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

Make them famous

Making someone famous is about giving your partner a shoutout on your website or in your newsletter, and definitely isn’t about just posting about it once in a while on LinkedIn. 

Making someone famous is about highlighting how your partner amplifies your customer’s experience—through their unique strengths, offerings, and skill sets—to encourage future engagement and conversations with others. 

It implies setting that person up as an expert that people can follow, trust, and ask for advice. 

So what’s in it for you? 3 things: 

1. If you don't focus on your partner, you risk appearing self-centered and may miss out on leveraging your partner's influence to build stronger, trust-based relationships with your customers.
2. When you make your partners and clients famous, you make them feel important as you set them up as expert figures. Nobody gets mad when you make them look good.
3. Every partner and customer story it’s an active asset, which can help you create content, build relationships, and increase brand awareness. 

Happy customers and partners = brand advocates = higher chances of renewal. 

TACTICS

3 ELG tactics to increase client retention

It’s getting increasingly difficult to keep customers satisfied. Luckily, partners can lighten this load without you needing to increase headcount. 

Partners are already working with your customers. They have their own set of expertise that they bring to the table that can help multithread and connect the customer’s technology and experience.

Here’s one of Fullstory’s secrets to keep their customers and prospects happy: 

They help their customers and prospects activate and adopt more integrations by launching Ecosystem-Led Marketing campaigns using Crossbeam and Marketo.

The results?

• 4% increase in gross dollar retention
• 6% increase in net dollar retention
• 50% increase in new pipeline from co-seling and co-marketing
• 5x increase in partner-attached ‘Closed Won’ deals YoY

Here are the steps of their strategy: 

Step 1 – Build a Crossbeam-powered “Better Together” campaign

Using Crossbeam, the FullStory team targeted the right audience for integration promotions. As a result, they identified mutual customers with partners like CrowdBlossom and YAARDE to run highly targeted co-marketing campaigns.

Here’s how they built their “Better Together” campaign:

1. Identify the right partner: They used Crossbeam to find customer or prospect overlap.
2. Build a report: They compared customer/prospect lists in Crossbeam, then shared with their marketing operations team.
3. Import and refine lists: Their marketing ops team imported their overlaps into Marketo.
4. Create campaign strategy: Their partner marketing and ABM teams developed strategies (emails, ads, webinars, etc.) based on business objectives.
5. Internal alignment: They ensured sales and customer success teams were prepped.
6. Measure success: The Fullstory team tracked metrics like integration activation, demo requests, and engagement stats.

Top tip: Automate with Crossbeam-Marketo integration. Automatically feed your overlapping accounts into Marketo for streamlined co-marketing campaigns.

Step 2 – Get your customer success and sales teams’ buy-in by running an internal enablement campaign

Partnerships need customer success and sales teams' buy-in for effective adoption campaigns. So, what the Partnership team at Fullstory did was to emphasize the importance of preparing these teams to support integration activation when customers or prospects inquire.

Here’s how the Partnership team enabled the rest of their GTM team: 

1. Create integration collateral: They developed materials for sales and customer success teams when onboarding new tech partners.
2. Select a partner: They choose partners with a healthy overlap, valuable integrations, and completed onboarding to make the campaign more successful. 
3. Conduct training: They reviewed partner collateral, including sales kits and integration articles, and provide sandbox demos.
4. Host office hours: They hosted weekly Q&A sessions for their team members to discuss integrations.

Step 3 – Track and measure integration adoption activity

After launching marketing and internal campaigns, the Fullstory partnership team tracked their impact on Gross Dollar Retention (GDR), Net Dollar Retention (NDR), and new pipeline generation.

Here’s what they focused on: 

1. Use FullStory: The Fullstory team drank their own champagne by leveraging Fullstory and Crossbeam to monitor integration adoption metrics specific to each partner.
2. Dashboard metrics: Examples include:
   • Click-through rates for Partner A using Looker dashboards.
   • Custom event tracking for Partner B via JavaScript.
   • Referrer URL checks for Partner C.
3. Salesforce reports: They tracked the number of integrations activated by each customer and their impact on GDR.

By closely monitoring these metrics, the partnership team could effectively measure and report their influence on key retention and growth metrics.

Access Fullstory’s detailed play-by-play here. 

FROM THE ECOSYSTEM

Focus on customer retention

One of the primary strategies you should use to grow is customer retention. Arman Taheri, Co-Founder at TalentPop, explains why: 

UPCOMING EVENT

Catalyst 2024

Join us at Catalyst August 14-16 in Chicago to meet the team, grab some killer Ecosystem swag, and get the most up to date intel on our recent merger with Reveal. 

Click here to pre-book a meeting with our team and as a bonus, register here for the Partner Tech 'Appy Hour' co-hosted by Crossbeam, Suger, Superglue, Magentrix and Partner Fleet.

Stuff you don't want to miss!

• 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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