By Ryan Brock

Whether a partner is “born in the cloud” or is of the transformed variety, there is one reality that nearly all face: Cloud marketing is at best a poorly understood art and at worst a complete mystery. This should come as no surprise most partners enter the business because of an affinity for technology rather than a love for marketing and sales. Cloud has made the situation, well, cloudier.

First, a partner must decide to focus on the cloud, create a plan, rationalize the investment, align with cloud vendors and reallocate and retrain staff. Then, with any remaining energy and resources, they must generate awareness and build a cloud sales funnel. Given these challenges, it’s easy to understand why only one in five cloud partners (i.e., those that offer IaaS, SaaS, DaaS, remote managed services, etc.) has been able to build or sustain a high-growth business. 

When we look at why so few partners have crossed the cloud chasm there are several critical roadblocks that are often cited: customer demand, technical competency, business model transition, and vendor and distributor alignment. However, the fact is that most partners that truly commit to the cloud are able to overcome these challenges within 12-18 months.

So the real question is, what sets apart the 20 percent of partners that are driving the lions share of the cloud opportunity today?

We set out to answer this question by analyzing what the most successful cloud partners are doing that is different than their peers. Our goal essentially was to build a model that predicts the growth of a partners cloud business based on the actions that the partner takes. The approach was fairly straightforward:

So what did we find?  Well, the results were surprising to say the least. The model shows that 30 percent of a cloud partners success can be attributed to its marketing approach and tactics.   In other words, of all the things a partner can do to be successful in the cloud, marketing accounts for one-third of that result. We knew we were likely to find that marketing had some measurable impact on a partners success; however, we did not expect the magnitude of the impact to be so significant.  Think about it this way: If a partner has committed to the cloud and has made transformational changes and investments but has experienced only modest sales, the ideal mix of marketing strategies and tactics is likely to push that partner into a high-growth tier, which often means a double or triple increase in cloud revenue growth. Thats huge!

Overall, we identified 19 marketing and sales factors that have a significant impact on a cloud partners growth and success.  Interestingly, size and type of partner have little impact on the partners segment and cloud growth; high-growth cloud partners are only slightly larger on average than other partners and include a mix of partner types that largely mirrors the overall cloud partner population (including VARs, SIs, MSPs, ISVs, Solution Providers, etc.). So whether a partner is big or small, a VAR or an MSP, they can benefit from the science of cloud marketing.  

Ryan Brock is senior vice president of worldwide SMB cloud and channels at Access Markets International (AMI) Partners Inc., where he helps suppliers and their channels with market intelligence and business practice consulting spanning the evolving technology footprint, including infrastructure, platforms, applications, communications, services and devices.
Twitter: @cloudbystorm, @ami_partners
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanbrock2010

MORE INFO

Learn more from AMI Partners’ Ryan Brock about marketing factors impacting cloud success  in the session, “Partner Best Practices: Marketing & Sales Tactics to Drive SMB Cloud Revenue,” at Cloud Partners, a Channel Partners event, Sept. 11-13, 2013, in Chicago.