Name: The Cloud GTM Journey of Salesforce: A Strategic Motion for Marketplaces, Momentum, and Multi-Cloud Moves
Uploaded: 2025-05-06T18:15:43.596Z
Duration: 43 min 28 s
Description: The Cloud GTM Journey of Salesforce: A Strategic Motion for Marketplaces, Momentum, and Multi-Cloud Moves

Transcript for "The Cloud GTM Journey of Salesforce: A Strategic Motion for Marketplaces, Momentum, and Multi-Cloud Moves": Alright. Welcome, Nick, Kaitlin. Thank you so much for being here. Would love for you just to take a second to introduce yourself to the broader cloud go to market XP audience. Awesome. And and, John, it is great to be back. A year, we've accomplished a ton. So, excited for this conversation. But, hey, everyone. I'm Nick Johnston. I lead the strategic technology partnerships team at Salesforce. And hi, everyone. My name is Kaitlin Place, and I lead our global co sell with AWS. Awesome. So like you said, Nick, it's been a year. I mean, last year, you were pretty early to the journey, and Kaitlin was busy working with the team, making everything happen. But, you know, so much has happened. What what what have you learned from the last year of experience, and how are you thinking about the milestones you all achieved over the last year? Well, first and foremost, we're really proud of what we've been able to accomplish together with the Tackle team, in the last year. So, when I start with the second question there around milestones, we couldn't be happier with the results, in terms of how we've been able to drive outcomes by selling through the AWS marketplace and expanding our marketplace strategy. I think we've really changed the the mentality both at Salesforce and with our customers around the benefits of selling through cloud marketplace and cloud go to market. And, really excited the fact that we've been, the fastest growing ISV ever, for the AWS marketplace, thanks to our partnership and the work we've done together and and the work that, you know, frankly, Kaitlin team drove. When we were here last year, we were talking about our strategy, why we went to the place that or we would landed on the place that we did, and and how we were thinking about launching on the AWS marketplace. But we built a team behind it also that Kaitlin led, and, they drove incredible results. So we're pretty excited. Yeah. It's been I mean, I think we talked last year about your desire to go fast, and I I think you were going fast last May, but you're really seeing the pace accelerate through the year was nothing short of extraordinary. So congratulations on that fastest fastest ISV ever, crown, we'll say. So It seems to be the fastest growing too. Yes. Yes. And and I'd I'd be curious, Kaitlin, from your standpoint, how have you seen customer behavior change? Because I I think last year we talked about Salesforce historically is a very direct company. And this is this is more than just a new route to market. This is like an evolution of the way that Salesforce sell. How how have you seen the customer behavior change and maybe even your internal team's behaviors change? Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's it's important to highlight that this was a brand new channel for Salesforce. We did not previous to, you know, eighteen months ago sell through marketplaces. So not only did we have the challenge of needing to teach our customers how to buy from us differently, but we also had to get our sales teams comfortable with leveraging a new channel that added significant value to the transactions that we were doing. Now it's all wonderful when we can talk about the success of last year, but it started off pretty rocky. You know, our first couple of quarters, we were not seeing a ton of traction. We really had to hit the ground with, you know, going to our sales leaders, going to individual accounts, where we believe that there was benefit of of transacting through the AWS Marketplace and really going step by step of why it was important, why cloud marketplaces were advantageous to their procurement cycles, to, you know, their AWS contracts, to their sales course relationships, and ensuring that they understood all of the levers that they would be able to capitalize on through that outside of just, you know, it's easier from a procurement standpoint. So, you know, now our customers are getting it. We've seen some tremendous success with some of our largest, most strategic customers, but I don't wanna short sell that. It took some time for us to really get the the the our customers on board with being able to transact through this new vehicle and getting used to Salesforce selling through this means. Now we only transact through marketplace, through Adept's marketplace private offers, so a lot of our selling mechanics stay the same. Our relationships with our customers stay the same. We still control the pricing, which was really important to our sales, sales team and sales leaders. And so I think that that was one of the first things that the ability for our customers to understand that their relationship didn't fundamentally change with Salesforce was one of the big keys to starting, them getting a little bit more comfortable with with this new channel for us. When you saw teams or, you know, whether it's a salesperson or a sales team get exposure to this new route to market, did that start to spread through that team organically, or or is it still, like, you have to almost convince one by one? Like, what's that what was that transformation like? Initially, it was very much one by one. We had a couple of of sellers that got it immediately, many of whom had the larger transactions that went through the marketplace. And as soon as they got it, as soon as they did one transaction, it was like a light bulb went off, and then they were starting to think of really creative ways to start applying marketplace mechanics that were not, you know, the traditional kind of, locked in ways that we had expected our teams to start leveraging marketplace. So it was very, very cool to see. You know, they would not only do additional transactions with the customers that they had initially transacted with, but then started rolling it out to the rest of their portfolio. This is where and when we started seeing that kind of replicated within one seller within a team, all of a sudden, their counterparts started, you know, leveraging the exact same plays or kind of, you know, tactics in order to get their customers to transact. And then one of the things that, you know, a year ago, we we had to really combat from a myth standpoint with the marketplace is our sellers didn't believe that it was real. It seemed too good to be true, because it's, you know, it's one of the I joke with a lot of our sellers that this is this is one of the most straightforward jobs that I've ever had because it's great. Marketplaces are great for our sales teams. They're great for our customers, and they're great for, you know, the marketplace sellers, you know, like AWS, like Google, like Microsoft. So, really, everybody wins. And so, of course, you know, you hear that. It's no. No. There must be a catch. Someone must be, you know, taking a hit here. Truly, there's not. And as soon as, our team started getting, you know, deals under their belts, they started seeing that that was the case, and then it just took off like a rocket ship. Yeah. And if I could add to that, John, I think I think I recall last year highlighting the fact that we made it a top down requirement that every seller get enabled on how to, sell with AWS and use the AWS marketplace. And I think that really ended up being the catalyst of awareness that was important. And then as Kaitlin referenced, once we started being able to promote the wins, you know, good salespeople are always out there looking at what is driving wins in other parts of their business and naturally competitive. They see their peers winning big deals with, you know, new ideas or new approaches, and they wanna jump to those pretty quickly. So thankfully, on the heels of that mandatory global sales training we had, we had some big wins. And we shouted those from the rooftops, and that really created a snowball effect that we could, could benefit from as we we ramped the overall motion into the the end of the year. Yeah. Let me see. That being a key pattern with ITs embracing this new route to market, just sharing those success stories early. But I I think it's a testament to Salesforce's sales culture, how fast people adopted that. Because a lot of times you hear from ISVs that have to do this, like, nonstop enablement. I'm sure this wasn't a one and done thing. There's still lots of hand to hand, combat or support that happens along the way, but I I do think, you know, seeing seeing how rapidly that'll evolve for you all was really impressive. And and yeah. And I think the the point I'd share with others that are thinking about how they build their team around this that I I think was really important is the role that Kaitlin and her team had was to be that ongoing drumbeat into the field, and we aligned, Kaitlin org to each of our operating units, which is what we call our different sales functions. And they had someone almost embedded into their sales team who could do ongoing, enablement both planned and unplanned or proactive and reactive, and then work inside the team's pipeline calls and see opportunities that maybe it makes sense to coordinate with AWS and, drive a co sell motion. So I think it was a a best practice we also learned was, you know, how to create the, ongoing operating mechanism by having a co sell team aligned to the sales org that could really bring that that new motion to life and support the sellers and not just how to use the marketplace, but also thinking about, how to effectively make sure that that value prop that Kaitlin referenced, the the customer winning, the partner winning, and Salesforce winning, all felt right as we were having the negotiation. So it was great being able to build out that global team and seeing the results work. As you went on that internal alignment journey, were there other areas of resistance? It sounds like from a sales perspective, it was enablement, it was success, it was them understanding why this was good for their customers, why this was good for the cloud providers, why it was good for Salesforce. But what were some of the other areas? Because this ends up being a pretty cross functional, and we sit in a lot of organizations. We talked last year, Nick. You you said this was like a a three part journey that took, like, six years over time, like, many different phases. But after that I mean, you did so much prework, but after that, like, what were the other, like, parts of the org that either took a little longer or you had to massage at ways you didn't expect? I think the the biggest one for us is Salesforce is a enterprise selling machine. You know, John Jahnke, as you mentioned at the at the outset of this, we have a very, very strong way of selling directly, and this process is completely different to our kind of, you know, inherent way of selling from a process standpoint. So I think one of the biggest challenges that that we faced was making sure that our ops teams were aligned with what we were trying to do and that we were building out sustainable, scalable processes that could that could scale with the growth that we've seen from marketplace. I think that we you know, at the beginning of last year, I think that we, you know, set some really ambitious goals that we blew out of the water, and I think that we aligned our our development road map from, you know, marketplace functionality standpoint to align with that. And I think that now, you know, we really need to make sure that their that those operations are continuing to to excel and build the functionality so that these types of transactions are as close to parallel or in parity with our direct sales motion as humanly possible so that we're not putting the operational burden of, you know, a new channel onto our sales, onto our sales teams and instead, you know, integrating marketplace as though it is, you know, just another option in a in a bag of additional ways that they can sell to customers. Yeah. And I think it just adding on to the spirit of what I hope a lot of the the listeners today are are interested in getting in terms of best practices. One of the things we did is we we actually structured, an operating committee where we would have our stakeholders from what we call, business technology, but your traditional IT organization, our, sales operations team, as well as our deal desk, who's looking at the cost structure of every deal and approving deals, and made sure that we had an ongoing cadence of the new features that we were rolling out. Thanks to also the Tackle team that helped us make sure that the features that AWS was developing or that we needed to continue maturing our operations actually worked with our systems. But once we add, like, a good line of sight to our road map, what are the implications in terms of, manual process work, How are we thinking about automating to Kaitlin earlier point? What does this mean when we're looking at deals? And in some instances, as we're negotiating deals, the customer is not necessarily certain if they wanna go via the marketplace or just transact directly. So what might those implications mean from a pricing standpoint and how we think about what deal desk needs to approve, and then all the way down to just the sales ops resources that at the end of a quarter are very resource constrained and how do we properly plan to make sure that, like, the pipeline in front of us, we can actually deliver on with any of the manual steps that we had to, to pick up as we were kind of building the automation while at the same time taking this new process forward. So we had a a decent amount of things that a year ago were pretty manual, and now we started to automate. So started to automate. So having that steering committee and, like, the governance structure so everyone was on the same page operationally, I think, was also very important. That's great. So and we talked a little bit about, like, business application providers embracing marketplaces. And, you know, when when you all launched, it was I I feel like it was one of those shots heard around the world in the cloud go to market ecosystem, like Salesforce is embracing AWS Marketplace, world class direct selling organization. And and still to this day, I have people in vertical applications and business application say, does my buyer actually buy that way? And I'd love to hear I mean, we talked a little bit about procurement last year as part of the puzzle, but I'd be curious to see how how that's played out as this has gone to scale across the organization. Are are the buyers there, and what would what advice would you give to other vertical application providers out there? Yeah. I I think that we have been surprised with how ubiquitous the customers' or the customers' interest have been through all of our segments and all of our verticals. I think that we've actually had sizable wins in every single vertical that we are in and every single industry that we are in, which I don't think that we expected quite as, you you know, we expected to have, you know, one or two segments that were really, really, you know, into the marketplace transaction, process. And we've kind of seen it from everyone, because, truly, you know, if any if any customer is leveraging, you know, cloud technology to run their business, which I think, you know, the vast majority of almost any company is, they they probably have the ability to transact through marketplaces and add in, you know, that huge commercial lever for not only consolidating the or simplifying their overall procurement efforts, but also getting the advantages of, you know, contributing, their, you know, SaaS providers or business application providers to burn down that that spend commit that that their, that is probably their largest IT spend with a cloud provider. So I think that that's, you know, the biggest lever from the marketplace standpoint that Salesforce has really been capitalizing on is we have customers that have this spend that they can allocate towards towards business applications that they can now use to buy Salesforce. And that was the big for one for a lot of our sales teams, but also for a lot of our customers that I don't think quite realized how powerful that would be, not only to their individual functions, so, you know, a business user buying a specific application, but also to their overall procurement strategy all the way up to, you know, a customer's CFO who is now able to consolidate a lot of their spend and make sure that they're going to hit their spend commitment to, to their cloud providers, which was really, really exciting and made us a lot of friends within the CTO and CFO organizations. Great. So I'm curious. I mean, a lot of there's still a lot of conversations, and this may be more of an ecosystem wide, because I think Salesforce has a unique position. But relative to co sell, like, co selling with the clouds is a a a hot topic amongst all ISVs. And and your mileage varies based upon the size of company you are, based upon your maturity, based upon how big your deals are. There's a lot of variables in there. But what I mean, what's really happened with Cosell from a Salesforce standpoint over time? And then even as you think more about the broader community, if you had any guidance to say, like, understanding Salesforce may be a little unique. What other advice would you have for others relative to how to maximize the impact of Cosell? Yeah. Yeah. So great great question because Cosell partner Cosell is obviously, always a little bit tricky, especially when you talk about large organizations that are inevitably going to be stepping on each other's toes from a product development standpoint, or a go to market standpoint. With AWS Marketplace, so I previous to us launching AWS Marketplace, I did co sell with AWS and many of our other strategic partnerships for four years. Marketplace was a huge lever for us unblocking scalable co sell with AWS, and the reason for that is because it removed the barrier of AWS reps wondering what was in it for them and why they would engage with Salesforce to help us sell products that, you know, they believe that we could either sell ourselves or they weren't seeing significant, you know, positioning of AWS native products. So I think that that's the the big place that that we saw a or that we've seen a huge co sell advantage is now we quickly get to demonstrate or build trust with the AWS teams because we are aligned around a commercial a commercial strategy to benefit our customers. So we come in. We have products that are ready to position that we want to push through the marketplace either because our customers are demanding it or because, you know, there's significant, commercial advantages to it. And the AWS team is willing to lean in with us because, you know, it's a pretty great lead for them to get, from Salesforce. We do a lot of the heavy lifting with positioning those initial products. They get, you know, the payback from going through the marketplace, but then it really unlocks the what I consider the cooler part of co selling, which is, so we've done this. How do we help each other position our products more effectively across things that are going to drive, you know, the licensed sales sales of, SaaS providers or business apps and also will contribute to AWS, positioning more of their native services, to make us mutually, successful and to accelerate our customers' business outcomes. So this is where that win win win comes even back. You know, there's a lot of hesitation around what customers are or what, you know, what these big tech companies are doing across, our road map and across their road map. And we've been lucky with AWS that there's been a lot of, synergy in what we develop and what they develop intentionally because our product teams work so closely together. But where we do step on each other's toes, the marketplace really removes a lot of that friction because for the first time, we're logged in in kind of the greater overall strategy within a customer and able to see that, you know, maybe, you know, we need to sacrifice this so that AWS can come in and help the customer move faster, and then they'll help us position a different product where the overall kind of strategy within that account is more powerful because we're working together. Yeah. And then, Kaitlin, you nailed it. I I think the only other piece I would add is where I'm seeing a lot of our co sell focus evolve going forward is how do we think about in this world of data and AI, how do we make sure that the win win win concept of the partner winning, Salesforce winning, and most importantly, the customer winning is still true. And a lot of that has to do with educating sellers on not just how the Salesforce products work, but also how the partner's products work and why the partners care, and, like, how you help drive consumption on all fronts and then, you know, really reinforce the message that it helps the customer save money and provides simplicity for the customer. So I think just the the maturity around co sell is just getting more technical, especially as we start thinking about agent to agent scenarios and, data sharing scenarios that it's it's most relevant right now and is maybe a little more technically nuanced, but still needs to meet that you know, the triangle of value so that the partner Salesforce and then the customer are all winning. And just, Nick, that that a great point just to double down on that. Like, what we've really been seeing from a co sell perspective from our customers is gone are the days of this, you know, Cambrian tech age where you can work in these silos. Our customers don't care where their data lives. They want it all in one place, and they wanna be able to use it as though it is in one system because that's what they need in order to respond to their customers. So, you know, with products like our data cloud, which runs on AWS, there's this very kind of natural synergy with us all selling together that requires a co sell. Whereas before, you know, we could kind of sell something and then AWS could come sell something or, you know, we could have another hyperscaler come in. But now customers want to see that integrated solution because they don't wanna have to go through the process of building everything themselves for core functionality that's not only gonna make their AI better and move faster, but they'll also be able to leverage in agents to really start accelerating their, their business outcomes. And so much of that talk track really centered around collaboratively aligning to the outcome that matters to the joint venture. And I'm curious because I think a lot of people expect to get leads. Like and it's it's what it's the most common question I get from people who have never done this before, they're like, well, what are the leads I'm gonna get? I'm like, hey. It's a lot more nuanced than that. But I I'm just curious. Like, do do you think about leads? I don't think you all do, but I it's We love it in one case. Know if it's great. Yeah. Leads are leads are great. I I have a a personal opinion on this, which which Nick might not agree with. But my A little conflict on the call is great. Like, it's Yeah. So so my my personal opinion about the leads place, because that was something that our leadership, you know, our top leadership at Salesforce was very, very interested in. Right? We've entered into the marketplace. Where are the leads coming from? Now we do get leads from AWS, but it's more around customers that want to buy through marketplace, customers that they know are Salesforce customers that wanna buy through marketplace. But from a product standpoint, we have one what I consider one of the best enterprise sales teams in the entire world. And, AWS, someone that does not, you know, have kind of that core understanding of our products, finding something within a customer that we are actively working that we have no visibility into is pretty rare. But now with marketplace, the leads conversation does change because now there's a mechanism that we may not have visibility into that the AWS team will be intimately involved with. They will know, you know, when their customer, is, you know, primed to buy and when when they would when they, you know, know new at a PPA, like yeah. All of these news. Yeah. Exactly. Right. And those are the places that they don't necessarily get us, you know, net new leads that we have no visibility into from a product standpoint. But what they do do is help us drive the urgency or help drive a compelling event that can help us lock in a product. And that's very advantageous. I agree with that completely. Unfortunately, there's no disagreement on that to create some spice on the call, John. But, no. I think that's right. Yeah. I actually think multi multi party, the evolution of multi party, especially, I think about for companies like Salesforce who have really mature ISV ecosystems. Like, as those ISV ecosystems start to come to these marketplaces as well, the multi party and and there's not a lot of foundation to make that happen yet, but I do think that'll all start to come to life this year. We saw it. We've seen it in the last year where there's scenarios, you know, around you know, I'll just give an example, like, our service cloud and a contact center partner who's also an AWS ISV, the transaction all happening at the same time, not necessarily on one piece of paper, but the deal's all lining up in the same way for the customer because they're looking at it as one big transformation effort. And Right. Just simpler for them that way. So to your point, you know, all the foundation for how we can really make that simple is still getting worked out, but we're already seeing deals closing in that type of nature where customers are looking at multiple SaaS applications to the marketplace at the same time, and transacting that way. And I will say also for for, larger, you know, business application providers, because of the success that we've seen with marketplace, the AWS, partner success organization is definitely a little more tuned in to what's happening within their customers with Salesforce as well now, which, you know, they're they're more interested in what our strategy is. They're more interested into where you know, into learning how our products work, which we previously hadn't seen as much of because they obviously have a huge ISB ecosystem. And so that marketplace success, it's not the only thing because, obviously, driving native you know, driving their their native, or core consumption is the place where they really wanna sell into. But marketplace is a great indicator of where they can actually capitalize on it, so it helps helps kind of accelerate or keep you top of mind for that team. And you I mean, you all have a pretty sophisticated system integrator ecosystem as well. Are you starting to see marketplace and system integrator come to life more? The system integrators are very, very interested in marketplace. I think I think that there is a huge opportunity for them to lean in a lot more, and we've been working with some of, you know, the larger GSIs on strategies to do that. I think that the the trick with SIs or or GSIs is that that is still you know, we are still looking for product positioning there. So marketplace is can be a factor, but we haven't really seen that be a huge driver in us actually being able to leverage marketplace as as, a mechanic within our deals. Yeah. And what I remind the the leadership team is from the SIs is marketplace can be some of the how, but it's not the what. It's not the thing we should be going to consult customers on when you're in that position as an SI. Really, when the magic happens is when they get their AWS practice aligned with their Salesforce practice with a point of view on how you can take the best of the services from AWS with the, business application Salesforce has running on AWS, deeply integrate them to solve a specific problem, and then the marketplace can become, you know, a great transactional vehicle, so that everybody's winning. However, the the the real value in the solution architecture is still, I think, what customers wanna see and the role that SIs can provide the most leadership in. I I think that you just hit the nail on the head with where multiparty will go. Like, that's where we'll end up, which is truly that solution delivered in a single seamless way, all tracked on a common bill. Yep. Intersection of services and products. Great. So let's, shift gears. Multi cloud, it was not really a topic of conversation last year. Was not? Yeah. The, exciting announcement between you all and Google Cloud both, you know, on a commitment to Google as well as integration to Gemini and AgentForce and, you know, how how are you thinking about that evolution from a multi cloud approach perspective? Well, first and foremost, any partnership that we do is going to be customer driven. So we we prioritize where we focus and the work that we deliver, based upon where our customers are asking us to be and where they want us to go. And it's frankly where we started with the the journey we were on with AWS is our our customers were pushing us to not just build there, but deeply integrate there and and also provide them with more flexible purchasing options, which is what got us to the marketplace last year. But at the same time, we we had material demand for other, options. And so I think that's that's what got us to where we we are now, frankly, in the announcement that you referenced. There's also in this world that I referenced earlier around AI and data and and everyone trying to nail their data strategies so they have the right Agenstic strategy, Google's doing some amazing things with Gemini. And, we were really excited to, be able to bring some of those capabilities into agent for us, especially where customers are starting to have opinions on the large language models they're using. They wanna see more multimodal capabilities with the agentic platforms they're investing in. And Google's leadership there, made it another great option that we could bring forward. So I think you'll generally always see us be multi partner, open to the extent that we can be open and working across the ecosystem, and we just have to sequence things from a timing standpoint based on customer demand. But I'll say we're we're really excited about the customer demand we've seen so far since making the announcement with Google and, our ability to just provide more optionality to our overall customer base. And, Kaitlin, as you think about everything you learned bringing AWS to life across Salesforce, you know, how's that evolving the way you think strategically about doing that again? Well, so now we're gonna have to deliver on being the fastest growing vendor on GCP too, you know. I'm sure I'm sure they will love hearing that. Yeah. I mean, it's I think it's the exact same. We we have had so many learnings, and have built such a strong playbook over the course of the last eighteen months with everything that we've learned rolling out the AWS Marketplace, that we are going to leverage to do or to accelerate our growth on GCP, that that I mean, I think that it's going to be challenging. Obviously, every marketplace is different. No no one knows that better than tackle. But, I mean, in partnership with with you all, I think that, you know, we've got some some really strong, momentum that's building behind Google, and we're really excited to see, you know, how that accelerates, you know, the accelerates our ability to sell with Google in the exact same or in the similar capacity to the way that we are with AWS. Great. So lightning round. We're kinda kinda getting down to time. So one word to describe the journey from a cloud go to market standpoint so far, Kaitlin? Like, what's your one word? One word. Just one. Fast? That was the word I was in my mind. Nick, what about you? Fulfilling. Yeah. That that's a good option. I think we talked about it for a while. We had to drive a bunch of education across our company about it, and I'd say there were skeptics. And so it's good that we were yes, we were able to go fast, but it's also great that we were able to even, surpass expectations, and thanks a ton to Tackleio for helping us. Address Kaitlin point, the speed of peace, I don't think we could have done that without the help you guys offered and then the results have, spoken for themselves so far. So that that always feels good when you're grinding to see the outcome and, know you got there. Yeah. Definitely. And if you could do anything different, like, starting over, what would? I I don't generally like these questions only because I I'm not someone and Kaitlin knows this about me. I'm not someone who likes to look back because I'm a big believer in the things that you learned during the process that, maybe were painful and you wish you could change actually helped you get to the next thing faster. So I'm I'm I'm gonna punt on that one. I don't think I would change anything. It was hard, but it was meant to be hard. And I think we learned a lot more, and we'll be in much better position, going forward because of how much we learned. But, Kaitlin, I don't know if if you disagree. You might The the only thing that I would change so, you know, launching into, you know, the the new marketplace that, you know, will eventually be launched. I think that my only the only change would be to trust the plan that we have in place. As I'm sure you can imagine with AWS, especially in the first couple of quarters, there was a lot of, you know, executive pressure to deliver on the numbers that we set out on. And me personally, I I got a little scared about, oh my gosh, is this a viable channel? We're getting so much pushback. It seems really challenging. We're getting a lot of questions and, you know, hesitancy from engagement from the field and from our customers, And we just kind of maintained the course, but there was a lot of, you know, personal, roller coaster of emotions associated with it. Yeah. And then, eventually, we saw the success and everyone once they're leveling down or started calming down across the organization, it was just kind of this constant drumbeat of of trust us. It'll happen. It'll be okay. While internally, it was a little bit more of a of a, I really hope that this is true. And so I think and we had a great plan. We had done all the due diligence. We were we were confident that it was gonna happen, but I think that, you know, moving forward, I would kind of give us a little bit more leeway in the just because it's not happening immediately, just because it might be taking a little bit more time than we thought, that's okay. We still trust that it's going to happen, and we're still going to continue on with the plan because we know that this is, you know, a viable mechanism that's important to our customers, that's important to our partners, and is important to Salesforce or will be important to the, you know, stability of Salesforce moving forward. That's such a great bit of advice especially for the larger companies because this does I mean, it takes time. And and you did have a world class plan. You invested so much time and energy and thoughtfulness into getting all the right people aligned. So, I love that one. We kinda did pieces of advice, if you have the one piece of advice for anybody. I'll still go back to you gotta start at the top and make sure you're bought in at the highest levels of the organization for what it's gonna take to go and and sell in a new way. For some, that might not be a ton of commitment. For us, it was a very important amount of commitment we needed because as Kaitlin referenced at the beginning, it was so new. But if you don't have that sponsorship at the top, you should focus on that and launch according to that support that you need top down to go get everyone's attention. Yeah. And I think my advice is in line with that where it's don't try to boil the ocean, especially for larger organizations. Not everyone is going to turn their head at once and be an advocate of of marketplaces if it's not a, you know, a traditional process that you've used for for selling. Find find your advocates. Find the customers that get the process and that don't need to be convinced, you know, from the bottom up or the top down, that this is the right way to go and start there. Get the wins. Tell those stories, you know, ad nauseam, and make sure that you are are leveraging that advocacy from your sales leaders, from your customers that believe in this to start building the momentum because that's that's how we saw success at first. You know, we were trying to spread ourselves probably a little bit too thin because we wanted everything to hit at once and then really started reappropriating our resources to where we were really seeing the traction, really seeing people get it and wanting to engage so that we could get those wins out of our under our belt, prove that it worked, and then start going to the places that were a little bit trickier, for us to engage. Bold prediction for cloud go to market. Like, what do you think happens? And we could take this a bunch of different ways. Like, people talk about the dollars showing through these clouds. I think, Nick, you brought up agents. So what happened with agents? Like, what's your what's your bold prediction for cloud go to market? I mean, I think you guys have already done a really good job with the business case, and there's there's a lot of analysts out there also just showing the amount of, spend that's moving this way. So I I don't think there's anything too compelling that I could throw out there in terms of the numbers. I it's proven now that this is important. I'll stick to the agent piece because I think the agent the concepts around agent to agent interactions and agent handoffs and what are a business applications really gonna look like in a world where maybe you are only logging into a single prompt interface and asking it to help you do your job and it's, you know, touching 10 to 15 different apps behind the scenes on that. What that actually looks like from a purchasing standpoint is gonna be totally different. So I think the the big the big prediction I'll call out is we're gonna see a significant shift in the way that, cloud go to market is working towards consumption and towards being able to track actual agent utilization and agent engagement outcome type billing that agents are gonna provide, maybe less of the more upfront purchasing that we're seeing today. Mine kind of builds on that, but more from the selling capacity. I think that cloud marketplaces meaningfully change the way that we engage with our partners. They allow us to make it easier for customers to handle co sells. So not not just having vendors come together with, you know, solutions that are complimentary, but really helping their back end business adapt to that process. So, yes, we have we're there from a technology standpoint with AI, with agents, you know, all these things that require companies coming together. We also need the go to market mechanics to make it easy for customers to do that. And I believe that that's what marketplaces do or at least right now are the best way for marketplaces or for our customers to actually ingest that co sell motion. And so that's where I think we're finally getting a mechanism or have a mechanism that's catching up with the technology, and so co sell will start to become a lot easier for our customers to actually process. Selfishly, I know that I run co sell, so it's maybe that's maybe that's a little bit, of my personal opinion, but but I do think that speaking the language of everyone on this call. So Good. Perfect. Perfect. But, yeah, that's where I see it. Like, you know, it's hard to buy, you know, even even from, you know, a smaller vendor standpoint. If we are if we, Salesforce, are selling a solution that's complimentary to one of our clouds, and we're trying to convince the customer to buy that solution also, having to contract with another vendor is really hard. It's really hard. And they have to run up a separate sales cycle, especially, you know, if they can't buy it on Salesforce paper. And marketplaces largely fix that. They make procurement so much easier and so much more streamlined, plus you get the benefit of being able to burn down your overall, you know, spend commitment with your cloud provider. So it really helps from the, you know, from that process. So so in addition to the technology, I do think that that's kind of the next piece that I would see and why we're gonna see an uptick in, you know, many, many customers even outside, you know, the technology industry, really start capitalizing on marketplace transactions. I think the agent agents will just drive a massive expansion in the number of software products. Absolutely. Every company's catalog is going to balloon with Yeah. New line items that are agents that need to be integrated into these kinds of motions and tracked and metered. There's a lot there's a lot to be pioneered in all of that. Yeah. Totally. And, you know, just as we're having this conversation and just thinking through it more, I mean, maybe marketplaces become the metering vehicles for agent to agent interoperability. They're all plugged in to the the same common fabric of customer billing, and it's how we're actually figuring out which which agent is doing what work behind the scenes and how the customer should be billed for it. So tons of new opportunity ahead for sure. Yeah. Definitely. Anything we can expect from what's next from Salesforce? And then we can kinda bring this home. What do you think, Kaitlin Pleas? We're gonna bring we're gonna bring our strategy forward next year with Google, and, I would say we're gonna keep listening to customers. And so as customers are guiding us to more options, maybe there'll be more that we support going forward. I would like to say that we'll continue breaking records and being a leader in the space. We're a pretty competitive organization, and we like like to lead and like to win. So and I think we'll continue continue working with you guys to make sure we're we're bringing in the best expertise and how we're thinking about this go to market and and wherever we can, sharing it with others, because I think it's a a great journey to be on. So that's what I've got. Kaitlin Pleas, anything else? Any other bullet? I mean, I I would just say that that our success has allowed Salesforce to continue to invest in this motion. So, you know, whereas this time last year, there was, you know you know, limited limited investment or invisibility. I think that that has completely changed, and I think that, you know, it's it's in line with everything that we've been saying here. Salesforce has seen our customers lean into this. They're seeing our sales teams lean into this. They're seeing our partners, our hyperscale partners lean into this. And so it is something that we are going to continue to invest in and make easier not only for our sales teams, but also for our customers and our partners to be able to leverage. Thank you. Thank you so much. For that. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Congratulations on being the fastest growing ISV ever. I I can't wait to see where things continue to go, and it is I know I speak on behalf of everyone at Tackleio who supports you. It is an absolute pleasure to work with the Salesforce team. Likewise. And you you guys are part of that that, win too. Couldn't have done it without you. So appreciate it. Thank you for having us again, and looking forward to the next one.