With a 25-year career spanning Partner, Channel, and Direct Sales, Niall has worked for the past 13 years in Cloud Services. For the last 8 years, he served as a Senior Sales Lead in Enterprise Sales at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Niall is now founder and Managing Director of Flywheel Consulting, specializing in AWS Marketplace Build-Market-Sell.

He shared his insights on creating a winning co-sell motion with cloud providers:

🎯 Early alignment is crucial for a Successful Co-Sell

Co-Sell on Marketplace is a net new route to market. It is not an OR channel - it is an AND channel.

It is important to emphasize that when Marketplace partners are engaging and selling to customers in a new Co-Sell motion, Cloud Provider is NOT selling your service, and the partner is NOT selling the cloud provider’s service. They’re offering a JOINT solution to customers that addresses specific customer needs and delivers better customer outcomes.

Co-Sell via Marketplace requires partners to be exceptionally clear on their "WHY" their product/service delivers additional customer value.

🤝 Collaborate early on WHY

For a successful Co-Sell motion ideate the "WHY" for the customer, explaining how the "better together" story leads to a successful customer outcome. For instance, AWS ideates through a working backward workshop that starts with customers’ needs and collaboratively work backwards to ideate on solutions to deliver better customer outcomes.

💎 Be crystal clear on the value you deliver

Drawing on my experience as a seller in a cloud provider, if we're working together, I needed a clear understanding of other's values:

✔️ What are you deeply passionate about?

✔️ What are you best in the world at?

✔️ What economic value do you bring to the collaborative solution?

📈 Build Trust

Co-sell is a lasting business partnerships for customers, partners, and Cloud Providers. Establishing trust is crucial for success as this success needs to scale into vertical industries and regions etc.

💯 Share success stories

Celebrate and share successful case studies with customers, marketplace sellers, and cloud providers.

💡 Bring Unique Insights to Effectively Engage

In addition to absolute clarity on your "WHY" and Values you deliver, other effective strategies to engage with CSP sales teams include:

✔️ Elevate customer engagements with your Insights

Enhance interactions by having specific insights into a client's business challenges or a unique perspective on addressing customer needs.

✔️ Leverage competencies: Cloud provider sales teams seek partners with the right competencies to deliver optimal customer outcomes.

✔️ Referenceable use cases: Highlighting previous customer studies is an impactful tool to engage with Cloud Teams and emphasise the value add.

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