Before rush hour became a national pastime, cars were luxuries reserved for the rich. That changed in 1913 when Henry Ford invented the assembly line — a composable way to streamline operations across his production chain. This turned his ambition of creating "a motor car for the great multitude" into reality.
Ford's legacy far surpasses his billion-dollar automobile company. He leaves us with the lesson that to scale the adoption of any new technology — from the factory floor to modern revenue channels — you must first scale its operations.
While $85 billion of software sales is expected to flow through cloud marketplaces, only the top 20% of sellers drive about 80% of the revenue throughput on this channel.
Like the pre-1913 automobile industry, the problem remains the same: underdeveloped or under-supported revenue operations.
Buyers on cloud marketplaces expect the same quick commerce experience they find in retail marketplaces. Slow or manual operations frustrate them, creating sales delays and forcing sellers to revert to traditional, costly selling methods.
This article explores how to build a cloud marketplace operations setup that aligns with your existing sales operations, drives greater adoption across your organization, and helps achieve the outcomes promised by a cloud go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
Like in Ford’s assembly line, no tool or infrastructure in a software business works in isolation. Your revenue operations (RevOps) experts often need to shoulder the daunting task of integrating a new GTM channel with your existing tech ecosystem, building workflows for your sales or partnership leaders, and unifying reporting and analytics.
This backbreaking setup often triggers the primary resistance to any new channel. But the challenge is a bit more pronounced for cloud marketplaces.
Cloud marketplaces are digital platforms managed by hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). They enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to sell products directly to businesses, offering:
While ISVs are responsible for launching and maintaining their software listings, cloud marketplaces handle critical processes like billing, metering, and disbursements, allowing them to scale by reducing operational load.
For ISVs, cloud marketplaces present opportunities to:
Cloud marketplace automation does not have years of experience and adoption behind it. While it integrates multiple motions across sales, channels, and partnerships, it also has an initially demanding approach to go-to-market operations.
Traditional GTM tools that sales, partnerships, and operations teams are accustomed to typically focus on a single part of the sales process. For example, CRM systems handle pipeline automation, while marketing tools manage lead nurturing.
Source: CS2
Cloud marketplaces, however, combine solution discovery, transactions, billing, disbursements, and product deployment into a single platform — one that they govern. This integration helps eliminate the sustained pressures of maintaining a fragmented setup comprising billing, invoicing, contracting, payment processing, and disbursements.
The trade-off is that vendors must comply with new channel operations requirements defined by hyperscalers, requiring significant upfront effort during the setup phase.
Despite initial overhead, cloud marketplaces generate significant ROI for many businesses. Companies like Pinecone, Honeycomb, and CloudZero have earned millions in revenue while scaling efficiently by minimizing long-term operations costs.
Source: Clazar
CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Snowflake have already surpassed a billion dollars in cloud marketplace revenue. Canalys named AWS one of the largest software distributors globally, and a Forrester Consulting report found that businesses selling through the AWS marketplace experienced 50% faster deal closures and 4-5 times larger deal sizes compared to non-marketplace transactions.
The benefits extend to buyers as well. Forrester found that software purchasers on the Microsoft Azure marketplace benefited from end-to-end transaction management services, resulting in a 75% reduction in new vendor onboarding time and 50% effort conservation during procurement.
By implementing cloud marketplaces, RevOps teams aren't just creating a new revenue channel; they're shifting focus from new earnings to greater revenue efficiency and better customer experiences. This approach aligns departmental goals of enhancing customer and GTM experiences and lowering acquisition costs with broader organizational objectives of increasing net cash inflows and net revenue retention (NRR).
Many businesses abandon cloud marketplaces prematurely due to operational conflicts with existing revenue operations setups. This creates friction for both sales representatives and RevOps experts, who must reconcile competing priorities.
To prevent cloud marketplace operations from cannibalizing existing RevOps processes, we must understand the sources of friction.
In 2023, Salesforce reported that two-thirds of sales representatives struggled with tool bloat. By 2024, companies were reducing SaaS tools to combat this issue. The last thing your reps need today is yet another addition to their learning cycle.
Cloud marketplace transactions occur in third-party environments, with processes regulated by hyperscalers. This often clashes with internal revenue operations. Each hyperscaler has its own partner portal, further complicating matters.
Source: AWS blog
For cloud marketplace deals, sales teams must:
These additional processes consume bandwidth, delay deal completions, and reduce the time-to-value from cloud marketplaces as a channel.
In December 2005, a trader at Mizuho Securities made a critical typing error, triggering a $225 million loss on a stock trade — an incident severe enough to potentially erase the firm's $233 million quarterly profit.
Source: Wall Street Journal report
Human errors can lead to significant financial losses, which is why businesses establish multiple guardrails to prevent errors in offer creation and contracting.
This includes:
In cloud marketplaces, these challenges are amplified by the unique demands of each hyperscaler:
This leaves businesses vulnerable to data governance and compliance errors that can delay deal cycles, disrupt financial reporting, and damage partner relationships.
For Nadav Tzuker, product partnerships manager at Wiz, “cloud marketplaces are inevitable” as a revenue channel. They simplify procurement and offer greater sales reach through co-sell partnerships.
This opens up several opportunities for ISVs who can:
Unlike traditional sales processes, where sales and partnerships teams have little overlap, co-selling with hyperscalers blends the two teams and their motions, creating a unique, collaborative approach. This relationship goes beyond software distribution to involve conjoined solution-building, shared goals, and mutual deal strategies.
In turn, they bring new challenges to cloud marketplace operations:
To avoid having these challenges cascade into greater disadvantages, RevOps needs to build new processes and align them with its existing business model.
In the following section, we explore how ISVs can simplify cloud marketplace adoption by building operational frameworks that align with their organization’s unique needs, ensuring both short-term adaptability and long-term growth.
Jay McBain, chief analyst at Canalys, said, “We’re actually hearing buyers tell us that they would buy a product 80% as good as the next if it worked better in their environment.”
The growing demand for faster time-to-value (TTV) in software procurement puts pressure on sales teams to accelerate their timelines. Any new tool implemented should support this need, with higher productivity being a key requirement in sales and RevOps today.
When implementing cloud marketplace operations, it's crucial to avoid introducing new rituals and training that may lead to channel abandonment. Instead, focus on simple, scalable solutions that build on your teams’ existing processes.
Progressively, more business teams are tying their end goals to revenue outcomes. This creates a cascading effect, where more business teams — like partnerships through channel-based distribution or product teams through product-led growth — contribute to your revenue.
Traditionally, these teams would build their own independent deal desks, but on cloud marketplaces, software sales and distribution are viewed as parts of the same play. Your true cloud marketplace deal desk ends up looking something like this:
Source: Clazar
Like with Ford’s assembly line, each individual team has a unique, often repetitive role in every cloud marketplace transaction.
This is where task automation lends value. By automating repetitive tasks like offer creation, contracting, approvals, and reporting, teams that drive your revenue on cloud marketplaces can avoid getting in the way of each other. Here’s how:
Hyperscalers prefer their partner portal for marketplace opportunities, while sales teams favor their CRM. Integrating these systems eliminates duplicate data entry and offers several advantages:
Collaborate with your development and partnerships teams to build key integrations, such as automated opportunity syncing and real-time deal status updates. These integrations streamline processes and improve efficiency in managing marketplace deals.
Most deals, especially standard subscription offers, follow a consistent contracting process. Standardizing templates for common deal types offers several benefits:
On cloud marketplaces, you have two EULA options:
Standardizing templates streamlines the contracting process, reducing time-to-close and improving overall efficiency.
Cloud marketplaces aim to balance disruption and integration, offering familiar features while adding incentives for high-performing sellers.
This often leads to a “too many cooks” problem involving multiple teams:
This complex web of interdependencies can cause delays and errors. Implementing intelligent workflows can streamline the process by:
Couple these workflows with bi-directional sync to allow teams to work efficiently from their preferred platforms (e.g., CRM for sales or accounting software for finance).
By automating approvals, you can significantly reduce coordination time, minimize errors, and accelerate deal closure.
Offering uniform access to cloud marketplace dashboards across your organization may seem simple, but it can lead to:
These risks are amplified when working with channel partners and hyperscaler sales teams.
While RBAC is standard in most revenue systems, cloud marketplace partner portals often lack built-in RBAC containers. This forces businesses to choose between assigning a single owner or sharing unrestricted access.
Common workarounds include:
A more scalable solution is to use cloud GTM platforms that combine marketplace operations, deal desk, and sales analytics with RBAC provisions. These platforms allow interdependent teams to collaborate effectively while maintaining appropriate access controls.
In 2024, the channel ecosystem grew 14%, despite widespread tech layoffs, with over 96% of transactions being partner-assisted. Simultaneously, buyers are signing more expensive, long-term contracts with major cloud providers.
Source: Clazar
Partnerships won’t just play a dominant role, the choice of partners will be even more critical in software sales.
For RevOps, the challenge lies in simplifying collaboration and partnerships without overburdening revenue teams. Automation and streamlined stakeholder management are crucial to achieving this balance.
Co-sell opportunities in cloud marketplace partner portals often have:
These factors complicate what should be a straightforward sync process.
To address this, RevOps teams should:
The result is a highly automated ingestion of co-sell opportunities that requires no extra work, despite the need for custom properties.
Hyperscaler sellers often juggle multiple ISV partnerships simultaneously. To maintain a valuable partnership, you must act with urgency and accuracy, which can be challenging when your revenue teams are monitoring various channels.
RevOps can support this by creating conditional triggers that alert the right stakeholder to any new entry or change within an opportunity. Standard deal notifications include:
Tracking customer interactions and purchases through cloud marketplaces is crucial, whether they're buying through public offers or negotiating with your sales reps. This insight informs future decisions and helps you improve your GTM roadmap.
However, tracking the various conversion paths can be complex. RevOps can simplify this process by establishing clear rules for opportunity attribution across systems, such as:
Any sales motion, cloud marketplace or otherwise, relies on accurate data to function well. Every individual business team generates business-critical data within their own systems of preference, such as:
Efficient data synchronization ensures that your cloud sales assembly line runs smoothly by connecting all interdependent systems to share accurate, real-time information with every stakeholder.
Here’s how RevOps teams can make it happen:
Cloud marketplace operations require more than one-way updates. For instance, when your sales team creates an opportunity in their CRM after speaking with a prospect from your cloud marketplace listing, this information must automatically flow to the hyperscaler partner portal for cloud sales assistance. Data syncs should be bidirectional, ensuring both your systems of record are always updated in real-time without manual effort from your revenue organization.
With multiple systems prioritizing different fields (e.g., CRMs for deal progress and partner portals for hyperscaler incentives), RevOps teams must establish a single source of truth.
This involves:
Periodic data audits can identify discrepancies early, preventing small issues from becoming larger problems. By proactively reviewing synchronized data, RevOps teams maintain high standards of data integrity and compliance.
The founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd said, “Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.”
Automation, workflows, and data guardrails are all derivatives of a thoughtful operations strategy for a new channel. And more often than not, the key lies in extreme simplicity. Henry Ford didn’t force his workers to adopt a new process; he broke the existing one into manageable parts, fostering a culture of ownership and collaboration.
Cloud marketplace operations follow similar principles. By breaking down tasks like:
...into thoughtful, consumable systems, RevOps can not only streamline complex internal structures but also prepare for future scalability.
Even after introducing his revolutionary assembly line, Ford took six years to deliver the first truly affordable car. But when they did, they made sure they were equipped to handle scale.
Pete Goldberg, the director of Alliances, Own Company (from Salesforce), said,
“What I found is that many companies ended up launching their marketplace listing without thinking it through. Fast forward three or four years, and you're doing a few hundred transactions…all of a sudden, your back office hits a bandwidth problem.
They're trying to figure out how to reconcile 500 transactions, and they're not really equipped ... cause they didn't care earlier. I've watched it happen in a couple of places where, all of a sudden, this huge wrench gets thrown in the back office process because they didn't really plan for it at the beginning.”
For your operations strategy to stick, it needs to be thoughtful. It needs to be comprehensive yet flexible. It needs to accommodate the most pressing needs of your revenue (sales and partnerships), legal, and finance teams early on, yet be mobile enough to involve new stakeholders as you grow.
RevOps leaders should consider these elements when building their cloud marketplace operations to ensure long-term success and scalability.
The most scalable systems rely on comprehensive datasets. Before setting up operations for a new channel, take stock of all disparate tools and data reserves. Work with respective teams to structure available data by order of importance. This exercise helps build a strong understanding of where critical deal context is hidden and what integrations are essential when adding a new channel.
Establish a centralized hub where all marketplace operations converge. This platform should allow:
Clazar finds that cloud marketplaces can drive up to 30% of new revenue for many businesses. Attributing new revenue to the right channel, partner, and AE is crucial. Understanding top revenue sources, performers, and partnerships enables data-driven decisions and resource allocation for higher returns.
Manual processes in cloud marketplace operations will inevitably break under pressure. Automate high-impact tasks such as approval workflows, deal notifications, and data synchronization between CRMs and hyperscaler partner portals. Automation reduces manual intervention, accelerates time-to-quote (TQQ), and ensures data consistency across systems, allowing teams to focus on strategy rather than administration.
Cloud marketplaces must remain iterative to outperform traditional channels. As new capabilities are added (e.g., AWS added 45 new features to their marketplace in 2024), it necessitates new integrations, mapping, training modules, and solution design. Invest in ongoing training and enablement for both your teams and the rest of the organization on marketplace-specific workflows, tools, and best practices to remain agile.
Enterprise cloud commitments have surged past $380 billion, creating new opportunities for software vendors in cloud marketplaces. Cloud marketplaces bring you closer to buyers, manage billing, transactions, and processing, and, when implemented correctly, reduce long-term operational work.
By following the solutions outlined in the article, RevOps can evolve from revenue enablers to revenue accelerators.
Scaling revenue on cloud marketplaces requires a strong go-to-market approach. Our in-depth guide on go-to-market strategy will help you position your business for success.
Edited by Shanti S Nair
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