Improving Your Visibility to AWS Sales: A Practical Guide for AWS Partners

AWS Partner visibility within AWS is undergoing a fundamental shift to make collaboration more strategic, driven by data. Partners have shared the immense value in the opportunity to co-sell with AWS to drive new business and accelerate sales cycle. In response to this feedback, we have enhanced and integrated the build-market-sell-grow journey across AWS Marketplace and AWS Partner Central experience to expand your customer reach and accelerate engagement with AWS Sales team.

AWS Sales team members needed a simplified way to match thousands of partners and solutions with relevant customer opportunities. To address this, we developed a machine learning engine that connects partners with customers. The engine analyzes concrete signals such as solution metadata, past performance, and opportunity data to deliver partner recommendations. This approach increases partner visibility within the AWS Sales network and helps sales team members identify the most suitable partners for each account and opportunity.

As a partner, you can influence how your company and solutions show up in the AWS Sales workflow through three key actions. Improving your AWS Marketplace and AWS Partner Central solution listings, keeping your pipeline data current in AWS Partner Central, and actively participating in AWS programs. The clearer and more relevant the information you share, the better we can match you with customers.

In this post, we will show you how to improve your visibility to AWS Sales by fine-tuning the key signals the recommendation engine uses. You will also learn how you can monitor your performance and positioning through AWS Partner Analytics and Insights on AWS Partner Central. We presented this topic at re:Invent 2024.

How the AI-powered partner recommendations engine surfaces works

The AI-powered partner recommendations engine is used by AWS Sales to receive partner recommendations inside their CRM. The engine evaluates a wide range of partner signals, such as firmographics, use case fit, program participation, specialization, win history, and deal velocity. Through this data we can surface the most relevant partners to the customer’s industry, segment, and strategic priorities.

AWS Sales teams have visibility into the factors that determine partner positioning in the recommendation engine like partner win/loss/stall metrics, solution listings in AWS Marketplace, partner incumbency, historical success in similar use cases, and participation in AWS programs. These data points help sales team members quickly evaluate partner fit and confidence that a partner will be able to achieve their customer’s business outcomes.

What good looks like: characteristics of top-performing Partners

AWS Partners that exhibit strong positioning and data integrity will implicitly perform better in our engine. Top-performing AWS Partners consistently demonstrate distinct characteristics that drive sales outcomes and higher customer recommendation rates. These partners typically have clear, focused positioning of their solutions that articulates their unique value proposition and specialized expertise, whether in specific industries, technologies, or business challenges. Data shows that partners with strong positioning receive significantly more customer referrals and maintain higher win rates in competitive situations. The most successful partners invest heavily in AWS certifications, maintain dedicated AWS practices, and build deep technical expertise in key services aligned with their target markets. They also demonstrate a track record of successful customer outcomes, maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, and actively participate in AWS programs and co-selling opportunities. These partners tend to specialize in specific solution areas or industries rather than trying to be everything to everyone, allowing them to build repeatable solutions and develop deep domain knowledge that resonates with customers.

Importantly, they maintain strong operational metrics, including healthy cloud economics practices, consistent delivery methodologies, and robust customer support capabilities.

Actions you can take

You can follow these steps to achieve higher performance:

1. Opportunity Hygiene: APN Customer Engagements (ACE) opportunity records require complete AWS pipeline and regular updates on the: accurate stage, next steps, revenue, and classifications—especially for industry and use case. Best practices for the opportunity include:
   1. Opportunity title includes a summary of the project [customer name, workload, delivery].
   2. A description of the customer use case (a few short sentences are better than lengthy filler) including the desired result for the AWS customer.
   3. Keep “Next Steps” and “Estimated Monthly Recurring Revenue” up to date. Use AWS Pricing calculator to get a true estimate.
   4. Ensure that your solution(s) are tagged as AWS Partner Solution(s) to the opportunity.
   5. Ensure that any relevant AWS services used to deliver the opportunity are tagged as AWS Products and listed in the opportunity text fields (e.g. Description).
   6. Update the opportunity stage as launched or closed-lost as soon as an opportunity closes. This will be crucial to correctly estimate the time-to-win and available capacity.
2.  Complete Solution Metadata: Listings are well-tagged by industry, use case, geography, and buyer persona—on both Partner Central and AWS Marketplace.
   1. Solution title match with how you go-to-market with your customers. If you have five solutions on your website, create five solutions in Partner Central.
   2. Provide a detailed and specific solution description that include clear use cases, industries, targeted customer segments or customer persona, geographic availability, and AWS Services.
   3. Attach relevant artifacts such as architecture diagrams, implementation plans and case studies.
   4. Software partners should add deployment details and link your AWS Marketplace listings with corresponding Partner Central solutions.
3. Validate solutions via Foundational Technical Review or AWS Specializations. Active solutions should have passed the Foundational Technical Review, demonstrating quality and readiness.
4. AWS Marketplace Presence: Listings are linked between Partner Central and AWS Marketplace to ensure consistent signal ingestion.
5. Specializations: Partners earn AWS specializations in their core strengths and participate in high-value programs like ISV Accelerate. Specializations are highly important to AWS Sales.
6. Conversion Metrics: Partners with high Return on Investment (ROI) and short cycle times are seen as more effective.
7. Responsiveness and Engagement: Partners that are actively engaged with AWS field teams when they share an opportunity and maintain near real-time pipeline sync offer higher trust with AWS Sales.

Monitor and improve your visibility

The Partner Analytics & Insights dashboard in AWS Partner Central provides direct visibility into your AWS co-sell recommendation score on AWS customer opportunities. Partner users at the Validated or Differentiated stage can access Analytics and Insights through AWS Partner Central, via the Analytics tab in the navigation bar. To access your AWS co-sell recommendation score, you must have a specialization. Through this dashboard, you can:

• View aggregated customer matches from the AI-powered partner recommendations engine
• Analyze recommendation trends by product family, region, or industry
• Benchmark your performance against ideal visibility ranges
• Identify gaps in your metadata, CRM hygiene, or program participation

Figure 1. Pipeline performance indicators within Analytics & Insights

Figure 2. AWS co-sell recommendation score, reflecting likelihood to be recommended by region, industry, and segment

This is your direct feedback loop into how AWS sees you and your solutions. Use it to continuously refine your positioning.

Here are the immediate actions you can take to improve your visibility:

1. Automate Pipeline Updates: Use Partner Central APIs or connectors to ensure your data stays current.
   1. Publish Historical Wins: These help the engine recognize your success in similar contexts. If it’s in your CRM, surface it to AWS.
   2. Keep your data current: Regularly update opportunity stage, value, next steps, and ensure correct use-case and industry tagging.
   3. Integrate your CRM to maintain data hygiene. You maintain control of the data you share with us but also automate pipeline updates seamlessly automating the carry over into Partner Central. This ensures accurate, real-time signals for AWS Sales.
2. Get Specialized: Apply for AWS Partner Specializations in your core strength areas.
3. Validate All Active Solutions with FTR: Don’t stop at the minimum needed for ACE eligibility. Signal quality matters.
4. List and Link on AWS Marketplace: Complete Marketplace–Partner Central Linking: This ensures cumulative signal ingestion and consistency across systems. Ensure all active solutions are listed and linked to Partner Central.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed you how to influence your visibility in AWS co-sell by improving the data signals that drive partner recommendations. Enhance your visibility with AWS Sales by completing FTRs, maintaining accurate pipeline data, and using automated data management tools.

Visibility to customers and AWS Sales is in your control, so start today by auditing your solution listings and opportunity records, reviewing your Analytics dashboard, and reaching out to your AWS Partner Development Manager (PDM) for personalized guidance. Take control of the inputs and improve your outcomes.

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