Marketplace revenue is growing but finance hates the platform fee. How do I make the case?
Do not argue about the fee, argue about the alternative. Compare the fully loaded cost of deals won through the marketplace with your normal CAC, then add the weeks of procurement and legal you skip. Then point at where the money comes from: the customer is spending budget already committed to their cloud provider, which regularly unlocks a deal size no departmental budget would have carried. If you are in a program like AWS ISV Accelerate, private offer fees drop, so the real internal conversation is usually about qualifying for the right program rather than about avoiding marketplaces altogether.
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The benchmark dataset for marketplace and co-sell: multi cloud sellers at 29% of revenue through marketplaces versus 3% for single cloud, and 92% of companies saying cloud partner attention is the hard part.
The actual eligibility bar for co-selling with AWS, in AWS's own words: marketplace listing, ACE eligibility, 5 launched and 15 qualified opportunities in 12 months. Read it before you promise your board a co-sell motion.
Primary source rather than a vendor blog, and the entry point to the delivery method, entitlement and private offer docs you will actually need when you list.
Freshworks' SVP of global channels on why the mid market is only reachable through partners, with a live example: one distribution partner selling through 6,000 plus resellers, growing over 40% year on year.
