The following article is an excerpt from “The State of Partner Sales: Studies in Excellence” from HubSpot, Crossbeam, and Partnership Leaders with a foreword from Bobby Morrison, CRO, and Ritu Khanna, VP of Global Partnerships at Shopify. 

The State of Partner Sales is a collection of stories from key players in the industry who are finding success selling with their ecosystem partners. These case studies show how unifying motions between companies and their partners, as well as partnership teams and their sales counterparts, can drive more revenue.

“You can’t go anywhere within G2 and not hear from me, and then from my leaders, about why partnerships are important, and why you need to chase those partner deals down.”  — Jon Maly, VP of New Business Sales at G2

G2’s key results: 

• 3x better win rate with HubSpot-sourced deals 
• 40% shorter sales cycle with HubSpot-sourced deals 

Results reported by G2

The challenge

“How do we monetize this?” 

That’s the question everyone working with partners (and arguably everyone who works in B2B) has been focusing on for the last year and a half. And Alexis Bonavota, Senior Partner Success Manager at G2, is no exception. 

G2 and HubSpot had been partners for a while, but they had yet to see the revenue from that relationship meet its potential. Thankfully, both companies understand the importance of tech partnerships and how they can be leveraged to give customers a world-class, connected experience.  

“The better together story between G2 and HubSpot is very intuitive, and a lot of our personas tend to overlap. You've got the G2 data that helps you be hyper-targeted in a tool like HubSpot, that then operationalizes all of the targeting. It's pretty simple,” Alexis explains. 

This made it easy to see the potential in the partnership when G2 joined HubSpot’s partner co-selling pilot program in early 2024. The challenge then became how to tighten G2’s Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG) strategy, both internally and in collaboration with HubSpot, to scale success. 

The solution: G2’s ELG-driven revenue org

Alexis and G2’s VP of Global Partnerships, Christine Li, worked closely with everyone from C-suite to individual reps to embed their ELG motion into the very fabric of their revenue strategy, making partnerships like HubSpot’s valuable to all parties involved. 

Here’s how they did it:

1. Get focused on the target audience: The G2 team looked closely at the data to figure out the best audience overlap between them and HubSpot. They discovered that the highest overlap between their prospects and HubSpot customers were SMBs. The added benefit of this target segment is that it also allows them to easily create 30-day pilots of new initiatives to see what's working, and be able to measure results in a way that they necessarily couldn’t do as quickly with an enterprise audience. 

2. Strategic hiring: G2 decided to hire Jon Maly, VP of New Business Sales, at the beginning of 2024. And because Christine and Alexis had laid the groundwork to get complete buy-in from the CRO, ELG was communicated as a key strategy and expectation from the very first interview.

Jon shares, “I think it starts with how our CRO has built the org structure. Christine was part of my interview panel and is clearly a peer with me and the other VPs…We hit it off immediately. She also has a sales background, so I knew right away that G2 is a strong partner organization with value to add. It kicked us off on the right foot.”

3. Align on key objectives: At their fiscal kickoff in February, the partnership team aligned with their new business teams as a very focused way to start the co-selling process with HubSpot. They wanted to start where they saw the most opportunity to make the quickest impact, and that was with new business. Jon and Alexis collaborated to delegate partners to the different audience segments. HubSpot was designated as the go-to partner for their new SMB business.

“Our goal was really to help accelerate pipeline, not necessarily create new pipeline. That would be the cherry on top, yes, but how do we get these deals through quicker? Traditional co-selling was one way, analyzing our open opportunities and seeing how we connect with HubSpot reps to share intel,” Alexis explains.

4. Seller enablement: The biggest hurdle for any organization rolling out an ELG strategy is getting your sellers on board with the changes. AEs are often skeptical of working with partners, believing that partners will slow down deal cycles or poach the deal completely. To combat this belief and get their sellers prepared to win with ELG, G2 made some key decisions:

• ‍Make ELG status quo:  “You just need one leader to say it's not optional,” Alexis states. “When it’s optional for revenue teams to do ELG, that's when nothing gets done. You need one leader to say, ‘This is what we are doing moving forward,’ and that will change everything.” Jon is one of those leaders at G2, working diligently to hold his sellers accountable to ELG-focused goals and reward them for their ELG performance with financial incentives.
  

• ‍Work backward with enablement: Alexis and her team quickly realized they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Meaning that, while Alexis believed that the enablement materials they were providing their sellers were comprehensive, she didn’t know that many aspects of ELG were still very foreign to them.

Alexis worked hard to get real-time feedback from the new business AEs, identify the gaps in education, and then work backward to fill them. Simultaneously, she isolated and accelerated the reps who needed less hand-holding to get success stories and build champions while she furthered education with other reps.‍

• ‍Make sure ELG lives where sellers live: Alexis and her team makes sure to focus on an integrated Ecosystem Intelligence experience for their selling team, so that ELG plays live directly in the place that AEs are working most: their CRM. G2 sellers can leverage Crossbeam’s Copilot to automate co-selling support, all in one place, while also allowing Alexis to keep visibility. Alexis explains, “AI-generated questions and plays make it easy for our sellers to be able to submit co-sell requests to more than one partner at a time. It has really accelerated the adoption of co-selling for us.”

• Prioritize target accounts : Crossbeam shows overlap in G2 and HubSpot’s audiences, and in addition to coaching his team on ELG best practices, Jon can make sure his sellers are prioritizing the best accounts for the partner motion. For example, G2’s mid-market AEs usually have approximately 300 prospects each, which is too much for any one person to cover at one time. Partner data and a few other data sets narrows that list down to around 50 to 60 target buyers. Jon then gets prescriptive on things like how many outreach attempts an AE needs to have, on what mediums, and over what period of time. They use a different outreach approach on green prospects versus the remaining 250 or so.
  “It also helps [get seller buy-in] that every single large deal that we have had has some sort of partner attachment,” Jon admits.
  

5. Targeted partner offers: Once teams were aligned and sellers enabled, it was time for execution. But how could they entice HubSpot customers to invest in making the most out of their HubSpot experience by leveraging G2 data? They decided to run a special promotional offer for HubSpot customers and were blown away by the results. They saw an immediate jump in win and conversion rates that were sustained over the first half of the year. ‍

6. Continued refinement and nurturing: Alexis and her sales leadership counterparts are 100% dedicated to maintaining and improving their ELG strategy with sellers. Randall Zellers, Sr. Manager of SMB Sales explains,  “I talk with our partnerships team on a weekly basis. We review which accounts, partners, and co-sell motions we're trying to emphasize at any given moment. We create initiatives around certain partners for different quarters, including discounts or promo offers, and we use Crossbeam to understand who our target market is for those offers.”

The results 

Just 10 months after rolling out a dedicated, unified ELG strategy within the HubSpot co-sell partnership, G2 reported the following results: 

• 3x better win rate with HubSpot-sourced deals 
• 40% shorter sales cycle with HubSpot-sourced deals 

About G2

G2 is the largest and most trusted software marketplace. More than 100 million people annually—including employees at all Fortune 500 companies—use G2 to make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews. Thousands of software and services companies of all sizes partner with G2 to build their reputation and grow their business.