Announcing the Customer Engagement Incentive for AWS Partners

By Gerald Kwong, Partner Funding PM – AWS

Millions of organizations are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster—with the cloud continuing to be a catalyst for modernization and transformation for our customers.

Our partners have shared that in today’s environment engaging new customers or early cloud adopters is complex. According to a 2023 Techaisle Channel Partner Trends report, it is 3.2X more expensive to engage new customers with longer sales cycle (2.7X), compared to expanding sales with existing customers.

That’s why we’re excited to launch the Customer Engagement Incentive, which supports partners to engage companies in the early stages of AWS Cloud adoption and accelerate their growth on AWS.

The incentive is designed to lower the cost of sale, increase profitability, and grow customer adoption of AWS services by recognizing partner efforts when engaging with new customers. The incentive is available to AWS Global Systems Integrators (GSI), System Integrators (SI), Solution Providers (SPP), and Distribution Partners.

According to Gartner, “more than $1.3 trillion in enterprise IT spending is at stake from the shift to cloud, growing to almost $1.8 trillion in 2025.” Additionally, “almost two-thirds (65.9%) of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies in 2025, up from 57.7% in 2022.”

The opportunity to help customers transform using the cloud is greater than ever. The Customer Engagement Incentive helps you capitalize on this opportunity and build customer pipeline. This new incentive encourages partners to focus on the initial or small workload first, rather than relying solely on larger workloads.

“Our team will use the Customer Engagement Incentive to support investment and the engagement process with our clients to help drive AWS organic growth,” said Rochelle Manns, vice president, Converge Technology Solutions. “This incentive focuses on gaining interest from new customers to move to the cloud or start a fresh build. This AWS Partner benefit combined with other existing AWS program investments for our clients is a winning combination; we start small, earn the business, and then move to the larger project/build.”

Benefits

The Customer Engagement Incentive helps partners reach new customers while growing their existing base.

Partners can generate greater profitability by offsetting costs at each stage of their build, market, sell and grow journey, including:

• Advising, designing, and building workloads for their customers.
• Completing the initial build and launching workload on AWS.
• Delivering managed services to drive greater partner and customer growth.

How it Works

The Customer Engagement Incentive—available to partners in the form of cash, credits, and discounts—provides a consistent, simple, and global framework by:

• Providing funding earlier in the customer sales cycle to lower the cost of sale, allowing partners to focus on initial workloads before developing larger workloads.
• Incentivizing partners to build and close pipeline and continue to drive the growth and spend of new AWS customers.
• Providing a repeatable incentive structure, enabling partners to profitably scale from small to large customers.

Get Started

To get started, submit an eligible opportunity through APN Customer Engagements (ACE) Pipeline Manager in AWS Partner Central.

For more information on the incentive and how it can benefit your organization, review the Customer Engagement Incentive Resources (login required).

Attend the PartnerCast to learn about eligibility, benefits, and the incentive structure: