A cloud-marketplace sale is a strange kind of customer relationship. Someone bought your product — the revenue is real, the subscription is active — but the person whose name is on the transaction is often a procurement or cloud-operations contact who has never opened the product and never will. The people getting value from it are somewhere else in the organization, and the marketplace stands between you and them like a one-way mirror. You can see the account; you cannot see the human. Getting a testimonial out of this arrangement is mostly a problem of finding the right person, because the buyer of record and the user of value are rarely the same individual.
Why marketplace purchases hide your real advocate
When a company buys through AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace, or Google Cloud Marketplace, they are usually doing it for a reason that has nothing to do with loving your product. They want the spend to draw down a committed cloud budget, they want to skip a separate vendor-onboarding process, or they want procurement consolidated in one bill. The purchase is a finance-and-procurement decision, executed by finance-and-procurement people. Your actual champion — the engineer, the analyst, the team lead who wanted the tool — may not even appear on the paperwork.
That is the core obstacle. A marketplace testimonial request sent to the billing contact lands on someone with no opinion about the product, because they have no experience of it. The task is not to convince that person to write something; it is to travel through them, or around them, to reach the person who does have an opinion. Until you have found that person, you have a paying account and no story — the same gap that appears whenever your only contact is procurement or billing, just with a marketplace layer making it harder to see past.
Use your own product data to find the real user
The good news is that while the marketplace hides the buyer, your product usually reveals the user. The transaction record is a dead end, but the usage record is not. Look at who is actually logging in, who created the account inside the tenant, who is generating the activity that shows up in your analytics. The person with the most sessions, the earliest signup inside the account, or the admin role is almost always your real relationship — regardless of whose credit card the marketplace billed.
Map the two together deliberately. The marketplace gives you the company and the contract; your own telemetry gives you the human. Once you have connected the account name to a specific active user, you have found the person worth asking — and you have found them without needing anything from the procurement contact at all. This is the same move as turning a support conversation into a testimonial: the signal you need is already inside your own systems, waiting to be read.
Reach the user without going through procurement
Once you have identified the active user, reach out to them directly — not to the billing contact. A short, specific message works far better than anything routed through procurement:
"Hi Dana — I can see your team has been using [product] heavily since you set it up through AWS Marketplace back in the spring. I'd love to hear how it's going and, if you're happy with it, whether you'd be open to sharing a couple of sentences we could use as a customer story. No pressure at all — mostly I just want to make sure it's earning its place."
Notice what that message does. It skips the procurement contact entirely, it references real usage (which proves you are paying attention), and it treats the person as the user they are rather than the buyer they aren't. The specificity — "since you set it up in the spring," "using it heavily" — signals that this is a real relationship, not a mass send, and that alone lifts the reply rate the way any personalized, well-timed ask does.
If your product genuinely has no way to identify individual users — some infrastructure and API products don't — then your route runs through the procurement contact after all, but with a different ask. Instead of asking them for a testimonial, ask them for an introduction: "Could you point me to whoever on the technical side has been using this? I'd love to check in with them." Procurement contacts are usually happy to forward you along, because it moves the request off their plate.
Anchor the testimonial in the marketplace context
Once you reach the right person and they agree, the marketplace origin is not a detail to hide — it is a detail to feature. A testimonial that mentions the buying channel carries extra weight with a specific, valuable audience: other companies who buy the same way.
Ask a question that surfaces it: "Did buying through the marketplace make anything easier — the procurement side, the billing, getting started faster?" Very often the answer is a quotable line about avoiding a separate vendor-onboarding cycle or drawing down committed cloud spend. That line is gold, because it speaks directly to the next marketplace buyer's exact concern. A quote like "We had it running in a day because we bought it straight through Azure Marketplace — no new vendor paperwork, no separate contract" does work no generic testimonial can, in the same way an industry-specific quote earns trust with a matching prospect. The procurement-friendliness of the marketplace is itself a selling point, and your happiest marketplace customers are the ones best placed to say so.
Turn the marketplace listing into a collection channel
Finally, close the loop by making the marketplace work for you going forward. Most cloud marketplaces let buyers leave a public review on your listing, and those reviews are testimonials you did not have to chase — written by verified buyers, visible to every future shopper browsing the same catalog. When a customer tells you they are happy, point them to the listing: "If you have two minutes, a review on our AWS Marketplace listing would genuinely help other teams find us." A verified-buyer review sitting next to your listing is one of the highest-trust proof points in B2B, precisely because the platform, not you, vouches that the reviewer actually bought.
The through-line is simple. A marketplace purchase separates the buyer from the user, so stop asking the buyer and start finding the user — through your own product data if you can, through a procurement introduction if you can't. Reach that person directly, anchor the quote in the marketplace experience that other buyers care about, and turn your listing into a standing collection channel. The transaction that looked anonymous has a real advocate behind it; your job is just to find them and give them an easy reason to speak.