136 – MASTERCLASS – How Can Partners Achieve Their Greatest Results Through Marketplaces?

Vice President for Marketplace Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®

My mission is to help technology organizations achieve their most significant results working with the technology giants like Microsoft. We see an acceleration to the transformation of partner ecosystems fueled by marketplaces. Technology buyers have rapidly shifted, and partners need to align. This Ultimate Guide to Partnering® guest is at the center of the “maelstrom”. Jake Swenson is Microsoft VP for Commercial Marketplaces and joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®to answer the question, “how can partners achieve their greatest results through marketplaces?”

I was excited to welcome Jake Swenson to Ultimate Guide to Partnering. Jake Swenson is Vice President, Commercial Marketplaces at Microsoft. In his role, Jake is responsible for product management and engineering for the Microsoft commercial marketplace, with the overall mission of dramatically simplifying the way B2B technology is bought and sold. Jake partners across the business to drive Marketplace strategy, delivery, GTM, and operations.

We have been chronically the transformation here at Ultimate Guide to Partnering®. I believe that marketplaces will be an accelerant to successful partner growth during this rapid transformation. Microsoft’s Rodney Clark put a stake in the ground last year by significantly lowering the fees associated with Microsoft’s Marketplace, a solid signal to technology organizations and competitors. Previous guests like Jay McBain cite marketplaces as a driving force during this “Decade of the Ecosystem” Sanjay Mehta and Tackle.io have built a business model tied to enabling technology organizations to publish to marketplaces

In this episode, Jake helps us understand his organization’s role and mission, the value for Microsoft customers to utilize marketplaces, and how partners can significantly benefit by coming onboard.

What You’ll Learn

  • The role and mission of Jake’s Microsoft Commerical Marketplaces organization.
  • The value for customers to using Microsoft’s Commercial Marketplaces.
  • The value to partners in publishing to the Microsoft Commercial Marketplaces.
  • Lessons from the best Microsoft Commercial Marketplaces partnerships.
  • Valuable career advice for our earlier in career listeners.

It was great to feature Jake Swenson. I hope you enjoy and learn from this discussion as much as I enjoyed welcoming this extraordinary leader to Ultimate Guide to Partnering®.

Quote From This Episode

“So for partners, number one is “reach.” We serve from startups to the biggest software publishers and enterprise software providers globally. What they all have in common, they all need reach. By publishing in the Marketplace, partners get instant access to reach. This includes millions of Microsoft customers globally, our network of 90,000 Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), and the opportunity to qualify for co-selling with our 15,000 field sellers. Scale is a significant value point for partners.”

Other episodes designed to help you decode Microsoft & Marketplaces

For 2022, I am excited to announce PartnerTap as the Founding Sponsor of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. PartnerTap is the only Partner Ecosystem Platform designed for the Enterprise. Their technology makes it easy to align Channel Teams with automated account mapping, letting you control what data you share while building a partner revenue engine. I’m so excited to have them on board and for our exciting year ahead!

My organization, Ultimate Partnerships, is also a sponsor of this episode. Ultimate Partnerships helps you get the most results from your partnerships. Get Partnerships Right – Optimize for Success – Deliver Results – Ultimate Partnerships.