Co-Sell with AWS
A full guide on how to scale co-selling with AWS through the ACE and ISV Accelerate Programs. Discover 5 proven motions to maximize your customer outcomes and amplify your partnership impact.
UPDATE: ⭐️Free Course Offer to the Medium Community⭐️: Mastering Cloud Partnerships & Co-Sell
Due to the high demand on learning how to partner with AWS, I have shared my FULL Cloud Partnership Playbook over a comprehensive course. I want to share with the Medium community a free access to the course, click here to get a FREE coupon to the course.
Building a co-sell strategy with AWS is not easy. There are many sales teams, thousands of partners, numerous solutions, so it is very difficult to stand out and build a scalable co-selling process. In this blog post I will go over the AWS Co-Sell process and the main Co-Sell programs you need to know.
Due to the high demand on learning how to partner with AWS, I have shared my FULL Cloud Partnership Playbook over a comprehensive course. I want to share with the Medium community a free access to the course, click here to get a FREE coupon to the course.Building a co-sell strategy with AWS is not easy. There are many sales teams, thousands of partners, numerous solutions, so it is very difficult to stand out and build a scalable co-selling process. In this blog post I will go over the AWS Co-Sell process and the main Co-Sell programs you need to know.
How do AWS Partners Make Money with AWS? Co-Selling!
Before we dive in, let’s first understand what Co-Selling with a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) like AWS, actually means.
What is Co-Selling?
Co-selling is a sales motion where partners and CSPs collaborate on customers’ opportunities
Enroll in AWS Co-Sell Partner Programs: APN Customer Engagements Program (ACE) and ISV Accelerate
The two most relevant AWS Co-Sell Programs provided by the AWS Partner Network (APN) are:
Step-by-step guide — how to enroll in AWS ISV Accelerate and ACE
For a full explanation on the requirements and the benefits of these two programs, and how to enroll in them, check out my deep dive post into ACE and ISV Accelerate.
Maximize your sales impact with AWS through strategic co-selling: Leverage deal support and customer referrals
AWS offers two critical forms of support that can transform your sales efforts: deal support and customer referrals. Engaging with AWS sellers who have strong relationships with potential customers can accelerate your sales cycle, increase your credibility, and possibly expand the scope of deals. Furthermore, through customer referrals from trusted AWS sellers, you can tap into new markets and drive additional pipeline growth. This guide will provide a detailed co-sell flow, helping you to build a robust co-sell foundation and fully capitalize on the potential of partnering with AWS.
Deal Support
First, AWS sellers can provide deal support for your existing opportunities. Let’s say you have an opportunity with a certain customer and such a customer works closely with the AWS Seller. Collaborating with this seller can potentially help you. The involvement of a CSP seller can help you to gain credibility and improve your chances of closing the deal. It can also accelerate the sales cycle and help you overcome potential challenges with the customer. In some cases, they can also identify if there is a potential for a larger deal. The deal support is dependent on a few factors. First, how well connected the AWS seller is with the customer, and second, how well connected the AWS Seller is to the partner’s seller.
Customer Referrals
Another way AWS sellers can help is by providing customers referrals to brand-new customers. This is more advanced and requires a close collaboration between your sellers to AWS sellers. Here it how it goes.
AWS sellers that trust you and have customers that had a good experience with your solution can introduce you to new customers and generate new pipeline opportunities for your business. Getting customer referrals is not easy and takes a lot of work from the partner side. Partners that get customers’ referrals are partners that have built a strong co-sell foundation with the AWS sales organization. I will provide you with step by step co-sell flow that you can follow in order to establish your co-sell foundation and maximize the co-sell potential.
5 Steps for a Successful Co-Sell Flow (“CHEER” flow)
- Create your co-sell field-ready kit. This is SUPER important, and many partners are not doing such a great job here. Without a strong kit, it is very difficult to succeed in the rest of the flow.
- Highlight your customers’ engagements by sharing customer opportunities with the CSP.
- Engage with the CSP sellers and start getting deal support on your existing opportunities.
- Earn the seller’s trust, and start winning together.
- Leverage your efforts and get customers’ referrals from the CSP. This is the most challenging part, where you can start getting brand-new opportunities proactively from the CSP sellers.
Following the CHEER flow will help you to see better results working with CSPs that ultimately impact your number of deals, conversion rate, deal size, and sale cycle lengths. For a deep dive for each step of the Co-Selling flow, follow this online guide.
Create an AWS Co-Sell Playbook
In order to make the most out of the engagements with AWS sellers, it is important you will create a co-sell strategy and a co-sell playbook and train your sales team on how to work with AWS sellers. To scale your co-selling effort successfully, you should use the AWS marketplace for executing deals (see here the AWS Marketplace Partner advantages). As you scale your sales engagement. Measure the impact, and hire a partnership team accordingly.
5 Sales motions to Co-Sell with AWS
Below I will share 5 ways you can leverage the Opportunities that you are anyway required to submit, based on the new APN requirements.
1) Engage with AWS Sales Teams
As you get the Sales team details while validating an Opportunity, you can engage with them directly and see if they have more customers you can support. In a few cases, when we contacted sales reps, we had the opportunity to give them a better understanding of how Epsagon support AWS customers, and discuss additional opportunities that we can collaborate on.
2) Accelerate Deals
When you submit an opportunity, you can ask for specific support from AWS — pricing assistance, technical consultation, deal support, etc. When interacting with the customer’s AWS account manager, him/her can help you accordingly and get a better understanding of how you can support the customer. For me, it was super helpful to get support to accelerate deals, by “closing the loop”. In one of Epsagon’s deals, AWS also provided Marketplace support that was needed to the customer, that made us close a deal very quickly.
3) Differentiation- Evangelize your Existing AWS Business
Everyone wants to co-sell with AWS. However, as there are thousands of partners, it is really difficult for AWS sales teams to get their head around all of the solutions out there.
When you submit an opportunity, you highlight your AWS business to AWS. As you submit more opportunities, you differentiate your business from others and get better attention and support from AWS. When you are submitting a and launching a significant number of launched opportunities (closed-won) yourself, it indicated that you have something good going on. By sharing your success with AWS, via the ACE Program, you show to AWS teams that you are a partner that they might want to know better.
4) Receive Leads and Opportunity Referrals from AWS
By leveraging the ACE Platform, Partners are driving internal visibility of the engagements. Moreover, ACE eligible Partners are able to receive Opportunity Referrals from AWS. What does it mean? AWS sales teams can create join opportunities proactively!
Partners can either accept or reject such opportunities (see screenshot below).
Note: It is expected that opportunities are accepted within 3 business days.
So, by submitting more opportunities, you show AWS Sales teams that your product help AWS Customers, and they will consider to recommend your product to their customers and provide you customers referrals. One of the tools you can leverage to analyze your AWS joint opportunities is the AWS Partner Analytics Dashboard (see below).
What is the incentive for AWS Sales team for recommending your product?
The first incentive is to help their customers. As AWS is a customers obsessed organization, if you show that your product brings value to AWS customers AWS Sales teams are likely to recommend it. In addition, there are a few programs that incentivize Sales teams by providing commission. For instance, if an AWS account manager will support you on a deal, and the deal will be executed via the AWS Marketplace, it will help the AWS account manager to meet his or her quota. For more details, see this post which is dedicated on how to benefit from the AWS Marketplace.
5) Set One-to-Many Co-Sell Sessions with Sales Teams
Having a few joint wins with AWS is great. But how can you scale that? One of the answers to that is — one to many sessions.
In one to many sessions, you get the opportunity to educate more AWS sales teams about your solution. A great way to start is to map your opportunities based on the location of the AWS account managers. If you see that you have a bunch of opportunities that are covered by account managers in a specific city, try to get their help in order to set a Lunch & Learn.
Earlier this year we held Lunch & Learn in New York. It went VERY well and created new opportunities for Epsagon.
Co-Sell Best Practices — hear from community experts
Watch this Meetup recording of the Cloud Alliances Community group to hear from market experts from Snyk & Gitlab about their Co-Sell practice. In this meetup we discuss various co-selling strategies and tactics to help startups and ISVs to accelerate business growth.
Key Takeaways
- Submitting more opportunities will drive internal awareness of your product within AWS sales teams.
- Engage with AWS account managers to get support and accelerate deals.
- Educate AWS teams about your solution. Try to set one-to-many sessions. This can lead to new opportunities that will be created by AWS and will support your pipeline.
- Have a clear messaging to AWS Sales teams on how your product can help AWS Customers.
- Work with AWS Sales teams to build a joint pipeline and receive AWS led opportunities.
I provide the Medium community a free access to my Cloud Co-Sell Playbook, presented in this course.
