Stefan Shetty: The Power of Showing Up in Cloud Co-Sell

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Food. Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers again here from Boston, and we have a great event happening here today. I loved it. Yeah, it's really great, really great information. We had a workshop for about an hour and a half, and now we're doing the happy hour. And I'm excited to be joined right now by Stefan. Shetty. Stefan is with AWS. Stefan is a senior partner sales manager based in Toronto, and you cover the commercial market in for Canada,

Stefan Shetty  0:31  
mid market and small, medium business segment. So

Chip Rodgers  0:35  
that's that's fantastic. Really glad that you are you, did you come down for for this, or you had some other business. I

Stefan Shetty  0:43  
was already down here for some other business and visiting our offices here, but I've worked with a partnership leaders team for a while, so I heard about this great event that you were doing to help co sell with AWS. Wanted to come and give my support.

Chip Rodgers  0:57  
That's fantastic. So Stefan, tell tell us a little bit about what you and your team are up to these days.

Stefan Shetty  1:03  
Sure. So at AWS right now, I'm part of the partner sales team, and the easiest way to explain that is that we help all AWS partners help find solutions with our customers. So I'm kind of the fulcrum, and go between, between our wonderful sales teams that are working closely with customers to design great products and solutions and connecting us to an incredible suite of AWS partners. So that goes the whole way, whether you're services or consulting partner, where you're helping a customer build on AWS all the way to if you're an ISV or a SAS partner, where you have a best in class tool that customers love, it helps them do something really interesting. And I kind of, I'm right in the middle of that with my team of partner sales managers, and we'd like to connect the dots and get customers to build the best type of products they can build.

Chip Rodgers  1:58  
Well, that's, that's fantastic. I know it's, it's, it's a challenge, right? It's like putting all the pieces together. And it's not always necessarily going to come from AWS. Some of it, of course, will, but then putting the right services and technologies together to create a whole

Stefan Shetty  2:13  
solution. Yeah. So the way we kind of operate as AWS is we view ourselves as the building blocks, and our customers can use the building blocks to assemble the best products they have, or in a lot of cases, our partners, like many people here in this room, have built wonderful tools and solutions using our building blocks. So what we like to do is just bring that all together, bring the best in class stuff, and help promote the work that some of these great partners that I've done already

Chip Rodgers  2:41  
that's fantastic. Well, you know, we're here. This workshop is all about CO selling with partners with AWS, and sponsored by AWS, which we which we really appreciate. But during one of the you know, conversations in the workshop, Stephan, you mentioned a few things that were really interesting to me. One is you said, you know, we were talking about like, how do you get attention with the with the AWS field as a as an ISV, maybe your small ISV. And you said, Gosh, you know, you see things pop up on ace. Tell me what you said. It was, it was great,

Stefan Shetty  3:15  
yeah. So I would say the best way to be seen is consistency. And we have the way you register opportunities with us through ace one of the best things that we've seen in this workshop is there are tools to automate that. So when you're working with customers, you let AWS know as soon as possible that there's an opportunity we can help support it. So the partner team there is sitting there. We're trying to help connect the dots with our sellers. So I will get notifications when a new partner is putting in a new opportunity. And sometimes that's a it's a fortuitous cycle. So I'll see maybe a couple times the same name, the same partner is popping up, and that will kind of be a signal to me, Hey, they've got something that's really landing in the market right now. So maybe I need to hear about it. Maybe I need to meet this partner. See what they built on AWS. See if there are customers in my area, my reps areas, that can benefit from hearing about this partner.

Chip Rodgers  4:17  
I love that. I love that that's, I mean, it's so, it's so it's simple really, yeah, but, but very powerful. And it's something that I think a lot of lot of ISVs sort of struggle with, like, how do you how do I get how do I get started? How do I prime the pump? And I love that,

Stefan Shetty  4:36  
yeah, and I think the key part of that is consistency. So it's not about doing it once showing up and then kind of going away and getting caught into it. It's building the right processes and procedures through your entire organization that's ready to support that on an always on basis, like I'm just one person in the ecosystem. Our sellers are just. One person you want to appear to as many people as possible with the same type of message all the time, always on,

Chip Rodgers  5:07  
yeah, yeah. That's great. That's just great advice. So I'm curious, Stefan, you know your team, you talked about, what the, what the, what your role is? How are you guys measured? Like, what are your goals? How do you what are you What's success for your team and your team?

Stefan Shetty  5:22  
So what's great about how we built our KPIs and success is our customer success is our success like any other organization, we will have some KPIs on partner opportunities that we help all the way through, but ultimately, if our customers grow, we win, just like our AWS account managers and account executives, we're on the same goals. So when you're speaking to an AWS team, you have to talk about how what you're doing will help customers grow on AWS and build more on AWS. That's

Chip Rodgers  5:55  
that's really cool. That's great. Well, I mean, it's makes a lot of sense, and it's because it is a it's not an easy thing to sort of fit things together. You need somebody that's thinking about it, and kind of, you know, putting the putting the solutions together to for success. So Stefan, let's change gears a little bit. You're also, you're based in Toronto, and you started this organization called Cyber Toronto, which just you we were talking about a little bit earlier. It sounds phenomenal. Tell us a little about it, but you've got events. You're getting 500 people to show up at events around cyber. Tell us a little bit about it.

Stefan Shetty  6:33  
Yeah, sure. So. Cyber Toronto is an ed tech startup. I actually founded it with my wife. She's one of the most awarded cybersecurity professionals in Canada, and what I saw out there, and what we saw out there really was, there's a big skills gap right now in cybersecurity. Every company right now, and this is every discussion we're having with our customers, is on how to like, keep them secure, keep them safe. There's ransomware attacks, there's social engineering happening, and all of this has created a demand for skill set of cybersecurity to be embedded everywhere, throughout companies. And quite honestly, if you look at the statistics, we're so short of the amount of people we need in the industry. And so what we try to do is kind of help fill that gap and do it in a way that's easily accessible. So right now, if you're interested in cybersecurity, previously, the best way to do about it is to look at certifications, try to meet people in the industry. However, a lot of these conferences are very expensive and for newcomers to the country, for students that are just getting out of school, they can't really afford to go to these conferences unless a company is sponsoring their attendance. So we built a platform where we could run these virtual conferences. We could bring the cybersecurity community together and do it in a way where we promote education and learning, and also give people a chance to like, network and meet. And we've been very, very fortunate. We've had in our country, we've had the CISOs from the best companies in our country, volunteer their time, come to speak at our conference, teach, reach out to the community, and just be a great example of what you can achieve in the communities. That's wonderful. That's

Chip Rodgers  8:22  
amazing. That's such a great community story, bringing people together that are trying to solve and learn, right and solve problems. So congratulations. That's just amazing. No

Stefan Shetty  8:31  
problem. And I want to be clear, like we're not doing this alone. There are great cybersecurity community groups, just like there's tech interest groups out there, and what we're found is we can bring them together and give them a platform and send people to different meetups across the city, just like we have meetups here today. So it's been great.

Chip Rodgers  8:49  
That's amazing. Well, Stefan, thank you for taking a few minutes and sharing some of your thoughts and appreciate AWS sponsorship of the event today and and I guess let's go meet some Thank you.

Stefan Shetty  9:03  
This is great love being here, looking forward to it.

Chip Rodgers  9:07  
Thanks, Stefan, thank you all for joining. You.

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