AWS re:Invent 2020: How to sell on AWS Marketplace

hello my name is chris cruz and i'm the director of business development for aws marketplace service catalog and control tower my organization is responsible for onboarding isvs and aws marketplace and then putting together go to market programs so they can drive attention to their listings i've been with the marketplace team now for five years and i've seen over a thousand isvs launched into the marketplace catalog since joining the organization so today we're going to talk about how to sell an aws marketplace and some of the best practices that you can take advantage to drive attention to your listings on our catalog so before we get into aws marketplace it's important to understand the thinking that drives our behavior which we call our mental models within amazon and aws now mental models are really our ideas on how the world works otherwise known as our beliefs and their deeply embedded patterns of behavior and reasoning that help us guide on how to be more effective now the first mental model that i wanted to talk about is the 550 5500 model this mental model really guides our behavior in terms of how enterprise software is purchased by large organizations so when we take a look at a large organization they'll have an i.t budget and what we find is about 15 to 25 of that it budget is dedicated to software now when you peel the onion back a little bit further what we find is about half of that software budget is really tied up with five vendors on average these are the usual suspects this is oracle microsoft ibm and aws has a variety of solutions to support these types of technologies running on our platform marketplace however is not a good fit for these types of technologies these are typically vendor managed relationships and these are not the isvs that we typically focus on for selling through aws marketplace now when you go below the top five what we then find is that a large or enterprise on average has 50 isvs that are strategic in nature these are isvs that they've built up a skill set around they typically have a pretty large spend with that company and they're strategic for how they are migrating to aws or operating on aws aws marketplace is a great fit for these types of isvs so if you're an isv that falls into this bucket this is a very good way for you to distribute your products to aws customers then below the top 50 and five we then find that an enterprise on average will have upwards of 500 separate isvs that are being used across the organization these are typically used at smaller departmental levels and are also important for that enterprise as they migrate and operate in the cloud aws marketplace is a great fit for these types of isvs as well because we give you a great way to sell to aws customers in a great way to accelerate your transactions so that brings us to aws marketplace aws marketplace is really a curated digital software catalog that allows you to find try and buy and provision software and data products on aws it allows our customers to get the software very quickly they can actually find the product by going through our catalog in just a few clicks they can actually deploy that into the virtual cloud environment we allow customers to pay as they go for buying third-party products when they buy aws services they're typically buying them in a consumption format and they want to have the ability to buy third-party software in that same consumption look and feel and aws marketplace is really the enabler to working with that third-party community and working with yourselves to get your package software up and ready to be consumed in that consumption format and finally itabus marketplace verifies all these technologies and this is a great value add for our customers and something you can leverage as an isv selling through aws marketplace we actually work with you as you onboard into aws marketplace we go through user documentation we make sure your machine images are all ready to go and the reason why we do that is it really established a trusted relationship between aws marketplace and our customers and as an isv that adheres to what we do and our standards it really provides that trusted relationship down to your software for an aws customer so how does aws marketplace work right and while we share the name with our retail brethren what i would encourage you to think of aws marketplace as is an end-to-end supply chain on how a customer of aws gets third-party software into their environment so when you take a look at this slide on the left hand side you see the isv this is you that's trying to sell through aws marketplace and it doesn't matter if you're a software vendor or a data provider you can use marketplace to distribute your products to aws customers so on that side of the equation what we do is we provide a whole series of apis that allow you to automate your experience working with aws when i've worked with isvs across the years one of the things that they're really looking for is how do they actually automate that experience selling to an aws customer they want to partner with aws but they can't do that in a manual nature they need to have some automation aws marketplace is part of that automation story we provide you with apis that allow you to publish your technologies directly out of your own tool chain environments directly up to aws marketplace it can literally be a command out of your own ci cd pipelines to publish to aws marketplace we then give you a variety of different apis to integrate to you that actually let you integrate directly to our billing platform so this effectively allows you as an isv or data provider to literally put your transaction on the aws bill we then collect all of those transactions across all of our aws customers using your technologies on a monthly basis we then disperse that back to you in one lump sum every month and so if you're looking for a way to consolidate your disbursements aws marketplace is a great place to take a look at and we also give you access to our taxation platform so you as an isv can plug in what your tax nexus is and then we will actually calculate out the tax that needs to be collected by each transaction anywhere in the united states that that's purchased and so that's a great value add that you get by virtue of selling through a business marketplace now on the right hand side of this equation is the buyer and when we look at the buyer we provide a bunch of experiences to them that make them like to use marketplace to get third-party technologies first of all we deploy the entire catalog to any region when we go live marketplace is considered a day one service so when we launch in a new region aws marketplace is one of those services that is their day one and so our customers love the fact that they can get third party technology regardless of whether development teams are sitting they might have a team in the united states maybe a team in europe maybe a team down in apj they can actually get that technology regardless of where those teams are sitting they can discover test and purchase products directly out of the catalog and then once they've done that we actually entitle them to use that product we tag that transaction and then allow them to deploy that into their virtual private cloud once they've done that we then meter and bill all that consumption on a monthly basis and then we total that up and we put that directly on their bill now when we look at the aws customer we affectionately delineate our customer audience between what we refer to as the nascar audience and the volvo audience the nascar teams are your developer teams they want to get technology and they want to go they want to be able to deploy things on demand and so we have to add features on the buyer side that really satisfy the developers that they can get the technology that they need and get it very quickly so they can immediately start to work with that product on the other side of that spectrum is the volvo crowd this is your centralized governance teams things like architecture finance procurement legal and they want to go fast but they need to have some controls and some governance around that third-party software and so for the buyer community what we do is we consistently add features that support both the developer as well as those centralized teams so things like private marketplace as an example that allows you to curate the overall aws catalog down to a set of standards is a feature that we've launched to address the needs of the centralized governance teams same thing with procurement system integration so if we actually need to have marketplace fit into a system like ariba or koopa we can actually integrate into those environments as their system of record for procurement now the entire center part of this slide is great from a self-service transaction perspective now what we started to see was that invariably a customer would want to negotiate a subscription price and everything on the aws website and through our console experience is really pay as you go and so we didn't have a great way to facilitate a negotiated transaction that's specific between an isv and a customer and to address that three years ago what we launched was private offers so private offers allows you as an isv to submit a negotiated transaction directly to an aws customer you can upload a eula that is specific to that transaction and if the customer hits accept it then goes directly on their bill you can even establish the times that we need to actually build a customer so if you want to have us build a customer on a quarterly basis a monthly basis an annual basis over a one year two or three year period you could also do so via private offers this really opened up the aperture on the types of transactions that you could actually complete through aws marketplace now soon after we launched this we had a number of our customers and isvs come to us and say this is great but you're missing a step here we work with channel partners to actually complete those larger subscriptions how do i bring my channel partner in the mix but i still want to use aws marketplace to address that request what we launched was channel partner private offers so this is a feature that now allows you as an isv to authorize your preferred channel partners for aws marketplace you can plug in the margin that they receive on your transactions and then they are free to then take that margin and make private offers to all of their customers on the customer side they would get a private offer from their preferred channel partner for you as an isv and if they hit accept it then follows the same paradigm that they just walked through for private offers and our self-service transactions so this again opened up the aperture even further and allowed our channel partners now to finally leverage aws marketplace in a meaningful and an automated way and so when you look at this slide in its entirety this is how i would encourage you to think about aws marketplace it's a end-to-end supply chain for how you bring software into your environment regardless if you're selling direct or through channel partners aws marketplace can provide you with that mechanism to do so now i broke our buyers out effectively between the the nascar crowd and the volvo crowd but the reality is when we take a look at our buyer community what we find in an enterprise is there's really a whole bunch of different domains that actually purchase software so when you sell something like storage as an example it's going to be sold to that storage administrator conversely if you're buying something like a security product it might be your ciso's office which is on the right path for the slide and then of course you're still going to have those centralized procurement legal and i.t and finance teams that are going to weigh in on that decision then to complicate things even further if you're selling line of business software application software then you typically have to work with a departmental cio which is on the middle top part of this chart and they might have a business relationship office that liaisons back to that cio's office but you have a whole other set of constituents that weigh in to buy those types of technologies and then we also see the rise of the enterprise intelligence team so these are where we're seeing data lakes formed and we're starting to see big data and this is also where machine learning is starting to creep into the equation each of these domains have different buying needs and require different types of software and so we also keep this in our mind as a mental model on how software is also purchases there's different domains and different stakeholders and software is rarely bought by one individual in an organization it's typically bought by a team of people and so we need to be aware that from a marketplace perspective and we serve those constituents across the board so here's an example of some of the software that we actually break out by domain so if you take a look at that previous slide if you just look at the cio's office these are the more popular categories that we actually sell to those types of buyers you can see we have lots of great selection of operating systems and security storage networking database we cover a majority of the market leading technologies in all these categories and we've got a really rich catalog that our customers like and so by using isv selling through aws marketplace you're able to leverage the fact that it's a catalog that they're already coming to for other technologies and they can now come to our catalog for your technology should you listed marketplace so why is an isv why should you sell an aws marketplace and so there's a variety of benefits but these are the three that always kind of bubble to the top when i talk to my customers and i talk to other isvs that sell through the business marketplace one it allows you to sell the way your customers want to buy our customers are used to buying in consumption format and they want to buy third-party technologies in a consumption format and they want to buy and they want to just put it on their aws build that's how they're buying other aws services today and so by virtue of 738 marketplace you're available to streamline your software procurement for that aws customer second it allows you to grow your customer base aws marketplace has 300 000 active customers using our platform any given month and on top of that we have over millions of customers using aws and so by putting your products in need to be used marketplace you're getting access to this new set of customers in an easy way to sell to them and this allows you to grow your customer base and get new logos and new customers for your technology and finally we improve the efficiency and profitability of how you sell what we find is by virtue of just putting on the aws bill we're going to be able to accelerate your transactions by selling through abuse marketplace we have a number of our isvs that have told us that they've actually been able to accelerate their transaction transactions upwards of fifty percent faster by selling through abyss marketplace this means you get your deals done faster and that increases your profitability now it's important to list in marketplace but then it's also important to drive attention and awareness to your marketplace listings and to do that what we've done from a marketplace perspective is we've set up a whole variety of different go to market programs that you can leverage as part of your marketplace listing on the left hand side you'll see that we do a number of things from digital demand so is always promoting marketplace as a channel to buy technologies so we have a number of thematic campaigns that we run on an evergreen basis through aws marketplace to promote those types of categories and invariably we grab uh specific examples of isvs to heavily participate in those types of campaigns we support those on a global basis we run those uh in north america europe we run those in apj and we really focus on use cases when we do those types of solutions because we're looking to bring in early stage buyers to actually take a look at those marketplace listings that invariably drives attention to the products that you put into indivis marketplace we also offer managed seller go to market programs so these are traditional go to market programs that involve market demand funds and their specific campaigns between marketplace and an isv typically there's some kind of call to action maybe a webinar and we have a specific use case that we're positioning and then we will go and promote that to segments that you want to focus on whether it might be an enterprise segment territory segment or a geographic segment and those are specific to individual isvs and their listings the radio-based marketplace now we also get a lot of feedback that our isb community says hey can you just give us some things that we can go fast and go do things ourselves but get your best practices so the final two buckets you see on the right hand side these are designed for those types of requests in mind we launched a concierge service this year and this is basically an agency-led go to market service that we've curated for aws marketplace we've hand-selected a number of different agencies that we can point you towards that are ready and knowledgeable about how to promote a marketplace listing we can supplement that with our own market demand funds and our own content so you really have a concierge type of approach to actually driving your marketplace listings or if you just want to get our best practice content you can also do that by accessing the seller go to market academy so the seller go to market academy is really a go to market playbook that has all kinds of best practices that we've gleaned over the years working with other isvs so you're gonna have templates in there wireframes sample emails all kinds of curated content that you can grab and go and do your own campaigns and know that we've already taken a look at that we've certified it and we've also seen other isvs had success with that so we have this academy approach that allows you just to grab our content and go and do your own marketing activities so why do customers buy 3d abyss marketplace right and again we have a variety of different things that we get from buyers in terms of the feedback but some of the more popular ones include flexible consumption and contract models they love the ability to be able to pay as they go and buy third-party software in the same way that they buy aws services they also love having the ability to have flexible contracts and flexible payment terms and we've enabled that through aws marketplace our flexible payment schedule will allow you to actually define the dates that you want us to actually bill your customer for your software you can literally plug them in on a calendar and then we will actually put those on the bill for those months and build those customers accordingly our customers also give us great feedback that were it's very easy and secure deployment through aws marketplace you can deploy these products instantly into your virtual private clouds and this allows them to move quickly but also have that sense of assurance that what they're deploying is going to be ready to go because there's a variety of places that you can get third party technology there's lots of different get repositories out there but when they get through aws marketplace they know they're having a little bit more of a secure experience by virtue of running on aws and the ability that we've actually gone in and curated that listing and then finally what they really like is the consolidated billing from aws they just love the fact that they can put your spend on their bill this is a great way to really accelerate your transactions because they're already established they already have those budgets to sign and they already know how to put other products on the aws bill and so this is a great way to really accelerate your transactions and to kind of supplement these three areas you can see here's a couple quotes from some of our customers from simplepay from goodwill industries and makerbot that testify to those three areas but those are the ones when i've worked with customers and isvs again these are some of the top reasons that bubble up on why customers want to buy through abyss marketplace now one of the other things that we enable for you as the isv is to go to market quicker right what we're trying to do with aws marketplace is really provide you with an improved experience to release your products the delivery and also tweak adoption we're gonna streamline that flow of engagement so when you do a marketing campaign you can drive them from your campaign directly to your listing page and that just provides a great continuum on how you actually market and promote your listings marketplace is great and that also allows you to iterate your products to meet your customer needs it's very easy to upload new versions change things on your listing page and so you can get customer feedback and instantly respond to that and use marketplace to be that vehicle that you actually respond to those customer requests you can upload new versions uh within a day and it's very simple to actually post that and then your customers have access to that technology and this also helps eliminate technical debt right so when you take a look at how aws marketplace is set up again because customers can move to quick new versions it really helps eliminate the backlog that you might have for just publishing that technology so when you look at all three of these elements in combination it ultimately helps you as an isv go to market faster now i talked a little bit about our curated marketplace experience i want to spend a little bit more time talking about that in detail so when we talk about aws marketplace we refer to it as a public managed catalog and what we mean by that is we have a couple different ways that we curate manage that experience so first of all we have a 24x7 catalog operation team that is constantly monitoring our catalog we're looking for different things so as an example if there's a cve for a particular linux operating system we will immediately pick up that cve we'll take a look at our catalog we'll look at what listings might be using that particular linux operating system notify those isvs notify customers so that you have this high touch experience and you know making sure that we're monitoring for anything like that right we continually scan the catalog so we have scanning technology that is continuously scanning the catalogs to make sure that nothing creeps into the catalog that might not be a good customer experience and because of that we're also able to then give suggestions to our isvs on how they can better improve their listings through our operations team we also provide a great self-service experience from aws marketplace you can submit a new listing you can update your information you can do that all through our marketplace portal right and so it's very easy to manage and maintain these listings you can also go in and you can sunset some of your listings or different instance types and then we provide all this information back to you we've got all kinds of reporting that you have access to where we literally will drop your information into an s3 bucket and you can query that data similar to a data warehouse which we also have an api that's available for you to take advantage of so what does this really look like so i'm going to give you a couple screenshots here just to give you a little bit of a sense of the feel that you get when you log into the aws marketplace portal the database marketplace portal is really your central hub to manage your marketplace listings right and so you'll log into our portal and what you're going to see in our portal is there's 10 different sections in here that help you manage your listings so you can actually have a place where you're managing your machine images your amazon machine images you can create an image build through aws marketplace there's content there in terms of how you file upload and how you manage your images your logos through abyss marketplace there's a whole variety of settings in there that manage your banking information your tax profile we have tabs in there to manage your private offer business so you can actually see what private offers are out there and which ones have been accepted and there's a bunch of information in there in terms of the marketing results so we actually feed marketing data into your marketplace portal so you can actually see the results of your marketing activity we have support information in there and then other reports that just give you a variety of information on your marketplace activities anything from a daily transaction report that shows how many people subscribe to your product on a daily basis and we also summarize all that information across a monthly report in terms of who's subscribed who we've collected from where's your revenue going so there's a whole variety of rich reports that you have access to by virtue of using aws marketplace and also also allowing you to create those listings there's all kinds of automated tools in there to create a listing directly through the aws marketplace site and so this is kind of a screenshot of that self-service listing process but again you know it's very intuitive and you can manage your product listings directly from aws marketplace as i mentioned you can submit new produ products to the work self-service workflow and you can edit those listings all by going into marketplace and the website experience this is a place that we've invested in quite heavily in the last number of years for some isvs that have been with our catalog for you know some time we used to do this through a spreadsheet which is very manual in nature but marketplace now being an eight-year-old service we've been able to automate a lot of the self-service capability and a lot of the functionality that you need just to manage your listings you can just go into the marketplace portal and you no longer need to use our metadata spreadsheet to upload that data back and forth and as i mentioned we provide a rich set of reporting and commerce analytics on your marketplace listings historically these were reports that were provided to you in just a csv format but earlier this year we launched the ability to provide you with all this data through an api so as i mentioned this data literally gets dropped into an s3 bucket that is specific to you and then you have the ability to query that data and actually do your own manipulation that data and pull that into your own data warehouse or your own data lake to actually manage your listings or integrate to other systems of record so this has been a big request that we've had from our isv community and was really happy when this got released earlier this year and we're excited about the prospects here because we're only going to continue to add additional data elements into this data setup and allow you to access that all via that api and as i mentioned seller private offers is also available through the marketplace portal this is a screenshot that really shows you how simple it is you literally go into marketplace you select the product that you want to make a private offer to you you plug in the aws account id of the customer that you want to submit that to you you would hit next on this screen you can upload a eula put in the price that's available to that customer hit submit and you're done and it's a very easy workflow we've had a lot of a lot of our isvs have really leveraged this in a big way and it's really become a key part of how they're going to market and they've really just operationalized how they use aws marketplace private offers to sell to aws customers it also allows you to set expiration dates and term dates in here so there's a lot of flexibility but it's ultimately a feature that allows you to sell to our aws customers in a way that they want to buy but still sell those larger negotiated subscriptions that you ultimately want to drive to increase your overall revenue now one of the other things that we've invested in over the years is how do we improve the contracting process through aws marketplace and to do that we have two different contract programs that you have at your disposal we have standard contract and enterprise contract for aws marketplace standard contract is a public-facing eula that you can incorporate into your listings what we're doing with this is we're actually driving all of our isvs and our catalog onto the same eula and this is a great buyer benefit because now when a customer's looked at one of those eulas they've effectively looked at it for all the other isvs that have adopted that eula and it really just shrinks down that legal negotiation component of software buying enterprise contract is really a superset of standard contract which just has a couple additional elements around things like limits of liability an enterprise contract is designed for much larger negotiated contracts and it again is trying to provide a higher level baseline so that you have a much shorter legal negotiation for any contract that you're driving through abs marketplace these are both available to you as an isv and i would strongly encourage you to adopt the standard contract to something we launched earlier this year we've had great adoption and so the more isvs that join in we just get the larger network effect that you can take advantage of and as i mentioned back on the nascar slide we also offer marketplace private offers through our channel partners so this is something we launched about two years ago and it has also had a lot of success so if you're an isv that's looking to sell to aws customers but leverage your channel ecosystem or find new channel partners then i would strongly encourage you to take a look at our channel partner private offer feature which we launched and really has gone gone big in a in a good way in 2020 so to get started with aws marketplace it's very straightforward you just register as a new seller i've done this myself it takes about five minutes the thing that took the longest was to find my routing number so it's very straightforward on how to register you then integrate to marcus ap apis to submit your product for listing and away you go so it's very straightforward and it's a very easy process and i encourage you to try it out yourself because you'll see how simple it is to do and with that i thank you for attending this session hopefully you learned some things on how to sell on aws marketplace my team is standing by in order to help you out and get your marketplace listing off the ground so please take advantage of our team and if there's anything i can help you out with personally from an aws marketplace perspective please let me know and with that that concludes this session i encourage you to complete the session survey at the end always looking for good feedback on these so thanks again for dialing in on this one and appreciate your feedback thank you you

2021-02-14 08:00

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