In the last six weeks of the year, a particular kind of conversation happens in enterprise software deals. The buyer is ready, or nearly ready, and then someone on their side asks whether the purchase can go through their cloud provider’s marketplace. The reason is rarely about features. The company signed a multi-year committed spend agreement with AWS, Microsoft, or Google, a portion of that commitment is still unspent, and money not spent against it by the end of the term is effectively lost. A software purchase routed through the marketplace counts toward the commitment. A purchase on the vendor’s own paper does not.
For a growing number of B2B companies that conversation is no longer occasional. Marketplace transactions have gone from a curiosity five years ago to a meaningful share of new enterprise bookings for many software vendors, and in some categories, particularly security, data infrastructure, and anything adjacent to AI workloads, they are now the default route for large deals. The hyperscalers have made this deliberate. They reduced their listing fees, built private offer mechanics that handle custom pricing and terms, and pay their own field sellers for helping partner software close through the marketplace.
Sales and finance usually understand this already, because they live with the contract and the fee. Marketing tends to discover it later, typically when the pipeline report and the bookings report stop agreeing with each other. As 2027 plans are finalized over the next several weeks, it is worth treating the marketplace as what it has become: a channel with its own buyers and economics, which needs its own plan.
Why the Marketplace Is a Channel, Not a Checkout
The instinct in most marketing teams is to regard a marketplace transaction as a procurement detail. The demand was created by marketing and sales in the usual way, and the buyer simply chose a different way to pay. For some deals that is accurate. For a rising share it is not, and the distinction changes how you should plan.
Three things make the marketplace behave like a channel.
The budget is different. When a buyer purchases against committed cloud spend, the money often comes out of a budget controlled by infrastructure or a cloud center of excellence rather than the line of business that wanted the software. That can bring a different set of people into the buying committee, and it can rescue a deal that would otherwise have stalled for lack of discretionary budget. It also means the person who signs may never have seen your campaign.
The cloud provider’s sellers are involved. Each of the major hyperscalers runs a co-sell program in which their account teams are compensated, in one form or another, when partner software transacts through the marketplace in their accounts. A cloud account executive with a quota and a list of customers who are behind on their commitment has a strong reason to recommend software that will help them spend it. That account executive is a source of demand that most marketing teams have no relationship with, and no visibility into.
Discovery happens there, increasingly. Buyers do browse marketplace listings, especially technical evaluators who already spend their working day inside a cloud console. As the providers add AI-driven search and recommendation to their marketplaces, and as buyer-side agents begin assembling shortlists, the listing becomes a piece of content that is read by machines and people who may never visit your website.
None of this means every B2B company needs a marketplace strategy. If your buyers do not run significant workloads on one of the big three clouds, or your deal sizes are small enough that committed spend is irrelevant, this is a minor consideration. But if your sales team has closed even a handful of deals through private offers this year, the channel is already shaping your pipeline whether or not marketing is planning for it.
The Measurement Problem Shows Up First
The first symptom most marketing teams notice is that their reporting breaks.
A deal closed through a private offer is invoiced by the cloud provider, not by you. The order data arrives through a seller portal or an API feed, in a different format, often with a different customer identifier than the one in your CRM, and sometimes on a delay. If revenue operations has not built a reliable integration between marketplace transactions and CRM opportunities, these deals appear in finance’s bookings but not in marketing’s influenced pipeline, or appear as duplicates, or attach to the wrong account entirely.
The second issue is net revenue. Marketplace fees reduce what the vendor receives, and private offers frequently carry additional discounting to make the deal attractive to the cloud seller’s customer. If marketing reports pipeline and bookings at list or gross contract value, its return-on-investment figures will diverge from what finance sees. That gap is small when marketplace volume is small. It becomes a credibility problem when a quarter of enterprise bookings route this way.
The third issue is attribution in the honest sense: knowing what actually created the deal. When a cloud account executive brings an opportunity to your sales team, who sourced it? In most attribution models the answer is whatever marketing touch happened to be recorded first, which may have been an unrelated webinar the buyer attended two years ago. The opposite error is also common: deals that marketing genuinely created get credited to the partner because they closed through the marketplace.
Before you plan any marketplace marketing activity, fix the plumbing. That means a defined field on the opportunity that records the transaction route and, separately, the source of the opportunity, including a value for cloud provider referral. It means marketplace orders reconciling to CRM opportunities on a regular schedule, with someone in revenue operations who owns the exceptions. And it means reporting marketing’s contribution on net revenue, after fees, so that the numbers you present match the ones finance presents. None of this is glamorous. All of it is required before any of the more interesting work can be judged.
Marketing to the Cloud Provider’s Sellers
The least developed part of most marketplace programs is the relationship with the hyperscalers’ own field organization. This is partner marketing, of a kind many B2B marketers have not done before, and it has its own logic.
A cloud account executive manages a large number of customers and an enormous catalog of partner software. They will recommend the vendors they understand, trust not to embarrass them, and can explain in a sentence. They have very little time and they will not read a forty-slide partner deck. What works with them resembles what works with a reseller’s sales team, with the important difference that you do not pay them directly and cannot compel their attention.
Give them a short, specific reason to bring you in. The most effective material I have seen for cloud sellers is a single page that describes the customer situation in which your product helps them, in their terms. That usually means workload migration, consumption growth on their platform, or the security and data requirements that are blocking a customer from moving a workload. “Customers running regulated data workloads who are stalled on migration because of audit requirements” gives a cloud seller something to listen for. A list of your product’s features does not.
Work account by account, not program by program. Mutual account mapping with the cloud provider’s team, using whatever tool or process their partner organization supports, will show where your target accounts overlap with theirs and where their seller has a commitment shortfall to close. That overlap list is the most valuable account-based marketing input you will get from the relationship. Running joint campaigns against it, a co-hosted executive briefing in the provider’s local office, for example, produces far more than generic co-branded content.
Invest in the field relationships where the pipeline is. The partner organization at each hyperscaler is large and layered. Your partner manager can help with program access and funding, but the deals come from regional field sellers and their solution architects. Field marketing and partner marketing should be planning together, choosing two or three regions or industry teams where your coverage and theirs overlap well, and building relationships there rather than spreading thinly across the whole provider.
Use the funding properly. The providers offer co-marketing funds, proof-of-concept credits, and incentives that can reduce the cost of a customer’s evaluation. These are useful, but they come with eligibility requirements, claim processes, and deadlines, and in many companies a meaningful amount goes unclaimed because nobody owns the paperwork. Assign an owner and treat it as a budget line, with the same scrutiny you apply to your own spend.
The Listing Is Content
Most marketplace listings for B2B software are poor. They were created by a partner or alliances manager to meet the technical requirements for transacting, they reuse the opening paragraph from the website, and nobody in marketing has looked at them since.
That was tolerable when the listing was just a checkout page for deals already agreed. It matters more now. Technical evaluators do read them. Cloud sellers check them before recommending a vendor. And the AI search and recommendation features inside the marketplaces, along with external AI assistants, use the listing as a source of structured, apparently authoritative information about what your product does and who it is for.
Treat the listing the way you would treat a key product page. Write it for the evaluator who already knows the cloud platform well and wants to know, specifically, how your product deploys, what it integrates with, what it costs in their environment, and what the procurement path looks like. Include the architecture detail that a solution architect needs. Be precise about the categories and use cases you select, because they determine which searches you appear in. Publish pricing for the standard tiers if your business model allows it, since a listing with no public pricing pushes every inquiry into a private offer conversation that slows small deals down. And put the listing on someone’s content calendar, with a review at every major product release.
Where Marketplaces Do Not Help
A balanced plan should account for what the channel costs and where it does not fit.
The fees, though lower than they once were, are real, and they are paid on deals you may have won anyway. If your sales team routes every enterprise deal through the marketplace by default because it is convenient, you are paying a commission on business the channel did not create. Finance should be tracking which marketplace deals were genuinely enabled by committed spend or cloud seller involvement, and which simply used the marketplace as an invoicing method.
The channel also concentrates dependency. A meaningful share of pipeline arriving through one cloud provider’s field team is a share of pipeline subject to that provider’s priorities, which change with their own fiscal year, their own product announcements, and occasionally their decision to build a competing service. Marketing’s own demand programs remain the hedge against that, and they should not be cut on the assumption that the marketplace will replace them.
Finally, the customer relationship becomes more complicated. When billing runs through the cloud provider, renewal timing, expansion, and even basic customer data can be harder to see. Customer marketing and customer success need to know which accounts transact this way so they can plan renewals and expansion conversations around the buyer’s commitment cycle, not just your contract dates.
What to Put in the 2027 Plan
For teams finalizing next year’s plan, the practical steps are reasonably clear.
First, get the data right. Agree with revenue operations and finance how marketplace transactions are recorded, how opportunity source is distinguished from transaction route, and how marketing’s contribution is reported on net revenue. Do this before the fourth-quarter rush makes the problem visible in a board deck.
Second, decide whether the marketplace is a channel for you at all. Look at this year’s closed deals by transaction route and source. If the volume is material, give the channel an owner in marketing, usually within partner or field marketing, with a defined budget and targets.
Third, if it is a channel, focus. Choose one cloud provider where your customer overlap and product fit are strongest, rather than running thin programs with all three. Build the relationship with specific field teams, run account mapping, and plan joint activity against the overlap list.
Fourth, rewrite the listing, and keep it current.
Fifth, align the calendar. Buyers with committed spend are most motivated as their commitment term approaches its end, which for many large customers is the end of the calendar year or the end of the provider’s fiscal year. Account-based programs aimed at marketplace buyers should build toward those dates, not peak in the first quarter because that is when the annual plan starts.
The marketplace shift is a change in how enterprise software gets paid for, and the money now moves through the cloud providers. Where the budget comes from shapes who decides, who influences the decision, and what information they rely on. B2B marketers have dealt with this before, with resellers, systems integrators, and value-added distributors. The particulars differ, but the discipline does not: understand how the channel’s people are paid, give them a reason to bring you in, and measure honestly what the channel adds versus what it simply processes.