Name: The Grassroots Guide to Cloud GTM Success
Uploaded: 2026-02-18T19:01:35.932Z
Duration: 56 min 24 s
Description: The Grassroots Guide to Cloud GTM Success

Transcript for "The Grassroots Guide to Cloud GTM Success": Hello, everyone. Happy Wednesday. I hope everyone is doing great. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are dialing on in from. First off, do me a favor while we wait for everyone to trickle on in and go ahead and throw in where you are actually called in from here in the chat along with your morning coffee order. It always interests me in what people had to drink that morning. While you're doing that as well, you're gonna be seeing a poll come up, and it is what are you most excited to learn about today? We've got Nashville, Chicago, New Hampshire. Love this. Love this. Awesome. Brandon, always great to see you. Cool. Cool. Cool. Well, I think we can go ahead and start to get rolling. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is David DiFonzo. I am one of the customer success managers here at Tackle. I've been with Tackle for almost four years now, so it's been a while. It's been a while. I am so excited about today's session because, number one, who we're joined with, Corey, amazing. I have to say, in an email that we sent out, I referred to you, Corey, as my good friend. And someone responded back to my email, and they were like, are you really good friends? And I was like, listen. Number one, yes. Number two, we've met in person at re:Invent this year, so I think I can call you my good friend. So very excited. So I'm most excited about today because as a CSM here at Tackle, the the crowd that I work with mostly works in the startup space, mid market sides. And one of the big things that we see usually in webinars are the fact that we see companies who basically they're doing tens of millions of dollars each year. And when you're seeing that, it's always not the most encouraging thing in the world. You're like, okay. This is great. I love that they're so successful. How am I gonna get there? You know? So Cory from Superhuman, formerly known as Grammarly, is here today, and her story is a little different. So Cory literally started the AWS Marketplace journey as a side project, which is I just we're gonna hear more about that later. Some people do power dough baking. Some people knit. Some people do AWS Marketplace as a side project. We do what we do. You know? It wasn't her main job. There was no budget. There was no executive buy in at first, and just decided to do it. Eight months later, they've closed over $1,000,000 in one week and are projecting $5,000,000 this year. And, honestly, the most important part of this whole entire thing in my mind is the fact that it's not even the numbers. It's how you actually did it, and that is what I love the most. So, Corey, thank you for being here today. I would love for you to go ahead and introduce yourself and give us kind of a sixty second version of where Superhuman was, where you started, and where you are now. Of course. Well, hi, everyone. So nice to meet you. My name is Corey Woodburn, and I love tackle so much. And I absolutely love getting to work with David. So I will definitely plus one that we are close friends, and I'm excited to see some of my friends from a past life, where I was a CSM. So I take it very seriously to get my CSMs to love me. But, yeah, I am I'm so excited to talk today about the AWS Marketplace. I I am now our alliance lead for our cloud marketplace alliances. We mostly do AWS Marketplace, but I run that overall strategy. And I will be very real with you. I was not hired to do Marketplace. Prior to taking on this role, I had no experience with AWS Marketplace or any other marketplace. I took this project on because I didn't like the job I was hired to do anymore, and I wanted to provide value another way. So I was working with channel partners, and the primary channel partner I was working with was not doing well at all. And due to a very interesting series of events and actually, like, a rather tense conversation between Amazon and one of our executives, somebody just mentioned marketplace. And, like, our executive threw it over to the partner team and was like, if somebody was interested in this, I guess you could do it. And my manager was like, Corey, you don't like your partner, and you're pretty technical. Like, you wanna take a look? And I and I took a look. That's our actual origin story. Nobody forced me to do this. We had $0 going through marketplace. We had no pipeline, no clients who wanted it, no executives saying that we needed to do this. And so I just started building stuff on the side. And now we're looking to close about 15 to 20 deals per quarter compared to less than five deals that we closed in fiscal year twenty five, which was the first year that we were on Marketplace. I'm really proud of how far we've come. I think the thing I'm the most proud of is how my sellers' attitude has flipped towards AWS Marketplace. And we've actually reached a point where Tackle in AWS Marketplace is a really important part of how we sell and particularly our end of quarter push. Taco loves when I say that our CRO actually asks for, like, weekly reports towards the end of the quarter so we know what has a high score, who's gonna co sells, all that kind of fun stuff. So there was a lot of grinding and building that got us to this point, and we're definitely not not done and not there. We're getting close. We're getting close. So I think, obviously, we're gonna break down kind of a little bit of where we're gonna go during this webinar. I do wanna say one quick thing. Corey and I both love questions. We love live questions, so please don't hesitate to throw them in the chat. There's also an actual q and a, tab at the top. Literally says q and a. Can't miss it. You can throw your questions in there, and then we can showcase them here actually on the screen. So don't hesitate. Do them live. Don't wait till the end. We love live questions. So we are gonna cover around three topics in today's webinar. So number one is the dreaded executive buy in, especially when you have nothing. I love Corey's story when it comes to getting executive buy in, and you'll find out a little bit more as to why I love that story so much. Number two is enabling sellers who don't understand the marketplace yet. This is something that, especially in the space that I work in, I see this all the time. It's sellers you know, we we have it as a tool in our toolkit, but we don't really know how to use it. Or there's been new sellers who have come on, they see that we've gone through the marketplace prior, but we don't really know where to start from a net new kind of perspective here. And then number three, how to use data to close deals faster. And as a spoiler alert, we are gonna be sharing a couple templates that you will hear about later, which I think are going to be extremely helpful for everyone. So let's dive right in. So, again, Corey, it's always so fascinating to me. How did you start in this? Like I said, some people, the whole sourdough knitting I mean, I I took up canning during the pandemic as a side project. Do I do it anymore? No. But you know? So how did you start doing marketplace stuff on the side? Again, like, it kind of was just a project that came up. And I would say I am inherently a maker and a builder. I love to build programs. I also like, this is not exclusive. You can be an AWS Marketplace person and a knitter knitter and a quilter and a crocheter, so I am all of those things. But, yeah, we we really started pretty small. It it didn't we didn't build everything overnight. And so it literally just started with me meeting with Amazon, learning a little bit about this, kind of doing some exploring and understanding, is this an opportunity worth me spending my time on and trying to get the buy in? Because, you know, taking building a program no matter what it is is never easy. So, yeah, I would say it was really just starting with talking to Amazon, talking to other peers, and understanding really how big that opportunity was and then starting really small. Yeah. Starting really small. I I love that. I love that. When you talk about kind of those that starting small, what's an early win that you actually did press for? Yeah. So I think I know one of the areas that people always like to talk about is, you know, executive buy in. And I wanna be really clear before I start this that I had really good executives. Nobody was blocking me. Nobody was pushing me down. No one is saying you can't do this. They just didn't have any proof that it would work or, like, any incentive to really care. And so, you know, it wasn't a strategic initiative. I had the time, and I had my direct buyers, you know, buy in. But everybody else, I really had to get on board and get them to decide to take, you know, kind of this journey with me. And my degree is in communications, public relations specifically, so I decided that it was time to do my own press and my own PR. I view myself as the reporter, the editor, the subject, and really the face of the partnership. And if I don't promote promote my wins, nobody will. And so thinking chronologically, really the first win that I had to promote was, like, why marketplace? We had to sell people on the idea of marketplace, and I'm sure everyone who's on this call has seen, like, the the kind of, like, highlights of, like, why you should be on marketplace, accelerating deal cycles, all of that. So I had to do a lot of selling conceptually. But my favorite things we've done is actually, like, doing press about the wins that we've had. And we'll talk about this later too, but I by far, the most successful things that we have done have been making our sellers the stars. I am on base camp all of the time, and and talk a lot to our entire sales team. But the times that we've really won hearts and minds are when we put our sellers front and center and let them tell their story. And they say nice things about AWS that, like, are way better than anything I could have ever said when it comes to a coastal perspective. Yeah. I I love that you and this is something I mentioned to you when we were kind of prepping for this webinar is I love that you talk about getting the executive buy in that there wasn't opposition per se. This is something that I see a lot is this perceived kind of notion that it's gonna be an uphill battle, and I'm gonna have to fight for, you know, buy in to actually show the work of the marketplace. But probably eight out of 10 times, that's not the case. It's more of just this sort of, we don't really know, but we trust you. Go for it. You know? And I was really pondering on that idea because it's almost like a psychological thing. Mean, if you think that you're about to have this giant battle, you're not gonna do it, or you're gonna push it off. But these conversations are so crucial and so important. And, again, it's not this kind of scary obviously, like, everyone's gonna be opposed. Again, normally, it's just we don't really know that much, but we trust you. So I I think that's that's awesome, and I love that that was your experience as well. I see a question, and you might be able to speak to this a little bit. So Ben asks, are you selling consulting services or an ISB type product? Yeah. So we are an ISV. The most popular product in our suite right now is Grammarly. And for those of you who don't know Grammarly, we've been around for fifteen years. We are a AI writing and communication support tool. We write everywhere. We support you everywhere you write, and that's really, like, the ethos of our brand. And so, again, that ubiquity, we we provide AI services everywhere you are. And we've actually kind of rebranded and become superhuman, and we've added multiple other products to our suite. And we'll be launching kind of additional products that are joint solutions, of those. So we also have Coda, which is, like, the best documentation tool you can ever use. We're actually gonna show it later in this webinar. It's where I keep my playbook. And it integrates with a lot of other sources, and it's just amazing for product and engineering teams. And then we also have Superhuman Mail, which is where we took our name from. And superhuman mail, I know, has a lot of super fans within this group as well, but it is they build themselves as the most productive email service ever. And I was very doubtful of that when we acquired them, and I can confirm it's true. And I love it, and I will never run my email without it again. So that's a little bit about who we are, but that is also a really interesting part of this story. Like, I started this, and we were Grammarly. Just Grammarly. We had two products, Grammarly for business, Grammarly for education. And we acquired another product that was already on marketplace. We acquired another product that was not deployed on marketplace. So it's added a lot of complexity to this process. We have different sales teams with different needs, but it's been a really fun journey, and the job just keeps getting, like, bigger and weirder, and we try to, like, contain everyone, you know, keep us all on the same page. Yeah. Also, shout out to the superhuman side of the house because I have who adore it. And when I when we started to realize, like, oh, hey. These two things are merging. It was, like, a really big deal internally at Taco. We were very excited. So very, very great. Very great. One other quick question from David. Great name, by the way. Curious if, how, and why your sellers are incentivized around marketplaces. So this is a really good one. I would say, like, the this this gets to the heart of, like, why marketplace. And so I had to do a lot of education around why their clients care about marketplace. So, like, to answer your question really directly, we are comp neutral, but we have no spiffs around marketplace. And I would say even that comp neutrality started with, like it was pretty soft. And this year, we were moving into a much more aggressive. It doesn't matter if it's partner generated or, you know, ISV generated. If we bring it in internally, we have full comp neutrality. So we have found that to be enough of an incentive for our sellers. Again, I would say, like, this is where telling stories becomes really important. We'll talk about it. But, like, my sellers are like, how does free money work at Amazon? And, like, that that's not really how PPAs work. But it is true that your client might have budget, as part of their cloud commitment that isn't being utilized, and you should ask them about this. And so that that's kind of been a big part of this story is them figure helping my sellers understand what are the benefits of purchasing through Marketplace. I also view it as part of my job to collect as many incentives as possible. So right now, we have mPop funding, and my sellers who know nothing about marketplace know what m pop is. They're like, the free one to 2% cash back. I'm like, yes. I am a used car salesman. I say one to 2% cash back. That's my job. The other program that we're part of that's really cool is called ArcRamp, the Amazon ramp ramp credits program. And, essentially, we can give $300 cash back to any client for any reason. They don't have to complete the transaction like MPOP. So I am always, like, trying to do what I can on the Amazon side to have fun incentives, but we don't run a formal SPIFF program. And we I had to work really hard to get us to comp neutrality. And that is definitely, like, the first goal that I would encourage you to work towards. Yeah. Those the net neutrality is always one of those, like, okay. This is we're there. We're getting there. Right? Yeah. It's definitely an uphill battle sometimes to sell sell leadership on that. And, again, it kinda gets back to this question earlier. We did not start there, and it became a larger conversation about partners generally. But, yeah, you you you Amazon's like, you have to have it. You don't have to have it to start. It's good to have it. Always. move in that direction, but it's not a requirement. And so, like, start where you are even if it's not perfect and isn't best practice. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Corey, obviously, we just talked a little bit more along the lines of we started this really small. When did this go from your side project to this being like, okay. Hey. This is actually working, and it's important. Yeah. So a resource that I've built with Tackle and Trade previously is, like, the why partner with AWS document. I think it's actually linked in the docs. And at one point, I was working on this project, and I started, like, talking to different leaders. And what we found is that no matter who I was talking to, like, we would burn our first thirty minutes of conversation on them asking the same questions of, like, what is this? Why is this? What are you doing about insert tax questions, legal questions. And it took a lot of time. And once we explained everything, I was able to get these really senior leaders on board, but it took a lot of time and was really wasteful. And to be honest, we had kind of a a failed, like, not launch, but I we had a moment with, like, an AWS technical implementation type thing with the listing, which as a side note, don't self list. It is so hard. I did it. I love tackle. So there's that. But in short, even though I was sending this blurb over about marketplace and kind of prepping people for our calls, it wasn't good enough. And so after kind of this failure, took a big step back and was like, okay. How can I do this better? What am I trying to achieve? What is going on? And so I put together this why partner with AWS document. And, basically, it was very simple. It was two pages. It on the first tab, it showed everyone I was working with from every team, and listing who was on board. So it was all of my executives, all of that leadership. I had really simple high level reporting on why we should do this. Think of all those, like, wonderful eye popping marketplace stats that Amazon and Gartner love to puddle. And then I had a section called key considerations. And so like I said, those first meetings, we were burning. Just people asking really good, really fair questions about things that are outside of their domain of expertise. And so by calling them out explicitly to say, hey. This is how we're managing this tax consideration, and this is how we're managing this legal component of our EULA. And here is our head legal person that has signed off on it. Feel free to go ask her questions. And once people saw that, they were like, oh, cool. Like, this is a really cool project. We have a lot of cool people attached to it. Corey knows kind of what she's doing, which we love that. But more than that, it was like, okay. They could trust me that I was looking at all this stuff. Again, they could totally raise other concerns, but they were able to just look at their piece of the pie and offer their feedback on finance or billing or whatever it was. And that really was kind of what shifted the momentum for us. And once I started having kind of this Rolodex of major leaders I was working with, the momentum really started to get bigger and pick up, and that's where, it wasn't quite my full time job. I was still doing my other role on the side with that partner, fortunately or unfortunately, kind of, like, fizzled out and was failing. So I just started taking up more and more time with AWS. And, ultimately, we actually got to a really cool place with that document that I shared. It was so easy to keep up to date. Like, I I think that it's way easy to over document things, and that was, like, a external facing document. Again, like, my messy internal project plan was a whole different thing. But we actually got to a point where people thought this project was really cool and would send the document ahead of conversations I was having with people. So we actually had, like, product marketing at one point come in and say, hey. Like, we're releasing a new product around the time that you're going live with marketplace. Like, can we work with you to make sure that you have the most up to date language? Can we push your launch back by a little bit? And I ended up getting a lot more people involved than I originally had access to, and we built a lot of advocates and allies. And the project got a lot bigger than me, and it really elevated the visibility throughout the entire company. And that's where, like, our CEO and our CRO and our CMO were actually open to post about the launch on marketplace and kind of support us even if they weren't directly involved in the project. Wow. Okay. So we're hearing documentation is really important. I I remember early, early in my my CSM career, I had a customer who was one of the first customers that I saw that would start to document even, like, the smallest of things, but but they would be really simple with it. And I remember in my naive little mind, it was like, oh my gosh. Like, these like, why are we doing this? Like, this is a lot, like, to have to keep up with. Because was like, you know what you're doing. And it was later that it started to realize, like, no. There needs to be a scalability to all of this, when, say, for example, you move on in another position or the person that I was working with moves on. Having that stuff documented, even this operational side, but also the strategic side in a very easy to read manner is crucial, so crucial. So it's really, really important. I I wanna put in one other thing that you said is you talked about kind of meeting like, these meetings. Was there some sort of recurring meeting about this that was set up? No. Which I wouldn't advise. Again, Okay. like, for better or for worse, like, I am a one woman wrecking crew still. So I I ran it by myself, to be honest. Okay. And so I had touch points with different teams, but there was nothing standing on my calendar except with my other internal partner marketing counterpart at the beginning. And that looks very different today. I know one area that, I talked to a lot of other people, in this community about is that I run a monthly meeting with my executives now. And I think that is a really, really good touch point. Again, like, I meet with Tackle. I meet with Amazon. I meet with my managers. I meet with my leaders. But the meeting for me that I think is really interesting, and, to your point of documentation, David, I think what will probably far outlive me, when people wanna look back on our Amazon partnership is I do a monthly meeting that's really. simple, and I send it out. It goes from my boss, the VP, the CRO. I don't send it to our CEOs to share, but maybe someday he'll join. And what I do is, like, we get Amazon and our team in the same room once a month, and it's a really simple deck. I actually take screenshots of, like, our closed won deals for the month or quarter, give a status on how we're doing. I do a breakout based on expansion, renewal, new business, just, some really basic basic data. And it's again, it's a screenshot straight out of Salesforce. Like, this is not this is not rocket science. And then, usually, I'll do a slide on key learnings or key takeaways. We'll do a slide on major initiatives and then a slide for next steps, action items, items we need help with. And what's really interesting is I'd say, like, at least 75% of the time, if not more, my VP and my CRO never come. Like, it's a meeting that, sometimes it's just me and my AWS counterpart that we talk constantly. Like, it's not necessarily needed. But having that documentation, it's prepared every month either way. And I send that off to my executive leadership. And so that way, when I or AWS come up, it's not like, I wonder what Corey's doing. These people, even if they spend twenty seconds with the deck, know, hey. Like, we've made progress over last month. Hey. These are really big deals that have gone through AWS. These are the major projects that are on the horizon. And so having that level of I think you constantly have to be thinking about stakeholder management. And especially when you're dealing with executives that have a million other projects, I want that brain space. And even if they only give me thirty seconds a month, now they are able to see progress and see that documented wins that we have. So I think that's one thing that we've done that a lot of other folks have been interested in and is worth calling out. That's that's really cool. I love how organized this whole thing is. That's one of the reasons why I just I love our meetings because you're just so organized with everything, and it's just great. I love this. So, obviously, now we've talked about, okay. We are good. We have some executive awareness going on. One of the things that I find is one of the biggest challenges with with people who are just starting out in the marketplace is getting the sellers to understand everything that needs to happen. So we get listed. Our executives are, okay. Let's do this. Yay. And then crickets because no one's actually utilizing the marketplace. What was one of your bigger challenges when you started to try to get sellers to adopt utilizing the marketplace? My biggest challenge by far was getting them to think of AWS. Like, Mhmm. we had. zero mindshare. I don't know how the rest of this group's teams are, but, like, I had a couple sellers that were from Salesforce that really knew what they were doing. But other than that, like, none of them had sold on Marketplace, had no awareness. And I've talked about this in a past life. I was a director of CS, and I've built all of my own customer enablement resources. And every single time I have built a successful program, I know that it's really messy at the beginning. And so when we were just starting out, I wasn't afraid of the mess. I'd also say again, like, I I really got into the middle of it, I decided that I was going to do everything myself. And I really did things at the beginning that were a 100% not scalable to build direct relationships with people and learn as much as I could so that in the long run, we could build a program that does scale, and it and it has scaled. When I was starting at the beginning, I was really focusing on internal adoption. And so I did a lot of one on one meetings with sellers, and I got, like, very templatized in how we met with them. But it was like, if anyone was just willing to chat with me for five minutes, we would do that. So I think getting, like, very meeting people where they are and, again, like, getting into the forums where your sellers are listening and care. Like, I did we had, I mean, all sorts of different touch points with different people. Some people pay attention to big group meetings. Some people want help with their deals. Some people care like, pay attention to their managers. Some managers are really influential. So I think kind of hitting all of those different places and building resources as you go was really beneficial for sure. Yeah. No. Absolutely. There's a really good question, that is focused on this, actually. And and Nicole asks, does your organization absorb the AWS Marketplace fee, or is that passed on to customers? We absorb it. So we, again, like, the 1.5 to 3%, we view it as a cost of doing business. Originally, it actually was, like, decreased off of the total ARR, which was a really big problem for our CSMs because it could count as if you had, like, a 5% expansion, it actually could look like churn. Because then, you know, you take that 1.5%, and now we're only at 3.5%, and that's not the amount of growth we need or whatever. And so that's really where, like, comp neutrality came in and became really important. And we've had to spend a lot of time working with our deal desk and finance teams to make sure that we are accounting for those fees correctly. But, ultimately, my leaders were very supportive of not passing that on and having it be, like, equally attractive to our customers to go through Marketplace versus coming direct with us. And a lot of that came down to the data that I was able to present on customers who are new through Marketplace are more likely to, you know, stay customers for longer, spend more money with us over the long term. They're more likely to expand, and that process is really easy. And so, honestly, for us, like, the benefit of not having to personally track down the money and the billing, I was able to sell that as, like, a we should just absorb this fee versus pass it on to our customers. But I do know that other people don't do it that way, but it's something that we've done, and, I'm very fortunate that we my leaders were bought in on that, and I do think that it's helped make it easy for customers to get say yes to go through Marketplace. That's that's incredible because that's something that we hear a lot is you know, for example, I work more in the the side of the operational side of the house where people will then come back and say, wait a minute. Like, we're getting a lot of pushback from sellers. Why do they wanna do this when we have to pay for this? Like, yes, renewals are less, net but new is more. So those conversations are really hard. And the fact that you were able to find a way to say, okay. There's a lot more to it than just that fee, and there's a lot more data points that are there that AWS can provide. Right? Mhmm. I'd also say, like, I would encourage you to even if you don't if you aren't able to absorb that fee at the beginning, like, document with your sellers that that are willing to go through that process. Document why the customer wants to go through Marketplace, and then document your seller's experience going through Marketplace. For us, like, at the beginning, I had some leaders that were really not into Marketplace and viewed that, like, 1.5% as, like, money we were just burning. Yeah. But once I had CSMs that were like, oh my gosh. Like, this saved the renewal. Like, we were able to get this in on time. My customer, you know, now wants to look at x y and z project, and it's opened up all this budget. Like, it took me having those stories and getting really influential sellers to give me, like, amazing sound bites. And, like, I would write them down and send them back to them and be like, hey. You agree that you said this. Right? And, like, I can put this in my I can put this in my report and send it to leadership. Again, I was very aggressive with that from the beginning, and I think it's part of why we were able to build that story and, like, not not pass those fees on. So, yeah, again, like, your sellers are your star. And, like, if you can show the benefit that you are offering both to your internal sellers and to your customers, that 1.5% is a lot easier to swallow than it might be otherwise. I'd also say, like, again, I sat in the channel partner team, and 30% margin was pretty typical. So, Mhmm. like, let's do it. Let's do a a comparison there and see how we feel about the value we're getting from that 1.5 to 3% fee. Yeah. Okay. That's I love that. And that like like you said, like, having those examples are so, so important. I see another question from John. So John asked, do you have a channel strategy around the marketplace? This is such a good question, John. So I will like, full transparency, this is something that we're really looking at in the coming year. Again, like, I originally sat on our channel team. And so I just started asking Amazon. Like, okay. Who do you guys work with? And based on my research, it's largely, like, Carouselff in the public sector education space. And then we got a lot of SHI and CDW at the beginning. And I'm not gonna call anyone out, but I will tell you that we have done some channel partner deals, and it was, pulling teeth. So I when we signed up, like we did, we signed up for DSoar. We made sure that we were unable to do CPPO, and all of those kinds of things. And I met with all of our channel partners that had partnership or had AWS practices. And I will tell you that there is a wide variety of what you will experience, and some of these partners that you would expect to be really leaned into marketplace, kind of view them as a competitor and, like, it's what's going to potentially kill some of their business. So I meet with people that are like, yes. We have a marketplace practice. Yes. We have services. Yes. We have this. And they'd be like, yeah. We really don't wanna do it. We we actually don't pay our sellers on it. And I was like, what? Like, what is going on? So we I would say, like, I burned a lot of energy trying to force people to work with me and work with us on marketplace if they had a marketplace practice, and it did not yield very much fruit, just to be totally honest. Right now, we are kind of in the process of rebuilding our entire partner program, and that includes, you know, everything from channel to, you know, smaller ISV partnerships, boutique delivery partners. And as part of the assessment and onboarding, we actually have an AWS section. So the partner manager needs to assess what is their AWS readiness. Do they transact through the marketplace? Are they managing clients' PPAs? All of that kind of stuff. And once that is complete, I'll be meeting with each of those teams, making sure that they're aware of our incentives. Again, like that MPOP, I know that our distribution and I believe our resell partners are able to leverage that. So making sure they know how Amazon friendly we are and that we won't be charging them those fees and all that kind of stuff, is a really important part of our strategy. And, like, I'm still in the middle of figuring it out. So if you have any advice or templates or those sorts of things, like, please shoot me a message because I'm in the process of figuring it out. Like, I love a good template. If you have a good template, like, please share. Yeah. I I love that. That's the template. That's kind of where I wanted to go. Next is moving on to this idea of building for scale. You know, Yeah. you and I know this for a fact. I've seen a lot of it, and it's great. You've kinda built an entire hub of enablement, essentially. How did you start to do that? How did you organize it? What's in this hub that you have, essentially? Yeah. So I would say there's been a several iterations of this, and the document that I'll share today is actually, like, the updated version, of of the original one. So I'll share my screen so you guys can see it. But we call this originally, it was welcome to Tackle, and we, actually launched this when we, deployed our Tackle like, Tackle in our Salesforce and our sellers were able to access that. I did a huge PR, social, everything push around that. But this getting started guide really addresses all of the questions that I was getting from sellers. So it's a really long story, but, basically, one of my biggest projects got moved out, and I had a almost free month to do work. And we called it the grassroot grassroots month. I was taking at least five impromptu callers with sellers a day, and it was, like, really just on the front lines of end of quarter, and was asking different people from different teams questions. And this document addresses 95% of those concerns, and gives you the resources to find the other 5%. So, basically, we have a couple of tabs. The first is a getting started guide, and this was really what I would do with team members when they wanted to figure out how to start working with AWS. So, I, like, built Salesforce reports in here, linked it out. These are all very, very simple. But, basically, the idea is how do you identify high potential accounts? What does tackle scores mean? How do you submit the co sell? How do you pick what's a good co sell? And then once you've done that, how do you actually connect with AWS sellers and prepare for a meeting with AWS? The second so that's, like, really just a simple four step seller journey. One thing I will also call out is that my sellers are constantly asking about this. So now when people ask me questions like, how do I submit a co sell? I now just, like I've, like, forced myself sorry. I'm in a different window. I forced myself to copy the link, and I'll be like, here's how you do it. Also, here's the document. So I'm constantly plugging this document as I'm helping people work through. The second thing was explicitly asked of me in kind of a snarky manner originally. But I would say, like, we all know that there are a million and one AWS acronyms, and our sellers do not speak AWS. They don't know what a PPA is. They don't know what an EVP is. Like, I was getting questions. I'd like, I really try to dumb down my language or, like, not use these terms, but people don't know. And so we have a glossary, and so this is really good. Like, when people meet with AWS, they'll have this open. And so they'll be like, what does built on AWS mean? Like, obviously, you you can kind of infer what that means, but it's like, oh, this is a badge. This means it counts towards client commitment burn downs, all that kind of stuff. So I have included, like, 99% of our list here. So, hopefully, it makes your life a little bit easier, both for yourself and your partner team, but also for, for your sellers. The next tab is probably one that, I think is really interesting, and I actually probably I don't wanna say I use it more than my sellers, but I don't find them poking around here as frequently, and this is, like, linked into other places. But this is what can you ask Amazon for. Your sellers, most likely, my sellers for sure didn't, they don't know what's possible. Can you talk to Amazon? Can Amazon talk to your client's procurement? Yes. Can you tell them who your contacts are? Yes. And I hope somebody on this call relates to this. But my sellers, I've mentioned this before, would be like, Corey, like, can you check with Amazon if my client has free money? And I was like, guys, like, that is not how this works. And so you'll see in here that's like, where is it? Free stuff, question mark. And so how we, phrase this or where is it? It's basically like, this is the main question I have my sellers asking. Instead of saying, do they have free money, credits, unused funds? We say, does this client have a PPI or EVP? If so, how are they tracking against their commitment? Is there a spend gap? So, like, I have completely dumped this down for my sellers. Like, if you mean this, say this. Because I think so often with AWS, you have to get the language right. And just in full transparency, like, people have heard of the Grammarly name, which is great, but we've built our brand internally at AWS on looking prepared. And that is in large part because of these resources. Like, I've made my sellers feel equipped to not say, does my client have free money or free credits? It's instead, you know, how are they spending towards their their cloud commitment? Yeah. We referenced this, like, welcome to Tackle. I've left this in here in part because it might better meet where some of you guys are, but also, like, I've kept it up for my sellers. In their minds, like, Tackle is synonymous with AWS, is synonymous with Corey Woodburn. But there is a difference. And so, again, especially when we were starting out, like, what is Tackle? Why are we doing this implementation? Why should I care? And then we actually break out, like, okay. What is the AWS marketplace? What are the benefits to me as a seller? This is also a great place. This document is in CODA, as I mentioned, but this is also a great place you can, like, make sure you're tracking who's reading it. You can put a question log. So we actually did collect questions along the way, and it's been a really good way for me to track who's reading things, maybe what teams we aren't reaching, and how we can help people. I know, David, you wanted to spend a few minutes talking about templates. This was, like, the OG document that now is, like, incorporated in everything and what I get the most questions about. But, yeah, the most part most used part of this document for sure is the templates. Yeah. David, I don't know if you wanna dig into that. Yeah. I I see that at least a little preview because I think. it's my favorite part. Perfect. So, usually, like, I I have people come up to me and ask, like, hey, Corey. Like, I know you do like, I know you're the templates person. Like, somebody said you have 80% response rate, and that is true. So, again, like, I am a little bit anal. And, again, as someone who's been, like, a director of CS and was sending out messages to all these people, I went full on AB testing. And so I spent like, I sent every single follow-up email from an ACE approval email at the beginning, and we literally just started testing everything. And so I've gone ahead and included these here. We have a couple different versions. I I also give an example of our product background. But the main template that we use has a really simple format. The first line is like, hey. I wanted to connect on insert client company name. We give a small description of what's happening. And then line three is we have an active sales cycle with name, role, department. And that third line is really critical, and a lot of the sellers that I work with were like, well, I don't know if I wanna say that. Like, why would I tell Amazon that? I always like to highlight. It's like Amazon gets so many emails phishing. I don't know if this group has faced that, but I tell my team, like, hey. Chances are if your client has a PPA, this Amazon seller knows them better than you do. Part one. And part two, like, if you are legit, you need to show it. Like, put your cards out, show the name, role, and department, get them excited to work with you, and then they're much more likely to, respond and give you what you're looking for. The next section is product background, and I have this fully prewritten. It is just copy and paste. They don't need to think about any of it. I would also say this is a great place, and if you don't do it here, can do it someplace else in the email, but include all of your Amazon jargon. Are you ISVA? Is Has co sell benefit eligible, deployed on AWS? All of those fun things that you have. Sometimes we include that we're unpop, all that kind of stuff. Basically, I tell my sellers that you have to put all of that in there. Please don't remove it because this is how you tell them they get paid. Use the words. Do it. And then we do a deal background. And this is where you can really call out your competitive advantages. And this took me a long time to figure out what was the right version of things for us. But one thing that's really interesting about Grammarly is that, it's an incredible product that people in sales, marketing, and CX love. We love that, of course. But what's interesting is that Amazon doesn't always have the best relationships with those personas and is looking for excuses to talk to them. So I always tell my sellers, like, hey. If you're working with one of those three teams, you need to call this out because there's a very good chance that Amazon seller is gonna be like, I don't care if this is lower ARR. I'm picking up that phone because I want a reason to talk to that CMO, that CCO, whoever that may be. Again, figure out what your version of a competitive advantage is and call that out there so your sellers can know, like, what is what is most interesting to AWS. We also have really strong usage data, and that is very attractive to Amazon. So we include that. Again, I don't know if all of you will have that, but whatever it is, include what is interesting and compelling about this particular deal and why Amazon might wanna work it. And then the final portion is the single most important, because a lot of times, Amazon will only look at this. But in bold, at the bottom, the whole sentence, ask for what you want. If you do not have a clear and defined ask, we are basically, like, throwing away time. We are throwing away our name, brand, and recognition, all that kind of stuff. That sheet that I showed earlier of, like, the what can I ask Amazon for, this is where you put that? You know, will you meet with us? Can you confirm if this client has a PPA? Could you reach out to procurement? Do you have a relationship there? Whatever you need, make it clear, make it bold. So yeah. I know that that is, like, again, kind of interesting, to a lot of people. And, again, like, we did test this, and I would encourage you to do the same thing. I have found that if sellers write their own emails, we are we are consistently getting less than a 20% response rate. And if they use a template, it's over 80. So, and the other thing that's cool is, like, not only do we get a response, but you we usually get what we asked for. And I sound like a crazy person, but I'm not kidding when I say, like, I talk to our sellers, and they say, like, use a template or don't bother. A lot of people wanna respond and be like, hey. Are you free to chat about this account? And I'm like, guys, they get 200 emails. Like, it's not good enough. And so, you know, taking the five minutes to really fill this out, and it really like, once you've done this a couple times, my sellers can do it in five minutes. This this is really, really important to when it was a really critical step in my co sell process. And I still have some sellers that aren't great about it, and that means that they don't have as many deals that do well with AWS. Mhmm. I love this so much. My mind is still always blown. It's funny because when I my manager reached out to me last week, I believe, and was like, hey. Like, I'm excited to see these templates. Like, they're gonna be really helpful. Maybe maybe we all can use them as well. And I was like, yeah. We can because they are the most organized thing you will have seen all year so far, and it's incredible. And I just have to say one of the biggest parts that I like the most is just how it's just to fill in the blank. That's really in reality, that's what it is. It makes it so simple, and that's half of the journey is getting sellers to understand the ideas of co selling and what they need to submit and what needs to be included. And the fact that it's all here in one place is so phenomenal, and I can't thank you enough for sharing this. This is so phenomenal for those who are just getting started or maybe who have started coselling or sending offers, but they're just getting a little bit stuck or the buy in isn't fully there, I can only imagine just how how helpful this is going to be for them. And so I truly thank you so much. This is amazing. Of course. And, again, I'd say too, like, know that last, like, February, I was in Austin at an Amazon training, like, harassing people, asking, like, what kind of emails are you sending? What are you asking Amazon for? Like, what's working? And so, like, there are templates in here that are inspired by other people, and it really does take, like, taking and sharing. The other thing too is, like, this is changing so fast. So much of what I have here has changed from once once we launched it, and I have no doubt it's gonna look different at the end of the year. So no matter, like, where you're at in your journey, you are not that far behind because the marketplace world is changing and changing fast. So if you're willing to be experimental and try things and learn, you can be kind of on that cutting edge very, very quickly because, like, we're we're night and day from where we were a year ago, and it's really quite quite amazing. And it's only uphill from here, and I love it. Awesome. Well, we are out of time. Corey, thank you so much. I I'm so grateful that you were able to share all this with us, and I know that this was helpful for those who have joined. Always feel free to reach out to us. For those who are in the audience, we are here to support you as well 100%, and to help you on your journey and your go to market journey. So we are we are here for you. Corey, I hope this is the start of you know, this is this is possibly the launch of our podcast. We haven't actually made it official yet, but you all may have just witnessed history. I don't know. So good things are coming. So have a wonderful rest of your week, everyone. Remember, we're here to support you. And I think what do you think? I think we can have I there was a question I would love, actually, and it's being put up here now. Yeah. Do you see this question? So what was the ah, this is a really good question that we can end on. What was the biggest mistake you see in this space? Okay. So there's a couple things. And, again, this this really speaks to different people, and it kinda depends. But there's two things I wanna call out. One is, like, resting on your laurels. Like, if something's working and you think it's gonna keep working, like, you're probably not. Right? So, like, we're I am constantly thinking, asking, iterating. Like, that process, like, when I say, like, it doesn't stop, we have not arrived, like, I mean that so deeply. But in terms of, like, biggest mistakes that we had, I think feeling like you have to have everything ready. Like, start small. Start with one template. Start with one seller. So I really leverage data really heavily, and I would do account mapping at an individual seller level. And at first, I was like, this is so not scalable. I can't do this. I can't do this for everyone. And it's true. You can't. And that's why we now have this document, which is great. But at the beginning, like, who cares? Just do it. It's what it's gonna take for you to learn and make some friends and make some allies, and then that's how you get your first deal, and that's how you get your first case study. And then now your CRO cares, and it's getting shared to the whole company. Like, you just you you start where you're at, and, like, don't let what you have to build overwhelm you. Like, it really is just one step at a time, and these little tiny actions compound. That's phenomenal advice. Phenomenal advice. I did also see one other question. I just, I did answer it. It was how does Tackle integrate with non Salesforce CRMs? We'll preview. Good things are coming. Stay tuned. We're we're constantly working to to bring more opportunities for our customers, so so stay tuned. Good things are coming in that space. Alright. There is one other question I see here. So it looks like we sell to the marketing org, and we've been finding it difficult to convince our POC in marketing to opt for the marketplace. So getting introduced to the procurement POC helps as they speak to the benefits of consolidating invoicing that doesn't happen often enough. Are there any other benefits that you would recommend? Okay. So this is such a good question. And we actually have a template for this. So request for note to be sent to procurement. So I I can't say that I can solve all your problem, but my advice like, I tell my sellers constantly, like, don't start with your client. Like, don't trust them when they say they don't work with AWS. Like, there's a good chance that they don't know. And so what we do in a lot of cases is actually, like, go if we see a high tackle propensity score with the co sell and just shoot a note to the, AWS seller, basically asking if they'd be open to shooting a note to procurement. And you can see, like, the example template. We we write the template for AWS to send, and it's like, hi. Connect you with this product team. They inform me they're currently working with contact names on insert team. I wanna give you heads up that this may come across your desk and that this product is listed on marketplace and is eligible to help reduce your PPA. Or let's see. How would I let's see what I wrote. Don't even remember. It is eligible to help retire your PPA if applicable. Happy to connect you with their team if they happy to connect you with their team if you have any questions. Many thanks. And then we include, like, our very simple background. And what we have found is that sending this off directly actually kind of, like, allows us to meet in the middle a little bit. So that's one thing that I would highlight. The other thing that I would ask specific to this question, and I I'll tell you, like, it doesn't always go marketplace for us, is if you if your seller feels like it's too complicated to set up, that's an internal problem. And a lot of times, I will hand it over to AWS and the procurement contact to help, and we don't always work through that. But more often than not, like, their procurement contact comes in. It's like, oh, this is so easy, and it's better for us, and it's this. And then suddenly, like, you have a procurement contact that's maybe more senior than he originally signed to, and that deal just, like, flies through. So a lot of times, like, actually, like, we we pick up at least one or two strays at the end of every single quarter that are, like, deals that just went sideways in procurement or, like, we need vendor onboarding. And some buyer who did not know that we did like, we're on marketplace and doesn't know that they had an Amazon commitment, we're able to end up pushing it through really fast. So, again, there's a couple different ways you can approach this play, but it is tricky. It is hard. I would encourage you to, like, to talk to Amazon to see if they can get you the correct procurement contact and if that procurement contact can talk to your client about the benefit and why they should do it. Amazing. I do see another quick question just came in. It looks like it says I can't see it. Hi, Corey. Did you go through the effort to achieve marketplace designation such as industry competencies? It seems like a significant amount of work. I'm curious if it's curious if it's a worthwhile effort, and would you recommend other ISVs doing it? So, Matt, this is exactly the kind of question that I'm asking to other alliance leaders. So full transparency, we don't have any competencies to date. We are looking at the generative AI competency and then a, like, an additional designation for industry most likely will go for education. But, like, that is the question that I'm asking to other alliance leaders and to Amazon. Like, I I can do almost anything, but I cannot do everything. So what if we pick five major projects this year? What can we do? And I continue to weigh, like, competencies. Are. they worth it? Sometimes Amazon will say yes. Sometimes they say no. Again, the generative AI one is really hard to get, but you get $50,000. Like, it's kind of this constant weighing of what makes sense for you. And I can say that I have talked to other ISVs that have really felt like getting a competency was worth it. Again, it allows you to be listed on different web pages. It allows you to, like, be recommended. I think especially in, like, the AgenTek, like, buying process that Amazon's rolling out, competencies are gonna become more important. So I can tell you that I am building a competency strategy, and we will definitely be getting at least one in the coming year. But, also, like, we've been able to get by without it. So, again, I don't know how the program runs anymore, but, like, being ISVA was really, really important to us, and that that was what it was worth it for me as our first step. But, again, I definitely think it is worth it if you have the time and resources to make it happen. A 100%. Awesome. We got one other question here from Brandon. How are you balancing multi cloud marketplace listings and how you route to which one? This is a great question. And I have such a boring answer. Today, we're just on AWS Marketplace. So, it it's not it it's not something that we have to deal with as much, to be totally honest. Again, there's some really great classes and trainings and other leaders that I've been able to connect with. And what I have found is, like, it really does depend on your industry if it's worth it, but nobody's gonna treat you better than where your product is. deployed. So, again, Grammarly and Coda, which were the first two products we had in our suite, are on AWS and deployed there, so it just makes the most sense. Superhuman is with GCP, so it like, we're considering it. But to be honest, it's not that important to our customer base. Like, I get maybe one question every other quarter versus talking to other alliance leads. You know? Like, if you're in financial services, like, Azure or GCP might be really important. So I think it's going to I think you're gonna need to talk to somebody else to get better advice on that one, but I do think it's industry dependent, you know, kind of what your strategy looks like. Brandon as well, I have some some advice on this that I could send over to you. So I'm gonna actually make a note of your name and your email address, and I'm gonna reach out to you as well. And we can even set up some time to have a quick discussion on this. A lot of my customers are in multi cloud, so it's it's a journey. It's it's it's a it's a process, but we're gonna we'll we'll talk to you about it, and I would love to have a conversation with you. Alright. I think that is actually all of the the questions that have come in. So any last minute questions, comments? Again, Corey, this was wonderful. Thank you so much for doing this. You can find us on Spotify. in, And yeah. like, a couple months. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. But yeah. Again, for folks that wanna connect, I'm on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me. Sometimes things get really busy. We're doing next week and, like, or in annual planning. So if I'm slow to respond, I apologize. But, yeah, I'd love to connect with other alliance leaders. Love to know what's working, what's not working, what questions you have. And I'm a big believer in, like, we succeed together, and I have really benefited from other people being generous with their time and thought and experimentation. And for the most part, we're not in like, we're not direct competitors. And so, yeah, I I I wanna help others win and hopefully, like, learn from your successes as well. So thank you, Thank. you, everyone. Have a great rest of your week, and we'll be talking to you soon. Bye, all.