The go-to-ecosystem approach opens up new ways of thinking about B2B SaaS.
For those of you who have followed our GoToEcosystem movement, you know that the journey to becoming an Ecosystem Business is based on partnerships with other B2B SaaS companies. Together, these partnerships form the end-to-end or ecosystem solutions that our joint customers are demanding today. When the co-innovation that forms this tribe gets combined with co-marketing, co-selling, and co-retaining, we witness the canonical GoToEcosystem motion.
Creating end-to-end solutions
Creating these end-to-end solutions and to GoToEcosystem together requires a further transformation in the conventional direct-to-consumer mentality of most of the executives in the C-Suites of B2B SaaS Companies.
The first transformation has already happened. Most product and sales teams in B2B SaaS know that they have to integrate third-party software, and most of them understand that they need flexible APIs and resources to reduce the burden of creating fragile and unstable point-to-point integrations. Thank you, Pandium, for a gem of a research paper on the State of Integrations and APIs at 400 SaaS Companies.
Taking integrations seriously
Data points from this paper demonstrate that most mature SaaS companies already take Tech Partner integrations (the co-innovation part) seriously:
- Among the 100 largest SaaS players, 84% have public API documentation, 73% have an in-app customer marketplace, 53% provide SDKs for their external APIs, 14% have transactional marketplaces, and they average 621 product integrations.
- The 400 SaaS companies analyzed have an average number of 189 product integrations.
- Integrations and app marketplaces grow in direct proportion to the maturity of SaaS companies.
- The fastest-growing companies focus more on interoperability and providing integrations than the typical company of a similar size.
Overcoming fragmentation
The second part of the transformation is just getting started. This part is where integration partners become true GoToEcosystem partners leveraging co-marketing, co-selling, and co-retaining motions and doing so efficiently, predictably, and at scale. The reason that we have only just begun this transformation is that the shift has to be systemic and overcome the fragmentation we discussed in last week’s column - Overcoming the Homelessness Problem in Tech Partnerships.
Unlike integration partners who touch product or sales or customer success in silos, GoToEcosystem partners touch everything and require a complete re-imagination and a whole bunch of new strategic questions:
- Product Management- What was a maniacal focus on our Product roadmap and features becomes a planning environment that combines the Ecosystem and Product in road mapping and co-innovation strategy?
- Product Marketing - What was the feature or function of our product must now become a customer context that includes a whole solution and use cases that span across our product and those of our partners.
- Marketing - What was a focus on creating and converting MQLs, now involves reconstituting Demand Creation, ABN, and Marketing Automation around solution thought leadership and partner referrals as the highest converting and top-performing channels.
- Sales - What was a sales motion relaying on direct-to-market demand gen and AE push now becomes a race to creating 100% partner-attached pipelines. No deals happen if they don’t include a partner, as partner-attached deals are twice as big and close twice as fast.
- Customer Success - What was a renewal challenge now becomes a race to 99% renewals built on 2, 3, 4, or more partner integrations and customer success build around end-to-end product use cases.
The advantage of GoToEco
Companies that achieve these transformational outcomes realize that their product and their company are only as good as their GoToEcosystem with strategic alliances (mostly with tech partners).
Only GoToEcosystem partnerships can:
- Drive the integrations and proven use cases that lead to superior customer experiences.
- Differentiate your product as part of unique whole solutions that fill the top of your funnel with unstoppable Ecosystem Qualified Leads.
- Create SQLs that convert at a 3-4x higher rate.
- Reduce time to customer value while increasing customer retention.
- Ensure that your product remains relevant, resilient, and responsive to changing market forces.
To help partnership leaders and the C-Suite to better understand the mindset and strategic transformations required, we have created a full library of all of our GoToEcosystem content that is available for free to any B2B SaaS company.
Click here to obtain your library, and let’s GoToEco together.
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