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CentralSquare provides technology solutions that help more than 8,000 public sector agencies deliver vital safety and administrative services to 3 out of every 4 residents of the U.S. and Canada. CentralSquare’s mission is to innovate for the public sector to create the broadest and most agile software platform to help solve some of the most pressing issues facing local governments today.
nOps fast growth presents a sales sales pipeline management problem common to all partners of hyperscale clouds. As a fast-growing independent software vendor (ISV) that uses Salesforce CRM and the AWS ACE Pipeline Manager to track and manage sales opportunities—manually updating leads between the two systems. With month-over-month co-selling growth, the pain for nOps to maintain an accurate, steady exchange of leads and opportunities between the two sales pipelines became untenable.
The hard impact of this is measurable slow-down drag on the flywheel of growth which in turn caused frustration with customers with slower times to solve their problems, and with staff both at nOps and AWS who just want to get the paperwork done and move to delivering value as soon as possible.
nOps sales staff worked closely with their ACE counterparts and asked “How can we remove this double-entry CRM bookkeeping from our process and make it more efficient? How do we solve the double-CRM problem?”
CentralSquare Technologies creates mission-critical software for the public sector. They reduce time spent on workflows, gain actionable insights, and effectively collaborate with agencies and citizens.
"We help the public sector innovate, so it’s on us to have the best relationship with cloud providers like AWS. This is how we deliver on our promise to the public sector, to bring the power of cloud solutions, automation and the value of data to your community.”
This means, like all AWS partners, CentralSquare needs to find an efficient way to co-sell with AWS. But they have to manage opportunities in their own CRM and in the AWS ACE CRM.
"Our Labra Customer Success Manager – who is as patient as he is technical – helped us carefully integrate our Salesforce instance with AWS, making sure our processes worked and no data was lost."
Like all partners who manually maintain their own CRM and ACE, the double-entry of opportunities takes up a lot of staff time.
"We had to double-enter CRM updates on our Salesforce and then on AWS’s ACE CRM. We carefully tracked each opportunity with our AWS peers on the phone and email. We felt our CRM didn’t really reflect what AWS saw, and the same from the AWS side! This fragile connection isn’t what we need to build a solid business with AWS on.”
CentralSquare asked AWS for ideas on how to streamline the updates between their CRM with ACE’s CRM. Their AWS partner manager had success with Labra with another account solving the time-consuming double entry of data for opportunity sharing with ACE, so recommended it to CST as the best solution that they have seen.
"AWS recommended we work with Labra to automate our CRM updates and build a robust co-sell pipeline to support our growing business."
CentralSquare didn’t just want to automate their manual processes: they wanted a more streamlined and robust way to synchronize their CRM and build a bigger business with AWS..
"We use our CRM for lots of non-cloud work, and AWS uses their CRM in a particular way, so one challenge was mapping how we did things to AWS processes. We couldn’t just throw out our sales process. Labra OppSync gave us a middle-path by mapping our CRM to ACE."
Once the mapping of CentralSquare’s CRM to AWS was complete, then “the taps were turned on” and data was synchronized.
"It’s really convenient to not have to constantly phone our partner manager or track lots of email notifications and then manually sync leads and opportunities with AWS. We can share our opportunities with AWS with one-click. When AWS shares a lead with us, we can see and accept it immediately in Salesforce."
How long did it take CentralSquare’s team to get used to the new way of working in Salesforce? The process went beyond the normal technical integration, with Labra helping them customize workflows and build new best practices.
"Our Labra Customer Success Manager worked with us over a few weeks to help make adjustments to our Salesforce, he walked us through our sales pipeline stages, and got the team feeling comfortable with this new automatic way of co-selling with AWS.”
The Labra OppSync dashboards inside their CRM helped CentralSquare to gain efficiencies and improved business processes and the working relationship with AWS. By reducing manual updates, we have ensured data integrity – on both sides.
"The Labra OppSync dashboards in Salesforce give us an instant, snapshot view of how we’re doing. Nobody wants to go through two CRMs and create a dashboard manually. The tracking and synchronization of AWS delays in Salesforce is a time saver, and it increases confidence in pipeline management, but the biggest bonus of using Labra OppSync is that it helps us collaborate better with AWS to grow our strategic business."
Since implementing Labra OppSync, CentralSquare has seen a range of improvements related to their strategic AWS partnership.
The sales team, released from their manual tracking, now have hours each week returned to them so they can focus on sales and spend more time with customers.
"We haven’t done a time-and-motion study to report on specific hours, but anecdotally the team has gotten hours back in their day."
Since handling AWS co-sell deals is easier, the sales team is encouraged to collaborate and share deals more often with AWS, further building the strategic relationship.
"Collaboration improves because it’s easier to work with AWS and that’s really the whole point of this: strengthening our strategic AWS alliance."
Finally, CentralSquare highly commended the Labra Customer Success Manager for delivering a custom experience tailored to their needs.
"Labra played an integral role in bringing together two sales databases to create efficiencies and reduce double entry. Our Labra Customer Success Manager was phenomenal to work with. He was patient and technical all at once. He explained and helped us to build new workflows and best practices, and helped us agree on rules of engagement. Thank you to Labra for making this possible!"
To solve this double-CRM overhead that causes so much drag and difficulty of sales data management, Ibexlabs implemented Labra OppSync to integrate nOps’ sales data from their Salesforce CRM with the AWS ACE Pipeline Manager.
Labra OppSync is an elegant, automated SaaS solution for bi-directional integration of data between two sales pipelines. Here, the implementation process of Labra OppSync was painless and required minimal involvement from nOps IT. Moreover, it was completed within weeks.
nOps Sales staff no longer have to manually make – or not make – double-entry CRM updates and they now have a single source of truth with updates in near real-time. nOps sales staff spend more effort helping customers buy and onboard and get to value rather than flipping between browser tabs to copy and paste data. Leadership at nOps and AWS can now, finally, “see” the same pipeline and can work together to improve it for the customers’ benefit. Labra OppSync provides a dashboard to visualize the data as it flows through the different stages of the sales cycle, adding confidence to the process.
“With our playbook with the AWS Ecosystem being such a big part of our growth of pipeline, it became more difficult for our Alliance Manager to keep things approved, updated, and launched. We worked with AWS on the custom integration but keeping it up and working was difficult with a very agile team. When we implemented Labra OppSync we were able to allow each team member to manage their own deals and increase the visibility to the AWS teams on the progress of the deals. This allowed them to gain even more confidence in nOps and increase the AWS-initiated deals.”
“Labra played an integral role in bringing together two sales databases to create efficiencies and reduce double entry. Our strategic AWS alliance is going from strength-to-strength now that we have a robust, automated co-sell pipeline powered by Labra.
Gabriel, from Labra, was phenomenal to work with. He was patient and technical all at once, helping us to build new best practices and workflows. Thank you to Labra for making this possible!”
