Channel Voices
Channel Voices is The Podcast for Future Channel Leaders, where we learn the ins and outs of partner ecosystems through casual conversations with channel professionals from a variety of industries, partner types and geographies.
Channel Voices
Three Sellers Walk Into An Account And Everyone Hits Quota | Channel Chewsday
We lay out why co‑sell has become non‑negotiable for vendors and partners and how to make it work with hyperscalers and marketplaces. Clear roles, aligned incentives, shared data, and trust turn scattered efforts into a repeatable revenue engine.
• Buyer shift to cloud marketplaces and committed spend
• Why resale margins thin and solution bundles grow
• What co‑selling is versus lead trading
• Hyperscaler programs, quota retirement and marketplace paths
• Common failures from vague roles and weak data flows
• Nearbound intelligence and building trust first
• Enablement, joint value narratives and ready‑made plays
• Operating rhythm, mapping, attribution and measurement
• A simple starter checklist for first wins
Send us a topic suggestion for the next episode, and we'll see you next Chewsday for another channel challenge to chew through together.
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Co-selling is quickly becoming the default go-to-market motion for high performing vendors and partners. Not just a nice to have experiment. In this channel Chewsday episode, the focus is on why co-sell is exploding and more importantly, how to make it actually work in the real world. Happy Channel Chewsday, it's Maciej here, and today we're chewing on a topic that keeps coming up in conversations with vendors, partners, and ecosystem leaders. Co-selling. Why are so many vendors and partners doubling down on co-sell motions? And what does it really take to make them work instead of becoming yet another PowerPoint dream presented to your C suite? Co-Selling sounds simple on paper. Let's go to market together, but in practice, it's a mix of incentives, trust, process, and a lot of coordination. Let's unpack this in three categories. First, why co-cel has gone from niche to non negotiable? Second, what good co-selling actually looks like today and in the near future, including hyperscalers and marketplaces. And third, some practical steps you can take to turn co cell from chaos into a repeatable margin grow in motion. Let's start with the why now. For a long time, vendors and partners ran in parallel lanes. A vendor's direct reps did their thing, partners did theirs, and best case, they didn't trip over each other. But a few big shifts changed the game. Buyers moved to the cloud and marketplaces, they started preferring pre-approved vendors, standardised contracts and bundled solutions, not one of products. And as CRN and others keep pointing out, margins on pure resale have thinned. So everyone is hunting for bigger deals, faster cycles, and lower cost of acquisition. CO-sell fits neatly into that reality. Canalys data shared by AWS shows partners who co-sell frequently see significantly higher revenue growth, higher close rates, and larger average deal sizes than those who don't. When a vendor's AE, a cloud hyperscaler seller, and a services partner walk into an account together, they can offer a complete solution. Plug into existing procurement routes like AWS or Azure Marketplace and remove a lot of friction that used to slow deals down. So what exactly is co-selling in this new world? Think of it as coordinated selling around a shared opportunity, not just trading leads. It's a multiple sales teams aligning on one account, combining the relationships, insights, and capabilities to win together. Co-selling might look like an ISV teaming up with AWS or Microsoft field sellers, listing the solution in the marketplace, and then bring in an SI or MSP to design and deliver the full project. It's not just about you sell my product, it's we build and sell a solution that makes sense for the customer and fits how they already buy. Hyperscalers have turned this into a system. Programs like AWS, ISV Accelerate, and Microsoft Co-Sell Ready give partners access to cloud seller teams, co-marketing funds, and importantly, quota retirement for those sellers when they bring you into a deal. That last bit is key. When the Hyperscalers rep gets credit for revenue that goes through the marketplace with your product in the mix, they suddenly care a lot about co-selling with you. Cloud marketplaces then close the loop by giving customers a familiar procurement path, often using existing committed spend. All of that sounds great, but here's where many co-sell efforts fall down. They rely on vibes instead of a structure. Co-selling only works when roles, expectations, and data flows are crystal clear. The best practice guides from ecosystem tools and alliances all stress the same basics. First, start with a real opportunity, not a generic let's partner chat. Bring something concrete to the table an open deal, a named account, or a clear segment you want to attack together. Second, align on who does what in the deal cycle. Who owns the relationship? Who leads discovery? Who drives the technical validation? Who manages the commercial path? And how the services wrap will be handled. Then trust becomes the multiplier. Co-sell best practices talk a lot about nearbound intelligence. That's basically using your partner's knowledge of the account to get smart fast. That could be inside info on stakeholders, insight into internal politics, or recent transformation projects that might support or block your proposal. But you only get that level of intel if partners see you as genuinely invested in their success, not just there to grab their relationships. That's why experts recommend starting your co-sell conversations with what can we do to help you win, instead of what can you give me. Another thing that differentiates co-cell leaders is how seriously they treat enablement. It's not enough to say we have a co-sell program. You need to equip your own sellers and your partner's sellers to work together. That includes training on how to position a joint value proposition, how to use marketplace listing as part of the pitch, and how to talk about commercial models that span licenses, services, and cloud consumption. Leading vendors go further by giving partners ready-made plays. For example, here's how we co-sell this solution with Azure into a regulated industry, including discovery questions, typical stakeholders, and a suggested services wrap. Operationalising co-sell at scale is where the serious revenue shows up. Analysts and platforms emphasise that when you systemise co-sell, shared account mapping, standardised intake forms, mutual activity tracking, you can source a lot more pipeline and accelerate sales cycles. It also helps avoid the worst case scenario. Two or three companies bumping into each other in the same account without realising they're all chasing the same opportunity. So if you're listening to this thinking, okay, but where do we start? Here's a simple mental checklist. First, pick a small set of partners where causal motion actually makes sense, maybe a hyperscaler plus one or two key SIs or ISVs where you already see overlap in your customer base. Second, define one or two clear joint offers, not twenty, one or two that solve a real customer problem end to end, where each of you brings something essential. Third, agree on your operating rhythm. Who logs the opportunity, how you share updates, and how you'll handle credit and conflict, and of course measure it. AWS points out that multi-partner deals managed through their co-sell tools are several times larger than single partner deals. Canalys and others show higher win rates and faster closures when co-sell is done right. Those are the numbers that convince skeptical sales leaders and finance teams that this isn't partner playground. It's a real revenue engine. Co-selling is really about accepting that no single company wins the customer alone anymore. The problems are too complex, the buying centers too fragmented, and the tech stacks too interconnected. Vendors and partners double down on coSell when they realise they close better deals with more stickiness when they show up as a team. The art is in making that teamwork repeatable. Aligned incentives, clear roles, shared data and a culture that rewards collaboration, not territorial behaviour. What's one thing that made a co cell motion work brilliantly for you? Or one thing that broke it completely? Feel free to share. That's it for this channel Chewsday. Thanks for listening. Send us a topic suggestion for the next episode, and we'll see you next Tuesday for another channel challenge to chew through together.
