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Today’s show featured an interview with Tyler Replogle, Principal Partner Solution Architect at AWS.
Find Tyler on LinkedIn.
TYLER’S TIP: “Have an opinion and push that opinion. I said to my customer, ‘Here’s what I would do if I were in your shoes.’ That actually progressed the deal.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m excited. We got Tyler Replogle with AWS. We’re going to be talking about some interesting things. We’ve been talking about The Challenger Sale since it was published. As a matter of fact, when we first started the Institute for Excellence in Sales 12, 15 years ago, Neil Rackham, who wrote the foreword to Challenger Sale, we brought him to Northern Virginia to speak to a couple hundred sales professionals. Challenger was coming out a couple of days later, Neil wrote the foreword to the book. Neil, of course, is the guy who wrote SPIN Selling, one of the fathers of consultative sales, and because of that, he wrote the intro to The Challenger Sale.
We’ve gotten to know the guys who wrote The Challenger Sale, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, and have had them on various Institute for Effective Professional Selling events. You and I got to meet each other and you said you want to be talking about The Challenger Sale in public sector. It was perfect timing. It was interesting timing. There’s a lot of things obviously happening in the public sector markets. We’re doing today’s interview in May of 2025. There’s a lot of efforts going on to shift some of the ways that companies interface with public sector markets, and it’s the perfect time to talk about The Challenger Sale.
Give us a brief introduction to yourself. Tell us a little bit of how you work with partners in the public sector. I’m going to ask you to describe what Challenger Sale is. Just give the audience who doesn’t know about it an intro to what it is, what its purpose is, and then we’ll talk specifically about how it may or may not play in public sector sales. Introduce yourself, tell us what you do with partners at AWS.
Tyler Replogle: What I do, what I’m passionate about is I’m passionate about partners in the public sector, and that’s what I do. I work with partners in the public sector, our ISVs, our independent software vendors, or Sis, system integrators. What I do is I help them, mostly help them on a sell through basis, where we’re working with the partner to help them sell to a customer. We do a little bit of sell too where we help them build up their own internal business, but most of it is selling through. Really it’s the glue, as I like to think about it, is we work with our own teams and account teams that have their customer is a government agency, and then we say, “Okay, you have this need. Here’s our partner that has this solution or this capability,” and we bring them together. We’re doing it sometimes an internal selling to our own teams, and then we’re working with our partner teams to connect them to our customer teams. I’m a technical seller too, so I do a lot of things.
Fred Diamond: Before we talk about Challenger Sale, a lot of people, I’ve come to realize, in our listening audience, do not necessarily understand the role of partners with such a large company with AWS. You mentioned ISVs, you mentioned technology partners. How many partners do you have? Whatever you’re allowed to discuss, let us know just the breadth of how critical partners are. AWS is one of the top handful of technology companies in the world, in the cloud world, et cetera, in the software world. Just give the audience who may not know, just the breadth of what the channel looks like in the partner network.
Tyler Replogle: A partner network is very big. We have something called the Amazon Partner Network, and it’s part of our AWS ecosystem that we have. There’s hundreds of thousands of partners that we have on there. Different ones have different capabilities. It’s so big that we’ve added competencies so that we can understand what those partners are actually doing, and there’s a way for them to be able to search and become a partner.
Fred Diamond: Let’s put this in context of The Challenger Sale. For people who don’t know, who haven’t read the book, the book is called The Challenger Sale. It was written by two guys, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson in 2012. It’s frequently referenced in the B2B world. I hear a lot of people who say, “We’re challenger. We’ve implemented all the processes,” not as much in public sector, so I was really glad when we talked about this. Tell us what The Challenger Sale is from your perspective, and then give us some perspective on how the approach has helped partners or could help partners in the public sector.
Tyler Replogle: The interesting spin on this is I’m a technical seller too. The Challenger Sales model in the book, it sounds like it’s written for your traditional seller that might be just focused on customer soft skills aspect of it. But I think it actually goes beyond that. If you’ve read the new edition, they even have a section in there at the last chapter or so that talks about how it can go beyond just a seller aspect. It’s something that you can use beyond just selling throughout your life.
But when I think about The Challenger Sales model, there’s really, I say model, it’s actually just the word that I use for it. They don’t say it like that. They say framework or other aspect in there. I’m just a practitioner of it and I’ve used it in those spaces. But I think about the three Ts for it. If you’re going to go to a meeting, I like to prepare. That’s another thing I’m going to teach the customer. That’s the first T, is teach them. What I’m going to be doing, if it’s something new there, I want to add value to that meeting. Then whenever I’m teaching them about something, it really doesn’t matter to them unless it’s tailored to them so that they can really understand what they’re going to be doing for that. They can understand that I wasn’t just taking something off the shelf and bringing it into this meeting. It’s really, I’ve spent time to understand what their business problems are so that I can say, “This is really something that’s important for you.”
The last one is take control. This is something that’s interesting to me in this space. In AWS there’s so many different options that we had. I just talked about the vast number of partners that we have. We have something over 300 different AWS services, so sometimes those services compete. We like to have a saying here in Amazon that two is better than zero. Oftentimes you have services that’ll compete with each other and the customer and the partner are wanting me to be able to say, “This is what my recommendation is. This is how I can take control,” and tell you this is what I would recommend to do, rather than just being like, “Here are all the options.”
Fred Diamond: One of the ways that the word challenger is applied is you’re challenging your customer to think differently. You’re challenging your customer to think in ways that they might not have thought about before. If you think about it, your space is extremely competitive. Some of the major tech players in the world you go head-to-head against, they are approaching your customer every day. They’re working through their channel partners to get certain messages to the customer as well.
The other thing that’s interesting here is the customer, even public sector doesn’t necessarily need sales professionals anymore if you’re not bringing them value. There’s so much information they can get on AI or on the internet, even with networking, if you will, but it’s up to the sales professional to bring them ideas, not just on what they could do today, but where they’re going. I’m curious, how do you use The Challenger Sale approach, two more Ts here, to help customers transform their technology or the technical requirements into business value?
Tyler Replogle: I’ll use an example. You brought up AI. It’s been 10 minutes here, we’ve got to talk about AI. That’s the new technology. It’s the hot thing that we’re talking about and it’s AI with agents now. Whenever I talk to a customer in the federal space, there’s regulations that they have to go by. There might be executive orders that came out, or there might be an act or something if you’re not in the US. What typically ends up happening here is if you talk to them from a commercial standpoint of here’s what we can use, you’re like, “Well, that’s great that you said this, but I have all of these security controls and compliance that I have to talk about.”
What I do when I talk to the customers on that is I lead with that. I tell them, “Hey, I know that what you have to deal with are these security controls. Well, this might be FedRAMP certified.” Or, “This is going to be running in our GovCloud AWS region that’s meant for your workloads.” I’ve just removed that obstacle out of the table. Then what I do is I’ll tailor it to them by saying, “Here’s a specific example where a customer in your space has done that, and you can go and talk to them.”
Sometimes I’m not able to say the specific customer and I’m like, “I’ll see if they can contact you,” just because of the space where sometimes they don’t want to give a reference out. But it’s teaching them that aspect of it that’s particularly interesting to them about their mission. It might be like, “Here’s a specific example.” Let’s just say if you’re in the healthcare space, maybe one of the things that they want to do is pre-approvals to make that go a little bit faster. I explain to them, even though they already know, but I’m explaining to them what a pre-approval is, just so they can understand that I know what it is and some of the challenges that they’re seeing in that space. Then I’ll take control and say, “Here’s what you want to do with it.”
Fred Diamond: A couple things that you just said there that’s really appropriate is the fact that for sales professionals to be successful now, again, we’re doing today’s interview in May of 2025, is like I mentioned before, the customer doesn’t have time for you if you’re not bringing them value that’s specifically tied to their mission. I’m going to ask you a question here about how you’ve seen the relationship with customers evolve as they embrace more and more the cloud transformation, if you will, but the markets that you serve, public sector, customers are doing some serious things. The world is in a very challenging place. Citizens are demanding more things. There’s challenges obviously with macroeconomic situations around the globe. There’s a lot of challenges with improving lives for citizens, health and human services, et cetera. They’re dealing with some big stuff defending the country, obviously. How are you seeing the relationship with customers evolve as they embrace cloud transformation?
Tyler Replogle: That’s an interesting thing that you talked about there. When I talk to people that are not aware of the public sector, sometimes they say government moves very slowly, and there’s aspects of it that do move slowly. But I think in this last administration here, last a hundred plus days, we’ve seen a lot of movement and speed that matters here to them. It is getting things done efficiently and fast. We have a term that we’ve said in this space for a while, is at the speed of mission, meaning that mission is fast. I’ve talked to people in other spaces that hear at the speed of mission, they think it’s slow because it’s government, but actually mission is fast, is sometimes the moving the government piece is a little bit slower here, but really that’s the thing that we’re trying to increase here, is that speed to mission or speed to value.
Speed matters is something that we’ve talked about at Amazon really since day one, is when you order a package, you want it there as quick as you can get it. But you also want it to be there without any blemishes, or you don’t want it to be broken when you get it because it’s not useful for you, and you want it to be the right item when you get it. Same thing for when we’re selling something to a customer there that’s a solution. You want to make sure that it’s the right solution, that it doesn’t flop on day one when they go up there. From a technical side, I want to make sure that it scales out to whatever we’re using.
Government actually is one of our biggest customers, if you think about it from a transactional standpoint. If you’re a credit card company and you do transactions or a bank, you think you might be one of the biggest companies out there, but everything has to go down to the government side to clear all those transactions. They’re the clearing house for everything. Every one of those commercial entities actually funnels down to a federal agency that has to go through and clear all those transactions. They’re actually bigger than what you might think from a commercial standpoint. They’re a huge space and size for that aspect.
Fred Diamond: That’s true. It is, we like to say fortune one, and for people who don’t understand the federal marketplace, it’s not just the government. There’s military, there’s defense, there’s intelligence, there’s a whole slew of civilian agencies, health, human services, infrastructure, agriculture. Even with some of the challenges that the administration is bringing, there are still a lot of things that the government has to do.
Just a quick thing here. People ask me all the time, it’s like you said, the government’s so slow. It really is driven by mission. It’s not that the decision making is slow, it’s just the process. The reason is because they’re spending our money. I tell that all the time. It’s, they are spending our money to make things happen. There’s checks, there’s balances. Someone just can’t make a decision to spend hundreds of thousands on something. It has to be approved, because again, it is using our money, is really what it comes down to, I think, at the end of the day.
Tyler Replogle, good advice here, but as technology rapidly evolves, and you’re in a really interesting space, the cloud. Things are happening on a daily basis with the technology. Obviously, as you throw things like AI into it, it gets even further hastened. Is The Challenger Sales model still relevant today? Again, we’re doing today’s interview in May of 2025.
Tyler Replogle: I definitely think it is still relevant today. You had talked about it at the start of the conversation here about how today, even with generative AI, for example, somebody can go onto a chat bot and ask a question about whatever piece of technology that they’re looking at, and they can get an answer. Information is readily available. It’s readily available now than it was when they wrote the book 10 plus years ago. Now it’s even more important, I would say, to be able to come in with an opinion, to be able to come in as a trusted advisor and to be able to help steer them the right direction. It’s definitely more applicable today than it has been in the past.
I do want to revisit that aspect that we talked about of the speed of government. One of the challenges that you have in the government’s face is the life cycle of creating a deal, or an opportunity of maybe if I wanted to sell in this space, I’d have to go for a request for proposal. There’d have to be one that came out. That can be a really long cycle. It can be somewhere between 18 months to 24 months to be able to come back for that.
What we’re seeing now for increasing that speed that we talked about there, is that we’re able to go with something that’s really been in the tool belt for a long time, but an unsolicited proposal as a way for us to say, “Okay, let’s go where we already have a vehicle today and let’s say how can we save them money today based on this disruption that’s happening?” We know that there’s changes that they have to make, they have to be more efficient. What are we going to do in order to help them do that? That can be an unsolicited proposal. It doesn’t have to wait 18 to 24 months for an RFP to come out.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. One thing that the administration wants government to do is to adapt more commercial processes, but there’s still some checks and balances that need to be in place, because of all the reasons that we just explained there. This is a fascinating conversation. We’re going through a very major shift in a lot of ways, not just with the technology, but with how the government operates from a business type perspective, if you will. But for the sales professionals listening today, there’s just the one commonality we keep seeing, and you brought this up a number of times and it plays in really well with The Challenger Sales model, interestingly, 10 years later, is that you have to bring more value than ever before. For you to get the customer to even listen to you, even if you’re with AWS or a brand name top five technology company, the customer’s not going to listen if you’re not really bringing them value on how they can better, faster possibly, more effectively achieve their mission.
Every public sector customer is mission driven. They’re not buying things to improve a customer experience, now citizen experience at some level, but they’re doing things to help achieve their mission to serve those who they serve more effectively. If you’re not thinking in those terms, then your career I think is going to be very, very short.
Tyler, give us a final action step. We like to end every show with our guest saying something that sales professionals should do right now. You’ve given us a lot of ideas, what should the sales professionals listening to today’s show do right now to take their sales career to the next level?
Tyler Replogle: The thing that I would do right now, it’s back to what we had talked about from The Challenger Sales model or framework here, is that basically have an opinion and push that opinion. You’ve got to have the relationship with the customer to do that, but don’t just come with, “Here’s the information, here are the options.” I’ll give you an example.
I was working an opportunity as a specialist. I’m big on the database space, and I help out across all of AWS with that. We had given them three different options. I was talking about before, I work with partners, the account team was like, “We’re going to be neutral. We’re not going to give an opinion on them.” We kept having these meetings over and over again, and they’re like, “Okay, we’ll make a decision in two weeks,” and then two weeks rolls by, and then another two weeks and they’re like, “We need to meet again to figure out what the options are.” It was a loop. It just kept happening.
I was like, “Okay, I know these people from before. What they really want us to do is to tell them what our opinion is.” We said, “Whatever way you go, we’ll work with you, but here’s what I would do if I was in your shoes.” I laid it out for them. That actually progressed the deal. They went with the opinion that I gave them, and it moved it, and opportunities here at Amazon are something that continually happen. It’s a switch that can turn on and off. Right now they’re in the process of doing that.
Fred Diamond: Very good. Congratulations on that. Once again, I want to thank Tyler Replogle with AWS. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo