Atlassian, please stop asking for Cloud Loyalty & Dual Licensing discounts, or remove the toggles

[remie]

Hej Atlassian,

Long time no rant!

Can you please stop reaching out to us through ECOHELP tickets asking for Cloud Loyalty and/or Dual Licensing discounts on an individual quote basis?

We have deliberately disabled the toggles in MPAC:

Or, if you’re not going to adhere to these toggles, can you please remove them?

Thanks!

[amardesich]

Hi @remie

Thanks as always for the feedback and for a slightly easier topic ! Nevertheless, this isn’t a one size fits all situation. I see your point though. Maybe our approach is too simplistic.

tl;dr

• The toggle being off doesn’t tell us your intent. It just tells us it’s not on.
• Informational pitch - the App Commercial Desk may have value even if you plan to decline.
• Ideas for changes are at the end, please share your thoughts.

For anyone following along that isn’t familiar with the concepts in the post:

We recently centralized the information on all of this along with enablement in the Partner Portal if anyone with at least 1 paid via Atlassian app wants to learn more or hasn’t yet seen it.

Here’s what Partners have told us is why they may have these discount toggles off

• Off is the default and they were not aware of them, weren’t aware of the prior process to opt-in to dual licensing, or didn’t know what they were for. When we launched the dual licensing toggle a few months ago, opt-ins increased ~900% in 2 months compared to the cumulative total opt-ins over the ~2 years prior to that. This signaled a pretty apparent awareness gap combined with an overly complicated opt-in process before the toggle.
• Some partners deliberately keep them off because they don’t intend to offer these discounts.
• Some partners keep them off because they want better visibility into customer demand for the discounts to better forecast the financial impact of turning them on or because they value more visibility to their customer pipeline. The App Commercial Desk process we launched in November has helped streamline this visibility for some.
• Some partners don’t want to proactively offer the discounts but have requested Atlassian to always point customers to them to consider offering promo codes instead.

The App Commercial Desk process
It’s been 3 months since the launch, volumes are increasing, and we expect them to continue to increase based on the pace of customers migrating to cloud. Fine-tuning is needed. We’ve already made some adjustments based on Partner feedback.

Feedback from many partners has been positive even if they plan to decline requests. Many are seeing a reduction in customers and Atlassian teams going to them directly through various channels with varying details. The way Atlassian streamlines the channel and information in the request is lowering operational overhead for some partners. Coupling the overhead reduction with the added visibility to customers planning to migrate and visibility to customer demand for pricing adjustments it is helping many partners better plan and scale elements of their business.

Brainstorming ideas
We’ll start evaluating options and see what we can come up with both near or long term. Some initial ideas are:

1. Create a way to capture explicit intent to opt-out.
2. Create canned messaging to use with customers making requests to explain a partner has elected not to participate or receive requests for the discounts. We’ll want to make sure we get input on the wording. If you have any suggestions here that would be great!
3. Expand our recent pricing content and enablement on the Partner Portal to share best practices for explaining your value-based pricing as a means of gently deflecting or declining discount or pricing requests. This may be something we can collect over time to better tailor messaging to customers who make a request and a partner wants us to auto-decline. Again if you have anything you use and would be willing to share here or privately it would help us evolve to better meet the needs of partners who would prefer something like this.

If you or other partners have suggestions, tips, or votes for or against these ideas please share! Also if anyone wants to share about the value they’re receiving in the new App Commercial Desk process it could help us better position the value going forward.

[remie]

Hi @amardesich,

Thank you for outlining the reasoning behind this approach.

For me personally, I think the toggles are not the right approach to this. I think it was correct to set them to false by default, but given that your explanation makes it clear that because of this Atlassians approach to the toggle is non-binary and instead now has three different states (on, off-by-default, off-by-intention), it does not solve the problem at hand.

My suggestion would be to remove the toggles on an app-level, and instead create a new “Discounts” or “Communications” tab in the vendor pages which allows more granular control over how the Marketplace Partner wants to be involved in the sales / migration process.

This would also allow us to indicate if we are open to any form of discount and will prevent the rather unpleasant conversation I had today with one of the Atlassian enterprise sales representatives who continued to push for a discount even though we initially turned it down (with reasoning).

Looking forward to seeing a more streamlined approach to this now that Cloud migration is going faster than ever.

[amardesich]

Thanks for the additional suggestion. Definitely something worth exploring further and I like the view of the expanded communication since we’re adding more contact roles for things like the App Commercial Desk process as well as looking at more standardized procedures on how Partners might get included in Migration tickets, support tickets, etc. for technical support.

I’ll reach out separately to understand details about who reached out after the request was declined so we can continue to improve our internal training here.