EPISODE SUMMARY
Most hyperscale sellers are formally trained. Most hyperscale buyers are not.
That imbalance isn’t theoretical. It shows up in your contract, your architecture, and your long-term cloud bill.
In this episode, we lift the lid on how hyperscalers like AWS actually sell. The sales methodologies, champion strategies, architectural tactics, and trust-based playbooks that quietly shape decisions inside your organization.
We’re not here to bash hyperscalers. They’re doing exactly what they’re meant to do.
The uncomfortable question is whether you’re equally prepared on the other side of the table.
If you’re accountable for a multi-million-dollar cloud relationship and you’ve never been trained to sell, this episode may change how you think about every renewal, optimization review, and “strategic partnership” conversation you’ve ever had.
This is about levelling the playing field. And asking whether you’re negotiating or just approving.
Follow Naran McClung on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/Naranmcclung/
Follow Jono Staff on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanstaff/
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1OLe84gNqa7X76OVS0kkwp?si=M7IOegDBQwaq2zPEMC6SSg
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Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uJkewa9GYV4
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For all enquiries, contact pru@thingsreasons.show
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00]
If you’ve not been a seller, if you’ve not walked the mile, what do you know about it if you can’t do it? Or more importantly, if you haven’t done it, how do you spot that you are being sold to?
How do you identify a good seller? How do you understand the language?
Welcome back, everybody. It’s 2026. We are back. This is Things Reasons, the podcast for IT leaders.
My name is Naran McClung. This is John O Staff. The first thing we wanna do is thank you for subscribing and listening throughout 2025. We are super, super grateful. It’s been amazing. We’ve had incredible engagement, comments, feedbacks. Thank you very much to all the guests that [00:01:00] we had as well. Stellar lineup of guests last year.
Plenty more coming. Super proud of that. And happy. And the podcast. What are we all about? This is the podcast for IT leaders in Australia. It’s the stuff not said in the presentations and the PowerPoint deck. This is the other conversation. It’s the one that’s not being had. That’s what we’re all about. So, John O, what are we here to talk about today?
This is rant cast number two. Rant number two. For those of you who remember the last one, I think it was one of our more popular, if not the most watched episodes that we did. I wanna have a rant today. Let’s have a rant. I want to have a little look behind the curtain. Yep. At a conversation. No one’s ha having.
Mm-hmm. But it’s going on all the time. Yep. And that is hyperscalers. And today we’re gonna talk about AWS. Nobody panic ’cause we’re gonna talk about the others too. Hyperscalers [00:02:00] and the amount of money and investment weapons, grade sales methodologies and playbooks, yes, that they have developed, yes, that are directly linked to insane compound annual growth rates.
Yes. For over the last 10 years in the hyperscale market in Australia, we talk about all the time organizations, it’s so hard to control your cloud spend. Finops, the duopoly emerging in the market with over 70 cent of the market held by AWS and Microsoft together, and it’s nearly a $3 billion market now, and it’s growing year on year at 20%.
It’s insane. Mm-hmm. Everybody’s talking about things like governance and optimization and right sizes, finops and finops, right size, and these are all good conversations to have. But you know what? Nobody. Nobody has the guts to admit that they’re all being sold to. [00:03:00] Now, hang on a minute. Every single IT leader in this country should be emboldened and powerful and capable of facing off to anyone.
That’s why they’ve been hired. They managed to convince the person that I them, that they were the man or woman for the job. They were capable of eking our value, driving business outcomes, supporting the business within a budget, perhaps doing all of these things because they’re capable people that can face off to AWS.
Now it’s very important as two guys in the B2B sales game. Mm, in, in the, in the business game to acknowledge that sales methodologies, we’re not here to bash sales methodologies. We’re not, we’re not here to bash sales. We’re actually, I’m passionate. Advocates for sales done well. Yes. When it helps a customer and creates value.
That’s right. And we’re not here to bash AWS either. That’s right. Right. Let’s be clear, and I know that’s strange something from me, so bear with me here. We give them credit, credit for doing the things that they do. This is a platform that’s been designed for builders, right. They appealed to [00:04:00] builders and so they’ve done an incredible job because people have built, they’ve embraced the platform.
They’re growing, they’ve been wildly successful. So we take your hat off too. You’ve been hugely successful, but we are today trying to balance the scales. That’s right. We’re gonna balance the scales and my rant is my hypothesis, and you have to hang around and listen if you want to figure out what the antidote is.
Mm-hmm. But my hypothesis is after speaking to several economic buyers, and if you don’t know what that means, you are already gonna love this episode. Mm-hmm. Who preside over multimillion dollar AWS and other hyperscale cloud contracts. Who have never been formally trained in sales. Yep. My hypothesis is if they don’t understand the rules of that game that they are playing.
Yep. How can they possibly ever hope to win? Alright, so there’s two things there. One is, if you’ve not been a seller, and we’ve [00:05:00] spoken about this in the past, if you’ve not walked the mile, what do you know about it if you can’t do it? Or more importantly, if you haven’t done it, how do you spot that you are being sold to?
How do you identify a good seller? How do you understand the language? And we’ll talk about med pick and other things. How do you know any of that if you’ve never done it before? And I do wonder how many IT leaders out there have never been sellers or sales managers. This is controversial because everyone thinks they do a great job of this.
Hmm. But the telling thing for me, because we did do research, we did. Naran, you did more recent. There’s a lot of research there. I feel like we’re investigative journalists. Right. I’ve never had more notes in front of me. And few weeks ago as well, I put the bat signal up on LinkedIn to say, we wanna speak to some XAWS sellers and sales managers.
And guess what happened? They spoke to us. They spoke to us. They spoke to us. Right. And the telling thing for me, this one question. Mm. And if you just, if this question resonates with you and, and it it rings a little [00:06:00] bell, you need to hang around and listen to the rest. That’s right. I asked them both, if you woke up tomorrow and now you are a CIO or an economic buyer on the receiving end.
Yeah. On the, on the other side. Do you think that you would be able to cut a better deal with AWS than all the average customers did in the average? That’s right. And what happened? We got an emphatic yes from everyone that we spoke to. An emphatic yes. That they were empowered, capable, knowledgeable, strategic, whatever words you want to use, they’re gonna face off better to AWS than anybody else.
And why is that? Because they are well drilled and well trained. They know the game. There’s been huge investments. Right? Huge investments made. Huge investments. So stick around. ‘Cause this episode we’re gonna expose the game. We’re gonna talk about the mechanics, we’re gonna talk about the things that are deployed against you [00:07:00] purely for the purposes of empowering you to be the best version you can be.
And if you’re an AWS seller out there, stick around too. ‘Cause we know you watch and we know you listen. Mm-hmm. Do not panic. Don’t panic. Because a rising tide lifts all boats. That’s right.
All right. Here’s the field of play as I see it. Infrastructure as a service market in Australia. I dunno, it’s probably pushing somewhere near $3 billion a year now.
Yep. Is spent on this stuff. I think AWS holds about 30% of the market share, maybe a little bit. It’s kind of neck and neck between them and Microsoft. Sure. And it’s growing at crazy compound annual growth rates every year. Depending on what report you read, it could be upwards of 20 to 30%. And what I do know is that most buyers.
That we speak to, even though AWS is absolutely customer obsessed, and this is well drilled [00:08:00] into them, and we, we will get into that. No fault of AWS here, no, they’re, they’re doing a great job. But most buyers we speak to are unhappy with their deal. Okay? To some degree. Yep. That is what’s going on out there.
That’s what’s going on. Now, most of them, when you ask them why, they’ll talk about things like finops governance. My bill is hard to understand. Growth price rises. And what you quickly start to realize is that all of the things that they’re, they’re looking at that, that’s all, that’s all ingredients. It’s all ingredients to, to bake the cake, that, that drives growth, right?
And they’re things that you need to monitor and, and control. So all good, but you know what, none of them are saying. None of them are saying, you know what, I think, I think the, the, the account team is [00:09:00] just doing an epic job of selling into my organization. That’s right. I think that’s why I’m spending so much money.
This is the, the off the PowerPoint deck question that we haven’t really seen anybody ask. Certainly when we’ve had these conversations, and we’ve been doing this for a long time and we have a lot of them. Is how well was your organization sold to? Yep. And and did you get here by way of a deliberate strategy?
Yep. Now, if it was done well, it should be in, in line with creating immense value for your business. Sure. Right. But sometimes you’re, the situation in your business changes what was valuable two years ago, three years ago isn’t necessarily anymore. You need to pivot, you need to change directions, and all of a sudden, uh, it’s gotten away from you.
Yeah. And this is this common conversation our industry has, particularly when it comes to hyperscale cloud. And AWS have done, [00:10:00] I think, an incredible job of this in terms of driving adoption. We’re gonna get into the mechanics behind how that happens. Yep. Both from a sales tactics perspective, but also from a commercial model perspective and a platform perspective.
But it’s very interesting that no, no buyers are actually asking the question or stopped to really think about how am I being sold to, what is my vendor or partner’s strategy for growth? Does it align with my objectives and, and, and am I able to enter that conversation or, or partake in that game or strategy or interaction, uh, with a, with a wide field of view?
Mm-hmm. With a full understanding of what’s going on and maybe being able to play chess instead of checkers. Like, how do I be three moves ahead the way that they are. That’s right. All the time. Yeah, indeed. Because, because, because they are, that’s right. And maybe knowing the engine, [00:11:00] knowing the tactics that are used against you.
It’s about preventing the risk of arriving at that end state, which is that you’re not happy with the cost and you are now captive. And I’m not saying that’s always the outcome, it’s sometimes the outcome. I’ve certainly seen it when RFPs come past our desk, right? And there’s a concerted effort to consider an alternative, an alternative architecture hybrid.
New service providers, even service providers prepared to take on the risk, right? So they understand the platform, they understand AWS services principle, or pri primitives, I should say. The way the architecture works and the vendor says, I’m absorbing this risk. I’m taking it on at my cost. I will do it all for you on this timeframe.
Even in those scenarios, we see examples where the business says, I still can’t do it. Just can’t do it. Just can’t do it. That’s right. That’s right. And so we think, we [00:12:00] think selling has a role to play in this. It, it undoubtedly does. If it didn’t work, if, if all these sales methodologies would be. And all the playbooks and tactics with bs, big organizations wouldn’t spend tens of millions of dollars on developing and training to these methodologies.
Exactly. Now for me, I’ve got some favorites and I’ve never had more notes in front of me in my whole life. Right. So talk us through it. Talk us through it. Well look, the fundamental things that stood out for me, and we’ll get into it, there’s two, we’re gonna talk about Med Pick and I liked your framing as well, and that is, if you haven’t been a seller before, let’s just start there.
And we’ve, we’ve opined on this as it relates to sales managers as well. How can we expect a sales manager to hire good sellers to manage the right behaviors if they’ve never walked the mile themselves? Is that an unfair ask on a sales manager? And equally, [00:13:00] if somebody’s gonna face off to a hyperscaler, do you know what Med Pick is and something that AWS have adopted
Do you know what it is? What’s gonna be coming at you? The language, the process, the flow, all of that open question.
So the other points we wanna really get into here is this concept that AWS really seeks to sell to builders they’re seeking to sell to. Developers, engineers, architects. They had this concept of SKU based. Where they sell primitive services, these critical services that can underpin the fabric of the architecture that the customer owns.
We’ll talk about that as opposed to, say, bundled based selling that Microsoft may deploy, as with E five and E three, and the other ways in which Microsoft have been wildly successful. My favorite, and the last point I really wanna get into is this concept of champions,
It’s a good start there. We, we pose the question, [00:14:00] uh, do you know what med pick is?
Right? If you’re a buyer, there’s gonna be heaps of listeners now putting up the hand going, yep. We use that. No. That in my business, especially if you’re a seller. Yep. This is a very widely adopted modern sales methodology. Kind of feels a little bit familiar for those of you who’ve been around long enough with, uh, Miller Hyman, strategic selling and some other methodologies.
But for, if you’re wondering, if you’re wondering what Med Pick is, it’s an acronym stands for metrics. So it’s a qualification process. This is what an account manager at AWS and many other vendors, uh, would use to qualify a deal, qualify, whether or not it’s something they can pursue, how much it’s gonna be worth, how quickly they can get the deal done, who needs to be involved, et cetera.
It’s, it’s the way that they develop their strategy to grease the tracks to get a decision made to do a deal and do it with AWS. Yep. Now, not always [00:15:00] a bad thing. Right. Important, important to recognize that humans are naturally resistant to change. Yep. And a deliberate approach to selling when it’s coming from the right place to create value and then exchange that for money to help a business.
Uh, it’s, it’s an essential. Component Yeah. Of business, in my view. I agree. So not bashing sales methodologies. Nope. At all. But I know for me, as somebody who transitioned into selling midway through my career from an engineering background, it was like a secret club. I never understood what was going on, never understood what was going on, and uh, and I think there’s a lot of buyers who are probably in a similar boat.
Yep. Lemme play it out to you. MM stands for metrics. So what are the things that, uh, an organization’s trying to achieve are, are you trying to save money? How much are you trying to move faster? How much faster? Et cetera, et cetera. So what are the, the things that you can measure that are [00:16:00] the goals that doing this deal is trying to achieve in the organization?
Do you know who the economic buyer is? The economic buyer is the person who has veto power over the decision and actually really writes the check the decision criteria. So how is the organization going to evaluate? The decision, you need to go and gather that information. The decision process, the paper process.
So the contracts, the procurement engine. You need to understand everything. This is what an account manager is doing. They’re gathering this information mm-hmm. Taking these signals and feeding it back into a strategy. Yes. So they can align to the tracks in your business and grease them to get to where they want to go.
That’s right. Right? Mm-hmm. Moving on, I is for I, uh, identifying pain. Right? So where, where is, where is not doing this, this project causing this organization pain? And if there isn’t some, can we manufacture some? You’ve gotta find some pain. Yep. Right. Because that’s the catalyst for real change. Mm-hmm. And it drives [00:17:00] the deal forward.
C Champion and there’s another C in med big competition. Have we identified and developed a champion, someone who will advocate for this deal to happen above all other options Yep. And make sure the organization doesn’t do nothing. Yep. Who is that person? Mm-hmm. And who is the competition? So there’s a lot going on here.
This is comprehensive. It is comprehensive. That’s right. And it all starts with a long-term view as well. So point number one of the 16 principles, customer obsession. The leaders start with the customer and they work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Trust is a word that came up time and time again.
It is all about trust. Leaders pay attention to competitors, Jono, as you’ve mentioned, but they obsess over the customer. So there is a long-term view here. No short-term wins, gains, or anything to that. It’s all about trust, business value, and bringing the customer along on the journey. [00:18:00] With importantly, a champion within the business who is going to get things done.
So what is a champion? Well, a champion persists. A champion who’s somebody that may see leadership come and go. I got a little cheeky analogy here. Maybe it’s a little bit like the leaders of the CIA. They see presidents come and go. They don’t feel the need to necessarily read presidents in on all things.
Could be talking about UFOs. Don’t know. Could be something else. It could be similar, but the point is they persist. They survive politics. They can navigate the business. They’re influential, they can facilitate change. They are change agents themselves, but more importantly, they are the person that AWS is going to nurture.
They’re the person that’s gonna get access to the roadmap, the NDA collateral. They’re gonna get access to the architects to solve problems, and they’re gonna get trained up, uh, to be an advocate, not just an [00:19:00] advocate, a defender. A defender of the AWS truth within the organization. And AWS will go looking for that person, and if they can’t find it, they’ll have a partner help to seed that person.
They are a change agent. They’re influential. They’re the person that advocates for the change. They have been sold intimately on the value of these primitive services. And we talk about those, we’re talking about the classics, right? There’s a bunch of them, EC2 s, three storage objects. It could be, uh, dynamo db, Amazon RDS, Amazon VPC, et cetera, et cetera.
These are critical services that once you believe in the value of them, the AWS seller just has to find new pathways to adopt something that you are already a passionate believer in. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The tip of the iceberg. Tip of the iceberg.
Now, some listeners would go, oh, well, that’s what [00:20:00] the procurement department’s for, and, uh, oh, I’ve, I’ve been doing these deals forever. Mm. But there’ll be some of you out there going, huh, that’s interesting. I’ve never even heard of that. Mm. Wonder if, um, there were two KPIs, right? So every board, every CEO said.
You’ve got freedom within boundaries. You’re allowed to do the things that you need to do such that our business achieves its objectives. You will have a budget. So question number one would be, is it appropriate for the public cloud budget to grow anywhere between 20 and 30% year on year? Is it appropriate?
Now, if you are in a growth phase, and we’ve seen this before as well, where organizations are growing rapidly. I mean, is there anything greater than the public cloud to allow you to scale and grow and build services? F fantastic scenario. Fantastic. And it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s a little bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
When the the platform suits your objectives, the primary objective is to meet the demand, perhaps of new markets, new [00:21:00] regions, et cetera. As you deploy and maybe roll out new products, if that momentum slows down, then people start to look at the other hierarchy of needs, as in the other items in that same hierarchy.
And it could be that you start looking at cost. And so the next key question. If you’re comfortable with growth is, are you portable? And maybe there should be a portability review. Maybe there should be some sort of metric or scale to which you could assess your environment to determine just how portable you are.
Yeah, and I think we’ll get into that in terms of portability as a potential antidote. Mm. To something that the platform is deliberately engineered for. Mm. And the sales methodologies are geared towards and KPIs and targets and quotas. And that’s stickiness.
Now, it’s no secret that most B2B tech vendors are all chasing stickiness. Nobody likes churn in their business, but [00:22:00] when there’s so much money being spent on objection handling as it relates to stickiness and lock in, if you’re a buyer and you’re thinking, okay. There’s a team of people around my account, millions have been spent training them hundreds of thousands of dollars or developing the playbooks.
How much money have we spent on, on training our buyers? And some of the things that we’ve uncovered through, going deep on this, you talk about what drives the stickiness in the platform. It’s, it’s the sheer volume of SKUs. Yep. It’s thousands of SKUs and it’s very, becomes very difficult to discern which SKUs are, are, are necessary and which ones are not.
How can I optimize, how can I cut a better deal? There’s, there’s a lot to be said for having an antidote to stickiness and that is portability. Yes. There’s a lot to be said [00:23:00] for even recognizing that there is likely. A champion within your organization. Mm. And if you don’t know who that person is, how can you give them a KPI around portability?
Right. Right. Question one, do you know who your champion is? Right. Right. Okay. And going back to the SKUs, they’re not all created equally. Some are more portable than others.
And we’ve seen examples too where if there is a cost objection and somebody raises their hand and says, hang on a minute, um, can we just pause here for a second? I’m not comfortable with where this is going. I want an architectural review.
Now, that is a well-oiled machine within the AWS megalithic service capability. Very, very well trained. And the architectural review isn’t so much about cost reduction, it’s about regaining trust. And it’s [00:24:00] about reorienting the question to focus on other things.
And yes, cost may be, may have been the trigger for the review, but the process that you go through ultimately may end up in a situation where you are further locked in and you could be further locked in by virtue of an improved architecture, perhaps the adoption of more native services. So these are those services that only exist on the platform to which they’re sold and delivered.
And AWS has them, and Microsoft has them, and Google has them too. They all have them. Well, that’s the, that’s the other outcome that, uh, that you can expect. So when you, when you’re making architectural decisions, uh, in a, in a well architected review with guidance from architects from AWS or your hyperscale supplier, what you can expect, of course, is for them to advocate for changes that then lead to stickiness.
Yeah. Long-term relationships, maybe, uh, some of you’ll be familiar with the, the standard playbook, which is we optimize. Yep. And then if you’re chasing a discount, well, what we do is to lock in all of those, those optimizations. We’ll do a new reserved instance and they happen last g give give us another three years.
Yep. So what we’re actually then what you’re doing is inadvertently locking in your higher rate of spend. Mm-hmm. But you’re locking in based on optimizations that you’ve done now in exchange for, in exchange for future portability and flexibility. And, and so if you are not fully aware of the, those conditions of the game or those rules of the game, very, very hard for you to play that game to your, to your maximum advantage and also diminishing returns as well.
So the two major examples that I brought up before, you know, in excess of 500 K of AWS spend, the outcome was that there was less than 5% to play with. Having been through so many well architected and [00:26:00] architected reviews, there’s just nothing left to squeeze out of the orange. It’s been squeezed. The adoption of native services is as high as it can be, and there’s very little room to move.
And so each time the board asks the question, can we improve our profitability? The champion perhaps, or someone within the business says, well, I can show you how well we’re optimized. Look at this. We’ve been through this, and you’ll see that we’re actually optimized as well as we possibly can be. But that’s not the end of it.
You and I both know that there are further triggers and things in games that you can play to get more value. Absolutely. Right? Absolutely.
I think, uh, I think we’ve touched on a few of them. It’s impossible to cover all of this in today’s episode, be because it’s, it’s very comprehensive. Mm-hmm. But if I was gonna just play back some of the headlines, the headline is, it’s very [00:27:00] apparent, very apparent that a lot of hyperscale buyers are not as well equipped as they could be to buy because they’ve never been taught how to sell.
Yep. I think that’s, it’s critical. I think that’s critical and nobody’s talking about this. Mm-hmm. That’s a tough thing to admit to as well. Can I just be sympathetic to that? Because I think it’s, I’ve been a CIO before I’ve been responsible for a budget. When I took that job, I was broad shouldered, head up, confident that I could negotiate the best deal for my business, make all the right decisions, et cetera.
I mean, you gotta be confident to have the job. That’s probably how you got it in the first place, that you’re able to convince somebody who was hiring you, that you were in control. You probably believe it. You do your best. What are you doing? Shaving points off cost and getting some credits, maybe getting a bit of work done for you?
I mean, is that three things? That’s right. And, and not all, [00:28:00] not all of our listeners will have the benefit of a well-funded procurement engine. Mm. And even then, based on the procurement departments I’ve interacted with, I don’t think they’re as well equipped as they could be either, because they often don’t understand the tech Yep.
And the playbooks behind the tech and how that’s how that’s being driven into the broader organization. Mm. They may introduce some competitive tension, they’ll run a process. There’s all of these normal things that you can expect. Mm. But it still doesn’t, uh, it still doesn’t give you what. The, the, the level of understanding that, that a sales person would have.
Yeah. As it relates to the specific platform itself and the unique strategies that drive growth. That’s right. Uh, within that account. So that’s the, that’s the, the number, the number one thing I think that we’ve learned is that most buyers probably aren’t as well equipped as they could be to buy ’cause they’ve never been taught [00:29:00] how to sell.
I think the other one that’s very obvious to us is that these platforms, and particularly AWS because of the thousands of SKUs in the SKU based selling model Yep. Have done an incredible job of engineering stickiness That’s right. Into the customer journey. Yes. And so that is, that is absolutely a force to be reckoned with is, is this idea of stickiness and how, what’s the antidote to that.
Right. And I think, I think we’ll get to that. Mm-hmm. And I think, uh, I think the third thing that really stood out to me, and this was the, the conversations that we had with, uh, some of the sellers Naran. Mm-hmm. Uh, and, and you sort of touched on it a bit as well. We asked them the question, if you woke up tomorrow and you were, you were a CIO Yeah.
Do you think you’d be able to cut a better deal than all of your customers cut while you were there? Universal, yes. An impassioned Yes. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? [00:30:00] Yeah. So that’s, that’s something telling for our listeners to be thinking about. That’s right. The, the, the sellers at hyperscale providers and the ones at AWS that we spoke to are very, very confident of their ability to come out on top playing this game.
Yes. I think the thing that gives them the confidence is the fact that they’ve been trained and the other player hasn’t. That’s right. Seems to be right. Seems to be right. Yeah. And that was the reaction that we got from that question was just, it was just an immediate Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Emphatic, emphatic, big smiles.
Absolutely. Yeah. And you know what, like who’s better placed, who’s better placed to face off than the, the ones who did an excellent job selling to everybody else. Yep. Right. I, I think that’s right. So if you’re still listening to this, I’m sure you are, you’re probably thinking, what’s the antidote? What are we gonna do with all this, [00:31:00] Jono?
What, what can you actually do about it? Well, I think, uh, I think we’ve got a couple of ideas, but we’d love to hear from our listeners as well. Mm-hmm. Right. Share, share your ideas. Because the rising tide lifts all boats. This isn’t about demonizing sails or anything like that. Nope. This, this is about.
Leveling the playing field and improving com competitiveness in the market, which is good for everybody having choice. Well, the purpose of our podcast, right? The purpose of our podcast ideally, is for us to be able to offer insights, guidance, whatever language we want to use that help it leaders. That’s right.
So we’ve come up with three things that you need to think about Now. Talk us through the first one, because I think this is the, the one that was the light bulb moment for you. What can you, what can you do about it right now? If you’ve heard this and gone, oh God. Well that first thing you can probably do is go and, um, get in the chat GPT and figure out how Med Pick works.
Mm-hmm. It’d be a good start. There’s [00:32:00] probably people doing that right now. Talk to us about champions. Champions. Well, okay. So if you know who your champion is, great. Right? Um, one way, if you don’t know who your champion is, they’re getting a lot of love from AWS. So they’re doing things like early roadmap previews.
They’ve got access to solution architects, they get private briefings, sometimes NDA sessions. Um, they’re executive sponsor aligned. What do I mean by that? They are defended, right? AWS wants the exec sponsors within an account to defend the champions because they must persist. Leaders come and go, John o right?
But the champion must persist. Uh, they obviously support reference architecture creation. It’s about ownership, right? So going back to this point on selling by SKUs and primitives, et cetera, they are architecturally versatile. But it is a customer owned responsibility. The customer owns the architecture.
The [00:33:00] champion is trained to do it the right way. And by that I mean the AWS way. They’ve got visibility, they’ve got access to regional execs, all sorts of people. So they are taken in under the wing, these champions, and they are believers.
That’s right. So what’s the antidote? The antidote is find out who the champion is in your organization. Yep. If you don’t already know and think about, think about the KPIs for your champion. That’s right. How can your champion in that capacity be leveraged to ensure that your business is getting the most value?
Alright. Out of this relationship about that, let’s talk about KPIs, about that. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Here’s one. I’m ready. You ready? If AWS native services, a particular native service, and we’ll go back to SKU based selling. So [00:34:00] this is where you will face off to an AWS seller who intimately understands the inherent value of a particular sku.
There is a playbook for that. KU specifically, right? Very different to Microsoft. And bundled based selling is a completely different approach. It’s for the builders, for the bros, the tech bros, the devs, the architects. It’s for them. All right? That’s how the SKU has been designed. That’s how the playbook has been designed.
I’ve just got one question. How hard is it to move off said SKU. Why can’t that be part of the value equation? You can love the thing. You may even love what it costs. All of those things, the value for you may be so powerful that you just about damn near pay anything for it. I’m all right with that.
Can you move off it? Ask portability, ask your champion portability. Ask your champion. What is your process for moving off this thing? Is it possible? ’cause if I ask you to do it, are you gonna piss and moan [00:35:00] and carry on or are you gonna get on with it? Right. Are you gonna scream bloody murder that the organization’s gonna collapse if I tell you to move off this thing?
Because now there’s an ecosystem of services that are sociability aligned to this thing and so intertwined that you tell me it’s impossible, I’ve got a problem with that. So I care about portability, some kind of portability score. Mm-hmm. Right. Portability score. How? How can you be a champion within our organization?
Yep. For hyperscale, cloud portability, portability, that’s it by all means. Right? If we’re sold on the value, you’ve just still gotta tell me that if, should we choose to move off it for whatever reason, and by the way, the reason may well be changes in your business. That’s right. Right? Absolutely. Changes in economic conditions, tariffs, God forbid.
Yeah. Anything could happen to your business. Well, now if you are, if you are listening to this and you’ve gone, oh, I think I’m the economic buyer. Mm-hmm. Not the champion. Right. And you go, I dunno who that, who is that person in my business? How do I find out? Here’s an easy one. Have you ever met with your [00:36:00] account director?
Yep. If you haven’t, you should do that. Yep. And, uh, you should ask them. Mm-hmm. Ask them, right? Yeah. Pretty, pretty straightforward. Yep. So this is just one example of being armed with the right information. Being trained as to how to sell will help assist you as to how to buy. That’s right. Yeah. Talk to us about, uh, well architected reviews or this is code for optimization.
Yeah. So fascinating one for this. Is that not always the case? Obviously when, you know, AWS accounts are managed, um, differently, there are consistencies, there may be a partner, this may be one of those opportunities where a partner is wheeled in a partner’s job is to own that outcome. That’s an interesting pivot, I think, for our friends at AWS to introduce a partner at that point.
’cause the trigger point may well be a point of [00:37:00] frustration over cost increases. It’s a funny time to introduce a partner there. Just pose that as a question. That’s right. Right. And so what is the outcome now? You, you wanna save money at what cost? That may sound ridiculous. Right? But you’ll go through and if the exercise is about trust realignment, right.
Coming back to that first princip. Customer obsession is all about the long-term view. It’s all about trust. And so the conversation can’t be about cost. It has to be about something else. Right? It has to be about something else. So straight away the conversation pivots and become reframed. Reframed.
That’s right. This is, this is also playbook language. It is all playbook language. That’s right. Now, I think, again, you’ve gotta look at the outcome. You may well save some money at the other end of it, but has your portability score improved or has it worsened as a result? And I’m super critical of [00:38:00] these native services as well, right?
Because if you cannot move off, then you are restricting the business. And if macro changes happen, economic changes, or something happens in your business where you are required to, it could be make or break for your business, right? Like anything can happen and it’s no due to no fault of any particular SKU or the value.
’cause at a point in time, particularly when you were growing, it all made sense. Something changed. The business wants you to do something about it. Can you do it? And was the result of your well architected review a position where you were further entrenched? Or did you manage to save money without becoming further entrenched in adoption of more native services?
I think that’s right. So the antidote to, well architected reviews, I’m not saying, I don’t think we’re saying don’t engage in a well architected review. I think what we’re do we’re saying is educate yourself as to the structure of a well architected review and the [00:39:00] playbook behind a well architected review.
Yep. And make sure that you’re entering into that process on your own terms. Yep. Through, through your value creation and optimization lens. That’s right. Not. AWSs or your, or your hyperscale partners lens. Mm-hmm. Definitely make sure that you are selecting the partner they’re introducing to do this work.
Mm. Who are well compensated by AWS to do this work for you. Mm. It might be free for you. Mm. But they’re getting paid handsomely, so that’s already an interesting situation that will there be given success criteria. So you want to, you want to, you wanna participate in this with eyes wide open. Mm-hmm. And start to get educated around the playbook, behind what triggers a well architected review and why, and what the outcome is and enter into that process on your own terms.
I think so. And I [00:40:00] think it’s about framing KPIs, freedom within boundaries. You could say from the outset to the process. Yes. I wanna save money. Yes. I trust you. I trust the platform. All good. Nobody panic. But the outcome of this, I don’t wanna be in this position. And you can outline the things that are a problem for you.
Anchor, anchor in the things that are problems for you. Mm-hmm. Resist the temptation to reframe those problems as something else. That’s right. For example, spends got away from you. Oh, that’s a governance issue. Mm-hmm. No, it it’s, it’s a pricing issue. Yep. It’s a macro, a unit economics issue. It the, these resist these reframing, uh, objection handling techniques.
Educate yourself and, and you will be able to drive a better outcome. Because ultimately, if we go back to even the conversations we had with AWS sellers, they truly are customers obsessed. They are, they do want the best thing [00:41:00] for, for your account. Yeah. But unless you’re educated and able to advocate on your own behalf, it’s you, you’re gonna be on those tracks that agrees to a place.
Perhaps isn’t a place that you want to be going exactly right. And you, you just don’t want to be an organization that feels paralyzed, that feels like they can no longer make the decisions that they need to. And you know, we’ve got real world examples of where that was a problem. You’ve gotta try and head that off.
And I think it represents an existential risk to your business. By all means, embrace the services, believe in the value, but do so cognizant of the fact that you don’t want to be an organization that’s captive, that’s incapable of making critical decisions to materially reduce your spend should you need to for whatever reason.
That’s right. Absolutely. Leaves with stickiness, mate. What’s the antidote to stickiness? Well, I think the antidote for stickiness is this tough. It’s tough, it’s hard work. Yeah. And I think it, it’s, it’s SKU by SKU. [00:42:00] Yeah. So again, it comes back to portability. I think the antidote to, to stickiness is, uh, complexity.
Like how, how opaque is the architecture? Right. So I think there’s some really good language here where you can be essentially economically locked in. And if all the metrics, if all the measures, if all the levers are all platform specific, and in this case we’re talking about AWS, it’s difficult for you to make a decision that’s not an AWS one.
We call that economic lockin. It’s not a technical correction at all because you’ve got AWS specific semantics, specific tuning specific integration points. And I’ll go back to my point previously as well. If the seller’s done a good job of selling the primitives in order to sell more, they just figure out new pathways for the same product or the same SKU, and they allow it to be woven into other parts of the business, other regions, new business problems, more value, et cetera.
So next thing, you’ve got countless use cases in your business that depend on this thing [00:43:00] that becomes irreplaceable. That’s right. Right? That’s right. So educate yourself. About how the platform is sticky, right. The sales playbooks behind driving that stickiness and that that sprawl Mm. And, and why it’s happening.
That will enable you to identify where it’s creating value for your business and where it’s not. Mm-hmm. Because oftentimes at scale, that that line becomes very blurry. It does Very difficult to un to unpick. That’s right. We’ve seen this time and time again, and I know a lot of our listeners are going, yep.
That, that sounds like me. Or, I was at a place where that happened. Yep. This conversation’s been going on for 15 years. It has And, and the facts are there. Look at the compound annual growth rates. Yeah. Look at the state of the hyperscale market in Australia as it relates to adoption. Yeah. You cannot argue with that trajectory.[00:44:00]
No. And, and you cannot argue with the role that sales methodologies. And training and playbooks have to play in that growth. It doesn’t happen by accident. No, it doesn’t.
And so we’re super motivated on this. We are, we’re, we’ve gone deep, think we’re, we’re absolute believers. We want to hear from our audience. We wanna hear from you. Has this happened to you?
Does this resonate? Do you think, and let’s hear from the sellers out there, let’s hear from the buyers. Would buyers be better equipped to buy if they understood how to sell? Yep. What could that look like? How might that show up in your business? We’ve given you a few examples. I think, like we said, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Yep. But we want to hear from you because there’s more to come on this. There is, we’re not just rant casting and, and picking on the [00:45:00] usual. Right. There’s more to go narin we’re, I dunno why you’re looking at me, but, but we wanna hear from you. We’re gonna, we’re gonna iterate on this. I think it’s uh, I think it’s time that there was a reckoning.
I think this is another lever. Yep. This is another lever that savvy business leaders can employ. To cut the best deal possible and get the most value from these platforms and it’s being underutilized today. I wholeheartedly agree. Success can be reframed. You can have your cake and eat it too. You wanna embrace those services.
Great. You do so, do so knowing how you’ve been sold to the path that you are on and understand inherently, if somebody asks you the question, are you portable? Can you move off with a straight face? Can you answer that question in a way that is risk mitigated, achievable, and reasonable by anyone’s
measure?
[00:46:00]
This of course has been things reasons. I’m Naran McClung. This is Jonathan. Staff. Where do you get your podcasts? Wherever you do it could be Apple Podcasts. It could be YouTube. God bless you if you try and avoid us on LinkedIn. We’re everywhere. We’re on Spotify, of course, as well.
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That’s what we are. Basically investigative journalists at your service. At your service. Send us down this rabbit hole. We’re everywhere. We’re motivated and we will produce something we will of value.
Of course. We are famously produced by Pru Loon.
Our digital producer is Karina Aguilera. You can contact us at PR at things, reasons show. Reach out if you wanna be a guest. If you’ve got feedback, anything at all, [00:47:00] contact us. We’ll definitely respond. Thank you for listening in.
Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Thank you very much. See you next time.