A Look Inside the AWS Sales Team

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Good Morning and Happy National Burrito Day. Earlier this week, Chipotle launched an online ”burrito vault’ game where players competed for a chance at $1M worth of burritos. Only 53 players beat the game and were entered in a drawing to win the $1M. But if you missed the game or weren’t one of the 53 people that beat it, they’re making it up to you by offering free delivery through the Chipotle app today. Better than nothing I guess… 🌯 

In today’s Follow Up:

• The AWS sales team 👀 

• The sales funnel challenge 🤑 

• Sales tip of the day 💡 

• Sales around the internet 💻️ 

• Sales jobs, job market & a meme 😂 

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A Look Inside The AWS Sales Team

It’s another day, which means another news story about the company fueling my girlfriend's shopping addiction… Amazon.

Earlier this week, the company announced it will be laying off 100s of sales reps across its AWS team.

It’s an unfortunate announcement for the sales reps affected but means a group of highly trained reps will be hitting the job market as free agents.

This news comes a few months after an internal memo from their Sr. VP of Sales, Matt Garman, revealed they’re changing the structure of the sales team to better align with customer needs.

AWS is Amazon’s Cloud Services business unit and the most profitable part of their business. In 2023, AWS generated over $90 billion in revenue, which is almost $250M every single day of the year…

And to reach those kinds of numbers, you best believe they’ve built a dominant sales org.

Like most high performing sales org’s, they’re strict about hiring, hold reps to their numbers, and churn reps that don’t meet expectations.

All of the normal things you see in a $90 billion/year sales org…

But there’s gotta be more to it, right? Of course.

Here’s three things they do differently:

1. Customer Obsession

Amazon has 16 leadership principles they tie all of their work back to.

And holding the #1 spot is Customer Obsession.

Being customer obsessed means starting with the customer’s needs, and working backward to find (and sell) them a solution. Every deal can look different and doesn’t always make for an easy sales process.

As Bezos has said: “The working backwards process is not designed to be easy, it’s designed to save huge amounts of work on the back end, and to make sure that we’re actually building the right thing.”

2. Special Teams

When selling a complex product, sales reps need to rely on specialists.

AWS sales reps are tasked with owning the deal, which requires looping in a team of specialists to take care of the parts that get too technical.

As a part of the sales team restructuring memo, Matt Garman highlighted the need to align the sales teams and specialists to better serve their customers, which will also result in “increased agility, scale, and efficiency”.

3. “Situational Fluency”

In an interview with Barney Brown, AWS’s Global Head of Sales Enablement, Brown said the one thing separating top AWS sales reps from the average ones is situational fluency.

In layman’s terms, situational fluency is the ability to understand a customer’s complex needs and adapt your response on the fly.

Brown says the best way to build up a seller’s situational fluency is to increase their: “business acumen, their domain acumen, and their executive engagement skills.”

Scripts and talk tracks are out. Situational fluency is in.

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Checking In On The Job Market

This one’s tough to read… 🥶 

Sales Meme of the Day