7 Co-Sell Tactics That Separate $1B Marketplace Winners
Hi, it’s Roman Kirsanov from Partner Insight newsletter, where I deconstruct winning Cloud GTM strategies and the latest trends in cloud marketplaces.
This week: insights from our recent event “AWS Marketplace: Your 2026 Revenue Engine”. Here’s what you’ll learn:
Jay McBain’s keynote breakdown - why 96% of deals are partner-assisted—and how marketplaces deals are often won months before transactions.
Partner involvement in marketplaces is climbing to 59% by 2030, with AWS expected to hold ~80% of marketplace transactions, according to Jay.
7 co-sell tactics separating $1B marketplace winners from the rest. Leaders at Okta (crossed $1B on AWS), Anthropic, AWS Marketplace CoE, and Clazar break down what actually scales vs what stalls.
But before we dive in:
Cloud commits just crossed $500B— AWS hit a record $200B alone. If you need to train your sellers to convert commits into closed deals, join our online workshop on Wednesday (Nov 12) with leaders from Contentsquare, AWS, and Suger.
This 60-minute session delivers the sales scripts, playbooks, and automation workflows you can implement in Q4 and into 2026.
Jay McBain: Why Your Deals Are Won Months Before They Close
If 70% of tech spend moves to/through/with partners and 96% of deals today are partner-assisted in some way, are marketplaces a checkout lane or the coordination layer for how enterprise software is actually bought?
Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Omdia broke down the shift in his keynote at our recent “AWS Marketplace: Your 2026 Revenue Engine” event.
Here are my 7 key insights:
1) Treat growth as a team sport—engineer the “seven-partner room.”
Today’s $5.3T tech market still transacts 70.1% via partners, with 96% of deals involving partners at some stage. Winning means designing for the seven actors around each deal (consulting, design, architecture, implementation, integration, MSP, ISV).
Jay showed a real enterprise example (they tracked at Omdia): AstraZeneca purchasing millions in software. The customer visited AWS twice. The seven partners conducted dozens of interactions—and the deal was actually won in December, but transacted in April.
Practical takeaway: secure advocates across that stack for every opportunity and influence their role before, during, and after the transaction.
2) Prioritize AWS first—marketplace share is not evenly split
Jay’s view: AWS holds a dominant share (close to 80%) of marketplace transactions/revenue today. Translation: if you must sequence marketplaces, sequence AWS first. Build your Cloud GTM motions where buyers already transact at scale.
3) Bet on rising partner attach inside marketplaces
Marketplaces have been compounding ~82% in recent years as Jay predicted; now he predicts that partner involvement is climbing to 50% by 2027 and ~59% by 2030 in marketplace deals.
Case signals from the event:
Hyperscale ISVs like Okta and CrowdStrike scaling to $1B+ via MP; Salesforce hitting $2B on AWS Marketplace in 18 months; and channel partners like Presidio entering the billion-dollar club.
Action: operationalize partner programs on marketplaces and consider CPPO for complex deals.
4) Build for an integration-first buyer
The new majority buyer (millennial) optimizes for integrations and assembles best-of-breed stacks. Services are growing faster than products because integration-first buyers employ more partners to reach outcomes.
Category mix matters: MarTech sells just ~10% via partners; Cybersecurity >90% through channel.
Action: if you’re in the industry that is heavily partner-focused, deepen services alliances and packaged integrations that shorten time-to-value.
5) Master “co-keep,” not just co-sell—NRR is the score
Two-thirds of the industry is recurring. The sale (via marketplace) is only the first 30 days; the job is renew, expand, and enrich to 108%+ NRR (that Wall Street is expecting). Build joint success plans with your seven partners (implementation, data, security, ops) and schedule expansion triggers as motions, not afterthoughts.
6) Play the power-law in services—align with the few that move the market
Jay shared their most recent research at Omdia, showing that 1,000 partners firms drive two-thirds of global tech services. The very top tier of partners drives more than the next 970 combined.
Those 970 drive more than the next million providers.
Map your top target services partners per region/vertical and co-create multi-partner offers that bundle their design, implementation, etc. with your SKU.
7) Ship AI as features inside stacks—through partners
Jay highlights that early enterprise AI has been 88% partner-driven (POCs, agentic patterns), an encouraging signal for the industry. This high percentage supports the idea that, like previous tech eras (like cloud), partners will be fundamental to how AI is implemented.
Jay argues that AI will be wrapped around SaaS platforms and applications (that businesses already use). Jay highlighted that a restaurant doesn’t call OpenAI or buy a GPU — they see AI through Toast or Square. Enterprises expect AI inside their existing stack.
Most of the world’s SaaS and ISV applications were built on AWS. Therefore, as these platforms add AI features, they will naturally look to AWS for the integration to build those AI models
Why this matters now
When deals that transact in April were actually won in December —months before the transaction happened on the marketplace —it’s a reminder that many early, decisive “moments” are invisible to the seller. Jay’s point is to move upstream and influence the entire 28-moment customer journey.
Discover where your buyer is learning, which partners influence design, and which integrations increase adoption. The long-term vision is for the marketplace to give you visibility across those moments. Until that arrives, alliances must orchestrate it.
500B Cloud Commits Crossed: Coach Your Sellers to Convert Them on Marketplace
Cloud commits just crossed $500B— AWS hit a record $200B alone. Milestones matter, but only if your sellers can turn commits into won deals on Marketplace.
This Wednesday (Nov 12), we’re bringing operators to connect strategy to the exact sales plays, scripts, and workflows your sellers need.
Mike Marzano - Global Head of Cloud, Data & Platform Alliances, Contentsquare
Mike drove $0 to $30M+ in marketplace revenue in 30 months with just 3 people supporting 400 sellers.
His results:
Deals averaged 81% larger through co-sell
Sales cycles compressed by 26 days
He gained traction with both AWS and Azure by leading with pipeline momentum and driving marketplace deals.
Mike will walk through his seller coaching system for Marketplaces:
The 3-question qualifier + decision tree to route deals to Marketplace vs direct
3 proven deal plays (Commit-Retirement, Budget-Crunch, Beat-the-Competitor) with buyer + Cloud AE scripts you can copy
Automations & workflows that convert commits into revenue faster
Juston Salcido - Strategic Partnerships, Sr. Partner Development Specialist, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Juston spent 6+ years architecting marketplace strategies for 100s of ISVs and generating millions in revenue growth.
He’s authored comprehensive guides which contribute to key pillars of AWS’s “Characteristics of Successful Sellers” (COSS) framework—the playbook AWS uses to help ISVs scale.
Juston will break down what makes co-sell work from AWS’s perspective—and the framework that separates partners who scale from those who stall.
How AWS teams decide which partners to engage with, and how to position yourself to get prioritized
How AWS marketplace and co-sell can help to get MEDDPICC insights on customer, budget potential, etc.
Sales enablement that scales — How top partners structure training, compensation, and renewal strategies to move from single deals to 100s
Roman Kirsanov - CEO, Partner Insight
I’ll stitch the macro to the micro: why the $531B cloud-commit milestone creates urgency now.
Then we’ll move into seller qualification, MEDDPICC tie-ins, and the automation patterns that remove friction so reps don’t need to become ops experts.
We’ll also discuss what worked for 300 alumni we trained in our Cloud GTM Leader course.
If you need your sales team to run marketplace deals—not just discuss them—this is the session to join
🗓️ Join us on Nov 12, 9–10am PT (60-min tactical workshop)
This isn’t another keynote. We’ll show you how to coach your sellers to convert cloud commits via Marketplace, so you can integrate it into your Q4 and 2026 strategy.
See you on Wednesday!
Thanks to our partner Suger
Suger helps B2B software companies unlock revenue through cloud marketplaces—from listing to transaction to co-selling—by automating the heavy lifting of marketplace operations.
7 Co-Sell Tactics that Separate $1B Marketplace Winners
If you’re measuring co-sell success only by deal volume you submit , you’re missing what separates billion-dollar performers from everyone else.
The co-sell panel at our recent “AWS Marketplace: Your 2026 Revenue Engine” event, revealed the operational tactics behind marketplace scale.
It featured Krista Damico from AWS Marketplace CoE, Josh Greene who leads cloud alliances at Okta (crossed $1B on AWS Marketplace); Umang Shukla, Strategic Partnerships at Anthropic, and Aditya Patil who leads Customer Experience at Clazar.
Here are the 7 moves that stood out:
1) Verticalize your approach—AWS re-focused, you need to follow
AWS reorganized around deep industry expertise. Top performers adapted by building sector-specific use cases, not generic pitches. One example: an Okta team member spent extra time creating a healthcare-specific presentation for 40 AWS sellers covering that vertical. Result: home run engagement. Vertical messaging earns field trust faster and gets you into more rooms.
Action: pick 2-3 priority industries and rewrite your co-sell narrative around their problems, not your product features.
2) Arrive with precise asks
High performers lead co-sell calls with a crisp situation summary and specific, actionable requests for the AWS account team.
Cloud commits and credits (PPA/EDP) are deal sweeteners, not the strategy.
Mature partners take ownership of the deal and come with a plan. Don’t ask AWS to win the deal for you—bring the business context and specify exactly what you need.
3) Co-sell is a cross-functional sport inside your company
Sales is your first customer, but finance, operations, legal, deal desk, and enablement determine whether marketplace works at scale.
Build trust early by mapping what each stakeholder cares about and how they’re measured, then show how AWS marketplace features help them do their jobs better. When you do this, they advocate for marketplace instead of resisting it.
4) Automate your ACE flow to match your GTM motion
There’s no one template for submitting opportunities. PLG companies like Honeycomb use simple rules—auto-submit deals over $50K ACV when they hit specific stages—to double or triple monthly ACE submissions.
Enterprise-focused companies filter by vertical, region, product, and revenue before submission. Both approaches work if you layer on disciplined weekly reviews, automate error fixes, and pipe AWS feedback back into CRM so AEs see which account managers drive referrals and conversions.
5) Make “Better Together” simple and aligned to AWS initiatives
You’ll get limited field time. Win it with clear use cases tied to AWS priorities—such as securing AI agents. The goal is triggering interest by showing you solve a shared customer problem, not delivering a comprehensive deck.
Sophisticated doesn’t mean complex.
6) Use marketplace to meet buyers where they are
Marketplace reduces procurement friction and lets you tap existing cloud commitments. It also provides the governance, auditability, SSO, and security posture enterprises expect—especially critical in regulated verticals like financial services and life sciences. Industry-tailored SKUs and listings accelerate adoption by addressing sector-specific requirements upfront.
7) Expand globally with AWS infrastructure, not headcount
For lean companies, the AWS Marketplace provides leverage to scale internationally without local teams. Two paths: established enterprises mirror local operations with local currency and local marketplace operators; startups anchor new countries on marketplace and outsource invoicing, tax, collections, and disbursements.
Why this matters:
Even Okta, which crossed $1B on AWS Marketplace continues to evolve. Co-sell isn’t a program you launch, it’s a discipline you refine continuously.
Winners build internal stakeholder buy-in before chasing external volume, simplify their Better Together story to earn field attention, align deal submission mechanics to their sales motion, and treat AWS as a force multiplier for reaching buyers and geographies at scale.
Unlock Your Growth on Cloud Marketplaces: Last Cohort of 2025 Starts on Nov 18
After guiding 270+ cloud alliance leaders to marketplace success on AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud, our last cohort of 2025 Cloud GTM Leader course opens Nov 18th.
With software sales on cloud marketplaces projected to reach $163B in just 5 years (see Jay McBain’s projections above), mastering them has become essential for companies looking to scale.
Why is it more relevant today than ever before?
The playbook to grow on cloud marketplaces isn’t obvious and constantly evolving.
Cloud commitments hit a record $531 billion in committed customer spend and growing.
Co-sell, PLG, free trials, and co-marketing with hyperscalers are becoming more critical than ever.
The AI agent explosion is rapidly accelerating cloud adoption and turning marketplaces into “everything stores” for SaaS, data, and agents - right before our eyes.
That’s why we’ve been partnering with 50+ exceptional speakers and mentors who share their actual battle-tested strategies in our courses.
Why join this Cohort?
Learn directly from VPs of Partner of the Year winners, hyperscaler experts and our incredible mentors
Master co-sell tactics that drive real pipeline ($0 to $200K+ in sales and $7M pipeline in 8 weeks for one alumni)
Get practical frameworks to get your entire org on-board and accelerate cloud GTM together
Join a growing community of 270 cloud alliance leaders
But don’t just take my word for it.
Here’s what our alums are saying:
“I came in knowing almost nothing and now I feel equipped to have in-depth conversations with leadership and stakeholders.”
“The highlight was learning a clear, actionable GTM framework and how to align teams around cloud buyer needs through ecosystem partnerships.”
Our alums loved the “open discussion with peers from different business functions and companies covering SaaS, Cybersecurity and Hyperscalers” and the “tactical elements and measurement tools to measure progress.”
“People with real experience sharing the how - how did they win, how did they fail, how did they tackle challenge X or Y.”
“Finding Partner Insight’s Cloud GTM Leader course was exactly what I needed. Roman is so well connected, bringing key players across AWS, GCP and Microsoft. I really appreciated hearing from both large and small companies on their selling journeys in the marketplaces.”
Ready to transform your growth on cloud marketplaces? Cohort 13 kicks off on November 18 - last cohort of 2025.
Don’t miss your chance to join this program recognized by Jay McBain of Omdia as a Top Education Program for Channel & Partnership professionals.
P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.