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Here is what manual AWS co-sell looks like in practice. Your AE identifies a co-sell opportunity, logs into AWS Partner Central, fills in 14 fields manually, copies the opportunity details from Salesforce, submits the referral, and waits. Meanwhile, the same deal lives in three places: your CRM, the ACE portal, and a Slack thread where someone is asking whether the referral has been accepted yet. When the deal closes, someone has to manually update all three.
This is not a niche problem. It is the operational reality for the majority of AWS Marketplace sellers who have not yet built the automation layer that their co-sell motion requires to scale. And the cost is not just time. Deals are lost when co-sell submissions are late, when opportunity data is inconsistent between systems, or when AWS field sellers cannot act on a referral because the submission is incomplete.
What the AWS ACE programme actually provides
The APN Customer Engagements programme is AWS's structured framework for partner co-selling. It is the mechanism through which ISV partners share, receive, and collaborate on customer opportunities with the AWS field sales organisation. Understanding what ACE provides is the prerequisite for understanding why automation matters.
- Opportunity sharing: Opportunity sharing: partners can submit deals to AWS and receive AWS-sourced referrals through a single managed pipeline
- Validation: Validation and acceptance: AWS reviews and accepts or declines submitted opportunities within defined SLAs
- Collaboration: Co-sell collaboration: accepted opportunities allow real-time collaboration between the ISV sales team and the assigned AWS seller
- Revenue recognition: Revenue recognition: closed marketplace deals through ACE contribute to co-sell revenue tracking and partner tier progression
51% higher average revenue growth reported by AWS partners that co-sell frequently vs those that do not
The revenue impact is material. But the ACE programme is only as effective as the operational infrastructure that supports it. Partners that co-sell frequently are not doing more manual data entry. They have built the automation and integration layer that makes high-volume co-sell operationally viable.
Why manual ACE management breaks down at scale
Manual ACE management is workable at two to five co-sell opportunities per month. At twenty, it becomes a RevOps bottleneck. At fifty, it is a revenue risk. The specific failure modes of manual co-sell at scale are consistent and predictable.
1. Data inconsistency between CRM and ACE portal creates validation failures on submission, delaying co-sell acceptance and the field seller assignment that follows it.
2. Status updates in ACE are not reflected in the CRM in real time, so AEs are making deal decisions based on stale information about AWS engagement status.
3. High-priority opportunities sit unsubmitted when the team member responsible for ACE submissions is unavailable. AWS co-sell has time-sensitive submission windows that manual processes routinely miss.
4. Reporting on co-sell contribution to revenue, win rate impact, and AWS-sourced pipeline requires manual reconciliation across systems that should be connected.
"The co-sell opportunity cost is not the time your team spends doing manual ACE submissions. It is the deals that close later, at lower rates, or not at all because the co-sell motion was too slow to be useful."
The CRM integration
AWS's Partner CRM Connector is the native integration layer between the ACE pipeline and CRM platforms including Salesforce and HubSpot. It supports bidirectional synchronisation of opportunity data, meaning updates made in the CRM propagate to the ACE portal and vice versa. This single integration eliminates the most common source of co-sell operational failure: the dual data entry that creates inconsistency between systems.
AWS ACE-CRM integration incentive: AWS offers $10,000 in AWS credits for ISVs that complete a net-new CRM integration with the ACE portal or Marketplace Portal. This is a meaningful offset against the integration development cost for teams building the connection without a third-party tool.
For teams that prefer a no-code integration path, platforms including Tackle, Labra, Clazar, and Suger provide pre-built connectors that sync CRM opportunity data with ACE in real time, automate submission workflows based on CRM stage triggers, and surface ACE status updates directly within the CRM record. The time-to-integration for these solutions is measured in days, not weeks.
Designing the automated co-sell workflow
Automation does not replace judgment in the co-sell process. It removes the manual work that delays and degrades the execution of that judgment. A well-designed automated co-sell workflow has five components.
1. Trigger: opportunity stage advancement in CRM triggers automatic ACE submission without manual intervention. The trigger logic should be configured to match the qualification criteria that make a co-sell submission appropriate, typically a validated business need and confirmed AWS consumption component.
2. Data mapping: CRM fields map automatically to ACE required fields, eliminating manual transcription and the validation errors it produces. Custom field mapping should be tested against ACE's submission validation rules before going live.
3. Status sync: ACE acceptance, assignment, and status updates reflect in the CRM record in real time, giving AEs current visibility without logging into a separate portal.
4. Alert routing: key ACE events, including new AWS-sourced referrals, submission acceptances, and collaboration requests, trigger notifications to the relevant AE through their existing workflow, typically Slack or email.
5. Reporting: a unified co-sell dashboard in the CRM aggregates ACE pipeline, submission-to-acceptance rate, AWS-sourced opportunity contribution, and co-sell win rate versus non-co-sell deals.
Scaling the co-sell motion
The automation layer is the prerequisite for scale. But scaling co-sell volume also requires deliberate process investment in two areas that automation cannot replace: AWS field seller relationship management and co-sell quality control.
At scale, co-sell quality matters more than co-sell quantity. An ACE submission that is incomplete, inaccurate, or submitted for an opportunity that does not have a genuine AWS consumption component wastes the AWS seller's time and degrades the ISV's co-sell standing within the programme. Building a qualification gate before ACE submission, even an automated one that checks for required fields and AWS relevance indicators, consistently improves acceptance rates and AWS seller engagement.
$10,000 in AWS credits offered to ISVs completing a net-new CRM-to-ACE portal integration
Tool selection should be driven by CRM platform, team technical capacity, and budget. The native AWS connector is cost-effective but requires ongoing maintenance investment. Third-party platforms cost more but provide pre-built compliance with ACE submission requirements and reduce the risk of validation failures that manual and custom integrations are prone to.
