There’s a moment that hits most RevOps teams when marketplace selling starts to scale, and their dream job turns into a nightmare.
Slack lights up with messages from AEs:
“The customer wants to go through marketplace last minute. Can you help?”
“What’s the status of the deal? Can I close it?”
“What’s the AWS account ID?”
Then when the deal closes, Finance joins in:
“Have we actually been paid for that deal?”
“How are we supposed to recognize this revenue?”
These questions aren’t with bad intent, but with the assumption that marketplace deals are just another channel. They aren't. The mechanics are different enough that your existing quote-to-cash process doesn't cover them, but similar enough that no one thinks to build new ones until something breaks.
This is the first chapter of a RevOps Marketplace Playbook built around one principle that sounds obvious until you try to enforce it:
The fastest way to introduce friction is to treat marketplace transactions as "special," "partner-owned," or "outside the CRM." The fastest way to reduce it is to force those deals back into the same operational discipline as direct sales. Most of the problems teams run into later are visible right at the start.
Cloud marketplaces made buying and selling software easier. They did far less for the teams responsible for operating those deals. For RevOps, the promise tends to fall apart the moment a deal stops looking like a "direct" sales motion.
In a direct sales motion, RevOps knows what to expect. Marketplace deals usually take the scenic route. Marketplaces slowly become an additional system of record, not because anyone intended it, but because execution moved faster than RevOps controls. As deal volume grows, this becomes a real pain.
Which brings us to our core thesis, and what we believe is the root of all evil.
RevOps teams interviewed across enterprise and mid-market software companies consistently report that marketplace deals introduce approval blind spots, pricing leakage, and compliance risk when portals replace CRM as the source of truth.
This matters because RevOps designs controls around the CRM. That's where the company enforces policy: discount thresholds, approval routing, deal desk review, audit trails.
Once a user has portal access, they can technically publish an offer at almost any price, for almost any term, without triggering internal approvals. Furthermore, the process downstream of the creation and acceptance of the offer is manual and invisible to RevOps.
💡 Key Takeaway
Multiple systems of record become a nightmare for RevOps in 3 areas: Policy, Workflows, and Ownership.
When private offers are created directly in marketplace portals, the company's approval, pricing, and legal governance frameworks simply don't apply. The portal doesn't know what was approved. It doesn't enforce margin rules. It doesn't validate legal terms. It just publishes what the user enters.
Four policy failures show up almost immediately:
At that point, RevOps isn't operating the revenue engine anymore, it's reacting to it.
The most important decision RevOps makes is:
Leading RevOps teams enforce policy that come from this belief. For example:
Suger connects directly to Salesforce and HubSpot, enabling sales teams to launch private offers without leaving their CRM. Data flows automatically from opportunity records to AWS, Azure, or GCP, eliminating manual re-entry and transcription errors. This unified workflow ensures zero "data drift" and keeps reps focused on selling rather than switching between portals.
Even if you solve the policy issues, the next issue is that deal desk and revenue workflows are not designed for how marketplaces actually operate.
Deal desk workflows exist to coordinate execution across systems. Traditional CPQ-based flows assume a single contracting surface, a single billing model, and a linear quote-to-cash sequence. Marketplaces break those assumptions. Workflows and systems tend to break down across 2 areas.
RevOps needs to adjust pricing, legal, and approval frameworks so marketplace mechanics aren’t treated as exceptions. That means incorporating marketplace fees into approvals, clarifying which terms apply, and ensuring CPQ reflects marketplace-specific SKUs and billing constructs.
With Suger, existing CRM approval workflows extend automatically to marketplace deals, ensuring consistent governance. Deal desk can configure pricing rules, account for marketplace fees, and sync legal EULAs directly from Salesforce to ensure net-margin visibility and compliance. Flexible payment schedules map natively to cloud billing, removing the need for manual workarounds.
Research across RevOps teams shows that unclear handoffs after marketplace submission are one of the largest contributors to delayed provisioning, missed revenue recognition, and poor customer experience.
In a traditional sales process, roles are clear:
However, when a deal goes through marketplace, ownership becomes blurry.
Across the lifecycle of the transaction, these are the most important questions you should ask:
|
Deal Stage |
What’s Happening |
Where Things Break |
Critical Questions: |
|
Offer created/sent |
The private offer is shared with the customer. Acceptance may be delayed due to internal approvals, budget sign-off, or timing. |
Monitoring progress is often split across Sales, Partnerships, and Ops, creating follow-up gaps. |
Who is responsible for monitoring progress once the offer is out? |
|
Offer pending with issues |
The customer attempts to accept the offer but runs into blockers technical issues. |
These are marketplace-specific issues, not sales objections, and they often fall between teams with no clear owner. |
Who owns resolving marketplace-specific issues that block acceptance? |
|
Offer accepted |
The customer accepts the private offer. |
Post-acceptance ownership becomes unclear, leading to gaps in visibility and handoffs for downstream teams. |
Who ensures the deal is reflected accurately for downstream teams? |
Most orgs handle this with a Frankenstein-esque monstrosity of manual processes and handoffs:
This works until volume picks up, where it then breaks. Because the lifecycle of a marketplace transaction is outside the “direct” workflow, no one is the owner, and has a view of the upstream or downstream dependencies and risk.
RevOps should define who drafts, who publishes, who monitors, and who updates the CRM and centralizes visibility so acceptance and expiry don’t depend on someone manually checking a portal.
Real-time Slack and email alerts notify stakeholders at every stage, while automated CRM updates move opportunity stages the moment a customer accepts. AEs can track, amend, or withdraw offers independently, eliminating routine handoffs to Partner Ops. For reseller deals (CPPO/MPO), teams maintain full control over usage and pricing directly within their existing system of record.
The underlying pattern here is that marketplace deals introduce catastrophic friction at every layer of the revenue process.
The moment the portal becomes a parallel system of record, your RevOps process stop being enforceable
The consequences aren't trivial.
Teams who try to roll with the chaos are in for a rude awakening. That can work early on. It breaks the moment Cloud GTM becomes material.
At scale, you need systems that connect the CRM and the marketplace so existing policies, workflows, and ownership extend naturally into this channel. Without that bridge, marketplace deals remain exceptions.
Some teams accept that trade-off. Most stop once they see the real cost.
💫 Final Pro Tip: Suger was built by RevOps and technical leaders who felt this
problem ourselves.
For us, this is personal. If you’re tired of the toil, we should talk.
The problems outlined above don't get solved with a single tool or a single process change. They get solved systematically, with clear checkpoints at every stage of the deal lifecycle.
We've built a comprehensive RevOps Marketplace Best Practices Checklist that walks through:
👉 Get the RevOps Marketplace Checklist!