Co-Sell with AWS: A Guide to the AWS ISV Accelerate Program

TL;DR

• The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is AWS's co-sell program for software vendors listed on AWS Marketplace, connecting ISVs with AWS's global field sales organization.

• AWS sellers in the program receive quota retirement for co-selling ISV solutions through Marketplace private offers, which means they are directly compensated to bring your product into customer deals.

• Partners who frequently co-sell with AWS report 51% higher average revenue growth, 65% higher close rates, and 54% larger deals (Canalys, "The power of partnerships: unlocking the AWS co-sell opportunity").

• Qualifying requires a GA Marketplace listing, Validated or Differentiated partner status, ACE eligibility, active pipeline, completed co-sell training, and at least $2,000 in recognized AWS account revenue.

• Enrollment alone does not create pipeline. ISVs need disciplined ACE management, private-offer execution, field enablement, and funding operations to turn program access into revenue.

Listing on AWS Marketplace makes your software available to buyers. The harder question is how you get AWS sellers to actively bring it into customer opportunities. The AWS ISV Accelerate Program creates motion.

The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is a global co-sell program for independent software vendors (ISVs) whose products run on or integrate with AWS and are listed on AWS Marketplace. It connects participating ISVs with AWS's field sales organization, so that AWS account managers actively position ISV solutions in customer deals.

Without the program, a Marketplace listing makes your software available for purchase. With it, AWS sellers are compensated and incentivized to recommend your product to their accounts. That distinction is the difference between a passive listing and an active sales channel.

The program creates a structured relationship between the ISV and three roles inside AWS:

• Partner Development Manager (PDM): Your primary AWS contact. The PDM helps you build your co-sell strategy, access AWS resources, and escalate opportunities.

• Partner Development Representative (PDR): Focused on pipeline generation, working with you to identify new opportunities where AWS engagement changes the deal outcome.

• AWS Field Account Executives (AEs): The sellers covering specific AWS customer accounts. When you share a co-sell opportunity, the relevant AE engages alongside your sales team to influence the deal.

Every co-sell opportunity flows through ACE (APN Customer Engagements), AWS’s system for managing co-sell opportunities. ISVs use ACE to share relevant sales opportunities with AWS, track their progress, and request support from AWS sales teams where needed.

Each component of ISV Accelerate feeds the next. The strongest co-sell motions work as a connected system:

• Share qualified opportunities through ACE to give AWS visibility into your pipeline.

• Engage AWS field sellers on relevant customer opportunities and build a joint sales motion.

• Close deals through Marketplace private offers, enabling seller incentives through the SaaS Co-Sell Benefit and, where applicable, allowing customers to apply purchases toward committed AWS spend.

• Build a stronger co-sell track record as opportunities progress and Marketplace revenue grows.

• Create deeper AWS engagement over time, including greater field visibility and access to relevant funding programs.

The value comes from connecting these pieces. ACE creates visibility, field engagement supports joint selling, and Marketplace transactions activate many of the commercial benefits available through the program. When these motions are managed consistently, co-selling becomes more repeatable rather than a series of one-off partner activities.

The data on co-selling with AWS is concrete. According to a Canalys study commissioned by AWS ("The power of partnerships: unlocking the AWS co-sell opportunity"), partners who frequently co-sell with AWS experienced:

• 51% higher average revenue growth compared to infrequent co-sellers

• 65% higher close rates

• 54% larger deal sizes

Eighty percent of partners in the study identified AWS Marketplace as an important part of their co-sell strategy. A separate Forrester Consulting study found that ISVs experience 50% faster deal closure when transacting through AWS Marketplace.

Partner results inside the program reinforce these numbers.

• Qlik reported a 41% year-over-year increase in customer wins globally, alongside 13% YoY growth in AWS Marketplace total contract value and a 16% YoY increase in Marketplace private offer quantity.

• Sumo Logic described increasing co-sell engagement with AWS by more than 70%, calling the program a critical accelerator for pipeline growth and joint execution

• Astronomer reported a 500% month-over-month increase in ACE launches after the SaaS Co-Sell Benefit was activated, citing higher ACE acceptance rates and more closed-won business

Beyond the numbers, the program gives ISVs several practical advantages that strengthen how they sell with AWS.

AWS field seller visibility and incentives

ISV Accelerate members are featured in AWS account manager-facing solution finder libraries and partner recommendation engines. When AWS account teams plan customer engagements, participating ISV solutions surface in the tools they use to identify the right partner fit. AWS Account Managers also receive cash incentives for successfully co-selling with ISV Accelerate partners through Marketplace private offers, creating direct financial alignment around bringing your product into customer conversations.

The SaaS Co-Sell Benefit

The SaaS Co-Sell Benefit (formerly known as SaaS Revenue Recognition) is the mechanism that makes the co-sell motion operationally powerful. It gives AWS sellers quota retirement when they co-sell SaaS or PaaS solutions transacted as AWS Marketplace private offers. When an AWS seller helps close a deal for your product through a private offer, that revenue counts toward their sales targets.

This benefit was previously invite-only, reserved for large technology partners. AWS expanded it to all ISV Accelerate partners transacting through Marketplace, including eligible startups. AWS sellers now have a direct financial reason to co-sell with ISVs at every stage of growth, which changes who gets invited into customer conversations.

Qualifying for the SaaS Co-Sell Benefit requires maintaining good standing in ISV Accelerate, actively sharing and updating opportunities in ACE, and providing transaction details including total contract value, procurement type, and contract terms. Standard public listings alone do not trigger the quota retirement mechanism. You need to be transacting through Marketplace private offers.

Committed-spend drawdown shapes enterprise procurement

This is one of the most important dynamics for ISVs to understand when selling through AWS Marketplace.

Enterprise buyers sign multi-year committed-spend agreements with AWS, known as Enterprise Discount Programs (EDPs) or Private Pricing Agreements (PPAs). Under these agreements, the buyer commits to spending a set amount with AWS over the contract period in exchange for volume discounts. The ISV's software can draw against an existing AWS commitment rather than competing for a separate line item, which often means shorter procurement timelines and fewer approvals.

ISV Accelerate amplifies this because the program ensures AWS sellers are incentivized to bring ISV solutions into these committed-spend conversations.

Funding and promotional programs

The program opens the door to several AWS funding mechanisms:

• Marketplace Private Offer Promotion Program (MPOPP): Provides AWS Promotional Credits to customers as an incentive for purchasing from participating ISVs. The program supports both new Marketplace sellers with immediate funding and established sellers with renewal-specific incentives. ISVs submit self-service funding requests through the AWS Partner Funding Portal, and credits are delivered the next business day after private offer acceptance.

• Marketing Development Funds (MDF): Available to newly enrolled ISV Accelerate partners, MDF provides go-to-market funding for demand generation activities. Partners must implement Partner Revenue Measurement and meet co-sell engagement requirements to access funding.

• ISV Workload Migration Program: Offers direct credit disbursements to end customers for eligible SaaS deployments through Marketplace, helping ISVs facilitate customer migration to their solutions.

IAM Temporary Delegation for customer onboarding

IAM Temporary Delegation is a capability exclusively available to ISV Accelerate partners. It streamlines customer onboarding by allowing ISVs to request limited, time-boxed access to a customer's AWS account for product configuration.

The ISV creates a delegation request specifying what permissions they need and for how long. The customer reviews the request in the AWS Console with full visibility into what is being requested and why. Once approved, the ISV completes setup with no persistent access granted. The entire process is auditable. For ISVs selling complex products (security tools, data platforms, AI agents, managed services), this can compress onboarding timelines considerably while staying within enterprise security policies.

ISV Accelerate is designed for AWS partners that have already built a foundation on AWS Marketplace and demonstrated active co-sell engagement. To qualify, ISVs need to meet a defined set of requirements:

• One or more software products listed as general availability (GA) on AWS Marketplace

• ACE (APN Customer Engagements) program eligibility

• Validated or Differentiated status in AWS Partner Central

• Amazon Payee Central account set up

• A minimum of 5 launched opportunities (ACE or Marketplace Private Offers) in the past 12 months (Full Value Opportunities excluded)

• A minimum of 15 qualified opportunities in ACE in the past 12 months (Full Value Opportunities excluded)

• At least one individual having completed the "Co-Selling with AWS" learning module on AWS Skill Builder

• At minimum $2,000 in recognized AWS account revenue at the time of enrollment

Enrollment is complete only after the ISV submits an AWS Partner Business Plan and a Field Ready Kit (FRK). The FRK consists of two documents: a sales brief (an AWS-internal reference document highlighting your product's strengths) and a solution brief (a customer-facing document AWS account managers can share). These are the reference materials AWS sellers use when positioning your solution inside their accounts, and their quality directly affects how effectively sellers can advocate for your product.

Build your AWS Partner foundation

Join the AWS Partner Network and enroll in the Software Path. Partners progress through four validation stages: Registered, Confirmed, Validated, and Differentiated. You need at least Validated status to access the program.

Build qualifying co-sell activity in ACE

Start sharing opportunities through ACE and build the pipeline activity required for ISV Accelerate eligibility.

Prepare your enrollment assets

Complete the required training, set up the necessary AWS accounts, and prepare your Partner Business Plan and Field Ready Kit.

Complete enrollment and activate co-selling

Once eligible, complete the enrollment process and begin working with your PDM to build your co-sell strategy, identify priority accounts, and begin routing opportunities through ACE for joint pursuit with AWS field sellers.

Enrollment opens the door. What happens after determines whether the program generates revenue or collects dust. The patterns that separate high-performing ISV Accelerate partners from those that stall tend to be operational, not strategic.

• They treat ACE as sales infrastructure, not partner reporting. The ISVs getting the most from co-sell don't update ACE because AWS asks them to. They build opportunity sharing into their CRM workflow so that every relevant deal flows into ACE automatically, stays current, and surfaces to the right AWS account team without manual intervention. ACE is not a compliance exercise. It is the mechanism through which your pipeline becomes visible to AWS sellers.

• They give AWS sellers a reason to engage. A Field Ready Kit checks the enrollment box, but it is not enough to drive active co-selling. Sellers need a clear customer problem your product solves, a realistic attach motion, a reason why your solution is relevant to the AWS services the customer already uses, and competitive differentiation they can articulate in two sentences. If an AWS AE cannot explain why your product matters for their account, they will default to the partner whose enablement material makes that easy.

• They design Marketplace into the deal from the start. Introducing Marketplace as a procurement path at the end of the sales cycle creates friction. The ISVs with the fastest close times position Marketplace early: they lead with the committed-spend drawdown story, they structure pricing for private offers from the outset, and they make it easy for the buyer's procurement team to see that this purchase fits their existing AWS spending pattern.

• They align with AWS economics. The strongest co-sell conversations connect customer outcomes with AWS consumption. If your product drives workload migration to AWS, increases usage of high-value AWS services, or supports strategic account priorities that the AWS field team cares about, you become a more valuable co-sell partner. ISVs that can articulate this AWS consumption story get prioritized.

• They operationalize funding rather than chasing it deal by deal. MPOPP credits, MDF, ISV Workload Migration funding: each of these programs has eligibility windows, submission requirements, and timelines. ISVs that build a repeatable process for identifying funding-eligible deals and submitting requests capture materially more value from these programs than teams that discover funding after the deal has already closed.

AWS provides the co-sell opportunity. The operational challenge is making it repeatable.

As pipeline scales, ISVs have to keep ACE, CRM data, Marketplace private offers, funding requests, field enablement, and revenue reporting in sync across every deal, across every cloud. That is the layer SaaSify automates.

SaaSify is an agentic Cloud GTM platform purpose-built for ISVs selling through cloud marketplaces. As an advanced AWS partner, SaaSify works closely with AWS to help ISVs activate and scale their Marketplace and co-sell operations across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

For ISVs navigating the ISV Accelerate motion, SaaSify handles:

• Marketplace listing and management: Configuration support for SaaS contracts, SaaS subscriptions, and professional services offerings, managed through a single platform rather than inside the Marketplace Management Portal.

• Private offer creation and tracking from your CRM: Create, send, and track AWS Marketplace private offers directly from Salesforce or HubSpot, with deal data syncing back in real time so your sales team operates from the CRM instead of context-switching into Partner Central.

• Co-sell pipeline automation: Sync co-sell opportunities between your CRM and ACE automatically, maintaining the pipeline hygiene that ISV Accelerate rewards without the manual data entry that slows most teams down.

• Funding automation: Identify and capture cloud funding programs like MPOPP and ISV Workload Migration credits that many teams leave on the table because they lack the bandwidth to track eligibility and submit requests across each deal.

• Revenue reconciliation and expert advisory: See every dollar of Marketplace revenue across AWS, Azure, and GCP in a single view, with automated reconciliation against disbursement reports. SaaSify pairs the platform with hyperscaler specialists who advise on co-sell strategy, deal structuring, and program enrollment, particularly useful for ISVs joining ISV Accelerate for the first time and building their initial co-sell playbook.

ISV Accelerate gives ISV access to AWS's field organization, seller incentives, and customer procurement ecosystem. The advantage compounds only when the underlying co-sell motion is operationalized consistently.

If your team is exploring the program or looking to scale an existing co-sell motion, schedule a demo with SaaSify to walk through your current Marketplace operations and map the path from enrollment to active co-sell revenue.