Lessons Learned from Operationalizing Commvault's Cloud GTM Strategy as we Scaled
Commvault has catapulted its way into becoming one of the top cloud sellers, but it wasn’t an overnight success story. Hear from Jacob Bishop, Sr Director of Operations, about the people, processes, and technology required to build a sustainable Cloud GTM motion.
Wow, the clock just starts right away. I already see it's at 1950. I was
getting great to see
everybody. I was wondering backstage if there's like a lot of audio for claps
as you come onto
this thing to resemble like actually coming onto the stage. But nonetheless,
there were no claps,
but it's great to be here. And it's exciting to see lots of comments coming
through in the chat.
To introduce myself, my name is Mike Wallace. I'm an enterprise account
executive here at
Tackle. I've been with Tackle for about three years now. It's been very
exciting watching Tackle
grow up and also the Cloud Go to Market Space grow up in general. I've had the
pleasure to work
with a number of tackles larger accounts and the pleasure to support Commvault
for about a year now.
And I've been working directly with Jacob for about probably, I don't know,
what would you call it,
Jacob? Two quarters or so? About a year now. Yeah, which has been great. And we
've had a ton of
wins and it's been a lot of fun to be part of that success as well. So very
excited to take you all
through kind of the journey of Commvault from kicking things off, seeing early
success through
the marketplace. But then the bulk of our conversations primarily going to be
around how Commvault
scaled their marketplace operations, particularly when it comes to revenue
operations and channel
ops as well, which has all been spearheaded by Jacob. So without further ado,
Jacob, I'll kick
it over to you if you want to just give a little bit of back to yourself and
some background on
Commvault. Thanks, Mike, and pleasure to be here. Great to see everyone out
there. My name's Jacob
Bishop. I've been at Commvault now four and a half years. I've held a few
different roles in our
GoToMarketOps organization. And kind of through that continuity, I've looked
after marketplaces
in a number of my roles and with a pretty full time focus for the last nine
months or so. A
little bit about Commvault. So Commvault's really gold standard in cyber
resilience. We help our
customers recover their data from a cyber attack, everything from data
protection, data security,
data intelligence, really all on one platform with a really competitive TCO
with the lowest in our
space. We're available on all four of the marketplaces. So Azure, OCI, GCPN AWS
, OCI obviously being the
the newest entrance in that space. And we've been transacting on marketplace in
some way since our
fiscal 2021, so the last three or four years. Right on. I think you also forgot
to mention that
Commvault is headquartered in Tittenfall, New Jersey. And for the crowd, you're
speaking or
listening to two Jersey boys here. I'm based in Hoboken and Jacob's down in
South Jersey near
the Tittenfall's office. So I think that's why we also have always hit it off.
They've got a great
office. Jay, why don't you take us back to kind of where things got started and
maybe talk about
Commvault's initiation into cloud GoToMarket? Like what really got you guys
interested in selling
through the marketplace in the first place? What was kind of the catalyst for
that?
Yeah, absolutely. So there's really kind of two different parts of our cloud Go
ToMarket
origin story. So right around when I joined into 2019, we launched our SaaS
offering,
which is based in Azure. And that creates a natural overlap with Azure
marketplace starting a
similar time, getting our SaaS products transactable in a public offer and
private offer setting.
It was a really natural GoToMarket fit there. While that was happening, we have
a healthy,
sizable software business. And we were seeing early demand from customers in
our alliance's
business around starting to transact in AWS and GCP marketplaces. And our kind
of core product team
built our first offerings in both marketplaces. And we started transacting
private offers for
software in AWS and GCP. And for us, it's really pretty natural. We're selling
into CSOs and CIOs.
And every one of our customers has a cloud strategy. So there's a natural fit
that this
conversation would have evolved for Commvault as it was evolving in the broader
market.
Got it. That makes sense. What do you think like once you started getting
selling through the
marketplace, what were some certain signals that you picked up that actually
led you guys to like
really lean in and double down? Like I think you walked us through kind of
seeing some indications
from the market with some synergies to toe the waters. Well, were some of the
early successes
that you saw that you were like, okay, we're going to really lean into this.
And really,
I think that's when you kind of started to take over as well.
So I like doing things in threes, right? Nice round number for us. But there's
really three
reasons that I think our cloud good market started scaling. And the biggest one
is really
customer demand, right? So our reps out in the field, we're hearing more and
more regularly
from customers that they want to be able to decrement their Mac. They want that
spend to be
able to be created. It's really customer driven motion. That's one piece of it.
At the same time,
right? The cloud provider incentives have been pretty clear, right? Each year,
we kind of lean
a little bit farther towards a lot of our ISV incentives are being tied to
marketplace goals.
So we see on the partnership side that it's important that we continue to drive
marketplace
and grow our presence. And then the last piece is really for our sellers, right
? The budget
availability with Mac and EDPs. And I know some of my colleagues today have
been talking about
that as well. That's one of the one of the beautiful things for a company like
ours. But
we're seeing that benefit in terms of deal velocity, in terms of transaction
size, and in terms of
the TCO value that we can bring to a customer. Yeah, I remember you kind of
like walking me
through it as it was like kind of this like read the room moment where
everything was starting to
come together, particularly from the customer demand side. I know you're an
operator yourself
and you take pride in building efficient systems. When you were tasked with
preparing
Commvault to scale its cloud go to market, what were the things that scared you
? What were
some of the early challenges that immediately stood out that you knew you were
going to have to address?
So like anyone who started this journey, there's just differences in how you
transact.
Marketplace processes look different. They feel different than other routes to
market. And we're
historically, we're a channel driven business. We continue to be a channel
driven business.
Marketplace fits into that. But it feels different to create a private offer,
to manage that process
with the cloud providers, with a CPPO or MPO partner, with a customer who may
not have
transacted through marketplace regularly, than it does to manage in orders with
a channel.
It creates different flows at every step of the process. And it's really,
there's three pieces, because I like doing things in threes. There's all the
internal corporate
process, right? How are we managing the whole quote to cash end to end? There's
sales process
in the different conversations you need to have, sales supporting tools, you
know, quoting,
forecasting, sales force. How do I get a private offer? And all those different
pieces have to
come together. And then there's also the customer and partner facing pieces of
it as well, right?
We've had folks on our team who've really had to develop an expertise in how
you talk about
marketplace processes with a customer or partner who hasn't done it before. And
our leaning in
from an ISV perspective has really been key to execution. I remember you
mentioning too, like,
well, how did you handle the seller enablement? Because that was new for you
guys as well, just
you know, coaching up that your field, there was a new motion for them. So that
's one that I would
definitely consider a work in progress, right? And I know some other sessions
have talked to
it as well, but it's really a story you have to be consistent with. You have to
be able to give a
really clear what's in it for me on the why they should do it. But once you get
that message across,
you still have to be able to then go and help them execute and make execution
simple. We've come
along the way on that journey, right? And tackle has been key to that for us in
terms of creating
processes that feel relatively consistent across the different marketplaces.
Sure.
But for our sales teams, our goal continues to be making it the simplest router
market,
and we're not all the way there yet. Got it.
I think the next, like, where I'd like to take the discussion is just kind of
talking about,
you know, some of the things that you actually did to address all those various
challenges when
it comes to the internal corporate challenges that you're talking about, the
partner challenges,
and then also the enablement. What were some of the actions that you actually
took,
maybe particularly on the "cash system"? Yeah, so really every stage of our
internal process has had
to either be shaped to accommodate marketplace, or we've had to shape
marketplace processes
to accommodate what we do as a company. So, right on the quoting side, as a
channel business,
we're used to quoting to a distributor, right? We have a distributor and a rese
ller on a quote,
we pass that out. So for our field teams, we now need to be able to quote to a
marketplace provider,
and we really bake that in to all of our systems. So you can quote in every one
of our quoting tools,
with AWS or with GCP or with Azure as a part of the router market. When you
forecast that quote,
right, it picks up in route to market forecasting the same way other channel
partners do.
It pulls on to the opportunity the same way our other channel partners do, and
it's really become
a part of a natural motion for us as we think about what a sales team has to
understand to be
able to manage their opportunity. Once that quote happens, right, it still has
to hand off into the
private offer workflow. And that's something that we've really still been
handling with,
you know what I would consider people automation, right? There's a handful of
us who really know
how to make a private offer and can go in and do it with all the right detail,
ask the right questions.
But we've kept that really hidden from our sales teams for the most part. So
from their end,
they need to quote, they have to be able to talk about price with a partner and
customer,
but the back end, they don't have to touch. Right.
What did you do just in terms of like cleaning up your story with AWS and
Microsoft and like
actually gathering data to help tell that story? So as we've scaled, right,
each of the different
parts of the company, we've had to bring along that good market journey with us
, right,
for our finance department, marketplace creates a different order processing
mechanism.
That's taken work and it's partially done work that we've been able to drive
from hyper scale
perspective and with tackle to create some relative simplicity that we now get
something that's an
object we can book, right? We get a notification from tackle that feels close
to a PO. But we've had to
also accommodate that each of those orgs that we're touching is changing their
process along
the way also, right? It's different things that have to be validated. It's
where do we know that
we have the right legal term store or that if we negotiated legal terms, they
're being captured as
part of the deal. And to drive that story internally, right, we have had to get
really very clear
on the growth narrative of why cloud good market is important and right not
going to get into
financial details and camp, but the year on your growth is significant for us
and being able to
demonstrate that and show why the scale is relevant and why it's important to
the business has been
a very necessary part of the narrative to work the change management side.
Yeah, that's interesting kind of touches. Like I know a lot of the theme of a
lot of these
discussions have been enablement for your sales reps and stuff and out in the
field to make them
aware of what cloud good market is and what marketplace is. But I think what
you're touching
on is it's also it's important to enable the all of the stakeholders that are
internally
involved with cloud go to market and make sure that everybody's buying in and
understands the why behind it and the value that it's bringing to the business.
You know, it's funny. It's a lot of the same things that we talk about from a
sales operations
and sales enablement standpoint, right, or the same skills that we really had
to manage internally
to drive the outcomes we're trying to drive, right? Yeah, building internal
champions,
right, having the right stakeholders in the room, having the decision makers
buy into the change
we're trying to create, it really has been a call a two or three year sales
cycle,
internally, for us to get to where we are today. Yeah, yeah, that's an
interesting way to put it
at to think of it as like a two to three year sales cycle. What are you I mean,
you've done a lot
particularly over the last three quarters, I'd say, and it's been exciting
watching you not only
adopt the tackle platform, but also watching your marketplace revenue, frankly,
skyrocket.
What are you most proud of? Like, what's the what's kind of the feather in the
cap if you were to
put this as a brief on your LinkedIn page of your work over the last year? What
would you highlight?
I think there's a story that's out there for most ISVs that have a partnership
motion at all,
that this is something that can drive meaningful growth, right? Marketplaces
across different,
you know, selling motions, enterprise, mid-market, SMB, there is a growth story
that you can create,
and in an established company, right, it's creating material change. So it's
being able to really
affect change within the organization, and now seeing the outcomes of that
change is probably what
I'm most proud of, but we're not nearly done yet, and that's probably where we
should go next.
Yeah, I know you're an hour psyched when I'm forgetting the name of your CEO,
but he was on CNBC
probably like three months ago on like the little tech check after one of your
earnings calls,
so it was pretty cool to see our work make it all the way up to that.
All right, what was let's talk about like, I know we've got five minutes left,
so we've got time
for probably like two more larger questions. What's something that you would
have done differently
in hindsight? That stood out or maybe a mistake that you made that took kind of
another go at it,
what would some advice that you would give to the crowd of lessons learned?
So this is definitely a hindsight being 2020 type item, but with having
relationships across the
different cloud providers, we've created more challenges than we needed to in
treating them
differently in some of the internal marketplace efforts and processes. And I
think in the last year,
we've made a lot of progress at standardizing, right, getting where kind of
what we have on offer
in the marketplace is it's closer to parity, simplifying the messaging aligning
the messaging
across them in terms of what we're talking about, how we're talking about the
product,
and then all of the internal process around it. For anyone who's managing
multiple marketplaces,
really driving consistency there, I think is the most important thing we can do
, because
if I'm a seller, it's enough to learn how to manage one whole new process with
marketplace
compared to direct or compared to a channel sale, but managing three or four,
you'll just lose
people on. Right, forget it, that's too thick. Yeah, a lot of sellers would
just put that in the
too hard pile. Let's talk about just to kind of wrap like what's next, where
you want to take things
moving forward and how you take this from kind of like this. I think you took
cloud go to market from
an initial experiment to something that's now part of the business. How do you
continue to scale that?
So I think this is probably the last set of threes. We need our field to really
get more nuanced and
more understanding of how private offers flow. We've come a long way in terms
of the ability to
manage a transaction, but it's taken a lot of resources and effort. With three
people creating
offers, you can do that when it's 10 orders a quarter, you can do that at 30 or
40 orders a quarter,
you can't do that at 200. Being prepared for that type of growth across the
business is really an
important part of our next phase. And on the private offer side, it's how do we
get the technology
to where we can leverage technology to drive scale, not just people. So I have
an offer
automation out of Salesforce off my opportunity with the right guardrails that
I'm pulling from
the quote, all the information I need. I'm pulling from an account record, the
cloud provider
details that I know about this account from the last private offer, right? Rep
turnover is another
tale as old as time in B2B sales. How do I know who I worked with last time?
How do I know the
Azure account ID that we transacted with six months ago and being able to
really systematize
how we manage that lifecycle for customers and for data. And then the same
thing for
Cocell and we haven't really talked as much about Cocell on this. But how do we
really get
programmatic about who we should cocell with, right? If I'm looking at 100
opportunities
in a district in a quarter, which ones of those should we be talking with Azure
which ones should we be talking with AWS and why? And how do we get our field
to really drive that?
There's alliance is led and I know that's part of the tackle maturity model.
But we are in that alliance is led space, though, and starting to think about
how we make the pivot
to where the field really can drive those conversations. And then the last
thing,
you know, it's really that technology piece that we haven't nailed.
And that cuts across all of it, but getting the last mile clean of getting an
offer out to a
customer where they have all the right details to understand it without a
manual touch point
before an acceptance is another piece we haven't quite cracked. And that's a
little harder because
I don't think there's a clean system to do it in. But it's part enablement,
part technology,
and part process that we need to make that last step easier than we have.
Yeah, totally. I mean, and that we've taken that as our charter just to kind of
finish this out
and let everybody know what we're doing. Like over the next quarter, I think
Jacob had touched
in a lot. You know, our we're mapping out the Salesforce integration with
tackle to initiate
private offers out of Salesforce, also using tackle prospect to help better map
out various
districts like Jacob was talking to. But we're coming down the wire. Jacob,
always a pleasure,
my friend. Likewise, Mike. Take care, everybody.
Okay. We're still recording. Don't say anything. Don't say anything yet.
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