Nearly all enterprise software companies have a slide claiming a partnership with Microsoft or AWS. Few have the revenue to show for it. The logos get announced, a listing goes live on a cloud marketplace, and then the motion stalls between the partner team and the sales floor, where nobody is compensated to care. Bryan Mobley, Vice President of Cloud Partnerships at Meltwater, has spent 25 years building partner and channel programs at Cisco, Nokia, Sprinklr, and Ciara, and his read on the failure lacks sentiment. The companies that win, he says, treat the cloud partner as a genuine extension of their own sales team. Everything else is paperwork. What follows is the mechanical work most organizations skip: fixing internal compensation, learning how the other side gets paid, and earning the right to ask for introductions.
Fix The Compensation Math Before You Ask For Anything
The first obstacle to a co-sell motion is rarely Microsoft or AWS. It is the account executive (AE) inside the building who quietly routes deals away from the marketplace, because doing so protects their number. Cloud marketplaces take a small percentage of the deal, one to three percent, to process the transaction. That fee is trivial at the corporate level and enormous at the rep level. “You do not want your AEs taking that hit on bookings credit,” Mobley says. An AE who loses even a point of bookings credit on a six-figure deal will learn the lesson once and never route through the marketplace again, and no amount of encouragement can overcome that incentive.
Compensation neutrality is the floor, not the ceiling. Mobley points out that some cloud programs return a percentage of marketplace-transacted revenue to the partner, sometimes as marketing development funds (MDFs), sometimes as cash that can be used directly as an incentive for AEs to drive marketplace revenue. That distinction matters more than it sounds. MDF pays for demand generation; cash can change seller behavior this quarter. Companies that understand which lever they are holding can convert a compliance exercise into a real incentive. Companies that do not will keep wondering why their marketplace numbers stay flat, while their partnership headcount grows.
Learn How The Other Side Gets Paid
The second discipline is the one partner teams most consistently neglect. Cloud account executives and specialists have quotas, accelerators, and retirement rules of their own, and those rules are not static. How AWS and Microsoft AEs or specialists get paid can change every year, Mobley notes, which means last year’s pitch is already stale. A partner who walks into a field conversation without knowing what counts toward the seller’s quota is asking for a favor. A partner who knows exactly how the deal lands on that seller’s compensation plan is offering something useful.
The practical payoff shows up in meeting acceptance rates. Understanding the compensation structure, Mobley argues, lets a partner be crisp in the communication they send when requesting a meeting or a call with the account team. Getting that right dramatically improves the odds that the cloud team will show up. The scarcity is the point: “Remember, there are thousands of partners vying for their time,” he says. Cloud field sellers triage their inbox by whichever partner is most obviously going to help them hit their number. Specificity is the filter. A message that names the account, the deal, and how it retires quota gets a calendar invite. A generic partnership introduction does not.
Earn The Right To Ask For Introductions
The third move is where co-sell stops being a transaction-processing exercise and starts producing pipeline. Once a partner brings a deal to a cloud account team in a way that helps that team get compensated, Mobley says, they have earned the right to ask about other accounts. The sequencing is deliberate. Value moves first; the request comes second. Ask the account team what other accounts they own and whether they would be willing to make an introduction. That single question, asked after a seller has already been paid on your deal, converts a one-time marketplace transaction into a standing relationship at the field level.
That is also the argument that settles internal resistance. Partner programs tend to get scrutinized because they look like a tax on deals the company had decided to close. Mobley’s answer is to change the evidence. If you can drive existing deals to the marketplaces and then source new opportunities on top of them, he says, it removes most of the objections from internal teams. Sourced deals, the ones brought to you by a partner and entirely new to your pipeline, carry weight that co-sold renewals never will. “Source deals or leads, that is, deals that are brought to you by a partner that are entirely new ops for you, are very valuable on all fronts,” Mobley says. The three pieces compound: make the team compensation neutral, understand how the cloud teams are compensated, and invest in real relationships to drive new leads. Do those consistently, and the cloud partner stops being a logo on a slide and becomes, in his words, one of your strongest engines for growth.
Follow Bryan Mobley on LinkedIn for more insights on cloud partnerships, co-sell strategy, and marketplace revenue.
