Making the case for a Cloud GTM Platform: How to convince your sales/partnerships leaders
The rise of hyperscaler marketplaces like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are revolutionizing how enterprises sell and buy software. With sales on these platforms projected to hit a staggering $85 billion by 2028, adopting a Cloud Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity.
But here’s the challenge: managing a Cloud GTM process manually can be overwhelming, riddled with inefficiencies and roadblocks that stall your momentum.
If you’re a salesperson trying to unlock the potential of this revenue channel, you know the uphill battle of convincing leadership to invest in the right tools.
The good news? A Cloud GTM platform is your solution, and this blog will show you why. We’ll dive into how these platforms streamline the complexity, accelerate time-to-market, and drive better results, making your case for investment undeniable.
Let’s explore how to elevate your sales strategy with the power of a Cloud GTM platform.
Why should your leadership care about a Cloud GTM platform?
Simple – to make Cloud Marketplace management and co-selling smoother and more efficient, improve attribution, understand customer purchase behavior, and maximize ROI from CSPs. We could go on and on.
But often, this is not enough to convince leadership to invest in a Cloud GTM platform.
So, you need to exercise your fine-tuned sales skills. The golden rule of sales is to put the customer first. You need to think about buyer needs, processes, and what results they can achieve using your solution.
This exact approach needs to be adopted while pitching a Cloud GTM platform to your manager. Lay out all the ways this platform can benefit them and your organization, make their job of reporting on your go-to-market approach easier, and gently propel them towards taking the deal (in this case, buying the Cloud GTM platform).
Let’s dig into the advantages.
Complete end-to-end visibility of the sales pipeline
“If it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.”
As a salesperson, you may have heard this quote from your manager one too many times. And they’re right. Your CRM should be your organization’s single source of truth when it comes to opportunities and sales pipeline.
But when you’re juggling with multiple cloud providers, data is fragmented. This means you work tirelessly to accumulate all the data in your CRM manually, which is prone to human error. And, inaccurate or incomplete information could snowball into misinformed business decisions.
Not to mention that updating CRM can take up to 3-10 hours of your week.
A Cloud GTM platform connects your CSP portals and in-house CRM, making it easier for opportunities to flow between the two in real-time — from lead through opportunity giving powerful attribution and sales data. This means you save up to 8 hours per week, and your manager gets complete visibility into the sales pipeline across multiple, multi-cloud marketplace listings.
Your pipeline review meetings get a whole lot easier when your sales manager has a pulse on what’s happening at any given point in time.
Works with your existing processes
One of the major pushbacks from executives while implementing new software is disruption. Most organizations are set in their ways and do not want to be deterred from it.
You cannot blame them for it. If it’s broken, don’t fix it, right?
But with evolving customer expectations and needs, it’s important to adopt new methodologies and strategies into your sales processes. Cloud Marketplaces are one of them.
The best part about a Cloud GTM platform is that it fits perfectly well into your existing workflows. In fact, enables the current process, and does not deviate from it.
A Cloud GTM platform, like Labra, integrates with your existing CRM and marketing tools. So there’s no additional engineering effort needed to set up integrations between the two platforms.
More efficient choice for cloud sales operations
Cloud commits are set to hit $500Bn in the next 18 months — which means your customers are more likely to be transacting on cloud marketplaces to make the most out of their cloud commits.
With companies like Crowdstrike already making $1B from the AWS marketplace alone, it’s all the more important to have a Cloud GTM strategy in place.
An effective Cloud GTM strategy involves Cloud Marketplace and co-sell, they often go hand-in-hand.
As Udi N, former VP of Channels and Alliances at Snyk, says, “[Hyperscalers] have built sophisticated co-sell flywheels. As a general rule, the major cloud providers are playing at a whole other level: their lead-sharing platforms, Cloud Marketplaces, structured processes, and sales incentives all create significant commercial velocity for themselves and their partners.”
It’s impossible to manage Cloud Marketplaces and co-sell without a system in place. A Cloud GTM platform enables you to smoothen out co-sell motions, reducing administrative overhead and empowering sales teams to focus on building relationships and closing deals. Read on to find out how Labra helped IBM cut down their AWS co-sell lifecycle time by 90%.
Additionally, it allows you to manage and edit multiple listings across cloud hyperscalers from a single platform — with zero engineering effort.
So your team can now update and manage listings regularly (with no time wasted!), and close deals faster!
4 ways Cloud GTM Platforms help sales teams
If you’ve made it this far, it’s highly likely you already know the pros of Cloud GTM platforms and how they can help you.
But we’ll list them down here to support your cohesive pitch plan to convince your manager to invest in a Cloud GTM platform.
Manage Private Offers more efficiently
When you create a Private Offer on your AWS Marketplace Management Portal, you add pricing details, legal terms, sales documents, and other necessary information. This offer is then extended to customers. However, preparing multiple Private Offers and sending them to customers can be tiresome and cause unexpected delays.
Additionally, Private Offers require inputs from various other teams – such as finance, deal desks, and cloud alliances. Manual processes and disparate systems hinder collaboration and cause further delays.
A Cloud GTM platform is equipped to handle multiple Private Offer creations. You can just create a template, and then duplicate it to further customize the offer based on individual customers. Additionally, you can track whether your buyer has viewed the Private Offer, opened it, or any other interaction. All this you can achieve right within your CRM as well!
Streamline co-selling with Cloud Service Providers (CSPs)
Sharing co-sell opportunities with Cloud Service Providers becomes a hassle when it’s a tedious, manual job. This alone takes up a lot of your time.
“We would have to copy and paste the data into the AWS ACE tool, which took up to 10 minutes per opportunity,” says Brennon Bissell, global AWS business development executive at IBM.
A Cloud GTM platform automates this process by providing a bi-directional sync between your CSP portal and in-house CRM.
Manage multiple listings across marketplaces
Your marketplace listings serve as a digital storefront for your product. So, it’s important that you keep it updated and fresh, so your customers know exactly what you offer, the value, and purchase your product.
However, maintaining multiple listings is difficult, as the manual effort needed to update the listing is quite high. This effort compounds when multiple clouds enter the scene.
A Cloud GTM Platform, like Labra, collates all your listings in one single platform. You can update your listing in a matter of minutes.
Oversee marketplace and co-sell operations from your CRM
This is probably the biggest value of all. With a Cloud GTM platform, your referrals, private offers, and co-sell operations can be managed within your CRM – a platform you’re all too familiar with.
All the processes build on your existing CRM objects with easy and automated field mappings and also have pre-made flows and dashboards for your convenience. Platforms like Labra integrate with Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and other sales tools you use every day.
Succeed in your Cloud GTM journey with the right partner
Remember: convincing leadership to invest in a Cloud GTM platform isn’t just about showcasing a shiny new tool — it’s about demonstrating how the platform and the people behind it help you address real challenges, drive efficiency, accelerate results, accelerate results, and drive real ROI and revenue efficiency giving access to new purchasing channels.
With Labra, you gain more than an industry-leading CRM integration and Cloud Marketplace and Co-sell Platform. You gain a partner who is committed to your success on the Cloud and invested in your journey — one validated by AWS as enterprise-grade!
Our team offers support throughout your journey and we are constantly enhancing the platform and releasing new solutions that drive automation and ROI to make your sales processes faster and more efficient. All this means you get to enjoy the fruits of your success without worrying about engineering lift.
