Maximize co-sell potential with AWS Partner Central APIs and Clazar

If the multi-step process of – securing technical certification, building your credibility, and working the right contracts from within the AWS seller team wasn’t enough work for co-selling through the AWS marketplace, sales teams were also plagued with slow data-sharing between AWS’ and your own CRM system.

While little can be done about the need to establish authority, credibility, and a good working relationship with their field sellers, the AWS Marketplace has already worked towards a reimagined status quo with their new Partner Central APIs.

This new and recently announced API framework empowers AWS Partners to achieve seamless integration between their CRM and the AWS Partner Central, eliminating longstanding barriers that have historically impeded co-selling at scale. The result is a more fluid, responsive, and productive partnership ecosystem that delivers substantial value to partners, AWS, and end customers alike.

All Clazar customers are automatically upgraded from their previous Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) integrations to the new Partner Central APIs for no additional cost or effort.

This is based on the recognition that Partner Central APIs aren't just a technical upgrade. It has far more telling implications for how partnerships are operationalized and how collaborative selling is executed in the cloud marketplace environment.

Historical challenges in co-selling implementation before Partner Central APIs

Before the introduction of dedicated APIs, partners relied on manual processes or basic Amazon S3-based CRM integrations to manage co-selling activities. These approaches introduced significant inefficiencies and limitations, especially for businesses that allocated internal resources to independently build and manage their marketplace presence.

Businesses like IBM report spending up to 10 minutes per opportunity in the drudgery of simply copying information between their CRM and the AWS Marketplace partner portal.

Companies that used Clazar could bypass hours spent duplicating data and context with an automated bidirectional sync between their CRM and the marketplace partner portal, but this system was facilitated by the S3 integration. Hence, even when manual data entry wasn’t necessary, this automated system took a while longer.

For many others who managed the process on their own, this drain on what could otherwise have been productive selling time wasn’t their only challenge. The lack of APIs also introduced data inconsistencies, delayed opportunity progression, and hindered collaboration between partner and AWS sales teams.

As opportunity volume increases, manual processes also become increasingly unsustainable, creating an uncanny paradox where success generates its own challenges that could hamper growth.

The transformative effect of AWS Partner Central APIs

In late 2024, AWS Marketplace announced AWS Partner Central APIs as a fundamental reimagination of how partners engage with AWS's co-selling infrastructure.

“This API allows partners to streamline and scale their co-selling process by automating the creation and management of APN Customer Engagements (ACE) opportunities within their own CRM. This API provides improved efficiency, scale, and error handling compared to the existing Amazon S3-based CRM integration, and is available to all AWS Partners.”
— AWS blog

For the more technically proficient, the move to APIs is standard procedure, after all, in 2024, the API market was already valued at over a billion dollars. For AWS, this was more than that. A significant aspect of the API transition is how it positions partner integrations within the broader AWS service ecosystem.

For APIs to be introduced as the new framework for integrations, they needed to not only play well with any new integrations developed through the interface it needed to play with first-party AWS services like CloudTrail for auditing or the AWS Marketplace Catalog API to manage everything from opportunity to offer.

Thus, when finally launched with Clazar among their official launch partners, APIS not only eliminated context switching and duplicate data entry, it also solved for additional business cases:

1. Sophisticated referral handling and partner co-sell through Partner Central APIs

Partners can now programmatically list, view, accept, or reject AWS engagement invitations, ensuring that no potential collaboration opportunity goes unaddressed. This systematic approach to referral management ensures that partners can respond promptly to AWS-initiated opportunities, significantly improving the experience for both AWS sales representatives and end customers.

The API also enables strategic entity association, allowing partners to connect their opportunities with relevant AWS products, partner solutions, or AWS Marketplace offers. This capability creates a more cohesive view of the customer solution, facilitating better alignment between partner offerings and AWS services.

2. Accelerated deal progression and higher responsiveness to deal changes

All data is pulled in real-time with increased accuracy, rather than requiring manual checks for updates. The API can push notifications about opportunity changes directly to partner systems, enabling immediate response to evolving deal dynamics. This responsiveness accelerates deal progression and ensures that all participants maintain a synchronized understanding of opportunity status.

3. Complete data synchronization between two different deal desks

The seamless integration between CRM systems and AWS Partner Central represents the operational centerpiece of the API's value proposition.

API connectors are designed for flexibility and immediacy. These connectors eliminate the previously required manual intervention, creating an automated bidirectional synchronization that maintains data consistency across platforms.

The integration capabilities extend beyond basic opportunity synchronization to include sophisticated workflows that support the entire co-selling lifecycle. Partners can now manage private offers directly from their CRM environment, create and process contract renewals, implement upgrades or downgrades, and manage extensions without switching contexts. This seamless process flow not only improves operational efficiency but also enhances the customer experience by reducing friction in the transaction process.

4. Error-proof data sharing for a confident deal process

By automating the exchange of critical opportunity data between CRM systems and AWS Partner Central, partners can rely on accurate and up-to-date information, eliminating the potential for manual errors that could jeopardize deals.

This real-time data synchronization ensures that all stakeholders, including AWS sales teams and partners, have consistent visibility into opportunity status, fostering a more reliable and efficient co-selling process.

With the API's robust error-handling capabilities, partners can confidently manage their pipeline, knowing that data inconsistencies are minimized and deal progression is smoother. This confidence in data integrity allows partners to focus on high-value activities like customer engagement and solution development, ultimately leading to better business outcomes.

The Clazar advantage with Partner Central APIs

Beyond the process efficiencies that the AWS Marketplaces instituted with this move to APIs, Clazar customers also have more ways to enact a sales and sales-ops process that is built for scale without compromises.

1. Automated upgrades from S3 to Partner Central APIs

Clazar has been facilitating automated bidirectional sync before the Partner Central APIs through AWS S3 integrations. As official launch partners, every Clazar customer will now be able to benefit from API-based reliability and immediacy by being automatically upgraded to this new system without additional cost or effort.

2. Easier proof of concept (PoC) testing with a ready-to-run sandbox environment

Traditionally, proof of concept (PoC) in this domain has been facilitated through interpersonal relationships between the vendor and the hyperscaler, which introduces significant delays in setting up a sandbox environment. With APIs, Clazar has greater control over the processing of setting up a sandbox environment, allowing prospects to immediately test, validate, and improve their operational setup. This leads to faster onboarding and turnaround times in setting up successful cloud marketplace operations.

3. Zero maintenance efforts in integration management

Clazar automatically migrates customers to the latest marketplace guidelines, features, and capabilities. This is provided as a completely managed backend operation for a hands-free experience so our customers can focus instead on optimizing their revenue workflows without worrying about the technical legwork.

An integrated, automated, and immediate future

The transition from S3-based integration to the AWS Partner Central API represents a necessary evolution in how AWS enables its partner ecosystem. While functional as an initial solution, the S3 approach created technical and operational limitations that increasingly constrained partner effectiveness as the ecosystem scaled.

The hourly batch processing, limited error handling, development complexity, and isolation from other AWS services represented significant challenges that required a more modern approach.

By introducing a dedicated API with improved efficiency, scalability, error handling, and real-time capabilities, AWS has addressed these limitations and created a foundation for more effective co-selling. This transition wasn't merely a technical improvement but a strategic enhancement of how AWS engages with its partner ecosystem, enabling more seamless, responsive, and productive collaboration in the increasingly important co-sell motion.

This change's significance reflects AWS's recognition that partner integration isn't merely a technical capability but a strategic business enabler that requires a fundamental redesign to meet the evolving needs of the cloud marketplace ecosystem.

Leverage the same benefits and the AWS Marketplace’s transformative effects on your sales and partnership process without operational overhead with Clazar today!