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

New customers aren’t always better customers

Repeat customers spend 67% more than new buyers. (Inc.)

Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25-95%. (Harvard Business School)

Acquiring new customers is 5x more expensive than retaining existing customers. (Invesp)

And yet, 44% of companies favor new customer acquisition over retention, and only 18% favor retention. Focusing more of your efforts on growing existing customer accounts could help you spend less, drive more repeatable revenue, and prevent your customers from churning and choosing your competitor.

Guess what can be a big help? That’s right, your partner ecosystem. By leveraging your and your partners’ respective relationships with customers and prospects, Ecosystem-Led Customer Success could be a critical tool in your revenue growth arsenal.

TACTICS

3 ELG plays for generating new revenue with your existing customers 

Account Mapping, which you can do easily in Crossbeam, includes the ability to identify overlaps between your and your partners’ customers.

With this information, you can work with partners that your customers and prospects already trust to better serve your customers and unlock revenue that will help their investment do more.

Play #1: Renew

If your team is in current discussions with an existing customer about renewing their contract, your partners can help. Your channel partners (including agencies, system integrators, and more) can help your existing customers leverage underutilized areas of your product.

For example: if your customer is considering switching to your competitor’s product because of a particular functionality, your channel partners can help them understand how they can achieve the same outcome using your product and features they may not have used yet. This extra influence from a third party can help you land the renewal and box out the competition. 

Additionally, your channel and tech partners can encourage your existing customer to adopt an integration that will help them hit their goals. The integration can help make your product “stickier” and can sometimes lead to an upsell. Integration users are 58% less likely to churn, on average, and a higher number of integrations or a high-quality integration can help you land the renewal and grow the account.    

Play #2: Upsell

Let’s say you’ve identified 10 customers who use your partner’s product but have not adopted your integration. Perhaps you also know via working in or with customer success that all 10 customers would benefit from adopting the integration and that they have good relationships with your company and your partner’s company.

If you have a paid integration or if customers pay according to integration usage, this presents an upsell opportunity. Or, if you know that integrations impact product usage, feature adoption, and other metrics that may tie directly to upsells depending on your business model, then you can analyze adoption among select customers to communicate the value you’re driving.

Additionally, your partners can speak directly to your customers to put in a good word for you, share success stories about using your paid integration or product features with similar customers, and show how they can use your joint solution as part of their existing tech stack.

Play #3: Expand

Whether you’re ready to sell more seats in your product or sell your product to entirely new teams, your partners can be your best advocates. Let’s say you’re looking to sell into the marketing team in a particular account, and you already have existing users in the sales team. 

Your partner can:

• Recruit internal advocates.
• Reach out to their existing customers in the marketing team to identify internal advocates who can communicate your product’s value to their internal stakeholders.
• Share success stories. 
• Reach out to their existing contacts in the sales or marketing team to help make the case for them to adopt your product. They can share relevant case studies and success stories about similar customers they’ve worked with who have adopted your joint solution.
• Educate your team about your new buyer. 
• Help you understand the marketing team’s business goals and priorities. You can also collaborate on one-pagers, case studies, and other collateral that helps communicate the value of your product to marketing teams.
• Encourage integration adoption. 

They can encourage the marketing team to use your integration, get more value out of your tech partner’s product, and even replace your competitor’s product in their tech stack.  

Stuff you don't want to miss! 

• • TOMORROW July 31st — Partner Sourced Summit ’24: Bob Moore (Crossbeam), Justin Zimmerman (PartnerWebinar), Rob Rebholz (Superglue), Greg Portnoy (Eulerapp), Cody Sunkel (PartnerFleet), Asher Mathew (Partnership Leaders), Katie Landaal (ZoomInfo), Lizzie Chapman (Nextroll), Alexis Bonavota (G2), and many more, will share tactical ways they use to drive partner-sourced revenue. Register here.
  • August 1st — Designing the Right Incentives for Partners: Karlyn Bentley (Senior Vice President, Client Partnership at Ansira), Kathleen Meeza (Senior Director, Global Partner Program at Dell), and Tai Rattigan (Co-Founder and COO of Partnership Leaders) will share key tactics for designing incentives which accelerate partner value and impact. Register here.
  • August 14th — From Data to Dollars: Strategies for Nurturing Event Leads to Drive Success: Benito Aguila (Events Marketing Manager from Google) and Airmeet’s CEO, Lalit Mangal will share how to capture valuable data at events to implement targeted follow-up strategies. Register here. 
  • August 20th — Exploring the Power of the Benefits Broker Channel: Leveraging HR’s Most Trusted Consultants: Ryan Taguding (Founder and Principal at Temio Consulting) will share where to begin, how to identify your ICP and distinguish sales blockers from champions. Register here.

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See you tomorrow