Honeycomb Doubles AWS Opportunity Submissions in 11 Days with Clazar ACE CRM Integration

Honeycomb is a full-stack observability platform that helps engineering teams understand, debug, and improve production systems. The company combines distributed tracing and a query engine for highly contextual telemetry data to reveal why a problem is happening and who it impacts. Honeycomb is part of the AWS Partner Network (APN) and participates in the APN Customer Engagements (ACE) program, through which AWS Partners collaborate and pursue co-sell opportunities with Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, because of a lack of integration between Honeycomb’s Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system and the AWS ACE Portal, the company relied on manual processes to move co-selling data to ACE. “We faced scalability challenges with our AWS Marketplace operations because our partner team had to switch between systems and enter data manually in each system. It was difficult to keep everything up to date as we added more data,” says Jack Grisanti, technical alliance manager at Honeycomb.

This was especially concerning because AWS Marketplace is a strategic channel for Honeycomb, where over half of the company’s sales pipeline consists of partner-influenced opportunities. “Our customers are increasingly driving revenue through AWS Marketplace, but that was becoming more difficult,” Grisanti says. “We needed a solution to manage our marketplace listings and automate the co-sell opportunity workflow.”

Honeycomb overcame its challenges by working with Clazar, an AWS Partner. Clazar provides a cloud go-to-market platform that helps software companies manage their listings, private offers, and contracts across all-in-one cloud marketplaces. Honeycomb implemented the Clazar Salesforce ACE CRM integration, a tool that automates data entry and enables seamless integration between Salesforce and ACE.

Using the Clazar solution, Honeycomb can automatically create co-sell opportunities directly from within Salesforce. The integration also automatically updates opportunities through bidirectional sync capabilities and provides tools for simplifying management. “The Clazar user interface is very easy to navigate, and it has streamlined our private offer process,” says George Miranda, head of Ecosystem and Partnerships at Honeycomb. “Having this functionality now helps more of our teams—across various functions—easily participate in issuing marketplace private offers.”

Honeycomb doubled its opportunity submissions in just 11 days after deploying the Clazar solution. “Using our previous manual process, we couldn’t submit opportunities as soon as they were available to be entered into the system,” says Grisanti. “With the bidirectional sync in the Clazar Salesforce ACE CRM integration, we’ve automated that process, which has helped accelerate our time to value and our time to connecting with AWS.” Honeycomb also achieved a 100 percent opportunity approval rate by AWS because of more accurate, automated CRM data. “Clazar has a lot of control fields that we were able to quickly plug into our co-sell process, which helped improve our overall sales effectiveness,” Grisanti says.

Additionally, Honeycomb now has a more scalable way to keep pace with sales growth. “Our partnership with AWS has progressed pretty rapidly, and we’re pacing to about 110 percent of our goal this year, which was already up 200 percent from the previous year,” Miranda says. “We now have the scalable solution we need to meet that demand. Clazar was the right solution at the right time to support the kind of growth we're going to see in the future.”

The APN Customer Engagements (ACE) program allows you to securely collaborate and co-sell with Amazon Web Services (AWS), drive successful engagements with customers, and grow your business. Participation in ACE provides you with a platform to manage your pipeline of joint opportunities and leads to further drive engagement with AWS and enrich customer relationships.