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Today’s show featured an interview with Rebecca Wetherly, AWS Public Sector Systems Integrator Partner Director. Rebecca was the IES Partner of the Year for 2024.
Find Rebecca on LinkedIn.
REBECCA’S ADVICE: “Leverage your network from others who are doing the job. I have a close group of trusted advisors myself who I lean into for advice and counsel from a professional lens. Find mentors and advisors who will share, who will ask you questions and give you good perspectives on what you’re strong at and what you do well and what you don’t do well.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’ve got Rebecca Wetherly on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Rebecca, you are the Institute for Excellence in Sales 2024 Partner of the Year. We gave that award to you at a really nice event. It was our 14th annual award event, and we did it on May 17th, a couple of weeks ago if you’re listening to this show sometime in the future. Congratulations on receiving that.
It just made a lot of sense because a lot of times people want to know about partnerships, and you’ve been leading partnerships at Amazon in the public sector for a number of years. You’ve had a great sales career, you continue to have a great sales career. People are inspired by you. When people found out that you were the recipient of our Partner of the Year for 2024, so many people reached out and complimented the Institute for Excellence in Sales on selecting you.
I want to get deep with you about a couple things, how important partnerships are to Amazon Web Services. AWS has one of the largest technology partner ecosystems on the planet. It’s one of the most progressive, I believe, it’s one of the most fruitful for partners. We’re going to get deep into what that ecosystem looks like and how sales professionals or partner professionals can take their career to the next level. How can they become more trusted advisors? A trusted partner is a term that we’ve uttered countless times on the Institute for Excellence in Sales. I think this is also going to be a good podcast for partners in the technology ecosystem to understand how they could get more value from their vendor and developer relationships.
First off, congratulations again on receiving our award. It’s great to see. Why don’t you give us a little bit of your background? Before we talk about the AWS part, your ecosystem, give us an update on how you got to this point.
Rebecca Wetherly: Well, Fred, thank you so much for the award. It’s truly such an honor to be recognized as the Partner of the Year for IES, where I think there’s tremendous potential for sales professionals. I think your organization does an amazing job of providing avenues for education, learning enablement, and career development. For me, I can’t thank you enough for providing those avenues. A podcast like today and learning about partnerships, it’s really a delight to share with you a little bit about my own personal philosophy, my professional background, and my experience. I hope that inspires others to get involved in partner ecosystems, whether it be AWS, or any company they’re working with.
As you mentioned, I’ve worked a bit of time in partnerships at AWS. I’ve been here almost 12 years and always working in the partner ecosystem focused on our consulting and systems integrator partners working with our public sector customers. I feel a tremendous passion for the mission that our customers serve, whether that’s healthcare, government, education, or aerospace. These are important missions that affect all of our lives. If I think about how we work collectively with our partners to achieve mission success, there’s a real impact on our daily lives. It’s a real treat today to join you and share with you a little about what we’re doing, how we think about partners, and maybe some tips that might help somebody else down the road.
Fred Diamond: What does the AWS, Amazon Web Services, partner ecosystem look like? Give us some insights into how important partners are to AWS?
Rebecca Wetherly: As of October ‘23, which is the latest stat that I have, our Partner Network included more than 130,000 partners, over 200 countries. We call our partner ecosystem the Amazon Partner Network, or the APN. That includes thousands of systems integrators who specialize in AWS services and tens of thousands of independent software vendors who adapt their technology to work on AWS. We really pride ourselves on our depth and reach with over 105 availability zones and 33 geographic regions around the world, and are launching 12 more availability zones and 5 more regions, including Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Those are all on our roadmap.
If you think about that reach, partners are really critical to how we serve our customers globally. Working both centrally with partners and then in region, in globe, meeting our customers where they are for their needs.
Fred Diamond: 130,000. I had no idea. My MBA thesis was on channel theory and design. I was working at Apple Computer at the time, so I’ve spent a lot of time in my life. I never would’ve guessed 130,000 in over 200 companies. I would’ve said like 40 or 50. That’s incredible.
We’ve done over 700 Sales Game Changers Podcast episodes. One of the most common terms we hear is trusted advisor and building trust. A lot of the sales leaders that we featured on the Sales Game Changers Podcast said you need to build the trust. How do you build trust with a partner and how conscious are you of being a “trusted advisor”?
Rebecca Wetherly: My philosophy about working with a partner is rooted in our leadership principles from Amazon. We start with a customer and always work backwards from their needs and requirements. By doing that, we remain customer-obsessed and focused on those mission outcomes I was talking about. Our partners are also our customers, so I treat them like a customer. I think that bodes well for how we create trusted, transparent partnerships. That’s the approach that I take.
One of our, what we call leadership principles at Amazon, is in fact Earn Trust. That’s defined as leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They’re vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing, and they benchmark themselves and their teams against the best. One of the ways that we’re working to build trust and transparency is by establishing more intentional focus on industries and lines of business versus simply core IT services. I’ll give you an example.
Back in 2020, Amazon Web Services announced the launch of a new business focusing on aerospace and satellites. Now, leaning into what our customers were telling us, we believed that earth and space-based systems would inform many of the decisions our customers were making. We listened, we acted, we hired a team, led by retired General Clint Crosier of the Space Force, who you’ve had on for a podcast before. Under Clint’s leadership, we’ve grown a business by hiring subject matter experts to align with both commercial and government aerospace and satellite initiatives. We’re doing this across all areas of government education and healthcare as well.
From a partner lens, we couple this deep focus with their expertise to deliver great industry experiences for our joint customers. For example, with our partners, Deloitte and Kyndryl, we’re deploying EPIC on AWS workloads for healthcare customers. We know that organizations can radically enhance their clinician, patient, and employee experiences by leveraging a broad portfolio of AWS services for electronic health records. Our partners are the ones to migrate and modernize those systems for our customers.
Fred Diamond: One of the things for people listening to the show, and this is hitting me as you’re going through some of these examples, Amazon Web Services, you’re in some of the most mission-critical customer operations. You serve in the public sector, which is government, and I presume it’s also education, maybe healthcare as well. These are real serious applications that have very, very important benefits for citizens, for governments, for companies. The partners are very committed.
At the same time, when you work with the partners and the channel, they have concerns. They have their businesses to run as well. They all have goals. They’re dependent upon AWS bringing the best solutions to the market that they can focus on the needs of their customer. What are some of the concerns that your partners have that you frequently need to address?
Rebecca Wetherly: One area I’d call out, Fred, is keeping current on our services releases and roadmaps. For perspective and scale, in 2023, AWS released 3,410 new services and features. We are continually accelerating our pace of innovation to deliver unique capabilities and technologies that customers can use to transform their business. Now, I think many traditional OEMs have fully baked long-term roadmaps. At AWS, our roadmaps are largely customer-driven. You heard me talk about working backwards. That’s how we are continually reinventing on behalf of our customers. That forces our partners then to be pretty nimble and have a deep technical awareness for our offerings.
Now, we offer often and ongoing training workshops, virtual and local sessions for partners on a continuum, because they have to remain current. I think the other thing I’d point out is our partners really want three things from us. Predictability, profitability, and simplicity. Simplicity is all about how we assess and refine our programs, systems and tools, and look for opportunities to make it simpler and easier for our partners to work with AWS. They also are looking for predictability in how we’re going to work together. We’re always seeking ways to improve how we involve partners and account and territory planning to help make sure we’re on the same page with how we’re going to engage and drive joint results. Certainly, the third spindle is around profitability. We believe that partners can achieve a $6.40 multiplier against every dollar of AWS sold. That’s if they offer services, including professional services, advisory services, maybe procurement, design, build, managed services, all around our platform. Our programs are designed to help partners capture that multiplier, which is super important in the business we’re in.
Fred Diamond: That’s a pretty impressive multiplier. I didn’t realize it was that high, which is great. I’m just curious, do you think of yourself as a sales professional?
Rebecca Wetherly: I absolutely do, Fred. I think partners are a natural extension of our sales teams. Without partners, we cannot deliver the full needs of our customers. My team wears many hats, and I’ll tell you, I read in an article in LinkedIn recently that said, “Partner leaders have 15 jobs, with sales being only one of them.” Other jobs that we do include business strategy, market analysis and development, solutions, consulting, account management. At Amazon, we believe that our partner managers are absolutely core to helping incubate sales, drive sales, close sales. Absolutely, partners and partner leaders are core and critical to the sales process.
Fred Diamond: You and I once had a conversation about the concept of exceeding expectations and how that was such a critical part of how you go about doing your business. Do you try to exceed expectations with your partners? Explain that, what does that mean?
Rebecca Wetherly: Each and every engagement, and every day, I try to exceed expectations. I do think that starts with proper expectation setting, being prepared, and being open to critical feedback. That means we’ve got to constantly seek ways we can improve. We have to be humble, stay humble, and I have to be available to my team. I have to be available to my partners. I also think partnerships are very much a two-way street. We need each other and we value one another. I expect partners I work with to be open and honest about what they need from us to help our joint customers achieve success. I also understand at times we may miss the mark and even fail. Candidly, Fred, failure is probably one of those places where we learn the most. Learning to embrace failure as a part of learning and doing better, and helping exceed on the next go around, is critical.
Fred Diamond: In the partner relationship, especially a long-term partner relationship, it’s not always rosy. Sometimes bad things happen. I remember when I was at Apple and in Compaq Computer managing channel partners, sometimes the news wasn’t very good. These companies, they’re making a big bet that they’re supporting the right vendor, partner, developer, manufacturer, whatever it might be. Sometimes you’re communicating “bad news”. Tell us your philosophy on that. How do you communicate “bad news”, but you still need to maintain a strong relationship?
Rebecca Wetherly: Transparency is critical to good partnering. I really appreciate when a partner tells me they’re working with us and they’re in the boat. I also appreciate it when they tell me they’re moving in a different direction. I would much rather know. I may not like it, but I want to know. I also think managing bad news is really about having trust, and having a long-term vision of joint outcomes is super important. Because you could get easily sidelined by a bad piece of news, but that’s not going to affect jointly what we’re working to accomplish.
Just a quick example, even in the last couple of weeks, I had a partner flag that they had a press release going out with a different cloud provider. This is a big partnership of ours. They didn’t have to tell me exactly what it was, but I appreciated so much that I was able to know about it and make sure I flagged that up through our leadership organization of what I expected to happen, and that it was not disruptive on what we were looking to accomplish and deliver long term. That’s a good trusted partnership.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, that’s a good one. I’m getting some shivers right now thinking about seeing a press release from a big partner that they’re bringing on another vendor, a competing vendor. The worst thing when you’re a partner professional, that you didn’t see that coming or weren’t told, so then your boss’s boss’s boss sends you an email or a text now and says, “What’s going on here?” and you didn’t foresee it and you didn’t warn your people.
Before I ask you the last question, Rebecca Wetherly, this plays into what you just answered as far as that question. What are the top three skills that a great partner professional, someone who works for the manufacturer who wants to have that partner management role, what are the three most important skills for them to possess?
Rebecca Wetherly: Well, I answer it two ways. I’ll go back to partner leaders do a lot of jobs, and doing them successfully is nothing short of pure magic. You have a lot of influencing you have to do. People don’t report to them, both internally and externally. You have lots of goals you’ve got to accomplish and dependencies on lots of other folks. I think partnerships are the unsung heroes of true go-to-market. I expect partner professionals to know their partner, to know their company and the key solution areas they can serve, and most importantly, knowing the markets where their partners can be successful. Again, not trying to be everything to everyone, but knowing exactly where you can serve and do well.
You asked me about skills. I also think there’s three skills that are really needed by a great partner leader, and that’s to be a terrific business strategist. Know the landscape. Two, have a sales mentality. You have to have a desire to win and grow. Third, I think you got to be a masterful negotiator. You want to seek a win-win for all, and I say most importantly, for our customers. That’s what we look for with great partner sales professionals.
Fred Diamond: Everybody needs to win, Amazon Web Services, the partners, and the customers. We didn’t really talk too much about supporting customers at the end of the day, but it’s all about bringing them the best solution, supporting them the best way, and working with the best partners who are going to make that happen.
I just want to acknowledge you also, you’ve been a huge supporter of the Institute for Excellence in Sales Women in Sales Programs. Our Women in Sales Leadership Forum, our Women in Sales Emerging Leaders Forum, our Women in Sales Leadership Conference. Thank you so much for wanting to support women in sales, also women in partnerships as well. It’s one of our most prized programs at the Institute for Excellence in Sales. AWS through you has been a critical partner of ours, understanding how we can better produce our programs, how we can better help sales professionals take their career to the next level, which then leads to more customer success.
Along those lines, what would you recommend to someone who is interested in a career in sales in becoming a partner professional?
Rebecca Wetherly: I appreciate it. I also want to say I appreciate you gave me an opportunity on LinkedIn to give some advice to your daughter, who’s a new college graduate. My advice is similar, I’ll say right here, which is leverage your network from others who are doing the job. I have a close group of trusted advisors myself, Fred, who I lean into for advice and counsel from a professional lens. Find mentors and advisors who will share, who will ask you questions and give you good perspectives on what you’re strong at and what you do well and what you don’t do well. For me, I look for someone who is committed to outcomes to be in a partner sales role, who will work backwards from customer outcomes and needs and bring forth their approach for being very partner forward. I also look for lifelong learners, someone who is naturally curious. Our business moves very fast and you need someone who’s going to lean in to both the customer and the partner. I think this is the other key, who is willing to take calculated risk to advance the business.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo