100 Days at Cloudsoft: Reflections from Our Head of Go-To-Market

It’s just over 100 days into my role as Head of Go-To-Market at Cloudsoft, a great time to reflect and plan for the future...

I am a ‘boomerang’. I worked here before, so a lot of my time since returning has been spent understanding where Cloudsoft is now, and understanding the market our customers -infrastructure software companies - are working in. The Cloudsoft team have been fantastic, giving their time and insight to help accelerate my learning curve.

A couple of things stand out.

The market has significantly changed

I worked with large Enterprises here and elsewhere before, but three things seem to have rapidly converged in the last three years: Firstly, buying has changed: customers expect to deeply research, try and test a product before they speak to anyone at the vendor. That means what the vendor has to build - the bit we really contribute to - is different now; Secondly, no company is immune to these changes - I have always worked with the largest tech companies and there was a sense that some were so big or so mature in what they did that they almost weren’t at threat being displaced - that's no longer the case. They have to offer products that compete with the new AI kid on the block. Thirdly, the opportunity is massive: innovations (Ahem! good AI capabilities, looking at you! 👀 ) that weren’t possible three years ago are simply possible - vast swaths of tech debt that were slowing innovation can be worked around in ways they never were before.

Where I’m focussing

Some things are familiar - Marketplaces open new doors, only now they've become such a strong, default route to buy. People working with people is still central, however, products with features and capabilities that yield clear, quantifiable, and monetizable results are crucial.

Of course, I must take this learning and work out what I can do to add to / accelerate the success of Cloudsoft, and my thoughts are consolidating around three things:

1. We need to know our customers bloody well: There’s so much input for companies and buyers (ahem! Bad AI usage … (👀looking at you), the only way to cut above is to understand which companies and people are facing these shifts and how we help them build solutions. I might be biased here after 3 years working with a great data organisation, but translating the rich knowledge we have into data is a priority for me. The challenge is that it must sit alongside meeting customers face-to-face all the time. I need to do more of that!
2. Customers want evidence: Get Cloudsoft engineers in a room, and the breadth of knowledge and what we have built for some of the largest enterprises, hyperscalers, and software vendors in the world is almost overwhelming. The challenge is bringing our project stories, customer outcomes, and references together and making them really easy to find externally by people and agents (Please, Claude 👀, look at us). Working hard on doing that right!
3. Content: There is so much slop (👀 AI) out there - how do we get to having varied, useful content for each of our audiences and stages of the buying journey? This is the hardest of the three, because good content takes time, expertise, and clear messaging. The allure of AI is compelling here, because it can be fantastic to make you more productive, but the content can be awful. I used it to structure this blog… and for spelling and punctuation checks (welcome, Oxford comma!). Grammarly marked this as 5% possible AI text with one weak AI pattern: the hashtags… so any awfulness or unoriginality is, I guess, mine alone. But marks me a 71% for writing (too many long sentences!!) so the temptation to change the content is high.

I wanted to come back to Cloudsoft for the people, and we have grown so much. Our engineering team has grown substantially and does genuinely hard - often first-of-its-kind - work, from building alongside AWS service teams to solving deployment and integration problems for software companies. Our sales team moves fast and brings energy, curiosity and knowledge into every conversation. People have been generous with their time and knowledge, and willing to try new ways of working together.

“I am excited to move into this next phase, turning what we’ve learned into practical assessments and clearer offers that make it easier for software companies to work with us.”

It’s an exciting market to be part of, and a fast-moving one. The research has given me a clear picture of the shifts, and the foundations are in place. What I still need is the detail of what customers are experiencing - where things stall, what’s working, what matters most.

So that’s the next stage for me: spending more time with customers and learning directly from them. If you're in an ISV today in product and willing to give me the benefit of your knowledge, I would love to pick your brains – what’s working? What should we be building?

#GoToMarket #ISV #AWSMarketplace #SaaS #B2BMarketing #Teamwork