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Don’t get left behind on AWS!
Don’t get left behind on AWS!
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In this episode, we go deep inside the AWS Marketplace with Louise Strandoo, who spent nearly a decade building AWS’s marketplace business from the ground up and now leads partner development for AWS’s data, analytics, and storage practice.
Louise unpacks COST, the six-pillar framework her team built by studying what actually separates hypergrowth startups and billion-dollar sellers from partners who treat marketplace as a side project.
We break down why operational excellence has to be in place before you ever enable your sales team, why executive sponsorship from the top of the organization is what keeps a marketplace strategy from collapsing into a single point of failure, and why product-led growth is no longer optional now that buyers, and increasingly AI agents, expect to try, buy, and deploy software without waiting on a human to close the loop,
Key Takeaways
- Success on AWS Marketplace requires a comprehensive framework like COST, not just a simple checklist of tasks.
- Your product must be something customers actually want to buy, not a subpar offering used merely to test the waters.
- Operational excellence is required to ensure your marketplace motion has the sustainability to scale globally.
- Product-Led Growth (PLG) is essential for enabling frictionless procurement, especially as buyers shift toward agent-driven AI solutions.
- Executive sponsorship is critical; building a strategy without leadership buy-in will prevent it from gaining real traction.
- Sales alignment ensures reps are appropriately compensated and friction is removed, preventing them from avoiding marketplace transactions.
If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community.
At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.
Key Tags
AWS Marketplace framework, COST methodology, product-led growth, agentic procurement, hyperscaler ecosystem, operational excellence, revenue friction, private offers, co-sell acceleration, strategic collaboration agreements, resilient architecture, cloud commitments, organizational transformation
Key Tags
Louise Strandoo Audio Episode
[00:00:00] Louise Strandoo: Salespeople, rightly so. They don’t wanna introduce something that’s going to add a complexity to the deal. They’re like, why would AWS wanna be involved?
[00:00:11] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI’s remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026.
[00:00:22] Louise Strandoo: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi. Own
[00:00:26] Vince Menzione: your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy.
[00:00:45] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s start.
[00:00:53] Louise Strandoo: And Louise Strand, come on out. Come on up. Uh, our first, our first
[00:00:59] Vince Menzione: Amazon executive at, at this session. Not our first ever, but our first at this session.
[00:01:06] Louise Strandoo: Happy to be
[00:01:07] Vince Menzione: thrilled to have you. I, why don’t we sit down on an, um, I’ll have you sit here and, you know, you get, take one of the ultimate partner pillows with you since you’re a first assignment attend.
[00:01:15] Louise Strandoo: Wonderful.
[00:01:16] Vince Menzione: Uh,
[00:01:16] Louise Strandoo: good
[00:01:17] Vince Menzione: to hear. So great to have you. I thought maybe we’d start, maybe, uh, with you, uh, explaining your role. Then we can start talking about costs, which is the subject is like near and dear, and we’ll talk about that, about what that is. But I want to keep people on their pins of their seats right now.
[00:01:33] Vince Menzione: So tell us, tell us more about you and your role and your journey at AWS.
[00:01:37] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, well thanks for having me. Good to see everybody in the room. Um, so my name’s Louise. I have spent the better part of the last nine and a half years at AWS and I spent almost that whole time, probably around eight years. In AWS Marketplaces business Development organization, um, I joined to help startups figure out how to scale their business on the marketplace.
[00:02:00] Louise Strandoo: And from there, I grew into a number of different roles, helped ISVs figure out how to scale their marketplace business of all sizes. Um, I worked with some of our top sellers on the marketplace, figure out how to really scale their revenue through the marketplace. Today I am actually the lead of the data analytics and storage partner development team.
[00:02:20] Louise Strandoo: Nice. Within the US Tech partnerships organization. So it’s been a really cool transition to go from like all marketplace focused. And throughout that time, marketplace kind of became the center of partnerships. Yep. Within our partner program. Um, so now I manage PDMs and partners and we still talk a lot about marketplace.
[00:02:40] Louise Strandoo: Also everything else that we do as a partner. So it’s, um, it’s been a fun journey.
[00:02:45] Vince Menzione: And we were talking about this earlier, like you started with Marketplace and then moved out where all the other organizations started from partnership and moved into marketplace. Mm-hmm. Almost the other up. And you have built a framework costs
[00:02:59] Louise Strandoo: mm-hmm.
[00:03:00] Vince Menzione: Characteristics of successful sellers. And I have a set of operating principles about successful partnering. So I’m really intrigued about this conversation. I was hoping you could walk us through it, like what are these characteristics and where do most partners fall short in terms of characteristics?
[00:03:18] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, so, um, like all really good things, cost was an effort that I built alongside a bunch of other really smart people. And we started to have this conversation about what does, uh, you know, what does success look like? We we’re focused in the beginning, in my marketplace journey on getting. Partners to sell on the marketplace, getting them to list and adopt the features.
[00:03:41] Louise Strandoo: And of course they’re like, why would we do this? And we’re like, that’s a great question. Let’s figure out like really what the why of this whole thing is. And as we started to get partners who were startups and some of our really large partners activated, we started to see all kinds of value and how marketplace was helping co-sell and all this good stuff.
[00:03:59] Louise Strandoo: And we needed to figure out like how do we identify what is like the lightning in the bottle? So we looked across some of the most, uh, hypergrowth companies on the marketplace. Mm-hmm. Some of those startups that had really propelled into major success stories. And then some of those like really scaled enterprise sellers, the one
[00:04:17] Vince Menzione: that got to a billion dollars.
[00:04:18] Louise Strandoo: Exactly. The market, our billion dollar market market. Billion dollar sellers. Right? Yep. And we looked at what are the common characteristics that all of those partners embody. Yes. And how do we kind of. Define a framework that is not a checklist because a lot of us were doing that at the time. Here’s all the things that you should do to make it work well.
[00:04:34] Louise Strandoo: It doesn’t really work from partner to partner. Everyone has a unique go-to market strategy. Yeah, so we developed costs to kind of be this overarching tool that partners can use to say, do we have the right kind of fundamental approach to how we’re going to market with AWS and how we’re thinking about the marketplace.
[00:04:51] Louise Strandoo: Do we have the right tools to like bring our overall go-to-market strategy to A AWS and to the marketplace so we’re not doing two separate things. That was sort of the genesis of the idea. Makes
[00:05:02] Vince Menzione: a lot of sense.
[00:05:04] Louise Strandoo: So, um, the characteristics, there’s six of ’em. I won’t go into detail about every single one.
[00:05:11] Louise Strandoo: Oh,
[00:05:11] come
[00:05:11] Vince Menzione: on. We’ll do that one. Yeah. We have some people in the room that are gonna be intrigued by this. Go ahead.
[00:05:16] Louise Strandoo: So, um, the first pillar is. Partnership with AWS, you can’t do marketplace without figuring out what, what’s your overall partner strategy, right? So how are you using the partner programs to drive differentiation in your business?
[00:05:30] Louise Strandoo: Yep. How are you using our funding programs to elevate the parts of your business that you really wanna accelerate? Um, and how are you thinking about your partner strategy with AWS overall?
[00:05:40] Vince Menzione: Interesting.
[00:05:41] Louise Strandoo: The second one is, uh, selection on AWS marketplace.
[00:05:44] Vince Menzione: Product selection.
[00:05:45] Louise Strandoo: That’s right.
[00:05:45] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:05:46] Louise Strandoo: You gotta have a product on the marketplace that your customers wanna buy.
[00:05:49] Louise Strandoo: I think the biggest thing that partners have done wrong over the years is they think, let’s do crawl, walk, run. We’re gonna put something up there that we’re not, you know, really excited about, but we’ll see how it does and then we’ll try to invest from there.
[00:06:03] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:04] Louise Strandoo: If you put something out there that nobody knows how to sell, then that you’re not excited about, your customers aren’t probably excited about it either.
[00:06:09] Louise Strandoo: There’s no reason it’s gonna do well in the marketplace.
[00:06:10] Vince Menzione: Yeah. It makes no sense to me.
[00:06:12] Louise Strandoo: Yep. So you gotta have something good. You gotta have your marquee product, and then you wanna use features that are gonna help buyers actually access that product in a way that’s frictionless. Yeah. The third one is operational excellence.
[00:06:25] Louise Strandoo: So that’s looking at how are you structuring your organization and investing in all the right processes that you need to scale the business. Reporting at a global scale, understanding how to recognize revenue and thinking about all of the in-between moments of. Being on the marketplace, creating an offer, how does your sales team gonna get in touch with you when you need to send that offer out?
[00:06:47] Louise Strandoo: And how are you making sure that an alliance person isn’t trying to find an outlet in a random corner of an airport to send a private offer to a customer? All of that structural stuff to make the, the motion scale.
[00:07:00] Vince Menzione: So we’re talking product led growth versus. One off or
[00:07:04] Louise Strandoo: all of it? All of it. Okay. No matter what kind of partner you are, you have to have operational excellence.
[00:07:08] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. To make sure that your marketplace and your partnership motion has sustainability and scale. The next two, I’ll kind of go through fast. There is, yeah. Um, partner commitment to marketplace revenue. So what do you really want Drive from a revenue perspective, right. How do you get your leaders bought in on that, and how do you set a goal that dictates what you’re doing?
[00:07:28] Louise Strandoo: And then how do you define sales alignment? From a structural perspective to say we’re gonna remove friction that could get in the way of the field selling this thing. We’re gonna remove things that are, um, negating reps from wanting to go through marketplace because it’s impacting their comp. Yeah. Or it’s really hard.
[00:07:46] Louise Strandoo: All of that kind of structural stuff goes into the sales alliance.
[00:07:49] Vince Menzione: So there’s, yeah. I wanted to take this apart a little bit too, if you don’t mind. No
[00:07:52] Louise Strandoo: problem.
[00:07:53] Vince Menzione: Because I think about this a lot. So when you start talking about an organization, you’re talking about what this, we’ll call it an ISV Sure. Or an si, but.
[00:08:00] Vince Menzione: You know, ISPs primarily is where it all started. They need to get their internal operational excellence. Right, exactly. Which means their, their ops piece. Yep. And their sales execution. They’re gonna to market all those things. The sales alignment side. Is that their sales teams
[00:08:18] Louise Strandoo: correct.
[00:08:19] Vince Menzione: Are compensated properly so that they don’t go around the systems.
[00:08:22] Vince Menzione: Exactly right. They’re aligned. They’re aligned to go drive the right results.
[00:08:25] Louise Strandoo: Exactly.
[00:08:26] Vince Menzione: Because they’ve made commitments as well.
[00:08:28] Louise Strandoo: Yeah.
[00:08:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:08:29] Louise Strandoo: And I always talk about marketplace, like it is transformation. It’s different. It’s not what you’re doing today.
[00:08:35] Vince Menzione: That’s right.
[00:08:35] Louise Strandoo: Salespeople, rightly so. They don’t wanna introduce something that’s gonna add a complexity to the deal.
[00:08:43] Louise Strandoo: They’re like, why would AWS wanna be involved? Stay away. So if that is already there and then on top of that Mm, they don’t get paid as much when they go direct.
[00:08:53] Vince Menzione: Right? Right.
[00:08:54] Louise Strandoo: They’re not gonna go through the market nice.
[00:08:55] Vince Menzione: No, they’re not.
[00:08:55] Louise Strandoo: They’re not gonna bring anything to you and the partnership team saying like, Hey, we really wanna figure out how to make this engine work with AWS So we have to do as much as we can to remove that friction from the experience.
[00:09:06] Vince Menzione: So, you know, you mentioned private offers, which made me think about like product-led growth versus private offers. ’cause it’s, it feels like marketplace from the beginning. It’s changed. It
[00:09:15] Louise Strandoo: has,
[00:09:16] Vince Menzione: you’ve been doing this for a number of years. You were first to market with a marketplace. There was, I’ll call a lot of friction because there was channels and other, other routes to market direct selling.
[00:09:27] Vince Menzione: Tell us, take us through some of those experiences. Yeah, yeah. Like what was that like? And then obviously you built cos because you had a lot of field engagement with these organizations trying to get them to go do it the right way.
[00:09:38] Louise Strandoo: Right?
[00:09:39] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:09:39] Louise Strandoo: So it’s interesting actually, when we built the marketplace.
[00:09:42] Louise Strandoo: It was completely like a product-led growth motion, as in let’s just figure out a way to let AWS customers find amis in the marketplace. Developers are gonna go get it, and they’re just gonna buy it without any additional push from the field or like co-sell. That doesn’t need to happen. Then we heard from customers, Hey, this is great.
[00:10:02] Louise Strandoo: But what we really want is also to be able to buy bigger contracts. We wanna customize our contracts, we wanna negotiate price when we’re buying this on behalf of, you know, large organizations. We’re not just buying what’s on the shelf. We need something more custom. So we introduced this concept of private offers to make sure that we could bring all of that customization into the process.
[00:10:23] Louise Strandoo: And then we heard from customers saying, uh, we want to purchase from our preferred channel partners. We really wanna make sure that we’re, you know, not losing that source of, um, engagement with our really critical partners. So we had to figure out, hey, how can we make it so that we’re not competing with the channel?
[00:10:41] Louise Strandoo: ’cause we’re not really a channel at all. Right. So we had to go and build our platform that allowed for channel partners to sell through the marketplace and augment that private offer piece to say, Hey, if you want, you can have a channel partner resell your product through the marketplace. So today we kind of see all of those as just different routes to market and different ISVs are gonna embrace different routes to market.
[00:11:04] Louise Strandoo: First, the really important thing about costs is that it’s. Pushing partners to think about bringing their go to market strategy that works outside of the partnership to the marketplace. Mm-hmm. So if you’re an ISV that doesn’t sell with channel today, don’t start with channel partners on the marketplace.
[00:11:21] Louise Strandoo: Right. If you don’t do product-led growth today, probably figure that out before you start doing it on the marketplace. Yeah. But if you’re doing those things, if you’re not doing those things, you should look at why not, and could we be doing those things and then we have the ways to bring it into your strategy with AWS marketplace.
[00:11:38] Vince Menzione: So what separates the partners who kind of build this flywheel of success that you describe from those who treat it maybe as a side project? And do you, do you see less and less of that today too? I wanna, I wanna ask you.
[00:11:50] Louise Strandoo: No, I think, um, the more mature the marketplace gets
[00:11:57] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:11:58] Louise Strandoo: The more obvious some of the, uh, characteristics of success become and the more important.
[00:12:06] Louise Strandoo: Embodying that framework becomes for partners as they grow to become the next billion dollar seller, right? And become the next a hundred million dollar seller. Um, I think a couple things come to mind for me. The first thing is that like at AWS overall, we talk a lot about like resilient architecture. We talk a lot about what does it look like to drive successful transformation.
[00:12:29] Louise Strandoo: All of that has to happen in the partnership. Partners that have really strong marketplace motions with AWS, they do not have single points of failure. They are not expecting an alliance lead to manage everything and then have the business collapse if they leave.
[00:12:46] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:12:46] Louise Strandoo: They figure out how to delegate and get buy-in from leadership so that they have multiple folks invested in the strategy for multiple angles so that there’s scalability and sustainability.
[00:12:58] Louise Strandoo: Without that. You could do all the things right with costs and if there’s res, if there’s no resiliency, if there’s, if there’s a single point of failure, it doesn’t scale and it doesn’t last.
[00:13:09] Vince Menzione: It’s so funny ’cause you haven’t seen my seven principles of, of successful partnering, but we talk about growth mindset, we talk about executive commitment and then clarity on your vision and what you’re hoping to achieve.
[00:13:21] Louise Strandoo: Yeah.
[00:13:22] Vince Menzione: Like that’s your internal victory. You’ve gotta get those things right. That’s exactly what you just said. A hundred
[00:13:26] percent.
[00:13:26] Louise Strandoo: And you can’t, you, you know, like if you don’t have that executive sponsorship,
[00:13:30] Vince Menzione: yeah,
[00:13:32] Louise Strandoo: great. You’ve done the cost framework, but where are you gonna go with it?
[00:13:35] Vince Menzione: And it’s not just the sponsorship, it’s.
[00:13:38] Vince Menzione: Up in, from the top of the organization all the way down to the selling floor. Completely. Right?
[00:13:42] Louise Strandoo: Completely.
[00:13:42] Vince Menzione: Everybody has to be aligned. Resources, investments all need to be aligned to this. Mm-hmm.
[00:13:47] Louise Strandoo: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:47] Vince Menzione: We’re speaking the same language earlier. A hundred percent. I love it. I love it. I love it. Um, so what does, we talked about product-led growth, but I want to maybe jump in here a little bit more.
[00:13:58] Vince Menzione: Because I think it’s, it’s becoming more prevalent today, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s like, you know, we talked about private offer. It was really private offers, at least my perspective was a few years ago, I wanna buy something from you. Oh, you have a cloud commitment. I can access the cloud commitment.
[00:14:13] Louise Strandoo: Yeah.
[00:14:14] Vince Menzione: And so it was always the private offer thing that was going on behind the scenes, which required a lot of internal resources to go drive.
[00:14:19] Louise Strandoo: Yep.
[00:14:20] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about product led growth. ’cause that becomes a fly more of a flywheel that’s automated Yeah. And allows you to sell while you’re sleeping kind of thing, you know?
[00:14:28] Louise Strandoo: Totally.
[00:14:29] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:14:30] Louise Strandoo: So I think, um, we have heard a lot from customers saying, okay, when we really need to negotiate and we need something custom, we wanna be able to do that.
[00:14:40] Louise Strandoo: But we also wanna be able to purchase things quickly. We don’t wanna have to go out to dinner every time we need to upgrade, uh, like our licenses and get a new contract. We wanna be able to experiment and pick the things that resonate best with the line of business users that are, you know, increasingly taking some of that buying power.
[00:14:59] Louise Strandoo: And I think especially now that we’re entering into, you know, the unprecedented, unprecedented times, it’s everything is AI like. There is more, um, pressure than ever to have users quickly figure out, does something add value to me and my business right now? And if it does, then I’m gonna keep using it, and if it doesn’t, I’m gonna go to the next thing.
[00:15:22] Guest: Right.
[00:15:22] Louise Strandoo: Product led growth is really about eliminating some of that I would say. Paperwork at the start of the process and putting the power in the hands of the user to say, can this product solve your challenge? And as more and more buyers are looking at Agen solutions, they wanna be able to try something, see if it works, and then quickly buy it without having to go through a whole bunch of steps because they have work that needs to be done right now.
[00:15:54] Louise Strandoo: So the marketplace, that was our roots, like we started with this PLG motion. So we have all of that foundation to do it, and we’ve spent a lot of time over the last two, three years, like really investing in that from our engineering and roadmap perspective to build a whole bunch of features and capabilities that support product-led growth.
[00:16:11] Louise Strandoo: We have things like free trials request, demo request, a private offer if you want to. Um, we introduced something, you know, last year that was an express private offer experience. Hey, you know, you want custom pricing. Request it and we’re gonna give it to you right away because the vendor has populated rate cards.
[00:16:26] Louise Strandoo: Right? So all of those things I think are really important right now to say, yeah, when your customers like, wanna get going, now let’s stop. Putting barriers in the way and let your product actually show its value immediately.
[00:16:38] Vince Menzione: And you were actually putting buttons or making buttons available Yeah. For people’s websites.
[00:16:42] Vince Menzione: Exactly. So they could just say, click here and
[00:16:43] Louise Strandoo: buy. Absolutely. We buy with a Ws. You can click from your own website, your own marketing pages to route them to the marketplace. If that’s the preferred way to transact,
[00:16:50] Vince Menzione: yeah, why not?
[00:16:51] Louise Strandoo: Yeah.
[00:16:52] Vince Menzione: So you mentioned ai. We talked a little bit, I call it the tectonic shifts.
[00:16:56] Vince Menzione: We, we’ve seen this incredible transformation happening so fast. And now we’re talking about agents. Right. And, uh, John Yo was over here from, uh, earlier from Sugar talking about like, what happens if the buyer is an agent?
[00:17:08] Louise Strandoo: Totally.
[00:17:09] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about that.
[00:17:10] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. I mean, I think that PLG and like is the right thing to enable a agentic procurement.
[00:17:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:17:19] Louise Strandoo: If, um, you know, like in the, uh. 2019 when private offers were like, that was the big boom. We were like getting people to sign up on the marketplace. All we were focused on was private offers. So many sellers would have products on the marketplace where you’d click and purchase it and it would just say, thanks for buying, and it’d be like, we’ll get in touch with you and like a 24 hours and then we’ll figure it out.
[00:17:42] Louise Strandoo: No worries. Thanks for buying. If that doesn’t work. If you’re an agent, it doesn’t work. An agent would be like, okay, this is like a dead end, right? Yeah. Agents are gonna look for products that they can purchase and begin using instantaneously. So yeah, product-led growth is like a really good, um, strategy that ISVs can use to future proof their business and make sure that they’re not just catering to an evolved.
[00:18:06] Louise Strandoo: You know, procurement persona who maybe is looking for that faster transaction, but also preparing for that agent persona. Yeah. That is gonna be helping make software procurement scale.
[00:18:17] Vince Menzione: So what do the partners in the room need to do to rethink how they think about this?
[00:18:22] Louise Strandoo: I think there’s a couple things. I think you know, number one, you can look at the cost framework and start to use it as a jumping off point to evaluate your business.
[00:18:31] Louise Strandoo: You can look through a bunch of resources that we’ve put out around costs, and one of the first blogs that I wrote has a Buzzfeed style quiz. You can go through and be like, where are we at? And if you realize after you run through that exercise that you’re farther away from where you wanna be in terms of partnering with AWS, it’s a really good dump like starting point to be like, great, here’s the challenges.
[00:18:56] Louise Strandoo: But the biggest message I would relay to the partners is. Do not wait to try to go build this and then bring it to your executives and say, look what I built. It’s not gonna go anywhere. You need to go and use that as the cry to your leadership team. Like escalate. Now here’s the opportunity that we have with AWS.
[00:19:17] Louise Strandoo: Let’s look at all of the awesome studies that we and our partners have put out over the years. Look at your competitors that are in the marketplace, your competitors that are partnering with AWS, and start there by saying, we’re. Behind or we’re missing in these areas. We could be doing, you know this, to make our product more a ag agentic ready.
[00:19:37] Louise Strandoo: We could be doing more in marketplace to ensure that we’re capitalizing on the private offer business, and we need to figure out how we’re gonna drive commitment now so we can go and build this if you try to build it. Then show the value later. It’s gonna be really hard to then be pushing that boulder up the hill.
[00:19:55] Louise Strandoo: So the more that you can lean into getting the sponsorship early on, you’re gonna have a much easier time then navigating, you know, all the hard work that comes with partnership co-sell, um, and, and everything kind of fun that we get to do once we get to go to market with our partners.
[00:20:10] Vince Menzione: Do you have one piece of advice for each one of the.
[00:20:13] Vince Menzione: Conditions or characteristics for, for, for this group to follow or
[00:20:17] Louise Strandoo: think about? I think that, um, the, we didn’t talk about the last one, which is a good one to end on, which is enablement.
[00:20:22] Vince Menzione: Yes.
[00:20:23] Louise Strandoo: Enablement starts with like most of the time, ISVs in particular, and this, it goes for channel partners as well.
[00:20:30] Louise Strandoo: They’re like, we gotta enable the field go and enable all the salespeople why they should do all this stuff. You have to do these things like in some sequence though. So if you go and enable the field, everybody do marketplace and they’re like, how? Where do we go, right? Do we send you the leads? Are we slacking you?
[00:20:47] Louise Strandoo: Like are we emailing? Like what do we do? You have to then go back and be like, actually, our operational excellence isn’t sorted out. We need to do that first. And who needs to be enabled from that side of the house? Like don’t forget to enable your rev ops teams, your deal desk teams, all of the teams that are kind of essential to making your partnership with AWS Hum need to be enabled in the way that is relevant for their business.
[00:21:10] Louise Strandoo: So when you, you know, think about like what do you need to do across all the pillars? It’s gonna be different depending on what your go-to-market focus is. If you’re a hundred percent focused on selling through SIS today and through channel, maybe product-led growth is not the top priority, but then you need to go and figure out, okay, so how have we.
[00:21:28] Louise Strandoo: Figured out which partners we wanna work with on AWS and how have we enabled them and have we communicated that enablement to our salespeople? Are we removing unnecessary barriers to them transacting? That’s what you really gotta figure out. So it’s really about looking at how you execute outside of marketplace, outside AWS, figuring out what that, what are the strongest pieces that you do in your business today, across those pillars, and then asking to replicate that with your partnership with AWS.
[00:21:56] Vince Menzione: Nice. So to the room here is, um, if someone in this room doesn’t, does one thing differently on the marketplace, what should it be?
[00:22:08] Louise Strandoo: There’s so many things I can think about. I think like first
[00:22:12] Vince Menzione: you’re coaching ’em
[00:22:13] Louise Strandoo: individually,
[00:22:13] Vince Menzione: by the way. Just think about it that way.
[00:22:15] Louise Strandoo: One of the first things like, it depends on where you’re like, where you’re at in your journey.
[00:22:18] Louise Strandoo: So like, quick show of hands, who is, um, a partner that is like using the marketplace today?
[00:22:26] Vince Menzione: There’s quite a few actually.
[00:22:27] Louise Strandoo: Okay. Awesome. Thank you for helping drive the marketplace. So for those of you that raised your hands, like my sentiment to you all would be figure out how you are incorporating marketplace as the center of your strategy with AWS.
[00:22:44] Louise Strandoo: We are increasingly using marketplace as the point of scale for all things about partnership. All things funding are like increasingly requiring some hook into marketplace. So we can actually provide more funding and scale increase like more. So think about like how do you use marketplaces that like center of your partnership, um, for those of you that are not on the marketplace today and are thinking like, is this something that is valuable to me?
[00:23:15] Louise Strandoo: Is this something that I should think about and do? You should absolutely. Go look at who are your competitors? Who are the folks that are already out there on the marketplace and, and why aren’t you there? And then you should start to look at what are the characteristics of successful sellers to map out What could we do and what’s the kind of order of operations that we should take to figure out like, how do we get there?
[00:23:40] Louise Strandoo: How do we have a plan from the beginning to get buy-in for our partnership with AWS so that we’re not going about it, expecting that it’s gonna just like drive a bunch of leads to the business. It’s not what it does well, but it is gonna help accelerate the way that you co-sell with AWS, which can be a tremendous value add when done appropriately.
[00:23:58] Louise Strandoo: So I think, yeah, like figure out the right way that it’s gonna unlock business value depending on what’s most important to your priority. Um. Today
[00:24:08] Vince Menzione: we have about three and a half minutes, and I, I’m eager to see if there’s any questions. I, I, um, I, John’s right here with the mic and I love that. I love the, want to get the interaction here in the room.
[00:24:19] Louise Strandoo: Yeah,
[00:24:20] Vince Menzione: it’s a great group.
[00:24:25] Guest: Oh,
[00:24:29] Vince Menzione: can they light up that mic? Maybe
[00:24:33] Louise Strandoo: Good.
[00:24:37] Vince Menzione: There you go. That’s fine. There you go. It’s working. Alright.
[00:24:41] Guest: Thank you so much. This is a really great presentation, first of all. I love it. Um, I’m actually part of the, uh, the GSI, so I work cognizant. My name is Ana Hill, um, and I’m manage alliances with ServiceNow. Um, our goal is in the really near future to really engage with all the hyperscalers in sell.
[00:25:00] Guest: So that’s one thing. But my interesting, my question is how do you, how, how does AWS measure success? Of the partners who are on your platform, what are the metrics? How do you determine which partners are actually successful and what other partners can use to learn from that?
[00:25:19] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, that’s such a great question.
[00:25:21] Louise Strandoo: So, um, something that I think is like super helpful that you bring up is cost is not a, um, a scorecard that says everybody that does all these things is a good partner. It’s basically inputs that we have come up with that are supposed to help with the partnership outcomes. Um, so partners, we measure a whole bunch of different things.
[00:25:47] Louise Strandoo: I think PDMs and my team carry goals across like seven different categories. There’s a couple of big things that we look at. We look at the revenue that you drive through the marketplace, so whether that’s through private offers or through your self-service business or through. Selling through a reseller, or if you are the reseller, like what is that resell business or driving?
[00:26:05] Louise Strandoo: Um, we look at what are the opportunities that you’re bringing and sharing with AWS and that you’re launching. So through our lead sharing mechanism. Not only what are you launching, but what are you sharing with us that is qualified that you’re bringing the field into? Um, we look at things like migrations and migration, realized revenue.
[00:26:25] Louise Strandoo: How are you helping drive customers to the cloud? And how are you helping customers not just get everything set up, but you start actually using it. Um, so we really are gonna look across like a multitude of those metrics and when we look at like which partners are kind of leading the way. We’re gonna start to look at the revenue in those buckets, right?
[00:26:44] Louise Strandoo: Like who’s sharing and bringing and growing with us? Who’s bringing more opportunities to engage before it happens on the marketplace? Who’s actually completing that transaction? And then who are helping who, who are the partners? Kind of like leading those big types of transformations, migrations, and, and realize revenue.
[00:27:00] Louise Strandoo: This is really great. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:27:04] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Any other questions? Come on. We’ve got 30 seconds left. We have time for that one last question. Run over there. John. Come on.
[00:27:17] Guest: Thank you again, a great, uh, presentation. One question I had is, uh, this morning, right Jay from, uh, oia, right? He identified a whole bunch of, uh, companies that are doing.
[00:27:28] Guest: More than a billion dollars in revenue with AWS.
[00:27:30] Louise Strandoo: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:31] Guest: What would you say are one or two top qualities among these companies that help some drive? I can give
[00:27:36] Louise Strandoo: six. And they’re all of these. Yes.
[00:27:39] Vince Menzione: The cost,
[00:27:40] Louise Strandoo: but like, I think, um, so I love it. Yeah. My, my team we’re working on some content to better capture, like Yeah.
[00:27:48] Louise Strandoo: You, you’ve gotten there, you’ve done the six basic things. Now what happens when you’re a billion dollar business? What does it look like there? It’s a lot of the same stuff, right? Like billion dollar billers on the marketplace. They embody that resilience, for example, in their operational mechanisms.
[00:28:03] Louise Strandoo: They’re moving beyond the point of there being like one person that creates private offers and they’re like just part of the partnership team. They activate their, um, their deal desk to really manage private offers and marketplace business at scale. They’re integrating their pipeline to share deals proactively through their CRM system and they have really targeted enablement that is.
[00:28:24] Louise Strandoo: Really pushing to the field to make sure that every person in their team understands the value of cloud value of AWS and how marketplace accelerates the pipeline. So the more mature that you become as a marketplace seller, like the more that cost is relevant to help keep you on track and be that kind of north star to say like, you could do a cool bunch of stuff with us, but here’s really where you wanna check and see, like what can you do to evolve the business to the next stage?
[00:28:49] Vince Menzione: What you’ve said is so like impactful and we have some experts in the room that do this. They help these organizations better understand it’s really getting into your field organization to help them understand how to. How to show up for meetings with AWS re, like how to, how to, uh, co-sell together, how to think about going after these opportunities.
[00:29:09] Vince Menzione: What, when you’re, when you’re talking to customers, potential customers about their cloud commitments, like what are the right questions to ask in the pro? There’s so many things, like I’m sure the costs six has like 150 each
[00:29:21] Louise Strandoo: Easily
[00:29:21] Vince Menzione: steps. Yeah. You know, to it.
[00:29:24] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. And I think like, just to follow on that.
[00:29:26] Louise Strandoo: Um, we have partners who have gone and they’ve been like, okay, we’re getting a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS. We’re getting funding, and if they don’t have this, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It fails. So this is really like, yeah, it’s about building that resilient architecture to say, if we go big, do we have the execution plan to succeed?
[00:29:47] Louise Strandoo: You can’t start with a plan to say, give us a bunch of funding and we’ll go do it. Your salespeople will say. Know what that is. Don’t care. Yeah. So you have to put all of that, you know, all of those building blocks in first to make sure that we can actually execute.
[00:30:01] Vince Menzione: You need alignment from the executive suite down to the selling floor.
[00:30:05] Louise Strandoo: A hundred percent.
[00:30:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:30:06] Louise Strandoo: Yep.
[00:30:06] Vince Menzione: That’s really what it’s all about.
[00:30:07] Louise Strandoo: Yep.
[00:30:08] Vince Menzione: Louise, thank you so much. It’s been incredible. So great to have you join us. Thank you
[00:30:15] so
[00:30:15] Louise Strandoo: much. Yes, thank
[00:30:16] Vince Menzione: you.
[00:30:16] Louise Strandoo: Thank you,
[00:30:16] Vince Menzione: thank you. Thanks for listening to The Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated. Share it with a partner leader in your network.
[00:30:26] Vince Menzione: Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the Ultimate partner.com for show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.