Get on Marketplace. Fix your ACE hygiene. Build a Better Together story. Use a 3PI. Get exec sponsorship before you go near AWS with an ask.

This is all correct and good advice.

But none of it tells you what to do on Monday morning.

It's not so much that the advice is wrong, more that the generic one-size-fits-all nature isn't fit for purpose. Generic best practice, mine included, assumes a starting point that is never stated. "Build a Better Together story" means something completely different to a seed-stage PLG tool with no sales team than it does to an enterprise ISV with a 40-person AE org and no exec sponsor.

If you don't know where you're actually standing, you can't tell which version of the advice applies to you. And most partners don't know where they're standing, because "readiness" gets treated as one axis when it's really three.

The Three Things Everyone Conflates

What's actually differentiated about the AWS relationship. The AWS-specific mechanics that don't exist anywhere else. ACE visibility. Comp neutrality for reps selling through Marketplace. FTR status. Whether your APN tier even makes you fundable yet. You can be a genuinely excellent sales organisation and still be invisible to AWS because none of this is in place.

What industry best practice actually looks like. What partners who are actually winning field deals are doing at each stage. There's a real difference between "best practice for a partner with zero ACE discipline" and "best practice for a partner with a live pipeline and a stalled renewal process."

How that best practice maps onto your specific business. A PLG motion with a $40/seat price point and self-serve signup needs a completely different Marketplace and co-sell setup than an enterprise ISV closing $250k deals with a six-month sales cycle. Both can be "doing AWS co-sell well." The mechanics underneath look nothing alike.

Most partners are reading advice built for axis 2, trying to apply it without ever having mapped axis 1 or axis 3. That's the gap.

Why a Checklist Can't Fix This

A checklist can't tell you which box is the most important one for you to tick next. I built my own diagnostic around six pillars, precisely because a single "are you ready" checkbox was hiding more than it revealed:

COSS Foundations: exec alignment, comp neutrality, APN/FTR status, Marketplace listing, your Better Together story, and internal ops. This is the bedrock (pardon the pun for all those AWS Services fans out there). Most stalled partnerships stall here, invisibly, because nobody separated "we haven't done this yet" from "we tried and it's broken."

Co-Sell Ready: seller prep, structured bootcamps, ACE pipeline hygiene. This is where a sales team either can or can't actually run a co-sell motion day to day, independent of whether the foundations above are solid.

PLG Ready: pricing model fit for AWS consumption, Buy with AWS enablement, free trial/demo flow. Entirely irrelevant to an enterprise-motion ISV. Existential to a PLG one.

MP Traction: subscriptions, CPPO, Private Offers. The transactional plumbing that determines whether Marketplace is actually moving revenue or just sitting there as a badge.

Activation Trigger: industry events, joint PR, seller campaigns. The visibility layer that turns readiness into actual field engagement.

Ongoing Co-Sell Motion: the Field Ready Kit, pipeline KPIs, reporting cadence. What keeps a co-sell motion alive after the initial push, instead of quietly dying the way most do.

The same pillar produces a completely different next step depending on where a partner sits. Take Better Together. For a partner with no story at all, the right move is building the asset, something a rep can repeat on a call without a technical deep dive. For a partner who already has a solid story sitting in a deck nobody's used, the right move is completely different: get in the room and actually pitch it live with an AWS seller, and refine it based on what lands.

Same pillar. Same piece of generic advice — build a Better Together story. Two entirely different actions, depending entirely on the starting point.

That's the whole argument. Best practice isn't wrong. It's just meaningless without a maturity system underneath it.

Why This Is Getting More Urgent, Not Less

As I've written about over the last few issues, AWS itself is moving toward algorithmic partner matching, with PDMs and AI systems increasingly deciding who gets surfaced based on structured data, not relationship history. That system doesn't care about your effort or your intent. It reads your ACE hygiene, your Marketplace metadata, your FTR status, as signals of maturity.

If you've never mapped your own pillars, you're not just guessing about your next move internally, you're also invisible to the systems that are starting to decide who AWS brings into a deal in the first place. Maturity mapping used to be a nice-to-have for internal planning. It's becoming the input the algorithm actually reads.

Tip of the Week

Before you act on any AWS co-sell advice this week, mine or anyone else's, write down where you honestly sit across the six pillars above. Not where you want to be. Where you are. The advice hasn't changed. Your starting point determines which version of it applies to you.

One to Read: Go back to Week 24 (The Algorithmic Matchmaker). It's the clearest signal yet of why knowing your own maturity is no longer just an internal exercise.

Thanks for reading. If you want a second pair of eyes on where you actually sit across these six pillars, not where the generic advice assumes you are, that's exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy having. Reply or reach out.