The secret to building hyperscaler-ISV relationships on the AWS marketplace with Pete Goldberg

If done right, cloud marketplaces can drive nearly 20% of your ARR pipeline at six to seven times cheaper than traditional channels. If done thoughtfully, they can even drive $1 billion in software sales, as they did for Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, or Snowflake. 

But without careful planning, it can result in spiraling interest, extended sales cycles, and a disappointed leadership team.

Director of Alliances at Own Company, Pete Goldberg, argues that the difference in where you stand is often that of – context.

Before you can onboard AWS sellers to co-sell on deals, build a strong cloud sales motion, or even present your cloud marketplace proposal, you must understand their priorities.

"The marketplaces aren't hunters. They're accelerants… Once you get that alignment done, the journey becomes easier for an alliance director or an alliance team."

Pete Goldberg

Director of Alliances  |  Own Company

In this blog, we will cover hyperscaler motivations, how to put an early cloud alliance motion into action, and the strategic tactics for building symbiotic relationships with AWS. We will also help ourselves to a generous serving of insider information from Pete Goldberg’s experiences.

TL;DR

AWS Marketplace has gone over the years from a value-add to an essential sales channel for enterprise software. However, many ISVs fail to crack the code to a successful hyperscaler partnership. 

To build a successful partnership with AWS, focus on:

• Adding value to the relationship
• Building solution synergies for customers
• Making it easier for AWS teams to support you

Read the blog to learn how Pete Goldberg advises you to translate this into action, and how a platform like Clazar can help.

AWS Marketplace has evolved into a critical sales channel

Cloud marketplaces have become an essential part of your GTM strategy. Unlike a decade ago, software commerce is now buyer-controlled rather than sales-driven. A majority of software solutions are now being built and deployed in public clouds. And the big three—AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft—now command 68% of the market.

"Marketplace as a procurement option aligns well with the shift to cloud, with 30% of all workloads expected to run on cloud, and more than 60% of new apps/workloads starting natively on the top clouds."

Nima Badiey

Strategic AI Partnerships Leader  |  NVIDIA

Cloud marketplaces have now matured into complete commercial and transactional engines for software sellers

AWS Marketplace today has become a full-fledged solution where AWS customers can find, buy, and deploy software in the same cloud environment they already use.

A Forrester study shows the benefits of listing software products on AWS Marketplace:

• 80% larger deal sizes
• 27% higher win rates
• A 40% shorter sales cycle
• Incremental pipeline contribution going as high as 20%

By 2028, Omdia expects cloud marketplaces to drive $85 billion in software sales.

How AWS thinks about value-creation and partnerships

Pricing for most AWS products “is similar to how you pay for utilities like water and electricity.” This brings down the total cost of ownership (TCO) for its customers but also creates an upward pressure to constantly drive consumption.

AWS realized that third-party solutions could also contribute to consumption growth in two ways:

• Customers increase consumption by adding new software solutions to their AWS workloads
• By deploying more software within AWS environments, third-party sellers also increase their own cloud consumption

Pete had moved to AWS Marketplace by 2015 to “recruit and build the original sellers on the platform.” It is within the AWS ecosystem that he best understood that even as onboarding and partnering with ISVs on the marketplace was a strategic priority, some partners would always be worth more than others.

"We were looking at it [marketplaces] differently. We were looking at how much compute we can drive on AWS through selling pre-built software packages."

What ISVs get wrong about marketplaces

Many businesses falter in their marketplace strategy because they don't view hyperscalers as equal partners. 

Pete notes that a common misconception is believing that sharing 3–15% of deal value with the platform entitles ISVs to active support from the cloud provider's sellers. Instead, leaders must reframe their approach to recognize the mutual value in the partnership.

Cloud marketplaces are more cost-effective than partner-sourced or even direct deals. Credit cards and payment processors charge a standard fee for every transaction, and other channel partners also operate on a commission basis.

Compared to that, a nominal 3% charge on marketplace transactions while providing the benefits of listing, transaction processing, and partnerships is far more economical.

To get more value from this relationship on the AWS Marketplace, ISVs must also treat it as a symbiosis. Instead of expecting AWS sellers to be an extension of your own sales team or the marketplace to be a lead-generation engine, introspect on how you can prove your merit as a partner.

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How to become a valuable partner to AWS

To build an effective win-win partnership with AWS as a software seller on the marketplace, ask yourself these three questions:

• Value Addition: How does partnering with us help AWS sellers meet their quotas by attracting new customers or increasing cloud consumption?
• Solution Synergy: Can integrating our software with AWS's first-party solutions create a compelling package for customers?‍
• Reciprocal Support: Are our sales and partnership teams proactively supporting AWS sellers, or are we expecting support without first offering value?

During his tenure as Director of Alliances at GitLab, Pete started from scratch and eventually drove 20% of the company's revenue through marketplaces. Rather than forcing a marketplace strategy, he developed a system of incremental progressions.

It starts with the understanding that deal referrals and co-sell support from the marketplace were earned, not gotten.

"This isn't like ‘Field of Dreams.’ It's not like you build [your marketplace listing] and the buyers come and show up on day one… It's not a discovery engine, at least for the vendors I've been a part of."

Pete Goldberg

Director of Alliances | Own Company

Instead, Pete recommends that ISVs start using the marketplace to accelerate deals that are already in their pipeline and gain a series of early wins.

"If I have a SaaS platform that runs on cloud A, every time I add a new customer, it also adds 2% to my billing each year because my platform [consumption] grows. That’s one of the things [your cloud partners] look at – how am I helping you grow platform consumption in addition to solving customer problems?"

Pete Goldberg

Director of Alliances  |  Own Company

Once you close a significant number of early customers through the marketplace, field sellers start noticing your contributions and find more interest in partnering with you.

Bonus Resource: The Complete Guide to Sales Growth on Cloud Marketplaces

Watch the complete conversation with Pete Goldberg here

How you can build a strong co-sell partnership with AWS sellers

For AWS, the marketplace is a conduit through which they drive the dual goals of:

1. Adding new customers to AWS
2. Driving up AWS cloud consumption

AWS field sellers are incentivized to partner with high-performing ISVs on the marketplace. However, to achieve a preferred partner status with the field sellers, an ISV has to meet the following criteria:

1. Prove their marketplace motion by closing a few early deals independently
2. Build a strong ‘better together’ story with the marketplace
3. Sharing the right opportunities with AWS to build a co-sell motion

Also Read:Grow revenue by aligning with hyperscaler priorities and incentives

How to close early deals on the marketplaces independently

The average $20-50K SaaS deal takes two to three months, with deal durations dramatically lengthening as contract value grows. This is because selling your product to the user isn’t the only selling you do as a vendor.

Even when you are the favored vendor to your potential customer, there is budgetary restraint and the matter of ‘unblocking funds for the procurement’ from the IT or Finance department within your buyer account.

This is a great early pain point that cloud marketplaces can take advantage of. If your customer already has cloud commits with a provider that you are partnered with, they need to utilize the entire sum within the predefined period. Since cloud commits also come pre-approved by the IT or procurement department, your buyers can simply use them to procure your solution through the AWS marketplace without having to negotiate a new budget from their finance team.

This enables faster and painless procurement.

How to arrive at the right ‘better-together’ story

1. Product alignment

How does your product align with that of AWS? For example, Datadog built deeper AWS integrations, supported 75+ AWS integrations, and offered better cloud application monitoring with AWS, making both products more appealing to customers as a package.

This helps AWS find solution completeness. By selling together, Datadog and AWS can serve customers whose cloud buying decisions depend on strong application monitoring capabilities.

2. Driving cloud consumption

Product alignment is the lowest common denominator in building a ‘better together’ story, but it does not have to be the determining factor.

In fact, despite offering competing solutions to AWS, businesses like Elastic have managed to build mutually beneficial value propositions. They do this by focusing on deployments within the AWS cloud environment and through their own usage of AWS, which drives up consumption revenue for the cloud provider.

How to build a co-sell pipeline through mutual opportunity sharing 

With thousands of ISV partners seeking co-sell support from AWS field sellers, standing out requires a different approach. Offering valuable context on challenging opportunities or introducing potential customers from your network demonstrates your investment in AWS's success.

In return, AWS field sellers are more likely to support your deals where they have insights.

“Previously, ACE registrations took 10–15 minutes each. With Clazar’s Salesforce integration, we now systematically register nearly all SaaS deals at the qualified sales stage.”

Eric Renner

Head of Cloud Partnerships |  Vectra

Also Read:A Complete Guide To AWS Marketplace

How to scale credibility through AWS partner programs and certifications

Today, 40,000+ listed products and services are competing for customer attention and field seller support through AWS Marketplace. Pete advises joining AWS partner programs, specifically the AWS Specialization Program.

Earning a ‘competency’ and obtaining AWS certifications signal strong hyperscaler endorsement. Additionally, certifications build trust with AWS field sellers, reinforcing your status as an approved and reliable partner.

"As an AWS seller if I’m going to introduce you to a customer and you hold a competency, they will have a little more trust in your solution."

Pete Goldberg

Director of Alliances | Own Company

AWS also launches several partner initiatives, incentives, commit reliefs, and support motions that are dependent upon ISVs enrolling themselves in several other programs. Here’s a quick overview:

• AWS SaaS Factory Program: Assists ISVs at any stage of SaaS development on AWS, offering guidance on building new SaaS products, support for migrating existing applications to SaaS, and resources for optimizing SaaS solutions on AWS
• ISV Workload Migration Program: Helps ISVs accelerate customer migrations to SaaS offerings on AWS. It provides go-to-market support, technical enablement, funding for rapid and successful migrations, and development of customized migration playbooks
• AWS ISV Accelerate Program: Connects ISVs with the AWS Sales organization to drive new business and accelerate sales cycles. Key benefits include
  
  • Incentives for AWS sales teams to promote ISV solutions
  • Increased visibility with AWS sales through solution libraries and awareness activities
  • Prioritized access to AWS co-sell support teams
  • Webinars on successfully working with AWS sales

Build a robust cloud GTM motion with Clazar

As a catalyst for ISV sales on cloud marketplaces, Clazar collaborates closely with AWS to equip businesses with automation tools, expertise, and strategic insights necessary for a successful cloud go-to-market strategy..

See how Supabase scales their AWS Marketplace revenue with Clazar

Our AWS solutions include an intuitive portal to manage listings, enhance marketplace presence, automate opportunity sharing and approvals, and fully leverage marketplace capabilities. Interested in learning more?

Top FAQ's

1. Why do cloud marketplaces matter for ISVs?

Cloud marketplaces lower friction in acquisition, accelerate expansion via pre-approved budgets, and streamline procurement operations. When done effectively, marketplaces can drive up to 20% of ARR pipeline at a fraction of traditional channel cost—fueling the full cycle from first deal to multi-year expansion.

2. What causes early failures in AWS Marketplace adoption?

Most early failures stem from misunderstanding the context in which AWS field sellers operate. Teams expect AWS to source deals or drive pipeline, but in reality, co-sell support is earned—by proving value, driving consumption, and demonstrating early wins. Without this foundational context, marketplace motions stall.

3. What motivates AWS sellers to co-sell with a specific ISV?

AWS sellers prioritize ISVs who:

1. Drive incremental AWS consumption
2. Help close competitive deals
3. Offer strong solution synergy with AWS services
4. Have momentum (early closed wins) on the marketplace
   Becoming “seller-friendly” is the fastest way to accelerate co-sell participation.

4. How can ISVs generate early marketplace wins before formal co-sell support?

Start by routing in-pipeline, stalled, or budget-stuck deals through the marketplace. Buyers already have pre-approved cloud commits; procurement becomes instantaneous, turning stuck deals into quick wins. These wins build credibility and attract AWS seller attention.

5. How can Clazar help an ISV grow on AWS Marketplace?

Clazar helps Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) grow their AWS Marketplace revenue by acting as a Cloud GTM Co-pilot. The platform solves the two biggest growth hurdles: technical complexity and operational friction. 

• Speed to market: Clazar automates the technical heavy lifting, allowing you to go live in 5–20 days instead of the typical 3–4 months
• Operational efficiency: Clazar integrates directly with Salesforce and HubSpot, keeping your sales team in the tools they already use. Benefits include 1-click private offers, and automated metering for usage-based models

Easier co-sell: Clazar syncs your CRM opportunities bidirectionally with the AWS ACE portal for automated opportunity-sharing, leading to better alignment and faster approvals

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