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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.
Brian Denker [00:00:00]:
You have to actually create the deals, create the energy around selling with the clouds, and then the listing is how you actually consummate that deal at the end. So what we do is we say, okay, company, like, how do you want to take this to market? Like, let's build an actual channel here that's going to be driven with the clouds, right? Let's figure out how to engage, let's figure out what area, maybe geographically, maybe vertically, do you want to attack on this. And like, let's take some prospects, let's go like, co-sell those deals with that particular cloud and let's work directly to actually go co-sell a deal together.
Patrick Riley [00:00:37]:
Welcome to Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market, the podcast where we deliver actionable insights from ISVs, partners, thought leaders and cloud providers to help you launch, scale and succeed in your cloud go-to-market journey. Whether you're building your first motion, fine tuning your strategy, or aiming to maximize revenue, this show brings you the stories, strategies and lessons learned from the people driving innovation in the cloud ecosystem. Each episode cuts through the noise with candid conversations and proven tactics that you can apply right away, because the future of cloud B2B success is here and the time to unlock it is now.
Patrick Riley [00:01:15]:
Welcome to the Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market podcast. I'm your host, Patrick Riley, and today we're tackling, no pun intended, a bold topic, SaaS. Is it dead? Is it simply evolved? We're not going to say who quoted that, but I think we've got some great opinions here. Joining me today, I've got two fantastic guests, definitely experts in our space. We've got Yeva Roberts, the VP of Marketing & Alliances for North America at AllCloud, and our very own Brian Denker, Co-Founder of Tackle, leader in alliances, partnerships. Welcome, both of you. I'm glad we're all in blue.
Brian Denker [00:01:55]:
Glad to be here. Absolutely.
Patrick Riley [00:01:57]:
Yeva, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about your role at AllCloud and just kind of some background on your experience with marketing alliances and kind of how that intersects with Marketplace.
Yeva Roberts [00:02:09]:
Thanks for having me, first of all. So I spent most of my career working for or alongside SaaS companies, specifically ICs, and helping them figure out how to launch and stand out on cloud marketplaces. And I've seen firsthand what works, what flops, and what makes someone swipe right. Now I'm at AllCloud. It's my first professional services management services company. And my team and I, we kind of refer to ourselves as the backstage crew. Now we get to shape how we as outcloud show up on these cloud marketplaces, a professional services company, and we do this for actually the two of the biggest cloud marketplaces, Salesforce and AWS. I feel like it's a pretty cool spot to be because AllCloud Superpower happens to be helping software providers, ISVs thrive on these same platforms.
Yeva Roberts [00:02:56]:
So kind of drinking your own champagne, if you will. And we do that by modernizing their solutions and simplifying their path to revenues in the cloud. So that's me.
Patrick Riley [00:03:06]:
That's awesome. I foresee a storefront on your website with a little swipe left, swipe right to buy these services. Like, let's see that tomorrow. That's exciting.
Yeva Roberts [00:03:15]:
Oh, yeah. I'll have you say that to my boss and see how you respond.
Patrick Riley [00:03:18]:
Hey, it's trying something new. It worked in other use cases. Why can't it work here?
Yeva Roberts [00:03:23]:
I agree.
Patrick Riley [00:03:24]:
All right, thank you for that introduction, Brian. You've been around the block here for a while and you've seen kind of the forefront of SaaS providers getting help from Tackle through Marketplace, but you've connected with tons of the Marketplace executives, product teams, et cetera over the last few years. So none of this is new to you. What excites you about today's conversation with Yeva?
Brian Denker [00:03:49]:
It's pretty interesting. I mean, Tackle has been around for eight years. We were there from the SaaS beta in AWS all the way through Google starting it, and then Microsoft and all three kind of embracing the SaaS marketplace kind of concept, right?
Brian Denker [00:04:02]:
And Tackle's always been there to make it easier, make it more simplified, and we've been building that. But what's really exciting to me is how it's kind of changing in the way you think about it. It's. It's less about just the commerce engine of SaaS and just kind of happening with a listing, and it's more about how you're building a true go-to-market channel with the clouds and with your partners, like AllCloud. And at the end of the day, this stuff is becoming more outcome driven, right?
Brian Denker [00:04:27]:
Folks are looking for an outcome that they want to actually solve. They're just not looking to plug some software in. And so when you look at the marketplaces, they're kind of like pulling together and creating more and more avenues of opportunity for folks to work together and pull that stuff and simplify procurement for that, right?
Brian Denker [00:04:44]:
So you don't have to go through, get purchase orders and all these different contracts signed across all these different players. You can pull it all together in one spot and actually get to an outcome a whole lot faster, right?
Brian Denker [00:04:54]:
And Tackle is kind of the middle of that, working with all kinds of partners and personas and channels. And it's just crazy to see how it's gone from an experiment of, like, maybe this works, you know, maybe I should swipe right, swipe left, I don't know, all the way to something that it's kind of like at this point in time, if you're not building some type of marketplace strategy with cloud, go-to-market. Like, you're already behind, right? And you should really get in front of it. So hopefully we can kind of bring some of those things to light here today and chat a little bit about it, so.
Patrick Riley [00:05:26]:
Let's talk about the big headline. Is SaaS really dead? Satya made a huge wave. And if you saw his post and then all of his people posted after, like, there's thousands of people commenting where he said SaaS is dead, but he didn't really provide a lot of clarity or context behind that. So you have, as someone who works closely with these providers every day, like, what's your take on that?
Yeva Roberts [00:05:51]:
Dead. Not even close. That's. That's my point of view on it. I, I feel like SaaS has just had its glow up. We've all been talking about the, the days of SaaS being about subscriptions. I feel like that's gone.
Yeva Roberts [00:06:02]:
It's really more about having smarter, more intuitive solutions that fit into how we work every day, right? So I definitely think that it's not dead. I think it's more that it's SaaS 2.0. It's become more useful, right? And I do follow Chief Marketing Technologist Blog, Scott Brinker, who is at HubSpot. I don't know if you guys do as well, but I actually think he nailed it when he said SaaS isn't dead.
Yeva Roberts [00:06:23]:
It's just gotten serious. So I'll add it on to that. I think maybe paraphrasing, but he said something along the lines of platforms, AI and partnerships are shacking up together. Maybe I'm paraphrasing, maybe he said teaming up, but I'll go with shacking up.
Patrick Riley [00:06:38]:
It's an evolution, right? And maybe Satya's sentiment was to kind of spark that. These partnerships, especially with AI, everything's evolved much further than a traditional SaaS. And I think if we look back and any of us who've been around a while, traditional SaaS is not what we're talking about today. There's so much more complexity in it. And yet at the same time, the structure around it is the same. There's still partnerships, there's still new tools that are helping us get there. You know, it's AI in this case. But, Brian, like, what's your perspective on that?
Brian Denker [00:07:09]:
I think Satya was trying to be very provocative. They're not really saying it serious, but trying to make you think. I mean, with AI coming up and all these things, there's kind of thinking, oh, I have bots and I have things that can take care of all these things that SaaS does. I don't need to buy a subscription to something because all my little agents are going to take care of all these things for me. Well, that's not really true. I think where you're seeing the real scale is when you build intelligent agents into proprietary data that sits into SaaS tools, right? And so that's something that we're even working with and working with a lot of other folks to do. I mean, Salesforce kind of led SaaS in the early 2000s, they were the first SaaS company, and right?
Brian Denker [00:07:46]:
SaaS kind of got pigeonholed into this idea that it was purely just a revenue subscription model. And that was what was really different about it. It's like, oh, I don't have to have data centers, I don't have to manage my products. But really that's just been like the procurement cycle around it. What's really changing now is kind of where we're going back to. And what Yeva was just saying is like, this is a set of solutions to solve a set of problems, right? And AI is going to make that more robust and get you to solutions faster and maybe allow you to navigate that tool that you purchased quicker and easier and reach other folks. But the way in which you interact with that tool, the way in which you kind of procure and kind of deal with that is still similar, right? And Marketplace is making that so much easier, right?
Brian Denker [00:08:30]:
The idea is, how do you simplify? Just like AI is simplified kind of usage and insights out of the data, the marketplace is simplified. The way you can procure, renew, sell, buy all of those things in a centralized place, right? And it's kind of pulling these things together and you're even seeing the expansion a lot of folks use channel. There's two tier, there's three tier. All of that stuff looked a little bit more complicated earlier on. Now that's being embraced by all the major marketplaces. They're all building channels, they're all building things to support distributors and partners across the globe and making that stuff tons easier. So SaaS isn't dead, it's just changed. It's changed a lot. And AI is just making the SaaS products better and easier to implement and faster to get insights, but you still have to have the underlying product and marketplaces have just streamlined how that can get procured and managed and renewed.
Patrick Riley [00:09:24]:
When all of these started, it was very much a seller's tool. It was great for sellers. There's all these value metrics toward the sellers. But now the marketplaces are realizing and the cloud providers are realizing that the buyers are asking for different things. So they're modifying this and it's very much now morphing into like, what do the buyers want, how do they want to buy, how is SaaS impactful to them? I think those are coming together and helping out.
Brian Denker [00:09:51]:
We're originally even driven by the buyer side, right? I think sellers kind of went there kicking and screaming a little bit like, wait, this is how I sell software. And then buyers started to say like, no, I want to buy it a little bit different way. I want to like lean in and I want to commit with my cloud provider that I want to leverage and simplify this. And so it's pretty cool how it's actually been driven almost from the buyer side and now the sellers are embracing it.
Patrick Riley [00:10:14]:
Let's get into some specifics. Yeva, where do you feel like there's the biggest opportunity for SaaS providers that you're working with? You talked a little bit high level on where you see general opportunities, but is there some specific actions that you're starting to see ISVs take or specific opportunities that you're coaching your ISVs on where they should be?
Yeva Roberts [00:10:37]:
I think where we play in the journey of migrating to the cloud is, is really early on for a lot of these SaaS companies. So we are still very much coaching them on AI and integrating AI and making their solutions much smarter. So to echo some of the sentiment that Brian was just sharing, that yes, AI is stealing the spotlight right now and that's where we're spending majority of our time. But the reason for this partnership that we have with Tackle and the whole reason why I'm here is really about acknowledging and reminding them to have that revenue conversation first as a business as part of the reason why they migrate, cloud marketplaces are not at the center of that conversation right now. And so it's a good reminder that if they want to scale and scale smarter beyond AI, they have to start evolving and thinking about cloud marketplace. Go to market strategy first. So that go-to-market strategy conversation is really important and what we're doing together as a partnership. And I think to summarize that, I think, you know, honestly, the biggest opportunity in SaaS, nobody goes to market alone anymore, right?
Yeva Roberts [00:11:38]:
So it is about the partnership. So whether it's about co-selling or co-marketing with folks like AWS or ecosystem players like Salesforce, or working with you guys to navigate cloud marketplace, I think those tactics are really important to bring to the forefront and is something that we think about every day.
Patrick Riley [00:11:58]:
Those are excellent points. And I think when you talk about partnership, you also can talk about how not only should they look at the market and the opportunity that's available today with the partners that we have in the marketplace space, but also looking at the product side of things, how do we evolve to meet our partners better and to be better for the marketplaces. So if we think about sassification and we, you know, consider what that looks like in today's market, is that something that still matters to you and your customers? Why if it does matter, is it so important for folks that are looking to scale? Like, what is your perspective on that?
Yeva Roberts [00:12:39]:
Yeah, I think sassification in itself as a word can be overwhelming for some, right? Who've never heard about it. So think of it as like giving your product a passport. It makes it easier to scale, speeds up the buying decisions and helps you fit into the cloud partner programs, right? So if you do it right, then your customers don't just buy from you once, they keep coming back to your listing on the marketplace, right?
Yeva Roberts [00:13:03]:
So if you got the product right, it's smarter, more intuitive, you placed it on the cloud marketplace, you should have a growth engine in place is what that means.
Patrick Riley [00:13:13]:
That makes sense. Brian, how do you feel about, as far as these ISVs are concerned, sassifying their products, coming to market? What role do you feel like the marketplaces themselves play in the success of ISVs that already have that now?
Brian Denker [00:13:31]:
Yeah. So you think about like if you are a newer software company, you're probably, you know, in the last five to seven years, you're probably built on the cloud from day one. You are built with a SaaS subscription model since day one. You know, whether you're not a marketplace or not, you're kind of there. It seems really easy. Like, why wouldn't Everybody have a SaaS product? Why wouldn't everybody sell a marketplace? But what AllCloud and his team like deal with is like, there's a lot of companies that are used in a lot of businesses that aren't, you know, just six Years old. And they're trying to figure out how to create, you know, a competitive track, how to actually create this new model and sell it. And what's really cool about Tackle and AllCloud together, which know a little shameless plug here is, you know, they sassify a lot of these products, they take these legacy products, they help the company through this whole process and they work with the P and E and the engineering teams and get this stuff in a more robust kind of cloud-based model.
Brian Denker [00:14:26]:
And then the joint offering here is that like Tackle can then help that bring to market, right? Because a saasified product that is still sold the exact same way through the old procurement methods with the old stuff is only halfway there. Or in the same respect, trying to sell a VM product that is very legacy with Marketplace is only halfway there. Where you really get the scale is when you have a sassified product that automatically can kind of being brought to market with the AWS reps, with the Microsoft reps, Google reps, co-selling that stuff together. And so the joining of that is really cool. It creates the full journey, right? Satisfying your product is only half the way. Getting into Marketplace is only halfway. But bringing that entire thing to market is really what's super key. And that's where alcohol and Tackle come together and bring that story and it becomes a multi year journey, right? Satisfying a product could be, you know, kind of a point in time and now it's satisfied, now what do I do with it, right? Kind of like getting a product in Marketplace to sell it is kind of a point in time, but I actually have to bring this to market and co-sell it and actually work to it, right? And so that's to me what's super exciting about how marketplaces are kind of like the root of that.
Brian Denker [00:15:34]:
And then it brings into the cloud, go-to-market space and there's just a ton of cool stuff happening. We put out a cloud go-to-market report every week. We query everybody in the summers and every fall we kind of put it out. We had a cool podcast displaying it. But like the numbers are crazy. Even if Cloud itself is only growing at like 20 to 30% year over year, the marketplace revenue is growing like 100% year over year. Folks that are going into more channel, like 85% of folks are looking to buy more through Marketplace. Like these numbers are pretty staggering.
Brian Denker [00:16:04]:
Like I said earlier, it's not an experiment, it's not something to try. If you put these pieces together and you have a true SaaS product that's now, cloud driven, that can scale and you bring it to life through Marketplace, you're gonna have more success, right? And we have a blueprint for how.
Patrick Riley [00:16:19]:
That works for enterprises like my former employer and other large companies. They built their products to scale internally, selfishly. How do we scale this to make more money at less cost, et cetera. And the marketplace is almost forcing the Saas-ification of this process and making it easier for the buyers. So it's kind of an interesting process to witness and watch. At least once a week, I'm on a call with a prospect and their product is set up either poorly from a customer experience perspective, or you can tell they've already tried marketplace and they're running into these operational roadblocks. And what's interesting to see is we end up spending a lot of time with customers who aren't sassified upfront down the road with a marketplace operational transformation workshop, or talking to them about how to go now fix all these policies, procedures and operational processes from quote to cash that were set up for this big behemoth enterprise to just make money and not thought about the customers on the front end. So I love that what AllCloud's doing on the front end is prepping these customers to have that partner and then obviously, you know, we're helping those that haven't gone through that process yet.
Patrick Riley [00:17:36]:
So it's interesting to see and think about how really sassification is making it easier for the buyers too. As part of your role, it's very interesting to note that you not only cover alliances, but you also cover marketing. So you're like very intimately connected with your customer, your partner journeys, not only internally, but externally on how that looks. How do you see from that very unique perspective these marketplaces and these cloud providers contributing, complimenting or maybe disrupting a company's marketing, growth strategies, et cetera. What does that look like?
Yeva Roberts [00:18:17]:
It looks like me geeking out. My team will tell you. I think when I see a SaaS company just at that tipping point, about to list or has just listed and they're trying to figure out what's going to happen next, I think that's where I geek out the most. Because really, all this work, you know, like you mentioned, that our team does is to get them to this point, right? And then you all come in, you get them over the finish line, they go launch, and then you start to see their growth engine go right? And why is that happening? And this is the piece that I think a lot of companies today forget to talk about is because when you list on a call marketplace like AWS, you're immediately gaining the visibility, you're gaining the credibility and you're opening the door to all of these co-marketing opportunities with AWS that you otherwise didn't have before, right? So I think that oftentimes isn't something that is discussed and should be. I feel like when you are selling on a massive stage, if you think about it, the storefront of AWS, right, is a massive stage. You get an opportunity to tell your story like never before, right? You can attract through that story the right type of buyers, you break through the noise a lot faster and that's how you accelerate your growth. So I think that's why I get so excited.
Yeva Roberts [00:19:31]:
And if you were to ask me again, is it a unique role? For sure. I mean, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes in terms of partnerships alone, but having a hybrid role is a unique opportunity to see it from both sides.
Patrick Riley [00:19:45]:
Who doesn't have more than one hat if you're working with a cloud provider today, right? That's the end goal. Just like, can I only focus on this thing? No, that's excellent. I think the co-marketing piece is fantastic to bring up. We don't always talk about it very often, but there are tons of marketing opportunities, funds, programs, et cetera, even whole portals dedicated to marketing on these cloud providers that never get talked about. Let's bring this all to life. We've talked conceptually about why SaaS isn't dead, why we think that it's actually helping customers, why the connection between marketing and product is strong and necessary within a successful ISV story. Let's talk about one of those stories where AllCloud has helped a customer go through that process, SaaS-ify the product, and then take it to marketplace successfully. Do you have a story or a journey you can talk to us about?
Yeva Roberts [00:20:39]:
I will say that they are very much in an early stage of their story, so they've not listed yet. But the reason why I'm so excited about it is because of what I think Brian was talking about earlier, that we do specialize in helping a lot of these traditional SaaS providers, right. So have this great IP, it's on prem. They haven't gone to the cloud yet, but there's just so much opportunity in front of them. So the company I'm thinking of is actually called Binect. They're a leading output management company, solution provider. AWS has just been advertising their story. You may have heard of it, but they process over a hundred million if I'm not wrong. Business documents. So think of documents like you get from your bank statements or your doctor, right? And the biggest challenge that they had is what I was just alluding to. They wanted to move to the Cloud, but they didn't want to compromise in security, which is very top of mind. And one of the biggest reasons for hesitancy, perhaps, right?
Yeva Roberts [00:21:32]:
And so when we got involved, right, the conversation was all about how do we do this without compromising on the security, since it's the foundation of their business, dealing with official documents, right? As a solution provided to them. So AllCloud migrated them to AWS, ensuring that all of this security was rock solid still, right? We set them up to also take advantage of what we've been talking about in this conversation of AI, right? So if you think of use cases like Intelligent Document Processing in a traditional space like Binect operates in, it's really important to take advantage of, to scale your business, right?
Yeva Roberts [00:22:04]:
So that is something that really is exciting to me because now that they've achieved this, their next best and biggest step is actually launching their product on AWS Marketplace, which is, if you read their case study, that is exactly what they're discussing and figuring it out. Great opportunity for Tackle. And the reason they're doing that is really to reach more buyers and what better place to be than in the marketplace? So I do think they're like the perfect example of how SaaS isn't just about moving to the cloud, it's about unlocking new ways that Brian was talking about to innovate to scale and deliver to your customers, so
Patrick Riley [00:22:39]:
That's a good segue question for Denker. So AllCloud just took this customer, sassified them, they're ready to go launch on AWS. How does Tackle complement that story? What's our role?
Brian Denker [00:22:50]:
I'm going to start with what our role isn't, right? Because I think that's where a lot of people start, right? And this is why a lot of people may be like, oh, I don't need somebody like Tackle. I used, you know, AllCloud led me through this technical change and we did all these things and I'm just going to go get listed. It's pretty easy. You know, the clouds have made it pretty simple. I'm going to get listed and the deals will come, right?
Brian Denker [00:23:09]:
And I think if anything we've kind of laughed about over the last five to seven years is that, like, if you list it, they will come. I mean, it's great to get listed and you have to have it there. But that really is the starting line of your work, not the finish line, right? And you can't say, cool, I'm listed, now I'm done. Let's just wait to see these deals come in. You have to kind of almost start at the very top, right? You have to actually create the deals, create the energy around selling with the clouds and then the listing is how you actually consummate that deal at the end. So what we do is we say, okay, company, like, how do you want to take this to market? Like, let's build an actual channel here that's going to be driven with the clouds, right? Let's figure out how to engage, let's figure out what area, maybe geographically, maybe vertically, do you want to attack on this. And like, let's take some prospects, let's go like co-sell those deals with that particular cloud and let's work directly to actually go co-sell a deal together, right? And we have a lot of tools that help that we have prospect, which gives you some propensity to like say, hey, let's register or focus on these 10, 20% of deals first. Let's register those, let's co-sell those.
Brian Denker [00:24:15]:
Let's actually meet the cloud representatives and talk about how we can sell this deal together, and then we drive towards the finish line, which is let's actually do this deal through Marketplace, right? That should be the end game, which is great. But the goal is to actually create a repeatable route to market that leverages the cloud's help and the cloud support. And that's what everybody's looking for, right? People are looking for like sales efficiency, more efficacy around prospects, more deal. And they're not just looking to kind of say, I, I want to list this thing and then somebody's going to come in like Walmart and buy it, right? It's not going to happen. You want to actually proactively go forward. So that's why working with a company is like tackle is so key. We're going to kind of give you the cheat codes to do that quickly and easily.
Brian Denker [00:25:00]:
We have everything from coaching to support to online enablement and all of that stuff. We of course take care of that technical stuff on the background, but what's really important is actually showing and teaching your folks so they lead with it, right? A lot of times Marketplace will get brought up at the ninth hour where it's like, oh, we're already agreed on a deal. How do you want to take this deal down, right?
Brian Denker [00:25:21]:
Let's lead with the cloud partnership upfront and Say like, oh, who do you work with? Let's figure out who that is. Why don't we engage that person so we can work together and take this deal through, let's register it, let's make sure everybody is compensated correctly and kind of navigate that. It's a totally different way of thinking versus just getting listed and then hoping these deals happen. You want to actually kind of come from the top down, use data to kind of bring in more efficacy and focus around your opportunities, then actually drive those opportunities with co-sell and then drive those towards marketplace in the end. And that is how Tackle can take the great work that AllCloud's doing with those companies like that and actually bring those to market.
Patrick Riley [00:26:01]:
And you want to do that all in one place, right? You want to try and centralize that so you're not using multiple tools or having to go to different locations. And I think that's the great thing about the new Tackle for Salesforce that we've launched and all our updates that, that we've spent, you know, a lot of time with our cloud provider partners on that platform is critical for SaaS workflows. As we know, you have a. How do you help customers with Salesforce? Is. Is there anything you're doing around improving their sales workflows? What does that look like?
Yeva Roberts [00:26:33]:
Salesforce is our other practice, right? That we specialize in. There's a lot of assumptions that can be made. So I feel like Salesforce itself is mission control for a lot of these SaaS companies. But what I see is the most barely scratched the surface in terms of knowing how to use it. So especially the truth of data, the goldmine of data that they're sitting on. What we do, our team, is we turn that data into action, right? So we help them. To your point, Patrick, there's a lot to be done in terms of streamlining sales service and even marketing workflows using Salesforce so that they're not tracking those activities, they're not just doing that, they're actually driving action. And what that action typically means for SaaS companies is engagement, customer engagement. That's really what it's all about when it comes to using Salesforce. And now with AI, of course, I wouldn't be doing my job if I did not mention AgentForce, right? It's an AI powered tool that Salesforce rolled out.
Yeva Roberts [00:27:26]:
So we are of course helping a lot of our clients be even more proactive because that's what really what this tool does and why that's so critical to this conversation. And goes back to making smarter, more connected experiences is that the expectation for a lot of SaaS users is that we're already doing it right? So by integrating AgentForce, you're delivering that kind of connected experience that users expect from companies today.
Patrick Riley [00:27:51]:
I briefly mentioned it, but when ISVs get enabled by AllCloud and they're saasified and now they actually understand how to use Salesforce properly within their ecosystem, is there anything else you want to add to around the Tackle for Salesforce application? How else that helps there where that could complement the work that AllCloud did?
Brian Denker [00:28:11]:
That was a pretty big change for us, realizing that exactly what you were saying. You want to do that in one tool, you don't want to have a bunch of different tools. Like traditionally, our whole, you know, Tackle experience is manifested in a web app that people can use and kind of log into and do things. But what we realized is that folks kind of want to live in the place where they already live. And that's Salesforce, right?
Brian Denker [00:28:31]:
When you look at the alliance managers to the rev ops teams that are doing the deals, to the field sellers that are aligning on prospects, all that's happening in major enterprise customers in Salesforce. So we created Tackle for Salesforce to bring this all to life and manifest the entire Tackle experience within Salesforce. And so what's been pretty cool is the ability to actually expand the way Tackle works within Salesforce to almost be like a live agent within Salesforce. So the web app and the Salesforce app are actually the same platform just being manifested in two different spots, Right.
Brian Denker [00:29:07]:
So it's not like we have a whole set of code for Salesforce and a whole set of code for the web app. It's actually one in the same. So you get the exact same experience in both. And manifesting all of that, being able to create private offers, have our back control, do all those things through Salesforce is pretty cool, right? And it just simplifies the way folks can use things and we're bringing the tool to them. They're happier and more aligned with using it than having to go to a different tool and actually go into something else.
Patrick Riley [00:29:31]:
It's interesting to contemplate on where this can continue to go. You're well positioned to help us understand some of that with both the marketing and obviously the cloud provider aspect of things. So looking ahead, what do you see next for cloud providers over the next couple of years? Are there particular trends that are going to define SaaS growth?
Yeva Roberts [00:29:54]:
Right now, honestly, I think it's everything that we've been talking about, right? So it's a trifecta. You have platforms, AIs and partnerships all teaming together. They SaaS providers need time to adopt that strategy or that way of thinking. So I think just to summarize, if AI is changing the game, and we've been talking about how it's step one is reshaping how SaaS providers think about their products and built them, then really it's about those partner ecosystems and taking advantage of them to think about them as key growth engines, which a lot of SaaS providers are still not doing that, and then turning to these marketplaces as real growth engines for their marketing, right? I think it's an exciting time, but I do think there needs to be a moment for adoption, right? So I think instead of jumping to the next big trend, I think there needs to be time to have people, process and systems come together to adopt this trifecta.
Patrick Riley [00:30:48]:
Denker, how about you? What do you see for the future?
Brian Denker [00:30:51]:
I see this all kind of coming together a little tighter. You know, I think when folks get engaged with like a single cloud, they think, oh, I can handle this, I can manage it, I can do it. You know, even a single product, right? Like, oh, I have a single SaaS product, I can manage it. When you're looking at this stuff at scale, like it becomes so complicated. As soon as you have more than one cloud, as soon as you have more than a couple products with within a couple SKUs, like this becomes pretty, pretty challenging to manage. And so I see the next wave is not like just getting going and doing your first couple deals and getting started, but like, hey, how do I actually take this to scale, right? You know, how do I actually take this and go, do you know, now there's five or six companies that have done over a billion dollars in AWS marketplace, right? And Tackle supported three or four of them. And it's like, that's a lot of revenue. And that is not just being done by like one person on a web app, right? That's being done federated out across multiple controls with multiple things.
Brian Denker [00:31:48]:
So the scale is something I see being huge. The other thing I see is like we're all the way back to the beginning, the partnerships coming together, folks like Tackle and AllCloud coming together, managing challenge, managing an outcome and a solution. I think this is where ISVs and even solution providers are looking to kind of go. They're saying, I'm going to sell an outcome that is very important to my end customer. And oh, by the way, it has to do with these Services and these products and these partners, right. And being able to put that all together in a single spot and manage that from a procurement standpoint is pretty huge, right?
Brian Denker [00:32:25]:
So lot of innovation happening there with the clouds. A lot of innovation with us. All of that manifesting through Salesforce and kind of coming together is pretty cool. So I see lots of partnerships continuing to grow, I see lots of partnerships continuing to expand and I see that even taking off internationally as well, right? I just think that there's so much untapped market opportunity when you get even beyond North America for this stuff to go. So pretty exciting. I mean there is a lot left to go on this stuff. There's a lot of runway.
Patrick Riley [00:32:55]:
Yeah, it's pretty cool this even this morning one of our customers and I were talking and they're looking at partnering with some of their competition in some places to fill gaps, to provide a better experience to customers. And it was all centered around marketplace because they could put together, you know, they're trying to figure out with one particular cloud provider in, in general, hey, we want to put a joint offering together. We want to make it one seamless experience. Like what does that look like? We're already at this like tipping point of these partnerships becoming bigger than you wouldn't have expected before. So that's really cool. All right, so let's leave our listeners something or watchers and something actionable that we can take away from this session. Other than Patrick obviously didn't sleep before today's session. If you each could give one piece of advice to a SaaS provider looking to modernize in this day and and world with one of the cloud providers or multiple cloud providers, very similar to the example you already gave us. What would that be?
Yeva Roberts [00:33:56]:
For me, it's what you were just talking about, Brian and Patrick, really, from the conversation you had this morning with your customer. It's not a zero sum game, right? So you have to be open-minded if you want to stand out at scale in a very, very crowded marketplace. I don't care which cloud marketplace you are listing in, it's very crowded. And I think the advice I would give is don't think that you can do it all by yourself, right? So don't go at it alone, right? Everything we talked about, and this is me wearing my partnerships hat on right now, is that's the story. Don't do it by yourself. Lean into those partnerships, use those marketplaces that they have to reach new buyers, right? And that's how you scale and stand out.
Brian Denker [00:34:33]:
These projects can be daunting and it can be very tricky to look at. You know, when you're, when you're saying, I have got to satisfy my product, I got to bring it to market. I don't know how to do any of this stuff. Like, I want to be like them. Like, how can I be like CrowdStrike? How can I be like Salesforce? We can simplify that for you. We can take that forward and do it in very sizable chunks that you can get done. You can work with AllCloud. We have maturity assessments, we have paths that we do together.
Brian Denker [00:34:59]:
We have go-to-market meetups and a lot of different things. So just get engaged with the process and reach out to both teams. Reach out to folks and get engaged. There's people doing it out there. It's still, it's still interesting, but it's not an experiment anymore. It's, it's the real deal. Like, I mean, there are billions and billions of dollars being processed. So, you know, if you're not there, you should get on the train pretty soon and you should reach out and get involved.
Patrick Riley [00:35:24]:
Awesome. Well, thank you both for joining us today on another episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market podcast. I'm your host, Patrick Riley. Today I was joined by Co-Founder of Tackle, Brian Denker and the VP of Marketing & Alliances for North America, Yeva Roberts. Thank you both for your time. Don't swipe left, don't swipe right. Click subscribe or like or whatever's at the bottom of your screen. And thank you both for joining me today.
Brian Denker [00:35:58]:
Thanks, Patrick. It's always fun, buddy. Love it. Thank you, Yeva. I appreciate it.
Yeva Roberts [00:36:01]:
Thank you for having me.
Patrick Riley [00:36:04]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Unlock Cloud Go-To-Market. For more resources on executing your cloud go to Market strategy, you can visit our website at tackle.io.