Co-selling with AWS and the APN Customer Engagements (ACE) program

Good morning, everyone. If you're here today for this session, then you are one of our esteemed partners. You could be a new partner or you could be a tenured partner, but you're super interested in ACE because that's what starts off your sales cycle with AWS Sales and helps you grow your revenue.

So today we have a full agenda. We'll start with why co-sell next? We'll move over to our improved ACE co-sell experience and some key changes we've launched in November. Why we should lead with offerings and our attempts at integrating with Marketplace and then we'll open up for a brief Q&A.

So why is co-sell? As a partner in the APN network, you have the ability to start submitting opportunities to AWS immediately that does two things. One, it helps you to bring focus to our AWS sales teams as to what solutions you have there to solve problems for our customers and gain visibility with them. And that allows them to introduce you to new customers who are looking actively to partner with people much like yourself who have some expertise in certain use cases and specific workloads.

Secondly, you can use ACE to enrich your existing customer relationships, the more insights you share with the AWS sales teams via ACE that helps you to sit down and understand the breadth of that customer account, the needs of the customer and to craft a joint value proposition between AWS and you the partner to go and solve problems for our customers.

And then third, but not the least is the benefits. As you start using ACE and submit opportunities, it opens up benefits available to you through our partner programs incentives and that could be things like discounts, training credits and other funding options.

So I want to share experiences from one of our key partners, Octa who has really focused down on doubling down on ACE and collaborating with AWS. And one of their observations is as they got very critical on using ACE effectively, they were able to assemble the right resources that were needed. Now that could be account executives. It could be solution architects or engineers but bring the right mix of a team needed to go to a customer jointly and make that deal happen.

Additionally, that has opened up avenues for them to have joint road maps with us where they can innovate together and really build solutions that to customer problems. They are seeing today with AWS. This is one of the biggest value proposition of ACE and why it is important to use ACE and build that connectivity with AWS.

So why are we innovating, what are things that we're responding to. So we've spent a lot of time interviewing partners through round tables, one on one sessions, surveys. And there are three themes that we see emerging from partners. Regardless of whether you're an ISV, you're a system integrator, whether you're on the software path or the services path, depending on how you go to market.

The first, you want faster connection with AWS sales. Because when you're pursuing a deal with a customer speed matters.

Secondly, you're looking for discoverability with AWS customers in an effective way so that you can scale your business with us.

And third, you're looking for insights on how you grow and where you're doing well and what's working.

So keeping those things in mind, we've really worked and doubled down this past year to improve the overall ACE experience.

So what have we done? We've moved away from one size fits all. What do I mean by that? We've really given you the ability to decide at the time of sharing opportunities, what you want to do with us.

We have feedback from partners that they want to co-sell with AWS, but they are also partners who don't need to co-sell with AWS. They want to submit opportunities because they want to get the benefits of the partner network, but they want to manage their own opportunities.

So, in doing so, we've created a for visibility only workflow that allows you to continue to engage with us, build credibility with AWS, gain benefits through the partner program, but manage all those opportunities yourself.

And then when you do really need to go sell with the sales team, you can tell us what you want to do. Deal support architectural reviews or meet with them on a pricing assistance or a combination of all of that that will help you prioritize which deals you want to work with AWS sales and we'll get focus from the sales teams on those co-sell deals.

They still see everything you're sending it in terms of for visibility only so that they have a full understanding of the reach of your partnership into their customer accounts. But they're gonna start prioritizing where you're telling them you want to co-sell and in the end you're really in the driver seat and co-sell.

So the second thing that we're doing is that there was an ambiguity in the space. And what, what can I submit? Are we expecting only net new business? What about renewals? What happens when I resell?

So we've made it very easy at the opportunity submission level for you to tell us this is net new, this is a renewal or we're looking to do an expansion here and you can expect the same back from our AWS sales teams when you get an AWS originated opportunity. That level of clarity on the opportunity submission really helps both AWS and partner when you're co-selling to really decide on how you want to approach the customer and what's the best way forward.

If you're in the public sector space, there are two key changes that you'll observe in a one is if you are working with national security customers, you are going to have to tell us up front about it and that guarantees you certain level of sensitive data protection.

The second thing which is new is if you're looking for support at the proposal stage for public sector or customers, you can now request that through the co-sell options. It's a specific check box that you can use to say I'm looking for deals, the RFP support.

In addition to that, you will see that the form itself has been digitized to a large extent, it's easy to use. It's quick, we've reduced the time that it takes for you to submit the opportunity. So we're really looking for you to move through this motion quickly so you can really get down to the business of selling. That's where we want the focus to be next.

We want to lead with offerings. So if you've spent time here to re invent this week and you've been listening to some of the keynotes, you've been listening to some of our leaders. There's one thing that has been coming out through strongly, which is we want to double down on customers and focus on the business outcomes that the customers are driving.

So with that, we want to start focusing on the offerings that you have, the solutions that you have to a customer's problem. Now, whether you take that to market in terms of a product or service or a practice leveraging AWS cloud and that can be sold to a customer. But we want that level of clarity when we're talking about deals with customers and we want it to be repeatable.

We want it to be scalable, but most importantly, we want the focus to be on what business outcome it is driving at the customer.

So what have we done and why do they matter one? We've allowed you to now add offerings in your opportunity submission directly, it accelerates sales, how AWS sales directly sees what you're pitching to the customer. It's not ambiguous because you would have defined your offering in partner central and you're telling the salesperson this is exactly what I'm pitching to the customer.

Secondly, expansion of awareness with AWS sales. This is one area that partners tell us that they spend a lot of time educating our sales teams in understanding what you do, what your value proposition is. And what exactly are you building? Now with this approach, the sales team can see very directly in their pipeline, what of your products you're selling at what customers and what does that really mean?

So that high touch approach that you've had to continue with all of our different account managers is going to get scaled when you see all of this information directly in the pipeline and they see that directly when they get that deal,

Thirdly discoverability, it is super important that we can now see where your solutions, your offerings are being successful through your pipeline. What you're launching and promote all of that on our public facing pages like partner solution finder or if you list on marketplace that improved connection with pipeline and what you sell is going to be important for you to customers to know directly what your solutions are and what business problems they are looking to solve so that they can sort of read about your solutions on our pages and understand what you're doing and

Lastly insights and recommendations. And this is very important from partners perspective because how do you get the right AWS opportunity that really is targeted towards what your solutions are as we start to connect more of your offerings and your solutions to your opportunities, we are better able to send you AWS originated opportunities that are the best fit for you and for that customer based on what you have done historically and in spaces where we think your solutions will work, it could be an industry play, it could be horizontal across different verticals and

So specifically on the form. Now, you will see a field that says solution offered and it is pulling all the offerings that you've already created in partner central. And so you are allowed to now pick those offerings when you submit the opportunity or update them throughout the life cycle of the opportunity. If something changes during the life cycle of the opportunity,

Integration with marketplace, this is a huge focus area for us. As we are seeing more customers buying on marketplace. We want to give you guys the ability to really connect these two different transactional layers.

So what have we done? We've given you the ability on the ACE opportunity to connect with an AWS offer. Now, you can do it one of two ways you can directly put in the offer id or if you don't know what the offer id, because your operational teams don't know it. You can go down and choose what your product type is. You can go down to your listing level and then choose the associated offerings.

This helps solve two things. The salesperson knows exactly what your, how your deal has been fulfilled through marketplace and can connect that back to ACE. And you can see all the benefits around that. Right now, the offer id will be restricted to private offers with the goal of expanding this in future years. But we hope to get more cohesiveness between marketplace and ACE.

So to encapsulate everything that I talked about, we're looking for speed and agility. We're looking for a faster way for you guys to connect with sales and we're really connecting two different areas that you're engaging in. One is your offers and solutions and your marketplace transactions and bring that all together.

We want to see that as a holistic picture so that when you come down and have conversations with your PDX teams or your sales teams, you really have a 360 view of what you've been doing at what customer across your solutions in terms of planning and optimizing your sales functions.

So, thank you so much for your time. Uh definitely open to Q&A right now and please use the session um id link on your mobile app to uh provide a brief survey. But if we, we can open up for questions right now. Uh I'm happy to address anything.

I think we have five more minutes.