“We need an ELG strategy” might not be enough for your CRO, CMO, CFO, or any other member of your C-Suite. You need numbers!
To get all your teams on board, proof helps. We gathered some results (from sources like GTM Partners, Allbound, Reveal, Canalys, Partnership Leaders, HubSpot, and more) you can share with your team the impact of ELG across each GTM motion:
- ELG Sales
- ELG Marketing
- ELG Customer Success
- ELG Product
- ELG Partnerships
Let this article be a reference you can return to. (We’ll keep it updated along the way. Feel free to send us more stats if you come across them!)
ELG Sales
Ecosystem-Led Growth sales means reaching buyers with the voices that surround them — voices they trust — to close more and bigger deals faster. It involves tapping into ecosystem intel, influence, and introductions so you can enter the buyer’s orbit.
If you want to get your Sales team on board, show them some of these stats on partner-influenced or partner-sourced pipeline and revenue, average deal size with partner involvement, and average close rates with partner involvement.
Revenue and pipeline (partner attached)
- 95% of Microsoft’s revenue flows through its partners. Microsoft’s AI strategy, in collaboration with partners, has resulted in a 100% partner attach rate and generated $2.5 trillion out of a total ecosystem value of $6.5 trillion, with an anticipated $5 trillion value contributed by partners working alongside their solutions.
- TrialPay utilized channel sales to go from zero to 10,000 clients in two years.
- SugarCRM partnered with Redington Gulf to extend its platform to Redington Gulf’s network of 15,000 customers in the Middle East, and gain access to a network of 34,000 resellers and more than 70 sales offices. In 2022, SugarCRM announced a 59% year-over-year increase in new customers, which it attributed in part to international growth through channel partnerships.
- After leveraging Reveal, Rydoo increased its qualified pipeline by 3x.
- Daniel O’Leary, Director of Partnerships at Box, mentioned that since implementing an ELG strategy in tandem with platforms like Reveal and Allbound, and working with his Sales team, they achieved a 55% higher potential ARR closed, meaning they won more of the seats.
- According to the “State of Partner Ops and Programs Report” Hubspot, Partnership Leaders, and Canalys found that 50% of organizations attribute 26% or more of their revenue to partners.
- PartnerStack and Monday.com have experienced 200% growth in partner-led revenue.
- Channel partners in Japan contributed to approximately 40% of Zoom’s Japan business in 2020.
- Atlassian’s ecosystem includes more than 700 channel partners that account for one-third of all business.
- Cloud marketplaces have also been growing YoY and the boom is set to continue, with predictions suggesting an increase from $15B in Marketplace throughput at the end of 2023 to $50B by the end of 2025.
- 82% of sales leaders identify referrals as the best leads, highlighting trust.
- Maya Connet, VP of Inside Sales at Clari, stated that partners impacted 41 % of their new logo business in the last 24 months.
- Highspot has observed that partners contribute 58% of the revenue generated by their top sales reps.
- Shopify’s partner ecosystem generated over $6.9 billion in 2019.
Average deal size with partner involvement
- Daniel O’Leary, Director of Partnerships at Box, and his team were able to close the biggest deals this year, last year, and the previous year (all were co-sold with partners), and they achieved 92% larger average contract values (ACV), with a higher attach rate of their top product.
- In GTM Partners’ report “Understanding Partner-Led Growth” they found out that partner-sourced opportunities have a 46% higher win rate, and partner-influenced opportunities have a 99% higher win rate.
- In GTM Partners’ Go-to-Market Benchmark Report, 33% of companies mentioned that their AVG partner deal size was between $20K - $75K, and the other 33% mentioned theirs was above $150K.
- According to Forrester, a deal can increase 4-5 size while closing 50% faster and realizing 234% ROI.
- Maya Connet, VP of Inside Sales at Clari, shared that opportunities that involved a partner converted at 4x the rate of non-partner opportunities, and that deals that had partners involved were 2.7 times larger than going at it solo.
Average close rates with partner involvement
- GTM Partners found that partner-sourced opportunities show an 11% shorter time to close.
- Daniel O’Leary, Director of Partnerships at Box, and his team, had 27% shorter average deal cycles when involving partners.
- 46% of Allbound’s closed won deals were attributed to partner intros, referrals, or previous existing relationships in Q3 2023, and they generated almost 40% of their deals through partner-led advocacy of some form.
- According to Allbound’s The Year of Partnerships report, deals are 53% more likely to close when a partner is involved.
- Sendoso calculated that partner-influenced deals close 28 days faster on average than non-partnership deals.
- Reveal has seen deals involving trusted partners have 41% higher win rates and close 35% faster.
ELG Marketing
Ecosystem-Led Growth marketing is a GTM strategy that aims to surround your buyers with the voices they trust. It’s not enough to try to cut through the noise and reach them directly; you’ve got to partner with the individuals and companies who already have influence.
Here are some stats to show your Marketing team the power of ELG for driving and qualifying leads, lowering CAC, and growing the market.
Qualified leads
- LeadMD doubled their bookings from ELG deals sourced through their partners like Marketo rather than through their marketing automation.
- By hosting a partner event with Vitally.io, Eric Sangerma, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Simplesat, achieved 240+ new MQLs with 8 immediate demo requests
CAC
- According to Workspan and Partnership Leaders, the CAC when working with a partner is 71% lower than when trying to acquire a customer in a direct way (featured in the Go-to-Market Benchmark Winter Report).
- As reported by Ernst and Young, those who have made the switch to ecosystem-first GTM have experienced a 56% improved new customer acquisition.
Partner influence
- At Yotpo, 60% of overall referrals a month on average are influenced by partner marketing.
- When implementing the open-text “How did you hear” field in Reveal forms and conversion points, we found more than 50% of people mention a specific person or company.
- 80% of B2B sales leaders say individuals in the buyer’s network have the biggest impact on purchase decisions.
- 70% of B2B buyers reference a person, a partner, or word of mouth as their “source”.
Events
- By running partner events in tandem with Reveal, Kate Hammit, CMO at Splash was able to drive 3x more pipeline, 45% increase in product usage by attendees, 78% attendance rate, 200% increase in total revenue from event programs, and 10% increase in win rate from attendees.
- Through a partner event-led GTM, Gainsight gained in their Q1 in 2023, 400 attendees, $20M in influenced ARR, and 300 AQLs and 40 SQLs.
ELG Success
Ecosystem-Led Growth customer success means identifying and solving customer problems with the partners that surround them. It involves understanding your customers and their world, going beyond just knowing your company’s software.
And if you want your Customer Success team on board with your ELG motion, you may want to share with them these stats around retention/churn and renewals/upsells.
Churn and retention rates
- Forrester Consulting’s report shows that partnered vendors have 10% higher customer lifetime value and nearly 14% lower churn.
- Rollworks found out that their customers with four or more integrations are 35% less likely to churn compared with those with just one integration enabled.
- 70% of users who join through Help Scout’s startup partner program convert to paying customers
- Payfit had an increase of up to 60% in lead-to-demo conversion rate and an increase of up to 50% in demo-to-customer conversion rate.
- Companies that partner have a 28% higher compound annual growth, attributed to the fact that partnering improves retention and expands your customer base.
Renewals and upsells
- According to Canalys, companies with strong partner programs enjoy a 15% higher renewal rate and a 20% increase in upsell revenue.
- RollWorks customers who are using partner integrations renew at a rate approximately 30% higher than customers who don’t.
- Breezy HR’s customers who worked with partners were 57% more likely to renew their contracts than those who didn’t.
ELG Product
Ecosystem-Led Growth product means partnerships are part of your overarching product strategy. How your product functions and integrates with your customers’ stack is even more important than what it does in isolation.
Here are a few stats proving the power of a ELG product strategy.
Integrations
- As reported by Ernst and Young, those who have made the switch to ecosystem-first GTM have experienced a 47% accelerated product-to-market.
- 91% of customers place a higher priority on how a product integrates into their lives or workflows over its price, service, and brand reputation, indicating the growing importance of integration-first buying behavior among customers.
- Integrations with existing tech are a top priority for 76% of buyers.
- AssessFirst had an increase of 4x in client integration and increased their lead generation by 100%.
- Integration is the most important factor for buyers purchasing partner technology. 74.2% of buyers report that a system’s ability to integrate is either a very or extremely important consideration.
ELG Partnerships
Ecosystem-Led Growth is more than just channel sales or traditional B2B partnerships. It’s an overlay to every department that involves going to market with and through the voices buyers trust. That includes solutions partners, channel partners, tech partners, referral and affiliate partners, but it also includes anyone else who influences buyers.
Here are some stats on the rise of partnerships.
- GTM Partners mentioned in their GTM Benchmark Winter Report 2024, that 60% of companies will expand their Partner team in 2024. As companies large and small look for efficient growth more and more are turning to the increasingly popular Partner-led growth motion.
- PartnerStack and Apollo.io have experienced 432% increase in partnership revenue.
- Reveal claims that by 2025 nearly 33% of all sales will come from your ecosystem.
- 75% of the $105 trillion world economy is sold through partners.
- McKinsey reports that 82% of CEOs are investing more in partnerships.
- Over 80% of Microsoft’s massive influx of new partners are non-transacting—focused on awareness, advocacy, and retention rather than direct sales.
- Thanks to Reveal, Lucca has significantly enhanced its partnership assessment and expanded its ecosystem with 15 integrations in the last eight months.
- The creation of a ELG enablement program thanks to the HubSpot and Reveal App, which made Contractbook’s GTM teams more efficient, leading to an increase of 2-3x more meetings booked.
- By using Reveal instead of spreadsheets for account mapping, you can save a significant amount of time. Typically, manually matching account data with a single partner without a tool like Reveal could take up to 20 hours of work for a dataset of 500-1K accounts, depending on the complexity of the mapping.
Revealing the power of ELG
Another way to prove the power of ELG is by leveraging Crossbeam's Attribution and Performance dashboards.
It highlights revenue potential in your partner ecosystem. This data is displayed in a separate dashboard so you can quickly and easily assess the potential value and prioritize your existing partnerships.
You can have access to metrics like:
- Partner addressable revenue: The total potential revenue across all partners
- Lead gen: My partners’ customers that are not in my CRM. Revenue potential is based on the # of accounts * Win Rate * Deal Size
- Sourced revenue: My prospects with no open deal that are my partners’ customers. Revenue potential is based on the # of accounts * Win Rate * Deal Size
- Influenced revenue: My prospects with an open deal that are my partners’ customers. Revenue potential is based on the # of accounts * Win Rate * Deal Size
Accessing this data can help you identify which partners have the most overlap and best impact on their key market/segment and prioritize them accordingly.
If you want to maximize the value of your partnerships and dial in your ELG strategy, Reveal can help.
Book a call with our team, and they can share best practices and use cases to get started.
