The Nearbound Daily is now officially the ELG Insider Daily! 

Welcome to the ELG Insider Daily—the #1 newsletter in the world keeping thousands of GTM professionals on top of the latest Ecosystem-Led principles, tactics, and trends. Join the movement here.

PRINCIPLES

Qualify your partners like you qualify your leads

Your partner ecosystem may be the most powerful engine in your revenue-driving machine, but only if it’s built right.

If your partnerships program is focused on recruitment instead of outcomes, you may find yourself with a lot of integrations to manage but not a lot of value in return. Forming the best, most strategic partnerships is about a lot more than compatibility as tools — there also has to be alignment in goals, customer needs, and commitment.

Ideal partners are those with whom you can exchange:

• High-quality, not just high-volume pipeline
• Insights into customers' true needs
• Strategies around a “better together” story that will help everyone win

TACTICS

3 ways to build your ecosystem for maximum revenue potential

Blaine Trainor, Global Vice President, Partnerships and Alliances at commercetools, has spent 25 years in e-commerce, and nearly half of those in enterprise sales at IBM and SAP. You’d have a hard time finding anyone more familiar with complex deals and grueling sales cycles.

Since taking over partnerships at commercetools, Blaine has transformed the program from an unruly source of high-volume, low-quality leads to a team that is integrated with sales and responsible for 40% of the company’s pipeline.

These three rules were essential to his success.

1. Go deep, not wide, and incentivize valuable partners

When Blaine joined commercetools, the company had an open door to any partner who could bring in leads. Each partner manager had as many as 40 partnerships to manage, and spent most of their time reacting to inbound leads instead of building valuable relationships.

Blaine reevaluated the company’s 350 existing partners, analyzed their pipeline volume and quality, and identified a subset that would be most productive in terms of aligned demand-generation activity, reducing the partnership load from about 40 to about 6-8 partners per partner manager, without adding additional headcount.

Blaine and the team also introduced reporting to help ensure that partner-sourced leads were reciprocated by commercetools. “Partners are far more engaged when they know they are participating in a balanced, two-way partnership that focuses on each party’s success,” he says.

“If you want to get the money out of the house, you can take a battering ram and knock in the front door, or you can ask somebody on the inside to unlock it for you.”

2. Focus on partners who will know when you’re the right solution — and when you aren’t

There are a lot of factors that go into a strong partnership. Many partners in the commercetools ecosystem are exclusively focused on commercetools as their provider of choice for commerce. 

Blaine explains: 

“At first glance, this seems like a winning strategy for commercetools, but this approach can actually lead to challenges with lead quality. I often explain that what’s actually good for our collective business are partners who have an informed point of view and experience on multiple commerce platforms, so that they can refine their own sales pitch to solve commerce-related business problems rather than how they will deploy one particular piece of technology. 

They’re armed with knowledge of the space and how we compare with competitors, so the prospect can make a conscious decision. When we receive leads from partners with a diverse platform experience in our space, they’re generally higher quality, because they’ve done the due diligence to determine we’re the right solution.”

3. Know your customer’s ecosystem as well as you know your own

If you’re a company with a mature ecosystem, there’s huge value in knowing what tech your customers and prospects are already using. With this knowledge, you can plan a sales strategy that involves the right partners to make the strongest case for your combined solution.

Leveraging incumbency data is a central piece of Blaine’s 2024 strategy, and commercetools’ sales team now uses the Crossbeam Widget for Salesforce to access that information and relevant contacts right away.

“The line I gave to the sales organization at kickoff recently was if you want to get the money out of the house, you can take a battering ram and knock in the front door, or you can ask somebody on the inside to unlock it for you,” says Blaine. “I told them that Crossbeam shows you who’s in the house, and what they’re doing in there.”

Read the full story for more detail on commercetools’ revenue-driving partner ecosystem.

UPCOMING EVENTS

The merger and what it means for go-to-market and ELG

Join us tomorrow, at 8:00am PT / 5:00pm CET as Bob Moore, Simon Bouchez, and Sophie Buonassisi deep dive into what the Reveal and Crossbeam merger means for the future of go-to-market and Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG). 

What to expect:

• Insights from Bob and Simon on the merger’s impact
• The future of the partner ecosystem and ELG strategies
• Actionable advice on leveraging the new unified data network for your GTM plans

Don’t miss out on this chance to get behind-the-scenes insights of the merger that will shape the way companies go to market. 

MEME OF THE DAY

Turn your ecosystem into a revenue machine

Stuff you don't want to miss!

• July 18th — Extend HubSpot with G2 and 6sense: How B2B SaaS Companies Can Leverage Account Based Strategies to Win—Tiphaine Amblard (HubSpot), Rachel Gianfredi (G2), Stephen Lackey (SmartBug Media), Jeff Wagner (6sense), and Jonathan Burg (New Breed) how you can better leverage the G2 and 6sense integrations to optimize your ABM strategy. Register here.

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