Ep#131 Cloud Marketplace GTM & Co-Sell Acceleration with Labra by Ibexlabs

May 24, 2023

Episode Summary

Welcome to the Jon Myer podcast, where we delve into the dynamic realm of Cloud Marketplace GTM (Go-To-Market) and Co-Sell Acceleration with Labra by Ibexlabs. Join us as we explore this cutting-edge topic with industry experts Kyle Heisner, Vice President of Go-To-Market at Labra, and Jesus Alvarado, Alliance Director at ProsperOps. Labra, a trailblazing company in the cloud marketplace landscape, offers a comprehensive platform that optimizes the process of bringing cloud solutions to market and accelerating co-selling efforts. Throughout this episode, we uncover Labra's key differentiators, dive into their seamless onboarding process, unveil the customer journey, discuss funding opportunities, and reveal an exclusive special offer.

Prepare for an enlightening conversation that sheds light on the ever-evolving world of cloud marketplace GTM and co-sell acceleration. As we explore Labra's innovative approach, we uncover insights and strategies that can empower businesses to maximize their cloud marketplace success. Tune in to gain valuable knowledge and leverage Labra's expertise in driving revenue growth, streamlining operations, and capitalizing on the vast potential of cloud marketplaces.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to discover actionable insights and stay ahead of the competition in the dynamic world of cloud technology.

Kyle Headshot_1.1.1

About the Guest

Kyle Heisner

Award-winning consultative sales professional with 25+ years of experience driving revenue through the sale of complex enterprise software solutions, SaaS and web technologies. Extensive history of building long-lasting, business relationships with C-level executives in F500 accounts, resellers, and channel partners. with a verifiable track record of exceeding quotas and financial targets year after year. Heavily rooted in the TOLA region with an extensive list of business contacts in the South-Central geography.

Jesus - Headshot_1.1.1

Jesus Alvarado

A seasoned Cybersecurity, FinOps, and Hyperscale growth-focused team-oriented player with extensive knowledge around frameworks, compliance, Hosting, SaaS, Cybersecurity, FinOps, IaaS, PaaS, DRaaS, and sales/go-to-market expertise.

#aws #awscloud #finops #cloudcomputing #costoptimization

Episode Show Notes & Transcript

Host: Jon

Hi everybody and welcome to the Jon Myer podcast. Today's topic is cloud marketplace, go-to-market, and co-sell acceleration with Labra by Ibexlabs. Now we're talking about several topics around this IT, which includes what is Labra, the key differentiators of Labra onboarding the customer journey, funding, and a special offer. Now, before we get to all that, I think we bring on our first guest, which is Kyle Heiser, VP go to market at Labra. Kyle has over 27 years experience of in technology sales through many go-to-market styles. He has always delivered a customer focus approach that drives value for his customers and their customers. Kyle, thanks for joining me.

Guest: Kyle

Thanks for having me, Jon. Glad to be here.

Host: Jon

Kyle, I love having you on the show. I love your enthusiasm, our fun, and the back-and-forth natural conversation, so it's always nice to have you on here.

Guest: Kyle

Yeah, I'm super glad to be back, Jon. Always fun to work with you. The professionalism and the work product that you deliver are outstanding and when CADy Shack asked me to come to do a presentation for their team, I asked them right up from the beginning, can we do this through Jon Myer and Myer Media? Only way to do it.

Host: Jon

Well, thank you, Kyle. I appreciate it. And how about we bring on our next guest, Jesus Alvarado, an alliance director? Jesus has been a member of CADy Shack for over a year and is involved in it in his free time, but did you also know that he works with ProsperOps? You know what? Cost optimization SaaS focused on AWS. Jesus, thanks for joining me.

Guest: Jesus

Thanks for having us on, Jon, really appreciate it. Glad to be part of this podcast.

Host: Jon

First, I got to thank you and CADy Shack, and Labra for allowing me to do this. When it comes up and you recommend me, I'm very touched by it because I love working with you guys and it's just a fun conversation

Guest: Jesus

Excellent wise.

Host: Jon

Okay, so I think we should get into this, Kyle. First, let's talk about what Labra is.

Guest: Kyle

Labra is the first digital cloud commerce management platform on the market, and that's a lot to say it. It's kind of a new market that we're kind of creating. Cloud marketplace has been around for what, 10 years, nine, 10 years. But in that nine or 10 years, it's still an INS infancy. The benefits are wonderful for customers, buyers, sellers, and everybody. But there are a lot of things that need to be innovated and involved in that, and that's what we're trying to do here at Labra our team is innovating daily, new workflows, and new items all the time and trying to buy, make the buyer journey a better experience and easier for the ISVs and the cloud marketplaces and the distributors out there that are all providing solutions and products, better ways to be able to recognize revenue easier, go to markets, all of those.

Host: Jon

Jesus, let's talk about the buyer journey in the marketplace and your experience with that. What have you seen out there?

Guest: Jesus

Yeah, so I mean it can be pretty complicated at times. ProsperOps, we're an I S V. There is a lot of things that we could leverage from a tool like Labra, helping us get things on the marketplace, get wafers out, just kind of streamline some of the work we do from wanting to do more with AWS and their marketplace. But also I think there are just a lot of day-to-day tasks that tools like LABRA make it easier for somebody in my role to be able to just focus on more of the AW S growth on the alliance piece instead of the day-to-day, making sure opportunities are tracked correctly, making sure that I'm mirroring them across. So from that perspective, there's, there's a lot of time that can be saved when an I S V like Prosper Props does, partner with a company as I would say,

Host: Jon

Kyle, talk to me about the tools that Jesus is mentioning and the day-to-day task and make sure that everything's synced about it. Give me that 62nd elevator pitch on what Labra does and help me out.

Guest: Kyle

So from an I S P perspective, it helps out with work where you work. We're working as a sales team every day, and me, Jon, that's my phrase. I love it, right, Kyle?

Host: Jon

I love that I've been using that time and time again because it is very resonating. It sits so closely with me. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I love that phrase.

Guest: Kyle

So we all are asked to do more things every day, less time to do them, bigger quotas. Everything is an ISV salesperson. We're always trying to work on deal hygiene for our bosses to make sure everything is clean and all that. But then we're asked to go to another platform to do this, another platform to do that, go to the cloud market, go to the AWS marketplace, and create your offer. Go to ACE and upload your opportunities. It's a nightmare. If you've got five, you have to have five screens to do our job today with Labra, you're down to one pane of glass. You are working in your Salesforce or your HubSpot. We try to bring everything to your CRM so that you don't have to go anywhere else. That's one of our core competencies is that we tell our engineers, to design it with the concept of in mind work where you work.

Guest: Kyle

And it's been great because no more going to ace. I want to submit an opportunity to ace you as an I-as-seller. I click two buttons. I make sure the form is filled out completely. It should be because my onboarding team has mapped everything flawlessly for you and you. You're just reading it to make sure it's there and you click one more button and it's submitted. So it should be a two-button submission to get that in to create a marketplace offer. No more logging in, having to know your AWS account, ID going to AWS, and all of that. I literally can create a private offer in my C R M. It's sent. I click the customers that I want to send it to and I don't have to sit there and wait for that offer URL to come back anymore.

Guest: Kyle

It it's done. Once I click that offer, the APIs kick off within 15 minutes, your offer and the email that you put into our system are going to be sent to them, and you're going to be able to track it in your CRM and see that the offer was sent, the offer was read, the offer was accepted, all of it in your C R M and even better yet now, revenue recognition. You don't have your rev op team coming to you saying, Hey, I don't see it. It's not in the AWS reports. Well, who cares? It's all right in your CRM because now you can Rev without having to worry about waiting for those reports. And for you cloud consulting partners out there that are doing CPPO, same, same thing. We can do it. ISV consulting partner, we are even working now for the distributors and making a three-tier distribution model from the Labra platform.

Host: Jon

Kyle, you're talking about two of your offerings and file, correct?

Guest: Kyle

That's correct, yeah. OppSync integration tool that we've developed. We were the first one to market with it. Now there are two or three others out there, but we've helped innovate that space well. And that is just one piece. And then Flyout is our marketplace listing service, but it also goes into revenue operations. It also goes into the workflows, and that's where we feel we have been a major differentiator in our innovation. We're not just helping you get your listing done, we're helping you do more with less time, and that is by helping you with workflows from your CRM to create those marketplace private offers, get 'em out, track the revenue by being able to give CPOs to partners so that they can do the same thing. So we're trying to help with that whole go to market act action that you do every day, which drives more opportunities. So we have buyers through the gamut of personas, operations teams, sales teams, alliance teams, you, CFOs, and CIOs, all coming to us trying to solve different problems.

Host: Jon

Kyle, before I jump into the key differentiators of it. Jesus, let me ask you a couple of questions. You've input some opportunities into ACE and you've input opportunities into a CRM like Salesforce. You did one, then you went to the other. What was your experience?

Guest: Jesus

Yeah, it's just very time-consuming and when you first do it, Jon, it's not as bad when you have two or three deals in a month and it's not very hectic, not very heavy, and you have one sales guy or two on the team and you're able to coordinate with them and see what they're updating on Salesforce, and then you can go update an ace and it's doable, I would say at that point. But once you start to grow a stronger customer base, once you start to see things from AWS come in, like AOS or Amazon-generated opportunities as well, this starts to become a full-day thing every week to where you're blocking. I mean, I'm blocking out my calendar maybe a full Monday and a full Tuesday so that every back and forth can be done correctly so that ACE can be updated and AWS knows where the deals are so that our reps can know where the deals are according to ace. So it's extremely time-consuming from a manual perspective.

Guest: Kyle

So Jon, can I add one thing to that? Yeah, that I think is that I'd kind of skipped by, and that's two other very important things. Our tool is bidirectional. So what's that mean if I update the next steps or the description or the revenue amount or anything that is tied to Ace and you can limit what you replicate in our system? The other beauty of our system is the workflows we've created. You may not want to send everything to AWS, you may not want to send it to Azure. You can pick and choose what fields are sent, but as Jesus said, a lot of people go out and they are updating the next steps so that the AWS team gets the updates or you have to keep the date up to sync, but because if you don't, they close lost the deals on you.

Guest: Kyle

With our system, if you update your date and you're doing your normal deal hygiene with your normal sales manager in your weekly review forecasting reviews, it updates on AWS so you don't have to worry about it. The other beauty is we've got some customer reports that we've created for teams like Jesus's team in the alliance space and things that there's no more creating QBR R documents. I'm in the process of working with my development team on actually building a QBR R report that an alliance team can pull straight out of our system that shows aos, pos, the dollar amounts attached to 'em, all of the data that you normally struggle at the end of the quarter to pull together for your team to be able to present to your management team to go ask for additional resources to help you grow your team. Those reports are all capable of being pulled out of Labra, so really helps shrink the time that you're doing that.

Host: Jon

Kyle, Jesus indicated that he was spending two days, and I'm just going to assume, and I know this is a bad assumption, Jesus, these are eight-hour days. They're probably like 10-hour days, but we'll just go with eight on it. All right, 16 hours working on these once a week or something and trying to make sure that he is up to date. Here's my experience working with ACE and Salesforce or any CRM tool, and I had to do this where I had to go and say, Hey, sales guy, did you update the information in this field? What's this value? What's this one? You had to keep asking him because you didn't know the deal. You didn't know the deal size, the opportunity where, what stage it was at, and like, okay, great, thanks. It's in now. I went over to Ace, I input that data. Oh wait, I need this. Go back to this Salesforce. Now, Jesus, you said that it's manageable on a one to two-person team, but as your teens grow, your opportunities grow. There's a lot more information input. And here's the key thing that I want to ask, Kyle, what is the value of inputting or making sure that all this information is up to date in Ace?

Guest: Kyle

Yeah, and Jesus probably knows this answer just as well as I do. If you want to build a strong relationship with hyper scalers, AWS, and Azure, you better be co-selling with them. And the first step in the co-selling process is inputting those opportunities into an ace, and that then gives you the ability, because there are a lot of reps at a ws, you don't know who they are. So it gives you the information back on who owns that deal as an account manager, who the PDM is, and who the I SV success manager is, and then you can start, go co-selling with them. One of the workflows, and this is getting into the differentiators of ours, and I think we've kind of hit a few of 'em already, but one of the big differentiators of our system compared to our competitors is the workflows, as I mentioned, and we've created automatic workflows to where you can implement a first email introducing your sales team to the AWS sales team so that Jesus doesn't have, if he gets five deals in that day, he doesn't have five emails to go in and type in copy and paste all the contact information.

Guest: Kyle

It just flows out of the system. And those are the differentiators. And I think that's one of the big differentiators of us being a cloud consulting partner versus just another I S V that wanted to go out and build a market. I'm running two sides of the business on this side, on this side, I learned a lot of what the pains are because I'm doing it every day. So we went and built a platform to solve those problems. I always say to our prospects, customers that are asking us what differentiates you is I do what you're doing every day. And that's a big difference.

Host: Jon

Kyle, before we recap some more of the differentiator. Jesus, is it safe to assume that it's a give-and-take relationship with Hyperscale? And we'll take AWS as an example because we're talking about Ace, but it applies to all where you're inputting the data into their system, they're seeing it, and I like LABRA and the automated emails that go out because that saves me a ton of time. I send so many emails as it is, I can't tell them 20 times I've got these opportunities, but you're inputting this data, they see it, they see that you are working on some valid opportunities, and now they see you as a prospect, a player in the place as a rising star in the community that's engaged and saying all into us. How important is that?

Guest: Jesus

Yeah, no, I think it's extremely important. So to Kyle's comment earlier, I've worked on ways of building more automation on this myself. So I use things like text expander, I have all these emails. So the moment that things come on, I can go ahead and make that introduction between our sales team, and the account managers at A W s. I have ones that are made out to isms. I have ones that are made out to PSMs. I do the same thing when opportunities are launched so that way they know that things are moving along. So again, there's a lot that goes into building it, but at the end of the day, the results are small. It's mindshare that we're after, and it's helping these AWS reps understand that I guess, that you care as much about the opportunity as they would even before it's in front of them.

Guest: Jesus

So some of the stuff that Kyle's saying I think is very important, especially if you haven't had any experience with ACE or with AWS and you've never had to do this at another partner before. I have the blessing that I did this for five years somewhere else before I had to come to Prosper Ops and do it all myself. So I learned the tricks of the trade from other people that had been doing it before, tools like Labra existed. So got to learn from them, but, it's very important to have things like this that can help your success.

Guest: Kyle

Well, Jon

Host: Jon

And I, so everybody we're talking real quick. Go ahead, Kyle.

Guest: Kyle

I'd like to add some, and I think that's the beauty of CADy Shack too. Being able to have peers with whom you can go ask questions is beautiful. Whenever I heard that and the teams were putting together a caddy shack, I was like, oh, this is so needed because I go hire somebody brand new. They may not know all the insights and outs that I do or Jesus does, but by having this community of partner and alliance managers together and being able to just learn from each other, my new sales reps could come in and be able to learn the co-selling motion from people in this community have multiple years, it is a critical component of helping grow this market.

Host: Jon

So everybody we're talking with Kyle Heisner vp of Goes to Market at Labra, and Jesus Alvarado, who's an alliance director, our topic today is cloud marketplace, go to market, and co-sell acceleration with Labra by Ibex Labs. Kyle, what does onboarding look like for Labra?

Guest: Kyle

Yeah, Jon, this is my favorite part, and this is probably our number one differentiator other than all the workflows and just the simple ROI and everything out of it. But we have done such a fabulous job in working with the AWS, you know ACE team that we are no longer. It takes us a week to do onboarding and get you completely onboarded. We do all the testing, we do all that for you. You don't have to do any of it. All we need you to do is give us access to an AWS person that has access to the account to create a read-only role to ACE and an S3 bucket, and you're up and running within a week if you'll let us do the work for you. Some customers have more stringent security requirements, and it may take two or three weeks just because coordinating schedules with some of these bigger companies can be difficult to get time with all the sales ops teams or the Salesforce admin, but really a streamlined onboarding process.

Guest: Kyle

We send you a form, it assigns roles. There's a task, everything just flows through the process and it works well. I will tell you every time I do a customer success review or a, I'll go do a skip-level review to make sure that my customers are happy with our platform and happy with our process. Everyone raves about my customer success team, Gabriel and Mariana. They don't talk about the product as much as they do about how well they are. And I love that. And I will say that's the other big, one of our big differentiators is our people are very passionate. We want to help solve problems. Most of them have come from another differentiator, and that's our customers, them telling us what they want differently, and then we go create workflows because we're using CRM. CRMs have a lot of capabilities in them, but our people go develop that and innovate.

Host: Jon

Kyle, we talked about several differentiators for Labra, not only for OppSync and Flyout, and how you're innovating the communication not only between the CRM and ACE. When I want to get on onboard for this, I say, I have my AWS account, I gave you my roles, my access, and here's my CRM, what does the integration look like from the CRM perspective? And you can use Salesforce as an example or hub, so it doesn't matter. But what does it look like within the console? Am I going to notice a dramatic change in the fields, the plugin, or the integration that happens?

Guest: Kyle

No, you're not going to notice much of anything at all. It's a managed Salesforce package or a managed HubSpot package that we offer today, and it's pretty simple to do. And I think we're going to do a demo here for you in a little bit, and I can show you that and get you set up. So,

Host: Jon

All right. So Jesus, let me ask you this question as doing some of the data between ACE and Salesforce, what is your experience with Labra?

Guest: Jesus

I've had a few conversations with Kyle and then what I've heard from the community is it's one of the tools Kyle is saying that people talk about giving you the ability to take some of this time off your schedule, automate a lot of the workloads. So positive reviews that I've gotten, I think is the best way to put it. I've never heard anything negative. I think it's as an alliance person with every software that's out there, you tend to use maybe 30, 40%. And I'd love to find out from Kyle what their customers end up getting success from. But for most of the people that I talk to, it's consuming 30-40 % of the software to make their lives easier. And then the other 60% is kind of just lying dormant. So I'd love to understand more of what that customer experiences with Labra, what you guys tend to see, Kyle on your end. I think that would be hugely beneficial to the Caddy Shack because again, we don't know what we don't know. So if there's cool stuff out there that we could use from Labra, I'd love to hear about it as well.

Host: Jon

Kyle. I

Guest: Kyle

Think one of the things that we always experience is usually whenever we work with customers for the first time on the library, it's always the alliance team and the sales ops team because they've taken on the work of doing that. They don't want to, the sales team is busy. You don't want to take up their sales cycles doing a bunch of work. So you guys spend, like you said, two days updating things, doing all that. What I've experienced is we see about a 117% increase in the opportunity submitted to Ace because of what we tried to get our customers to do, and not everybody does this still, but distribute it down to the sales team a little bit more, do a sales training, get them to use the tool themselves in submitting those opportunities to ace. The other workflow that we've created with two of our part two of our customer's recommendations was once it gets to a certain stage in their sales cycle, they want it to automatically submit to ACE.

Guest: Kyle

So that automation, those things like that in working increase the number of I ace opportunities are there and automatically being able to close. So we do see about a 117% increase on average over our customers of several opportunities submitted just because we make it a lot easier. It's not all on a team of two or a team of three Alliance people doing all that work, which is just really laborsome. So that's one of the key statistics we like to use, and that came directly from the ACE team. They came back to us and said, did you realize your customers are seeing a 117% increase since they started using your platform? Wow, that's huge. Wow.

Host: Jon

That's nice. Kyle, before we get to the demo, I want to talk to you a little bit about the integration between Labra and ACE and the plugin. I know one of my concerns when I was there is I don't want all the information transferred over to Ace. Is there a way to limit what or what records or opportunities are transferred over or require certain fields?

Guest: Kyle

Absolutely. Yeah. So ACE doesn't require, ACE has a certain number of fields that they do require, but five key fields are instrumental in your co-selling process, deal amount, description, and next steps. Those are the critical ones, and those are the ones that I tell everybody that you want to set up the do Bidirectionality from. Okay. But if I personally, there are a lot of partners out there that are multi, multi, multi, not just ace, they're Microsoft Partner Center also, which fields do I want? It's completely up to working with my operations, my customer success team, and your Salesforce team on building fields and mapping the right ones, and only sharing the ones that you want. It is completely customizable to be able to do that.

Host: Jon

So, Kyle, we're going to jump into the demo in one second, but Jesus, did you know, now here's one that I had a conversation with one of Labra’s customers, NerdRabbit, where they were spending probably about 16 to 20 hours a week using an Excel spreadsheet to input data from their sales force into a, and now they minimize it down to about 20 minutes a week in just validating the data, just checking to make sure everything's good and then they're done.

Guest: Jesus

Yeah, that makes complete sense because I have an Excel sheet that lives to make sure that,

Host: Jon

Would you like to save some time

Guest: Jesus

To make sure that nothing falls in the cracks like you're saying, Jon? So that's amazing.

Guest: Kyle

And that podcast is out there on Jon's site too, so go check it out. It's great.

Host: Jon

It's also on a w AWS APN TV. Oh,

Guest: Kyle

That's right.

Host: Jon

That was one of the first ones on AWS APN tv. It was a great conversation talking about the benefits and utilizing Ops sync with Labra within the integration portion. Kyle, how about we get to that demo?

Guest: Kyle

Yeah, so Jon, I go down here to the share screen, I take it, and I'll just go ahead and share my screen.

Host: Jon

Yep, let's do it.

Guest: Kyle

There we go. All right, so everybody, like I said, yo, it's not about the lab, so you're not going to see, we're not going to make you go to a labor website or anything like that. You are working in your C R M. So as you see if this looks just like a normal C R M, this is Salesforce, but I always demoed the Salesforce one because, but we do support HubSpot too. If you have a HubSpot and you want to see a demo, just give me a call. We'll set up a demo. But as you see, we've added the Salesforce package and the Labra Salesforce package, and across the top, you're going to see your normal opportunities. You're going to see your dashboard, your reports, and all of this, but you're going to see a few other things that I've added. If you want, you can just go straight to the lab and your normal dashboards will be up here.

Guest: Kyle

But I've added these because I want to be able to do things easily. So I've added the tabs by just simply going up here and modifying what tabs are up here. But as you can see, there are Labra referrals. LABRA offers Labra, new revenue tracking. So now I can see all my deals and how many deals I've processed and how much revenue I've brought in from those deals all in my CRM. I have not logged into ACE or Marketplace in over five months now to do anything except for the only thing I still have to go to ACE for to submit funding requests. That's it. I

Host: Jon

Bet they're going to prompt you to change your password the next time you log in.

Guest: Kyle

Yeah, probably because I just haven't used it. But, you know, look at your opportunities and this is how simple it is. Just to go through this real quick, if I pick an opportunity here and I want to create a new referral and what we call this E lab referral, you can name that tab anything while you're going through the onboarding process. We call it a lab referral because if you're a multi-cloud partner, Azure, GCP, and anything, you would click on this same button. If you call it AWS ace, it's going to be AWS-specific, right? So we kind of just called it a new lab referral, but that is customizable. So basically you can go in this it, it's brought up the ACE fields, you can see what they are. And most of these after the integration is done, most of these are already filled in.

Guest: Kyle

I don't do this in my demo because I like to show everybody, this is a dummy-proof system. You can't screw this up. It tells you, Kyle, you tried submitting it to Ace and you don't have the delivery model, the partner center user, the primary need from AWS, and the use case done. So it makes you do that stuff. So I have to go in and put that stuff in. Architecture validation use case is big data, whatever they are. And again, I hit, oh, still didn't put in, I didn't do the delivery model, so I've got to do SAS pass. The other thing that I want to be really, that is important is the number one reason why ACE is difficult to use for a lot of people is they don't do a good description. If you don't hit what the value is and why you're putting it in and the next steps and everything in your description field, it's going to get rejected by AWS or they're going to ask for more information. We've seen about 93% of our customers that use our platform decrease the number of, I'm sorry, they decrease the number of rejections and request for more information. Because we've automated the description field. We put it into where it pulls from a record that we give you three fields to fill in and you have to fill in that record. And then it pulls from those three fields into this description and it's helped cut down on the number of failures. Okay,

Host: Jon

Kyle, I'm going to jump right in there because I agree with you that the description field is very key because the moment that you get a rejection, you have just delayed the process of somebody reviewing it. If they've already looked at it once and they have to go back and look at it another time or it's automated, it's going to take a while for them to get back to it. And that's back and forth. If you can get a first pass on that, the value there of it being accepted is key.

Guest: Kyle

Well, and the other part of that is, now you have your sales rep and you get a notification, you got to go ask for more information. So we're just trying to help by creating three extra fields in your C R M asking for, what did you already do on this account? Because AWS, is the reason they don't like it, they don't want you using it as a prospecting tool to find out who the account managers are, right? To be able to go try to say, Hey, bring me into this account. They want you to have a real deal before they do it before they accept it. So they ask those questions on purpose. So it has helped with that. But now you see in that the deals are in progress, which means that it's in progress and sent to Ace. By the time now that we've started talking to you, you're going to see that it's going to go from in progress to success.

Guest: Kyle

That means it is an ace. Now, if I went and looked in ace, that demo referral from ACE 0 0 0 1 is in there and it is now bi-directionally synced so that whenever AW WS accepts it, this will turn green in your CRM showing that it's there and you can start co-selling and it will pull all of the information into the lab referral portion of your CRM for all the account team information, everything that you want to be able to start co-selling into that account. So if I go into my lab referrals, now I can see the lab referrals and that's partner initiated right there. So how do I track incoming ao? So if I look at my incoming, I basically can go to AWS referrals incoming. I can see, oh, these have already been accepted. I don't have to go to ACE anymore.

Guest: Kyle

I get that email from AWS. I look in my CRM and boom, I'm done. Okay, so I literally can go in and I can accept this, I can accept this one. Now it's sending via API back to AWS. Hey, we've accepted it. Please send us that. All in all important information that you've hidden from us before the acceptance. The other workflow we have created at Labra is for some of our customers, they don't want to have to accept them. They just think it's a waste of time because they don't give you enough information to know whether you want to work on it or not. So why not just auto-accept? So we've created a workflow that creates an auto-accept for all incoming lab AWS-initiated opportunities. They stay in the lab referral though, because the key to that is, and this is where the sales operations team or the alliance team still has control of all those incoming.

Guest: Kyle

As an alliance manager or sales op, you don't know until you get back the p I data, who the account is, where the account is, and what state it's in. So how does your C R M know where to assign it, right, or what rep to assign it to? So it's coming in here and then once it's accepted, you can then turn it into an opportunity. So you can either create a new opportunity or you can assign it to an existing opportunity. If you know that this deal is already being worked on by a rep, just assign it to an existing opportunity and the referrals tagged to that opportunity. If it's a brand new deal, you go in, create a new opportunity, and then it will be in your opportunities tab under the owner of that territory or the owner of that account.

Guest: Kyle

And that's the beauty of the workflow that we've created is that, but that's ops sync. And then like I said, as I talked about before, the dashboards, all the dashboards are there. You're going to be able to see AW, w s revenue, and all of this in the dashboards, but let's talk about referral and this is flyout. Okay? So if I go in back into that opportunity and I want to, I've now got to the point that I want to create a marketplace private offer. I can do it straight from my C R m, I can go in and I can go new Labra offer. I can go to AWS or Azure, I can select the product that I want. I'm going to do our subscription on this one. I'm going to go in and I'm going to fill in the account ID for the customer. We know they're 12 digits long, Labra or up.

Guest: Kyle

I set the expiration date of the offer to two weeks. I'm going to give them two weeks to accept. We know that everybody takes a while to accept opportunities. The service expiration date I'm going to set for next year is in May, and I'm going to enable $0 pricing because I've got $0 if I go in and I want to change the price because that's what an MPPO is, right? It's a private offer. You're changing your standard offer price. So if I put it in at $12,000, I go in here now and I pick, guess what? This is the beautiful thing. You want to send it to somebody instead of having to sit there and refresh the screen waiting for the offer URL and then having to copy the offer URL and then type an email up and send it. You don't have to do that anymore.

Guest: Kyle

It's all done in your CRM. I want to send it to these two people. They are the decision-makers, they are the signers, and I'm going to send it to them. I type, my message here, here's your private offer, and I am going to use the standard terms in AWS. Then, if I want to attach a custom contract or anything like that, a DPA or any other thing that you want to attach, we've also in our system allowed for metadata and global metadata. So your sales ops team may want to collect some specific data to be able to do some reporting. They can create global data that will attach to every deal that you create, or if you as a salesperson want to add some custom metadata, where is this state? I want to start tracking the states that I sell to most, or something like that.

Guest: Kyle

You can. And then the stakeholders, I want to be copied on my stuff. So I always put myself down as a stakeholder. That way I'm copied on the email that goes to the customer so I can see what it looks like when they receive it. And we also know that sometimes AWS even has this issue. Whenever they send out a private offer, that email sometimes gets blocked. So I like to sometimes send that email that I got and say, Hey, Mr. CUSTOMER, you should have just got this email from our system giving you the private offer. And you know, can do that very easily. But now I hit save and literally my offer has been created and now on the back end we have implemented a new AWS API and that API call is happening and within five or six minutes, you're going to see it go from in queue to send.

Guest: Kyle

So that email message and that offer link is going to be sent to your part, to your companies. If you want to add somebody, you can add a recipient and have it resent. You want to update the expiration date, no more logging back in. You see that an expiration, we all know how that happens. But literally, and oh, and your offer link is going to be in here as your AWS offer ID is going to come in your offer link, your offer. URL's going to be here so that if you do have another person that you want to send it to, you can copy and paste it as much as you want. But as I said, now your account name, your offer id, your offer R URL, and your AWS account ID are all in your C R m. So now, instead of having to go to those crazy reports that AWS has and put out, those new dashboards are great that they've done, but it's still not easy.

Guest: Kyle

Your rev rep team can Rev immediately from this system. So really helps out a lot. But that's the gist of the platform and how simple it is. So ACE integration, marketplace integration, and by the way, we just did two marketplace listings for a company last week and we started them on Wednesday, and they are up already on the marketplace. So we're able to get marketplace listings up in almost a week now. So the other beauty of what we do, Jon, the other differentiator is there's a lot of ISVs out there that are struggling new to the market. They know they want to get to market, but they have to do them, there are a lot of things that have to happen before you get to the marketplace. You have to do a wafer, you have to do an ftr. Because we're a cloud consulting practice too, we can do those.

Host: Jon

Kyle, this is amazing because I like where you said you work, where you work, and being that I was a former alliance director, the time and effort that it took for me to input in both systems, I'm not sure why anybody, this is like a no-brainer for me using Ops Sync to sync between those. I'm not sure why anybody would not try it or utilize it. I see a lot of time-saving for it. I know how long being a former Amazonian, how long it takes to get things listed on the marketplace. Jesus. Before we get to, obviously Kyle, I want to talk about funding and everything and wrap some things up. But Jesus, my question for you is your experience with companies and going to the marketplace and utilizing ace, do you see this as a value add and time-saving effort?

Guest: Jesus

Absolutely. No. Yeah, hands down, right? I think if you can partner with Labra to help you get your marketplace listing up, showing so that people can use and start to take advantage of huge advantage, it's just great exposure. It's a great Mindshare. It's an extra way to generate revenue that you didn't have before. So absolutely

Host: Jon

Kyle, what type of funding is available for this? Can I use MDF credits for it? Can I apply? I mean, help me understand what is the value that I can get this up and running quickly and maybe some cost savings.

Guest: Kyle

Yeah, so mdf, we've had some customers use mdf. You ought to be creative as we know how MDF fund requests go. But the great thing is if you come to me now, I've got about 50 or 60 credits left to offset the cost of the first year of use of Labra ops sync. AWS saw, saw those numbers that I talked to you about 117% increase in the number of opportunities submitted, the other things. So they gave us some funding credits to use to get people to adopt our platform because it helps their business. So they gave me a bunch of credits. I have a lot of those left. So come fir, they're first come, first serve, and I don't know if they'll give me more. I hope they do. If they do, we'll, we'll help. But you literally can get on ops sync for free for the first year and then the next year is going to be a negotiated price. But our standard pricing is $16,500, $16,000 total for the second year, and that's the list price.

Host: Jon

All right, as we wrap things up, talking with Kyle and Jesus Alvarado about cloud marketplace, go-to-market, and co-sell acceleration with Labra by Ibexlabs. Kyle, thank you so much for your time today.

Guest: Kyle

Thank you, Jon. We appreciate everything you do and Jesus, thank you. And thank you very much for coming, joining us today.

Host: Jon

Yep. Jesus, thank you so much for joining us an always

Guest: Jesus

A blast, Jon, so thank you for having me on.

Host: Jon

All right, everybody, thank you so much. My name's Jon Myer, and you've been watching a Jon Myer podcast. Don't forget to hit that like subscribe, end, notify, because guess what? We're out of here.