Glean Expands Co-Sell Pipeline and Automates Operations with Suger

Enterprise seller | SaaS product | Company-wide buyers

Glean is the Work AI platform that combines enterprise search, an AI assistant, and powerful agents to help teams find answers, automate workflows, and take action—grounded in both internal company data and external knowledge from the web. Backed by top-tier investors and operating at scale, Glean powers horizontal use cases across functions like IT, HR, Sales, and Support at companies including Confluent, Duolingo, and Canva.

Cloud Marketplaces as a Growth Driver

Kennedy Grimes, Alliance GTM Lead NAM, sees partnering with hyperscalers as a core growth lever for Glean. Today, a significant share of opportunities are co-sold with AWS or GCP — and nearly all are eligible thanks to the platform’s deployment on both clouds.

The Cloud Partner team builds and sustains strategic relationships with providers, driving joint go-to-market efforts that accelerate, expand, and unblock deals. By aligning with hyperscalers on internal generative AI workloads, Glean taps into a motion that is both natural and high-priority for customers.

“Cloud providers are one of our most important GTM partners — teaming up with them allows us to meet customers where they are and accelerate adoption of Glean on their preferred infrastructure.”

Life Before Suger

Before Suger, the team relied on manual processes that required updating five or more different tools, taking time away from driving co-sell activity. Uploading opportunities in ACE and Partner Advantage alone took over five minutes each, plus additional manual work to update opportunities in cloud provider pipeline management tools.

Enablement status was tracked in inconsistent spreadsheets, pipeline tracking lived in shared docs, and deal registration and revenue attribution were handled in separate systems. Integrations were DIY with manual handoffs, making alignment difficult, wasting time on low-value tasks, and leading to missed partnership opportunities.

“We were spending too much time updating disparate systems when we could have been progressing and or sourcing more deals. Manual processes slowed us down and took the team away from additional enablement and alignment activity.”

Key Challenges 

• Disparate tools  — critical activities were split across multiple tools and disconnected systems, making it hard to get a unified view
  
  
• Manual overhead — Repetitive admin work slowed partnership progress and increased the risk of errors.
  
  
• Coordination gaps — Internal teams and external partners struggled to stay aligned.

Why They Chose Suger

At prior companies, the team had tried other competitive solutions, which were overpriced and fell short of the promised experience — both around co-sell and private offer functionality. Because of this, they knew they needed to find another solution that actually worked. 

They first learned about Suger from a trusted peer in the Cloud Alliance Community, who mentioned it was purpose-built for cloud partnership automation.

Why Suger stood out

1. It delivers on its promise — a rarity among software vendors.
   
   
2. Integrations and workflow automation — directly addressing operational bottlenecks.

It replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets, CRM plug-ins, and manual processes with a single integrated platform designed specifically for partnership teams.

“We needed something built for how partnership teams actually work — Suger checked every box.”

Using Suger

Suger is now embedded in Glean’s core partnership workflow, integrating directly into the tech stack and automating critical steps in the co-sell process.

Integrations

• AWS – Marketplace and co-sell opportunity automation
  
  
• GCP – Marketplace and Partner Advantage integration
  
  
• Salesforce – Native opportunity, CPQ, and entitlement workflows
  
  
• Slack – Real-time updates to keep teams aligned

Best Workflows & Automations

• Private offer auto-population — Auto-populates CPQ data when creating private offers directly from Salesforce opportunities, streamlining the process and derisking manual errors.
  
  
• CPPO entitlement automation — Automatically attaches entitlement invoices and EULAs to Salesforce opportunities, notifying the back-office team to progress the deal to “Closed Won”.

• Direct PO entitlement automation — Automatically attaches entitlement invoices to Salesforce opportunities, notifying the back-office team to progress the deal to “Closed Won” while saving time and reducing errors.

• Referral auto-population — Auto-populates select SFDC opp fields when sharing referrals with AWS or GCP Pipeline Mgmt tools from Salesforce opportunities, reducing the process to just three clicks.
  
  
• Referral auto-linking — Automatically links referrals to offers once accepted by the buyer, eliminating manual linking.
  
  
• AWS contact sync — Auto-syncs AWS contacts to Salesforce when referrals are approved, improving CRM hygiene and enabling AWS rep attribution to pipeline and revenue.
  
  
• Referral auto-enrichment — Fills in missing outbound referral fields like company name, website, address, industry, employee count, and phone.
  
  
• Opportunity stage sync — Maps Salesforce stages to ACE stages and automatically syncs stages as SFDC opp progresses, allowing AWS Strategic Ops teams to highlight deals that progress, keeping AWS reps informed/engaged.
  
  
• Connected workflow automation — Logs and tracks deal registration, enablement steps, and partner communications in one place. Sends real-time alerts and automates reporting, freeing the team from manual updates and invoice filing so they can focus on strategic initiatives.

“The automation we’ve built into our referral and offer process has saved countless hours and eliminated repetitive, error-prone steps.”

Top Attributes

The team highlights several Suger capabilities as game-changers:

• Seamless CRM integration — No more double entry or missing deal info. Opportunities can be shared directly from Salesforce to AWS, with stages synced automatically. Private offers can be created in just a few clicks.
  
  
• Real-time notifications — Real-time deal creation and acceptance email and Slack alerts keep the team aligned
  
  
• Unified dashboard — A single view of outcomes across hyperscaler marketplaces, making it easy to measure results and performance.
  
  
• Pipeline visibility — Real-time insight into co-sell pipeline, revenue attribution, and partner health in one place.
  
  
• Streamlined co-sell sharing — Direct Salesforce sharing eliminates the old copy-paste process from Slack, email, and CRM to fill hyperscaler fields.

“Suger built an end-to-end solution that supports every team and every step of the process. It gives us full visibility into our pipeline while dramatically reducing admin work.”

Results & Impact

Suger has contributed to every closed/won opportunity through a cloud marketplace and a significant share of co-sell wins that went direct or through channel partners. The platform has enabled Glean to scale its partnering program without adding manual overhead, supporting more deals, and driving greater revenue through cloud marketplaces.

Impact Highlights

• Increased co-sell pipeline growth — Seamless sharing of opportunities to ACE, and soon Partner Advantage, without manual effort.
  
  
• Higher deal registration accuracy — Standardized field mapping improves CRM hygiene and ensures consistent, high-quality context is sent to cloud counterparts.
  
  
• Better alignment with cloud providers — PTB scoring identifies the customer’s preferred cloud, helping reps align with the right hyperscaler and avoid competitive scenarios.
  
  
• Faster invoicing and attribution — Tighter invoicing cycles and automated attribution improve forecasting and accelerate quarterly close.

“Every cloud marketplace deal we’ve closed in the last year has had Suger in the mix. We’ve significantly increased our co-sell pipeline without adding headcount.”

Looking Ahead with Suger

Glean sees continued opportunity to strengthen its cloud marketplace operations with Suger. The team is particularly interested in deeper integrations with hyperscaler funding portals to streamline deal support and incentive management.

They also value seeing continued advancements in Salesforce reporting capabilities, which provide richer visibility into pipeline performance and partner engagement. These improvements will help further optimize workflows and drive greater efficiency across their co-sell motions.