As the fastest-growing Enterprise IT Company in history - having grown from $0 to $10 billion in 10 years and still growing at an annual rate of 64 percent year over year - Amazon Web Services is continuing to accelerate the pace of its innovation. After starting out with a single storage service, today Amazon Web Services offers more than 70 services including compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile and enterprise applications. The organization announced 722 significant new features and services in 2015, which is 40 percent more than what was introduced in 2014. And, just recently, Salesforce named Amazon Web Services its "preferred public cloud infrastructure provider," and announced that it's investing $400 million on Amazon Web Services during the next four years.

The Challenge

Amazon Web Services' growth has happened organically, and it has placed an emphasis on innovating - rather than dictating - a company culture that contributes to its customer-obsessed nature.

Known for its "Amazonian" style of doing things, Amazon Web Services has a rigorous dedication to their culture, best exemplified in their 14 Leadership Principles. One can easily see how it would require an immersive learning culture to deliver on its standards by just looking at a few of these principles:

  • Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
  • Ownership: Leaders are owners. They think long term and don't sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say "that's not my job."
  • Invent and Simplify: Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by "not invented here." As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.
  • Hire and Develop the Best: Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
  • Insist on the Highest Standards: Leaders have relentlessly high standards-many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so that they stay fixed.
  • Learn and Be Curious: Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

While these are the traits expected and even demanded from its leaders, Amazon Web Services holds all of its employees to such exacting standards. So, when the company needed a way to standardize its primary leadership principle, customer obsession, they took a thorough approach to learning that was both broad and deep. CloudCoaching International is proud to have helped in this success story.

The Opportunity


Amazon's primary leadership principle of customer obsession is the major driving force in the company. "One of the things that Jeff Bezos has set out to be as a company is the most customer obsessed company on the earth," says Mike Clayville, Vice President of Global Sales. "That's his goal. It's written on our walls. It is embedded in our leadership principles and it is lived every day at every level of the organization."

"What it means here at Amazon Web Services, and in particular in our organization that deals directly with customers, is that it translates to our team being problem solvers with the customer," Clayville continues. "When we are working with a customer to help them understand how he or she can gain business abilities through using the cloud or how he or she can reduce cost if that's their goal in using the cloud, what we enable them to do is leverage that technology in the best way possible and we do that by sitting at the table with them. On the same side of the table, understanding the issues that are in front of them and helping them solve the problem."

In line with this over-arching principle of customer obsession, the Amazon Web Services approach to selling starts by identifying the customer's desired outcomes and then, and only then, recommending solutions that will deliver on those most critical desires. It strives to define success through customers' eyes, based on their unique priorities and target outcomes.

As the company was growing faster and faster, leaders knew they needed a way to unify on a common methodology and language to further extend the customer-obsessed mindset across its global sales force. Through collaborating with CloudCoaching International, and through deep discovery and design, a global program called Outcome Based Account Management was developed and deployed for sellers across Amazon Web Services. This program provides language, process, behavior and methodology that even further increases customer intimacy and focus on both business and personal customer outcomes.

The Approach


It was critical that the learning solution match the Amazon Web Services culture. So, CloudCoaching International worked with Amazon Web Services to create a highly customized version of its Customer Outcome Selling course to line up with the methodology and language of Amazon. This Amazonian selling approach is called Outcome-Based Account Management (OBAM).

OBAM is the process, tools, competencies, and dialogue architecture for initiating and solidifying Amazon Web Services' customer-obsessed relationships, fixated on the journey of transforming the seller-customer engagement into a lifelong strategic relationship.

"We're not trying to sell you parts and pieces or technology. What we're trying to help you do is get the business outcomes," says Clayville when defining OBAM. "Our job is to sit down and help. We really talk about it as the four E's: explore, engage, empathize and enable. Those four E's are ingrained in the behaviors of our teams that are really supporting this notion of problem solving, identifying business outcomes, creating a path for those business outcomes to be achieved and then helping the customer achieve those business outcomes."

The Results

The program has been delivered globally to around 1,000 people in all geographies, including the European Union, the Asia-Pacific region, and North and South America. In every location, the program is being met with great success, achieving a global average score of 4.2 or higher out of 5 from participants.

Amazon Web Services' deep commitment to a culture of continuous learning and skill development is sure to help its sales force not just keep up with the pace of its innovation, but provide ever-greater levels of service to customers.