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.