How CentralSquare Technologies™ strengthens their sales relationship with AWS

About CentralSquare Technologies™

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.

Highlights

CHALLENGES:

• CentralSquare and AWS use separate Salesforce CRMs.
• This created a lot of time and effort to manually synchronize via phone and email. 
• It was a fragile process at the heart of what we wanted to be a strong relationship between CentralSquare and AWS

SOLUTION:

• Labra OppSync automatically synchronizes our Salesforce CRM with AWS ACE.
• Any updates on either end are immediately reflected in the other CRM. 
• Build confidence in the CentralSquare and AWS sales pipeline.

RESULTS:

• Saved hours, per person, per opportunity, every week, which in effect creates more sales bandwidth.
• No opportunities lost because of manual mistakes.
• The biggest benefit is ‌improved collaboration and relationship with AWS.

Challenges

TIME-CONSUMING AND ERROR-PRONE MANUAL CRM UPDATES

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.”

Solution

A SALES PIPELINE SYNCHRONIZATION TOOL TO AUTOMATE CO-SELLING WITH AWS

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.”

Results

A STRONGER, GROWING AWS PARTNERSHIP AND HOURS SAVED EVERY WEEK.

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!”