I recently sat down with Andrew Morris on Beyond Cosell. In the 20 minutes that made the edit, we covered the basics: lazy listings, private offers, when to bring in a 3PI, and why “forecastability” is the easiest way to sell AWS to a sales manager.

What didn’t make the edit is the bigger point those all lead back to. Most ISVs treat Marketplace as something to deal with at close. By then it’s too late. Whether Marketplace works for you is decided much earlier: in why you’re on it, how you qualify deals, and whether your sellers trust it.

So this week I’m going to expand on the half of the conversation you didn’t hear.

Marketplace is not your paper process

Most sales teams treat Marketplace as an optional checkout. The deal is basically done, and someone says “we can transact through Marketplace if you’d like.”

Or worse, the customer raises it at the last minute. They’ve just found out they have a private pricing agreement to draw down. Now you’re scrambling to get a private offer out before the quarter ends, and the deal is at risk for reasons that have nothing to do with your product.

This is a qualification failure, and Marketplace is just where it shows up.

Marketplace is a real way for a deal to transact. That means it belongs in Paper Process in MEDDPICC, and it should come up at discovery, not at close. Does the customer have an EDP or a private pricing agreement? Who in procurement signs off a Marketplace purchase? Have they bought through it before? Every one of those is a question you want answered while there’s still time to act on it.

Do this and co-sell and Marketplace stop being two motions. They become one: the AWS conversation that helps you find the champion and the route to budget is the same conversation that tells you how the deal will close.

The catch is that this needs the CRO on board. Andrew holds a hard line here: he won’t take on an ISV without backing from the C-suite. I agree. If the CRO is a direct-only person, your real fight is getting the person who sets sales strategy to stop blocking you, and no rep will go against their CRO.

AWS’s definition of success isn’t yours

Part of the reason Marketplace ends up bolted on at the end is that ISVs adopt AWS’s goals without noticing.

For AWS, Marketplace success means more revenue transacted through Marketplace. That’s a fine goal for AWS, but it won’t necessarily be yours.

The headline numbers make this worse. “Billions transacted through Marketplace” reads to a founder like billions in new revenue that wouldn’t otherwise exist. That leads to one of two reactions. Either it sounds too good to be true and they stay away, or they sign up with wildly wrong expectations.

Get this wrong and you end up routing deals you’d have closed anyway through a new channel, and paying a fee for the privilege. Two years later, the CFO asks what it was all for.

So the first question I ask any ISV is simple: why do you want to be on Marketplace? “The CRO wants more revenue” isn’t an answer. If they can’t give one, working that out becomes the first part of the engagement. Everything else depends on it.

Champion AEs are built, not found

In the episode, I said the core of a partnerships role is removing friction. What didn’t make the edit is why that matters so much.

If a deal slips because the Marketplace process broke, it’s the AE who explains it on the forecast call, not the partner team. Their caution is rational. What wins them over is a deal that turned out easier than the one they’d have done direct.

So build that first win on purpose:

• Map accounts against AWS. Look for accounts under a single AWS AM that already buy through Marketplace, just not from you. That’s a short list of the easiest early wins.
• Start with renewals and uplifts. A spend commitment can bring them forward or make them bigger. Getting three or four of those through creates an AE who has seen it work, and who keeps doing it.
• Sit on the calls. When we built this at Okta, a colleague and I joined every co-sell call at first. Partly that was to make sure our AEs asked the right questions. Mostly it was translation. Okta AEs carry aggressive new-business targets, while AWS AMs are measured on consumption. Two busy sellers with different targets won’t value each other until someone shows them why they should.

Then step back. Spend less time on the calls and replace yourself with material. AI makes deal-specific briefs for sellers easy to produce now. Nobody is building large AWS partnership teams anymore, so champions spreading the word is how this scales.

Win wires, inside and out

Make external win wires non-negotiable. AWS teams are flooded by partners asking for airtime, and most of those partners never write one up. Use the format AWS expects, then circulate it through the AM on the deal or your PDM. Open rates will be low. Volume is what builds recognition, because AWS cares far more about proven results with their customers than about what you say you could do.

Then write internal win wires too. Your AEs are buried in asks from marketing, product and forecasting. Tell the story of a rep who had a strong quarter through Marketplace, in terms their peers care about.

That, really, is the whole partnerships job: understand what each stakeholder values, and explain why this matters to them in their terms.

Bottom Line

The fixes from the episode matter: a clean listing, a private offer flow, an integrated CRM. But they only decide how the deal closes. Whether the deal goes through Marketplace at all gets decided at discovery: in knowing why you’re on Marketplace, putting it into how you qualify, and building champions one account at a time. If Marketplace only comes up at close, you’ve already lost the chance to shape the deal.

None of this is secret. I give it away because the information isn’t the hard part. It takes someone focused on it for three months. Without that, it takes nine.

One to Watch: The Beyond Cosell episode with Andrew Morris, for the half that made the edit: https://youtu.be/lBLOzI2KWuQ?si=vSKQwX62l2BNWjbs

Thanks for reading. If you’re trying to get Marketplace into your qualification process and keep hitting a wall with sales leadership, reply. That’s a conversation I’m always up for.