7 best practice tips for co-marketing and co-selling with AWS

As a startup, your primary mission is clear: build and innovate with speed and precision. While managing sales and marketing is part of your growth journey, these activities shouldn't prevent you from maximizing your solutions’ full potential.

If you want to grow your business without compromising on innovation, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is here to help at every stage of the startup journey. Get access to the latest tools and expertise, tap into a global customer base, and skyrocket your business value by joining the AWS Partner Network (APN).

The path forward begins after you’ve joined the APN and secured your listing on the AWS Marketplace. Your next step is preparing for co-selling success. At this stage, you should have three key elements in place: established customer relationships, a functioning sales operation, and a dedicated resource to work with AWS. However, like any successful partnership, alignment between your business and AWS is crucial.

To guide you toward success, we've developed seven strategic steps for an effective go-to-market (GTM) approach with AWS:

1. Focus on your Better Together story 
2. Secure business buy-in and resource your team 
3. Study the value 
4. Set clear goals and outcomes 
5. Set clear goals and outcomes 
6. Identify your AWS champions 
7. Communicate joint wins and successes

Focus on your Better Together story

Your Better Together story is the cornerstone of your AWS partnership, capturing your unique value proposition that emerges when your solution offering is combined with AWS. Created during your APN onboarding, this narrative demonstrates how your joint offering addresses customer challenges.

To craft a compelling Better Together story, start with your initial mission statement. Reflect on these essential questions:  

• What inspired your solution’s creation? 
• What drives customers to choose your offering?
• What sets your solution apart in the market? 
• How is your solution improving the experience of end-customers? 

While AI tools like Perplexity AI or Anthropic's Claude can help refine your messaging, remember to maintain clarity and authenticity. Avoid creating a one-size-fits-all story that tries to address every use case and industry as this will likely dilute your message and complicate execution.

CloudZero is a cloud cost management platform that showcases a clear Better Together story by offering both an on-demand model and a custom enterprise plan. It demonstrates alignment with the pay-as-you-grow philosophy championed by AWS as its solution enables: 

• Automated cost management across AWS infrastructure
• Flexible pricing that scales with customer growth
• Enhanced control for enterprise clients
• Optimized AWS infrastructure spending

This focused approach helps maximize customers’ AWS investment while maintaining cost efficiency, showcasing how a well-crafted Better Together story translates into tangible customer benefits.

Secure business buy-in and resource your team

Success with AWS requires more than just executive approval—it demands complete leadership commitment to the partnership's value, goals, and activities. Your business leaders must be actively engaged champions who understand and support both the strategic vision and tactical execution.

Start by involving your team in developing the Better Together story, ensuring that they can clearly articulate and measure the partnership’s impact. Help your team to understand both the short and long-term strategic benefits of the AWS relationship. This buy-in creates the foundation needed in aligning your strategy with AWS.

With team commitment secured, focus on equipping your organization with the right tools and resources. Ensure your business development and partnership teams are properly staffed and supported to work effectively with AWS.

Empower your team with the right capabilities, including:

• Refined messaging that resonates with customers
• Compelling case studies that demonstrate value
• Reference architectures that streamline lead generation
• Strategic qualifying questions to guide customer conversations (e.g., existing AWS relationships, annual commitments, AWS Marketplace usage)

You should also prepare your business tools for integration and ensure you have a dedicated person with your team who is focused on maximizing co-marketing programs with AWS and understands how to fully leverage AWS tools. Implement integrations like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to enhance lead sharing, sales engagement, and co-selling workflows.

Finally, develop a comprehensive AWS Marketplace strategy. Your listing should be continuously optimized through:

• Refined product descriptions
• Customer reviews and testimonials
• Strategic pricing adjustments
• Clear co-selling goals aligned with AWS initiatives

This strategic approach ensures your presence on the AWS Marketplace actively drives growth and strengthens your AWS partnership.

Study the value

With the right tools in place, it’s crucial to help your business understand the value of partnering with AWS. Begin by leveraging AWS Partner Central to develop internal training to upskill your team’s capabilities.

Empower your team with essential knowledge and skills:

• Effective collaboration with AWS field representatives
• Seamless information sharing protocols
• Clear communication channels with AWS counterparts
• Confident navigation of AWS Marketplace transactions

Invest in your team's success by allocating time and resources for developing and promoting your Better Together story. Make AWS partnership training an integral part of your onboarding process, ensuring new team members understand the partnership's value from day one. Consider inviting your AWS account manager to deliver presentations that bring the partnership benefits to life.

AWS events are another valuable opportunity for growth as many are free to attend. These events give you and your team the chance to learn about new and existing AWS services and how to best utilize AWS products to support your startup. The AWS Sponsorship Program allows you to create strategic, ROI-generating opportunities. Through co-branded marketing and media programs, you can boost visibility of your organization, showcase your solutions, and connect with customers in the sectors that matter most. Set up meetings with prospective customers, generate leads, or consider taking the stage as a speaker: this is your chance to network with innovators and industry leaders and show how you’re solving some of their most critical challenges.

Set clear goals and outcomes

Establishing clear, well-defined goals is essential for a successful AWS partnership. Begin by developing an outline of your objectives: what you aim to achieve with AWS, how this partnership will fuel business growth, and the specific commitments required from both parties.

AWS Startup Partner Development Managers (PDM) collaborate with startup leadership to create detailed partner plans that track key metrics such as opportunities created, sales plays executed, marketing activities performance, and overall engagement outcomes. If your business qualifies for PDM support, dedicate a specific team member to manage and maximize the partnership’s full potential.

While your goal-setting process should draw from your AWS experience and understanding, maintain a realistic approach. Remember that:

• ROI develops gradually over time
• Growth should follow an organic trajectory
• Goals should be ambitious yet achievable
• All business objectives must align with your partner plan

This structured approach to goal setting creates a clear roadmap for your AWS partnership while maintaining realistic expectations for growth and success.

Prepare sales plays

Defining your sales plays is a fundamental element of your AWS partnership strategy. These tactical opportunities must include three key characteristics.

1. Relevance: Focus on proven customer segments where you've demonstrated success. 
2. Focus: Deliver precise, use-case specific messaging rather than broad, generic approaches. 
3. Repeatability: Create frameworks that can be successfully replicated across similar industries. 

To build and maintain successful sales play, you’ll need to be ready to create sales collateral, build target lists, and execute the plays within AWS. Ensure you document and scale successful campaigns and integrate sales plays into your partner plan for organization-wide alignment.

By leveraging a Partner Solutions Architect (PSA) within your sales strategy, you can create a combination of business and technical expertise that resonates with customers and drives results. If your business qualifies for PSA support, their deep understanding of AWS services helps bridge the gap between your solutions capabilities and customer requirements, making your sales play more effective and easier to replicate.

Identify your AWS champions

Building strong relationships with AWS advocates is crucial for your success. Identify and cultivate connections with key AWS team members (i.e. account managers, solutions architects, partner development managers, sales leaders, and technical specialists) who can champion your solution.

Take a strategic approach by:

1. Mapping your product's capabilities to specific AWS services
2. Engaging proactively with relevant stakeholders
3. Building long-term partnerships that scale with your growth
4. Creating opportunities for joint marketing and sales initiatives

Remember that different AWS team members influence different types of customer conversations. For example, solutions architects are particularly effective when your product serves technical practitioners. In these cases, provide hands-on demonstrations and technical enablement sessions to help them fully understand and advocate for your solution. This approach ensures your AWS advocates are well-equipped to represent your solution effectively and can help drive meaningful customer engagements.

Communicate joint wins and successes

Standing out in the large AWS ecosystem requires visibility and communication of your success. Make your achievements known by regularly sharing your successes with AWS—whether that’s landing a new customer, expanding an existing solution, or evolving your value proposition. Remember, communicating these wins doesn’t need to be in the form of elaborate case studies—even brief success highlights can significantly impact your visibility within AWS.

Once you’ve joined the AWS Partner Network, following these seven strategic steps positions your startup for co-selling success. Establishing these foundational elements will activate your pipeline-generating mechanisms, making you ready to scale your operations as a part of your startup co-selling journey with AWS. Explore co-marketing opportunities through AWS Partner Marketing Programs. These programs offer powerful tools to amplify your market presence and accelerate your growth within the AWS ecosystem.