start pushing along. And that's where John, you've done an incredible job is making sure people are moving along that journey appropriately so that when you're making a multimillion dollar investment on replatforming, you're not losing that momentum, you're. You're starting to get other people to help push that rock up the hill.
Patrick Riley [00:25:47]:
That's always an operational challenge, I'll say is the enablement piece and making sure folks are executing, but you all were doing this in not just one marketplace, but you were doing it in two. And that obviously can bring its own complexities because you have multiples and as John mentioned, they speak different languages. What other operational challenges did Jamf face during that expansion?
John Eisele [00:26:11]:
I always focus in on quote to cash. I mean, the visible layers of any of these motions is marketing, how are we talking about what we're doing here? And the sales team, but on the back end is really where things can get stuck. And sometimes those things are quote, unquote, invisible to the teams that aren't doing it. So early on I brought in our revenue operations and channel operations teams, our finance teams, our legal teams, so that I could map out exactly once we have accepted an offer, what happens in our Jamf workflow, which is potentially unique to us, but also important to us and doesn't match a direct deal, doesn't match a Channel deal. So how could I make sure that marketplace fit into there? What do we do with invoicing? Because we don't invoice. What do we do with the. The bill to date and the bill to address and all those different things that matter along the way.
John Eisele [00:27:05]:
So I really had to dig in and learn the processes of how do we set up our quotes, how do we set up our opportunities internally, how do we get to a closed one state, and how do we make sure that we are reconciling payments all the way through there? And so that's an interesting kind of operational piece that I have found really, really important because, you know, it's easier to make champions of salespeople win a few deals together and all of a sudden they can point to, hey, they helped me win ABC Co, but if I can make champions of the operations and finance and legal teams, then it's a lot easier to get that. Yes. When you're like, hey, let's do this next thing AWS just unlocked currencies. What do we have to do? I already have relationships internally where I can go back and say, this is what happened. What do we need to do to make this work? What do we need to do to turn this on? So that day one first deal we send through the pipe, everything works. So that was something that I have always focused on. And it's not always the glamorous pieces, but it is the important pieces so that nothing fails along the way.
John Eisele [00:28:07]:
And there's no reason internally for them to say, hey, this is too hard, this is too difficult. And we're not getting the ROI in this because we're thinking failing in these areas.
Matt Arsenault [00:28:17]:
And I think the underscore to that one that's really important is don't try to drink from the firehose, right? You said yourself, Patrick, we only have two. There's three offered, right? And it's not like we had Amazon and Azure the same day where we tried to get the teams running at them, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:28:35]:
Understand where your strengths are. Build through that customer base. As we talked about earlier, Build through where your technology stack is, is today. If those two things are matched, great. If they're not, you got some investment choices you got to make up front, but the key piece to this is take your time and learn one before you tackle two and three. Because of that change management aspect of this. On the operational side, the easiest way for some of these things to fail is not your FP and a team that's looking at the investment operation, but your finance operations teams to go, this is just too hard, right? And when they say I can't, the CFO hears we shouldn't, right? That's the key piece here that we've got to work through.
Matt Arsenault [00:29:22]:
And you've got to think about the timing of those elements and that investment. And we were very conscious about, hey, we're already built on Amazon. Let's take advantage of this, let's learn that first. Then we knew that the customer base on Microsoft was one that we really wanted to go after. So we, we were very intentional in picking that marketplace second. And we're waiting to see what opportunities Google will bring us. So we are being very intentional about how we're stepping through to build into that investment.
Patrick Riley [00:29:54]:
That's advice that we didn't hear much of in the past. We've all heard the, and I'm guilty of it, getting on and just talking about the high level things that you need to go do and Marketplace is easy. And these are the five things to go do. Here's the ROI you're going to get and just jump on board. You really should take a deeper assessment and build that plan. Build that foundation that Jamf has built so that if you go into another marketplace or when you add new products, you've now already got the foundation laid and built. You know, it's a relatively easy turnkey situation and you're not having to go start over and figure it all out.
Matt Arsenault [00:30:35]:
That is actually really important because of one of the other things John said, right? It's not like Amazon, Microsoft or Google have this perfect right. They're adding things, right? Amazon just allowed you to bill in foreign currencies. Microsoft is only putting channel partners through the U.S. canada and the U.K. we're going to move to Germany and Japan next, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:30:58]:
These marketplaces themselves are evolving and changing, which means you have to be thoughtful about that change management process as you're taking the marketplaces on, so if you are, if you are intentional about when you're going into those marketplaces, you can be much more thoughtful about adopting the changes and enhancements each of those marketplaces are throwing at you. And again, the advocacy that John has built with our operational teams means when he goes in and says, hey, all of a sudden we can, we can quote in 90 different currencies, they go, okay, well what will that mean for our team? How do we think about this? How do we move through it? Because we've been intentional in engaging them through the onboarding process of two different marketplaces now.
Patrick Riley [00:31:46]:
So gentlemen, we've talked A good bit about the reasons why to be here, how to evaluate it, but I'm sure there were some bumps along the way when you guys were either getting onto AWS or onto Azure. Can you tell us some of the lessons that Jamf learned from those strategies that maybe somebody listening who's just taken some copious notes right on everything Matt just said, can you give them some lessons on what they should avoid or look for when they're going on this journey?
John Eisele [00:32:19]:
I think one of the things that people look at when they are deciding to go through the CO Sell process and starting to go through this process is what do I register with the cloud provider? Do I do quantity or do I do quality? And then where do I leverage that? In the beginning, I'd say that we decided to go down the path of we are going to register deals that we know are going Marketplace, which meant that we didn't fully take advantage of the CO Sell lifecycle because we'd already recognized the customer, we'd already recognized that Jamf was a chosen vendor. And then we had asked the discovery question towards the tail end of that opportunity. This was early on, do you want to buy through Marketplace? The answer was yes. And we've started to move that earlier in the sales cycle, especially as we're going to a new cloud with Azure, where we do need to take advantage of the CO Sell, so finding that kind of lever in the middle there of quantity versus quality has been a difficult thing to do and to adjust to, so we've started moving that earlier. And another thing that we did that I've actually found to be a kind of a life hack here for doing deals with aws. I can't run everything through Marketplace, but there are deals that have a high propensity to buy that we are closing, we're closing through other channels.
John Eisele [00:33:38]:
So I am strategically taking those deals, registering them in ACE and launching them, so AWS knows that they're a customer, knows the buying cycle, knows more about that customer. So while it didn't go through Marketplace, I am taking that opportunity to register those deals in ace, kind of create more opportunities, so it's both quantity and quality. And then going after other programs like wmp, the workload migration program, and finding more ways of entering more data into ACE and registering that. So balancing that quantity versus quality really has started getting the motion going so that it's not just we found a renewal opportunity. We asked them towards the late stage, they said yes, they'd like to go Marketplace. That really does look and feel like Share Shift.
John Eisele [00:34:23]:
So how do we take it earlier so we can truly leverage everything about the co sell cycle and the benefits of the marketplace?
Patrick Riley [00:34:30]:
The data is really where the value is, so how can I help sell my data back to AWS in a meaningful manner?
Matt Arsenault [00:34:38]:
I think that one of the things that I will say is most of the people who are going to tackle this are shockingly going to be smaller than Microsoft, smaller than Amazon and smaller than Google. Like all of us, the old adage of you eat an elephant one bite at a time or be careful when you catch the tiger by the tail, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:34:56]:
There are these pieces where it is. This is not a silver bullet. This is not a solve all of our problems overnight by doing this strategy. There is real work to unlock here and you have to be intentional about doing that work, building that relationship and taking advantage of where those pieces are, enhancing your market, so the key piece of advice I would give is don't over call the benefit and under call the level of work you have to put in as the key partner.
Patrick Riley [00:35:31]:
Matt CFOs they're evaluating their go-to-market investments. ROI isn't immediately clear. We talked about this earlier. What's your quick like 1, 2, 3. Here's what I need to go do.
Matt Arsenault [00:35:43]:
The first is I think you have to understand which customers you're trying to go after and what your internal customer acquisition cost is for those, right? So using the marketplaces, whether it be Amazon for North American software providers, right? Do I understand what my customer acquisition cost and my success rate so understand where I'm at in the key strategy I'm trying to understand so that I can then compare. The second thing is to understand the additional investment that you need to offset and be very thoughtful about those investments and how you can get them through harder savings in the customer acquisition cost, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:36:28]:
Am I not going to add another head into my my operations teams or am I going to eliminate a collections head? What is it that I'm going to use to offset as a, as a hard cost? And then you got to look at over time your benefit of Share Shift, right. Meaning are you getting more new logos that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise? Are you just moving your customers from one way to the other so that you can continuously reevaluate whether your assumptions on that customer acquisition cost and lifetime value are persisting? And the reason for that is because you need to make that additional investment decision next year or the year after, right?
Matt Arsenault [00:37:07]:
This is not a stagnant. Let's go and we're in and it's, it's up and running. It is usually easy to persist it, but you gotta continue to monitor and make sure you're getting the value out of it so that you can continue to make the investments in the activities and the work that we've talked about in the background.
Patrick Riley [00:37:30]:
All right, so John, over to you. Where do you see Jamf? Where do you see that cloud go-to-market strategy in the next few years? So you're going to Google, you go into Alibaba. Where are you headed?
John Eisele [00:37:42]:
I do think it's important for us to take advantage of all the cloud marketplaces, so find the way that works there, but before we get there, we need to fully get the two that we have those investments up and running, demonstrate the value that are there because they are two different strategies. So how do we take one of those strategies and apply it to Google? But the other place that I think I want to really invest in is leveraging partners with dedicated contracts or, you know, D store or other channel ways that I can take our sales team, not necessarily out of the equation, but where our sales teams aren't different regions, different customers and leverage partners or other entities across the globe that are in there. So have a true global strategy so that we can have more quote unquote passive deals that are coming in, deals that don't require us to upfront, fully register a deal, go through a full sales cycle and then close that opportunity. How can we utilize different partners and different tooling out there to help alleviate that so that we can scale at a larger rate than the number of people we have? So those two areas are something I'm looking at. How do we do what we're doing today really, really well so we can grow into Google as well as how can we take advantage of all the programming across all three so that we can get sales that we wouldn't have gotten before and potentially get them without a Jamf salesperson without 100% involved?
Patrick Riley [00:39:08]:
I love it. I'm excited to, excited to continue to watch you all grow. I think it's spot on. Obviously, continue to invest in the places where you are today, make sure those are successful before you jump in with too many marketplaces. So good call out, I think overall. Hopefully the listeners today have learned a lot about Jamf, but also about you two. Can you tell everybody before we wrap up, either one of you, any final thoughts? What can they expect to see out of the two of you? Are you going to be out there talking on all the other podcasts about how great cloud go-to-market is?
Patrick Riley [00:39:47]:
It looks like Matt's got some invites.
Matt Arsenault [00:39:50]:
So if I'm going to be famous, I need to say that if you have problems managing or securing Apple devices at work, please go find us in the AWS or Azure marketplaces. We are Jamf J A M F. Go search that and let's test our process, see how quickly we can get you to buy. For me, what's next is to start to think through how do we scale out. The truth is, I said this in another conversation I had today. Most of the European colleagues I have say Americans are funny because they think Europe is a country and London's its capital, even though it's not in the EU anymore. Remember that the three companies with these marketplaces are very U.S. centric. They are U.S. companies.
Matt Arsenault [00:40:36]:
They have a better global reach than most of us do, but they still have the same biases that we have, right? I think understanding how we can leverage some of this stuff in really expansionary regions like North Africa and the Middle East, Latin America, those are the things that I am most excited about is to see how these marketplaces can help us reach regions that we just could not get to without significant investment on our own. And so what I'm looking forward to the most is that development of the marketplace internationally over the next couple of years. John, how about you?
John Eisele [00:41:16]:
For people in my seat who do this day in and day out and recognized and have recognized for a long time that cloud marketplaces are valuable and do offer value, I think it is important to know all the steps along the way and all the players internally so that you can create champions. And if you can create champions, then you can create more and more success. So champions in sales, marketing, and then all the way through the operational aspect, so from people in my seats as I'm looking at it, of how do you just get these things done and how do you get the. Yes, next time? It is to have those champions and to pay attention to every part of the process. And that does help the next time around.
Patrick Riley [00:41:54]:
All right, so John, Matt, thank you both for an enlightening conversation. You've brought a ton of value to the financial and operational side of the equation that doesn't usually get discussed. What's the value? How do we achieve that value? How do we measure that value? And where do we start? So thank you for providing those insights. Thank you for being a wonderful customer and we appreciate your time today.
John Eisele [00:42:20]:
Thank you.
Patrick Riley [00:42:21]:
So that was another awesome episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market. We had John and Matt from Jamf. They shared some fantastic insights on their marketplace strategies, roi overcoming those operational challenges, focusing on financial metrics like CAC, LTV and Deal Velocity to prove the value of marketplaces, something that I know everybody's trying to figure out how to do. And you know, John talked about not underestimating the power of operational alignment like with tools like Tackle to help simplify that journey. And together the two of them told a story of how they went from one marketplace to another in a very different manner with a very different route to market strategy, and have still seen success across them both, so fantastic discussion. Hope you all enjoyed it.
Patrick Riley [00:43:08]:
Please feel free to leave some comments or give us some feedback on anything you'd like to see in a future episode. And we hope to see you next time.
Patrick Riley [00:43:16]:
So pull up a chair, grab a notebook, and join us as we share the essential stages of the maturity model to start, optimize, and grow your company's revenue using the cloud. For more resources on executing your cloud go-to-market strategy. You can visit our website at tackle.io.