Wiz's multifaceted marketplace approach
When it comes to capturing opportunity in the commercial marketplace, Wiz takes full advantage of the platform's capabilities and initiatives to drive profitability while strengthening their customer relationships.
Co-sell
For Wiz, collaborative selling—or co-sell—is one of the most powerful aspects of the marketplace. "Co-sell could be a revenue generator, it could be a pipeline accelerator, it could be a relationship builder," Anderson said. "When you launch a proactive co-sell approach, Microsoft collaborates with you on an opportunity, they help you throughout the sales process, and then the deal goes through the marketplace. I think this is a super important piece in an ISV's strategy today. You cannot ignore it, because if you don't do it, your competitors will."
Marketplace Rewards
Through Marketplace Rewards, Wiz worked with Microsoft to create a credit incentive program to promote offers with customers through the marketplace. During a three-month campaign, Wiz used Azure sponsorship credits to close over a dozen competitive deals, resulting in a 1,500% ROI—and motivating more customers to adopt the marketplace.
The Wiz Alliances team
To proactively promote their solutions on the marketplace, Wiz established a dedicated internal team. Each seller that joins Wiz goes through the commercial marketplace and co-sell onboarding and certification. From there, they work closely with their Microsoft Alliance team to review their pipeline and come up with strategies for promoting their marketplace solutions for each deal.
Because of the customer and partnership value Wiz experiences with the marketplace, the Wiz Alliances team is incentivized to generate marketplace deals, and they have a dedicated commission plan for opportunities—which sparked their massive revenue growth in the past year.
Scaling through the channel
"Wiz is not only a marketplace-first company, but a partner-first company in our sales strategy—and that means that almost all the deals in our pipelines have a channel partner," said Anderson. Channel partners serve as a bridge between Microsoft partners and customers, collaborating with Microsoft to market, sell, and support products and services. "They not only personally know the decision-makers, but they also know the customer's cloud environment, needs, budgets, and KPIs."
With multiparty private offers, Wiz can scale through channel partners who have trusted relationships with customers who Wiz may not otherwise have access to. Through the marketplace, Wiz can send a private offer to the channel partner, who can then sell to the customer—simplifying the sales and procurement process for everyone involved.
The earlier Wiz can get channel partners involved in the process, the better—so they can help nurture the prospect relationships all the way up through the process of closing a deal. "And by that point, we want to be in a place where the prospect already feels happy with the engagement and results," Anderson said.
The channel partner plays a vital role in that, which is why Wiz is so intentional about onboarding them with certifications and a deep understanding of the Wiz vision and product. Wiz also has co-sell eligible Azure solutions, which means 100% of the channel partner customer's purchase counts toward their Azure cloud consumption commitment—giving them more value for their investment. "That really helped us close so many deals we probably wouldn't have closed if there wasn't a channel partner along the way," said Anderson.