IBM Reduces the Co-Selling Lifecycle by 90% and Boosts Sales Opportunities with AWS by 117% with ACE CRM Integration Using Labra Platform

IBM, a global technology company, is an AWS Partner and part of the APN Customer Engagements (ACE) Program, which gives partners the ability to collaborate, receive support, and co-sell with Amazon Web Services (AWS) sales and marketing teams. IBM previously struggled to efficiently share co-sell opportunities at scale with AWS because IBM employees needed to manually submit and track opportunities within both their Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system and the AWS ACE portal. “We would have to copy and paste the data into the AWS ACE tool, which took up to 10 minutes per opportunity,” says Brennon Bissell, global AWS business development executive at IBM. This often resulted in missed engagements and potential revenue loss. Ultimately, these factors limited IBM’s ability to co-sell at scale. The company needed a solution to handle the high volume of opportunities.

Additionally, the IBM marketing team relies on a third-party tool for lead management and progression. To receive leads from ACE, the team had to export data manually and spend time managing it through different Excel files. This was a time-consuming, error-prone process that proved to be inefficient for the team. As a result, the lead management process complicated marketing efforts and hampered lead conversion rates.

IBM solved its co-sell challenges by working with Labra, an AWS Partner that provides a suite of software as a service (SaaS) solutions to automate cloud sales. The Labra platform is designed to centralize co-selling activities and enable real-time data syncs across teams by replacing manual updates with an automated solution. Using Labra’s SaaS solution for AWS co-sell, IBM was able to create an efficient ACE CRM integration to streamline processes and help its marketing team co-sell and share opportunities with AWS more efficiently.

The integration, deployed in early 2024, allows the IBM sales team to seamlessly manage AWS co-sell operations, sharing data in real time and receiving AWS opportunities within Salesforce. Labra built its ACE CRM integration on AWS services including AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). “IBM salespeople spend much of their day in Salesforce. We built everything to work within Salesforce so they don’t have to also go into the AWS console,” says Jai Kumar, founder and chief technology officer at Labra. “Built on AWS, Labra’s co-sell platform easily scaled to support and accelerate IBM’s co-selling with AWS, thanks to our powerful Salesforce Connector app, which automated many complex and manual business processes within a few weeks.” In addition, the IBM marketing team now has a direct integration from ACE to the third-party lead nurturing and progression tool. The Labra team built this as a custom integration. With the Labra solution, the IBM sales team manages the entire co-selling process within Salesforce. Incoming opportunities are automatically accepted, and the bidirectional sync eliminates the need for salespeople to leave Salesforce to collaborate with AWS sales teams. Effectively, this integration allows IBM to use Salesforce as a single source of truth across all co-sell motions.

The Labra integration’s automated bidirectional opportunity sync within Salesforce has reduced the time it takes salespeople to move from creating to submitting to closing an opportunity. “With the Labra ACE CRM integration, we have cut the co-sell lifecycle time by 90 percent, and we expect that to decrease even further,” Bissell says. Because the co-sell process takes less time, the number of co-selling opportunities shared between IBM and AWS has increased by 117 percent. This means that within the first six months of using Labra, IBM surpassed the entire number of opportunities it created in ACE in 2023. By eliminating manual processes and streamlining the opportunity-sharing pipeline and approval flow, the IBM sales team is saving an average of eight hours per person each week.

Additionally, the Labra integration’s automation and workflow notifications have helped IBM decrease sales close time. Labra will continue working with AWS and IBM to identify more opportunities to collaborate. Bissell says, “We are all-in on our partnership with AWS, and we also know Labra will help us get to the place we want to be with our co-sell operations.” The IBM sales team, supported by Labra, has successfully leveraged automation at scale using Labra’s co-sell automation capabilities, which makes it easier for IBM to take on additional opportunities with AWS. As a result of this automation, IBM has seen a significant revenue surge. The growth has enabled the sales team to set ambitious targets, aiming for 10,000 opportunities within a single year—an achievement that was previously deemed unattainable.