The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.
FeedSpot named the Sales Game Changers Podcast at a top 20 Sales Podcast and top 8 Sales Leadership Podcast!
Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!
On today’s show, Fred interviewed Mike Cannady, AWS Global Director, Partner Programs and Strategic Initiatives, Public Sector.
Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.
Find Mike on LinkedIn.
MIKE’S TIP: “The most successful sellers I’ve known in my career really know how to work with partners and use them as a force multiplier. If you’re not working with partners, you’re limited by your own time only, but if you’re working with partners, you get their reach, you get their relationships, and that can be a really powerful thing for you.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Mike, we’ve interviewed a lot of your peers at AWS. Of course, Rebecca Wetherly, and we’ve had just some great leaders on the show, Amy Belcher. I’m really excited to talk to you and get your perspective. Introduce yourself. Tell us about yourself and tell us what you’re selling for AWS and what you do with AWS.
Mike Cannady: Thank you so much for having me, I’m excited to be here, Fred. I’ll start with a little bit of personal stuff and then get into my position and what I do. I live in the Northern Virginia area, just outside of Washington, D.C. Job number one for me is being a dad of two energetic kids who keep me quite busy with activities and all sorts of fun stuff. Also, shout out to my wife who helps me manage all of that and is my partner in crime, all the way. Appreciate all of that. Then on another personal level, I’m a big sports and music fan, pretty much any sports, and then love attending live concerts and music as well. Great to be here.
Professionally, I work at AWS, where I’m our Global Director of Partner Programs for Public Sector. Just to explain what that is a little bit, the mission of my team is really to help accelerate our AWS partner growth in public sector via programs, incentives, and strategic initiatives. Public sector for us, just to give some more background, is government, education, healthcare, nonprofit, and aerospace. Quite a large and growing exciting business. Then today, I think for the listeners out there, I hope I can shed some light on how we work with partners, best practices for working with partners. Also, if you’re an end customer seller, how you can leverage partners is really a multiplier effect for you.
Fred Diamond: Since you opened the door, you got to tell us your team, because our listeners know that I kick out on sports and music as well. Tell us your team, one or two teams that you follow ardently.
Mike Cannady: For me, it’s college sports mostly. I’m a University of Virginia person. Better or worse, I follow all those teams avidly, lots of changes there with NIL, and we could do a whole podcast on that, but really exciting. Then music-wise, I listen to everything from new music to I love classic Motown and actually reggae music. I collect vinyl records as well, so also a big passion area.
Fred Diamond: We can kick out on that later on. I was a DJ at one point in my career, and we could probably have fun talking about that. Let’s get right to it though, from the business side. We’re doing today’s interview in July of 2025. How’s it going? How are things going for your partner organization today, and what are some of the biggest challenges facing the channel these days?
Mike Cannady: Things are going great. I’ve been at AWS now for eight and a half years, which is hard to believe. It truly has been a rocket ship and an amazing ride. To put it in perspective, when I joined AWS, we were at about a $10 billion annual revenue run rate. Then today we’re at $117 billion annual run rate. Truly 10X, 11X plus experience over those eight years. What you get in that type of growth is really a lot of chaos. You try to control the chaos and then a lot of opportunity career-wise, and then also for our customers and partner base. Even at this level of scale, we’re still growing at about 17% year over year. Really exciting place to be.
I’ll talk a little bit about what that means for our partners. AWS people know, but it’s the world’s largest cloud computing platform. It’s everything from compute to database. Now AI is a big part of what we do as well. Then for our partners, we actually have over 140,000 partners in our partner network across 200 countries. What we’re seeing in public sector is a lot of partners growing fast with us, building vibrant businesses on AWS, very profitable businesses, and we love to see that. There’s just a ton of opportunity with partners in AWS.
Fred Diamond: I think one thing we’ve learned, again, AWS has sent a lot of your women in sales leaders through our Women in Sales Leadership Forum. We’ve been involved with you guys. I don’t think people really get the scope of AWS and how substantial what you’re doing in public sector really is. You’re pretty much becoming the underlying infrastructure for so many things that are going on that are so critical to IT and operations continuing. We’re talking today about public sector, but in so many different industries.
You talked about partnerships. You’re known as someone who can work with partners to achieve big results. I like what you just said before that a lot of the partners who are now getting involved are getting the opportunity to grow as well and have that scope. What does that mean and how have you developed the skillset that you’ve developed? Just as importantly, how are you training your team members to utilize those skill sets as well?
Mike Cannady: I’ve worked in different functions throughout my career. Everything from finance to sales, to partner development, to a bit of product as well. I think one thing I love about my job today working in programs is that it’s a mix of all of those things. We work very cross-functionally. That can be a challenge too, because you have to train people up to learn a lot of the different areas of the business, be a little bit of a jack of all trades. But I’ve been lucky in my career to lean in to different opportunities to work in different areas, which I think has helped me today.
Then for your part of the question about new team members and how we develop them, it’s really in two ways. The first is on-the-job training. We’re a fast-moving place. There’s lots of new projects, lots going on, and people can really get to run meaningful projects with big impact independently. We encourage them to what we call learn and be curious and invent along the way, and that’s how you learn and that’s how you develop. Then I did establish a formal support program for my organization as well, where we give them ways to develop their career through more mechanized approaches. One of those would be we have a job shadowing program where they can shadow leaders. We also proactively rotate people across the organization. The current organization I run, I have examples of people that have been in it for five plus years and maybe on their second or third job within the organization. We’re really big into that.
Then I’ll leave you with an example. We also like to think big here and create new things. There’s a program that we run called Think Big for Small Business that we launched a few years ago, where we actually help small business partners with 150 employees or less. That was launched within my team, from idea to running it. Now we have 1,500 partners in that program that grew 91% in the number of opportunities they launched last year. That’s just one example of things you can really lean into and create.
Fred Diamond: That is actually quite exciting, to give someone in the sales organization an opportunity to create something and to watch it grow and to have the impact like you just discussed. People who are in sales, their job is to grow sales, obviously, and your partner network is to grow the partners. Creating a program like that from scratch, like you just said, from idea to conception to growth, it’s pretty good to be able to do something like that as you grow your career. Kudos to you and to whoever was involved with bringing that program to market.
You mentioned AI before, and obviously, Amazon Web Services is leading the way in implementation of AI at customer sites, et cetera. Give us your thoughts on how AI is changing channel dynamics. What are you telling your partners and what do some of those conversations look like? What do they want to know from you about how AI can help them be more effective?
Mike Cannady: It’s no secret that AI is changing everything. It’s just absolutely mind-boggling what’s happening now. I’ve had the luxury in my career to work through a couple of big technology changes. I started when the internet was disrupting everything. Then I remember when mobile disrupted everything, then of course cloud computing disrupted everything. Now AI based on data is disrupting faster than any of those from a usage standpoint, which is pretty amazing. For partners, it’s the biggest hot topic, how do we navigate AI change? How do we make sure it impacts our business positively? My team is highly focused on this. There’s a couple things we’ve rolled out to really help partners.
First off, we have something called AWS marketplace where our customers can actually go and buy partner solutions. Think of it as an online store essentially. Just last week at our New York AWS Summit, we launched an experience within marketplace for AI agents and tools. Partners can actually create these tools, we have hundreds of listings already from partners like Anthropic and Salesforce, and they can make money and get to customers by being on the leading edge of AI, leaning in and having these tools, and we give them a way to do so.
Then we also have programs for partners who say, “I don’t have the capabilities yet. How do I get going?” We have something called the Partner Transformation Program that has a GenAI specific workshop module where we assess the partner’s AI technical capabilities, help them come up with their first use case, and then a real plan to bring that to go-to-market phase. We’re doing a lot with partners, and then internally, we’re also doing a ton. It’s disrupting our own business. On my team alone, we’re already using AI for things like faster processing of program applications from partners, opportunities they submit, and all sorts of things. That frees up my team to do more strategic work, which is a great benefit.
Fred Diamond: Is AI the thing that channel partners are most concerned about right now? I don’t want to lead the question, but if I were to ask you, what are channel partners most concerned about? We’re doing today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast towards the end of July of 2025. I don’t want to lead the witness, but what are channel partners most concerned about right now?
Mike Cannady: Definitely AI is a huge, huge one for sure. I’ll give you another one that’s very top of mind, and that’s the geopolitical landscape, of course. My job is global. I work with partners all over the world, and particularly in Europe, the topic of where does your data sit, who has access to your data is another huge one for partners. We call that realm digital sovereignty. At our re:Invent Conference last year in December, we actually launched something called our digital sovereignty competency, where partners can actually get trained to be proven to have expertise in helping customers manage where is their data set, who has access to it, does it meet their local country requirements? This is a super-hot topic, again, particularly in Europe. We train the partners, help them get capabilities here, they prove it, and they get a badge, they’re an expert. It’s good for our customers because when they’re worried about being in compliance, they know which partners to work with. We have 25 partners that have achieved that very high bar and about 15 others in the pipeline looking to achieve it. Fred, that would be another just big hot topic right now with digital sovereignty.
Fred Diamond: That’s one that we haven’t really discussed too much on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. That’s one that I’m looking to track a little bit further as we continue with that. I’m just curious, that’s one that you just brought up, there’s so many challenges out there right now to make partnerships successful. Right now, what would be your advice for partners about how they can be more successful working with AWS?
Mike Cannady: It’s interesting. With all the change going on in the world that I’ve just discussed, some of the fundamentals of what makes a good partnership have not changed, which may be a breath of fresh air to some of the partners and sellers out there. But number one, I think what makes a really good partnership is from the beginning aligned expectations and goals. You’d be surprised how many partnerships do not have that, particularly over a multiple year period. We try to start with that from the beginning, and then you need everybody to be reading to the same sheet of music, from the people working on it every day, all the way up to the C levels. We’ve rolled out even digital business plans called our One Team Business Plan that partners can fill out multi-year, and then our end customer sellers can see what the partners are focused on. We want our partners to be really clear about what are priorities for them, what are their superpowers. We like it when partners say, “Here are things that I don’t do,” so we’re very clear on what they’re aiming for. I think some of those fundamentals are truer than ever today.
Fred Diamond: I agree. That’s a great answer. I’m just curious, I want to get a little bit deeper with you as a leader. What are some of your leadership insights that you try to instill in the people on your team to help them become more successful? If I were to ask someone who reports to you, describe Mike as a leader, what would be some of the things that they might say?
Mike Cannady: My team might joke with you, hopefully in a loving way, that one for me is definitely the quality of our work or high standards. Here at Amazon, we have something called our Leadership Principles. A lot of people know about those, there’s 16 of them, and we have one called Insist on Highest Standards, which I love, and we actually hire against on my team quite a bit. But the spirit of it is that the quality of your work really matters. The work ethic really matters. Then if you look at even the words within that leadership principle, it says, just to give you a quick example, leaders have relentlessly high standards. Many people may think these standards are unreasonably high, leaders ensure defects do not get sent down the line, and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
I think those words mean a lot. We try to set the bar of having the highest quality work and fixing things permanently, and with people that that’s a little bit more new to, we of course teach them this in a positive way. I think that’s made a huge difference on the impact that my team’s had.
Fred Diamond: At the end of the day, the partnership is all about helping the end user customer, the end user organization. Again, in public sector, we’re talking about agencies and all the entities that are doing the work of public sector organizations. What are your end user customers looking for from the AWS partner relationship?
Mike Cannady: AWS has an extremely broad set of capabilities and things that we do, but I want to be clear that we will never do everything that our customers want in every geography of the world. We need partners, and partners are critical to the success of our end customers. What the customers are looking for is they’re looking for AWS to come in together with partners for a seamless experience that brings the best of the capabilities from AWS and the best of the capabilities from our partners. Things like partners bringing managed services, or industry solutions, or advisory consulting, what have you. But when they come together, it’s great for the customer because the customer doesn’t want to be buying each of those things ad hoc. They want them together in an end-to-end solution.
I’ll also add that we’re seeing a huge trend of more multi-partner solutions together. Not just us and one partner, but us and multiple partners. It might be a software partner and a consulting partner all combined. Again, that’s great for the customer because they get those enhanced capabilities.
Fred Diamond: If you don’t mind me following up, does that add a degree of complexity? Is it your organization who brings the multi-partner entities together to form one solution? Is it unique per customer, or is it, for lack of a better word, prebuilt type things, or is it both?
Mike Cannady: That’s a great question. We launched a program related to this exact topic because we did hear from partners, they wanted AWS to play a role in them finding other partners to work with and how to work together. We launched a program called BOX, Business Outcomes Xcelerator, that literally hosts matchmaking events for partners, where they come in to try to solve a really difficult topic area in public sector. That could be healthcare, it could be local government related, and they come in thinking about a specific topic area, and then they look at their capabilities and then they walk out of that experience with their first idea of something they want to do together. We’ve found that that approach is accelerating the number of multi-partner solutions and what we can bring to end customers.
Fred Diamond: I love that idea. One of the things we talk about a lot on the Sales Game Changers Podcast and at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling events is the fact that you got to be a couple steps ahead of the customer to be successful, because they don’t need you if you’re not. They have big problems, especially in your marketplace, public sector, you have a global responsibility. Usually, we’re talking about things focused maybe just on North America or the United States, but when you bring in all these other geopolitical type challenges and you need partners who have specific expertise, it takes a lot of work to be able to figure out who the right ones are so that you’re delivering to the customer where they want to go, that you know where they are.
Mike, this has been great. I really appreciate all your insights here. We touched on a couple things that we hadn’t discussed before on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Before I ask you for your final action step, and I may throw one more music question in there, I’m just curious, you talked on AWS’s leadership principles before, what are your top three personal leadership drivers?
Mike Cannady: For me, I’m big on transparency, air cover, and then having fun. I’ll explain each of those a little bit. Transparency, I have always led, and I strive to lead by just giving full information from the very top as quickly and as often as I can, because you want your talented team members at the edge working with partners. They’re making hundreds of decisions every day and if they don’t have the strategy or the direction, how are they going to do that at speed and independently? That’s really important. I just try to bring them the information and prepare them. I view that as one of the biggest pieces of my job.
Then the second one on the air cover piece, the last thing I want is for the team to be bogged down on reporting and process and all these internal things. We have to really focus on that at Amazon. It’s so fast-moving you have to resist that kind of stasis in a way and really keep things lean and fast. I really try to simplify that type of work for them. Then the fun part, it’s just life is short. Let’s have a sense of humor and let’s have a good time. I think my team would tell you that the culture is a really fun culture as well.
Fred Diamond: I have to ask you a music question since you brought it up, and I could talk to you for hours about it. Give us one band that means a lot to you, that right now when we’re done, if you just want to chill or be inspired, tell us one of your go-to bands, if you don’t mind.
Mike Cannady: I have so many across different genres, but my team always laughs because I’m a huge lover of 1990s hip hop, which people might not expect. I just find A Tribe Called Quest and some of those early ‘90s groups to just be so long-lasting and timeless music. That would be a big one. But I’ll also like Desert Island type artists. I would definitely have Bob Marley on there, James Brown. I’d probably have Axl Rose from Guns N’ Roses, so I’m all over the map. I would love to chat more music with you sometime.
Fred Diamond: Being a UVA guy, are you a big Dave Matthews fan as well, or not really?
Mike Cannady: I am a Dave Matthews fan. I’m not a diehard like some, but yeah, he was playing at fraternity houses back in the day, and some of those early demo tapes are really interesting and sound different, and then he obviously accomplished incredible things.
Fred Diamond: Very cool. You’ve given us so many great ideas. Give us one final action step, something specific that people listening to today’s show, watching us on YouTube or reading the transcript, should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Mike Cannady: I would say if you’re listening to this podcast and you work with partners in any capacity, I hope some of these insights help you work with partners. It’s really about aligning on expectations and goals, ideally over a multi-year period, and that’s how you can really unlock partner value. Then if you’re an end seller, if you’re a customer seller, I just would leave you with, the most successful sellers I’ve known in my career really know how to work with partners and use them as a force multiplier. If you’re not working with partners, you’re limited by your own time only, but if you’re working with partners, you get their reach, you get their relationships, and that can be a really powerful thing for you. Just highly encourage you to look into more of a partner-driven sales approach.
Fred Diamond: That’s great. Just remind us again, how many partners does AWS have? You said 140,000, was that the number you threw out?
Mike Cannady: That’s the number, 140,000 across 200 countries.
Fred Diamond: That’s pretty insane. Once again, Mike Cannady, thank you so much for sharing today’s information. My name is Fred Diamond, this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
ere.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo