Successful Co-Selling in the Cloud

In this month’s cloud partner monthly, we’re discussing cloud co-sell and I’ve invited Robin S. Liong to join me for some Q&A. As a reminder, all views expressed here are our own. If you'd like an audio version of this, please visit my Substack here (and subscribe while you are there). Robin is a National ISM at AWS (the ISM stands for ISV Sales Manager) and his role is to lead the co-sell between the AWS North America field team and select top ISVs to achieve joint co-sell revenue goals. Robin and I met a couple of years ago and we’ve both been in various cloud alliance roles, developing cloud partnerships and coordinating across many different partner and cloud teams.?

Kirk: Robin, thanks for joining me this month! Tell us more about your?background and experience in cloud partnerships and co-sell.?

Robin: I started my partner career building global partner programs, working with and managing resellers and Systems Integrators, then expanded to technology partners including IHV, ISV, SaaS, and CSP. Prior to joining AWS, I built and led global alliance partnership and co-sell with AWS for three different SaaS companies, and managed a quota carrying team responsible for partner-sourced & influenced revenue. Each time I had to do it from the ground up and successfully put my company "on the AWS map" as the top partner within our category and drove new multi million dollars of co-sell business.

Kirk: Let’s start by answering what is co-sell? ?If you are new to working with the cloud service providers (we’ll use CSP from here on), co-selling is a bit different than a traditional channel. The CSP’s present a great opportunity to expand and augment your sales team but it’s important to understand that they are not a reseller channel for your business. At AWS, we define co-sell as a sales motion where AWS and the AWS partner work together on an opportunity for an end customer. This can be AWS introducing the AWS partner to a new business opportunity or the AWS partner requesting support on an opportunity. The CSP sales org can be great coaches, helping partner sales teams gain a better overall picture of the customer’s cloud business, provide feedback to validate stakeholders, initiatives and priorities, and potential issues that could impact the ability to close an opportunity.?

Robin: ?If you are an ISV, you know best how to sell your product(s) or solution(s), and if you are a System Integrator, you know how to scope and sell your services. So partners need to be driving their sales cycle and the CSP’s can add a lot of value to help the partners, from an account introduction to accelerating the partner’s sales cycle, increasing the chance of winning the deal, and/or identifying expansion opportunities. The exception here is if a CSP enters into an OEM agreement with a partner, and the partner’s solution becomes available to be transacted on the CSP’s paper. But that OEM model is more of an exception than the norm with AWS, for example, from my personal observation.

Kirk: Let’s move on to a few key best practices to develop and accelerate successful cloud co-sell. We’re going to talk about co-selling and reference AWS but these apply to any of the CSP’s. It starts with focus and advancing your partner status. If you are a new CSP partner, your goal should be to advance as quickly as possible through the partner program stages to achieve a prioritized co-sell status (Become an AWS Partner ). For example with AWS, this means getting into the ISV Accelerate (ISVA) program. ISVA provides incentives for AWS sales teams, co-sell support and resources, prioritization for co-sell programs, and lower AWS Marketplace transaction listing fees. On that point, partners should list solutions in AWS Marketplace and make this a core part of your co-sell motion. I outlined AWS Marketplace listing best practices in a previous post here . Along with gaining visibility through co-sell programs, partners need to focus on where to target co-sell. If selling to financial services customers is the sweet spot for new business growth, focus there and don't chase other segments or verticals until you’ve got a solid co-sell motion established. Invest in ongoing, targeting pipeline sharing and engagement with the CSP to activate co-sell. The CSP sales teams have many partners knocking on their door so the way to create awareness and build mindshare with them is through focused, targeted co-sell that results in closed won business to demonstrate your success in co-selling. Robin, what’s the next co-sell best practice you recommend??

Robin: Enablement and there are two types of enablement here; one for the CSP field team and another for the partner’s own field team. It is important to have a crisp, better-together story with AWS on how the partner’s solution impacts the customer and what’s in it for the AWS field team to co-sell with the partner. What I used to create is a five-slide pitch deck to capture those key points, including example wins in the district/region you are talking to, and I recommend my partners to do the same, you can create a separate longer collateral for technical or deeper dive enablement. If you are new to the AWS ecosystem, the AWS partner manager and co-sell resources can help guide you on what matters to our field team. Partners also need to enable their own sellers?so they know whom and how to engage with AWS and earn their trust. This is not too different from how sellers work with prospective customers, you need to do your due diligence, be ready when you meet, earn trust, and follow up.?

Kirk: On enablement, a key question partners need to be able to answer before engaging in any co-sell opportunity is: how does their solution impact the journey of the cloud customer? The best way for a partner to develop this answer is to ask their customers! As a partner, are you able to articulate the value you deliver to customers - multiple customers. This will help demonstrate relevance and repeatability to the CSP seller. As a partner, it’s important that you be able to succinctly discuss how your solution accelerates the customer's time to value; how does your solution accelerate migration to cloud, or adoption and growth of services, overcome specific business challenges, etc..

The next co-sell best practice I recommend?is to evangelize your successes. There are many partners competing for the CSP account team’s attention so don’t miss any opportunity to promote recent wins and call out your marquee customers. Send out win-wires (both you and the CSP), create customer case studies and testimonials and include the CSP details. Are your sellers building their network of CSP champions beyond the account manager? CSP account teams want to see on-going demonstrated success (specific to their cloud and ideally using similar customer segments and industry vertical use cases for customers like theirs. Turn this into relevant, targeted content to support enablement and use with any initial co-sell opportunity outreach.?

Robin: The other thing that a lot of partners probably wonder is when they can start getting new AWS-sourced opportunities, they think AWS has over 1 million customers and they just need AWS to bring them into a subset of those customers. That is like the holy grail but it is just one of the things that matters in the partnership. Don’t lose sight of the importance of AWS-influenced business. Partners can leverage valuable deal support from AWS field team, funding mechanism (varies by program), and AWS Marketplace that is widely adopted by customers to increase their chance of winning the deal or accelerate their sales cycle. Typically the more a partner is leaning in the more support they get, for example an ISV that goes to market as a SaaS solution that is built on or powered by the CSP would gain more mindshare with the CSP field team and the customers adopting the CSP.?

Kirk: Robin, what are three actions you’d recommend to partners that want to develop a successful co-sell motion with AWS??

Robin: Sure, here are three I’d recommend as starting point:

1. Review partnership readiness: Are you investing in co-sell (e.g. CSP co-sell program, co-sell resources), what do your enablement content and approach look like? Don’t forget the five-slide approach we discussed, remember you have two audiences, the joint customer and the CSP field team, make sure your account teams understand the incentives for customers and CSP sales for using services like AWS Marketplace .

2. Pick your beachhead: a segment, region, or vertical to start with and focus on and then expand. Partners that claim they can do and go after everything will just get lost in a noise and the partners will spread their resources thin without being able to go deep and have meaningful follow up with the CSP sales leader and team given the size of the CSP organization. Resist the internal pressure from your sales leadership or sellers to go after every account, you want to get the co-sell flywheel going with where you can have the most success.?

3. Create a mechanism to kick off the co-sell flywheel by first sharing your pipeline, and a mechanism to engage the CSP field team. Take Ownership, the ISVs with successful CSP co-selling I’ve seen are leaning-in, on top of their execution, and proactive in making it easy to work with them.

Kirk: Thank you for these actions Robin and I appreciate you joining me this month to share your experience and insights! To my readers, thank you for your ongoing support and please let me know what topics you’d like me to cover in future posts.?