Start with one seller, one account, one win

Karan’s 0→1 playbook: don’t begin by trying to enable the entire sales team.

Find one seller with the right appetite, often someone who saw marketplace work at cloud-native companies like Snowflake or Databricks. Run one successful co-sell. Turn the result into an internal proof point.

Trunal stressed that companies often fail when they try to scale marketplace enablement too early. If many sellers are confused at the same time, the internal narrative becomes “this does not work.”

A single successful seller creates a much stronger internal flywheel.

Your consumption story is your co-sell currency

LangChain built a "drag calculator" to estimate how much AWS consumption its products drive for every $1 of customer spend.

Internally, that number tells leadership and finance why AWS would invest in the partnership. Externally, it gives AWS sellers a reason to engage.

If you want cloud sellers to lean in, show the cloud value your product creates for them.

Competencies are not badges. They unlock growth potential

Karan made a point many teams still miss: AWS competencies are not just partner-program checkboxes.

They can unlock MDF, marketplace programs, GenAI funding, and customer-facing benefits that help create pipeline and move deals forward.

Rob reinforced this. When he joined, Grafana had zero AWS competencies. Today, Grafana has multiple competencies, with the AI competency unlocking a strong set of GTM benefits, including demand-gen support.

In AI, an architecture decision is a distribution decision

Rob shared that Grafana Assistant previously used Anthropic models via an API.

The team moved that usage to Bedrock, with no change to the end-user experience.

But the go-to-market impact was significant. It strengthened Grafana’s AWS story, helped unlock the AI competency, supported MDF access, and gave AWS teams a clear consumption narrative.

Karan on why this matters: inference spend is one of the most strategic cloud consumption categories in AI. If your product drives Bedrock usage, you are much easier for AWS sellers to prioritize.

AWS cares about the customer’s AI transformation, not just your consumption

Nate explained what makes a compelling pitch.

The pitch is not only, "We drive AWS consumption." It is also, "Can you help this customer adopt AI across its business?"

Enterprises need implementation support, help to meet data and deployment requirements, and a path to run AI in their AWS environment.