Getting into the "guts" of AWS Co-Sell with Brett Fountain

Trunal Bhanse (0:1.964)

Welcome to the Clazar podcast, everyone. It's here where we talk about the GTM leaders who are reshaping the SaaS sales and partnership playbooks. And today we have one such leader with us. His name is Brett. Brett is the VP of partnerships and alliances at Posit. He comes here after an extremely successful stint as a director of AWS partnership at DeepWatch and two previous premier ISVs in the space. Brett is one of the co-founders of CADy Shack.

an incredible community that provides means for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing on AWS Marketplace and AWS Co-sell. He has also been featured on CRN's 100 People You Don't Know But Should list of leaders helping craft programs that ensure partnership success. Brett, welcome to the show.

Brett Fountain (0:49.285)

Trunal thanks for having me. It’s always great to get in front of more people and share the, like I always like to say, know, the dark arts of working with AWS. I really appreciate you guys having me and thanks for the investment that you guys have made into the communities that are out there. And it's a big challenge climbing these $120 billion mountains out there. So the more help we can get from our partners, we appreciate it.

Trunal Bhanse (1:8.376)

Awesome. The deep understanding of AWS and climbing the mountain of $120 billion is exactly what I'm excited to talk about with you today. And just for the audience, Brett is one of those, you know, experienced campaigners in the industry who has been there, done that and seen it all. know, Brett, what I'm excited about today's podcast is really going deep into the guts of AWS and really understanding how one strikes a good relationship? Like we have a script, we have questions, and we'll go through those. But at the same time, I would love to have an understanding of whatever you've learned over the period of the past several years that might be beneficial for the audience.  So to start off with, you know the current economic climate isn't the best right now. Despite all of the constraints on tech spends, businesses are still investing in specific areas like AI and data.

That puts an org like Posit in great position to take advantage of the cloud partnerships. Now, how are you using this demand to your advantage in an effort to strengthen the hyperscaler relationships?

Brett Fountain (2:14.478)

I've been a big, it's a great question to know, like, you know, scaling those big monsters can be such a challenge. And, and, now, we see the world going in that direction and the way that people are changing, they need to move faster, they need to be more scalable. And just the flexibility of the big cloud providers are really essential to our business. We see our customers there.

Brett Fountain (2:42.361)

They're asking for it, they're demanding it, know, and as such a large community we have over here at Posit, we have millions of users of our platform. They really help dictate a lot of that. Big fan, a big champion of our communities. But, you know, going back to that, right? You know, how are we, how are we using that to take advantage of that with the hyperscalers, right? For me,  this falls into like the, one of the primary areas of what, you know, like a Michael Musselman and myself always talk about like the five, the six C's of building successful alliance and partnership out there. You know, like three of the easy ways to get there is, you know, what we're doing together in Co Sell Co -Build and Co -Market with the hyperscalers, know, the big, the Amazons of the world, right? Integrations into everything from their marketplaces to Co -Sell to when we talk about Co -Build, deep integrations with, you know, infrastructure as a whole, integrations with the SageMaker team, making it easier for our customers to consume.

The way that our partners want to be able to do it, which is going to help get them to where they want to be faster, right? So staying focused on, you know, customer obsession in that route, right? Not only does it create new areas of trust with competencies and integrations, that also increases the, you know, just the tools in your sales tool belt, as we like to call it, that gets you into the right room with the right sellers to build rapport with not only the sellers, but the customers.

And really start to grow and take advantage of the whole world as it migrates into the cloud. I've seen a lot of big changes that have happened there recently. And then of course, that led you into another one of those totem pillars, co -market. Once you've got these great integrations and you've got competencies together with Amazon, you get to push it out there to the world and help grow and grow the business at scale with the individuals that you get to work with on a day -to -day basis.

Trunal Bhanse (4:24.644)

Absolutely. And one such recent example, AWS announced  last year at Re:Invent that Salesforce is available on the AWS marketplace. Now, businesses like Salesforce developer, and they have developed a very strong cloud partnership in the areas of data consolidation. 

You know, when they came on board, to be frank with you, I felt like, hey, Salesforce, what is Salesforce doing on the AWS marketplace? I was very curious to see their journey, but now I know that they're doing really, really well on the AWS marketplace. They announced recently in their earnings call that one of the top three of their top 10 deals were actually on the AWS marketplace, which is fantastic. Now, what do you think is the groundwork needed to create something like this?

Brett Fountain (5:13.423)

Well, two things, I got to have direct visibility into their progression into the marketplace. It was fun. It was one of the things we were, one of the individuals that ate our dog food, right? At the previous ISV. At DeepWatch, not only were we a big firm believer in all the great advantages of working with marketplace, transactional marketplace, but we ate our own dog food. We had an EDP with them, we would transact there. And one of our big spins was Salesforce. So even that advantage of helping ourselves as an ISV by leveraging the transactions of some of those top ISVs like Salesforce was great when that transaction finally happened. That was a newer program for them, but it really helped accelerate the program for us. We had the great financial benefits from there. And of course, now that's also led into best practices for Salesforce trying to really see the power and the flexibility and really the scale of working with somebody that's so big that delivers truly substantial financial value outside of traditional channel and bars and things like that. And so it's really a better together story. They're built on it, they keep our data on it. It's safer, it's more flexible, it's more scalable. And then we get financial benefits now that they're coming together. So the outcomes for the customer and the partners have been fantastic.

Trunal Bhanse (6:28.268)

Yeah, like again, you know, Posit or Salesforce are just fantastic examples.  On the other side,  Brett, is, you know, when you look at a Posit or even your previous org like DeepWatch, as much  demand as there is for data and security solutions, the competition is also just as extensive, right?  Now, when you look at that, look at that from a marketplace angle, like how does the need to stand out to inform your marketplace, how does that inform your marketplace strategy?

Brett Fountain (7:24.303)

You know, that's a, that's a good question. Um, I, me, going back even historically, it, know, leveraging marketplace and the deep understanding of how that can grow the business, how it can make financial impacts to your customers, how it can grow your partnerships is, really, really relevant. And like, that's one thing that I think strategically can be very, very attractive for new partner acquisition for, you know, getting to the right customers, knocking down the competitors that are in your space that are not quite as mature in those different areas. So for us, understanding those marketplaces, being masters of those, being able to leverage that to scale, to help our customers, not only in a faster transaction process, faster deployments.  I'll give you a short story about using that to be more attractive to partners. We were in a competitive situation a couple ISVs ago with the big national VAR, and we weren't necessarily winning the race with technology to technology wasn't there, but when they mentioned that they had some struggles working with the big guys that are out there, the big Amazons of the world, of understanding, like, how do you really co -sell? What do you do when you're in the room with Amazon? How can they really help a consulting partner or a GSI in those areas? And so that was a big gap for them in the business. But as we were big experts there and had great relationships, that actually took precedent over just the base technology, which was pretty close, but the business tactical advantages of understanding how to educate their sellers.

create Co -Sell with a partner leading the way was really, really attractive for him.  And within a few weeks after that, met with the board and boom, PR was released that we were the go -to market partner for the next 36 months. So that was a great accomplishment there. And it is just a different way to look at things like marketplace and being obvious that you are happy to transact and work with the big ones. And I think that shows a lot of maturity of understanding how to work with the big cloud providers that are out there. I think a lot of people are afraid of Amazon. A lot of people are afraid of some of the Azure's and GCP's of the world. It's really not the fact. They're there to help scale. They're there to help grow. And when you win, they win and vice versa. It's a really great symbiotic relationship that can come from there.

Trunal Bhanse (9:30.102)

Yeah, that's such a good point, Brett. You know, I talk to customers, you know, day in, day out basis, and we help them ⁓ unlock this mystery as well. But what I've ⁓ also seen quite a bit is this apprehension sometimes that you just called out, which is, you hey, I'm in a competitive, like I have a competitive product to one of the hyperscalers. Is Co-Sell really going to work for me? And I always give them examples that are out there, which, know, there's so many products out there that compete with the native services. But, you know,

be it AWS, Azure, or GCP, all of the hyperscalers are really focused on bringing value to the customer. And AWS specifically, I would say, they have the way they have structured those programs, the incentives on the seller side are just fantastic. Is there anything in that realm based on your knowledge, the incentives, the programs that can help like an ISV make use of that and then stand out? Do you have any examples of that to share by any chance?

Brett Fountain (10:25.817)

Yeah, you know, to me, the faster you move, the more transparent you are with somebody like an Amazon, the snowball effect starts to come into place, right? You look for other angles, other ways to win. And even within this last year, when I was at the last ISV, we were nominated for Partner of Year twice, and none of that was an accident. A lot of that was completely around the way that we were transparent in the strategy and the tactics we had to work and build favors all across Amazon.

And what happens with that, you get notoriety and then your name starts coming up more often, you become more relevant, you know, and then interesting ideas start to come your direction because they want to see you win. Because when they know that you're an all -in partner, then you start to speak Amazonian, you start to understand what makes them tick, how to stand out of the crowd. It's all about the macro level problems as a partner that we can solve for that just gets you to the front of the line. If you understand to start how to solve for those things with Amazon, you will raise the bar as a partner.

then you will get invited into launch programs, know, stage opportunities. I've gotten to go to PGA tours for free because Amazon and our strength of a relationship and wanted to grow that, it becomes very reciprocal. So, you know, I'd say even just from the basis being really transparent with Amazon and everything that you have to share is really, really incredible. And let me back up to answer that very, very first question, right? Like you said, being competitive, things like that. When you have 300 of your own products and 130 ,000 partners globally,

It's really easy not to be competitive to the other 130 ,000 partners offering. So, you know, at the end of the day, think about it. You know, if, you've got a bunch of products to sell, that's another macro level problem. The best thing that you can do for AWS, especially if you're worried about being, you know, non -biased or biased to your, there being not competitive is just lean in because of that simple fact you have. We're just, you know, at the core of it.

A lot of the tactical hand -to -hand combat happens at the seller level. That in the field is where the magic happens. And if you're a better partner to them than other partners, you help them sell, help them do their thing, then they're going to lean in towards you every time. Again, for the simple fact that when you have 300 products to sell, imagine mastering 300 products to sell and then understanding how to work individually with 130 ,000 different partners. It's never going to scale. And if you lean in and understand how to work well with an Amazonian, they're going to put your cart ahead of anybody else is just because they have an automatic and an immediate SME for a product, for a solution that solves a very specific problem that the customer wants to solve. And it's way easier for me to push a partner in and take one of the compensation programs in the back pocket than it is for me to try to learn another solution for another problem that may or may not be the best thing for being customer obsessed for the outcomes that they need.

Trunal Bhanse (13:12.266)

And do you think, Brett, like in this specific situations, like those sellers, when they bring in a partner, I sometimes actually feel that they're then perceived as a neutral entity in that conversation and actually helps them. And then as you just called out, right, like I can either sell my native service or a partner service and then still get similar kind of incentive. So I still win as an individual and I'm still helping the customer win.

But from a trust standpoint, I think that that lands probably better. Have you seen that happen as well?

Brett Fountain (13:44.931)

Yeah, no, absolutely. I've seen Amazon sellers put a directly competitive solution above their own solution because of a couple of those facts, right? They only have so much time in the data scale, you know, and if they can use a partner to get the same outcome, then why not? It's the same reason that they look at partners the same way that we look at Amazon. Like I've got an organization of, I don't know, several dozen sellers. Amazon has an organization of several tens of thousands of sellers, right? And so it works vice versa.

When they have 130 ,000 partners, that's 130 ,000 partners that can potentially close a deal that they're going to get paid for when they don't have to do it necessarily fully themselves. You make the connection, give them all the beautiful outcomes that they're looking for, and it's just an easy way to scale bi-directionally, right? So again, the way we look at partners is we want to work with the big guys. They've got relationships. That's a great way to scale. And again, vice versa. They can't be everywhere at once. They don't have all the solutions for everyone. And if they can put in somebody that's friendly, that knows speaks Amazonian, then they'll do it every time.

Trunal Bhanse (14:48.376)

Absolutely. And I'm going to bring you back to something that you said about being the partner of the year. And I think the next question actually gels really well with that. With the data being such an integral part of core hyperscale offerings, what is your strategy to align your product with theirs and continually explore the potential for core building and core innovation? So that's the question. But it really jives well with if you can position it in a way that you've thought about previously making progress towards that partner of the year award, I think that would be really interesting for the audience.

Brett Fountain (15:21.251)

Right. So, no, absolutely. That was a really interesting situation. And I find myself in a very similar situation here because of understanding the partner landscape and how that directly impacts an Amazon seller on a day-to-day basis. Right. And a lot of focus of what we did there at DeepWatch and ISV was, some of those macro level challenges. The sellers can't always be experts in all things. Let's say in that case, being a security operations center, like that is a

4 ,000 tools, people, millions of dollars to able to make something like that work. But what we did know was if we align certain things certain way, if we consume data a certain way on Amazon, it's going to increase consumption of native services. It's going to create a lot of bias to us. And if you lean into things like co -build, right, then it even helps solve other problems that traditional customers have. I can go down a little bit of the rabbit hole, but without getting too lost.

But even one of those outcomes that led us that direction was something that Ruba Borno announced at reInvent this last year. It was the AWS built in. And that was a concept that came from us as an ISV. We were trying to solve for a greater problem that customers couldn't solve on their own without either using ProServe or a consulting partner, which is time and expense, to be able to get onboarded for, at that time, additional telemetry in their environments.

And so the customers were always kind of stuck out there on their own for those certain types of challenges. But because we leaned in as a partner and we wanted to be customer obsessed and we brought the idea to Amazon, it created this beautiful outcome that also created not only a faster onboarding from months to minutes, but also a ton of bias to the sales team because they knew like, oh, wow, that's a really great use case. You've been sharing all this opportunity with us. We've been co -selling. They're driving more consumption in a better way that secures the customer gives the customer more of a secure outcome and everyone was happy with that. those interesting areas of again, the co -sell, the co -build, the co -market community finding champions and driving consumption, those six C's, right? They're completely interwoven and everything that you do and the outcomes that you get and how fast that you can move and accelerate yourselves with the big hypervisors like Amazon.

Trunal Bhanse (17:37.248)

And talking about things that are interwoven, that is a good segue into our next segment, which is I'm very excited about because I know you have like a treasure trove of knowledge there, which is the co -sell and marketplace together. Right. And just like you and Michael Musselman, one of our other favorite marketplace experts, Nadav from Wiz, often tells us, how the strategy, the co -sell strategy is your marketplace strategy. There are no two strategies. That's just like, you know, the one strategy altogether.

What could be a bigger superpower than having AWS or any hyperscaler advocate for you? Right. Now, could you tell us a bit about the point of your market, your marketplace journey when you recognize this opportunity and what are the first few things you did in order to build that volume and momentum to achieve that?

Brett Fountain (18:23.695)

So early adopter, know, early transactional marketplace, it just clicked with me, whether it's the, you know, like I joke about myself, my ADHD and the giant golden retriever chasing shiny objects that I am. I I saw the idea and the concepts behind it early on, like the ability to help a customer with their contractual spend, you know, with EDPs and PPAs. And it's like, wow, what a brilliant concept, you know? And it's almost inconceivable for a lot of customers and partners that are out there today still. And even as big and interesting as a mature concept as that is, it remains today only like, think it's two or 3 % of all global customers in AWS actually have an ADP or PPA. But that being said, it was just so many interesting little ways to win faster deployments, right? Talking about co -build, you know, more secure deployments, interesting ways, like some of the areas that you can, you can have things that drive co -sell with compliance, like, you know, the vendor insights that AWS has produced where you got third party compliance.

And then, know, great opportunities, like we got to be the pilot program for the original impop, which is, the acceleration credit program through the AWS Marketplace. And I think the number one lesson that I've realized in the years of doing hundreds and hundreds of transactions on Marketplace and having really unique wins was just to stay open about the possibilities of what you can do with Marketplace. I've seen customers get into an EDP without even enough spend.

with traditional infrastructure, but they have enough ISVs that were ready to transact to the marketplace together. Like what an incredible outcome for a customer that just wasn't really there with adopting cloud, but still got some of the other financial benefits. And then one of my all time favorite deals, working with AWS, it was a customer that was pretty much almost all on-prem, little bit in some of the other hyperscalers, but spent no more than, I want to say it was hundred bucks a month with Amazon on a connect product. So, you know, why would they, you know, why would say that they would do ever do anything with transactions over there. But again, I just, like to leave the, you know, that creative bucket open of how could you win with Amazon? Cause I've won huge deals with Greenfill engaged, you know, verticals across different areas, great little like leverage to pull with the marketplace team. But that one in particular with just a little bit more creativity and discovery with the customer. And we found they were behind on another project, which Amazon had a great answer for. And we said, Hey, just hear us out.

So we threw an idea, a concept out there to the customer and they loved the idea. They wanted to transact in the AWS marketplace, almost a million dollar deal, ended up back with $50,000 in credits, which completely funded a proof of concept for a DR project. And I made lots of champions in the hearts and eyes of the Amazon Southeast Greenfield team who still knows it loves me. There's so many ways to win. I think the leave that bucket open.

Don't be afraid of things like propensity to buy, but don't let it be a limitation for you either. So there's so many creative ways to get there. Just poke around, look for the stories, think about the interesting things that'll create benefits for customers. And so that's my probably number one takeaway of all the years and all the boxes you can put it in. Just leave that box open. You never know what you're going to find.

Trunal Bhanse (21:34.944)

And then as you called out, right, like there's so many levers that you can pull to strike a good partnership. And many times it's just lack of knowledge that exists out there that people think that, you know, hey, I have to spend millions of dollars in order to get those, get those benefits back. But as you just correctly pointed out, even if like just suspend via the marketplace, that could be a huge lever to pull. If you have that kind of a spend to go and strike a PPA with the AWS and then get those benefits. That's a, yeah, that's, that's a. something that is not as well known, I'm, you know, as expected you called it out perfectly in your answer here.

All right, so next question is, as we touched upon before, the data sphere is crowded and it's also core focus on AWS. Where are the hundreds of partners, when there are hundreds of partners vying for AWS' attention and backing on deals, how do you spotlight your value proposition in most compelling way? 

Brett Fountain (23:5.509)

Yeah, no, that's a good one. That's probably, I'd say, you know, the many times we've surveyed all of our group members, you see all sorts of different answers, right? And all the partners I talked to, whether it's in the field or at events, nine times out of 10, you know, I think there's a gap in understanding what does Amazon really care about, you know? And I go back to those macro level challenges, the 130,000 partners, 300 of their own, right? A lot of them get brand new accounts every year. And then most partners get observation, show up and expect to treat that they're going to work and co -sell together like they're in the channel, which doesn't work that way. They're never going to be in your channel. You're always going to be in their programs that you have to align to, right? And for compensation and things like that. And I think a lot of partners get really frustrated with that because they want to come in and...

Hey, there's usually like, you know, a point scale system, a silver, gold, platinum, whatever it looks like for compensation. And it just doesn't work that way. You can't spiff them. lot of the traditional, you know, approaches to channel and reselling and you name it, it doesn't quite work the same. So for Amazon, like it's our, in my opinion, it's our fiduciary responsibility to be a next generation partner, be really direct, understand how they're compensated. What does it mean for the seller? Like put yourself in their shoes. Like you're every 15 to 30 minutes, you might be in front of another partner. They're giving you their bright, shiny object and doing what they call the show up and throw up. And a lot of them, again, nine times out of 10 have no idea what it really means for you as a partner and what it means for them as a seller. So be like lead with intent. Be very direct with this is why I'm here. I am in the right programs. I hold the right competencies and then go right into the like what is the outcome for their customer? Because that's what they care about. They don't care a ton about all the 130 ,000 partners hope that it heard anybody's feelings.

but they care about the customer obsessed outcomes that they want for their customers. So do lead with intent, right? Again, what's in it for the seller? What is in it for the customer? And then what do you want? Those three things should be the focus every single time. And then the outcomes that you're going to want to get from that is either, know, Intel information, maybe some introductions, and then there's always the ability to influence your opportunities when you're getting there. So again, be direct.

They don't have a lot of time in the day. And if you waste that time, you're going to lose that shot. last two ones, I just want to add onto that because it is important. Know your divisional placement. If you're looking across your sales force and most of your customers are SMB, don't go into Amazon and tell them that you work in enterprise and SMB and PubSec and everywhere else. And then know your superpower. What is, what is that small differentiator between you and the next competitor? How does it consume more native AWS services? How is it going to give the customer a better outcome? Never trash talk to the partner.

But do lead with intent because you'll just you'll make a lot of fans. You'll make a lot of champions, right? Another one of our seas of success with Amazon.

Trunal Bhanse (26:0.664)

That's fantastic. And then let's say, you know, an ISV or a partner has nailed this, you know, better together story or value proposition. The next thing comes is the operationalizing of it, right? So when it comes to operationalizing and scaling Co -Sell, like sales empowerment, the sales partnership alignment is absolutely vital. And we've been lucky enough to have AWS experts conduct workshop for our customers on the three E's, right? Educate, enable and engage. Could you tell us a little bit about how this process works specifically for you?

Brett Fountain (26:31.097)

Yeah, you I liked a lot of the what that you can get from Amazon. I think the how is the dark arts, right? Like, yes, you know, educate, enable and engage, right? Yes, ACE is a sharing platform. Here's how you update and put in opportunities and then you follow up when you once you get validated. But that's not going to move the needle, right? So I do think that is very valuable. You got to have a starting point for everything. You got to have a basic framework. But the how is where things like, you know, the communities like CADy Shack and that expertise of the experience of understanding, again, is that a level of measurement for, you know, maybe certain compensation programs that shall not be mentioned on this podcast? Yes, it probably is. And if you don't have a minimum of active opportunities, great win losses, know, like percentages and good amount of close ones, then it's harder to get into the cool kids club. yeah, I think that, you know, making sure that you understand what you're doing there.

is one thing, how you're doing it and why you're doing it to get to the outcome. That's the strategy, Vision, strategy, execution. So where do you want to be and how fast do you want to move? You know, that would be my ⁓ response to you. If once you have access to it, there are fantastic partners like you guys that can help enable a lot of the Co -Sell at scale. But you also have to be ready to catch that fastball coming from Amazon. You go in and share a thousand opportunities. Can you set up, hand off, enable, coach, be the great translator before you between your company and Amazon with your sellers. That's one of the things you have to be careful with. So you can move as fast as you want. You want to start having a thousand account mapping sessions in the next 30 days? It's possible, but you got to be ready to catch the fastball when you get there. So I would say, again, sales enablement is key. I've looked at multiple sides of it today. I've looked at automation. I love it. I think I've had a body shop with lots of a whole crew, whole, you know, see of an army of Alliance folks and

doing the one -to -one, the handoff, the tactical hand -to -hand combat. And then I've really seen a great trend of focusing on highly enabled Co-Sell experts all across your entire sales force. You know, we can't be everywhere at once, which also means we don't want to be the hamstring to accelerate your opportunities when you're working in something like an ecosystem -led growth organization where you're leveraging your partners for growth, closing your deals faster, all the other stats we know behind that. So for that, for again, for me, it's how fast do you wanna move, and then you start to execute against to be able to make that happen. But it's all about capacity.

Trunal Bhanse (28:59.180)

Yeah, and in any context really, efficiency builds velocity. But  you can apply that logic definitely to Co -sell.  So in talking about efficiency and velocity, how have you been able to achieve that process efficiency to keep the volume of opportunity submissions up and maintain accuracy and accurate data transparency across your systems  and also with ACE all the time?

Brett Fountain (29:23.461)

Yeah. So again, based off of, where I'm throttling at the point, do I want to open the floodgates and move all that kind of stuff? So that's, that's going to come down to fine tuning your strategy. You know, are you ready to open the floodgates? No. Are you ready by 50 %? You have the, you know, what's your capacity look like tomorrow? Because once that starts to move again, you don't want to damage relationships. You've got to make sure that you're, you're responding accurately and you're saying the right things. You're speaking Amazonian and you're going in with transparency. You're going back to some of the other comments we had earlier, Trunal. You know, people can be afraid of working with somebody as big as Amazon thinking that they're going to steal their customers and things like that. So there's also, there's also that we don't want to waste anybody's time. If whether it's a new partner, maybe there's a part, another partner involved in the deal, like a consulting partner on top of bias fee, even having some preparation there can be really important. don't, you know, we don't want anybody to waste the Amazonian's time, our partner's time. Cause sometimes if the maturity isn't there, that it's just a waste of a conversation. So I think there's a lot.

that has to be said about that. again, fine tuning is really a response to everything that goes involved in the Co -Sell of connecting with your sellers, your counterparts, knowing what to ask for, knowing what not to ask for, and then eliminating the fear. They're not, you know, they're not some of the other partners that can be there. Amazon, they, when you're in a Co -Sell together and you're in their compensation programs, this ISV Accelerate, they only care about you and the challenge that you're trying to solve. They're not looking to, you know, see your solution and then find two other partners and then make meetings with the customer. It's just a, it's a, that's an impossible, that's an impossible hill to climb anyway, just because of the, you know, like some of the other macro level problems we talked about between how many partners are out there and how many products that are out there. Now, and the second layer again, kind of goes back to fine tuning, but it is really the co-sell experts. And in order to be able to scale, can't be one person. I can't have 4 ,000 conversations in the next three months. You know, it's just going to be impossible. So we do need, you know, well -enabled co-sell experts that know when to go in, they know what time to pull triggers, they know what to ask for, how to ask for it, how to speak Amazonian in the right ways, start to talk about the different compensation programs, just all those little things to earn trust and have the right expectations for the outcomes that they expect, not only based off of the relationship they have with the person, but the relationship they may have with the customer. So fine tuning co-sell experts is my short answer for that.

Trunal Bhanse (31:47.116)

Yeah. And like, think something that you said really caught my eye Brett is, you know, you can literally have go right now and start having this, you know, account mapping sessions and, promise the world to like account managers and like, they'll definitely get excited. They'll give you the attention, but what's really critical is what happens afterwards. And many, many companies and many prospects and many people that I talked to,  they, again, lack of knowledge,  because of lack of knowledge,  they're not really able to understand it. And then they miss out this opportunity where you can latch onto that moment when you had this opportunity to be really in front of AWS and catch on and then really strike a deeper partnership. that's  one thing that I would love for people to take away from that is, you know, make sure, making sure that you have the right capacity at each stage of the Co-sell journey.  Because at any point in time, if you don't, then, then things are not going to work in the direction that you want them to.

Brett Fountain (32:38.213)

Yeah, I 100 % agree. know, the other side of that too is again, what I started to kind of touch on, there's, I've had plenty of sellers on both sides. I've had some ones that do all of their business 100 % with Amazon and then some of the newer ones that aren't, they're not used to the co -sell behind that. And it either becomes deer in headlights or because they don't see value in, you know, what is that? mean, like just because it's not necessarily part of your industry, maybe you don't understand cloud. So you're afraid of cloud.

I've had sellers I worked with before like with, why would I want to work with Amazon? They're just like, they're just like a data center in the cloud. How the hell could they help help me? You know? And then what do you know? So, you know, maybe the news, the C level executive didn't realize they had an EDP or committed spend or other little just, you know, things to pull other levels to pull. You know, maybe it's a mandate from the CFO that all transactions need to go through marketplace. And if you don't bring it up to the last mile, when you're already past last negotiations, those transaction fees can hurt.

So there's lots of gotchas that we can accidentally, you know, create for ourselves, generally based off of fear or maybe ignorance, just as what it is.

Trunal Bhanse (33:44.106)

Absolutely. And as we are talking more and more about Co -sell, right? And Co -sell is definitely a gift that keeps on giving. You know, having the backing of AWS on a deal is such a huge superpower. Getting Prospect Intelligence, access to their wider network, these are the paths to greater revenue growth on the marketplace.  Maybe could you talk a little bit about some of the AWS programs that you have found valuable, extending the benefits of Co -selling?

Brett Fountain (34:9.625)

Yeah, actually, I'm going give you an origin story for Amazon. in the beginning, before there was credit acceleration programs and things like that, and I was working with some other ISMs, you but when there were still ISMs before it was collapsed over at Amazon. You you'd run here and you'd ask for favors for different Amazonians. And before there was established credit programs, you had to go, you had to go ask for a favor. Hey, can I get five grand? It'll help it drive through the marketplace. Just trying to find another angle to accelerate it.

That was a huge PIA for the AWS seller. So they had to go to deal desk, took at least a couple of days. had to fight for it. Sometimes it was positive impact because you got a bigger deal. Sometimes it makes negative impact because of the buckets that it may impact negatively for a seller. So it was always a challenge. But for me, I was always curious. Somebody had to have the bucket, right? Somebody had to own the bucket. So I said, so we went to the guy with the bucket, guy, George Merlakis, and just said, hey, we got an idea.

If we want to double the amount of transactions we have on Marketplace this year, this is back to the alert days. And I think we went from 40 or so and said, hey, we'll commit to 100, know, early, early days before Marketplace is really getting ruined. And they said, we like the idea. We'll just put guardrails around it. You dedicate a Marketplace customer advisor that says yes or no to every single one. But let's get a bucket. Let's see how many of these things we can actually accelerate.

So, MPOP was magical at that time. know, Marketplace Partner Origination Program or whatever the new acronym, there's a gazillion of them and then they change acronyms after they get taught the old acronyms. either way, that drove us to 120 transactions that year, you know, five, six, seven years ago, 120 transactions that year and established a new program that, voila, ended up on the next year's go -to -market available options to help accelerate your transactions on Marketplace. So,

I think that is probably one of the most interesting programs that I've worked with just because I saw what happened in the beginning, how it more than doubled our available transactions on the AWS marketplace, won a ton of friends and champions by being able do that. And at the time, I think we were seventh in marketplace out of all the ISPs that were out there. So really punching well above our weight, you know, because of that. and of course that led into so many other great things, other invites, special programs, QBRs with the big wigs, the Rachel Scaffs of the world and things like that. So really opened up a lot. So I'd say that's absolutely one of my favorite.  I participated in tons of programs specifically around go to market from analytics driven, know, AO producing product programs to thematic campaigns and even raising  the ability to work with some of the marketing teams and raising the bar with the outcomes that we were trying to get towards and really created some really fun content that say, you know toot my own horn, actually I'll toot Ryan Orsey's horn because he was the one that was fabulous looking on video. You know, even had him come down because again, it was these interesting programs that create the snowball effect and having all these great leaders create all sorts of great content and it just goes on and on and on. So, up there.

Trunal Bhanse (37:16.086)

Yeah. And then  the thing that I spoke at the start of the podcast, right, which is beyond the operational aspects,  the key to co-sell and having this strategy really work for you is relationship building. It's extremely vital.  And, you know, what I'm excited about is the following few questions, because I think this knowledge you either have to have,  or because if you worked at AWS, Azure, GCP, one of these big guns, and then you realize how they are structured and how they operate, then you know it.

Or if you've done it a couple of times, then you've known it. So I think what would be really interesting for our audience is helping understand how these org structures and who plays what role in this big behemoth of promotion. So can you help our listeners understand the different conduits or representatives from AWS that are available to you? And how do you get access to them? The PSMs, the ISMs, the sellers, the DMs, the other organization people as well.

Brett Fountain (38:14.937)

We can just say acronym, acronym, acronym, acronym, acronym, acronym, acronym, acronym. Right? Well, first off, again, number one level of measurement as a new partner is ACE. Let's just start there. That's a lot of people don't like understand the weight of ACE, but ACE is how you're measured as a partner. ACE is how your partner development manager is measured. ACE is how the PSM team decides if they're going to work with you or not.

Yeah, you know, same thing. The district managers look at you and they judge you based off of what the transaction history, what's your, you if you have a high win loss ratio or a low win loss ratio, a lot of those are really, really important. And that is that that's to me is that that's the initial conduit to opening up yourself to not just the APN, but the APO. Right. And those two organizations don't always communicate really well together.

So your PDM, you you got to start there. That's going to be your quarterback to like, let's get you to do some of the basic things to start getting visibility and the visibility you're going to want to be able to capture some of these other people that are going to be able to help you. And then after that, a lot of it comes down to, you know, a lot of the PSM, ISM organization and the sellers. And that's really kind of where the favors start to build up. You start there, especially once you understand your divisional placement, you know, your superpower statements and whatnot. Then you start to follow the verticals start making favor by sharing your ACE opportunities in the Co - Sell. Every single one of those that gets transacted,  whether it's through Marketplace or through just a launch and, closed one on ACE, let's celebrate and go do some more account mapping. Everyone that you share with Amazon that's a win is also a favor that somebody owes you, whether that's an account mapping session, a little bit of influence on another account, maybe it's an origination for something else, or maybe it's just Intel to help move the needle on an account that hasn't really done a lot in the last couple of months. So Conduit is...

It's all roads lead to sales like a lot of us sales people always say, right? Sharing those ACE is your conduit that opens up and starts really everything. Once you got the basic essentials set, you know, there after that, like for an ISV specifically, that PSM organization is the firewall or the accelerator based on how you know how to play the game. You start to speak Amazonian, you start to share and build that pipeline up. You start to hit those, you know, rules of the unwritten, you know, the unwritten rules of the road kind of markers.

Brett Fountain (40:34.159)

That show that you're going to need to be at this high angle and make things move over here to start moving up the rankings and get validated as a higher partner. And then that's where, again, the magic starts to happen. It starts to snowball. You're in the field. You're doing the tactical hand -to -hand combat. You're making favors with the field sellers. They start telling their friends, their other sellers around them that gets back to the district manager because you're impacting everybody's quota overall. Then your relationships start to pick up even faster with the district managers. And then the leaders want to ask you,

How the hell are you moving so damn fast? That's how you start to work towards getting nominations for Partner of the Year. But a lot of it does come from that, right? You've got to have good pipeline. You've got to have clean pipeline. You've got to have automated pipeline. Don't do this manually. It's just a silly, expensive way to do it. And that again, that just leads you into where the PSMs eventually become like your champions to get into different areas. You want to go work up in the Northeast with healthcare and life sciences? Awesome. You want to get down into, you know...

whatever it is, PubSec and DC, absolutely, those are the champions that are gonna open the doors and also say, hey, these are a good partner, it's okay to work with them. Or say, hey, you'll just have the meeting, get the free lunch and then we'll kick into the curve afterwards. So you need all of those champions, right? Another one of the C's of success with working with somebody as big as Amazon.

Trunal Bhanse (41:50.177)

That's awesome. And then as we talked about these different acronyms, the second, and probably maybe even more importantly, how does your team and you specifically as the leader build that one -on -one association and an actual connection with the AWS reps? Are there any cadences, best practices you use, any tips and tricks that you've seen in your years of experience?

Brett Fountain (42:12.477)

I'm going go back to transparency, right? You've got to share. They don't know what you have in your pipeline if you don't share. And it's not an eat your lunch kind of thing. They're not going to start just prospecting against your customers, but they need to know what's your value, right? If they help you grow, and Amazon, this is how they look at you, all right? You're built on Amazon. I want my sellers to help support any customer that's built on Amazon because if they sell more, they consume more. It's as simple as that.

And if you always think about it as everything, you know, everything is focused on consumption, then it's going to make you get there a lot faster. But going back to that, right now, it starts with care. You've got to build as many favors as fast as you possibly can with Amazon. And the easiest way to do that is to drive things through marketplace transactions and share it with ACE and make sure you're keeping up with those things. Give them updates, stay connected with them. And the more that you stay relevant with them, the more that they start to feed you back. Right. But you got to have those areas, right, that you've got to commit.

Even if you share an opportunity, if you don't go back and launch it an ACE, then the seller has nothing to show for the work that they put into it. And they don't want to share with, they don't want to share that type of activity with you again. So get in person anytime you can. If you have an opportunity to, to fund a QBR, a happy hour, their freaking Christmas party, whatever it is, build all those favors as often as possible as you can. Again, it could be something as simple as like maybe you're a third leg for a lunch and learn cause they just need another partner, but it's your opportunity to get access to that layer of sellers that most partners never ever reach. So the more that you can share and be transparent and then ask them for favors afterwards, then the more you'll build just that long list of favors every time you drop that carrot and ace.

Trunal Bhanse (43:53.656)

Awesome, this is amazing. So I have one last closing out question, but before that, is there any question that you would like me to ask you that we haven't covered?

Brett Fountain (44:2.733)

Yeah, I'd say of all you've been doing, you know, some podcasts for a while now and you got, you guys have a good book of business over there. A lot of customers and a lot of Alliance managers like myself that are doing some interesting things. Um, what about from your eyes, what should you not do with AWS?

Trunal Bhanse (44:23.577)

It's a great question, Brett. And this is the first time that I've been put on the other spot. So let me think about it. I think I'll probably route it back to the thing that you said is in the transparency. think it's really a human to human relationship that you're building. Sure, there's this big behemoth of Amazon.But behind it are really the sellers and those relationships are human to human relationships. though building that trust starts with transparency. It's like they have a mission to accomplish, they have a job to do, you coming in and being there, almost sort of a helper in helping them meeting the goals while still keeping things fully transparent. That is extremely important.

So that is exactly what you should do. And anything that comes in the way of that mission for you is something that you shouldn't do. You know, like be extremely transparent about how the deal is going, be extremely transparent about how you think about certain things in about the programs, give them feedback as well. I've seen AWS folks being amazing at accepting feedback and actually doing, actually taking an action on them, be it programs, be it tooling, be it you know, whatever it is that it is like, I think doing more of that is definitely super useful as well.

‍Brett Fountain (45:48.549)

Fabulous. Yep. That's a great call. Like I, I'll give you a couple examples of, um, of both sides of it, right? I've seen monster partners sharing 300 POs with AWS who have tens of thousands of customers, and then they don't understand why they don't get any love. Like, well, if they don't know, they have no idea you have 20 ,000 customers. They have no idea how to support 20,000 customers. And

You just lost out on 20 ,000 favors, but I'm glad you share 300. It's true.  I've seen individuals get frustrated. They're billion dollar companies. They don't understand why they can't move the needle. And a lot of it is, doesn't, it's, alliances is many complex moving parts and you've got to piece meal them all together because they're all intertwined. And if you don't follow best practices with that, yeah, you're not going to make it very far when it comes to the big hyperscalers that are out there. So transparency, again, to me, it's one of the biggest pillars of working with Amazon.

Now there's a lot of other things you got to do. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to make this too easy, but you know, again, some of those levels of measurement in marketplace, opportunities you share, the percentage, the quality of work you do, then all the rest of the stuff is still important. You know, like the win wires back in the day, your competency, how many certifications you have within your organization, are you growing that over year over year? And that really starts to move the needle too. But, but at a base level, like if you want to work and you want to grow and you want to do it fast and transparency is key. And the only way to get there is with automation.

It's something even, you I love the data science company I work for here at Posit. And that's one of the big things that we've made changes already to that have already grown the organization, the access layer that we get in, the types of relationships that are getting there. And it can't be done manually when you have thousands of customers. It has to be automated. And if nothing else, you're just saving yourself a crap ton of wasted data processing time anyway. It's been in the time where you should happen, where that should happen, like you said. I joke where I say, you know, tactical hand -to -hand combat, that's where the magic happens. It's in the field, building relationships, staying relevant. That's where it happens. People remember people. People don't always remember the details of your solution.

Trunal Bhanse (47:55.160)

Absolutely, absolutely. And this is a great segue into our last question to close it out, right? You like you've shared so many nuggets and so many insights on just this like 30 minute podcast. ⁓ But I would love to get your take on how leaders like yourself who are perhaps maybe not as advanced in their career as of right now, but aspire to be they can most how can they make the most of events or communities like CADy Shack to level up, build, a rapport and open up new opportunities for themselves and their organizations.

Brett Fountain (48:23.407)

So I will selfishly plug CADy Shack in. It's a open, free community for other Alliance, you know, Alliance individuals, no matter where you're on your journey. If you don't have an Alliance individual and you're the CRO, jump in. If you've got Alliance manager, director, VP, chief cloud officer, there's so many moving parts and so granular. I have so much content and details in my brain. I couldn't imagine starting back over again to try to make any progress, you know, out there without having all that beautiful tribal knowledge and there's nothing like tribal knowledge. Again, Amazon tells you what to do, understanding how to do it as a totally different animal.  Why you do it, how you do it, all the other kind of tactics behind that. So I would say if you, like I said, join our community, love to have you, if not find somebody else. That was really the core of the origin story of even CADy Shack I would go to different events and summits and specifically look for other Alliance managers and other Alliance directors like myself just to say, well, how the hell did you do this? How did this happen? Why didn't that happen? And again, because of those big macro level reasons we talked about, know, a PDM can't be everywhere at once. There's so many programs dedicated to so many different parts of the ISV stack, depending on if you're the big master, you know, monster mature ones, the crowd strikes of the world and the snowflakes of the world, or you're just starting off or maybe you're in between.

There's so many different programs to help you on your journey that are out there, but it's impossible for them to know any. So the more friends that you have that are doing this, right? We all hit ourselves on the hand or the toe with a hammer a couple of times. You learn lessons, right? From bad mistakes, but also all those happy accidents. And then the people that figure out like how to hack it a little bit. How do I move it a little bit faster? And then how do I actually take advantage of some of the go -to -market programs when they're thrown at me? And the only way to do that is to find other peers in our industry that have done the same thing. That's really, again, the core of the industry that we've been building over here in the community that we've been building over here with the guys like Michael Musselman and lots of really great people that have been out there.

Trunal Bhanse (50:20.932)

That's fantastic. And then I couldn't vouch it more. Like we had the pleasure to work with you and Michael for the longest time and, you know, excited for that journey to continue. But for today, Brett, thank you so much for spending the time with us. This has been so good. There's so much information to unpack here. I feel like we need to do another session that's maybe an hour long or two hours long, but we'll save that for some other day. But today, thank you so much for stopping by and, would love to have all the audience consume all of the learnings and take something with them every day.

Brett Fountain (50:52.951)

And of course, if you need data science, Posit is the place to be. Appreciate you, Thanks for having me on, Trunal. It was really great.

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