Working with referrals, leads, and opportunities

The following topics describe how sales referrals become leads and opportunities. The topics also explain the differences between opportunities originated by AWS and those originated by partners.

What is a referral?

The term referral serves as a general descriptor for leads and opportunities. A lead refers to a contact who expresses interest in an AWS product or partner solution. During the initial stages of the sales process, a sales representative determines whether the interested individual has the potential to become an AWS customer. This assessment and validation phase is referred to as qualification. If a lead is deemed qualified and has a higher probability of converting to a customer, it becomes an opportunity.

What is an AWS originated opportunity referral?

AWS Sales creates an AWS-originated opportunity referral by sharing the referral with you. The AWS Sales team receives recommendations to attach a partner to an AWS sales opportunity based on multiple factors, such as the quality of information in the solution listing, past opportunities, progress in the partnership journey, and past performance.

You receive referrals with the customer contact details—contact name, title, email, and phone—masked. However, the referral contains AWS contact details, including the customer name and project title, that you use to decide whether to pursue the referral. To accept or reject the referral, you send an Accepted or Rejected value for the partnerAcceptanceStatus field. You must do that before the acceptBy date and time specified in the payload. If you reject a referral, you must provide a rejectionReason.

When you accept or reject an AWS-originated referral, don't update any other values in the referral. Every update on a referral, from you or AWS, can take up to one hour to sync with your CRM system. When you accept a referral, AWS sends a new payload with the unmasked customer contact details. You then engage with the opportunity and provide regular updates to AWS.

What is a partner-originated opportunity referral?

You create a partner-originated opportunity referral when you share a referral with AWS Sales for coselling or visibility. By default, all partner-originated opportunity referrals go through a validation (review) process, and they have a status of Submitted. When the review starts, the status changes to In-review and you can't update the opportunity until validation completes.

If the validation succeeds, the opportunity status changes to Approved, and you can update to the opportunity. If the validation fails, the status becomes Action required, and the validator’s comments appear in the apnReviewerComments field in Salesforce. Fix any issues and resubmit the referral.

After you update and resubmit the opportunity, it moves back to the Submitted state and the validation process starts again. When the opportunity passes, the referral state becomes Approved, and partners and AWS can share regular updates about the opportunity. The validation process can take up to five business days.

For more information about the fields in partner-originated leads and opportunities, see Leads-Fields and Opportunity-Fields on GitHub

Closing a referral

When partners close referrals as Launched, they must attach an AWS account associated with the customer. To close a referral as Closed Lost, partners must provide a closedLostReason. For a referral that relates to a sale on AWS Marketplace, partners must attach an AWS Marketplace offer to the opportunity.

To see an opportunity's status, partners can check the awsStage field in Salesforce.