How does co-selling work on AWS Marketplace? An overview of AWS’ Co-sell Program
To cosell with AWS means formally collaborating with AWS field sellers on shared opportunities, often aligning deals to transact through AWS Marketplace. When done well, it increases visibility inside AWS accounts, accelerates procurement, and ties your solution directly to cloud consumption goals.
In the 2025 State of Cloud GTM Report, companies project marketplace revenue will grow from 20% to 32% of total revenue in 2026—a 60% increase. At the same time, the share of deals influenced by co-sell is expected to rise from 22% to 30%
In other words, knowing how to cosell with AWS is becoming one of the most reliable ways to grow Marketplace revenue. This guide walks through exactly how to cosell with AWS, what eligibility looks like, how AWS ACE fits into the process, and how to scale the motion responsibly.
What does it mean to cosell with AWS?
To cosell with AWS is to jointly pursue and influence customer opportunities alongside AWS field sellers through the AWS Partner Network (APN). This collaboration is formally tracked in the AWS Customer Engagement (ACE) tool, which gives both sides shared visibility into the pipeline.
When you cosell with AWS, you’re aligning on:
- Account strategy
- Technical positioning
- Marketplace transaction path
- Consumption impact
That alignment makes it easier for AWS Account Managers and ISV Success Managers to attach to your opportunities. It also increases the likelihood that deals ultimately transact through the AWS Cloud Marketplace, continuing to strengthen more AWS Marketplace benefits.
How does the AWS co-sell process work step by step?
If you want to consistently cosell with AWS, you need more than a good relationship; you need a repeatable system. Here is how to effectively cosell with AWS, step by step.
Step 1: Establish APN and Marketplace readiness
Before you can cosell with AWS, your company needs a credible AWS foundation. That typically includes:
- An active AWS Marketplace listing
- Participation in AWS ISV Accelerate or Competency programs
- Clear positioning around AWS workload alignment
Marketplace maturity matters because many co-sell motions conclude with Private Offers or CPPO transactions. When your listing, packaging, and pricing are aligned, it becomes significantly easier to cosell with AWS at scale.
Step 2: Register opportunities in AWS ACE
The AWS Customer Engagement (ACE) tool is the backbone of how teams cosell with AWS.
In ACE, partners register opportunities, share deal details with AWS account teams, and track collaboration status. Without ACE registration, AWS sellers cannot formally attach to the deal or receive incentive credit.
Consistent ACE hygiene is one of the clearest differentiators between occasional co-sell wins and scalable performance. If your team wants to reliably cosell with AWS, ACE cannot be an afterthought.
Step 3: Align around AWS consumption
AWS sellers are incentivized for cloud usage growth. When you cosell with AWS, your value proposition needs to connect clearly to AWS infrastructure consumption, whether that’s compute, storage, data services, or AI workloads.
The stronger your “better together” story is, the easier it is for AWS sellers to prioritize your solution. High-performing teams quantify:
- Expected AWS service usage
- Architecture dependencies
- How their solution accelerates AWS adoption
This clarity increases engagement and reduces the friction that 55% of organizations identify as a hyperscaler challenge. Operational maturity is often what separates teams that occasionally cosell with AWS from those that build a durable motion.
Step 4: Execute through AWS Marketplace
While you can technically cosell with AWS without Marketplace transacting, most high-performing motions end there.
Enterprise buyers increasingly prefer procurement through AWS Marketplace because it connects to Enterprise Discount Programs (EDP) and committed cloud spend. With cloud commitments exceeding $460B in 2025, Marketplace alignment is often the fastest path to budget access.
When co-sell collaboration and Marketplace execution align, the benefits of AWS Marketplace continue to grow:
- Shorter procurement cycles
- Larger deal sizes
- Increased trust
- Stronger cloud partner incentives
Step 5: Build repeatability into how you cosell with AWS
Once your team starts to consistently cosell with AWS, coordination quickly becomes more complex. Multiple stakeholders, account mapping sessions, ACE updates, and Marketplace transaction alignment all require disciplined follow-through.
At a small scale, this can be managed manually. But as co-sell influence grows, projected to reach 30% of deals next year, repeatability becomes the differentiator.
This is where automating co-selling on AWS Marketplace becomes practical. Connecting CRM workflows to ACE submissions, standardizing opportunity qualification, and creating shared visibility between Sales and Alliances reduces internal friction and improves AWS field trust.
Teams that operationalize how they cosell with AWS tend to see stronger engagement because the experience is predictable, measurable, and easier for AWS sellers to navigate.
How do you become eligible to cosell with AWS?
To consistently cosell with AWS, eligibility has to reflect readiness across four themes.
1. Marketplace maturity
A structured listing, Private Offer capabilities, and pricing clarity signal credibility.
2. Field enablement
AWS teams need concise messaging, clear differentiation, and defined ICP alignment.
3. Operational rigor
You must track opportunities, maintain clean ACE submissions, and coordinate cross-functionally between Alliances, Sales, and RevOps.
4. Your “Better Together” story
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 that helps AWS teams and AWS customers better understand your product/service, and helps warrant co-selling efforts. Similarly to the way you prepare your internal sales team to sell, you want to make sure AWS field sales teams understand your product, positioning, and personas.
In addition, our complimentary template download, Creating a “better together” framework, can also help clarify your messaging.
What are the key benefits of co-selling on AWS Marketplace?
For ISVs serious about capturing long-term cloud marketplace benefits, the ability to consistently cosell with AWS is foundational. Here are the benefits of creating an efficient co-selling system with AWS.
Larger revenue contribution
Companies expect marketplace revenue to grow to nearly one-third of total revenue, reinforcing how central Marketplace has become to Cloud GTM.
More co-sell influence
Deal influence from co-sell is projected to rise to 30%, meaning more pipelines will involve AWS participation.
Greater buyer confidence
AWS alignment signals architectural validation and reduces perceived risk.
Better access to committed spend
Committed budgets create urgency for customers to transact before expiration.
How is co-selling different from CPPO on AWS?
Although often mentioned together, coselling with AWS and CPPO solves different problems.
- Co-selling focuses on joint opportunity collaboration with AWS field sellers.
- CPPO enables a channel partner to transact a Private Offer on your behalf.
Advanced teams frequently combine both motions. They cosell with AWS to build pipeline influence, then layer in CPPO or channel partners to optimize transaction structure.
Why getting good at how you cosell with AWS matters
As AWS Marketplace becomes a larger share of B2B revenue, the question isn’t whether you should cosell with AWS. It’s whether you’re doing it in a way that scales.
The teams that consistently cosell with AWS treat it like any other route-to-market. They align Sales, Alliances, and RevOps. They maintain clean opportunity data in ACE. They quantify AWS consumption impact. And they make it easy for AWS sellers to engage.
That’s where we fit in. Tackle helps ISVs operationalize how they cosell with AWS by connecting Marketplace transactions, CRM workflows, Private Offers, and partner motions into a single, scalable system. Instead of relying on manual coordination or one-off field relationships, teams gain the structure needed to make co-selling measurable and repeatable.
If you’re interested in coselling with AWS and need a partner to help you execute, contact us today.
