Louise Strandoo: Inside the Engine: How AWS Marketplace Powers Partner Growth

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Hey everyone back again. This has been just a fantastic event. And so many great you know, partner folks and such great networking and connecting, reconnecting with friends and colleagues here in Seattle a catalyst. How's it going here so far? Louise,

Louise Strandoo  0:19  
yeah, it's been wonderful. It's been really great to see lots of our friends, lots of folks who are doing the groundwork every day to build partnerships and and help drive coastal and work with AWS. So it's been really exciting to see those folks in action. And I think the the thing that's been exciting is seeing folks and talking about how they feel, like they're they're with their team. It's really strong community.

Chip Rodgers  0:41  
Yeah, yeah. So true. So true. So I'm really excited to be joined by Louise strandu. And Louise is head of marketplace for AMR tech partnerships, so you're doing some really great things. We've known each other for a while, a lot of AWS events, and sorry, with AWS, I didn't say that. And Louise is just really, just so articulate, and shares so much about marketplace and the value of marketplace, you know, for partners. And so first of all, Louise, welcome, and let's talk. Tell us a little bit more about what it is that you and your team are are up to. Yeah,

Louise Strandoo  1:24  
thanks for having me. Thanks for the compliment. So I lead a team of partner development specialists, and we are part of the AWS AMR tech partner team. Our focus is on helping enable partners to make marketplace their default path to market within partnership. So what we've seen over the past, really, the past two years especially, has really accelerated, is marketplace is kind of the central point of all things partnership. All the partner programs are starting to use marketplaces that way to scale. And so we're a focused team on helping partners figure out how to transform their business, to do marketplace better, how to look around the corners and prepare for the next things that partners are going to be doing with marketplace. So we're helping partners today figure out how to change their their marketplace strategy, to adopt product led growth, helping partners figure out how to adopt the best practices implemented by other partners in order to make their marketplace business successful. And we work alongside partner development managers to make sure that marketplace is really woven into the partnership strategy. So we're, we're spending all day talking marketplace and trying to make it work for partners. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers  2:34  
yeah, that's, that's terrific. Well, it shows because you guys are really, so, you know, well versed and in depth and knowledgeable, knowledgeable about about marketplace. And there's so much to talk about, so let's do that actually. Love to hear about it, because, you know, I think AWS has done some really amazing things and really been leading with marketplace and and, you know, Matt, why and his team are just, you know, constantly building and releasing new capabilities. It's really incredible. So let's start there.

Louise Strandoo  3:10  
Yeah, so I've been with the marketplace team for the better part of the last seven years, and when I started, I was helping startups get listed on the marketplace. And we spent a lot of time calling our ISVs and calling our counterparts within the AWS organization to ask, Hey, you know, have you heard of us? Most of them hadn't. And we were really just trying to get that selection built and get the catalog to be something that buyers cared about. And thanks to the incredible efforts of, you know, the broader partner organization, or ISVs, and the engineering efforts from folks like Matt, we do really have this amazing catalog today that is full of really compelling features that make marketplace something that is actually very value add for our buyers. So we do see that marketplace has been kind of a, you know, at first it was this idea, let's really make this happen. And now it really is this default path where customers want to buy, because it does enable customers to get their software faster. It drives cost savings for our customers when they procure through marketplace. And there's a lot of simplicity. So right now, we're really looking at, how do we help drive more of that simplicity? We're looking at ways that we can incorporate marketplace features, like product led growth features that make marketplace just a lot more frictionless and low touch for our customers. And we're spending a lot of time focusing on how do we enable our international customers to make marketplace a way to reach the software they need locally with the same experience that our customers have within the Americas, where marketplace has really kind of started and flourished. So we've been on a journey, but I think it's really Yeah. Over the past eight years, we've gone from being this thing where we're trying to convince our partners you should try this, give it a go, to really seeing it be the default way that customers are looking to purchase. Send the way that we co sell. Really, it's how we're like I said. It's embedded into a lot of our partner programs, and it is the way that we are able to scale how we co sell with our partners.

Chip Rodgers  5:10  
It's terrific. I think, you know the I heard you present a session maybe four or five months ago, at a AWS sellers conference, and you, as you were talking and and sort of going into depth about some of the value of marketplace, I'm like, Okay, I'm writing notes. It was, I mean, you talked about, you know, simplified contracting, and, of course, currency translation, language translation, local banking, local tax challenges, you know, all those things that really marketplace you guys are investing to build to make it more streamlined for companies to go into new geographies.

Louise Strandoo  5:54  
Yeah, absolutely. I think that you know, marketplace. When we started, we took this idea of like, simplify the billing. Let's figure out how we can make it possible for us to take care of that billing for our buyers and make our sellers, you know, focus on selling their software, focus on developing their software. We wanted to create a platform that allowed our ISVs, in particular, to figure out how to put that investment into their tech, not just into maintaining billing and all of the operations, right? And so that was something that really worked, but it was limited to only working really in North America. We didn't have the capabilities quite yet to scale in the way that we're looking to scale right now. And so what we are really focused on is rolling out engineering features that make marketplace feel localized for customers around the world. We're thinking about, yeah, local language, currency conversion. We also really want to empower our smaller ISVs to be able to use marketplace as the way to sell globally without having to have boots on the ground in all of those regions. And so we hear a lot of success stories, especially from startups who are able to use marketplace to be that scale point and really reach customers abroad because of all the features that we're continuously developing around international expansion, yeah,

Chip Rodgers  7:22  
yeah. So, your role, you're focused on AMR So and, and it's really partners here, and typically ISVs in, you know, in the region that are looking to expand into new into new markets, yeah.

Louise Strandoo  7:40  
So we we kind of focus on a couple things. One is, we focus on helping partners who are newer to marketplace understand what are the best practices for doing so. So we leverage a framework that we call costs. I talk about it a lot. It is the characteristics of successful sellers. So we work with partners that are kind of newer to marketplace. Maybe they are, you know, maybe they're industry partners that have not yet had as much exposure to overall co sell with AWS or their startups, or they are partners that, for whatever reason, are kind of just getting on board. So we'll work on them by explaining and helping implement some of the foundations of the cost framework. We also work with sellers to help introduce and figure out how to execute new routes to market. So product led growth is a huge focus for us this year. If a seller is looking around and they're like, how do we make this easier for our buyers, and how do we lead with our product instead of, you know, this very high touch sales process that requires outfitting your marketplace listing and your operations on marketplace to support that. And so we work with partners to help understand, how do you update your listings? How do you leverage all these features that we're always releasing to have a seamless path and story to make your marketplace offering support product led growth and support the overall motion of selling through, you know, your product, rather than everything being a high touch sale. So that's by with AWS also absolutely, absolutely, yeah. So we, yeah. I think if you're, if you're keeping track, there's a tremendous amount of features that we're launching all the time, and it's hard to, sometimes for ISPs to weave it into a story. So what we do is try to help our partners figure out, how do I take features like buy with AWS, free trials, SAS, quick launch, and weave it into a strategy for product led growth that makes sense for how they sell, and how do they think about implementing those features the right time to support what they're what they're trying to accomplish? Well, that's

Chip Rodgers  9:39  
tremendous. There's a lot going on. And Louise, so it's, it's, it's a challenge, I'm sure, just to consume it and be able to tell that story. But you know, congrats on the great work that you're doing, evangelizing the marketplace and all the incredible features that you guys are rolling out.

Louise Strandoo  9:56  
Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much for meeting with me, and thanks for all the work you do. To help evangelize marketplace with our community. It's really great,

Chip Rodgers  10:03  
terrific. So, Louise, thank you, and thank you all for joining and a lot more still to come another day and a half, and so we'll see you next time, everybody. Thanks. Thank you. You.

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