How does co-selling work on AWS Marketplace? An overview of AWS’ Co-sell Program
One of the best ways for an ISV to scale is through co-selling with a Cloud Provider. In fact, Tackle noted in our 2024 State of the Cloud Marketplaces Report that our customers who engage in co-sell experience a 40% increase in deal size and close deals 20% faster than those who do not.
Co-selling is an integral part of an effective Cloud GTM strategy and is also key to building a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with a Cloud Provider. Fortunately, AWS has created a robust co-selling program to help ISVs build momentum and generate leads. Here are some of the highlights of the program, along with a few tips to help you get the most out of co-selling with AWS.
What is AWS co-selling?
Co-selling is the sharing of and collaborating on leads and opportunities between an AWS Partner and the AWS sales field. The purpose of AWS co-selling is to increase the amount of leads/opportunities between both AWS and the AWS Partner. Co-sell increases the likelihood of closing these opportunities by fostering collaboration across teams and communicating the value each side (AWS and the Partner) offers the customer.
What is the benefit of co-selling on the AWS Marketplace?
According to AWS’ data, co-selling with the Cloud Provider in AWS Marketplace has a few distinct advantages:
- 65% report higher close rates
- 51% higher average revenue growth for those who frequently co-sell
- 54% secure larger deals with co-sell motions
Although transacting on AWS Marketplace is not a requirement for co-selling with AWS, it does help gain access to the programs needed to scale the partnership. A co-sell relationship opens new doors and opportunities.
For example, buyers making purchases through AWS Marketplace can do so via AWS’ committed cloud spend program, the Private Pricing Agreement (PPA/EDP). Buyers are more inclined to use a marketplace for purchases if they’ve already committed spend to AWS. In a co-sell relationship with AWS, these budgets may become more accessible to ISVs, as AWS will more eagerly pair potential customers with your product to help buyers draw down on those cloud budgets. In turn, AWS benefits from increased cloud consumption.
How to co-sell on the AWS Marketplace
The AWS co-selling program is facilitated through the APN Customer Engagement (or “ACE”) tool, a portal that enables ISVs to securely collaborate and co-sell with AWS.
Partners can register and manage pipeline opportunities with the AWS team through ACE. This helps to enhance customer engagement and grow your overall business with AWS and your customers.
Once an opportunity is registered in the AWS ACE portal, you get access to AWS account owners who are assigned to that account in the “Contacts” section.
The ISV’s responsibilities
When it comes to AWS co-selling, the ISV must educate the AWS team on how its product or service is different from—or better than—a competitor’s product or service. This is best achieved by crafting a “better together” story describing the specific value that the Partner’s solution offers to AWS customers.
Partners should leverage the “better together” story to build their AWS Field Readiness Kit (FRK), an AWS internal document which helps AWS teams and AWS customers better understand your product/service, and helps enable co-selling efforts. Similarly to the way you enable your internal sales team to sell, you want to ensure AWS field sales teams understand your product, positioning, and personas.
In addition, Tackle’s complimentary template download, Creating a “better together” framework, can also help clarify your messaging.
AWS’ responsibilities
It is the AWS team’s responsibility to understand the thousands of solutions available to their customers and suggest (or introduce) the best one to meet the customer’s needs. The AWS team can assist ISVs by providing insight and potentially access to contacts inside the customer account. These include:
- Supporting Partner referred opportunities, which may include meeting with the Partner on the opportunity, or offering deal support ranging from identifying customer pain points to key account contacts.
- AWS referred opportunities, which encompass the above responsibilities but also include AWS introducing the Partner to the customer opportunity.
Key roles and people you’ll encounter through APN
As you work with AWS in your co-selling efforts, these are the people and roles you’ll most likely interact with:
- Partner Development Manager (PDM): Serves as the go-to AWS representative. For example, the PDM works with the partner’s AWS alliance lead to establish go-to-market programs and business development programs.
- Account Manager (AM): Leads adoption of AWS and their services with customers.
- Partner Success Manager (PSM): Drives adoption of ISV software in collaboration with the AWS ecosystem.
- AWS Marketplace Customer Advisor: Drives AWS Marketplace adoption for AWS customers and sellers.
- Solutions Architect: Ensures customers are successful with adoptions of AWS services.
- ISV Success Manager (ISM): Works with AWS sales teams to select and deploy the right ISVs to assist with customer needs.
All these acronyms getting confusing?Check out our AWS acronym cheat sheet!
✅ Best practices for co-selling with AWS
The trick to making co-sell work is knowing how to maximize your impact on the AWS sales team. This is done by clearly outlining the value that your offer provides, to both the customer and to AWS. Here are a few tips for developing a co-sell strategy with AWS:
- Have a clear story demonstrating how your software helps AWS teams hit their goals while solving a meaningful business problem for your shared customers.
- Leverage the information in the AWS ACE portal and develop a repeatable formula for introducing appropriate stakeholders to collaborate on deals.
- Establish a sales formula/process for collecting all information needed for submitting an opportunity into the AWS ACE portal.
- When an opportunity presents itself, take advantage of account mapping with the AWS team and share updates on the existing pipeline and potential new opportunities for the future.
- If possible, calculate the amount of AWS services your product will consume when deployed, and share this information with AWS. This is important to the AWS team from a compensation standpoint. It’s a good idea to also learn how each person you interact with at AWS is motivated/compensated.
AWS co-selling with Tackle
Co-selling with AWS is an effective way to put your product in front of a lot of buyers and speed up time-to-market. Fortunately, AWS continues to enhance its co-sell program with incentives created specifically to help make ISV AWS cloud selling a success.
To help you create a more effective better together story, don’t hesitate to reach out to Tackle today at aws-cosell@tackle.io to get started.
