Leveling Up Your Cloud GTM for Strategic Growth

Sanjay Mehta:

All right. Well we’re two minutes in, so we’ll get rolling. Thanks everybody for joining today. My name is Sanjay Mehta. I am the chief cloud officer at Tackle. A lot of folks say, “What does that mean?” Sometimes I joke, I’ll let you know when I figure it out. Before joining Tackle, I spent about 20 years in cybersecurity in the last decade with one company in five of those years, doing a lot of work in and around cloud marketplaces. And one thing I talk a lot about is how they tend to break a lot of glass inside of your organization on the go-to market side, on the back office side. And we find that the best companies in the industry in terms of ISV selling in marketplaces, typically make that somebody’s job and give them permission to break glass. And we encourage them, they should have a chief cloud officer, whether they call it that or a VP of alliances or whatever, but somebody who can look across the organization and figure out how to make the transition from traditional direct sales and channel sales to digital sales and marketplaces.

Sanjay Mehta:

So that’s kind of the genesis of the title. More importantly, we have two amazing guests today and I love doing these events that Tackle. We like to bring actual customers to the table who are living and breathing these experiences with the cloud providers and inside of their own organizations to start and scale their marketplace journeys, selling with the likes of AWS and Microsoft to GCP and IBM, et cetera. And I’ll let both of these folks introduce themselves, but we have Teresa from StreamSets, recently acquired by Software AG. So congratulations on that.

Sanjay Mehta:

And Cory from DataStax. We’ve known each other a bit, they’re both on really interesting journeys. And I think a great thing about digital selling and cloud marketplaces is everybody seems really willing to share their stories and to help others out. So at Tackle we’re fortunate to have folks that have taken dirt roads and paved them with nice, smooth asphalts, so other folks can drive down them more successfully. And I would certainly include both Teresa and Cory in that camp. So with that, Teresa, I’ll pass it off to you for a brief intro.

Teresa Letlow:

Thank you. So Teresa Letlow, I’m vice president of global alliances and channels here at StreamSets. Started here last year. What StreamSets is, is a data integration company. So if you think about that, there’s data everywhere, how do you get it into the customers that need it in a way that they can use it.

Teresa Letlow:

I’m now with the combination of working with Software AG, we’ll be working towards even expanding that further and figuring out how each company can think about continuous data for their connected enterprise, thinking about as a digital backbone. So that’s kind of where we are and where we’re headed. So hopefully that gives you a little flavor of where we are, and we can talk later about how the cloud fits in, but I can tell you that all of the alliances and channel partners that I work with are all in the cloud.

Sanjay Mehta:

Awesome. Thanks. And Cory, I’ll toss it to you.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. Thank you. Cory Schickendantz, I’m the global director of cloud ecosystems here. Very fancy way of saying I work with our cloud providers and seeing how we can take the DataStax solutions out to the broader market and in a cloud native manner. I’ve been with DataStax about two years and two months actually now to the day, doing alliances. And DataStax is primarily a database company, but we like to think of ourselves more of data transformation. We power some of the most stellar apps out there that require real time data access, and need to scale across the globe. All of those things align with the needs for cloud driven applications. So happy and excited to share our experiences and what we’ve done with the cloud providers, especially probably over the last nine months and hope it helps everyone here.

Sanjay Mehta:

Perfect. Do either of you keep anything fun on your desks?

Cory Schickendantz:

I have a fidget cube that I got from a legal conference a long time ago, and a little mini Buddha to tell me to kind of keep myself centered and not freak out sometimes.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. I love it.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah.

Teresa Letlow:

Anything fun?

Sanjay Mehta:

[crosstalk 00:06:51] question that you were totally not expecting.

Teresa Letlow:

Just a giant water bottle to remind myself that I need to drink 64 ounces of water a day at a minimum. That’s about as fun as it gets for here right now.

Sanjay Mehta:

I have one as well.

Teresa Letlow:

There you go.

Sanjay Mehta:

Might have motivational sayings on it though. I also keep this rubber ball. I once had my two times ago president, when I had a big job and I was juggling a lot of stuff. He said, “Remember, some balls are made of rubber and are made glass, make sure you don’t drop the glass one.” So I keep this on my desk to remind me on those days where a lot of stuff’s juggling that I can feel free to drop some of them.

Cory Schickendantz:

I like that.

Sanjay Mehta:

Cool. Thanks for sharing something personal. Why don’t we get started? We talked to ISVs that are well down their marketplace journey and they’re looking for help. We talk to others that are like, “What’s a marketplace? Why should I be in it? If I get in it, will customers magically fall from the sky?” So I’d love to hear from both of you, just a little bit of history on when your organizations got started and whether you were there or you heard the stories, maybe a little bit of the why you decided to embark on it. And Teresa, how about we start with you?

Teresa Letlow:

Sure. So for those of you in the audience not familiar with StreamSets, we are not a born in the cloud company. So we’ve been a company that’s been around for a while with our roots really in big data, in the Hadoop world, in the Cloudera world. And it became really apparent that the world was shifting and shifting to the cloud starting with simple cloud storage type processes. And then it’s been maturing all along the way. And so because we weren’t born in the cloud, but we knew this was where we’re headed, it really was a time for us to take a step back and realize, how are we going to shift our entire business model, if this is not how the traditional buyers are going to buy anymore, how are we going to tap into this evolution that’s happening?

Teresa Letlow:

So I think for us, the easiest choice was to say, “Well, let’s reach out to these marketplaces and figure it out and get our hands really dirty and spend 12 months working through the AWS and the Azure models.” And you’ve got to do all of these things and your product has to work this way. So that was kind of like the impetus for getting us started. And then really where we are now is evolving that further, making it easier, finding technologies such as Tackle, that’ll shorten that timeframe from what used to take as four months into getting our new offerings up to the marketplace in five to six weeks. So that’s kind of where we are now. And then we’ll keep maturing along with that, but hopefully that helps.

Sanjay Mehta:

Okay. For sure. Cory, what’s the history of lesson over at DataStax?

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah, it’s a pretty similar one actually. I mean, DataStax has been around for, I think just over 11 years now. And initially we pride ourselves on being very agnostic to where developers wanted to deploy. You can be on-prem, you can be in the cloud, you could be a mix of hybrid cloud or even multi-cloud. But majority of folks, at least way back when everyone knows about hardware and selling on-prem. And it was only in, I would say probably in 2019, the company kind of turned itself on its head and we had to rethink of the solutions, not only we took to market, but how we sell it at that point. So we started talking to cloud providers, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon figuring out how these marketplaces were and how to work with them.

Cory Schickendantz:

And it was a big task to take on. And a lot of it was a mindset to change mainly, and it came down to almost mandating that we have to go through the cloud. Our North Star as a solution provider is now a SaaS solution. So it has to be natively sold in the cloud. So why not just make it that way and build the partnerships. And so doing that we had to move very quickly and that’s when we started working with, I think Google and Amazon and even Tackle at that point. We’re like, “Okay, how do we get these onto the marketplace fast and quickly, and just make the best of this?” So that’s what we’ve had to do, but it hasn’t been easy by any means. And it’s still ongoing, I would say, changing that mindset, but that’s what we’ve done.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. Maybe teeing off for that last point. We talk to a lot of folks that are wrestling with where does cloud go-to-market fit in my overall go-to market? Or where does my cloud revenue stack up compared to other sources of revenue? Or my counterpart who’s running channels is saying my cloud business is really just share shift. It’s not net new motion with the cloud provider. So maybe we can spend a little bit of time on marketplaces are kind of a component overall cloud go-to market strategy. When you think of cloud GTM in your organization and how it transforming, maybe tell us a bit of the story there.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. I mean, the marketplaces for me at least just makes sense. There’s so many intrinsic benefits for us as a company and for the enterprises we sell to transact that way. A lot of the strategic accounts that we talk to and even smaller cloud native businesses, they pick a cloud strategy and try and stick with it.

Cory Schickendantz:

So being able to just consolidate everything in there makes it easier for them, it up levels us as an enterprise with the cloud provider. And spending and transacting more. And it’s one good thing after another, in that respect, but have having to try and change the mindset of sellers on being able to work with that is a big change and a hard one, think of it kind of like a stump removal of a mindset. And we had to really just change it all up, but we’re getting there. What have you seen Teresa?

Teresa Letlow:

Yeah. Once again, I feel almost like we’re running in parallel here. It’s like your experience is mine. If I think about the go-to-market motion as actually the three pillars, there’s the product piece, there’s the go-to-market piece, and then there’s the sales piece. And when you talk about how you get an organization to think about go-to-market, it’s a cross-functional approach and everyone has to be on board with that. So if let’s say that your product, everything’s perfect, it runs beautifully, it’s native, everything’s great, your go-to-market motion, your marketing teams are all on in it. They’re sending everybody to the marketplace. Everything’s fantastic. And then you get down to the seller motion and maybe there’s a breakage there where somebody says, “Oh, well if you’re selling our marketplace, what are you trying to do? Replace us? I guess you don’t need us anymore.”

Teresa Letlow:

And that’s just not true. Or when you talk about someone saying, “Well, your product has to completely out approve vision in the marketplace and sellers have to swipe a credit card. That’s the only way it works.” It’s not that simple. And so I think for us, it’s been very similar, the education around it’s like everybody has a part to play and there isn’t one simple motion. And you have to figure out not only how you want to sell, like if you have a product-led growth, it’s okay to bake in something where it stops at demo. And from the demo perspective, it goes to the sales field, and then there’s another different type of motion there. And I think what we’ve learned is… And working with a company like Tackle has really helped because each of those cloud providers works so differently.

Teresa Letlow:

It’s like, you can have this one common thing that says it all works differently, but we can help you figure it out. So you don’t have to have three completely different teams, talking to your product team about how this is what you have to do for Google versus AWS, Azure. This is what our marketplace needs to do differently. We have to have three different strategies. You can have one strategy with different selling motions. It’s just about being thoughtful and thinking and remembering that it is cross-functional. And you have to try to figure out how to scale. And that’s the challenge don’t get trapped on into these one product or GTM or sales. It’s all of them together.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. You touched on some key points there. One is sellers want to sell where buyers want to buy. So software companies are trying to figure out where my buyers looking to identify, discover, try, procure software. And sometimes that’s still in the traditional channel. Sometimes that’s with a cloud go-to-market motion and marketplaces. We do a survey every year. We started it two years ago called the State of Cloud Marketplace. And if you haven’t pulled it down, I encourage you to Google and look at it. But the predominant trend last year was that buyers buy through marketplaces because the consolidation to cloud budget, which is really driven by the cloud providers incenting them to do big spending agreements and then allowing them to draw down through marketplace purchases. And sellers similarly, you’re saying, the reason we sell through marketplaces now is because that’s where the money is.

Sanjay Mehta:

So if I used to sell storage or security or observability or whatever it is, and I sold to that buying center and those procurement folks, I’m finding there’s another pool of previous allocated funds I can tap into, and it can speed up my deals and shore up my confidence and everything else. So I’d encourage you to pull that down. The other thing you both talked about is like the internal challenge. And I always say 60% of your challenge when you try to go to cloud go-to-market is actually living inside your own walls or virtual walls. So I’d be curious as you navigated those, who are your biggest supporters and champions to get these motions going and who by title or by organizational function, who are the folks that were kind of those stumps, as you referred to Cory, that were kind of in the way, and maybe a bit difficult to move? And maybe Teresa will start with you.

Teresa Letlow:

Sure. So I think going back to product GTM sales, with these three different areas, and then there’s champions and challenges in each. If you look at StreamSets particularly, our executive management team is all in on cloud first strategy, Software AG feels the same way, from the top down, these are the relationships and the partnerships and the ecosystems that we need to work within. I think the challenge then becomes when you talk about the blockers is, in each of those realms, there’s individual personalities and there’s individual thought processes is about something as simple as how do you architect your product. There’s a lot of nuances around that. There’s a lot of different perceptions around that. So it’s figuring out how to provide the best of the partnerships that you can and still maintain your competitive differentiation, your competitive advantage.

Teresa Letlow:

On the product side, it’s not that these cloud providers are going to tell you, this is how you need to engineer your product. But it is how are you going to make it work with the most efficiency for the customer in that environment. On the GTM motion, it’s been very much like, yes, we want to tag on with these hyperscalers. We want to be as big as they are, but we have our own brand. So we don’t want to talk about their brand. We need to talk about our brand. So it’s like, yeah, we need to talk about both. Once again, it’s figuring out what partnership means, it’s not one or the other.

Teresa Letlow:

And sometimes for us in particular, because we work within an entire cloud ecosystem. So from database to storage to processing, to whatever within an AWS suite, there’s a lot of different teams to work with. It’s really making sure that we have to partner with all of those people. And I think that’s been the biggest challenges in all of those is partnering versus no one’s telling you what to do. It’s an in tandem. So how do you get your product managers aligned with their product managers? How do you get your engineers aligned with their engineers? How do you get their sellers aligned with your sellers? It really is just that mindset of co-selling and partnering.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. I mean, we had a very similar experience on our side too. I think the biggest advocate actually for us going cloud first was our CEO. He made the choice that DataStax Astra is going to be our North Star. We want to make this available to everybody in the world, and in order to do that and to scale. I mean, you put a Google logo next to a DataStax logo in Times Square, who’s going to recognize which one first. Let’s be realistic about that. So we made it a mandate as a company to transact through the cloud marketplaces first and only by exception to go direct for that new product, which was another big kind of step and move for us. But the way we incentivize that was we kept our seller as whole we didn’t knock any of their commissions down on listing fees.

Cory Schickendantz:

We ate that as a company as we wanted to make this the mandate because we saw that as the future. And getting them in line with that as well as product and engineering just as you said, I mean, it was very critical. And for us the marketplaces are huge transaction vehicle obviously, but also it’s a really great way for us to just make our opportunities bigger and up level ourselves in these conversations as well. So I would say probably the biggest blockers for us has just been time in bandwidth. Trying to prioritize between doing new integrations with Amazon or Google or Microsoft into our solutions versus building out our own stuff. How do we add value and grow the partnership while also just continuing to grow ourselves in a certain manner. But otherwise, as an organization, we’re all pretty on board with that, which has been great.

Teresa Letlow:

I have to echo what you just said, Cory. Absolutely, you can’t do everything you do with the partners, right?

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah.

Teresa Letlow:

Yeah.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. You hit on a few key points again there. A lot of folks talk about the propensity to buy. So software folks are trying to figure out who in the customer world is going to buy from these marketplaces. Who has a committed spending agreement. We’re spending more and more time thinking about propensity to sell. What does it mean for an ISV to be ready to embark on a cloud go-to-market motion or marketplace selling. And you talked about executive commitment. That is a very common theme that we see. You talked about, it takes time. When I talked to folks, I’m like, “If you can’t see yourself on a two year journey, don’t start.” Hopefully, it won’t take you two years to get your motion. Maybe you can do it in six months or nine months or 12 months. But if you don’t have the stomach for it to take a little bit longer, don’t get it started.

Sanjay Mehta:

Make sure you can see a meaningful piece of your revenue actually flowing through these channels because you know you have the product market fit and your buyers are going to be there. And if you can’t see your path to 5% of revenue or 20% of revenue in the next couple of years, maybe it’s not time to start. And then Teresa, you talked about the complexity of organizationally aligning with the cloud providers. And we all see it every day there’s a job posting for ahead of alliances for this cloud or that cloud. And always chuckling [inaudible 00:23:09]. So that one person is going to go try to influence the biggest companies on the planet. Good luck. We’ve all had those jobs. Some of us are still sitting in them.

Sanjay Mehta:

So when you look at your organization, what is the core kind of alliances function look like? And then who would win best supporting actress and actor at the Oscars to support your cloud go-to-market strategy? What are those other functions?

Teresa Letlow:

Sure. That’s a great question. Well, one of the changes that we made, I’ll say somewhat recently, is that instead of alliances kind of being on its own little thing, it rolls directly up into their revenue organization. My team reports directly to the chief revenue officer. So it is, we have a quota, we have a number. Our success is the success of the seller’s success. We don’t actually close and sign business, but we have a number. So what that did is it aligned us much more closely to something that’s real. It’s not something that’s like this arbitrary, oh, you’re you have the relationship. That’s great. But it’s done that way. The other thing that we did is, I have a director of cloud alliances that he wakes up every day and thinks about how can I improve ourselves in each of those areas and how do I prioritize. Which one is going to help us get to our numbers the quickest?

Teresa Letlow:

And then you talked about the supporting actors and actresses. This is where the cross-functional team comes in. We have a dedicated product manager that we work with for this. We have a dedicated partner marketing and marketing liaison that connects into that team. We have a dedicated partner solution engineer that works with us and our team. And we have a dedicated partner operations person. Now that may seem like, oh my goodness, I’m a small company. I can’t possible take that on. Well, we didn’t start that big either.

Teresa Letlow:

We started with borrowing, hey, can I have this much of this social media marketing person’s time, and building plans out and doing that. But when you start proving the success of the model, and you start showing revenue targets being hit, then you can validate why you need these other teams to really completely focus on that because it is a meaningful part of your business. So that’s kind of where we started with one man band kind of on an island perspective and then proving the model out so that we could get these dedicated resources. And like I said, that’s how you’re going to scale, is not by being on an island, but by making sure you’re integrated.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. I would say that we’re probably like mid-flight in that journey to where you guys are now. June last year it was one person doing all of it. And we had zero transactions year before through any cloud marketplace. And then it’s because of the fact that we’ve been able to dedicate a few folks to partner product marketing, or even just to each cloud provider itself. I mean, that just unlocks more and more to just transact that way. And we did change too, that we roll up to the CRO as well, which puts real numbers against us, which really does it. But the learning at the beginning of all that was be humble and don’t be afraid to go ask people about help or anything about inquiries, better to ask for forgiveness than permission, you could say.

Cory Schickendantz:

But getting everybody involved into it is going to make it go faster and not being afraid to go and ask those hard questions or to get a no, but understand why no, is also very important. And why we can’t do certain things. So getting the buy-in really does help in that regard. And so that’s how we’ve grown and I think it’ll be probably good couple months or sometime in the next year before we probably have really developed partner program. But I mean, even one or two key assets assigned to that can grow that network even exponentially for you.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. It’s interesting. You both roll up to the CRO, but you’ve both touched on the importance of kind of product management, product lead growth, product integration, service integration. So I think whether you roll up to alliances chain to the CEO, or roll through the CRO the balance in these relationships of go-to-market plus product market fit of how am I going to help customers actually achieve better outcomes with cloud transformation is really super important.

Cory Schickendantz:

And even taking a step further. I mean, up until this point, a lot of people haven’t worked with the cloud providers, maybe that intently, and it’s all been what’s our own stuff and how do we sell it? But as you build these relationships and start transacting through there you’re getting more and more visibility from the cloud providers. And then you can get into more in-depth conversations on how you can technically integrate and get even more valuable. And then continue to just up level yourself by doing your normal business, but just going through a cloud marketplace. It just, again, benefits you, very helpful in that way.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. A bit ago, Cory, you used the word mandate, which seems really, really, really strong.

Cory Schickendantz:

It was. Yeah.

Sanjay Mehta:

I’m curious to hear from both of you talked about listing fees and the treatment of it and kind of comp neutrality for sellers that comes up a lot from ISVs. Like how do I encourage marketplace selling and don’t have this kind of theory of attacks in marketplace. I always chuckled because if you’ve sold through channels for a long time, lots of folks have been scraping dollars here and there, but it seems to be a really hot topic in marketplaces. So in addition to kind of saying thou shalt, you can change behavior with a stick. You can change it with a carrot. Curious what both of you have either done or think about as you go kind of year to year on how carrots and sticks might influence your digital selling.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. I mean, our big thing, like I said before, was just keeping everyone paid the same as if they interact. Not harming them or discouraging the effort to work with the cloud partners or transact through them. And to even take that one step further, we as the partner in alliance folks now look at the partners and say, “What programs do we have that we can even incentivize our sellers further, or your sellers further because we have this new partnership status or programs to help the deals.” And give them even more of a carrot to come in and do transactions through the marketplaces and to work with the cloud providers. And the cloud providers are even putting carrots out there. I mean, Microsoft and Google going to flat listing fees for everybody now. I mean, they’re now more than ever hungry to get more and more folks to transact through that way.

Cory Schickendantz:

So that’s even more encouraging and easier thing to do. So that’s the way we’ve done it, and probably the hardest thing in the past was renewals. No one wants to take a renewal and take a haircut for no reason through a marketplace, but the conversations we can have and the growth that we can have including Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, and those strategic conversations outweighs a couple points off of the baseline. Just it grows exponentially in that case. So that’s what I’ve seen and how we’ve kind of done success.

Sanjay Mehta:

Any special secrets happening for you, Teresa?

Teresa Letlow:

No. I think pretty much aligned with what Cory’s doing things the same way. Well, I have a tendency to use a stick more just because I’m like, “Why wouldn’t you want to work with these people? They have commit to consume, they have a propensity to buy. Why are you spending six extra months trying to get this deal done through procurement? It makes no sense.” So I probably have a tendency to take the hammer approach more than the carrot. But I mean, I completely agree with Cory that it’s a balance of both. I just wish that I could crawl inside folks’ heads and get them to see what I see, but in that same vein and Cory alluded it to it as well.

Teresa Letlow:

The beauty of all of these partnerships is you mentioned that the ability of people wanting to help you, AWS has helped us so much. They’re like, “Let us come in and talk to your teams about why. Send us a list of customers you have and let you know, not how much or why, but do they like to buy to the marketplace? Let’s make it a little easier for your team to not have to figure that out on their own or figure out if they’re talking to the right people.” Following those programmatic approaches with those customers works. If there’s one thing that everybody on this call can remember is that both AWS and Microsoft have a programmatic approach to this, and if you follow it, you will be successful.

Teresa Letlow:

Cory, you mentioned unlocking benefits. They’ll say, “Hey, do these three things.” You do those three things, you just unlock the next level. It’s like playing a video game. It’s like, you take these steps, you follow it. Boom. Next level’s unlocked. And with each of those levels being unlocked, it makes it easier and easier to do business with these folks. With AWS, your goal is to get to ISV accelerate. Once you hit ISV accelerator, it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. You’ll start engaging with sellers and they’ll give you this templated list of questions. They don’t even want to talk to [inaudible 00:33:22] answer this list of questions. And you’re like, “Oh my gosh.” Answer the questions. The more you answer the questions, they’ll start seeing that you’re for real. And they’ll stop asking those questions and they’ll set up the meeting right away.

Teresa Letlow:

So it really is just this, if you just follow the approach, and like I said we obviously leverage Tackle hugely because they can kind of make it scalable. They can give you these tips and tricks and advice and say, “This is how to make it easier. Here’s how to cut your ramp up time in half.” It’s complicated if you try to do it on your own. And it takes a lot of times and resources, but there’s a lot of shortcuts and a lot of ways to really get there quickly.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. And one thing I’ll also say too is each cloud marketplace has a different program. They sell differently. They all have different terms for everything too. And like being able to speak their language when you talk to the sellers and to their technical presales folks, it gives you even more credibility because they know that how they work inside and out in that case, it’s a very small thing, but it goes a long way in those early conversations, for sure.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. I think that’s such a key point, the relationships around cloud providers and marketplaces are now measured in thousands and thousands of ISVs. So if you’re doing this five or six years ago, capturing some attention as a early lean in provider, not so hard today, really daunting. And certainly we talk to customers, like I’m in security, I’m in a crowded category. How am I ever going to capture any attention? And I think with all the cloud providers, it starts with customer outcomes.

Sanjay Mehta:

So are you going to deliver really great service or really great product to my customers and then work backwards from there? And I love what you said. They’ve spent tireless energy on defining these programs and the templates and the co-sell systems and lots and lots of role types. Huge investments from the cloud providers on making it easier for ISVs to do business with them, understand who those folks are, understand how are they motivated, how are they compensation. Cory, your point on speaking the languages. Is it an instance or is it a VM? Act like you care, like you’re invested in what they’re up to. So those I think are some really easy tips to kind of take away and work with.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. And one of the, I would say, a big hurdle for us even to this day, is most of the cloud providers have a sort of competitive solution to our own that they sell natively, and it’s to be expected. And there’s hesitation within our teams to engage with them a lot of times because of it. But the real simple fact is through the lens of an AWS, Google or Microsoft seller, we are this specialized person that they can ask and use for selling this unique solution. And almost to an extent, kind of take a step back and kind of take a break, and just have someone earn for them. They may not care as much about selling their own native solutions. It is just getting dollars through the door. And trying to ease that hesitation for our field sales team has probably been one of the biggest things for us to try and overcome, to be more proactive and not just purely transactional. And it may never be a perfect world, but it’s a challenge that most folks will probably have to overcome.

Teresa Letlow:

I have to add onto that I couldn’t agree more. Microsoft has a competitive product to us. AWS has a competitive product to us, and I will often hear from sellers, I don’t want to talk to them because they’re going to go in and try to sell their product against me. And it’s like, no, they’re not. That’s not how they’re comped. That’s not their model. They’re comped on customer success. And you have to be confident that, as Cory mentioned, you have a specialized solution that hopefully does more than the off the shelf thing that they built because a customer said, “Is there an easy way to do this?” Ah, yeah. Here’s something we’ll throw this together.

Teresa Letlow:

That it’s not going to bring the value that you bring or I’ll hear, well, we don’t want them to know about that because then they’re going to come in and try to compete against us. They already know. At the levels they have, you talk about chief cloud officer, they already know the architecture. They already know. They hold the keys to the consumption model. You’re not going to trick your way through Microsoft or AWS, not knowing that you’re talking into those teams. So it’s just kind of keep that in mind. You’re you probably don’t have the same relationships they do at the same levels.

Sanjay Mehta:

That’s funny, particularly in the big accounts. I’ve talked to providers in security. And when I was in a security provider myself, you’re talking to AWS, they’re meeting with the CSO twice a week.

Teresa Letlow:

Absolutely.

Sanjay Mehta:

You’re trying to find how to get from the director to the CSO. So I agree with you, don’t be afraid, be proud of what I have, be confident in your solution and be confident in your co-sell motions and go for it. And the one day you might get bit address it and it’ll probably get cleaned up again. I’ve seen a lot of successes that way.

Cory Schickendantz:

Not talking to them is actually probably more harmful, because then there’s nothing to hold them against selling their own solution versus yours, because there is no relationship. They’re like, “Oh well, we’re going to sell what we sell.”

Teresa Letlow:

And, or potentially them bringing in a competitor to you that does have a relationship with them.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. So the earlier, the better is what we try and enforce, but it’s a hard mindset to get through.

Teresa Letlow:

Yeah.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. And it’s a great tips. So maybe at an operational level a lot of the cloud providers have big co-sell systems like ACE with AWS or Partner Center and Microsoft and others that are developing. So when you think that comment, Cory, get them involved as fast as possible, do you take that to an operational level where you’re actually over rotating to transparency or maybe properly or rotating to transparency when it comes to co-sell systems or how’s that working for you?

Cory Schickendantz:

So we’re still kind of needing that one out a little by little. With Microsoft we do, because we basically identify every deal that says Microsoft is involved or they want to deploy there. And then we immediately reach out to our sales rep and say, “Hey, this customer’s going to deploy in Azure. Let’s talk to them and see how we can grow it.”

Cory Schickendantz:

So we’ve done that within the Microsoft partnership ecosystem, but for Amazon and Google, we haven’t quite figured that out yet. And part of it for us is a scalability thing and just not having enough people on board yet. But it will be so much more beneficial when we can get our sellers involved in those earlier stages, when we’re doing discovery and architecture and building and getting this whole strategy together, as opposed to, hey, we have a deal we want to transact to like, hi, I’m your counterpart. Can we just do it? It’s not long term viable.

Teresa Letlow:

Our solution is this is much more our mandate, Cory. So our mandate is that at a stage two, when you’re starting to do demos and stuff like that, that you need to ask of their ecosystem stack. We need to know them because we’re a data integration company. We need to know where the data’s coming from and where it’s going to. So it makes sense in our business model, but at a stage two, you identify the cloud provider at that point in time. And the mandate is anything that says stack whatever, it goes up into that respective portal. So for Microsoft Partner Network, if it’s a Microsoft stack deal or an Azure deal, it’s going to go up there. If it’s an AWS deal, it’s going to go into their ACE portal.

Teresa Letlow:

I will tell you that part it’s painful. They don’t make it very easy to automate those types of things. There are a couple of things, I know Tackle’s working on one with the Salesforce integration to that, which is fantastic. It can be painful because they are different. The AWS Partner Network does have a CSV download. So if you can figure out how to get your Salesforce fields aligned you can theoretically make that work. The Microsoft one’s a little tougher, but we mandate that every deal that has a stack of one of those goes in there and that every single one gets assigned a co-sell rep. And then that’s where the person on my team sits there and pokes on the shoulder. Hey, when’s the meeting? Hey, where’s the prep call. Hey, when are we meeting? So that’s the piece that we mandate.

Sanjay Mehta:

And do you mandate that at a seller level that they input those deals or do you created some sort of [crosstalk 00:42:34]?

Teresa Letlow:

This is where having a bigger team helps. We have one person that’s responsible for going in and making sure those are updated for those on the call that aren’t familiar with either system, you do have to go in and update those that are regular basis or they get closed out. So that’s kind of when I talk about the lack of the integration between your CRM system and those systems, it is a bit tedious and it is a bit manual, but it is absolutely critical to the co-selling relationship growth. So we have a dedicated person that supports that. And it’s the least favorite part of that person’s job. It’s like, when can we get to at the scale and size where either this is automated and integrated with something like what Tackle’s working on or we’re going to have to hire a full-time person. I don’t know.

Sanjay Mehta:

For sure. So you talked about what good looks like as your organization grew up. I’d love that mental model of you start small. You start with somebody in alliances and then over time that grows up to include product people and solution architecture people and sales operations folks, and probably cloud overlay type folks that get up and manage the relationships with PDMs and ECMs and ISV success managers and all these other role types in the cloud providers, which is I think an awesome roadmap of if I’m starting my journey today, what does good look like organizationally two or three years from now?

Sanjay Mehta:

So maybe I’m on similar lines. Like I came from a family of two doctors. So when I wasn’t a doctor, it’s like, well, we don’t actually understand what you do. So if I look back over 25 years, it’s like, what were my proud moments that my mom could have understood. So if you look back over your cloud go-to-market journey thus far, what are the things that you look back and you’re like, “This has been truly exceptional for the organization, and one of the bests that I can kind of hang my hat on.” And if anybody still made a resume, maybe even put it on there, but what are you most proud of either yourself or your team or your organization so far?

Teresa Letlow:

I’ll take a stab at that. One of the things that I’m most proud of is my team. I mean, my team gets up every day and thinks about how can I make one more step forward. That’s going to bring us more… We’ll use revenue as the KPI, but it’s not even revenue. It’s more about one step further towards making sure we’re relevant. That our company is relevant, that our customers continue to be relevant and they do. They get up every day and they think about that. So when I think about when I was able to come out and say, “Hey, we just leveled up with AWS.” That’s not me, that’s my team. I’m proud of my team that they’re doing that. It’s a collective effort. It’s a cross-functional collaborative effort.

Teresa Letlow:

That’s what I’m most proud of, is when I can start seeing all of the pieces work together, the CRO said to me on a call a couple weeks ago, he goes, “It’s flywheel. Let’s say, it’s dunked up with oil and you’re just trying to get it to move.” He goes, “But your team they’re getting that movement going. And pretty soon it’s just going to be running and it’s going to help us scale to that next level.” So that’s what I’m most proud of, is the team and how they get up every day and think about how they can do one thing today, that’s going to us one step closer to that spinning flywheel.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. Our team’s kind of small, but I would agree with that too. Every action they have is so impactful to progressing in that regard and a piece that we’ve created kind of since day one is when I kind of call our playbook Bible of everything cloud go-to-market. And it started as just this running document of just tracking all these, the new programs, what they mean and how we get in the next one and all the benefits and incentives we can utilize.

Cory Schickendantz:

And then adding again all the unique questions that the field brought to us around transacting through marketplaces and working with the cloud providers. And it just grew and grew into this kind of single source of truth that our team can go back to, our deal desk can go back to, the executives can go back to, even finance and billing and just have this record of every odd question and thing that we cannot quickly get answers to and not have to sort through bundles of emails or resource centers within the different partner networks. And that’s allowed us to move even faster on our side. So that’s been a big help.

Teresa Letlow:

Cory, if you need to become an author. Sounds like that needs to [inaudible 00:47:16] gets published out there for the rest of us to use.

Sanjay Mehta:

That’s one audible.

Cory Schickendantz:

It’ll make its way out there, maybe some time, but I pride myself in documentation and process and the more we can make it repeatable and easier for everyone else, the easier we could buy in from all the different business units.

Sanjay Mehta:

An important lesson there, I think, that partnering with the biggest companies in the world is a team support. The team is your tea, and Teresa, you said it earlier, I love a partner leader that knows it’s bigger than thou. If I tell my team, if you want to stand in the limelight and go to Maui at the end of the year, go take a quota and join the sales team. It might be the toughest job in the company, certainly the most easily scrutinized job in the company, the person with a number.

Sanjay Mehta:

So I think in these roles, it’s really important to get that alignment that the lift you need to measure is really at a company level, not at a kind of individual organization level or even a go-to-market system level. So maybe we’ll take the opposite question. I’ve lost a lot more here than both of you, or at least the ones I have are still great. But if you could do it all over again, what are one or two things that you ran into that are now documented in Cory’s audible series on things never to do again? But you can share today that the other folks on the call might be able to learn from and save a little hair themselves.

Cory Schickendantz:

I think for me, it goes back to don’t be afraid to go ask people you don’t know internally. That was probably the biggest hangout for us at the start is we weren’t sure or confident in the impact we would make on the business. And so we didn’t think we had kind of the clout to go ask these higher ups about certain things. But with the help of our CEO’s mandate shortly after a lot of that, but being able to go ask the head of product about working in integration with Google or Microsoft or Amazon, and being able to actually take that back and show that cloud provider that we’re serious about working with them not even just in a transactional method, but as a strategic partner really benefited us. But it held us up for a good couple months because we just didn’t go ask the right people at the right time because we didn’t think we could. So that’s my learning.

Sanjay Mehta:

Lovely.

Teresa Letlow:

Yeah. My biggest learning is, do not think that you can do this alone. Don’t think you can do it in a silo. Don’t think you’re going to pick this up and say, “I’m really smart. And I can totally figure this out on my own. I’m not saying you can’t, I’m just saying it’s going to take you a lot of time. Learn from Cory’s mistakes, my mistakes. I’m sure Sanjay his has some mistakes in there. You can’t do it alone or you can, but you might spend so much time that the world has changed and you have to start doing it all over again. So all those years ago when we were standing in Seattle at the steps of the AWS Marketplace Summit and I ran across these guys from Tackle and I was like, “Wait, you mean I don’t have to be here and learn how to do all this myself.”

Teresa Letlow:

I think that was one of the best decisions that we made because prior to that, we weren’t even halfway there. We’d spend a ton of time. I was literally there to figure out what are we doing wrong? How can we do this faster? There’s got to be a way, why is this taking so long. Don’t try to do it alone. Reach out to all the ecosystems. AWS will help you. Microsoft will help you. Google will help you. Tackle will help you. I’ll help you. Cory will help you. There’s just so many people out there willing to help just don’t do it alone.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yes. I think one more thing to add to that too is, especially if you’re just starting with this program and trying to get cloud working for your company, it can be overwhelming. As Teresa said, if you have to go out it alone, it’s going to take some time and it’s going to be a lot to handle. And those interactions you may get internally will start to become super transactional. Like you go and try and get an answer to a question and it’s either yes or no. And you’re satisfied with that.

Cory Schickendantz:

But I would almost challenge you to ask why no. Go one level deeper and understand why it is you can’t do that and maybe see where you can get to the yes. And get to that integration to that bit of funding for the marketing event or the integration you want to build out. Don’t stop at just the top level answer, but dig a little deeper and see how you can build it out even further.

Sanjay Mehta:

Yeah. That’s great advice. I love the question, under what conditions could I get to yes? A thousand ways to tell me no, but give me one way to get to yes, and I’ll drive down that road. So it’s awesome advice. Teresa, you mentioned the flywheel, you’ve been in a plug for Tackle. So I’ll put a plug for a famous author. There’s a great book called Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins. And I think it’s super important to define your flywheel when you’re defining a new motion like this. And one concept he talks about is bullets versus cannon balls. And I think the mistake a lot of folks make is they think of these big partnerships with the cloud providers and marketplaces, and they define this Uber world of things they’re going to try to go after. And what success is ultimately going to look like, and they drop the cannon ball before they understand the target and the most effective way to get there.

Sanjay Mehta:

So bullets versus cannon balls is all about firing a couple really surgical shots, doing a little bit of A/B testing, come up with a hypothesis, validated or let it fail pivot. And then finally get that flywheel turning. And it does take some time, but once it’s really spinning, it’s a really beautiful thing. So we’ve had a quiet audience today. Very few i.e., not a question yet, but we had a fun time. So that’s great. And hopefully we delivered a lot of good information to folks.

Sanjay Mehta:

Quick plug. We are doing another event called Cloud Go-To-Market XP, the Cloud Go-To-Market Experience. It’s the first big Tackle industry conference it’s on May 17th. It is virtual. So you can Google that up and register. And we have dozens of speakers, including most of the leaders, the major cloud providers, industry folks from the channel, from the analyst community, from the venture community, lots of folks from the digital tech stack and tools you’re probably using inside of your own companies and certainly that your customers are using. So I would encourage you to register for the Cloud Go-To-Market Experience. It’s a longer session than this, but you can tune in to the sessions you like most in them. I’m sure they’ll be recorded and shared in some way, shape or form. But Teresa, Cory, lovely to have you here today. Thanks for sharing your journey, your recipes for success, some of the pitfalls along the way and hope those that attended got a lot of value. Thanks so much.

Teresa Letlow:

Thank you.

Cory Schickendantz:

Thank you, Sanjay.

Sanjay Mehta:

Have a great rest of the week. Oh, we have one last second question. Hold on.

Cory Schickendantz:

Oh.

Sanjay Mehta:

Curious to know if you’ve noticed any changes in marketplace buyer trends at this point or semi post-pandemic phase as opposed to 2020 and 2021. So this came for me and Marie. I’ll let both of you answer and then I’ll pile lot if needed. So changes in buyer behavior around cloud and marketplaces over the last couple of years, kind of pandemic influenced.

Teresa Letlow:

So I can tell you that for StreamSets we sell to the enterprise. So really large customers. And one of the things that they definitely did was try to centralize control and spending through the cloud. So we saw a change because there were such bigger commits that we’re trying to centralize. With all the decentralization of people, the enterprises have moved to centralized spending. And the cloud’s been a big part of that.

Cory Schickendantz:

Yeah. I echo that and even to take it one step further for some of the cloud marketplaces, they have their own private marketplaces that they’ll extend to some customers. Like big financial services or whoever that is, which gives them even additional layer of control for their developers and architects. So that was another kind of interesting thing to see kind of come out of that. But we’ve noticed on our side more transactions, I think through the marketplace because of the scarcity of workforce almost.

Cory Schickendantz:

A lot of the drivers for some of our deals have been experts have left the organization gone somewhere else or just simply are gone. And they need to now be able to centralize everything into a fully managed service with their cloud provider that they have a strategy with. And it all just gets tightly knit up into one. And it works really well for them. So we have seen a small uptick in that, but I don’t think DataStax has been doing as much marketplace business to really notice too much of a trend in the past couple years.

Sanjay Mehta:

Okay. And maybe I’ll close it with the other side of the coin, which is the seller behavior. I think if you look during the pre-pandemic, we would send a salesperson, SE, maybe a sales manager who didn’t believe the salesperson was doing their job, possibly a solution architect and a channel person, all into Cleveland, Ohio to make a sales call. And that didn’t happen for two years and software companies experienced massive gains and great market capitalization gains and public markets and everything else.

Sanjay Mehta:

So I think buyers have proved they can buy in a digital world through trials and product led growth and marketplaces, and sellers proved themselves that they can sell in a different way, leaning on digital as well. And it wasn’t the end of the salesperson. It wasn’t at end of the channel and procurement is not dead. So all of those predictions were wrong and it’s just a better, faster, more efficient way to buy and sell software. So thanks again. You guys were amazing. And we’ll talk again soon. Thanks.

Teresa Letlow:

Thank you.