4 Tips to Sell in AWS Marketplace

This article is focused on helping AWS partners with their AWS partnership journey.

In this article, I share my experience with the topics related to selling your products and services in AWS Marketplace. I share my thoughts about what I went through to assist you in enabling your partnership success; but not basic info about whats, and wheres.

If this article caught your attention, you most probably are a technology or a consulting partner of AWS. — In other words, this article is intended to be useful for independent software vendors (ISVs) and channel partners (CPs) selling products and services in AWS Marketplace.

As the topic implies, here are my 4 tips for selling your products in AWS Marketplace.

1. Be enterprise-ready
2. Leverage marketing
3. Co-sell with AWS
4. Sell with consulting partners

Why Sell in AWS Marketplace?

You spend your marketing dollars advantageously, reach out to many AWS customers, and boost up your sales with this effective channel by using it right.

AWS has the best resources if you are looking for answers to questions like the below ones that refer to the relevant AWS pages.

• “What is AWS Marketplace?”
• “How can I list my product on AWS Marketplace?”
• “How to Sell in AWS Marketplace?”

Moreover;

You should be looking for answers for these sorts of questions if the topic of this article speaks for you:

“How can I boost my sales with AWS Marketplace?”

“How can I reach out to more AWS customers?”

“How can I benefit from AWS Marketplace?”

Let’s dive into the details.

Be Enterprise-Ready

Selling any software product or service to an enterprise organization is an arduous process.

If your startup is selling a SaaS product hosted on the cloud, most enterprises will ask for an on-prem version of it. They can ask you to fill out hundreds of pages of long security assessments. Their security departments probably will not trust your product if you do not comply with SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA, or etc.

If you manage to survive taking the initial step of an enterprise deal, then they will play their second card. Finding bugs in your application. The enterprise customers are so good at testing your application, they can even find heisenbugs.

Enterprises always have a good card to play, they will ask for customized features of your SaaS application. It could be anything they’d want to change. From authentication to user management or the way you process data.

But no, not yet finished. After all, when you think you went through all the hoops, they will ask you to sign their hundreds of pages long contracts prepared by their legal divisions.

… I just wanted to explain a bit how an arduous process looks like. If the above words remind you of the pains of an enterprise deal.

Let’s take a look at how you can benefit from AWS’s way of easing things.

Enterprise Contract Program

When it comes to signing contracts both of the parties want to apply their terms in the legal agreements in many of the sales processes. This leads to daunting legal cycles which can even push the deal in the danger zone.

AWS suggests standardized end-user licensing agreements (EULA) for the purpose of eliminating long legal cycles but also protecting the customers’ and sellers’ interests at the same time.

Any seller and buyer that trusts AWS’s standardized agreements have to participate in this program in order to benefit from it. This program shortens the sales cycle drastically and eliminates both parties from spending their valuable time discussing legal terms.

AWS offers Standardized license terms in two options. Standard Contract for AWS Marketplace (SCMP) and Enterprise Contract for AWS Marketplace (ECMP). Here is the documentation for this efficacious service.

Private Offers

Standardizing product offers is in the soul of SaaS and startups can only manage to scale their customer base with such standardization.

A lot of startups offer their products at a flat rate, usage-based, tiered, per-user, or per-feature pricing. However, as mentioned above, enterprise customers may come with various requests that will push the deal out of your preset pricing limits.

At this point, AWS comes to the rescue with the AWS Marketplace Seller Private Offer program. You can freely do the negotiation with your potential customers about custom pricing and terms of use (EULA: end-user licensing agreement) and just create your private offer for them through AWS Marketplace Management Portal.

AWS significantly simplifies the procurement experience for your unordinary customers with Private Offers. Your customers see your custom price added to their AWS account’s bill and there is not a single hassle for both the seller and the buyer.

With Private Offers, AWS solves an important problem for startups. The sales team can have the comfort of freely negotiating with customers, the product team can have the comfort of not having to add additional requirements for every new unordinary customer, and lastly, the engineering team can have the comfort of going back to coding without distraction.

There are a lot of details of the program but it is best to link to the documentation as the purpose of this post is not to give basic information but to offer solutions to common problems to enable your success in your business partnership.

Leverage AWS PrivateLink

AWS enables its customers who are not able to purchase SaaS products. In other words, those are the customers whose data is so valuable that they can’t afford to take the risk of exposing it to the world-wide-web.

AWS enables its customers to securely pass data directly to a SaaS application without ever letting them leave the AWS network. This way most large enterprises can have the opportunity to benefit from today’s modern SaaS applications.

Many ISVs adopt a “SaaS first” strategy but sometimes it is best to be ready before a customer asks for something else than you are prepared.

AWS has a program called “AWS Service Ready Program” which helps ISVs to validate products built by AWS Partners that work with specific AWS services.

In order to integrate your products with AWS PrivateLink, you have to go through this path first. Being an APN Select or Advanced Technology Partner is of the prerequisites.

There are more business and technical benefits in becoming an AWS Service Ready partner. Some are:

• You can list your product on the AWS Partners page.
• You can attend the Q&A sessions with the product team that you comply with.
• You can get additional AWS promo credits.
• You can get $5K Marketing Development Funds (MDF).
• You get eligible for the AWS Customer Engagement Program (ACE).

Here is AWS’s page for the Service Ready Program. You can check it out for more information if it makes sense for you.

Leverage Marketing

APN Partner Central is a valuable portal for partners to learn and execute.

When you browse through APN Partner Central-> Marketing (Partner Marketing Opportunities) you will notice that there are 3 tools like below.

an image from the AWS APN Partner Central

3. AWS Sponsorships

This is basically the gate to the AWS events. All of the event sponsorship actions are here. It’s helpful to plan ahead.

2. APN Marketing Toolkit

This is the ultimate guide of how to design anything that you do for your AWS partnership. The “Messaging and Branding Guide” helps your marketers, designers, sellers and business developers to use the right messaging in the right place and the correct way to create materials.

1. AWS Marketing Central

The campaigns can be found here!

an image from the AWS Marketing Central

AWS makes deals with the well-known agencies around the globe and provides packaged campaigns to the partners just like a SaaS.

You browse around campaigns and filter them down to your needs such as geography, buying cycle stage, marketing activity, and more.

If you find a campaign that you’d like to execute, then you simply select it and request a quote from the agency.

It is super easy and just like a shopping experience but the best part is you can use your MDF’s up to 50% in these co-marketing campaigns!

AWS Marketplace Seller GTM Program

AWS Marketplace Seller GTM Program offers Go-to-market resources to all partners in a self service way but campaigns are available for only selected partners.

This invitation-only program has some prerequisites such as revenue commitment, minimum investment, and foundational readiness.

Having said foundational readiness; it means you have to be ready as an organization. You need to have a listed pricing on AWS Marketplace, you need to offer a free trial, you need to have personnel responsible for customer success, you need to have a landing page, solution brief, a demo video, and so on.

Program Guide can be found here.

Let me list the benefits down from my experience:

• Investment: To be able to use your MDF’s in the campaigns is a huge advantage in my opinion. It feels like AWS is sponsoring you :)
• Visibility: Your solution can be included in the AWS Marketplace Solutions page and also you can participate in the webinar campaigns. These will increase your visibility and work for you as a demand generation machine.
• Co-GTM with AWS: There’s a program called Concierge Service. AWS assigns an account manager (Virtual Partner Marketing Manager (vPMM)) who supports you on planning, executing, and reporting the campaign that you run within Concierge Service Program.
  AWS can provide separate MDF for Marketplace campaigns. Running a Concierge Service program is a great way to make use of it.
• Self-service GTM: 180-day GTM Academy is the program that helps partners build, activate, and measure demand generation campaigns. I will explain it in more detail below.

180-day GTM Academy

This is an invaluable program that supports AWS partners generate demand and drive awareness for their products and services by offering GTM best practices.

It is a self-service program providing resources about GTM best practices to help partners build and track demand generation campaigns.

The resources are well-designed, simple, and so informative that almost everybody can generate, execute, and measure a campaign from the ground up.

I can list the benefits of the program below:

• Create and improve your messaging using the message development kit.
• Turn your messaging into marketing assets.
• Build demand generation campaigns around the assets you created.
• Measure and track campaign performance.

Although I already had a messaging, or any of the marketing assets such as blog, whitepapers, social ads, email series, display ads or so, the campaign helped me improve everything with it easy to use templates and frameworks.

After executing successful demand generation campaigns with 180-day GTM academy, AWS partners can achieve comprehensive success combining co-marketing and co-selling activities together!

Here’s my quote for AWS about the program;

“Being an early participant of the AWS Marketplace 180-day GTM Academy workshop, we had the privilege of engaging with the AWS Marketplace GTM SMEs and the agency. We gained insights and takeaways that will help improve our overall go-to-market strategy. Specifically, we had the opportunity to improve our email streams in the workshop. Furthermore, the ISV Sales Enablement templates will shed light on our partnership journey with AWS.”

Co-sell with AWS

I’d like to point out that co-selling means supporting each other on opportunity basis by introductions, joint calls, meetings, and technical support.

It does not mean selling on behalf of each other!

Remember the first Amazon leadership principle, “customer obsession”.

Co-selling at AWS is a sales motion where the end goal is solely to help the end customers.

ACE Program

AWS Partner Network (APN) provides this super efficient program called APN Customer Engagements Program (ACE).

I think AWS always filters its partners before letting them in any program. There are some requirements to be eligible to join the ACE program just like others. Details can be found in the official ACE program webpage.

ACE simply works like this;

1. You submit an opportunity through the ACE Pipeline Manager.

2. Your opportunity either gets approved or rejected.

OR

1.1. You receive an opportunity referral through the ACE Pipeline Manager.

2.1. You either accept or reject the opportunity referral.

3. You engage with the AWS seller / account manager.

4. Deliver your “AWS Better together story” sharp and precisely.

5. Work with AWS sellers to co-sell the opportunities.

In my experience; AWS sellers receive hundreds of emails daily and your reach out can easily get lost among them unless you know the way how to attract their attention.

When writing about an opportunity to an AWS seller, you must be really straight-forward about the below;

• what is the opportunity, who are you
• use case: how do you help the customer migrate to or modernize on AWS
• what you want from them
• when are you available to meet them

This framework works to start the conversation with the responsible AWS seller of your opportunity.

So, what are the benefits of ACE?

Believe me or not, I suspect that this program is sometimes more beneficial for the AWS sellers than the partner.

Looking from the AWS seller perspective; there is an army of partners trying to help your customers. You get commissions when you support them to close a deal. And if the deal is closed on AWS Marketplace, it helps you to meet your quota.

All aside, it is for sure a unique type of challenge to identify which partner provides what value to the customers and decide how to move forward with which partner first. It should be really challenging to identify whether the partner’s solution provides value to the customer or not on an opportunity.

Looking from the partner perspective; it is great to have the opportunity to co-sell with an AWS seller.

The beauty of the program is here: You get opportunity referrals and leads from AWS!

This is fantastic; but not easy.

You should have developed good relations with AWS sellers prior to receiving opportunity referrals. You should have convince them with proof that your solution will help specific types of customers.

And you should have educated them well about your solution. Only then, you will be able to start receiving opportunity referrals from AWS sellers.

Additionally; in an opportunity, you can ask for AWS sellers support about technical consultation, business presentation, TCO evaluation, architectural validation and etc.

Fine details of co-selling with AWS sellers

• Better together story :

It’s very important to build and deliver your better together story to the AWS sales teams because it’s one of the most efficient ways for the AWS seller to understand how you will help AWS customers with your solution.

You need to make it just like as a short story to help AWS seller visualize what benefits your solution will provide to the AWS customer and which AWS services will be highlighted.

• Migration / Modernization:

When connecting with an AWS seller, shape your message in either how your help customers with AWS migration or how you help customers modernize their workloads or applications on AWS.

If you position your message between migration and/or modernization guardrails, you will differentiate your solution from others and AWS sellers will be able to better identify your solution’s value.

• Provide simple assets:

AWS sellers will support you more easily if you provide them simple, explanatory, and understandable assets. It helps educate them well.

The wording in your solution briefs, sales briefs, battlecards, landing pages, microsites, emails, and any other sales assets should be easily comprehensible.

You need to bear in mind that AWS sales people don’t have much time to research about what you mean in an asset with complex or too technical wording.

• Provide proof:

In your assets and also in your meetings with AWS sales teams, it is a very good opportunity to differentiate yourself by telling customer success stories. If you have a happy customer that you helped before similar to the opportunity, don’t hesitate just go ahead and tell it.

Well, I know it is like the chicken or the egg problem. You may not have many success stories if you are a fresh startup but the more opportunities you submit, the more awareness you will drive inside AWS. The more precise and accurate data you provide in the opportunities and reach out to the sellers the more you will be recognized.

ISV Accelerate Program

The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is designed to help end customers by enabling AWS and AWS partner sales teams work together and assist each other on opportunities.

AWS partners drive new business into their sales pipelines by gaining access to millions of active AWS customers with AWS sellers globally.

Datadog claims that 25–30% of the opportunities in their ACE originate from AWS.

Why would an AWS account manager care to co-sell?

First and foremost, they are looking for the best and fastest way to help their customer. So; as a partner, you should show how unique your solution is and prove it with solid statements. Such as case studies which include data!

Yes, data is the second thing AWS people are obsessed with! (You already know the first one)

Additionally, co-selling with a partner helps AWS account managers to achieve their sales goals and get compensation.

Sell with Consulting Partners

AWS SPPO Program

Within the Solution Provider Private Offers program, AWS consulting partners can resell authorized ISV products in AWS Marketplace to their customers.

The aim of the program is to scale business transactions uniting technology and consulting partners powers together to serve AWS customers at the best possible way. Therefore, it is very facilitated to sell an ISVs product for an SP (Solution Provider).

What are the benefits? Well, closing more deals!

There are two perspectives here;

1. If you are a Consulting Partner:

Let’s say that you are already working on a deal and your customer needs solutions for compliance, security, and software architecture observability. These are totally out of your scope but complementary requirements. SPPO enables you to resell ISV’s products in the blink of an eye with a pre-negotiated discount. You can make your customer happy and all you have to do is close the deal!

2. If you are a Technology Partner:

It is an invaluable sales channel for you to grow your business. And the best part is you don’t make any effort! AWS solution providers already have deals on their sales pipelines and they look for solutions like yours. You make a deal with SPs beforehand — give them discounts, sit back and watch them sell your product/s!

You can see the program’s official webpage from this link.

AWS CPPO Program

CPPO means Consulting Partner Private Offers. Technology partners who sell their products on AWS Marketplace are able to expand their sales channels with this program.

In other words, with CPPO, consulting partners can resell ISVs products on AWS Marketplace.

Long story short; the benefit of CPPO for an ISV is the convenience to acquire new customers without making an effort. Authorized consulting partners can directly deal with the financial and contractual relationship with customers in AWS Marketplace. This way ISVs can enjoy their new sales channel.

On the other hand; the benefit of CPPO for a consulting partner is basically having the ability to offer a complete package of tools and services to its customers.

Additionally, the program eases the way customers purchase ISVs’ products. They can purchase ISVs’ products directly from consulting partners.

This is the program’s official webpage.

Summary

Amazon Web Services has a huge community and AWS Marketplace is a golden opportunity to market and sell your products or services. But since AWS is a big organization, it is very easy to get lost when you are trying to reach your target. For this exact reason, there are beneficial programs that you can enroll between you and your potential customer.

You should be proactive to work with AWS marketing and sales teams. They always do not have time for you, you should grab their attention! Remember this is not a one-way relationship. Show them what benefits you can offer for the shared customers!

Partnering with AWS may look complicated or pretty simple. One way or the other, it is always nice to take advice from someone who walked down the road before.