Unlocking Synergies: Maximizing Co-Sell Opportunities with AWS

“AWS Partner Experience Transformation” is a blog series on updates to the AWS Partner Programs, AWS Marketplace, and AWS Partner Central.

By Priya Bains, Head of Partner Brand and Content Strategy – AWS

At Amazon, our customer obsession drives us to continuously innovate and find new ways to deliver exceptional value. Through our AWS Partners, we’re able to unlock greater value and opportunities for our customers.

Partners have expressed a clear need for more support from AWS in the form of sales leads, enablement, and better collaboration with AWS Sellers. In response, we’re making significant investments to create a simpler, more predictable, and profitable co-selling experience for Partners to co-sell with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

According to the 2024 Canalys study, frequent co-selling Partners experienced 51% higher average revenue growth, 65% of Partners reported higher close rates and 54% saw larger deals as a result of co-sell motions. Eighty percent of Partners also claimed that AWS Marketplace is an important part of their AWS co-sell motion.

For these reasons, we’re providing ways for you to create a compelling co-sell strategy with AWS to generate greater revenue and scale customer reach with AWS Marketplace.

In this post, we cover new initiatives to help Partners co-sell with AWS, including building scalable and automated co-sell systems and tools, enhanced Partner benefits, co-marketing mechanisms, funding opportunities, and increased customer lead generation.

Expanding Benefits for AWS Sellers to Co-sell with Partners

Starting January 2025, we’ll provide more resources and align sales incentives to encourage AWS Sellers to prioritize co-selling with a diverse set of Partners. The SaaS co-sell benefit (also known as SaaS Revenue Recognition), previously an invite-only benefit for large technology solution Partners, is being expanded to all ISV Accelerate Partners who are transacting in AWS Marketplace, including eligible startups. AWS Sellers will now receive quota retirement for co-selling SaaS solutions with any ISV Accelerate Partner on private offers that that transact through AWS Marketplace.

Per a Forrester Consulting study, ISVs experience 50% faster deal closure when transacting in AWS Marketplace. These benefits help provide dedicated focus on co-selling to both our AWS Sellers and Partners, leveraging the power of AWS Marketplace to unlock unprecedented growth opportunities.

“SaaS Revenue Recognition is the mechanism through which our teams in the field see their AWS counterparts incentivized to collaborate,” says Helen O’Hara, Cloud Partnerships Director at Contentsquare. “This builds a confidence in the mutual benefit of co-sell for Contentsquare, AWS, and our shared customers that represents an exciting new chapter for our partnership.”

Streamlining Co-sell Business Planning with AWS

Per the Canalys study, organizations that lack a clear strategy for co-selling end-to-end solutions face insufficient sales readiness, misalignment with buyers’ needs, missed opportunities for upselling or cross selling, and ultimately, fail to achieve revenue goals. To enable AWS Partners to do upfront co-sell business strategy planning with AWS and drive focused engagement with AWS Sales teams, we launched a business planning feature in AWS Partner Central.

Currently, Partners have multiple touchpoints, conversations, and emails with AWS Partner management and sales teams as part of business planning exercises. AWS is making this collaboration easier and more efficient by centralizing the co-selling business planning process and standardizing templates in AWS Partner Central. This makes it easy for Partners and AWS teams to collaborate, set goals, and track progress in a single experience, enabling more efficient sales.

The business planning feature is available to AWS Partners who are actively engaged with AWS Partner management teams on joint business plans. Reach out to your AWS Partner contact to initiate business planning.

Easier Partner Discovery for AWS Sales Teams Utilizing Generative AI

We introduced a generative AI tool for AWS Sales teams to discover and match Partners to specific customers opportunities. It allows AWS Sales teams to assess customer need, find a qualified Partner, and connect them with customers through AWS Originated opportunity sharing. It analyzes data from APN Customer Engagements (ACE) and AWS Marketplace to recommend most suitable AWS Partners from over thousands of Partner solutions within seconds, directly in the AWS internal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) portal.

Working backwards from customer needs, the tool identifies AWS Partners who have demonstrated prior success and are dedicated to co-selling. ACE eligibility and achieving AWS Specialization are minimum requirements for AWS Partners to be recommended. Partners with AWS Specialization with Differentiated stage in AWS Partner Central can access “AWS co-sell recommendation score” through the Analytic and Insights dashboard. These scores provide insights on Partner’s capabilities that are evaluated and matched across regions, industries, and segments.

“The generative AI partner matching tool is an incredible resource for connecting Partners with AWS sales teams to ensure that customer problems can be solved collaboratively with the solution best suited to their needs,” explains Jessica Moore, Director of Global Alliances at Inflectra. “Its tailored recommendation highlighting Partner Specializations and opportunity engagement, ensures that every project finds its ideal match, driving innovation and delivering success at scale.” 

To increase your visibility with AWS Sales teams, share your pipeline through ACE by providing comprehensive details (the more the better)—including relevant opportunity information, project specifics, and relevant AWS solutions. If you have a public Software listing in AWS Marketplace, ensure that the description and product categories are up to date and accurate.

In 2025, we’re personalizing the Partner experience with targeted growth recommendations based on your business profile and strategic joint business planning with AWS to increase your visibility with AWS Sales teams and drive co-sell opportunities.

Scaling Multi-Partner Deals to Accelerate Business Outcome Solutions

Profitability comes from delivering differentiated value to customers—giving them the best possible solution to their business problem. Customers today are seeking integrated solutions that deliver measurable outcomes, which typically involve multiple components (software, hardware, consulting, implementation) and/or organizations. The Canalys report finds that 43% of customers use 4+ Partners to meet their business needs.

In June, we unveiled the Business Outcomes Xcelerator (BOX) Program, designed to assist Partners in developing and delivering solutions that address Line of Business (LOB) buyers needs and accelerate revenue growth by fostering collaboration through Partner matchmaking in-person events. We’re now expanding multi-partner engagement and deal management by introducing Partner Connections (in preview) in AWS Partner Central. This new feature enhances Partner matchmaking by allowing AWS Partners to find and connect with other complementary Partners through search and AI-driven recommendations, enabling connected Partners to share joint sales opportunities within this trusted network. It optimizes multi-partner deal management through direct collaboration between Partners and the AWS Sales team, ensuring real-time updates that lead to faster and more successful engagements.

The multi-partner deal management capability in AWS Partner Central offers a secure, API-powered experience that helps scale multi-partner deals—which average six times larger than single-partner deals. This integrated experience fosters innovation and drives growth through strategic partnerships across the APN community.

Partner Connections unlocks new revenue streams to increase Partner profitability, augmented with BOX Program benefits. These benefits include AWS Credits, cash, proof-of-concept incentives, and joint GTM and co-sell support through programs like AWS Specializations and ISV Accelerate.

Real-Time Collaboration with AWS Sales on Slack

At AWS, we consider you an extension of our sales teams. So much of our business is now conducted through quick exchanges over instant messaging platforms between Partners and AWS Sales. That’s why earlier this year, we launched Collaboration Channels in AWS Partner Central. Using Slack Connect, Partners can collaborate in real-time with AWS account managers and Partner managers on ACE co-selling opportunities.

This feature helps simplify and expedite communications between Partners and sales teams, ensuring all members stay updated on deal progression, enabling better collaboration and more efficient deal closure for strategic customer engagements. We built in controls to ensure the confidentiality of your discussions. Collaboration channels are available globally to ACE-eligible Partners directly through ACE Pipeline Manager in AWS Partner Central.

APIs for Selling with AWS

Partners have shared that as their business grows with AWS, manually managing co-sell opportunities across different systems becomes increasingly challenging, especially since teams prefer to work within their own CRM systems. To address this challenge and streamline the co-sell experience, we launched the AWS Partner Central API for Selling, enabling seamless integration between Partner CRM systems and AWS Partner Central.

This new API—the first in a comprehensive suite—allows Partners to streamline and scale co-selling process by automating the creation and management of ACE opportunities within their own CRM. AWS Partner Central API for Selling enables Partners to create, update, view, and assign opportunities, as well as accept invitations to engage on AWS referrals. Additionally, Partners can retrieve a list of their solutions on AWS Partner Central and associate specific solutions, AWS products, or AWS Marketplace offers with opportunities as needed. Along with the AWS Marketplace Catalog APIs, Partners can manage the complete lead-to-quote and quote-to-cash experience from within their CRM.

Take Action

To maximize co-sell opportunities with AWS, we recommend Partners focus on early business goals alignment, collaboration, optimization, and engagement with AWS Sales teams. Unlock the full potential of co-selling with AWS by following these best practices:

• Establish a dedicated co-sell point of contact in your organization and drive better co-sell outcomes by aligning goals early through a strategic business plan and AWS Marketplace strategy. For example, review the ISV Accelerate enrollment criteria to participate. Make sure your solutions are built on AWS, listed in AWS Marketplace, and you are actively co-selling with pipeline shared in ACE.
• Link your AWS Partner Central and Marketplace accounts through AWS Partner Central Account Linking in just 3 easy steps to take advantage of new capabilities like Partner Connections, Collaboration Channels, co-sell recommendation score, APIs, etc. Integrate your CRM system with ACE leveraging APIs. By leveraging the newly re-designed Tasks in AWS Partner Central, you can easily understand next best actions by account, solution, and programs to accelerate your journey with AWS.
• Share opportunity and leads on an ongoing basis: Ensure your AWS Marketplace listings are up-to-date and linked to relevant opportunities. This provides end-to-end visibility of your sales pipeline from opportunity to offer to cash. This also improves the quality and completeness of data associated with your ACE pipeline—increasing your solutions visibility to AWS Sales.
• Achieve AWS Specializations to demonstrate your expertise and proven success to customers and take advantage of benefits like AWS Credits, cash, proof-of-concept incentives, and joint GTM and co-sell support through programs like ISV Accelerate. Set yourself apart from the competition by developing co-sell stories with AWS that showcase strong customer outcomes across industries, segments, solutions, and geographies.
• Connect with other AWS Partners on opportunities to deliver end-to-end solutions to customers: Find, connect, and co-sell with other Partners on customer deals using Partner Connections. Send personalized connection requests to other Partners, manage the invitations you receive, and leverage the AI-driven recommendations to drive faster engagement.
• Collaborate with AWS Sales team: Navigate to existing ACE opportunities and request to interact with the aligned AWS Sales team leveraging Slack Connect.

Stay tuned for updates via the “AWS Partner Experience Transformation” blog series. Additionally, check out the latest enhancements to AWS Marketplace, programs, and AWS Partner Central in our What’s New posts.