AWS recently launched a new AWS Partner CRM Connector app on Salesforce’s AppExchange. This provides companies with a direct way to connect their AWS Marketplace listing to their Salesforce CRM. It is a step up from the previous marketplace API, which required that customers build custom connectors on top of their CRM. 

While the new AWS connector provides important capabilities such as creating and updating private offers and resale authorizations from Salesforce CRM, other solutions provide these benefits and so much more. Labra’s cloud commerce platform provides the tools and expertise to greatly improve your experience from the moment of listing to your continued business success on the AWS Marketplace.

In this article, we walk you through some of those key differentiators. This comparison is based on the features as of Jan 2024. At Labra, we continuously add new features to make the end-user’s marketplace experience seamless. Stay tuned for our latest updates.

Multi-cloud support

The AWS connector only provides basic connectivity between Salesforce and the AWS Marketplace. In contrast, the Labra cCommerce Platform helps you connect, manage, and automate all of your cloud listings, offers, and co-sell opportunities bidirectionally through Salesforce. Labra currently supports AWS and Azure, with support for GCP coming in January 2024.

The bigger your organization and the more product listings you have on different platforms, the more you will benefit from Labra’s streamlined integration. Further, you’ll need to have multiple apps installed, usually with excessive engineering and operations effort, to support different cloud marketplaces. If your business uses another CRM like Hubspot or ConnectWise, you’ll likely have to build the integration yourself.  

Faster onboarding

If you are just getting started with the marketplace, it can take you up to eight weeks before your onboarding is complete, not even factoring in the time to first sale.

Labra, with our technical expertise and years of experience, provides you with rapid onboarding that takes less than one week for most organizations. So that you can start selling faster, and leverage other benefits of the marketplace and APN to bring your valuable products to market ahead of your competitors. 

Automation

Here are some of the standout automation features available in Labra’s platform.

1. Create and customize automation workflows
   Based on your current organization structure, and the stakeholders you wish to keep in the loop, you can set up custom automation workflows that trigger in common use cases such as whenever a lead moves from one stage to the next or a customer’s subscription renewal is coming up.
2. Field mapping
   Most of the standard fields relevant to the opportunities object are automatically mapped and automatically updated and in sync with the AWS Marketplace and APN Customer Engagements (ACE) portal. This makes it faster and easier to create offers and ACE opportunities.
3. Auto referral creation
   With the ability to set triggers, Labra provides an automated flow for referral creation based on parameters in your Salesforce Opportunity Object. This includes the ability to create referrals automatically. These are auto-populated with information from your linked Salesforce Opportunity Object. An example of a trigger is moving an opportunity from to Qualified or Prospect state.

Sell your way

While the AWS connector allows you to map your data from the AWS Marketplace into your Salesforce CRM’s Opportunities object, this process is manual and requires some custom code which can take time and effort.

Labra’s built-in custom mapping UI offers additional benefits to the user.

1. Seamless mapping UI to simplify both the private offer and co-selling workflows
2. Link multiple objects to the opportunity object
3. Ability to access fields of all linked objects during the creation of offers and opportunities

Labra integrates tightly into your existing sales workflows instead of being an additional chore on your list. This reduces dependencies on multiple apps and negates the custom coding efforts required.

Public offer support

Labra’s CRM integration supports managing both private and public offers through your CRM. This gives you a complete picture of all your sales through the marketplace.

The AWS connector does not support managing public offers through Salesforce.

CPQ and custom objects

Labra’s platform supports (Configure, Price, Quote) CPQ and custom objects out of the box. This feature helps sales teams close deals faster and streamline the sales process by allowing them to quickly and accurately generate quotes for complex product configurations.

These custom objects in Salesforce are also linked to the opportunity object, which makes it easy to create new offers and easily integrates with the marketplace listings and your various public and private offers.

AWS provides no support for CPQs and custom objects.

Referrals Dashboard

In addition to creating and managing offers and resale authorizations, integrating Salesforce to the AWS Marketplace with Labra gives users access to pre-built dashboards that provide you real-time breakdowns of your AWS referrals performance with breakdown by region, industry, and more.

Communicating with stakeholders

While working with AWS offers, there may be more than one stakeholder involved from the seller’s end. Involving multiple stakeholders and keeping them notified can be a pretty manual task and the AWS connector does not have an easy way to facilitate that.

Labra’s Salesforce integration comes with a built-in reminder feature which you can easily use to set up reminders for additional recipients and stakeholders.

Other features

While AWS Connector is free to use, there is still a lack of customization and personalized onboarding. Thus, the setup process can be hard for larger organizations with complex offerings and large internal teams. It is also challenging for smaller organizations that aren’t able to commit enough time and resources to set up the integration.

This is where companies can see an advantage while using a platform like Labra. We handle your integration and setup with utmost care and meticulous attention to detail. Labra makes sure the integration sets you up for cloud marketplace success.

This video from AWS re:Invent 2023, shows Michael Herger, the Principal Technical Product Manager giving a shoutout to labra.io for our CRM integration capabilities.

Additional services

White-glove onboarding

Labra further helps you with technical assistance, and premium onboarding support to get your product listed even quicker. Labra’s partner company Ibexlabs is a recognized AWS Premier Partner with years of proven experience in helping companies digitize and get cloud-ready. Since both Labra and Ibexlabs are recognized AWS partners, you are in safe hands in your AW Marketplace journey.

Continued support post-listing

You heard that right. Labra continues to provide support to its customers even once they are onboarded. This can be in terms of training about our new features, revenue-related queries, or further customization based on your team’s internal changes.

AWS technical consulting

Ibexlabs also has AWS-certified experts on matters like the marketplace, cloud security, DevOps, technical reviews, and more to support you in your AWS journey.

Managed listings for your product

If by any chance your product isn’t eligible for listing on the marketplace, Labra offers a solution to list the product under Labra’s marketplace account.

Experience the magic of Labra’s cCommerce platform. Sign up for a free demo here.