AWS Marketplace: Co-Selling Strategies with the World’s Largest Hyperscaler

April 20, 2024

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AWS Marketplace: Co-Selling Strategies with the World’s Largest Hyperscaler

Participating in the AWS Marketplace yields partner benefits including richer deal sizes, increased net new business and accelerated sales cycles.

This entry is part 8 of 13 in the series Building Partner Ecosystems

The AWS Marketplace provides a new sales channel for ISVs and Consulting Partners to sell their solutions to AWS customers.

Jointly with the AWS Partner Network (APN), it helps ISVs and Consulting Partners to build, market, and sell their AWS offerings by providing valuable business, technical and marketing support.

A Total Economic Impact report from Forrester highlighted that:

Richer deal sizes: Sellers reported a 4-5x increase in deal size when reselling third-party software through Channel Partner Private Offers (CPPO).
Increased net new business: Interviewed sellers saw private offers growing 133%+ year over year, with 40% of these private offers coming from net-new business.
Accelerated sales cycle: Sellers reported up to 50% faster time to deal closure when selling in AWS Marketplace.

Solutions Marketplace

The marketplace caters for multiple categories of vendor solutions, such as by service type like Business Applications and Professional Services, by capability like Migration or DevOps, and by industry including Media and Government.

You deploy your solution as SaaS, AMI, Container, or Data and make it available for customers around the globe or certain countries you specify. Their seller guide provides a complete overview of all the product types supported on AWS Marketplace.

It enables you to focus on building your product while the AWS Marketplace manages metering, billing, collections, and payment disbursements, and supports numerous pricing options for your software including bring your own license (BYOL), pay-as-you-go and long-term commitment plans.

AWS provides a comprehensive program of support to accelerate your GTM (Go To Market) strategy, with standardized and custom demand generation packages and flexible GTM support. You can build your GTM foundation using self-service AWS Marketplace Seller GTM Academy to develop and execute campaigns and scale your growth with programmatic access to GTM investments, resources and AWS-led campaign inclusion.

Co-Selling with AWS

AWS helps tens and thousands of ISVs worldwide to build and grow their business on the platform. One of the foundational elements of growing a business is co-selling.

Co-selling is a sales strategy in which your sales team and the AWS sales team collaborate on a prospect to either develop a net new business or close the current prospect while supporting one another.

Additionally, to establish a brand-new working connection between the two teams at the client. Co-selling is when representatives from both sales teams get to discuss how they can best support one another, comprehend the value offer, and close deals together. The opportunity’s value for the customers grows when both teams are involved.

In this Partner Insight video Nadav Tzuker from Wiz, a 2X winner of the AWS Marketplace Partner of the Year award, recently shared his insights about the significant shift towards cloud marketplaces and how ISVs can accelerate their growth with smart co-marketing and co-sell strategies.

This Youtube presentation shares how you can drive new business and accelerate your co-selling engine for your software with AWS, hosted by:

Sabina Joseph, GM, America’s Technology Partners, AWS
Andrew Varhola, Senior Manager, US-West ISV Success, AWS
Mike Moss, AVP, WW partner field sales, mongoDB

Learn about the AWS co-selling roles, mechanisms, programs to globally connect with the AWS field teams, best practices to get into the mind of the AWS seller and customer, and hear from an AWS Partner about their co-selling journey and keys to their success.

The three pillars of any successful partnership are co-build, Co-market, and Co-sell. For this process, you will work with the AWS partner organization, AWS marketplace, and the AWE field teams. The partner development manager and the partner solution architect in the AWS partner organization will help you build and scale your business on the team.

To support you, the first step is to join the software path and enroll in the AWS or APN customer engagement program: ACE.

The software path will help you grow your business on AWS with the team’s foundational technical review which helps you optimize your solution for mutual end customers. The program provides you with different funding mechanisms, tools, and resources to help you along this journey.

The next step is to engage together to build a comprehensive business or partner plan. This partner plan leads to a better together story focused on identifying the use cases towards where demand generation activities are driven at. You can also use the competency program where you can showcase the validated solutions by workloads.

At this point, you can start co-selling together by sharing opportunities in the APN customer engagement tool, ACE. Once you’ve laid this foundation you can now join the ISV accelerate.

Seller Conference

The AWS Marketplace Seller Conference is an annual event organized by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring together sellers and partners from the AWS Marketplace ecosystem.

The conference provides a platform for sellers to learn, network, and collaborate with industry experts, AWS representatives, and other sellers. It offers valuable insights into the latest trends, strategies, and best practices for selling products and services on the AWS Marketplace.

The AWS Marketplace Seller Conference is a two-day event held at a prestigious venue, attracting hundreds of sellers and partners. The conference features a mix of keynote sessions, technical workshops, seller success stories, and networking opportunities.

Keynote Sessions – The keynote sessions are the highlight of the conference, where industry leaders and AWS executives share their insights, vision, and strategies for the AWS Marketplace. These sessions cover a wide range of topics, including marketplace trends, customer demands, and future roadmap. Keynote speakers often include renowned experts and successful sellers who share their experiences and success stories.
Technical Workshops – The technical workshops provide sellers with hands-on training and deep dives into various aspects of selling on the AWS Marketplace. These workshops cover topics such as product listing optimization, pricing strategies, security and compliance, marketing techniques, and integration with AWS services. Participants gain practical knowledge and learn how to leverage the marketplace’s features to maximize their sales and reach a wider customer base.
Seller Success Stories – The seller success stories sessions feature presentations from sellers who have achieved significant success on the AWS Marketplace. These sessions provide valuable insights into their journey, challenges faced, and strategies employed to achieve their goals. Sellers can learn from these success stories and apply the lessons to their own businesses, helping them navigate the marketplace more effectively.
Networking Opportunities – The conference offers numerous networking opportunities, including dedicated networking sessions, breakout discussions, and social events. Sellers can connect with AWS representatives, industry experts, and fellow sellers, fostering collaboration and partnerships. These interactions provide a platform for sellers to share ideas, discuss challenges, and explore potential business opportunities.