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Partnerships 101: ISVs, VARs, SIs, MSPs, and the Glue that Holds them Together

Partnerships 101: What is Cross-Selling?

Partnerships 101: Strategic Alliances Explained (Finally!) Plus Examples

Don’t Fall Behind: Get Your Partner Data in Your Data Warehouse (Part 1 of 2)

What Partner Ecosystem Maturity is and Why it Matters

The nearbound.com manifesto: Trust is the new data

How RingCentral Built an Internal Culture of Partnerships

It’s Happening! Crossbeam and Reveal are Joining Forces to Disrupt Go-to-Market Strategy as We Know It.

Just Because It’s Partnership Tech Doesn’t Mean It’s a PRM

The Beginner’s Guide to SaaS Tech Partnerships

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Channel Partnerships

Nearbound Podcast #051: Day Zero Mentality - How Rob Brewster Went from Partner Chief to Company Chief

Navigating Partnership Ecosystems: Channel, Tech, and Strategic

Partnerships 101: What Is a System Integrator (SI), and Should You Partner With One?

How to Build Your Agency Partner’s Reputation While Protecting Your Own

2022 State of the Partner Ecosystem Report

Nearbound Podcast #048: The Fear & Greed Index - Right Now Every Partner Pro Needs to Stand Tall

25 Articles Showing the Business Impact of Partnerships (Bring These to Your CEO)

The Case for a Co-Marketing-First Approach

Growing Your Partnerships Team? Here are 3 Skills You Should Look for in Your New Hires

Does Partnerships Have a Boredom Problem?

A 5-Step Guide for Scoping and Qualifying Your First Tech Partners

Secrets to Building a High-Impact Partner Program

How to Ensure Accurate Ecosystem Data

A recommended ecosystem AI strategy: Take an integrated rather than a top-down approach

A Primer: 3 Things to Lookout for as a Partnership Leader

Your Guide to Preparing for Your Next Partner Pitch Meeting

How to Launch a Strategic Partner Program (And Not Take Forever to Deliver Value)

How to Guide: Partnership Alignment with Internal Stakeholders

How to measure and attribute nearbound impact

Balancing AI, automation, and the human touch in partner management in 2024

Tech Ecosystem Maturity: Scaling Your Integration Program Via Your API

The Inside Track: How to Accelerate Crossbeam Onboarding for Your Partners

Tech Ecosystem Maturity: 4 Ways Most Partner Programs Fall Short

You Have Dormant Partners. Here’s How to Get Their Interest

How to nail co-marketing events in 2024 with nearbound

How to Gain Internal Buy-in to Build New Integrations | Connector Summit 2022

Track Churn and You’re 3.6x More Likely to Have Dedicated Budget for Integrations

The State of the Partner Ecosystem 2022 Webinar

Crossbeam Explains: What are System Integrators?

The Awkward Dance: Should You or Your Partner Build the Integration?

Building the Flywheel Starts with Your Partners

Remote, In-Office, or Hybrid? Where Partnership Professionals Worked in 2021

Four Signs it’s Time to Expand Your API Docs

7 Tips for Co-Selling Like a Supernode

Nearbound Podcast #039: Dancing with Elephants — The Art of Strategic Partnering

Tech Ecosystem Maturity: How to Level Up Your Co-Marketing Motions

20+ Interview Questions for Hiring Your First Tech Partner Manager

3 Reasons to Get Certified in Your Partners’ Tech and Become Indispensable to Your Team

Tech Ecosystem Maturity: How to Level Up Your “Better Together” Messaging

Partner Ecosystems 101

Dave Goldstein: Ecosystem-Led Sales for the Enterprise: How Braze Leveraged Alliances to Fuel Robust Growth | Supernode 2023

8 Times a Partnership Impacted an “Exit Event” (And Why Acquisitions are on The Rise)

5 Signs Your Tech Partner's About to Get Acquired (And How to Prepare for Change)

Tech Ecosystem Maturity: How to Level Up Your Integrations Team

The Inside Track: Crossbeam Security 101 with CISO Chris Castaldo

Six Tips for Expanding Internationally Using Channel Partners

10 steps to develop a co-marketing strategy

How Typeform Went from 30 Integrations to 100+ in Just One Year

How Typeform Improved Their Revenue by 40% with ELG and PLG

Partnerships 101: What Is Co-Selling?

Partnerships 101: Inbound vs Outbound Integrations and Why They Matter for Your Partnerships

How to Communicate Effectively With Your Entire GTM Team and The C-Suite

Partnerships 101: What Is an Ecosystem and How Is It Redefining Partnerships?

The Inside Track: Get to know the Crossbeam Salesforce App

The 7 Metrics That Prove the Business Impact of Your Tech Integrations

8 Times Sales Reps Won the Deal by Co-Selling With Partners

6 Ways Sales Professionals Can Use Partnerships to Advance Their Careers (and Get Promoted)

How Co-Selling & Co-Marketing Build Revenue

How Demandbase Acquired DemandMatrix in Seven Months After Launching a Partnership

The Intersection of Partnerships and Product Development with Pandium’s Cristina Flaschen

The 4 Levels of Tech Ecosystem Maturity

8 Tips for Surfacing the Business Impact of Partnerships and Driving Partner-Sourced Revenue Earlier

Tech Ecosystem Maturity: How to Level Up Your Co-selling Workflows

Despite The Economy, Gartner Projects Double-Digit Growth As Companies Find Ways to Do More with Less

The 5 Things to Do in Your First 90 Days as a Partnership Leader

Ecosystem is Everything: How to Embrace Second Party Data with Crossbeam

Vetting 100s of Channel Partners? Use This Four-Criteria Checklist to Speed Up the Process

8 Ways to Treat Your Co-Selling Partners With R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Nearbound Podcast #026: Building Trust in Channel Partnerships

Partnership KPIs For Marketing, Sales, Customer Success + More

No More Silos: 4 New Ways to Use Partner Data

Account mapping. How to (finally) do it without giant, cumbersome spreadsheets

15+ Questions to Help Your Sales Reps Master Their Co-Selling Motions

How We Foster Collaboration Remotely at Crossbeam

21 Partnerships People You Should Follow on LinkedIn

A Fill-in-the-Blanks Exercise for Evaluating Your Partner Program

How to Use CRM Data & Automation to Nurture Your Co-Selling Relationships

How to Use Partner Data In Your Sales and Marketing Dashboards (Part 2 of 2)

How CallRail Increased Integration Adoption by 167% Through Strategic Partnership with HubSpot and Reveal

3-step strategy for partnership managers

How to Execute an Effective Nearbound Channel Strategy

Don't Try To Fit Ecosystem Partners into a Channel Hole

Nearbound Podcast #022: Build, Buy, or Partner

You Should be Account Mapping at Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

5 Ways to Incentivize Your Sales Team to Live, Eat, and Breathe Partnerships

How to Learn the Partnerships Love Languages

How to Learn Your Customer’s Tech Stack and Increase Integration Adoption by 17%

The 9-Step Partner Impact Score Methodology for Strategic Co-Selling With Partners

Catherine Brodigan: Effective Co-Selling* (*because you have no other choice) | Supernode 2023

October 27, 2023

minutes

‍
Nearbound Daily #440: All aboard the influence train 🚂

Shawnie Hamer

The best deals help everyone win

We recently sat down with top sales leaders to dive into The State of Sales. During the interviews, we noticed a theme: they had all used nearbound to close some of the biggest deals in their careers.

And the best part? The deals helped their partners win, too.

Scott Leese shares:

I’ve seen the effect of a go-to-network strategy multiple times in my entire career, but there are two deals that stand out from the rest.

The first one was in 2019, and the deal was from a government institution. Thanks to the network effect that my “Industry Relations“ team at that time was able to create, we managed to close a $2.6M deal.

The Industry Relations team consisted of 5 to 10 people, and their role involved talking and doing business with people who already had the trust of our customers. So, technically, they were in charge of networking with those who could help us influence our deals.

They needed to go to conferences and connect with people so those people could refer our business. This strategy was really helpful, it opened multiple opportunities.

They helped us get intros, influence, and intel to finally close our $2.6M deal in 18 months.

The second one is more recent; it was one year ago. One of my tech partners approached me looking for intros to some of my consulting clients. And since they already trusted me, they said yes and took the call with my tech partner.

The deal between them was about $360K, and just for that intro, I got a piece of that cake, resulting in a $36K commission just for helping my partner.

Scott is speaking at the Summit!

Holy trust, Batman!

Linkon Axon shares that in order for partnership managers to become superheroes—or those who "overcome all and deliver every time"—they always need to come back to alignment and trust.

Thanks for sharing, Linkon!

Linkon writes:

Like in any rev-ops department, no joint-venture partner or end-client value = no commercial ROI.

In that order.

Partnerships are people-driven, tech-enabled, and result-focused.

They are built with relationships and based on trust to generate value.

Do you have short-, medium-, and long-tail rev-gen strategies in place to justify your partner program?
Can you show me how you intend to track and optimize your results based on data?
Would you adopt your offer if it was presented to yourself?
What is the risk of me not adopting this?
What bandwidth is this going to take from our current resources?
How do we know this is working?

These are all questions leadership is going to ask you when adopting/running a partnership program...

They are all based in and on just one thing: TRUST

Trust that a program is not going to harm the brand
Trust that they will see ROI
Trust it will enrich not implode
Trust they will get full stakeholder buy-in
Trust that shared outcomes are the end goal

And if you want full partner program buy-in and sustainability, it comes down to 2 primary traits based on trust:

The partner/client has to have complete trust in yourself and your team
The partner/client needs complete trust in your process and outcome

So build your program with free-flowing enablement, keep the expectations clear at every stage, and trust in yourself and the process.

And in no time, you’ll be the partnership superhero you were always meant to be.

No capes.

B2B gets on the influence train

Image source: Ogilvy

Ogilvy surveyed over 550 senior leaders from B2B brands in 11 markets around the world to map the current landscape of influencer marketing in B2B.

As it turns out, B2B is all aboard the influencer train.

A whopping 75% of B2B businesses are already using influencers—which Oglivy defines as "credible expertise rooted in proven experience that contributes to professional opinion"—in their current marketing strategies.

And it’s working. Business Insider summarizes four other important takeaways that emphasize the importance of tapping influence:

67% of B2B influencer campaigns had more impact on the brands’ marketing performance than brand-only campaigns.
89% of C-suite marketers recognize that using employees as influencers holds value for their businesses.
90% of marketers said they believe that B2B influencers on social media are important to stay up-to-date with their industry.
Besides LinkedIn, YouTube is the most used platform for B2B influence.

B2B marketers are quickly learning that buyers aren’t just going to take your company’s word for it. Buyers are looking to those they trust, those who’ve been to the promised land, for help.

Cast your votes for Nearbound Rookie of the Year!

This year’s Nearbound Rookie nominees are in, and we need your vote!

Our nominees are...

🏆 Coriena Merejo, Channel Program Manager at Pipedrive.

🏆 Eleana Robinson, Partner Manager at GoCanvas.

🏆 Mariana Pop, Partner Manager at Rydoo.

🏆 Matt Sobel, Partnerships Lead at Writer.

🏆 Virginie Cliquennois, Alliances & Partnership Manager at TalentView.

🏆 Supered and their CEO and Co-Founder, Matt Bolian

🏆 Securequest and their CEO and Founder, Ben Wright

You have until Wednesday, Nov. 1st, 2023 to vote for the winner.

The winner will be announced live at the Nearbound Summit, on Startup Day, Monday, Nov. 6th, at 5:30 pm ET.

Stuff you don’t want to miss!

Join the official Nearbound Summit community brought to you by Partnership Leaders — Partnership leaders’ goal is to connect people interested in learning about partnerships around the world.
November 1st —Firneo Partner Strategy Forum (Day 3): How to Get Executive Buy-In for Partnerships— Learn how to secure resources & support from key stakeholders that are critical to partnership success.
November 6th-9th —Nearbound Summit 2023— The future of GTM is Nearbound. Join us for the biggest-ever remote experience in GTM where B2B leaders across departments unite to share how they’re winning with Nearbound strategies and tactics.
Enroll before November 14th —PXP Academy Partner Manager Certification Course— Join the interactive learning session that equips you with everything you need to be successful in your daily job as an operational Partner person.
November 16th —Elevate Your Presale GTM with Tech Partners— Learn from industry experts like Kelly Sarabyn (HubSpot), Jared Fuller (nearbound.com and Reveal), Sunir Shah (AppBind), and Alexander Buckles (Forecastable). Evolve your GTM strategy with tech partners.
Enroll by November 17th —Firneo’s Mastering Partnerships Strategy (4-week course)— Registration is now open! Learn how to diagnose and solve your partner program’s biggest challenges from the world’s top partnership leaders. Use the code "NEARBOUND" for a 1:1 Strategy Coaching package (worth $1,000) for FREE.
April 19th-20th —SaaS Connect 2023— It’s that time of year again! Get your spot early for the 11th annual partnership conference in San Francisco, hosted by Cloud Software Association.

Nearbound starts with you

People don’t connect with accounts, they connect with people.

At Startup Day at the Nearbound Summit, Mac Reddin, Founder & CEO at Commsor, will dive into why personal networks will help you win in the Who Economy.