Building AWS Partnership: A Tree Map, Not a Rolodex

AWS Marketplace is one of the most revered places for partnerships: a validation and scale motion for ISVs and resellers.

It tells the market that your product is vetted technically, and is used by many brands. At Branch, we run 15% of our revenue through AWS Marketplace, and another 15% comes through co-sell on direct contracts.

This is how I built the AWS partnership for Branch in India, using an account tree map as the backbone. I ran it through the mechanism of the ISV Accelerate framework: submitted deals, got connected to the vertical heads, and then helped the on-the-ground AMs of AWS.

The problem: a partnership running entirely on AWS Partner Central

For the first several months, “the AWS relationship” ran entirely through my inbox: the deals we submitted, and whoever we happened to get connected to via APN/Partner Central. There was no way to tell, from a name alone, whether the person emailing me owned the account, supported the co-sell motion, or was just passing through. Multiply that by dozens of live opportunities across three months of correspondence, and the partnership was running on memory, not structure.

That's not a sustainable way to scale a Marketplace and ISV Accelerate relationship across a market as large as India. So I built a map.

Decoding the vast landscape of AWS with the account tree

ISV Accelerate is AWS's framework for co-sell: it's the mechanism that lets a partner like Branch get deals routed through AWS's own sales force via ACE (AWS's opportunity-referral system), rather than selling in isolation. But ISV Accelerate only works as fast as the humans behind it, and AWS's org in India runs on three layers that rarely talk to each other directly:

1. 1.At the top sits AWS India's public-facing leadership: Sandeep Dutta (President, AWS India & South Asia), and the regional and functional leaders who show up at events like the AWS Partner Summit. This is the layer you name-drop for context, not the layer you email.
2. 2.One layer down is the small alliance team actually assigned to Branch: Aly Lee, our Partner Development Manager, who runs the biweekly AWS–Branch sync but is based in the US. So I made a point of meeting Santanu Chattopadhyay in person at the AWS Summit India and building a local relationship there. Nikhita Menon rounds out the team, covering APJ-wide partner specialties.
3. 3.Underneath that is the real engine, and the part that took the most work to map: 156 priority India accounts, split across 11 named Partner Sales Managers (PSMs) and 72 named Account Managers (AMs). The PSM supports the co-sell motion; the AM owns the customer relationship day to day.

That tree is what turned “the AWS relationship” from a feeling into a map I could actually work off of, laid out in full alongside this piece.

Submitting deals, and getting to the vertical heads

With the tree in hand, the ISV Accelerate motion stopped being guesswork. Every deal we submitted through ACE could be checked against the map before it went in: who's the AM of record, who's the PSM riding shotgun, and which vertical desk the account actually sits under. That mattered more than it sounds.

Knowing that, let me stop treating every AWS contact as generic and start routing requests to the right vertical head, going to Santanu Chattopadhyay when a deal touches retail or consumer goods, for instance, instead of hoping the right person self-selected off a CC line. Deals submitted with the correct vertical context move faster through ACE, because they land with someone who already has a reason to prioritize them.

Deals submitted with the correct vertical context move faster through ACE: they land with someone who already has a reason to prioritize them.

Helping the on-ground AMs: because they're the ones stuck in the middle

The most useful thing I did with the map wasn't submitting deals: it was building on-the-ground relationships with reps who have partners knocking on their door every day. How do you cut through that clutter? You help them break into an account they've been struggling to crack. That goes a long way.

We did this with Fera in Malaysia, on the Malaysia Airlines account, a net-new account for AWS. That relationship then helped us on other deals, like RevMedia, where the AWS rep helped us influence the account's CXO, who happens to be a local Malaysian political figure. This is the kind of access AWS teams can unlock for you.

Where it landed

The bigger lesson: an AWS Marketplace partnership isn't validated once, at signing. It's validated every time a deal moves, and deals move faster when you know the tree better than the AM on the other end of it does. Building that map, and keeping it current, is now as much a part of running this partnership as the deals themselves.

An AWS partnership is validated every time a deal moves. Know the tree better than the AM on the other end of it does.

Reach out to me for the complete tree file.