Most ISVs have a hyperscaler marketplace listing. Far fewer have a system that turns that listing into revenue. Kyle Hayes, CEO of Ecosystem Revenue Dynamics, shares the operational playbook that helped one client close $3M in booked business in four days.

Hyperscaler marketplaces are projected to generate $163 billion in sales by 2030. The opportunity is enormous, proven, and growing. But most ISVs are not capturing it.

Kyle Hayes is the CEO of Ecosystem Revenue Dynamics, a global boutique management consultancy focused on making partner ecosystems visible and operational inside organizations. Kyle works with ISVs through the lens of people, process, technology, and data to close the gap between marketplace potential and marketplace performance.

The pattern Kyle sees is consistent. The listing is live. The product is strong. But the revenue is not following. His playbook for fixing that starts with understanding why most ISVs stall, and then building the operational and relationship infrastructure that makes marketplace revenue repeatable.

The Marketplace Is Not a Storefront

The core problem is deceptively simple. Most ISVs treat marketplace listings like storefronts: put the product up, and buyers will come.

Kyle has seen this play out firsthand with large, well-known ISVs that had long-established AWS listings, strong products, and broad customer bases, but were not seeing any of that translate into hyperscaler revenue.

The scale of the gap is striking. Based on a report by Clazar, only about 20% of ISVs are fully leveraging the power of hyperscaler marketplaces. For a channel that represents one of the fastest-growing routes to market in B2B, that number should be a wake-up call.

"For me, this represents a problem because it's a great resource. Why wouldn't you use it?"

The issue is not the marketplace itself. The issue is what happens after the listing goes live. A listing without active engagement, without a relationship with the hyperscaler, and without a clear understanding of the customer's position is just a product page collecting dust.

The Four Misconceptions That Stall Marketplace Revenue

Kyle sees four recurring misconceptions that keep ISVs from turning listings into pipeline.

The first is storefront mentality. Teams assume that because the listing exists, the product will sell itself. It will not. A marketplace listing without active engagement behind it is no different from a landing page with no traffic strategy.

The second is cloud spend tunnel vision. Enterprise customers often have unspent cloud commitments through their EAs, and ISVs rightly see that as a potential market. But targeting committed spend alone is a shallow strategy. The real opportunity requires understanding what the hyperscaler is prioritizing, what the customer is trying to solve, and how the ISV fits into that picture.

The third is misunderstanding the route-to-market model. In a hyperscaler model, the ISV is not just managing its own partner ecosystem. It is also a partner inside a much larger one. That shift in identity is hard for many teams to internalize, especially as nuances vary across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The fourth is comp neutrality. If internal sellers are not incentivized to route deals through the marketplace, or worse, are penalized for doing so, friction is baked into every transaction.

Underneath all four sits a common root cause: internal enablement. Without the right training and readiness, sellers do not know how to engage operations, collect the right customer information, or move a marketplace deal forward with confidence.

Kyle's Playbook for Turning Marketplace Listings into Revenue

Kyle's approach is built around five operational moves that transform a passive marketplace listing into a working revenue channel.

1. Build a Real Relationship with Your PDM

The hyperscaler Partner Development Manager is the connective tissue between the ISV and the marketplace opportunity. Kyle treats this relationship as the foundation.

"You have to be engaged with your PDM to ensure that they'll bring you leads as well as you bringing them leads."

This is not a quarterly check-in. Kyle recommends building a full-year plan with the PDM: understanding their priorities, their commit targets, and how the ISV's offering supports what the hyperscaler is going after.

The practical move is to pre-build joint value messaging. If an AWS seller can immediately articulate how your product and AWS solve a customer problem together, they will use it. If they cannot, they will not bring you into the conversation. Most ISVs never prepare that material, and the co-sell motion never starts.

2. Create a Seller Qualification Framework

Once the PDM relationship is in place, the next bottleneck is often internal. Sellers do not know what information they need from the customer to move a marketplace deal forward.

Kyle's solution is a simple qualification checklist: a short, repeatable set of questions sellers can run through on every marketplace conversation. That includes billing IDs, which partner is involved, whether the deal is net new or an upsell, and any other details operations needs to process the offer cleanly.

Without this, the back-and-forth between sellers and ops becomes a deal killer. Kyle has watched private offers stall over something as basic as a missing billing ID, which is unique to each customer, like a bank PIN. If sellers do not know to collect it upfront, everything slows down.

3. Map Internal Processes to the Hyperscaler Workflow

Most ISVs have never documented how their internal contracting, quoting, and approval processes map to the hyperscaler transaction workflow. Kyle insists this is non-negotiable.

"However you do your contracts, however you do your quoting, you need to understand how it works and have that documented, how that would map in to the hyperscaler process. Every approval, every system that you need to liaise with is gonna be key."

For one client, Kyle built this mapping as a short-term engagement at the end of fiscal year. Using the ISV's existing tools, he created a checklist and submission form so the team could see every open item, track what needed to close, and reject incomplete submissions before they created delays. The result was a clear, repeatable intake process where none had existed before.

When marketplace execution depends on tight internal alignment and seller-ready workflows, purpose-built partner tech like WorkSpan can embed that coordination directly into CRM-native processes, reducing the back-and-forth and keeping marketplace deals moving. Learn more →

4. Establish the Cross-Functional Communication Chain

Marketplace execution is not a single team's job. Kyle maps out the communication lines that need to exist.

"Have an open line of communication internally between you, your PDM, and your operations counterpart. That lifeblood is key."

From there, the chain extends upward. The CRO needs a direct line to the alliances lead, because hyperscaler ownership typically sits within alliances. Operations and alliances need their own connection to ensure internal alignment on a day-to-day basis.

Kyle also recommends periodic joint conversations where the CRO and alliances lead sit down with the hyperscaler PDM together. That shared context keeps executive priorities aligned with what is actually happening in the field.

5. Build Quick, Consumable Enablement Content

The final piece is giving sellers and customers the resources they need to act fast. Kyle stresses that both internal checklists for reps and external step-by-step guides for customers should be ready to send at a moment's notice.

When a customer says they have a marketplace profile but are not sure what happens next, the rep should not have to figure that out in real time. A short, clear guide that says "do these four things" removes friction from both sides of the deal.

The cumulative effect is alignment at every level.

"That standardization makes everything so much quicker because you're staying aligned with the hyperscaler. You're staying aligned with your sales team. You're staying aligned with alliances and operations, and people who need the information quickly and at hand have it."

What Tight Execution Actually Produces

The results speak clearly.

For one ISV engagement, Kyle came in at the end of the fiscal year and built out the operational framework described above. The team processed and closed $3M in booked business in the last four days of the financial year, effectively smashing their Q1 target before the new year even started.

The longer trajectory is even more compelling. Another client grew hyperscaler marketplace revenue from $12M in year one to $19M in year two, and is on track to hit $30M this year.

Industry data reinforces the pattern. Strong partner involvement in marketplace deals correlates with a 64% lift in close rates, and 62% of companies report net new revenue through marketplace deals.

Beyond the numbers, Kyle points to something harder to measure but equally important: seller trust.

"By having that good, tight execution, those assets ready to go, and just being able to understand very quickly at any one point in time where you are, your sales team trusts. That's huge."

That trust compounds. When ops can deliver quickly, sellers bring more deals. When sellers bring more deals, leadership sees the value. The flywheel only starts when the operational foundation is in place.

Making Marketplace Revenue Repeatable

Kyle's playbook reinforces a broader shift happening across partner organizations. The ISVs seeing real marketplace revenue are not the ones with the best listings. They are the ones that have built repeatable systems around hyperscaler engagement, internal readiness, and cross-functional execution.

The gap between "listed" and "generating revenue" is an operational gap. Closing it requires the same discipline that modern partner teams are applying across co-sell, attribution, and seller activation: making partner motions systematic, measurable, and executable in the flow of work.

WorkSpan helps partner and revenue teams turn cloud marketplace motions into repeatable revenue, from automated private offers to CRM-embedded co-sell workflows. See how it works →