How Udemy effortlessly shared over 5,000 co-sell opportunities with AWS using the Labra Platform

Executive summary

Udemy, a leading online skills marketplace and learning platform, wanted to leverage its AWS partnership through Cloud Marketplace and co-sell.

By using Labra’s ACE CRM Integration and process automation, they have been able to make their Cloud Marketplace transactions and co-sell process more efficient and elevate the experience for their partnership teams. This simplified the internal workflow for Udemy and facilitated better collaboration between Sales, Partnerships, and Finance teams enabling them to move faster and improve their partnership with AWS.

Top Benefits

What is Udemy?

Udemy is the world’s largest online skills development and validation marketplace and learning platform where learners can take expert-created courses focused on the most in-demand professional and technical skills. To date, Udemy has helped over 77 million learners gain skills across more than 250K courses and over 4000 topics. Through Udemy Business, Udemy provides on-demand, immersive, and group learning solutions for enterprises to upskill their employees.

Importance of the AWS Partnership

As an AWS Partner Network (APN) member, Udemy and AWS already provide immense value to each other. Udemy has a valuable partnership with AWS and has seen a significant boost in sales as a result.

Udemy and AWS have a successful co-sell relationship, with over 5,000 opportunities shared between them. 16% of referrals from AWS to Udemy and 17% of referrals from Udemy to AWS have been successfully launched by leveraging the Labra platform.

Integrating the AWS Marketplace listing with Labra has helped Udemy channel more transactions, streamline the private offer process, and sync opportunities between the APN ACE portal and Salesforce seamlessly and further strengthen their AWS partnership.

How do Udemy and AWS co-sell?

Udemy sees AWS as an important strategic partner and vice versa. Udemy is a proud member of the APN. The Udemy Business solution is built on AWS to ensure that the platform is secure, reliable, and scalable for our customers.

To AWS, Udemy Business offers a great learning solution that is dependable, scalable, and easy to use and is essential to helping companies upskill their teams on over 200+ AWS products and services.

Udemy Business also provides courses in leadership, management, and other technical skills to several other companies in the AWS partner network. This breadth and richness of content delivered at pace is the value that Udemy brings to companies starting from small teams to enterprise clients.

Challenges faced in scaling their AWS partnership

“Before we implemented Labra for Co-sell, our entire AWS Partnership was handled by a single person who was tasked with being our resident AWS expert. He shared all opportunities with ACE himself, maintained the opportunities himself, and connected Udemy AEs with AWS AEs one by one, all by himself. Once we implemented Labra, it removed the need to share or maintain opportunities ourselves.”

Before integrating with Labra, Udemy faced significant challenges in its co-sell and marketplace operations.

• Switching between Salesforce and the APN ACE portal involved a lot of manual effort. Due to this, they faced difficulty keeping track of offers and opportunities across portals.
• Manual data entry occasionally caused delays and could result in mistakes, such as incorrect pricing or contract details, which impacted the efficiency and accuracy of sales operations.
• Udemy found it impossible to report on opportunities shared with AWS. “Without a real-time connection to SFDC, there was no way to reliably maintain all the opportunities we shared with AWS and report on them with any kind of accuracy,” said Nestor.

Streamlined process with Labra

“We used to spend hours a week sharing opportunities with AWS in bulk using ACE. Labra has given our Partnerships team all that time back literally with the click of a ‘Submit to AWS’ button,” expressed the Udemy team.

Udemy witnessed a notable difference in managing opportunities after implementing Labra. Labra facilitated the collaboration between Sales, Partnerships, and Finance teams when creating, issuing, and tracking private offers (POs). Through Labra’s Salesforce App, all three departments had complete visibility into every stage of the private offer process within Salesforce, a platform they were already comfortable using.

Scaling up the co-sell process

“The new private offer process (using Labra)… I LOVE IT. The new process is amazing, everyone should do it this way,” mentioned their Partnerships team.

Udemy was able to share twice as many opportunities while spending less than half the time and effort.

With Labra’s automation, Udemy has consistently been able to share over 300 opportunities over several months, which would’ve been unthinkable with a manual approach. “Labra for Co-sell and Marketplace have saved our team’s hours of manual work a week, it’s hard to believe that we used to do this any other way.”

In Nov 2023, Udemy shared over 1000 co-sell opportunities with AWS in a single month with Labra’s automation.

Faster time to close

Udemy has seen a 70% decrease in the time required to close opportunities. This accelerated process is a direct result of Labra’s efficiency gains.

Labra support experience

“The Labra team has been terrific to work with, always extremely responsive and willing to incorporate our feedback.”

Udemy was impressed with Labra’s readiness to hop on a call to resolve any issue quickly. Labra’s support team is always available and should an issue arise, they move quickly and get the job done.

Success on the AWS Marketplace

By listing on the AWS Marketplace with Labra.io, Udemy has accelerated and closed deals faster. Udemy has drastically increased the number of active contracts they’ve closed since using Labra in the first 2 months of our marketplace listing. Further, Udemy was able to  nearly 3x the number of closed deals in the following 6 months -which would have been unthinkable without the automation that Labra provides.

Being able to work directly from Salesforce CRM allows Udemy to streamline processes while meeting customers in their preferred channels.