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Josh Greene Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering®
We are excited to launch our first AWS episode in years. Join us as we delve into marketplace development and partnership success at AWS with our special guest, Josh Greene.
Josh is responsible for Marketplace Success at AWS and brings over 20 years of experience in startups, channel partners, and ISVs to this role. In this episode, Josh brings valuable insights into driving revenue generation, strategic partnerships, and global expansion, decoding AWS Marketplace Success, and how partners achieved billions last year.
Josh shares his expertise as the Sr. Manager of Global Seller Innovation/MP Development at AWS. Discover how AWS and partners leverage cloud commitments for partner success, the strategies behind AWS Marketplace growth, and the pivotal role of partner engineering in streamlining the sales process.
Tune in to learn the importance of collaboration, innovation, and customer obsession in achieving success with AWS Marketplace. Don’t miss out on actionable insights to scale your business and drive innovation with AWS.
What You’ll Learn
- Marketplace development and partnership success at AWS. (0:02)
- Leveraging cloud commitments for partner success. (4:06)
- Leveraging AWS Marketplace for partner success. (9:09)
- AWS marketplace growth, leadership principles, and customer obsession. (14:05)
- Partnering with AWS and reaching a billion-dollar milestone. (18:18)
- The importance of partner engineering in streamlining the sales process. (23:41)
- AWS success factors, including urgency, coalition building, and vision creation. (28:22)
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Transcription – by Otter.ai – Expect Many Typos
Summary Keywords
Summary Keywords
aws, partners, marketplace, organisations, work, customer, cloud, isps, programme, team, terms, conversation, budget, successful, partnering, sellers, dinner party, snowflake, success, years
Vince Menzione 0:02
Microsoft’s purpose is in service of your purpose. And again, 2024 is the year that partners come out as the leading edge of the spear. And on finding this player intent. You show up to every meeting and demonstrate why you are relevant everyday, I have to force myself to make sure that I’m taking one step ahead in terms of my own learning that flywheel
Vince Menzione 0:23
success is where you will build momentum. And that momentum will continue and then you feed into the other systems to say, this is what we did. This is how we did it together. Welcome back to ultimate guide to partnering. I’m Vince Menzione. Owner and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. And today, I’m excited to welcome back AWS back in the house for compelling conversation with Josh Green, the Senior Manager of marketplace development at AWS. Such a great conversation with Josh about the success he’s had enrolled the last four and a half years driving this marketplace strategy at AWS. The work he’s done with some of the biggest ISV marketplace organisations like CrowdStrike, and snowflake, and his best practices that he’ll share for successful marketplace development and deployment. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed welcoming Josh Green. Josh, welcome to the podcast.
Josh Greene 1:26
Thanks for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
Vince Menzione 1:28
I am so excited to have you. And AWS back in the house. It’s been quite some time, since we’ve had an AWS episode. And you and I got to meet actually last year at the catalyst event back in August seems like 100 years ago, right? It was it like six months or so not even. You’re the Senior Manager of marketplace development at AWS. And I am so excited to welcome you today to ultimate guide to partner. Well, ever since we
Josh Greene 1:54
first met and I started seeing what you’ve been doing. I’ve been excited to speak more with you and share some of the insights but I’m really happy to be here today.
Vince Menzione 2:03
So a excited to have AWS back in the house. Second, one of my favourite topics right now is about marketplace. So I’ve been referred to this as the marketplace moment. So but for our listeners and viewers that may not know you and your role and mission at AWS,
Josh Greene 2:20
can you tell us a little bit more? Sure? Well, I’ve been in in sales and business development channels for 25 years here at AWS. I’ve been on staff for four and a half years. And I started as an IC, actually, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that. But I’ve built a team, and the team focuses on partners, and how to help them be successful by leveraging the AWS Marketplace. And you know, in my travels over the 25 years, and certainly the four and a half years here, I know the same thing is true, every partner wants to figure out how to grow and how to be more efficient. So that’s been our mantra since day one. And
Vince Menzione 2:57
so Thomas, tell us a little bit more about that role on the marketplace development side. Sure, well, we
Josh Greene 3:03
have a diverse set of partners in in our community, I specifically work with ISV partners. And for example, when I started, I worked with 10 of the most leaned in AWS Marketplace sellers, which are ISPs think snowflakes, Blanc, crowd CrowdStrike, etc. And the goal was to learn from them and develop a set of best practices about what’s working, and how to help them accelerate growth, but also see value back. And our starting point for that was always working with the partnership leader or the alliance leader that had the AWS Alliance. And then since that time, I now have a team. And there’s actually we’ve spawned different teams in different regions that have the same charter, how to help them adopt best practices to unlock value. And it’s a really fun job because we get to hire from a bunch of different backgrounds and no day is ever the same week we work with operations, finance, sales, marketing product, etc. So it’s a really diverse, you know, role in team. But we’re having a lot of fun and there’s a lot of work to be done cities
Vince Menzione 4:05
see the job is maybe coming in as like a SWAT team and helping the organisation better align and maybe operationalize their marketplace strategy.
Josh Greene 4:14
Yeah, so I mean, if you listen to a keynotes from Aruba, Borno, let’s say at reinvent 2023, you’ll hear you know, automation and scale, of course, you’ll hear generative AI and a number of other topics. But in order for us to be successful, we need to create automation that helps streamline Yeah, and reduce inefficient processes and replace them with efficient ones. So in terms of a SWAT team, yeah, I was a SWAT team of one when I started and, and now we have a group of people that are doing that activity, and it’s never to be something that is there for good. It’s always how do we innovate ourselves out of this job to create automation so that we can go tackle another another opportunity
Vince Menzione 4:59
in You mentioned some ISPs. And we’re going to double click on those ISPs in a moment here. But it seems like your team has done pretty darn successful there.
Josh Greene 5:06
Well, it’s I mean, we’re one team among many, it takes a village. So we’ve and it, there are teams, there are developers and engineers, there are partner development managers, there are customer advisory where we have a lot of different roles. My team just happens to sit directly partner facing and tends to be on the cutting edge with those partners that are leading in the most. And that’s where, frankly, that’s where we learn the most from the partners that are the most taxing, and I guess taxi equals opportunity. And, and so we’re we’re part of a really robust community here.
Vince Menzione 5:39
So we’ve been talking about I’ve been calling it the marketplace moment, right? Because several things have happened. I’ve been discussing the tectonic shifts, we’ve been seeing where it’s been going on since even before COVID, the transformation, the change in buying patterns of behaviours, the millennials becoming the decision makers, the decisions being made in the lines of business, and buying happening now with clicks, right, where people don’t even want to talk with the salesperson, I tap my phone three times, and a box shows up in several, several hours. So our world has changed from that perspective. And now I think, you know, we we’ve been talking, I’ve been talking about CO selling for many years, and a lot of times organisations will say, Why do I need to do cosell? Like, I’m not getting any value from my hyper scalar partner? Like, why should I go do that. But I want to latch on to this durable cloud budget conversation, it seems that the realisation if you will, right, that AWS has a tremendous, or a captive relationship with the executive suite, within these organisations, enterprises, public sector agencies in the light, that there’s this huge durable budget available. And you know, recent estimates are that they’re over $340 billion and durable cloud budgets amongst the three hyperscalers. And then take layer on top of that kind of the ease of partnering with other organisations. We’re seeing, we’re seeing so much of a pattern now. And we’ll talk a little bit more about the success that your organisation has that. But this realisation that marketplace, is really a pathway to greater success, a working with hyperscale, like AWS, but also partnering amongst other organisations, building multi party offers and approaches to the customer to surround the customer. I’d love your perspective on this. This as well, I’m going marketplace moment. Yeah, I
Josh Greene 7:36
feel really, really fortunate. So I, I had been looking for an opportunity, and had tried to do this with a prior employer to the old term was cloud services broker. But that was really the first coming in my opinion of what we became this Cloud Marketplace. And we tried and failed. And the reason why I was attracted to AWS was having tried and failed before at a startup at a you know, another company is I thought, if anyone is going to figure this out, in my opinion, it’s AWS, because of what you just, you know, some of the elements that that desire to disrupt, to be infinitely customer obsessed, but also with this tailwind of customers that are putting their trust in AWS and making these commitments. So I don’t know if I would use the word, you know, captive audience, I would say an audience that’s been around with with our with our customers, but that’s been a tremendous tailwind and and turning that into, like, what does that meant for marketplace, it’s been huge. It’s been an opportunity where one of the first fundamental pillars, you know, of our value proposition was that and how to leverage cloud commitments to help our partners be successful. But you know, our value proposition is really, you know, expanded past that. And one little story about this is I was really challenged with how to convey this message to the executive team at one of our ISPs or to the board to convince them a while why to take this leap. This is going back now for years. And one of our business partners told me said, Hey, I explained it to them this way. And you should try it too, is there’s a there’s a, the cloud committed spend budget is a tremendous amount has tremendous gravity, and it, it’s pulling dollars into it. And either as an organisation, we can fight this gravity, or we can benefit from this gravity. And what I thought was particularly interesting about that example was in some of the best examples of where I’ve seen us go from nothing to something very material is that’s independent of whether we might have an AWS service that could be competitive without offer. So some of our most successful partners that we work with may have a product or a service that’s actually competitive to one of our own, you know, take MongoDB or snowflake, they’re phenomenally successful with marketplace and have made that decision that the the opportunity to tap into that That cloud committed spend and marketplace as a mechanism to reach customers and CO selling as part of that, as you mentioned, it is too powerful. And we’ve gotten a lot better with it over time. So those are the way I think about it is this has been a huge advantage for us. And you know, and we’ve gotten a lot better at partnering.
Vince Menzione 10:18
I love the term gravity in this conversation as well. Do you think it depicts it properly as you think about AI? Right? Because I do think there’s a tremendous amount of gravity. And you know, you and I were in an event that was very partner centric. But really, organisations need to backup and take a look at the bigger picture, right, and the gravity amongst the three hyper scalars AWS being the most prominent and the largest across those, those hyper scalars in terms of AI as it means it means that you’re having the conversations at the C suite level, not necessarily in the line of business. But you’re you’re negotiating at that CFO level, the organisation, is that right?
Josh Greene 10:54
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s, it’s a CFO, it’s a company level decision that’s happening depending upon where an organisation wants to invest in the cloud. And I think it’s not just one thing. So we talked about, you know, cloud commitment, a lot of these pieces have to come together. So the marketplace had to mature in terms of feature sets, the partner programmes you were mentioned in August, and the partnership leadership summit, I remember I ran into someone that we both know, Dorothy Copeland, who I reached out to, I want to say 14 years ago, when I was with Softchoice, where I was for 13 years, and tried to engage with Dorothy, who was just building a partner programme at AWS at that time. And I remember and Melville we like we had a laugh about this be a little miffed that AWS didn’t have time for me. And when I ran into Dorothy just last August, she said, Well, we actually didn’t have a programme at that time. So it wasn’t like I didn’t want to work with you. I just didn’t have a mechanism to do it. That was in 2011. Let’s see 2011. And look at us now. So it’s really just in the last, you know, whatever, 13 years, it’s come in incredible distance. And that’s, that’s another thing that we’ve benefited from.
Vince Menzione 12:05
How about this ease of partnering, right? I think about surrounding the customer and we were talking about Jay McBain a little bit earlier, Jay McBain comes up and just about every conversation these days, but yeah, he likes to talk about the seats at the table. And I like to think about it from the customer centric perspective, the customer isn’t just buying a cloud, it’s not just buying a security solution. It’s maybe solving a business need or requirement. And that requires maybe several different organisations coming together to solve for that. And what I see happening with marketplace we used to talk about when I was in Microsoft back in my day there, we used to talk about this thing called partnering to partner. And we we get two organisations together and try and go sell something or solve a solution for a solution need for a customer. It seems to me that marketplace automates that process, in many respects. Would you agree? Well, I
Josh Greene 12:56
think I think it can automate it. It can, let’s say it’s kind of lubricate that process in terms of how it like for a variety of reasons. You mentioned that there might be a cloud spend commit, you know, in place, well, that means that there may actually be a in in place identified economic buyer, that a third party who’s trying to sell a solution, you know, doesn’t have visibility or access into Yeah, I’d say the development and the growth of our channel business via the CPO programme that we have to embrace a channel partner. There’s a lot of work that’s being done with the GSI, you know, on that as well. So I think Jay said something like there’s eight seats around the table at any specific deal. I don’t I don’t know the exact number was, but I think we we can be a kind of strain that runs through through all of them. And it every situation is different. Every you know, customer scenario is different in terms of who has influence and who’s driving that opportunity. But Marketplace is a bit of a commerce engine underpinning that is is a concept that we’re aware of and trying to extend.
Vince Menzione 14:04
Yeah, I would agree with you there and the lubricant of that, helping that helping bring your stitch. I like to use the term stitching it all together.
Josh Greene 14:12
Did you better I like stitch you better.
Vince Menzione 14:14
So after your last earnings report, and congratulations on a successful quarter, another successful quarter was estimated that AWS had roughly $155 billion in DrupalCon budgets. And and that the tribulation of that, you know, having the largest share is what I would say. But also AWS may be coming from the retail side of things was early in terms of a marketplace strategy seems like the other two were maybe further further behind on that. What would you say about first
Josh Greene 14:44
of all, there are others that are far more qualified than I am to talk about, you know, our earnings in the growth of the cloud committed budget, but what I can tell you is in my observation coming in versus an outsider four and a half years ago was it takes some acclimatised zing to AWS culture, and AWS culture is rooted in Amazon culture. And so that notion of, we have leadership principles, and you hear people talk about them, but they are very much alive and well. And the first one that rules them all, is customer obsession. So if you are, if you are someone who is customer obsessed, and you’re understanding what a customer’s problems are, and you’re seeking to solve them, the byproduct of that is they you are in trust of another leadership principle. And they reward you with a commitment. And that’s a that becomes a durable cloud commitment. But that’s based on trust. So I think the Amazon culture certainly influenced this dramatically, as well as what worked in the, in the Amazon marketplace. And what’s working over here, how much third party versus how much first party services are being sold, and how big is the mark is the opportunity for free the market opportunity for each of those things as it pertains to third party software, or data or services, etc. So I think, you know, the fact that AWS was imbued with a lot of people that had Amazon culture and brought that over, it’s still very much alive and well, and something we talked about all the time.
Vince Menzione 16:13
If you’re part of the movement, you know, I have a very strong point of view. I’ve sat on both sides of the table for over 30 years now. I built growth through partnerships and PC, internet, cloud, mobile AI, marketplaces, and more. I’ve also seen the demise of organisations that are resistant to change part of the communities special interest groups and associations. And I don’t see one place that mirrors the ecosystem and brings it all together. You see, I see a vibrant world where hyperscalers, builders ISV, sellers, s eyes MSPs and other partners come together to spark the ecosystems growth. I’ve talked to many of you. And what I continually hear is, it’s noisy, I don’t know whom to listen to, and where to go. There’s a massive opportunity, but I’m not sure how to get there. Well, you’ve been heard, we’re getting ready to open the doors early at a pilot this new experience. We want this to be your place with your feedback and participation. If you’re a builder and innovator or a leader, visit our website. Again, that market leadership, and in fact 2023 was probably a seminal point for marketplaces, I would say right, we went into the year with some predictions, I was hearing predictions at the beginning of 2023. By Canalis, that by 2025, by the end of 2025, we’d see $45 billion flow through marketplaces. Jamie Baynes specifically said that they under call that number exact and he expects that number to be reached by the end of this year. And about 80% of that is going to flow through the three hyperscalers. But the the total aggregator of marketplaces it’s 45. It’s also was a big year for you mentioned some names in particular. But some of the organisations that you worked with reached a billion dollars with AWS and marketplace transactions, right. CrowdStrike and snowflake are among those organisations. What can you say there about where this is all headed?
Josh Greene 18:25
Well, I, I still think we’re so early on. So whereas it’s important to look at a milestone and yeah, like crowd strikes of reaching a billion dollars, and to enjoy that for a moment. But also, they’re they’re such a massive Tam, for what we’re doing in so much untapped ground out there that acknowledge that moment is, is interesting, but there’s so much more to be done. And I just think those milestones are exciting and more partners, seeing the value of marketplace and wanting to lean and make this successful, encourages the whole community to move faster together. And that means that buyers are becoming more savvy and learning how to leverage this, it means that sellers ISPs are and as well as channel partners and GSIs are seeing this as well. And there’s in there’s other there’s data providers, etc, that are participating. So, to me, you look at it and you say okay, infrastructure ISDS we’re the first that that might have been born in the cloud. We’re the first to really embrace this. Think about what how much more potential there is outside of that. So in my kind of newish rebate, I get to work with some other partners like Salesforce and ServiceNow. So the recent announcements of them getting listed in working with marketplace are really exciting. And those are kind of what we would call you know, business application providers. And then the next frontier will be the industry vertical partners that we have. So there’s always something else and so when I hear the estimates, I get really excited about it as You buy team in terms of okay, but one one day at a time, this is a marathon, and I have we, we need to, we need to take this, this opportunity and maximise it every day.
Vince Menzione 20:09
So I’d love to double click here for a moment, right? You help some of these organisations will come fled fledglings at the time, right, go to this big number. What did you see when you work with those organisations? What were the attributes that you saw, that made them accelerate more rapidly than maybe other organisations? Sure.
Josh Greene 20:33
Well, that there was certainly the existence of a strong partnership with AWS already. And actually, someone that I work with very closely your name’s Jen Valverde built a framework that we call characteristics of a successful seller. And this framework helped us identify what were the best partners doing that could be repeated and taught to other partners. And as it pertains to, you know, CrowdStrike, and snowflake, they saw and recognised that their buyers were also AWS customers. And therefore, they early on identified that, you know, I remember working with one of the folks at CrowdStrike, who said, like, we have a, we have a play called Path to budget that I run, which is how I teach my sellers, how and why to engage with marketplace in AWS to go access that cloud committed spin budget. So in that example, CrowdStrike had a great relationship with AWS and still do, and they had an empowered activated leader, and Jessica Alexander, who really drove that internally. So without him and empowered change agent, nothing’s going to happen. And I think, you know, in partnership leaders, we talk about this, a lot of I know, part of your role is to elevate the the chief partner officer up there with the CMO and the CRO, etc. If, if they don’t, if they can’t build that kind of clout, and don’t have those relationships, this won’t get in this won’t go anywhere. So convincing sales leadership to buy in, it takes some effort. And you have to be really thoughtful about where you go first, curating the scenario or where we’re going to engage. So you can build some momentum. Sure, you can demonstrate results. And then you get you get it you build momentum from there. So
Vince Menzione 22:22
path and budget. And was this person at the C suite level? Was it a CRO level,
Josh Greene 22:27
individual, no, a senior director, a senior director, but but how to say, but understood also where the roadmap needed to go for CrowdStrike to help embrace and protect cloud workloads. So this was these things came together really, really nicely. And that said, there was also some deep marketplace expertise on that team, and a willingness to, to experiment, that the status quo may not be what they what they wanted, in order to continue to propel their success.
Vince Menzione 23:02
So what do you see because I still see some resistance in some quarters on from ISVs. On marketplace, right? Especially those who have very strong traditional channels. What do you see from those who resist the change? What are you seeing from them?
Josh Greene 23:17
Well, I think, to some extent, we have a little bit of a luxury to have working with my team does of working with the ones that have raised their hand or are on the on the fence or want to learn about how to make this be successful. But as evidenced by the recent announcements, you know, we there are a lot of the hardware partners that are newer to marketplace we’ve been working on for a long time. This doesn’t happen overnight. And certainly the larger the organisation, sometimes the more difficult it is. That’s not always true. But I think if you look at compelling events, and you’ve mentioned this in some of your other podcasts in terms of things that are compelling, that are changing the way that business gets done, you know, marketplace is definitely one of those generative AI is definitely one of those. And we’re in an area where those two things can come together. And if if, if there are leaders in place, that aren’t willing to read the tea leaves and look at what the data suggests, I would be a bit concerned. And I think there’s a lot of pressure that happens to from the board to say, you know, what is our marketplace strategy? What is our AWS strategy where perhaps that conversation wasn’t as prevalent, you know, four or five years ago.
Vince Menzione 24:33
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Josh Greene 25:34
Well, I think it depends because you know, this, this is your dramatic change. So depending upon the size of the organisation, depending on where they are, if they’re a public company, private company, we work with a lot of, you know, startups as well that are kind of that are coming up. And they’re they’re, like I said there, they can be a bit more agile that way. But it’s a big bet. And what we’ve learned in 2022, and 2023, was, when I started off, I talked about what every partner wants is to grow and become more efficient. I think we shifted towards the efficiency conversation over the last couple years where it was this grow at all costs, you know, notion before. So I think I think our value proposition on path to budget and other things like that have really come to light given this. So there was some some consternation that will slow down in spending lead to a slowdown in marketplace. And actually, the reverse is true, I think we’ve seen an acceleration as a result of it. So I would not necessarily have forecasted that. But when our partners started saying, we need a more efficient way to go to market, we want to experiment and try with AWS and marketplace. That was really exciting. And that’s the thing, there’s inefficiency in the CO selling methodology or the process. Right. Would you agree there? Yeah, I think so. And well, absolutely. I agree. It streamlines so much. Right. You remember the old days of CO selling, you know, you have a piece of paper, you have a piece of paper, we’d upload all the information, you figured out that we co sell something together as opposed to this much more streamlined digital approach to the process. Well, it’s been it’s been clunky ever since, you know, account mapping days, way back when. And I participated. Yeah, the spreadsheets, the the, we sculpt the hug and chug where you get together with another sales rep. And you compare notes it was it was wildly inefficient. And I say one of the things that’s been prioritised by the partner engineering team has been the investment in automation and tools to streamline that process. So there are tools that we have offered that are going to first party services to facilitate that. But what’s also really exciting is that and this goes to your notion of, you know, the reliance on partners is there’s a whole community of partners now that do just that. And I can name a bunch of that. But the fact that there’s a whole this, this whole network of partners that exist that didn’t before that are really driving this increasing scale, and they innovate really fast is exciting. And that’s, to me, the hallmark of a healthy of a healthy community is that these third parties are really influential. And so we need to make sure that we we we work closely with them and support them.
Vince Menzione 28:15
I totally agree. And we’re I think we both know some of those organisations.
Josh Greene 28:19
Yes, we do. We work with them all the time. So what about our
Vince Menzione 28:23
audience? If they want to engage with they want to optimise their success working with you in AWS? What do they need to go do differently or think about this year? 2024?
Josh Greene 28:35
I think I remember, John Kotter was a was a leading change expert. And maybe like 20 years ago, I read his book leading change. And he had an eight step model. But the first element, I always remember the first three that are like creating urgency, you know, building a coalition, and creating establishing a strategic vision. And I come back to this, you know, 15 years later, but if there’s no urgency, nothing’s going to happen. If you don’t have the right Coalition, which probably involves product marketing, sales operations, and the partner teams working together, perhaps others like this is you’re going to flame out. And if you don’t have a vision about what you’re trying to deliver, like it, like we just talked about, gone are the let’s experiment with everything and you know, of three years ago, we we need to know or try to estimate what the light is at the end of the tunnel or the pot of gold, whatever you want to call it. But if you don’t do those three things, you’re going to be in trouble. And that I would say, and similarly we’ve developed tools like that framework I was talking about to say, we’ve got a step by step process that you can use that won’t ensure success, but will improve your probability of success and at a minimum will help you avoid the pitfalls that you know others might have fell Have you know before, which is which doesn’t do Good Friday one?
Vince Menzione 30:03
Can you double click with me on that those those steps those tools for success? Sure.
Josh Greene 30:08
So in our what we call the if we’re talking about the framework, I mean, the first one is, you know, you have to create. So after you’ve established a vision, and you have a coalition, you have to list in marketplace, what your customers want to buy, want to buy in the way that they want to buy it. And that’s in a in a b2b scenario, and the way that your sales teams are selling it today. So I guess what launching that brand net new product on marketplace is not something that I would advise to most ISPs out there. And certainly, partners like CrowdStrike, and snowflake, haven’t followed that that model is so because I’m trying to remove as many variables as I can in that process, because I’m trying to win the hearts and minds not just of customers, but of the sellers in the ISP organisation, if they don’t, if they don’t see value in this, and it’s, it’s going to happen some other way, or it’s not going to be recognised their quota or whatever else. We’ve all been through this, like, they’ll never do it. And I understand why it was a seller for you know, you know, 10 years. So I think that’s the first one and then, you know, do we have an empowered change agent identifying the right, you know, leadership buy in is wildly successful? Are you participating in the relevant partner programmes? Are you are you in the APN? Are you part of the accelerate programme? Are you participating in the workload migration programme, but we saw a correlation partners that were investing in things like programme participation and competencies did better. And it makes sense, this framework isn’t, you know, rocket science here, but the more they’re invested, the better off that will do. So that those are some of the other steps that are that are in the framework. And by the way, we’re happy to share this framework with with anybody that asks for it, it’s out. But I appreciate that we
Vince Menzione 31:58
might ask for a link to that. Or maybe you share it with them. shownotes would be wonderful this year that Josh, so really great learnings here from you. I really appreciate having you on today. I have a favourite question though. I asked almost every guest, it is a favourite. you’re hosting a dinner party. And you can invite any three guests from the present, or the past. In fact, one guest said the future they gave me guests in the future. Who would you invite to this dinner party? And we could also discuss where we’re going to have this dinner party? Do you have a favourite location? When would you invite and why? Oh,
Josh Greene 32:35
this question i. So this, this would be a minor all in the past. And that reflects that I’m a history buff. And by the way, I will I will disclose that they they might be aspirational, that they’d want to have dinner with me. But since it’s my dinner party, and I get to invite them, I’m gonna have at it. I read a book a long time ago about John Adams, the second president, and I just, he would be at the table with me. And the reason why is, you know, I just think about the impact of what our founding fathers did, not just on the US, but the diplomacy, how they navigated a crazy scenario, and just the lasting impact of that would just be fascinating. So I’m, I’m fascinated with that that time period. And is just that notion of building something new. I love building things. And am I read that book, I’d really like to meet that would have been amazing. The other two, I, I might, I’d say MLK Jr. would be an inspirational person for me to be I passion and energy. You can tell hopefully, by the way I talk about, you know, our business, I’m a passionate person. And I think that notion of overcoming, I think I read that that MLK Jr. was arrested 29 times, and the determination and perseverance. And frankly, what I think we need a little bit more of these days is something that I that I truly admire. And my wife would laugh at the third one, and it’s it’s not Taylor Swift, but I would say I haven’t necessarily committed enough to service. And in terms of someone who could inspire me to do that, in my career moving forward, I would say Mother Teresa is welcome to this dinner party to set a good example for everyone about what we what we can do and what we can achieve. And I think it’d be a really interesting conversation at that dinner table.
Vince Menzione 34:27
What a cool and eclectic list, right? I mean, John Adams, I’m always I’m fascinated with the Founding Fathers and how they brought together they went to Philadelphia that started off with a correspondence, right and then they started congregating in Philadelphia around a common purpose, which is amazing. MLK, Martin Luther King. The I Have a Dream speech brings tears to my eyes every time I watch it. So huge fan as well. And then Mother Teresa. Wow. I might have to maybe I can come bring up a beverage or reserve, what do you think? Can I do, John, you’re more than welcome. I
Josh Greene 35:02
think I would rely on others to help, you know, guide that conversation. I think I’d be the observer just just watching and absorbing this and hopefully being more inspired. But I think we would we would do well with some dinner parties with with those three, any
Vince Menzione 35:21
special location?
Josh Greene 35:22
That’s a good question. It feels like it would be appropriate to do it in. In the Northeast on the West Coast, you know, person so I don’t I don’t love the cold weather. But maybe it maybe maybe you mentioned Philadelphia, maybe that’s the place to do it.
Vince Menzione 35:38
Yeah. I’d love it. I love it. I used to live in the Philadelphia area, I could recommend some great restaurants if we want to host it there. So Josh, you you’ve been a lot of it’s been you’ve been a great guest. You’ve been a lot of fun to spend some time with today. I really love what you’re doing. So happy that you chose to come to ultimate guide to partnering to talk about our favourite topic and look forward to maybe having you again in the future. Maybe you could be a five time or like Jay McBain and some of our other guests. So, but for our listeners, this audience of listeners and viewers now what can they do differently? If they want to reach out to you if they if they haven’t built their strategy yet? Is there a way for them to reach out to you? Yeah, well, I
Josh Greene 36:22
It’s I get reached out to on LinkedIn quite a bit. I’d say there’s a every AWS partner. Most AWS partners have some type of a named resource to get engaged with, that’s really the gateway and they’re the true quarterbacks that leverage this. So my content you know, I’m in partnership leaders. That’s one way to reach me, I’m on LinkedIn is another way to reach feet or through the partner development management organisation is another way to reach be and not just me, but the team that I have the privilege of leading and then the content that we all collectively participated in building because that’s to me that’s that’s what it’s about. Appreciate your time today, Josh,
Vince Menzione 37:02
thanks for joining ultimate guide Department.
Josh Greene 37:04
Thank you for having me. Really enjoyed it.
Vince Menzione 37:11
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