WorkSpan Powers 6.5x YoY TCV Growth in Co-Sell Collaboration with AWS

This leader’s platform helps thousands of customers across the globe seamlessly integrate applications, data, and processes to enhance operational connectivity and efficiency across diverse systems.

With a goal to grow into a multi-billion-dollar company, the organization knew fully leveraging its rich ecosystem of partners - specifically, AWS - was imperative. But hurdles stood between the team and its ability to scale operations. 

Their Head of Global Alliances for AWS, responsible for overseeing the co-sell motion and shepherding AWS Marketplace efforts, took on the challenge of removing hurdles and building a successful flywheel effect which utilizes accumulative momentum: action by action, the turning of the flywheel drives sustained and powerful results.

The alliance lead identified key obstacles stalling their flywheel.

Challenges Faced

The organization has hundreds of sales reps who must be enabled to successfully share, process, and close joint opportunities with AWS representatives. This means executing on several fronts with automation and efficiency.

However, current operational processes were manual and inefficient, stealing away time available for more strategic efforts and partnership growth.

Manual and Time-Consuming Operational Processes

Proving partnership results and growth through documentation is key to a successful relationship with AWS. This documentation is captured in AWS’ ACE partner portal, the source of truth between AWS and its partners. As our customer’s alliance lead stated, “All roads lead to ACE every single time."

But the previous process of populating ACE with co-sell opportunities was manual and time-consuming, frequently getting deprioritized on a seller’s task list. Out of necessity, the alliance lead most often performed the work, copying and pasting from Salesforce, aligning disparate fields between Salesforce and ACE, and following up.

“Your alliance lead for AWS globally should not be spending time adding opportunities into a partner portal and waiting for an email. This makes scaling challenging and underscores the need for a solution to automate this process."_{Head of Global Alliances for AWS, WorkSpan customer}

Inefficient and Inaccurate Data to Sellers

Prompt and accurate data is lifeblood to a sales rep. Without it, momentum is stalled, strategic planning is impossible, and it’s difficult to have successful conversations with AWS counterparts.

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The manual effort of opportunity transfer between Salesforce and the ACE portal was prone to human error and far from realtime. This distorted the true progress of deal stages and negatively impacted planning. Just as important, the lack of timeliness meant the organization missed key opportunities where AWS support could have been applied.

“The challenge of ensuring accurate data reporting for our sales teams extended beyond the time it consumed. The real impact was felt in the way these errors hindered our strategic sales planning and decision-making processes.”_{Head of Global Alliances for AWS, WorkSpan customer}

Inability to Fully Leverage the AWS Partner Ecosystem

The AWS ecosystem is complex, including many stakeholders and processes. The organization was spending significant time on manual efforts instead of engaging with this ecosystem to build relationships and strategize in real time. 

The organization missed out on unlocking benefits such as incentives, greater participation in AWS events, and AWS Competency achievement.

“This complexity not only made it difficult to synchronize our efforts with AWS but also significantly slowed down our ability to move our partnership forward.”_{Head of Global Alliances for AWS, WorkSpan customer}

How WorkSpan Helped Propel the Flywheel

The organization addressed these challenges with WorkSpan's co-sell management solution. Workspan automated the process of entering opportunities into AWS ACE, improved data accuracy and availability, and facilitated a more robust connection between the sales team and AWS representatives.

WorkSpan helped the organization propel the flywheel with AWS, growing opportunities and revenue and unlocking additional partnership benefits.

Opportunity Growth Through Improved Operational Efficiency

The WorkSpan solution automated and streamlined previous manual processes, leading to a dramatic transformation in how the organization managed its opportunities and co-sell efforts.

The sales team now operates seamlessly from within Salesforce, reducing the context switching between applications. What was once a 20-minute effort to copy and paste data and align data fields for a single opportunity now takes 30 seconds.

As a result, the team experienced a substantial increase in the volume of opportunities managed through ACE, surging 220% over two years. 

“The team managing the co-sell process with AWS is extremely satisfied with WorkSpan. It has enabled them to quickly connect with AWS representatives and submit opportunities …  This process, which can be as fast as 30 seconds, significantly streamlines their workflow, illustrating the time-saving benefits of WorkSpan.”_{Head of Global Alliances for AWS, WorkSpan customer}

Revenue Growth Catalyzed by Enhanced Efficiency and Collaboration

One of the most significant impacts of WorkSpan adoption has been the substantial increase in revenue, directly attributable to the heightened efficiency and improved collaboration facilitated by the platform.

The data reflects the team’s success in meeting their growth goals: Total Contract Value (TCV) in the AWS Marketplace grew by 546% from 2020/2021 to 2023.

“Initially, I was hesitant about meeting large TCV targets, but with WorkSpan automating the ACE connection from Salesforce and our restructured team effectively scaling the process, my confidence grew. Thanks to these tools and organizational changes, I'm proud of our progress.”_{Head of Global Alliances for AWS, WorkSpan customer}

More Partnership Benefits From Enhanced Sales Enablement

WorkSpan solutions equipped the sales teams with the necessary resources to streamline and accelerate sales processes. By reducing the time required to progress through sales stages, the sales team could focus on strategic activities with AWS. This is the ultimate example of the flywheel in action: more time for seller-to-seller communication and planning means more momentum and better results.

The statistics speak volumes about this impact: approximately 20% of the organization’s deals witnessed an accelerated closure timeline attributable to the collaboration with AWS. 

This acceleration was not just a byproduct of streamlined processes but also a result of support from AWS. AWS provided buyer and seller incentives to fund deals and shared strategic guidance, which sped progress through the sales pipeline.

“When sales teams are properly enabled with the right processes in place, …  the sales workflow becomes more streamlined. This efficiency enables faster movement through the sales pipeline and accelerates deal closures.”_{Head of Global Alliances for AWS, WorkSpan customer}

WorkSpan has helped this organization achieve a transformative change in their AWS partnership by driving efficiency, increasing revenue, and unlocking more partnership benefits. The team has further optimized collaboration with AWS by adopting WorkSpan’s solution to manage Marketplace Private Offers. This integration ensures smoother negotiations, quicker deal closures, and stronger alignment with AWS’ framework. The team can now create, collaborate, roll out, and negotiate through Private Offers with customers - all from inside Salesforce.

The organization sees the WorkSpan solution as a foundational piece of the strategy with AWS, and a significant contributor to the flywheel momentum of the partnership. Automating the co-sell motion and AWS Marketplace efforts drove more opportunities, increased revenue, enabled more time to focus on strategic partnerships, and led to additional incentives and benefits.

The alliance lead has a favorite response when faced with a challenging goal:  "I've seen the future and we win." The WorkSpan team is proud to support our customer in this win.