About Rubicon®

Rubicon® is a leading digital marketplace for waste and recycling and a provider of innovative software-based products for businesses and governments worldwide. Rubicon’s software solution for heavy-duty government fleets–RUBICONSmartCity™–is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Rubicon leverages the AWS Cloud and other tools to empower cities to use cloud-based technology and machine learning to support their vision for smarter municipal operations.

“Strong AWS co-selling partnership needs an accurate and automated pipeline. The Labra platform created that for Rubicon and AWS.”

The Challenge

Manually managing two CRMs is inefficient and negatively impacts growth and strategic relationships

Since RUBICONSmartCity’s launch in 2017, Rubicon has partnered with AWS on co-selling opportunities. In a growing business, it takes a lot of internal back and forth between sales reps, sales ops, and AWS to keep Rubicon’s CRM (Salesforce) synchronized with AWS’s CRM, (APN Customer Engagements – ACE).

This synchronization overhead rises exponentially in a growing team. When opportunities are added to one CRM without an efficient way to ensure it exists in the other, it can lead to duplicative, “stale,” or missed opportunities. These are not reflective of the joint pipeline,  making co-selling more difficult.  

As the main sales ops person at the heart of Rubicon’s AWS co-sell process, Lilly Chadwick describes this challenge and its impact on the business:

“If the status of conversations/relationships with prospects/customers isn’t accurate, you can’t establish a true co-selling relationship because you’re not aligned on where you are with the pipeline and the relationships.”

The Solution - Labra cCommerce Platform

Sales rep opportunities automatically synchronized with AWS.

AWS recommended Labra to Rubicon because of Labra’s track history of solving synchronization problems for similar partners. Moving from manual pipeline synchronization to an automated one is a transition Labra manages regularly.

The Labra platform replaced manual synchronization updates with an automated solution. This streamlined process ensures the Rubicon and AWS sales teams maintain a consistent, updated view of opportunities across both CRMs.

As part of the solution, Labra’s white-glove customer success team optimized the platform to meet Rubicon’s sales needs and processes. For example:

• Mapping the Rubicon Salesforce fields to ACE fields to ensure “required fields” are filled in is a complex task that Labra’s team helps to complete.
• Helping to synchronize all existing opportunities with ACE.
• Providing ongoing support as both CRMs (Salesforce and ACE) get updated, the Labra customer success team always ensures Rubicon’s systems keep working.

The Labra platform automates the co-sell pipeline, while the customer success team is integral to adjusting each AWS partner’s CRM and sales process.

“I enjoyed working with the Labra customer success team,” said Lilly. “They were extremely helpful in crafting a customized solution fitting the needs and preferences of our team. Very proactive.”

Results

Hours saved for each opportunity, enabling the team to focus on value-add activities like deal creation instead of deal tracking.

Rubicon’s strategic AWS co-sell relationship is in great shape now that Salesforce is synchronized automatically and bi-directionally ‌with AWS ACE.

• Both Rubicon and AWS sales reps deal directly with each other, sharing a live, accurate, and up-to-date view of opportunities. This reduces the manual effort of tracking and updating and includes fewer phone calls to “check status.”
• Sales reps manage all co-sell opportunities from their own CRM. They don’t need to log in to ACE or ‌hand off to sales operations.
• Sales ops are freed from “busy work” and can focus on value-add activities like pipeline analytics and deal optimization.