It’s been an exhilarating year for all of us here at Labra.
As we sign off another year with deeper commitment to cloud partnerships, better than ever response from our customers, and onboarding larger teams with more complex workflows, I would like to write this blog with a personal reflection on the key milestones we achieved, the innovations we brought to life, and how they’ve shaped Labra’s journey in 2024.
2024 has been a year of many firsts for us – our first case study with AWS, our first multi-cloud customers, our launch on the SF AppExchange, our first official event sponsorships, our first VP level hires, and so much more that I’m excited to share with you.
As I sat to write down this recap blog, I was overwhelmed with emotions. First and foremost, I would like to thank the amazing team at Labra for making this year special and accomplishing so much. Our team has more than doubled this year alone and I can see both the speed of delivery and zeal of the team grow by much more than that! I’m excited to see what you will achieve in the coming year.
From day one, our focus has been simple – to help ISVs and resellers grow their revenue and sales on the Cloud with the least resistance possible. Any improvements we make along these lines affect not just the sellers. They have had an overarching impact on the buyer teams, as well as the CSP partners and resellers.
I’d like to categorize our new capabilities and achievements in 2024 as follows
- Boosting sales velocity
- Streamlined user experience
- Faster Migration to Labra
- Enterprise Readiness
Boosting Sales Velocity
Cloud Marketplace and Co-sell channels already do a lot of the heavy lifting in this regard. Compared to traditional sales channels, Cloud GTM channels can help with much faster deal close times while also increasing deal size.
Several of Labra’s innovations this year help you as a seller to close deals faster whether it is through a Cloud Marketplace, your channel partner, or through Co-sell.
More accurate transacting
Throughout our various products, we’ve made several changes to help ease the transaction process using automation. This in itself reduces the human error that can be caused while managing multiple systems. We’ve made our validations across private offers, co-sell opportunities, and marketplace listings even better to ensure there are lesser rejections and missed opportunities.
We’ve introduced a new Labra testing stage on marketplace listings to ensure even further reduction in rejections from the Cloud Provider’s end.
Effortlessly manage listings
Users can now edit all their listings in just one click using the Labra Platform. This can be done in all stages except the Cloud Provider testing stage. Users benefit from the simplicity of managing multiple listings across cloud marketplaces.
Subscription and renewal management
One of the easiest ways to consistently grow revenue is by upselling and renewing existing customers. We’ve made that much simpler using new capabilities such as future-dated agreements (FDA), and Agreement Based Offers (ABO) for our AWS customers. Providing both the flexibility and customizability needed for those users looking to continue using your product.
Faster, more secure: API-driven operations
Both the Cloud Co-sell and Marketplace operations using Labra are now fully API-driven. This makes your transactions more secure and real-time. With our additional back-end system improvements and UI responsiveness, we’ve been able to achieve a 3X more responsive experience for our CRM and Platform users.
Streamlined User Experience
We’re always striving to make the Cloud Marketplace and Co-sell experience as streamlined as possible. To enhance this, we’ve considered every single aspect that matters to our customers, from cost to set-up time, the end-to-end compatibility with their tools of choice, and how Labra sets them up for success.
Buy with AWS experience
As the official integration partner with AWS, we’ve helped 10 companies and counting implement their custom storefronts showcasing Buy with AWS option on their websites and landing pages. This latest push from AWS at re:Invent 2024 helps companies improve their conversion rates, increase trust with buyers, and win bigger deals using the AWS Marketplace right from their website.
Labra further allows customization in the ‘Buy with AWS’ module, allowing our customers to create multiple CTAs on the fly with custom code and promote transactions through the Marketplace. Users also get a custom dashboard with additional metrics powered by Labra’s technology.
Democratizing the Cloud Marketplace
One of our biggest announcements this year and an industry first, we launched no-cost listing for SaaS on AWS Marketplace. This has been a game changer for startups we’ve worked with and made their lives much easier. Through an intuitive UI, self-serve resources, and intuitive demos, we’ve been able to make the listing process more direct and approachable for our customers than ever before.
Full package for Cloud GTM
Unlike other vendors who only provide you with the transaction and listing service, we offer you an end-to-end package including the platform, listing support, as well as essential reviews – WAFR and FTR (for AWS) which together can help you achieve the most value out of your Cloud GTM journey.
Container listing
We are the first and only integrator to support container listings for our customers. Our customers in the Dev tools, security, analytics, and networking space, and several others have benefited immensely. With Labra’s help, companies have been able to list their container offering on AWS MP in just a few weeks. We’re thrilled to be expanding this unique capability further and providing cutting-edge features for the same.
Your Cloud GTM journey – Overview and Milestones
This year, we’ve introduced two new pages to our platform – the Overview page and the Milestones.
Overview page – This new page includes all the essential information to keep you on top of your Cloud GTM activities. Consider it a go-to dashboard to know your upcoming renewals, quarterly revenue, revenue breakdown by Cloud, and so much more.
Milestones – Using Milestones, customers new to the Marketplace have a quick and easy way of finding out their place in the Cloud GTM journey. This helps set you up for success in the early days of your Cloud GTM journey and gives a clear idea of the next steps for you to follow as you are working on growing sales.
Faster Migration to Labra
We’ve made it much easier for any user to migrate from their own or competitor’s integration using Labra. We’ve done this by launching these capabilities:
Quick import from Salesforce AppExchange – Easily import your existing listing information from Salesforce AppExchange to the AWS Marketplace.
Migrate legacy opportunities using ACE API – Migrate your co-sell workflow to Labra easily using the official AWS Partner Central API for Selling.
One click-import of existing Marketplace listings – Your existing marketplace listings (one or many) can be imported and managed through Labra with ease.
Enterprise readiness
This year, we’re proud to announce that we have achieved the next level of growth in terms of enterprise customers. We’ve successfully onboarded over a dozen large enterprises onto Labra and enabled effortless Cloud GTM success for each of them. Here are some enterprise-oriented capabilities launched.
Single Sign-On (SSO) – We’ve enabled SSO to streamline access to Labra. This helps enterprise clients easily manage their users and further enhance security.
Labra Helpcenter – By introducing the Labra Helpcenter, we’ve made access to product documentation, guides and our support team much closer, easier, and faster than ever before. The AI chatbot agent is also available to further make this process easier.
Custom integration and CRM flows – For some of our customers, we’ve delivered custom integrations to their marketing and sales stack so they can effortlessly integrate with tools such as Marketo for lead tracking without managing an additional task manually. This further showcases the flexibility and capability of the Labra platform and our industry-leading CRM app.
Here’s what to expect in 2025
As we close the year out, all our teams are busy planning and laying out the action plan for 2025. We are working on some game-changing updates that will revolutionize your Cloud GTM approach and provide you valuable insights along the way to make more informed decisions along your journey.
Based on some early demos we had given at AWS re:Invent 2024, we are highly certain these capabilities will help out all of our customers no matter where you are in your Cloud GTM journey.
- We are expanding on existing capabilities on the marketing front and improving the user experience to provide more valuable insights to help you boost discoverability and transactions.
- AI agents are the talk of the town and we will soon have multiple Labra AI-based agents to maximize your Cloud GTM revenue and close deals faster.
- As emphasized at re:Invent, we will continue to build capabilities to help prioritize your channel partnership and reseller relationships.
As always, if you have any suggestions or questions for me, reach out to me on LinkedIn. And I wish you and your family a healthy and happy winter break and prosperous New Year!
