Accelerate wins with co-sell in AWS Partner Central

Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us today afternoon. Hope you all are having a wonderful experience this week, exciting launches, learning and innovations. Well, we will keep the momentum going. We have exciting things lined up to share with you all that will help you accelerate the growth with AWS.

Before I start, can I have a quick show of hands to know how many of you are already AWS partners? Nice. And how many of you have used AWS Partner Central or Marketplace recently? Great. We are good mix of crowd some of the prospect AWS partners and we will be going a little deep into our co-selling with AWS, but we will talk in terms that allow our prospect AWS partners to also follow through and those who are already familiar with our co-selling program and Partner Central and Marketplace. If you have any deeper questions, we can take them too.

So let's know understand why we are here, why we are talking about co-selling and why it is important to accelerate that growth. You heard Ruba and Adam speaking yesterday, how partners are important for AWS growth and how it is a better together story for all of us. As per statistics, IT technology and services delivered through partners stand at 70% for this year. That's a route our customers are taking and as you go and as you build your capabilities with AWS that of hundreds of billions of worth of opportunity for next three years.

And here at AWS, we believe our AWS partners at inflection point to unlock greater scale and agility to meet tomorrow's challenges. And partners who will be ready with their people program and processes will able to overcome those challenges and realize the true potential of this opportunity and some of our partners are already doing it.

Example, is Mile Shark who has developed a deeper collaboration mechanism with AWS leveraging our ACE co-selling program Palo Alto Network who is adding millions of dollars of worth of sales pipeline and closing them much faster by building trust and collaboration across the two sales team leveraging AWS Marketplace.

However, today we will not talk about people program and processes. We will talk about technology and how technology should be leveraged as a strategic lever to overcome these challenges and enable to the path of the growth.

Myself. I'm a product lead in AWS Partner, Engineering and my colleague, Adelaide from AWS Marketplace will walk you through some of the latest capabilities that we have launched that allows you to center on the path of the growth. We also have Higher from Snowflake sharing how Snowflake has embraced the technology to scale their sales operation for future growth. And we will have some time for Q and A in the end to take some of your questions.

So let's first set the context about the partner journey and co-selling how they are related. And these two go hand in hand and also understand about the players that are involved in the co-selling. What are their needs and challenges that we need to overcome.

It always start with and customer, a customer who is having a specific problem. For example, a customer looking to modernize their sales application or a customer looking to professional services to migrate or manage their workload on AWS coming straight to the co-selling.

We have AWS sales and partner sales as an evangelist of their solution who needs to come together to solve that customer problem. However, those two sales team members coming together is not easy. It's often about timing, prioritization and visibility of real time information that act has a friction. It is this fiction and the delay in collaboration that we want to address for our partners working backward from our partners and the data that we have observed.

We, we understand how with the partner journey, there are certain evolving patterns that are well established as you evolve from one scale to another partners, irrespective of whether they are technology partners or consulting partners have shared the challenge of co managing the sales pipeline how it is burdensome for the sales team to systematically manage the sales pipeline across the systems. Lack of automation, lack of insights that provides information about the sales and marketing opportunities that impacts the growth and maintaining that growth trajectory on consistent basis.

Can I again a quick show of hands, how many of you resonate with at least one of these challenges? And I've seen that pattern in your business. I do see a few hands expected. So that's what our data also suggest. And partners and through a data, we have shared these challenges are being acknowledged or being faced as partners scale from along their journey.

So how do we solve for that? We need to look at this problem with the holistic view of partner journey. As I mentioned about those coastal actors which I spend across two different organization sits across system boundaries. They need to be integrated together. They need to operate as one team to overcome the challenges and realize the outcome of the co-selling. And this partner journey includes on boarding enablement engagement and then setting them on the growth trajectory and to excel the art of co-selling. You need to lay down the foundation at each part of this journey. And that is exactly what we are doing through technology and transformation.

We are creating a flywheel impact of this partner journey that is fast and intuitive, personalized and self guided. It is enabled to automation and it also integrates a contextual data that generate insights and help you measure while for this session, we will focus on the co-selling, which is primarily the engagement. But I highly emphasize for you to view your co outcomes through the lens of this partner journey. Often your coal outcomes are being driven from the one of the other three pillars talking about specifically on co-selling.

There are specific elements that we have learned from our partners and what we want to improve that help accelerate the co-selling element of your partner journey. It starts again with the customer where we want to help you on knowing your customer faster, either directly or through AWS sales, optimize your discovery, effective management of your sales pipeline across the sales team, efficient collaboration that can be measured in a unified way. These are the elements that we need to enable across our different partners and across the channel to help set the growth trajectory for our co-selling.

So we understood the why we, we know what we are trying to enable. But how do we do that? That's where the AWS Partner Central comes in. Those of you who may not be aware as I saw the hands, some of you are prospect, AWS partners. AWS Partner Central is the gateway for you to embark with the journey on AWS partner AWS Partner Central is a hub of accelerators that facilitates engagement for more than 130,000 AWS partners supporting 2 million registered users, managing, helping, managing our partners support hundreds and thousands of opportunities and also providing them incentives worth more than $1 billion through different programs.

And we are continuously investing in transforming the AWS Partner Central experience for its scale and automation and building new capabilities to provide our partners with a world class digital experience to drive successful customer engagement. Just to talk about the co-selling, we enabled our C2C integration using a Partner CIM connector for Salesforce. Earlier this year. In second quarter, we enhanced the ACE pipeline management user experience with advanced search capabilities which is faster and simple to use to manage tens and hundreds of opportunities.

We also improve our bulk import and update features in Q3 that provides you with the in line editing and pre validation views and now to manage our partners different needs for better visibility, prioritization and optimize resource assignment.

I am excited to share the new postal experience that is driven through differentiated deal flow. This is a new way for you to manage your sales pipeline through a framework. It allows our partners the flexibility to ask support where they need when they need it and also AWS sales team to prioritize the support for you.

So what this is how it is different and how it is differentiated as partners scale through AWS from tens to hundreds and thousands of opportunities. They change their needs varies. It varies from partner to partner. It varies by customers for a given partner. It varies by deal, by deal and to manage that information and manage that insights. We needed a different workflow that moves away from one size fits all far too long.

We have been relying on one size, fit for fit all, but now we are moving to an experience that varies by your needs. It varies based on the coastal engagement through the AWS sales or it could be for the visibility only where you can share the sales pipeline for visibility while ensuring that you get the support when you need it without risking the benefits that you can realize.

It also varies by deal type. For example, net new customer engagement that requires different level of support eligible for different benefits and incentives compared to the renewals and expansion of an existing contract. Now you can manage both of them with a differentiated flow. The new flow is also intuitive for public sector opportunities where you can classify the national security deals to safeguard the sensitive customer information throughout the sales life cycle in all together, this allows you to optimize your resources to win more, win faster. And at the same time, we utilize the resource more optimally and that's not all along with this capability.

We are also excited to introduce a new way of solution tagging. Remember the two sales people as an evangelist of their own sales solution solution tagging brings forward that sales solution that two evangelists have at the forefront. It provides better visibility and effective collaboration, attribution of solution to your deals helps in multiple ways. Also the solution include the AWS marketplace listing that you have and also the AWS services that may be a component for you to solve that particular customer problem. It provides the insight as how you are solving a problem and also provide you the support much faster. As now we can generate more insights knowing the solution and the right context of the problem.

Both for new and existing partners. I highly recommend to define your partner journey that leads with solution.

It is a proven data point that allows for optimum discovery. It also allows our partner sales processes to be more aligned across the organization with AWS being each of them operating individually. And for the first time, it also allows to put partner offering at par with the AWS offering, providing more insights and more visibility as putting together the right context to the problem. Prioritizing the resources, you win more, you win faster.

It also brings up another challenge. When you win more, you win faster. There is a challenge of scale. Often partners relies on new challenges when they scale from 10 to hundreds and then move on to thousands of opportunities.

Here. I would like to emphasize to consider CI/CD integration as early part of your journey. CI/CD integration with its tools and features allows us to meet you where you are as, as your partner sales team operates out of your own ecosystem. CI/CD integration allows to provide the sales motions with AWS Partner Central within your own tech stack.

Some of the benefits that our partners have leveraged upfront to the CI/CD integration is immediately reducing the redundant data entry. It also provides the real time visibility to the sales pipeline across the sales team and also contextualize the data with the metadata that resides on your own system to help you generate the better insights that is more aligned to the people and processes of your organization. And foremost, it provides you the scale at global level. As you scale across the division, expand your horizon, the challenges are different CI/CD integration allow you to keep those challenges aside and scale with your people and processes without thinking about new investment or focusing on the expensive change management process and drive the selling motion of AWS that you may have driven to the AWS Partner Central through your own system.

I can talk about the benefits opportunities it bring us for each of these elements and the learnings that we have gained. But why don't we hear one such story? Firsthand. I have here from Snowflake who have developed and integrated this solution for their sales operations team. Let's hear from him.

Welcome. Thank you so much for having me here. Hey everyone myself. I'm Harar. I manage the GTM technical team at Snowflake. So the use case that I'm gonna talk about today is something that is very close to me coming from an arctic background. As some of you may know, Snowflake product runs on AWS for the most part. And co selling is really a big deal for our sales team because it opens up a lot of opportunity for us to win these deals faster.

So um let me go to the next slide. All right. So like late last year, the sales ops team came to my team with this problem statement, they were like roughly processing 200 deal registrations from the partner central. And uh they were processing these deal rests manually and actually like manually is the keyword here, which I'll come back just in a bit. And um they are also like reaching out to our admin team each time they do a data correction error. So our admin team has to work with them to, to, to kind of fix these deals and this volume is only going to get bigger as we continue to have the strategic partnership with AWS.

So the problem at hand for me is how do I solve it at scale? And also how do I standard standardize the solution? And also how do I make sure I can apply the solution to other areas as well? But like before i, i go to the solution here is the high level view of what we were doing at that time.

So in the center, the Snowflake regional cloud lead is the person who logs in into our CRM system every single day. And they try to find out the deal registrations that were modified or like created in that one day and they take this data out and then they log into the partner portal, they input the data there and also like, you know, in case if there is any new deals for us to look into, they copy the data over back into rcrm. And after they copy the data into r crm, they use a scoring system to kind of understand what deals to push through the pipeline and how like where we can move fast in terms of winning these deals.

And in terms of the metrics, these were the numbers we tracked at the time. So we had roughly, you know, this person, regional cloud lead doing 1600 manual updates in our CRM system. And that accounted to roughly 120 hours of that person's time spending doing this manual work, either in our CRM system or in or in the partner. And each time there is an issue that they need to correct. As you guys know all the data that we have on the deals and the opportunities is controlled by the socks. So we have to engage with the admin team who can make these corrections and that is like roughly around 100 hours of admin time that we were spending to fix these problems.

So collectively, we were spending at least one person full time work to solve for this. And um when we wanted to solve this problem, we explored like several options within Snowflake, things like we wanted to do. Some RPR P stands for the robotic process automation where we can use tools like UI path or excel and e to solve for this. But we also wanted to hear from our partner team to kind of understand what they they recommended. And in the hindsight, reaching out to Pray and Adelaide's team is probably the best decision we made because they were already thinking about this problem and they had the CRM connector already in the works.

So the moment we heard about it, I really like jumped on to it and we signed up for being the private preview customer for this feature and like fast forward, this is our solution where the the biggest difference between the previous slide and this slide is we completely removed the human control from the entire process.

So now our CRM is directly talking to the Partner Central and getting the data seamlessly back into our system. And whatever hours we saved, either the ops hours or the admin hours, we repurpose the time into like something that is more meaningful and useful, which is either talking to our customers or like selling faster.

Um and this solution, like I said, it is scalable because now we are able to process around like 50% more records than what we were processing without even like spending like likes doing the manual data entry. And this is standardized. Most importantly because we get the data into our CRM system and we put this data through our processes on like how we, how we want to manage the pipeline forecasting and like whatnot. And it is simple uh because to get the solution into our CRM, all it took for us was like go to the App Exchange, uh find the package, uh click on a button and like get the uh software into our CRM system.

So, um and these are our metrics that we tracked most recently. So fast forward today, we are able to process roughly 300 inbound deal restorations and 600 outbound deal registrations, which is 50% more than what we were doing back then. And most importantly, we didn't have to hire one more person to do this manual work.

So with that, I'll, I'll hand it back to Pray and I can't wait to see what these guys are gonna build in the coming quarters and make use of it. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing your insights and aren't those numbers impressive that 50% more volume with less of investment? And I understand what questions you might be having like how can you realize a similar benefit for your organization? And for that, I want to list on few options that you have to embark on this CI/CD integration journey. And again, start this journey sooner rather than wait for when the scale hit. And you are scrambling for the effort because it takes time to set up the integration.

The options that you have are plenty. If you are on AWS Salesforce, you can use the IWS Salesforce CRM connector like B and Snowflake used the new CI/CD connector recently launched yesterday announced by Uber is also now integrated and supported for the new capabilities that we just launched. And I talked about here. It also have add on features like single click mapping and it also allows you to integrate with Marketplace with a single point solution rather than developing multiple solutions for each of those motions.

If this is not your solution, we also have high quality CI/CD integration solutions that comes with value added services from our partners like Wean Tackle and Labor Firm Ibex Lab. These are solutions that you can use if they are still you have additional customer custom needs for for information.

We can we are also taking an API first approach on AWS Partner Central. We are evolving that approach and if you have those custom needs and you want to learn more, we are here and we can talk about it that so we talked about differentiated deal flow that optimize your resources that leading with solution, that optimize your discovery to help you win more and win faster. And, and then increasing the efficiency by scaling through CI/CD integration.

But as you win more and win faster, you also need to measure your wins or losses to know where you are going. And bringing this all together in a consumable way is important. And for that, our latest capability of AWS Partner Central Partner Analytics goes a long way.

It provides you the trends that matters to you most it could be win rate, it could be the volume of the sales deal, the value of the sales day and also your investments and the marketing return on investment. It provides both your ACE sales and opportunities data, the investments, the campaign information as well as your views, views from your Marketplace revenue all conveniently located at one location within AWS Partner Central with single pane of glass view.

You can view your sales pipeline progression, the health and take specific actions to make your deal progression go faster and measure your trends on continuous basis that allows you to remain on that gross trajectory. These unmetric trends is something that I highly emphasize again to understand and also enable in your sales organization because these are the exact metrics that helped the discovery and also support the systematic recommendation of your solution and you as a partner to thousands of our AWS sales.

And that's not the only thing through these metrics and tens, we also generate a lot of insights and recommendations. And for the first time now, we are now also introducing the AWS Marketplace engagement score for our AWS Marketplace sellers.

The score helps you prioritize your resources to help you on the deals that you are most likely to win and win them faster. It also generates the insights that give you a prescriptive recommendation to make your sales pipeline progress and also always in fresh so that you can get the right support and the right benefit at the right time. These are the first time insights that we are sharing with our partners and this is not all we are continuously evolving these recommendations and we will continue to provide more insights to help you have a greater value, increase profitability and get more return on investment from all the motions that you have across aws.

As I talked about aws marketplace, which is a proven route to market to achieve a 10 scale. Now, I would like to invite Adelaide to talk more about aws marketplace and inform you about what are the latest capabilities that you can leverage to drive that journey.

Ok. Thank you for it. Yeah. So prairie, you've shared a lot about about our customer journey and the improvements we've made or we've invested in this year to be able to, to engage better with our partners and improve the coastal journey for our partners. Usually the coa process, the expected outcome is to drive a lot of opportunities and lead generations. A lot of our partners ask us what happens after we have a, we have opportunities. Typically, we would like to talk about how to use marketplace to leverage those opportunities to become actual transactions.

So i noticed that a few people raised their hands earlier when uh we asked, have you ever worked with marketplace? So i'll spend 11 or two slides talking about exactly what marketplaces and how it benefits our partners today.

So aws marketplace historically has been the primary place where aws, millions of aws customers find, find software solutions or that product subscribe to them easily and then govern those solutions for their for their enterprise business solution partners is svs and data providers use marketplace to innovate very quickly because it provides them the flexibility to be able to, to, to be, to be able to set up their product as container products. Amazon machine images or even software as a service marketplace allows you to start get started with the cloud very quickly.

One of the benefits of working with marketplaces, we provide out of the bus demand generation tools for you with self-service packages, you can be able to execute, execute demand, demand generation activities and this will be exposed to millions and millions of aws customers and marketplace who handles and provides out all of this out of the box for you.

Finally where marketplace shines the most is really to simplify the procurement process and the journey for procurement. What does that mean? Marketplace manages the of your product or transactions? We manage the billing to the customer. We manage the invoicing processes and we even manage the collections with buyers, buyers for you. So you do not have to go and worry about whether a buyer has subscribed, whether they're gonna pay you or not. We, we do all of that for you to give you the space in the room to be able to focus on what you do best, which is build your product to, to, to, to, to be able to solve your customer problems.

So how do our customers choose marketplace today or how do they actually engage or procure in marketplace today? There are three ways that our customers primarily procure through the marketplace and i'll illustrate the first one with an example.

So you have an it developer who probably works for a start up company and they're looking for ac rm solution, maybe it's snowflake. So they go on to a aws marketplace and they, they have, they can find thousands and thousands of softwares listed by isvs like yourself. They can explore that, find the value of them. And right, right from there, they can find which purchasing option that they want for, subscribe to that. And what marketplace will do for you is we will notify you and give you all the event management tools to make that software quickly available for the it developer to, to consume. And this is the the organic way that buyers or start ups find marketplace.

The other way that people find marketplace is really through where you as a seller, you can engage with your buyer, you negotiate custom terms and then you agree to certain specific legal terms and con uh terms and conditions. And what happens in that scenario is you have all the tools and we build all the tools to enable you to, to create a customized offering with custom payment terms, custom duration terms, contract terms, and flexible payment schedule so that you can actually customize an offer and a deal to meet your customer specific need.

The final, the final way that customers engage with marketplace is really an extension of the seller private offer motion, which is the customized motion. It is where we, we provide an extra person within the the sales route to market. So for example, you an iv based out of the us and you want to expand your, your bill, your, your your engagement to different regions where you don't have a sales presence. You can, you can leverage marketplace to authorize a channel partner who is based in that region and that partner is gonna act on your behalf. You also enjoy all the different terms and conditions and the different tooling that we have available for you if you were supposed to engage directly with marketplace.

So with these three primary ways of engaging with marketplace, we've, we've seen that a lot of our customers, especially partners find that the sale cycle gets reduced really, really fast and they can focus on what matters with them, which is developing and engaging relationships with their customers versus thinking about how to get started with cloud building in the in the cloud and transacting in the cloud.

So prairie talked a lot about the engagement process to build opportunities or generate opportunities, which is typically the quote, the lead to quote processes. And um marketplace really focuses on the quote to cash process. And historically, historically, what our sellers have told us is because these two processes were independent. They would have to invest in driving customer engagement with our partner central tooling and then have to build a completely different team around, around the skills when it comes to marketplace.

So for example, you have a, a partner sales alliance who is whose day to day activity involves working with the ideal stakeholders to be able to identify opportunities, create leads and then put them in the crm tools. It could be their own internal crm tools or it could be one of the aws provided ones and either they would have to repeat or duplicate those actions within the aws marketplace tooling, or there will be a completely different team who will be engaging with marketplace.

So what happens in that scenario is you find yourself with two different teams who are supposed to collaborate to ensure a deal closure. However, they're not talking to each other. So what we have started doing and pray sort of all to some of them is to start integrating these two processes and we are starting with private offers because the private offer motion really requires you to engage with your customer validate the business opportunity, negotiate the terms of the contract, which all aligns with the engagement process that pru walked us through earlier.

So what we are announcing or what we recently launched is really an opportunity or the ability for you to be able to map your private offices or your channel partner, private office with your opportunities that you've created in a and you can do this through all the channels or all the means that prairie talked about. So you can do this either through the experience or through your integration and crm connectors and the outcomes that we expect is to reduce the sale cycle.

So you can you can arrive at a sale cycle, uh deal closure faster and also to get better insights. So prairie talked about how when you link your your private offices, you can actually be able to get insight or a marketplace called right within your ace to you can only get that benefit. If you take, if you perform this linking, when you, when you create your opportunities within a one of the other benefit is we will provide real near real time event tracking.

So for example, an opportunity that has been linked to a marketplace private offer once that offer is subscribed to, because usually some of those offers don't get accepted in real time. You don't need your sales. Your alliance does not need to log back into marketplace or call a deal desk or ops or do any other thing to get notified that the that the private offer has been, has been closed right from, they would know that the opportunity or the deal has been won. And in, in the future, we will start automating some of these event actions and this tracking capa capabilities.

Finally, uh we all know the reason why we, we engage with aws. Uh it's because of incentives. So uh marketplace, marketplace of a lot of our marketplace, transactions are eligible for ince in incentives with aws. So once you have some of these opportunities mapped with your marketplace, private offers, you can actually get incentivized fast and get paid faster for your deals that you've collaborated with aws on.

So these are the primary benefits that we, we want to start unlocking once we integrate marketplace offers with, with the a and engagement processes. So i just wanted to wrap up all the conversation that we've had today by just doing a quick recap of the, the partner journey prairie talked about a couple of new enhancements in the engagement process.

So new features like solution tagging and prescriptive insight to be to help you to help you grow and optimize your cos selling process. What i wanted to say is, and as uh as everybody has stressed, it's an end to end process and we've made enhancement across board and, and not just in the growth and engagement process.

So please be sure to, to, to leverage all the enhancement because unless you are set up foundation in all of the three, all the other three pillars, you wouldn't get the real benefits from the fourth, which is the engagement process.

So a few call to actions and these are some learnings that we've learned by observing some of our partners. The, the first thing i wanted to wrap up with is aws is peculiar and our sales process is also peculiar. However, we are also very flexible. So please do work with your team to engage with us to, to, to build the sales and cos selling experience. That is, that is unique for your team.

I also want to encourage you all to start leveraging aws marketplace as a default transaction route. A lot of the partners that have gone, gone this route have found marketplace to be a strategic sales channel uh to be able to quickly migrate their existing customers to cloud or even get or even get a hold of new customers. So i would really encourage you to start looking into marketplace. If not already, i would also like you to uh aggressively track your performance and track all the, the, the the metrics that you want to get out of your partnership with, with uh aws and uh and uh marketplace.

Finally, you should drive skill through integrations and specifically programmatic integrations. Both marketplace and partner central have invested and continue to invest a lot into the uh the scalability and growth of our of our engagement. So we've introduced a ton of api s which i would encourage you to look, look, look for more details around to be able to integrate and skill your engagement with us.

So that is all that i have today. But if you call to action first, if you already have partner development managers, please do engage with them and have them reach, reach, reach out and show you all the new features that we continue to launch to enhance your co selling process. Also, you should, you can simply log into aws marketplace or partner central to learn more about everything that we discussed today.

Thank you all for spending the time with us and uh be sure to fill the survey for feedback. And uh if you do have questions, we will be taking questions at the end of the session right in the corner there. So thank you. That's it for me.