One of the most delightful things about our work at Crossbeam is seeing more and more companies adopt and succeed with Ecosystem-Led Growth. There’s no question that this partnership-focused go-to-market motion is generating new revenue, unlocking new opportunities, and growing fast within the SaaS world.

And we’ve got numbers. According to a Pavilion poll of SaaS leaders, nearly 60% are focusing more on ELG in 2024.

In addition to soaking up this growing enthusiasm in the SaaS community, we wanted a way to consistently track how quickly and deeply ELG is permeating SaaS companies as an active strategy. So last year, we created the Ecosystem-Led Growth Index, a way to measure the penetration of ELG in tech services and companies. 

The ELG Index is rapidly growing month-over-month, increasing by half in the past year alone.

The index is determined by taking the total number of companies on the Crossbeam network sharing account-level data with partners, divided by the total number of SaaS companies in the world that use partnerships according to Partnerbase, the largest global database of companies and their partner ecosystems. And it’s time to do it again.

Before creating this year’s ELG Index, we tightened up our dataset to make sure the Index accurately reflects active data sharing in Crossbeam — in other words, that we weren’t counting companies that aren’t truly investing in ELG in our numerator. Much to our non-surprise, the ELG Index is rapidly growing month-over-month, increasing by half in the past year alone, from 4.1% to 6.1%.

Furthermore, 2024 is already a huge year for ELG, and primed for lots of growth.

For starters, we’re hosting the first-ever Ecosystem-Led Growth Conference along with the ELG Alliance on May 15-16 in Austin, TX. It will bring together some of the smartest folks in next-generation GTM, including leaders from companies like Stripe, Drata, Typeform, Crossbeam, Cloudera, and Gong, to share insights and playbooks for Ecosystem-Led Growth that works. 

Another big milestone for ELG is the recent release of Ecosystem-Led Growth: A Blueprint for Sales and Marketing Success Using the Power of Partnerships, written by our CEO Bob Moore and published by Wiley. It’s already on several best-seller lists including USA Today and multiple categories at Amazon (read an excerpt here).

It’s a cliche to say “and we’re just getting started,” but well, we kind of are. The 2024 ELG Index reveals not only constant growth, but a huge opportunity for the tech industry to use the power of its many many ecosystems to grow and make an even bigger impact. You’ll want to be a part of it.

Want to learn more about ELG and join the climb? Get the book, join the conference, and subscribe to Crossbeam Insider. We got you.