Driving Revenue Growth by Automating Co-selling on AWS Marketplace via Salesforce
ISVs are increasingly realizing that direct selling forms on AWS marketplace forms only a part of capitalizing on the marketplace potential. Building co-selling partnerships with AWS marketplace, is an extremely important channel for an exponential increase in overall sales and revenue realization. However, co-selling the traditional way (all manual processes), is operationally heavy and can be an inefficient approach to resource allocation. In this article, we will focus on how co-selling in AWS marketplace is a gold mine for ISVs, provided they capitalize on it by leveraging co-selling automation, ensuring high output without being operationally taxing.
If you are looking to automate the creation of private offers for your direct customers or CPPO in AWS marketplace, check out part 1 of this series. APN Customer Engagements Program: Co-selling with AWS
AWS marketplace runs the APN Customer Engagements (ACE) program that enables ISVs to collaborate and co-sell with AWS, drive successful engagements with customers, and grow their business. It empowers ISVs to manage joint opportunities and leads with AWS, leading to higher customer engagement. With ACE Program, ISVs can:
- Discover new sales opportunities, drive more revenue, accelerate deals, and win customers together with AWS.
- Co-sell with AWS to better understand customer needs and leverage the expertise of the AWS Sales team to advance your customer opportunities.
- Earn discounts for originating new customer opportunities, access Marketing Development Funds (MDF) and Partner Opportunity Acceleration Funds, and more.
Why is co-selling a winning proposition?
It is natural for ISVs to wonder whether co-selling actually leads to increased revenue generation or not. Here are a few quick reasons which make co-selling a winning proposition for ISVs:
- Deals close faster giving opportunity to work on fresh deals at an accelerated pace
- Stamp of approval from AWS sales teams for greater credibility and competitive advantage
- Access to new customers as referrals from AWS field sellers
- Access to customer insights and demands via AWS partner interactions
At this stage, all looks good and co-selling is a dream for each ISV, however, the manual nature (without Salesforce automation) is what makes the proposition tricky.
Traditional path to co-selling: Key challenges
When it comes to co-selling, following a manual process, there are some concrete challenges that ISV sales teams face, eventually, making co-selling a not so lucrative proposition, including:
- Co-sell submissions/ acceptance is operationally taxing
- Requires exceptional investment in people or in-house technology solution development
- Context switching between CRM and AWS marketplace curbs productivity
- Tracking deals becomes a nightmare
- Understanding AWS marketplace fields involves a steep learning curve
Co-selling powered by Automate via Salesforce
Invariably, co-sell automation is the best bet for ISVs to unlock the co-selling potential of AWS marketplace, without completely choking the bandwidth of their workforce or losing out on the opportunities.
Transforming ISVs-AWS Partnerships with Salesforce Automation
Here’s how automate via Salesforce makes co-selling work for ISVs:
Create and receive co-selling opportunities from the same system of recordCo-selling with ACE Program for AWS marketplace involves managing inbound and outbound co-sell opportunities. With automation via Salesforce, ISVs can easily manage both inbound and outbound opportunities without leaving their familiar system of record, i.e.e Salesforce. For all outbound opportunities, sellers and RevOps teams can easily map their Salesforce/ CRM fields to the AWS fields and ensure that the opportunity is considered and processed. The need to set up field customizations once and then each opportunity can follow a similar process, making it work automatically. Similarly for inbound opportunities, ISVs can set custom filters and conditions to accept the opportunities they receive from AWS.Invariably, ISVs no longer have to toggle between different platforms, which is highly frustrating and results in significant loss of sales team productivity. They can easily share and accept referrals for co-selling without leaving their system of record. The process of co-sell automation via Salesforce is operationally hassle-free as it doesn’t involve hours of manual work in terms of data entry and duplication.
Real time visibility on all deals for everyone When it comes to co-selling, a multitude of stakeholders from the ISV side are involved, which includes the sales teams, revenue operations teams, finance teams and others. Invariably, it is important that each one stays updated on the status of each deal to carry out the next step of the process. With co-selling automation for AWS marketplace, all stakeholders can get real time visibility into the status of the deal within Salesforce. They can track in real-time whether or not the deals are moving along, if they have been accepted and navigate any challenges that come along the way. At the same time, automation via Salesforce, powered by bi-directional sync ensures that the data and status of deals is always up to date, across all systems in use, including SaaSify (the automation provider), Salesforce and the AWS Partner Central. Bi-directional sync ensures that there is a single source of truth for each offer/ deal, irrespective of the platform that ISVs team look at.
No upskilling, additional hiring or new technology solutions needed The ability to create co-selling opportunities from within Salesforce ensures that ISV teams no longer have to invest additional resources for:
- Upskilling their teams to toggle between Salesforce and AWS Partner Central
- Adding more people to the team to take care of what could be operationally heavy
- Building an in-house technology solution to automate the process of co-selling
Invariably, this reduces the operational costs which are otherwise taken on the expense side and deducted from the revenue generated from co-selling. Overall, co-selling automation via Salesforce significantly adds to resource optimization for ISVs, directly impacting the bottom line.
Automated workflows to close the loop fasterFinally, the automation of the entire workflow right from creating outbound co-selling opportunities or accepting inbound referrals to closing the loop after offer acceptance makes the process fast and agile. There are no delays due to multiple follow ups or human errors. Tracking is seamless and in real-time. All this adds to the accelerated pace of deal closure, leading to faster revenue realization. At the same time, ISVs can also customize their AWS marketplace sales workflows to align with their internally followed workflows to ensure complete coherence and faster uptake. Overall, with automation via Salesforce, ISVs can make co-selling a truly winning proposition, without compromising on other aspects of their business, in multiple ways:
Sales teams can accelerate sales productivity by converting existing Salesforce objects into co-selling opportunities and extending offers from within Salesforce.
Revenue and operations teams can easily map fields from Salesforce to AWS fields and customize the workflows, while ensuring that each opportunity is approved before being sent to the AWS Partner Central.
All teams can individually monitor status for each co-selling opportunity created or accepted from within Salesforce to keep track of closure rates and revenue realization.
Co-selling automation with SaaSify
The SaaSify Salesforce Application is a market leader in enabling ISVs with co-selling automation. Available in AppExchange, ISVs can leverage SaaSify’s capabilities to automate co-selling with AWS marketplace easily and leverage the ACE Program. Fortune 500 companies have been capitalizing on the SaaSify Salesforce Application to simplify co-selling processes and unlock multi-million dollar deals via sharing and accepting referrals with AWS field sellers. Book a discovery call today to understand how co-selling automation can impact your business and how SaaSify can power your automation journey. With SaaSify, you can scale faster, with less operational headache and build deeper partnerships with AWS marketplace by automating operational work of managing all inbound and outbound co-selling opportunities.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Salesforce automation offers ISVs a transformative opportunity in co-selling with AWS Marketplace. Centralizing processes within Salesforce streamlines workflows, reduces costs, and accelerates revenue realization. By eliminating platform toggling and ensuring real-time visibility, ISVs can optimize resources, enhance collaboration, and drive growth.Ready to experience the power of co-selling automation?
Schedule a demo today with our AWS Marketplace experts and unlock the full potential of your partnerships. But wait, there’s more!
Part 3 dives into co-selling automation in the AWS Marketplace via AWS ACE. Discover how to leverage automation to streamline collaboration and unlock the full potential of co-selling for your ISV business.
