Automate and accelerate your sales motion with AWS Marketplace

Ok, let's get started. Welcome folks. How's re:Invent going for everyone? Are you having fun? Yes. Do you have sore feet like me from walking? Yes. Right. Ok. Are you ready to learn how you can accelerate your sales with AWS Marketplace? Give me a "y" if you are.

Good, you're in the right room then. You at least got that.

So I'm Asha Tokar. I'm a Senior Product Manager with AWS Marketplace and with me here is my co-host.

Hey, everybody. I'm Michael Herger. I'm a Principal Product Manager for the AWS Partner CRM Connector. Good to be with you.

In today's agenda, we'll cover:

• A general overview of AWS Marketplace
• We'll talk about seller challenges as well as seller APIs
• We'll talk about how the APIs will help with those seller challenges
• I'll come back on stage and talk about what we've done with the AWS Partner CRM Connector
• We'll do a call to action
• And then afterwards we be up here to answer questions that you have

Here you go, Asha. Thank you, Michael.

So let's start off with what is AWS Marketplace. How many of you here have heard of AWS Marketplace or used AWS Marketplace? Show of hands, please. Ok, I see. We have quite a few.

For those of you who are not aware, AWS Marketplace, like the name suggests, it's a two sided marketplace for AWS software services and data. We have over 4000 sellers who have 15,000 software listings and we have over 300,000 customers who have 2.5 million active subscriptions on AWS Marketplace. Pretty impressive numbers, right.

So how many of you here sell with AWS Marketplace? Do you already sell or you're considering selling? Ok, I do see some show of hands.

Now, this is something we've heard from our partners who sell on AWS Marketplace or any cloud marketplace for that matter. They've shared these pain points with us and I hope some of these resonate with you or you might be like, "yeah, that's exactly my story."

So what exactly are these challenges? So this is me trying to tell you what your challenges are.

So let's say you are in this situation where you're trying to close this deal with the buyer through a private offer. So you start off by entering your private offer in your internal CRM system, let's say Salesforce CRM, you know, and you enter all of the details of your private offer and at some point in the process, you need to take and copy over all of those details on to the AWS Marketplace Management Portal or the Seller Portal.

And then you submit it on Marketplace, the buyer accepts it on Marketplace. And there again, you're copying all of the details, like the agreement details, how much did the seller purchase, when does the agreement end? You're copying it all over back to your internal systems.

So you're constantly doing a lot of back and forth data copying between the different applications. So what our partners have told us is this creates a very disjoint experience between the different systems and we call it like the "swivel chair" motion. You know, you're constantly like swiveling between the different applications.

And also what many of us, many of you, have told us is because of this, you've had to create a specialized sales team or you have to go train four or five people in your organization just to do this for you, you know, to copy all of the data over from one place to another, make sure it is entered accurately, verify it and so on.

And guess what? All of this causes operational inefficiencies. It adds time, it adds money. You should just be selling. You shouldn't have to worry about all of this, right?

So we get the operational inefficiencies and the challenges that you face.

And finally, I think most of you would have run into the situation. It's year end or it's quarter end and you get a call from that buyer, you know, they say, "Hey, I have $2 million sitting here for EDP draw down. If you give me that private offer by midnight tonight, I can close the deal with you right away." And you have like just an hour or two and you're scrambling to get a private offer out and your system and processes simply cannot keep up with you.

And you're like, "Wish I had a way in which I could churn 10 or 20 or 100 private offers with just the click of a button." And you're not just not able to do that.

So these are some of the challenges that we've heard from our partners, especially the partners who sell on AWS Marketplace.

So what did we do? We took these problems back to the drawing board and we have a solution for you. And that's what I'm here to talk about.

So we are here to talk about the AWS Marketplace APIs. But first, what exactly are these APIs?

So if you're a seller, you know that you've been publishing public listings, you create a public listing on Marketplace, you create private offers for your customers because that's a big part of your motion. You also work with resellers to create resale authorizations and they in turn resell through Marketplace through channel partner private offers.

And today you do all of this through the AWS Marketplace Management Portal which we call the Seller Portal.

Your buyers come to our website, they search for a product, then they buy the product, they manage the product again, all on our website.

But what you haven't seen is the APIs that are working in the background that power these experiences.

So for example, when you go to the API portal and when you say create a private offer, there's actually an API in the back that powers this motion. When a buyer comes to our website and says, "subscribe", there's an API that powers this motion.

And at Andy Jassy's keynote yesterday, he just announced the APIs for sellers and these APIs in particular are the Catalog API and the Agreements API.

So what does it mean to have these APIs publicly available? The APIs that were exclusively powering our internal applications such as the Seller Portal are now generally made available to all of you.

Isn't that huge? I mean that means you can build your own application using these APIs. You can build whatever suits your business need and what solves your business challenge using these APIs.

And I'll tell you very briefly what these APIs do.

So Catalog API, as the name suggests, helps you manage your catalog. So you can create a public listing. You can create a private offer or if you are an ISV, you can create a resale authorization all using the API.

Now, you would not just create, you can manage, meaning you can go back and update your listings. You can view all your listings, you can view all your private offers using the APIs.

Now, if you're a channel partner, you can view all of the resale authorizations you've received from your ISV. And you can create channel partner private offers using these APIs. That's what you can do with Catalog APIs.

With Agreements API, you can read all of the agreements that exist between you and a buyer. So let's say your buyer subscribes to your product or either through a public listing or a private offer, an agreement is created in the background. So these APIs allow you to read all of those details.

So you might say, "Ok, all of this is great. But how exactly does it solve all of my problems that we spoke about?"

So let's take a look at that.

The first big advantage that you have is you can take these APIs and you can integrate them with your current application or your current ecosystem, any of the applications that you have.

So going back to my previous example, let's say you're using Salesforce and you're creating that private offer in Salesforce. And if you integrate our APIs with Salesforce, anything that you do in your internal Salesforce is automatically reconciled with our Marketplace application without you having to do the data duplication.

So which means in turn, you become more efficient. You know, you don't need a team that is just copying the data and you have to verify the accuracy because our APIs automatically take all of it and enter it for you.

And when a buyer accepts an offer on AWS Marketplace, you see that status back in your Salesforce CRM. So it makes it very efficient for you. Your process gets more efficient.

The second advantage of using these APIs is you can enable automation, which in turn helps you scale. So you can automate transactions that are high volume, business critical or complicated. And when you use the APIs, you take out the element of having to do it manually and having to verify for accuracy because the APIs do it for you.

So let's say for example, you have 50 listings on Marketplace and you wanted to go change the license agreement for all of those, we call those "EULAs", you could just go do all of those with the click of a button using these APIs from your own application, you know, so you don't have to have someone go do it 50 times for your 50 listings.

And finally, the APIs give you better governance and control. And what do I mean by that? You can bring all of the Marketplace data into your internal dashboards and applications using the APIs.

So for example, you can build an internal dashboard that shows you all the current active subscriptions that you have with various buyers. You can even build an automation to say, "Hey show me agreements that are expiring in the coming 30, 60 or 90 days." And you can start sending automated renewal emails to your buyers well ahead of time.

So the APIs help you accomplish that and stay on top of your data, you know, so you don't have to log into Marketplace to see the data. I mean, this is your data. So if you're making it available to where you are, so the summary is the API - with the APIs, we are coming to you where you are rather than you having to come to Marketplace.

And we think that would be a huge benefit or at least that's the potential that you can tap into to make your processes simpler and faster.

So you don't have to do anything additional. When you're selling to sell on Marketplace, you can just keep doing what you do today. And we will automatically reconcile all of the transactions with Marketplace and give you all the benefits of Marketplace.

But the power of an API is truly harnessed by the kind of applications you build on it. You know, I could talk about APIs all day long, but then end of the day, it's like adjacent request and response.

So partners who build applications on top of this, they are the ones who unlock the potential of APIs.

Our APIs have been in beta since March of this year and we've had some partners who built pretty compelling applications using our APIs. I have them up here on the screen and I see some of them are here in the room with us.

And this is what our beta participants had to say. Close to 80% of them were very satisfied with the APIs. And they felt they could achieve at least 60% automation of their processes using our APIs.

If you think of it, 60% automation is a pretty huge number for anyone who's looking to achieve the extra level of efficiency. But hey, you don't have to take my word for it. Seeing is believing, right? So let me show you some examples of what some partners built and how they solved some business challenges using these APIs.

So first we have Red Hat. Red Hat is a partner that has several Amazon Machine Images, we call them AMIs, and SaaS products on Marketplace. So Red Hat integrated with our APIs to make their private offer management more efficient.

So how exactly do they do private offers? And I think this might be very similar to how some of you do private offers in your organization.

To start off with, their sales team logs into an application which is a deal dashboard. It shows them the status of all the deals that are currently in flight - so basically a deal that has just started, is in progress or closed. It shows them all the deals' real-time deal status.

Then when a buyer reaches out to Red Hat, Red Hat responds to them with a quote. So a buyer usually reaches out saying, "Hey, give me a quote for this product," and the sales rep responds with a quote. They have a quoting tool that they've built to respond to customer queries.

Now, if the buyer is happy with the quote, it gets converted into a private offer. The private offer goes through its own review and approval process within Red Hat because many times these are multi-million dollar deals. So they go through a review and approval process and once it's approved, it gets submitted to the buyer.

The buyer goes to AWS Marketplace, accepts the private offer, and the status of the deal gets reflected on the deal dashboard.

So by participating in our beta program, what Red Hat did is they were able to automate most of this private offer management cycle by using our APIs. And what they said is now they are able to create private offers in under a minute. And also thanks to this and the quoting tool, they are able to get back to their buyers more quickly and have more satisfied customers.

So let's see what their application looks like. This is the deal dashboard that I was referring to. It shows the status of all their deals and whether it is in draft, is it approved, and is it closed? And the deal status is coming directly from Marketplace. For example, when a seller accepts a private offer on Marketplace, that's when the deal status gets reflected as closed here.

This is the code builder that I mentioned. So how they use the code builder is they refer to the public listing prices and they import it into this code builder tool using our APIs. So for example, let's say they have a product, public product listed for $100 using our APIs. They bring that data into their internal tool and they provide a percentage discount. You know, they say, "Hey, I'll give you a 50% discount or 25% discount." And the sales team is able to generate a quote within a few seconds because all they are doing is they are taking the data from the public listing using the APIs and applying a percentage discount to generate a quote instantaneously and send it off to the buyer.

And finally, here's a look at how they create private offers. As you can see, they've entered all of the information and this is their internal application. It goes through a review and approval process and once it gets submitted, the data is reconciled with Marketplace and the offer ID from AWS Marketplace gets populated back in that HyperScalar ID field in Red Hat's system. So the data is reconciled automatically in the background using these APIs and they were able to build this application in the 8 months they were with us for the beta program.

The next example I have for you is from our partner Deloitte. Now, Deloitte's use case is a little different. They are a global systems integrator and they have different entities within Deloitte - what that means is they have a Deloitte US, they have a Deloitte UK, they have a Deloitte Emir and so on.

And in the past, what they were doing is when they had to create a product listing, they had to do it 3 or 4 times for the different entities with the various AWS accounts because each of these entities were mapped to different accounts.

So pretty much they were taking the same process and duplicating it 3 or 4 times for the different regions and different entities.

Now using our APIs, they built the centralized hub and anyone in Deloitte goes to this hub to create listings, create private offers and create channel partner private offers. And under the hood, it trickles down to all of the different accounts in the different regions.

So instead of having to do the same thing 4 times with 4 accounts, they do the process just once and it is automatically reflected across all the entities and all the accounts. And thanks to this, they've been able to achieve up to 50% operational efficiencies.

And again, they built this during our beta program which started in March.

And here's a look at how they build their offers and how they've mapped all of the accounts. So basically, once you do the process, once it automatically trickles down to the various accounts for the different entities,

The last example I have for you from a partner is from Cognos. Now, this use case is a little unique because Cognos is a partner that has over 600 listings on Marketplace. So they have over 600 AMI products and they have about 90 container products listed on Marketplace.

So anytime they had to update their inventory, it was a big challenge and it was taking them anywhere from 90 to 120 days to go and update their entire catalog of close to 700 products.

They integrated with Catalog API and now they are able to update their inventory in 18 to 24 minutes. So it's a huge time saving. If you think of it, they've gone from 90 to 120 days to 18 to 24 minutes. So that's the power of these APIs.

And now I invite Michael here to talk about an application that he and his team built using these APIs and how you might be able to benefit from those.

Excellent. Thank you, Asha. Very exciting. Very exciting.

So yesterday during RBA's keynote address, she announced the launch of the AWS Partner CRM Connector in the Salesforce AppExchange with Marketplace.

Just some history - the AWS Partner CRM Connector was launched in the Salesforce AppExchange in January of 2023 as the APIs were being built. We were building this particular module, AWS Marketplace module, into the connector and that's what we just launched yesterday.

The ACE feature is an enhanced feature because it supports the new Co-Sell data model that was introduced on November 15th. However, today we're not going to focus on the enhanced data model and the ACE feature. Instead we'll focus on the AWS Marketplace feature.

Now, the AWS Marketplace feature to the AWS Partner CRM Connector is powered under the hood by those same APIs that Asha just discussed - the AWS Partner CRM Connector AWS Marketplace feature supports both ISVs and channel partners.

So for an independent software vendor, it's about creating resell authorizations as well as private offers. For the channel partners, they can create channel partner private offers from shared resale authorizations.

So partners told us that they had these small specialized sales teams that have to navigate between the Seller Portal and their Salesforce CRM. And that because of this, it was very taxing.

So what you'll get as a benefit with the Connector is you'll have the ability to permission your users with permission sets in Salesforce. So if you're an independent software vendor, you can give your users a certain view. And if you're a channel partner, same thing, you can give your users a certain view and permission your users all from in the Salesforce CRM.

Another benefit is we had partners ask us "Well, is there any way we can bring back that offer URL into the CRM so that we can automate an email to the buyer?" Typically, what we've heard from sellers is that they take this offer URL, put it in an email and send it to a buyer.

Well, with the data now being in your Salesforce CRM, you can automate next step actions. So that's a huge benefit.

The final benefit is now that the data is all back in your CRM, you now can get customizable insights with that data. So for example, you could have reports, dashboards as well as list views.

So what we're going to do today in this slide demonstration is we're going to show screenshots and we're going to walk through in the AWS Partner CRM Connector and Salesforce a private offer creation process and a channel partner private offer.

Let's get started. So with Salesforce, with the AWS Partner CRM installed, you select AWS Partner CRM Connector. Now, if you look on the top, you'll see there's an AWS Account tab. To the right of that, there's a Marketplace Product tab, there's a Home tab, and then a Private Offers and so on and so forth.

With AWS accounts, we power multiple seller accounts selling within the same Connector application. So you may be a company that has a selling unit in Europe and you may have a selling unit in North America and they may have two different AWS account IDs and they may list the products separately, those two AWS accounts. You can put both of those accounts in this Connector in Salesforce and have a private offer creation process all within this one application.

This Products tab - during guided setup, there's an ingestion of all of your products into the Salesforce application. And I didn't mention - the Salesforce Connector here supports SaaS, AMI and container products. And there was a gentleman in the crowd that said that he sells an AMI product. So it's SaaS, AMI and container fully supported by the AWS Partner CRM Connector.

But we're going to start now in the Private Offer tab where we select New for new private offer. And what you'll notice here on the Create an Offer page is you'll notice sections.

The first section is the Product and Buyer section. Below that is Offer Details, Offer Dimensions, End User License Agreement, Renewals. And then finally, the Expiration Information section.

So under the Product and Buyer section, you simply enter ISV products and buyer accounts. In this case, we've entered that information and we move along.

In this case, you're selling a SaaS product and you want to enable your buyers to pay for the product in installments. So you select the Flexible Payment Schedule indicator, you then move along to the Offer Details section where you will give the offer a name as well as an offer description.

And in this case for the offer description, we put "My first AWS Marketplace private offer, the audience is creating the offer." So and then we move on to Service Length. For Service Length, we can opt to do a 1 month service length, 12 months, 24 or use a custom length. In this case, we choose 12 months.

Next we move to Offer Dimensions. In this case, we have two dimensions...

The first dimension is big deal.

The next is service hours.

And finally, there's a usage dimension identified and note.

There's a I want to enable $0 pricing indicator in the connector and this is a precautionary indicator to make sure that in the event you do enter $0 price, you confirm it with the indicator.

There is also in the connector supports dynamically adding dimensions. So if you wanted to add a dynamic dimension on the fly, you could with the add dimensions button for this offer, though we select three units.

We have a usage dimension rate of $0.

And we select, I want to enable $0 pricing before we move on to the payment schedule section.

You know, partners told us we do flexible payment schedules that are often 1224 36 months. And we do not want to have to enter, you know, 1212 items at a time. Can you please give us a utility that can auto generate a payment schedule? And that's what we've built, we've answered the call.

And so now you could simply select, yes, you identify a payment frequency, you identify the remainder options in the event. It's an odd value. And then you can select whether or not you want the frequency to be in business days or calendar days.

In this case, you choose 90 day interval, you enter a payment mo a start date and an end date range. You've, you've indicated these values and you select generate payment schedule and here's what you get, you get four payment schedules 90 days apart.

And now with the connector, you can change any of these values, you can change the invoice state, you can change the payment values. But in this case, we move along to the end user license agreement section where we have the ability to enter the standard contract for aws marketplace or you can enter your own custom ula.

In this case, we decide to keep the default selection, standard contract for aws marketplace.

We move along to the renewal section where we have to answer a yes, no question. We leave the default selection as no.

We proceed on to the expiration information section where we have to enter and offer. expiration. In this case, we know the buyer is, is itching to accept a private offer. So we, we, we set a turnaround time of december 4th.

We are now ready to create our first aws marketplace private offer using the aws partner crm connector. So we select create offer. And when we do the offer now is in publishing status. So in the connector, we call that in transit status, it's preparing, it's in a preparing stage, it is not published, it's just preparing, then it moves to an applying stage. And finally, when it is published, we can see by selecting the list, view publish offers that our offer has been published. Congratulations.

We drill in, we see that our offer has been published and now we offer the capability to modify the offer, expiry date, cancel a private offer as well. You can clone the private offer. And what cloning is is let's assume that you had a private offer that was successful. It expired the buyer calls and says, hey, can you just resend me that private offer? Real simple? You go in, you clone the offer. You might have to adjust the payment dates, right? And the flexible payment schedule, but it takes a lot of that, that time away by just doing a clone and the offer.

So going down to the bottom here of this particular screen, we'll see that the offer publishing status has succeeded. And this is where the seller can copy the offer url and send it to the buyer or what sellers have told us is that they will take this and they will create next step automation into a temporized email to a buyer.

Ok? While we were, while we were here talking about and we just published that private offer, the buyer has accepted the offer. So we go to a list views and publish offers. We see, subscribe success offers and right there, the buyer has successfully subscribed to that private offer. We've returned that value back to the connector and you can take next step actions such as close the opportunity.

Ok? Now we're gonna change gears and we're gonna, we're gonna uh create a channel partner, private offer. We are a channel partner. We're working with a particular independent software vendor and they've shared a resale authorization with us. So on the shared resale authorizations tab, we see the resale authorization, we drill into it and we'll note here that we can review all of the components of that resale authorization.

In this case, the product name is xyzs a subscription. It's got an expiry date. The offer has not been extended yet. If i want to see the buyer buyer legal terms that the iv has set for the buyer. I can click view pdf. If the is v has particular terms for us, i can click on the pdf. And in this case, the iv is provided the authorized reseller contract for aws marketplace as the governing agreement between the independent software vendor and the reseller.

So moving further down, we'll just make a note that the wholesale price is $5 we'll move back up. Let's create the offer. So we select the create the offer button. We're on the create an offer page much like we were with the marketplace private offer that we created. In order to proceed with the channel partner private offer creation, we must accept the independent software vendors terms. So we select that indicator and we move on to offer details.

We give the offer a name, we proceed to price adjustment and in this case, we're going to mark it up 100%. So as we see the wholesale price was $5 the total price is $10. We moved to usage duration where the subscription will not be a one day subscription. We change that and we make it a 378 day subscription.

We move along to isv legal terms and documentation. This is where the terms and conditions between the is v and the buyer are located. Legal terms and other documentation section. If the channel partner has legal terms for the p that they want to include in the channel partner private offer, they can either upload the files or they can drag and drop the agreement. And that occurs right here.

Finally, much like the marketplace private offer and the channel partner private offer, the channel partner sets an offer expiration date. And in this case, they said december 1st 2023 isn't that tomorrow? So, and then they select to create an offer.

So what we're going to do now is i am not going to go through the offer publishing status like i did with with the marketplace private offer, the offering status goes through and we surface in the connector and is available via the apis offer publishing status as preparing applying succeeded instead, what we're going to do is we're going to move on to the home page here is where we can take all of the views, all of the offer statuses and bring them into one single view.

So you have subscribed success offers. Those are the offers where the buyer has accepted the terms and the subscribed success notification comes back to salesforce and it's captured and the records are updated, published offers, published offers are offers that are published but not subscribe success. And behind the scenes, you're able to uh through the native salesforce features, change these views in transit offers as we showed before. Are those offers that have not fully published? And finally, if we navigate further down, we'll note we can also view our expired offers.

So below this, you'll see a couple of, of, of, of i charts soon to expire offers, product wise offer distribution. These are 100% customizable by you. In your sales force application, you can set the filters, you can set the display and it's all based on the data and how you run your business.

And if we navigate down even further, we'll see there's aws account wise offer distribution, there's two seller accounts here in this view, one is has 18 offers and the other has six. And finally on the on the lower right, we see subscribe success offer distribution and you can just show distribution by product in a bar chart.

Ok. Connector benefits. First, you can enable your users to create marketplace, private offers and channel partner, private offers all within the sales force application that we've built the aws partner crm connector. The ui returns the data and when the data is returned such as the subscribe success notification or the offer url, you can create next step automations based on having that data back into your sales force crm.

Finally, as we last showed the dashboard views the eye charts as well as the offer success notification, et cetera. You get quick customizable insights within the connector and again, all possible because they are powered by aws marketplace apis.

We also have three partners specifically labra takalo and works span and they are all leaned in on crm integration with not only integration with ace but also integration with marketplace. They have built some pretty appealing solutions. So we'd ask that you check out what they have to offer in terms of a call to action.

If you are interested in developing yourself and learning more about the a ps, you can visit aws documentation. We also have reference code in python supporting over 100 catalog and agreement api use cases in the github repository. If you're interested in the salesforce into the aws partner sear connector, you can visit the, the salesforce app exchange or listing. is there right now, you can visit aws documentation to learn more. And also we have a workshop studio where you can, if you're interested in installing the uh the connector, you can uh go through a self paced workshop and also there's where you al you can also learn about getting help with activation.

So that brings us to the end of our session. Thank you all for spending the time with us and it will be great if you can spend a few moments to take the survey, so you can give us feedback and we can make the session better.

Do you want to go to the next slide? Yeah.

Thank you. And that's our contact. If you want to reach out to us, we'll also be here for any questions that you may have.

Excellent. Thanks so much.