93% of partners now recognize their customers’ buying habits are shifting toward marketplaces, with 52% calling it a “preferred” or “frequent” purchasing source.¹ That’s the channel itself telling us where buyers are headed. Your marketplace listing is often the first thing a buyer sees when they’re evaluating solutions. For most partners, it’s also the last place they invest meaningful attention after the initial submission goes live.

Canalys forecasts that sales of third-party vendor solutions through hyperscaler marketplaces will soar to $85 billion by 2028.² Against that backdrop, a listing sitting untouched since launch isn’t a small thing to overlook — it’s ground given away in one of the fastest-growing parts of the buying journey.

Getting Listed Isn’t the Same as Being Found

Most partners stop there. Turning that listing into something that actually sells takes more work, and it’s the part that gets skipped. A default listing describes the solution. A high-performing listing sells it and does that job for more than one audience at once. Five things tend to separate one from the other.

1. Language. A default listing is written by whoever understood the product best, which usually means it’s written the way an engineer would describe it: capabilities, specs, technical differentiators. A high-performing listing is written the way a buyer actually talks about their problem. Those are rarely the same vocabulary, and buyers search using theirs, not yours.

2. Keywords. Listings need to surface in the searches buyers are actually running, which means aligning terminology to the solution categories your channel ecosystem organizes around. A technically accurate listing that uses the wrong category language stays invisible to the exact buyer it was built for.

3. Social proof. Most listings that include customer proof lead with what the product does. The proof that actually moves a buyer is proof of outcome — what changed, what improved, what got solved — not a restatement of features already covered elsewhere on the page.

4. CTAs. A listing without a clear next step asks the buyer to figure out what to do next on their own, and most won’t bother. A high-performing listing makes the path forward obvious, whether that’s a demo, a landing page, or a direct next step in a buying process.

5. Freshness. A listing is a living asset, not a one-time submission. If it still describes an 18-month-old version of the offer, buyers notice, and it reads as a signal about how seriously the offer is maintained.

Your Audience Is Bigger Than the Buyer

The other reason default listings underperform is that most are written for one audience when they need to work for three. A customer evaluating the solution wants to know if it solves their problem. A seller deciding whether to bring a partner into a live deal wants to know if it makes their job easier and helps them hit their number. A fellow channel partner wants to know if the offer creates an opportunity to extend their own solutions and services. Write only to the customer, and the other two audiences get nothing to work with — and both of them influence whether a deal ever reaches the customer at all.

Sequence Matters Here Too

A listing rewrite done in isolation, before messaging and positioning are settled, usually just produces a better-written version of the same generic story. Odigo’s marketing consulting services include a full marketplace listing review, but it comes after the messaging work, not before. Once the joint value proposition and core messaging pillars are established, the listing review has something concrete to write against: a specific buyer, a specific pain, a specific differentiator. Reverse that order, and you’re just polishing a message that hasn’t been defined yet.

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¹ Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Canalys, citing Canalys’ global channel partner survey (LinkedIn)

² Canalys, “Now and Next for Hyperscaler Marketplaces”