What Co-Selling with AWS Means
The term "co-sell" gets used loosely in AWS partner conversations, and that imprecision causes real problems. Partners describe themselves as "co-selling with AWS" when they have done nothing more than list a product in the Marketplace, register an opportunity in ACE, or mention AWS in a customer conversation. None of those things, individually, constitute a co-sell motion.
A co-sell motion is something more specific. It is a structured, repeatable process through which your sales team and AWS field representatives work together on a shared set of customer opportunities. The AWS rep brings their customer relationships and co-sell attribution. You bring your product and technical expertise. When it works well, both sides benefit: you get access to accounts and deal velocity you could not generate alone, and AWS benefits from a partner who drives more customers deeper into the AWS ecosystem.
The distinction that matters here is between co-sell eligibility and co-sell execution. Most partners focus almost entirely on eligibility: completing the prerequisites for ACE, passing the Foundational Technical Review, enrolling in the SaaS Co-sell Benefit program, and then wondering why their AWS relationship is not generating any pipeline. Eligibility is the entry ticket. Execution is the program.
AWS field reps are measured on revenue and customer outcomes, not on partner program metrics. They will co-sell with partners who make them look good in front of customers. Building a co-sell motion means earning that reputation, systematically.
Understanding the AWS Field Organization
A common mistake in AWS partner programs is treating "AWS" as a single entity. It is not. The AWS field organization is segmented, distributed, and in some respects decentralized, and the people who can move co-sell deals forward are not always the people you spend the most time talking to.
Partner Development Managers (PDMs)
PDMs are your primary AWS relationship contact. They manage a portfolio of partners and are responsible for growing those partners' participation in AWS programs, including ACE, funding, and tier advancement. They can facilitate introductions to field reps and help you prioritize which opportunities to submit. What PDMs generally cannot do is source customer deals for you directly, because their book of business is partners, not customers. Expect monthly check-ins, QBR prep support, and program guidance from your PDM. Do not expect them to be the engine of your pipeline generation.
Partner Solutions Managers (PSMs)
PSMs sit closer to the field than PDMs and have more direct relationships with the AWS account teams in specific territories. In practice, many partners have limited or no direct PSM contact, particularly at lower partner tiers. When you do have a PSM relationship, treat it carefully: PSMs are often the bridge between your program metrics and the field teams who source co-sell opportunities.
Territory Field AEs (Account Executives)
Field AEs are the most important co-sell relationship you can build, and the one that most partners neglect. These are the people managing relationships with AWS enterprise and mid-market customers in specific geographic or industry segments. When a field AE has a customer who needs a capability your product delivers, and when they know who you are and trust that you will perform, they will bring you into that deal. That is the co-sell motion at its core. The challenge is that there are hundreds of field AEs across AWS, they rotate territories periodically, and most of them have never heard of your company.
Specialists and Solutions Architects
Within AWS, there are domain specialists in areas like security, data and analytics, migration, and industry verticals. If your product fits a specific workload or compliance requirement, building relationships with the relevant specialists can surface co-sell opportunities that a generalist field AE might not flag on their own.
Most partners spend the majority of their AWS relationship time talking to the people who cannot directly source pipeline. Shifting attention toward field AEs, even incrementally, is usually the highest-leverage move available in a co-sell program.
Why the ACE Pipeline Is the Foundation, Not the Afterthought
ACE, the AWS Customer Engagement pipeline tool in Partner Central, is the mechanism through which co-sell activity is tracked, attributed, and measured by AWS. Partners who do not use it consistently are largely invisible to the field teams they need to engage. Partners who use it well signal to AWS that they are a serious co-sell partner worth routing opportunities toward.
There are two common failure modes in ACE that undermine co-sell programs. The first is under-submission: companies that are actively working customer deals that involve AWS, but are not submitting those deals in ACE. The second is stale pipeline: companies that submitted opportunities months ago but have not updated them, leaving their ACE dashboard filled with closed deals, lost deals, and outdated contacts that make the whole program look inactive.
The practical standard for a healthy ACE pipeline, from the perspective of a partner who wants to earn co-sell attention:
- At least ten active opportunities submitted at any given time, across relevant accounts and stages
- Opportunities updated at least monthly, with stage progression documented
- AWS account IDs included for customer records wherever available
- Co-sell collaboration enabled on opportunities where AWS involvement is appropriate
- Closed-won outcomes submitted promptly, with revenue attributed correctly
Maintaining ACE pipeline at this standard is not complicated work, but it is consistent work. Most partner teams underestimate how much ongoing attention it requires and let it slip when other priorities compete for time. This is one of the primary reasons co-sell programs stall.
The AWS Co-Sell Playbook
ACE submission templates, a PDM engagement framework, opportunity qualification criteria, and a repeatable co-sell motion your team can execute independently. Download it free.
- ACE Submission Templates
- PDM Engagement Framework
- Opportunity Qualification Criteria
- Field Alignment Protocol
- QBR Prep Guide
Building Relationships Before You Need Them
One of the most consistent patterns in successful co-sell programs is that the partners generating the most AWS-sourced pipeline are the ones who invested in field relationships before they needed them. This sounds obvious stated plainly, but it runs against how most partner programs operate in practice.
The typical pattern looks like this: a partner learns about co-sell, gets ACE set up, submits a few opportunities, then emails their PDM asking if any field reps in the territory have customers who might benefit from their product. The PDM may or may not respond quickly. If an introduction happens, it is with a rep who has never heard of the partner, has no context for why their product is relevant, and has forty other priorities competing for their attention. The call or meeting happens, nothing actionable comes of it, and the partner concludes that co-sell does not work for them.
The alternative approach starts much earlier and looks more like relationship management than sales development. Before you have active co-sell deals to discuss, you should be building awareness with the field teams in your target territories. This means attending AWS events and seeking introductions there. It means doing Immersion Days and executive briefings that get your product in front of AWS field teams in a low-pressure, educational context. It means showing up consistently in PDM check-ins with relevant market intelligence and customer stories, not just program status updates.
When a field AE eventually has a customer who matches your product profile, and when they have already heard your name from two or three different directions, the co-sell conversation starts from a position of credibility rather than cold outreach. That difference in starting position compounds over time and accounts for most of the variance between co-sell programs that generate consistent pipeline and those that generate occasional deals.
How to Qualify a Co-Sell-Ready Opportunity
Not every deal belongs in your co-sell pipeline. Submitting every opportunity to ACE regardless of AWS fit is counterproductive: it creates noise for the field teams you are trying to build credibility with, and it dilutes your ACE dashboard with deals where AWS has no meaningful role to play.
A co-sell-ready opportunity typically meets several of these criteria:
- The customer is an existing AWS customer, or the deal involves a workload that will run on AWS
- AWS involvement would materially improve the probability of winning or the speed of closing the deal
- The customer's AWS account team would benefit from knowing about this deal, either because it drives additional AWS spend or because it addresses a known account initiative
- The opportunity is at a stage where AWS engagement is productive, typically past initial discovery but before formal procurement
- Your team has the capacity to manage an active co-sell relationship on this deal: you will respond to introductions quickly and keep the AWS team appropriately informed
A smaller number of well-managed co-sell deals is consistently more productive than a large number of poorly managed ones. AWS field reps disengage quickly from partners who are slow to respond or fail to follow through.
Engaging Productively in a Live Co-Sell Deal
When a co-sell deal is active, the mechanics of how you engage with the AWS field team matter as much as the quality of your product. Field AEs are managing large account portfolios and dozens of active deals simultaneously. Your job as a co-sell partner is to make it easy for them to include you and hard for them to regret doing so.
Practically, this means a few things. When an introduction is made, respond the same day and come prepared with a clear, one-page summary of your product's relevance to the specific customer and use case. Do not send the standard corporate overview deck. When you are invited to a customer meeting, prepare a joint agenda with the AWS rep in advance and coordinate on the message before you walk in. When you learn something important about the account: customer feedback, competitive dynamics, timeline changes, share it with the AWS team promptly. These are the behaviors that get you included in the next deal, and the one after that.
Be explicit about what you are asking from AWS at each stage of a deal. "We would find it helpful if you could introduce us to the IT leadership" is more useful to a field rep than a vague request for support. When the co-sell relationship is governed by specific, actionable asks on both sides, it runs more efficiently and produces better outcomes.
Making the Motion Repeatable
The difference between a co-sell event and a co-sell motion is documentation and process. A single deal that happens to involve an AWS field rep is an event. A repeatable program requires that your team knows, without having to ask, how to identify a co-sell-ready opportunity, how to submit it in ACE, how to engage the relevant field rep, and how to manage the relationship through close.
This is where most partner programs stall. The co-sell knowledge lives in one or two people, typically the alliances manager and one senior AE, and it does not transfer to the broader sales organization. When the alliances manager is occupied or unavailable, co-sell activity stops. When new AEs join, they do not know the process. When the PDM changes, the relationship has to be rebuilt from scratch.
Building repeatability requires a written playbook that covers at minimum:
- Qualification criteria your AEs can apply independently to identify co-sell-ready deals
- Standard ACE submission process with templates and field-level guidance
- PDM engagement cadence, including what to bring to check-ins and how to prepare for QBRs
- Field rep introduction protocol, covering how to approach initial engagement and what to prepare
- Co-sell deal management standards, including communication cadence with AWS and escalation paths
- Attribution and reporting process for closed-won co-sell deals
The playbook does not have to be long. It needs to be specific enough that an AE with no prior co-sell experience can follow it without depending on the alliances manager for every step. That self-sufficiency is the marker of a mature co-sell program.
Measuring Whether Your Co-Sell Program Is Working
Partners often struggle to articulate the ROI of their co-sell investment because they are measuring the wrong things. The number of ACE submissions, the number of QBRs completed, and the number of field rep introductions made are activity metrics. They tell you whether your team is doing the work. They do not tell you whether the work is producing business outcomes.
The metrics that indicate whether a co-sell program is working are:
- AWS-sourced pipeline: the dollar value of opportunities where the initial introduction or referral came through an AWS field relationship, measured quarterly
- Co-sell-influenced win rate: comparing the close rate on deals where AWS was actively involved versus deals where they were not, which typically shows a meaningful difference when the program is functioning well
- Deal velocity: whether co-sell deals are closing faster than non-co-sell deals, which is one of the primary expected benefits of AWS involvement in a deal
- PDM relationship quality: a qualitative assessment, updated quarterly, of whether your PDM relationship is active, whether introductions are being made, and whether your program appears prominently in the AWS view of your tier segment
None of these metrics require sophisticated tooling to track. A quarterly review covering these four dimensions, compared against prior periods, gives you a clear enough picture to know whether the program is building momentum or stalling. Most partners do not do even this minimal analysis, which is part of why co-sell investments frequently seem to produce no visible return.
The Bottom Line
The frameworks covered in this article work in practice. They are drawn from building and managing co-sell programs across dozens of AWS partners at varying stages of the partner journey. Translating them into operational documents your team can use: ACE submission templates, a structured PDM engagement framework, and a deal qualification rubric, takes the concepts from principles to process.
We have packaged those documents into a single, free playbook. If you are building a co-sell motion from scratch, or trying to scale one that is currently dependent on one or two people, the playbook is a reasonable starting point. If you are further along and want to discuss the specific gaps in your program, the free strategy call is the right next step.
If you want someone to run this for you, co-sell motion design and management is one of our core services. We build the ACE discipline, manage the PDM relationship, and run the field alignment program. Reach out if you want to talk through what that looks like for your team.