YoY growth in AWS Marketplace transactions
year-over-year growth in shared referrals
About Qualtrics
Qualtrics is trusted by thousands of the world’s best organizations to power exceptional customer and employee experiences that build deep human connections, increase customer loyalty, boost employee engagement, and drive business success. The company’s advanced AI and specialized Experience Agents allow businesses and governments to proactively interact with customers and employees in personalized ways across every channel and touchpoint, respond in-the-moment to fix or improve experiences, and stay across the latest market trends and opportunities.
The Challenge: Building an AWS Partnership
In October 2023, Qualtrics alliance leaders were tasked with leading Qualtrics' AWS partnership with just one existing $8M AWS Marketplace contract in place.
"When we took over, we ran this very much like a startup," said Jason Mann, former Global AWS Alliance Lead. "We would fail quickly. We tried new ideas and concepts, and our leaders were willing to let us experiment with the AWS partnership."
This startup approach led Qualtrics to a foundational insight – they needed to get AWS to pay attention, and AWS Marketplace was ultimately the critical gateway to gaining relevance and results.
The Strategy: First Principles and Marketplace Focus
Qualtrics took a first-principles approach, meeting with their AWS counterparts to understand what would make the partnership successful from AWS's perspective.
"We met with every AWS counterpart, and we understood what metrics and benchmarks they were looking at for an ISV to be successful in their ecosystem," said Mann. "We credit our leaders for giving us the ability to adjust the metrics and change how we were benchmarking the partnership so we could achieve the metrics that AWS had for us."
Mann and Steven Partie, Head of AWS & Digital Partnerships, were determined to demonstrate immediate value, stacking wins quickly and moving as many contracts as they could to AWS Marketplace to create momentum and gain visibility.
"In order for AWS to invest in our partnership, we had to matter to them," said Partie. "We needed to ramp up AWS Marketplace and get that flywheel going."
They adopted a build, market, and sell approach, implementing a verticalized sprint strategy, focused month by month on specific AWS verticals—beginning with healthcare, then moving to travel and hospitality, financial services, and public sector.
The Scale Roadblock: Manual Processes Crushing Productivity
Qualtrics’ vertical sprint strategy required sharing as many opportunities with AWS as possible, but the manual burden of opportunity management quickly became unsustainable.
“Putting opportunities into ACE [APN Customer Engagements Program] was continuously a pain. Over 20 hours of my week was spent on managing reps saying 'Hey, I want to connect with AWS on this account. Can you put this in the system?' Each one was a 10-minute process,”
Steven Partie, Head of AWS & Digital Partnerships, Qualtrics
Additionally, their current private offer process for transactions was causing friction with customers who were hesitant to click "random links" from Qualtrics to complete their AWS Marketplace purchases.
With thousands of Qualtrics sales reps and a growing number of co-sell opportunities, the team needed a way to scale their operations with their existing team.
The Solution: WorkSpan Automation with Intelligence
Qualtrics’ migration to WorkSpan dramatically transformed their ability to execute at scale.
WorkSpan’s opportunity-sharing automation allowed Partie to single-handedly manage growing demands while also giving him back time for high-value partnering work. "It's now a 10-second process…eliminating 20 hours of my week is huge, and that allowed me to double down on the co-sell motions," said Partie.
WorkSpan’s automated private offer create and send feature significantly improved their private offer acceptance rates by providing a formalized customer communication process:
"Not only was it easy to create a private offer directly in Salesforce, but simultaneously having a more automated and formal email going out to the customers,” said Partie. “We had bigger success rates with customers accepting within the expiration period because of that."
Beyond automation, WorkSpan helped Qualtrics better understand the needs of AWS customers, allowing them to better identify which opportunities to prioritize, and which AWS representatives to engage.
“WorkSpan really helped solve this. When a seller opens these opportunities, we can instantly send them to AWS through the integration, get the [Propensity-to-Buy] data, and get details on AWS's relationships, allowing us to provide fast follow-up to sellers on whether they should engage with AWS early in their sales stage.”
Jason Mann, former Global AWS Alliance Lead, Qualtrics
The Results: Transformation from Seven to Nine Figures
The impact of Qualtrics' strategy, powered by WorkSpan's Hyperscaler Edition, was remarkable. In just one year, they:
- Scaled 1775% YoY growth in AWS Marketplace transactions
- Achieved 700% year-over-year growth in shared referrals
- Won AWS Healthcare Partner of the Year and was a finalist in the Travel/Hospitality and Customer Experience categories
- Received recognition as the Scale Winner of WorkSpan Costars of Co-Sell Accelerator Award
Most importantly, their focused approach ensured every AWS counterpart exceeded their metrics working with Qualtrics, laying the groundwork for a stronger, more strategic partnership.
“Something we are extremely proud of is that all of our counterparts [at AWS] went and presented their metrics to their leaders, and we had hit every one of our counterparts' metrics…We'd made everybody we worked with at AWS successful.”
Jason Mann, former Global AWS Alliance Lead, Qualtrics
This success evolved their relationship with AWS from transaction-focused to truly collaborative with AWS now investing resources to help Qualtrics break into new accounts. AWS counterparts actively helped create champions of CIOs to help Qualtrics bridge the gap between technical and business leaders to reach their targeted CMOs.
"Because of our success last year on Marketplace, AWS has put go-to-market resources to help us attain our metrics,” said Partie.
“AWS trusts us to close deals and put them on AWS Marketplace, so they're open to us being slightly competitive and actually giving business up to us because of how mature our partnership is.”
Jason Mann, former Global AWS Alliance Lead, Qualtrics
The WorkSpan Impact: Enabling Lean Team Success
Qualtrics noted a significant benefit of their integration with WorkSpan: it allowed them to maintain an agile team while scaling their AWS partnership to nine figures–an achievement that would have otherwise required a resource-heavy expansion.
“WorkSpan was the critical component allowing us to maintain a scalable approach and not have to resource a ton of people to keep pace. The more dedication that you're going to give to a software like WorkSpan, the more effective that your small, lean, mean team can be.”
Steven Partie, Head of AWS & Digital Partnerships, Qualtrics
For software companies looking to scale their AWS partnership, the Qualtrics journey is an inspiring case study of how the right strategy, combined with the right automation, can drive extraordinary results.
