How to GTM with the AWS Global Startup Program

awesome. hey guys. uh welcome to session pe x 119. my name is serge shevchenko.

um i am a pdm manager as part of the a ds global start up program as a start up.

have you ever wondered how do i truly go to market with aws? aws being such a large organization and many start ups, whether early stage midst stage comparing sort of the go to market values there, there's a big difference there.

and so what i really want to talk to you all about today is um a framework that i and my team have used over the last 56 years that successfully builds and prepares you to go to market with aws as mentioned earlier.

um i'm a pdm manager. i've been doing this for about 6.5, excuse me, 5.5 years, almost six years. i've been lucky enough to work with a variety of start ups, many of which have had unicorn defining rounds and have attributed a lot of their success to their partnership with aws.

my team today covers a variety of technologies all across the life cycle of the start up generative a i dev ops, data and analytics, storage, networking, et cetera.

so today, we'll start by just going through high level building the foundation of a successful go to market plan and a, and a tactical template on how you can walk away with a playbook and put it into practice tomorrow.

so we'll start with what is the aw s global start up program from a high level, what programs are required to make and build an effective go to market plan with aws as a start up and then we'll go through this tactical go to market framework by working backwards from desired outcomes and structuring this joint, go to market plan.

and what does each step through the lead development funnel look like and how can we as aws help you support and optimize your go to market strategy.

the a ds global start up program is an invite only go to market program supporting mid to late, mid, early to mid stage start ups who have achieved product market fit and have raised institutional funding.

um our program offers start ups a unique variety of resources, partner, development managers, funding, accelerated program access, et cetera.

um and often times, um the combination of the resources can really create for an efficient partnership strategy with aws.

so let's get started before we dive into structuring a go to market plan. i want, i want to set the stage and talk about what the foundational programs are required to really get started.

i do want to preface this with this process here should not take you more than 90 days. if it's taking you more than 90 days, there needs to be high level executive conversations across the board from product marketing and revenue to identify what blockers and pain points you have.

so to leverage the go to market motion again, some of the critical programs that are required are uh the partner path which when you register for the partner program, you'll go through and follow the process. it's pretty straightforward.

you want to complete your foundational technical review, you'll want to be listed on the marketplace part of iv accelerate and then apply for the aws uh global start up program. you can apply directly online or work with your existing ad bs account manager to get in touch with the a ds gold to start up partner program team.

so, again, this is just to lay the foundation and prepare to build a successful go to market strategy with aws.

ok. all right. so let's dive in.

so to ensure a successful go to market motion with the global start up program, it's critical for start ups to begin with identifying your core strengths. what are you really good at and what, what are your core functionality?

and so one of the things that we've realized over the years is many start ups say that they're good at doing a lot of different things. there's so many different features, there's so much different functionality. and as we're working with hundreds of start ups, it's often very difficult for them to differentiate before we start working together.

so the first thing we like to do is let's identify those core strengths. and there's a couple of different ways that we can do that.

um whether it's building a customer survey that asks a to bs customers, why are they purchasing, why are they happy with your solution? and what features and functionality can we eliminate from the, the public, um your public website or any other content because it can create confusion.

um secondly, determine how your solution enhances aws products and services. which ad bs products and services does your product enable adoption of? perhaps it's even create or optimize or run ad bs products and services more efficiently. that's ok.

what we need to figure out is how do you impact and affect our customers, growth, consumption and optimization of our services?

and after we do this, what that does is it prepares us to go to market with a very isolated message. ideally, we want to get to the point where if you get into an elevator with an a to bs seller, you can tell them what you do for their customer. within within 30 seconds.

there are two other audiences that you want to keep in mind along with an a w bs seller. there's the aws technical field community and then your end customer.

and as we identify the core strengths of your product, how they complement a to bs products and services. then we're ready to build what's called a field ready kit.

how many of you guys know what a field ready kit is? raise your hand? cool. awesome. so we got a couple here.

so a field ready kit is meant to be a um a repeatable document that aws uh sellers aws field teams are very familiar with that. talk about partner solutions on aws throughout the process of a field ready kit. and you can just simply google this or find it in the content hub in the partner portal.

um the field ready kit uh is both a sales and a solution brief. and again, it describes both high level and in detail what your solution is, how it complements a to bs products and services and how to get started.

so we'll want to do that before we even think about building a go to market plan.

so in the process of determining higher solution enhances a to bs services. 111 topic i forgot to mention was um we can run what's called a technical discovery form.

so if you don't know what that is, ask your partner team and in that process, we can identify which a to bs service teams should we collaborate with.

and in that process, as we talk to a to bs service teams asking those service teams, which functionality should you be considering and building for our shared customers.

i want to show you an example of a partner that we've worked with very successfully over the last couple of years.

a berkner, the ceo of amigo said the ads partner team helped us across the ads service team leading us to becoming a design partner for relevant service launches. this was priceless for us.

the deep technical partnership by the ads partner team allowed us to not only be exposed to upcoming features but also run joint engineering collaboration to the tune of the features which best serve our shared customers.

amigo actually builds what what are called ad bs workshops really well and i'll, i'll allude to those in a later slide.

so let's get started with structuring a go to market calendar because this is a go to market session. we're going to use revenue as the variable. here, there are a couple of different ways where you can um label a successful partnership, whether it's design wins um or it could be events like re invent, but let's talk about revenue.

so what i like to talk to my team about is when we start building a go to market plan, let's start with revenue. what is our shared revenue goal for the year?

so figure out that number by having conversations with your revenue team with your sales organization. and as you identify that target revenue divided by the average deal size.

so in this example here, if you, if your average your a cd is at $50,000 so we should expect about 100 deals together, let's say in this calendar year to hit our joint target revenue number.

now, if we have a goal of 100 deals and your conversion ratio is at 10% then you'll want to see roughly 1000 sales qualified leads in the in the pipeline together with aws. and if you take it a step further, of course, it will be 10,000 at a 10% conversion ratio.

so you could take this calculator and plug in your conversion ratios between mql and sqo to help you determine what the target revenue number is.

so as you have that revenue number, the the number of sales qualified leads, marketing qualified leads.

um i want to show you a template that you can reuse that we have reused successfully over the years with our partners.

um when populating the editorial calendar, take the entire fel into account, build out the funnel activity from january to december and make sure you add due dates, assign owners across the business and make sure that marketing and sales are on board with a variety of activities that you are planning to build in order to get to that shared revenue number that we alluded to in the previous slide.

so let's dive into some of these sections.

so the first section in order to develop joint marketing qualified leads with your aws partner team. specifically as a start up, there are a couple of different things we can do together in order to develop these leads.

so starting with the content, some examples of content that we can build together are things like joint webinars, blog posts, um case studies, white papers, et cetera.

i often ask myself and my partners, what are we missing to really go tell the story together? that should be our starting point.

oftentimes if we don't have a better together story in the public view, then let's start with a webinar. let's start with a case study, something that goes into the detail with a shared customer that we can bring on stage to talk about the strengths of the solution on aws. ok?

if you, if you as a start up, don't have the resources or the manpower to go and build some of this content, we actually have a lot of agencies that we work with to help you execute some of this content. and by the way, you can use your marketing qualified, excuse me, marketing development funds to go and pay for some of this activity.

we're often at a 1 to 1 ratio. so for every dollar you put into the event or activity will match with a dollar.

the second, the second piece of content that we often encourage our partners to start building together our events. so think of things like re invent ad summits, reinforce if you're a security partner, rears, et cetera.

um so as you captured, let's say, those 10,000 marketing qualified leads and you want to convert them to sales qualified leads. the next step is we need to determine what is your target audience.

so today, as we go to market with our partners, um there are two buyers that we share with a lot of these start ups and it starts with an enterprise buyer and a builder audience. so think of the developer.

so as we let's say, capture this, these 10,000 marketing qualified leads, you might ask yourself, how is a to bs actually gonna help me convert some of these leads into paying customers before they convert into paying customers. let's first convert them into sales qualified leads.

so i'm gonna dive into these two different tracks here and by the way, it doesn't have to be exclusive, oftentimes it's both.

so when you engage the the builder audience, a really good place to start is who at aws speaks the language of your solution. you want to think about um specifically developer or builder roles.

so think um sres engineers, p sas, technical account managers, um data analysts, et cetera and identify um which of these individuals are currently exposed to your solution, whether that's existing shared customers, perhaps they're even they're contributing to your open source projects, connect with them, invite them to your discord your reddit, your slack channels, connect with them on linkedin, get them, get involved with these a to bs personas as we're targeting this builder audience that perhaps is in your marketing qualified leads list as well.

one of the areas that has been shown to be very productive and valuable for our start ups, specifically start ups that have open source communities. communities are workshops.

so think ad bs dev days, immersion days, game days, ad bs jams, i think the jam lounge is just around the corner here.

um but these have been proven to be a lot more effective than webinars. simply because you're engaging an audience, they're building, they're immersed and they're engaged. and that's why we like to consider workshop as being a lot more effective and successful than webinars and some of the higher level content.

so let's talk about a partner ploy who has been doing this very well.

isaac from palu talked about how workshops help engineers and aws dev professionals get hands on experience using the latest a ds technologies with plume.

joint workshops with the ads global starter program have been indispensable, indispensable for on boarding new users and helping practitioners succeed both with plume and aws yielding significantly faster conversions than other channels.

we have had, we have had start ups that have had customers who have actually skipped the proof of concept stage simply because the workshops help the audience in that marketing qualified leads bucket, fully understand if the solution makes a fit for their use case.

and in the process of the workshop, we want to tell the story of your solution on top of aws and helping the customer or the developer or the builder here realize the value of our better together story.

so let's talk about selling to an executive audience. obviously, some of the worlds that we sell together are um folks like covp of engineering cto and other it leaders for this audience, targeting specific verticals is often more productive than casting a very wide net.

the abi global start up program has a lot of experience in targeting specific verticals based on your existing pipeline, let's say in that market and qualified leads bucket um or target customers based on a use case that you're developing as we're targeting these verticals, we highly recommend that we, we do that in the form of um webinars panels and inviting relevant um vertical customers to speak to the solution.

for instance, we had a large oil and gas customer that our partner brought on stage and actually brought in an ad bs oil and gas leader and and the partner worked with the ad bs start up uh the ad bs global start up program to actually go out and invite all of the other oil and gas customers that could benefit from a solution um like the one that we were presenting.

so as we have now went from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads for a particular audience, whether it's builder or uh enterprise buyer, how can a to bs actually help you convert some of these leads?

so we've got a variety of different programs and we have a variety of different resources that can help you do that.

so with the pipeline of sales qualified leads, some of the programs that are available to help accelerate and catalyze these opportunities include aws customer engagement tool where you register the deals in order to connect with the a bs seller audience and the aw s global start up partner team can actually help you engage in more meaningful ways i accelerate, which helps provide cash incentives for aws seller sellers on positioning your solution to their end customer.

and this is where the field ready kit that we alluded to earlier comes into play. now you have a customer that we obtain together that an ad bs seller has, has documented um has a document that they can reference to then go and position your solution to that end customer. and by the way, they're receiving a cash incentive for doing.

so, the ad bs marketplace also acts as a um as a procurement vehicle that can significantly reduce sale cycles but also create efficiency around standardizing contracts like eula's as well as providing governance and risk assessments.

i want to share a quick quote from iron kano, who's the ceo of marche and they are part of the global start up program, ian said that the a ds global start up program has enabled our team to effectively go to market with aws.

it's helped us grow our a ds attached opportunities by over 150% in that specific quarter. guys, since they joined the program through identifying new coastal opportunities, aligning strategic introductions, exploring custom co marketing opportunities and advocating on their behalf through aws.

i know that was a lot of information but feel free to connect with me afterwards. if you want to learn more about how to become a partner, please scan the qr code on the left side.

if you want to learn more about the ads global start up program, you can scan the qr code on the right side and if you want to connect afterwards, feel free to connect with me there as well as sending me an email.

um so that's it. thank you guys.