Co-selling with technology partners, and what it really asks of you

Co-selling sounds like the cheapest pipeline available: a vendor's sales team, already inside accounts you cannot reach, with a reason to bring you in. The vendors publish exactly what they require first, and reading those requirements changes the plan more than any partnership deck will.

A partnership conversation with a technology vendor usually opens on the wrong subject. Somebody draws the logos, somebody says their field team has four hundred sellers in the region, and the meeting ends with a mutual agreement to explore. Three months later nothing has happened, and nobody can say which step did not get taken.

Co-selling is the one partnership model where the requirements are written down in public. Both of the large cloud vendors publish what a partner must have before their sellers can transact with you, and both publish what happens to an opportunity after you share it. Those two documents are the honest version of the pitch, and they are what this piece is built on.

What co-selling is, and what it is not

The three models we usually rank by effort are referral, reseller and co-marketing. Co-selling is a fourth, and it sits oddly among them because the money does not change hands between you and the partner at all.

• Referral: they pass you a name. You sell, you invoice, you pay a fee.
• Reseller: they sell your product and invoice the customer. You invoice them.
• Co-sell: both sales teams work the same account at the same time, each selling their own thing. The customer buys two things, possibly on one paper, usually on two.

The effort profile is different too. A referral relationship can start with an email. Co-selling starts with a qualification process, and that is the part nobody budgets for. If you are choosing between the models rather than committing to this one, the comparison is in three partnership models ranked by effort.

The Microsoft gate, with the numbers it publishes

Microsoft's co-sell requirements in Partner Center define four statuses a solution can hold, and they are not degrees of enthusiasm. They are gates.

The documented statuses are In market, Co-sell ready, Azure IP co-sell eligible and Business Applications co-sell eligible. In market means the offer is live but co-sell-ready requirements have not been met, which is the status most partners actually hold while believing they are co-selling.

To reach co-sell ready, the page requires a PartnerID and an active Marketplace account, a complete business profile, the offer published live on Microsoft Marketplace, a sales contact for every co-sell-eligible geography, and the listing documents on the Co-sell page, which it specifies as a one-pager and a pitch deck. Services partners carry one more requirement: at least one solution partner designation in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program.

The next gate is where the arithmetic arrives. Azure IP co-sell eligible status adds four requirements on top, and the first is a revenue threshold: the organisation must meet or exceed 100,000 USD of Azure consumed revenue over a trailing twelve month period, or the offer must have a cumulative marketplace billed revenue of 100,000 USD. The page also notes that Azure credits do not count toward it.

Read that as a planning fact rather than a discouragement. The vendor is telling you, in public, that the seller-level co-sell motion is reserved for partners who have already produced consumption. If you have not, the route is the lower gate plus your own selling, not a partnership deck.

The AWS gate, which is a workflow rather than a threshold

AWS documents the other half of the picture, which is what happens to a specific deal. Its guide to working with opportunities in Partner Central sets out a review lifecycle with named states, and the names matter because each one is a place a deal can sit.

Documented state	What it means for you
Pending Submission	Created but not sent. AWS has not seen it.
Submitted	Sent for validation. The guide states no changes can be made until review is complete.
In-Review	Validation in progress.
Action Required	AWS wants more detail, communicated in a review comments field.
Approved	Passed validation, and the guide calls it ready for co-selling activities.
Disqualified	The other terminal outcome.

Two details in that document are worth more than the diagram. First, before an opportunity can be submitted you must associate at least one solution or product with it, and the guide allows between one and ten. Second, during Action Required only a specific short list of fields is editable, and it is the administrative ones: the customer's address lines, the website URL, the target close date, the expected customer spend and currency, the customer business problem, and your own opportunity identifier.

That list tells you what validation is actually checking. It is not reading your strategy. It is checking that the account is identifiable, the spend is plausible and the problem is stated. A deal that keeps bouncing is usually failing on those fields rather than on merit.

What the two documents together change about the plan

Co-selling is an administrative qualification before it is a sales relationship. That is the single most useful thing to take from reading both pages, and it has three consequences.

• There is a lead time you cannot sell through. Publishing a marketplace offer, producing the collateral and naming a sales contact per geography is work that happens before a single seller hears your name.
• Somebody has to own the paperwork. Not the partnerships lead in principle, a named person with calendar time, because opportunity validation is a recurring task and not a project.
• The first deal is the proof, not the agreement. Signing changes nothing on its own, which is the same pattern as every other partner programme and is laid out in why signing a partner agreement changes nothing.

Who owns the customer when it closes

This is the question people actually want answered, and neither vendor document settles it, which is itself the answer. Microsoft's page distinguishes a co-sell solution from a marketplace offer and describes where the collateral sits in internal catalogues. AWS says an approved opportunity is ready for co-selling activities. Neither says who owns the relationship afterwards, because that is not theirs to decide.

It is decided by your contract and by who holds the commercial paper, and the same test applies that separates a reseller from a distributor: follow the invoice. In a true co-sell both of you invoice the customer separately for your own thing, so both of you own a relationship, which is a better position than it sounds. The contrast with models where somebody else holds the paper is in who owns the end customer in a reseller or distributor model, and the clauses that decide it are in the channel partner agreement clauses that matter.

Joint account planning, concretely

The useful artefact is not a partnership plan, it is an account plan per account, built with the vendor's seller rather than for them. One page is enough: who we both know inside the account, what the customer is trying to do, what each side is selling, the next three dates and who owns each. If that document has no owner column, it is a wish list, and the fields that make the difference are the same six as in the mutual action plan template.

One more thing belongs on the page, and partnerships people routinely leave it off: the integration. A technology partnership normally implies that your product and theirs talk to each other, and that work is quoted on the happy path and paid for on the edge cases. Rivl's note on what an integration between two systems really costs is the honest read on retries, duplicates and reconciliation, and it is worth having in hand before you promise a joint solution to a seller who will repeat the promise to a customer.

Honest limits

Three.

This is two vendors, not a category. Everything above is quoted from Microsoft's and AWS's current documentation. Google Cloud runs its own programme and we did not verify it while writing this, so do not assume the shape transfers. Nor should you assume these two stay still: Microsoft's page carried a date of 5 October 2026 and had been updated again on 19 October 2026 when we read it, and thresholds are exactly the sort of thing that moves.

No regional specifics. We have said nothing about how co-selling interacts with commercial agency registration in Saudi Arabia or the UAE, because co-selling does not obviously trigger it and we are not going to guess. If your partner expects you to invoice their customer, you are not co-selling any more and the registration questions in who may legally act as your agent in the Gulf apply.

Nothing here says co-selling works. The documentation tells you what is required, not what is produced. The only honest way to know whether it pays for your firm is to run it for a year with the paperwork owned properly, and count sourced pipeline against the hours. If you cannot name the hours, you will conclude it worked regardless of whether it did.