@Robert Rand yes! I received a gift box from appdynamics that had ~8 client-sourced products in the box that all looped back to a theme (each of these brands had a mission, like a buy 1 donate 1 or some sort of "giving back" model). Example: Bombas socks and The Love Project. Amazing box. No branding at all except for an insert. No branded swag and all useful stuff!

I was invited to a happy hour with Sendoso, they sent me a make your own cocktail kit (I think its like 100$), but it was awesome

sup

We're a vidyard customer!

Hi Alyshah, At Plecto, we announce a new integration with a pop up in our product. This pop up is only visible for admins. We also announce the launch on LinkedIn and on our internal newsletter.

The sales team is typically the ones who has requested these integrations on a customer or prospects behalf so they often know about the integration beforehand. However we always make sure to associate clients and prospects to the feature request, so when this is made, the salesteam is able to reach out to all of the clients who has wished for the integration.

This gives us the option to either upgrade the clients in licenses when adding a new department og close a client who wouldn't have signed without the given integration.

I actually think it starts before the integration is built. I like the partner team playing a “voice of the partner” role in the design of the integration. This helps them understand its capabilities early, and empowers them to work most effectively with the product marketing team when launching it. This helps make all the typical launch announcements and activities more effective with better messaging.

I have my tier 1 that I meet with weekly, tier 2 that I meet with monthly, and tier 3 I meet with quarterly

If you can share: what are criteria for your tiers?

We tier our partners based on how we think they will perform in co-selling -- normally we'll use a tool like crossbeam to determine mutual overlaps for target account that are their customers, this will give us the TAM, then from there its a judgement call based on how engaged the partner manager at the partner is.

Large TAM + great PM = Tier 1 Small-medium TAM + great PM = Tier 2 (can move to Tier 1 or 3 depending on performance) Regardless of TAM + not engaged or no PM = Tier 3

PMs that are engaged tend to have a pipeline target, PMs that are not engaged tend to have a # net new integrations target.

Most programs I've seen move from a target of new integrations, to pipeline within 2-3 years of launching their integration program which is why we still meet with them quarterly to better understand their partner program growth.

I wrote a bit more in this article with Crossbeam on how we go about co-selling with partners and account mapping.

Hi Chloe, do you mean of tech partners (this channel)? Or was this meant for #channel-partnerships ?

I'm curious to hear specifically from other tech partners!

This might be a little esoteric when you’re looking for a tactical answer, but I think it’s an important principle…

You have the somewhat unique opportunity with a tech partner to really think through a cross-product experience and market that as a killer feature. Don’t just market all of _your_ product’s killer features and then, oh yeah, pass data to this partner. Really think about what does your combined (and now integrated) solution help the user do that they otherwise couldn’t?

Why is that important for lead gen? The same reason any other marketed feature is. It sets you apart from competition and triggers that, “oh man, I want this” response in your ideal fit user’s brain.

And, when you’ve worked with your partner to design the integrated solution with a cross-product experience mindset, you both reap the benefits, meaning you both generate more leads, which means you have more leads to share. Virtuous cycle!

Thank you for your thoughts @Ryan Lunka! Interesting angle you are providing me with, because this is actually what we do at the moment. Plecto is able to create manual datasources itself, however the intention is to use it together with integrations, since this creates the best value for the client!

My question might have been wrongly worded. But to elaborate, we have tried to create e-books, webinars, whitepapers, blogs, LinkedIn posts etc. together with Partners, however I have never seen a huge lead attraction when doing this. I was just curious to hear if anyone had found the lead-goldmine and wanted to share the success story

Your question was worded quite well. I just abused your wording a bit with my answer.

I’ve experienced similar challenges in past roles. Lead gen is just flat-out hard. Tactically I think joint webinars (assuming you have the audience to attract enough attendees) has probably been the most successful converting thing I’ve done. I wouldn’t call that a secret unlock or a goldmine, though.

I think all the tactics you mention can be effective but it depends on your target, your content, and your space - in some spaces, as Ryan said, it can be very competitive for eyeballs. With an ebook, for example, you really have to find a topic that your prospects are searching for. The integration itself might only be a small part of that content.

Do any of your partners have large, relevant audiences that you can post something on their site that incentivizes them to go back to your own website? (This can help an SEO strategy as well, though that will be more long term).

Do any of your partners have integration marketplaces where you can persuade them to feature your app? We see a lot of leads coming from marketplaces.

Another tactic if you haven't tried this already is to see if you can get your partners to include you in their customer marketing/communications (as opposed to public channels). That can be highly effective and practical and a much more targeted audience as they can likely segment it effectively.

I have also seen people take out Google Ads around people searching for how to do something made possible by the integration or on the integration category itself (for example 'survey app that integrates with Salesforce') - many of those searches would be low volume but high intent.

@Ryan Lunka Do you do anything specific when finishing the webinar in terms of contacting the leads? In my experience, we of course set a landing page, where they sign up with their info and give consent to being contacted afterwards. However, I am wondering if there is a more effective and innovative way of contacting them and awake their interest in getting a meeting with my team

@Kelly Sarabyn You are totally right. Maybe we could have done the communication and the topics more relevant and precise for our previous webinars! We are trying to provide guest blogs for partners websites, which tabs into their own clients needs and converting that information into how they could use our platform. We also create a landingpage on the marketplaces for when we build a new integration, as we also see that some of these marketplaces are running quite good!

I have tried to provide a specific offer to one partner, however, sometimes they do have strict agendas as to what and how they communicate on their newsletters, however I might try this with other partners as well.

We also just did this with our google ads and discovered that Excel users are converting really well!

Another thing I have tried, which might inspire you (or others) is to do demo trainings for the partners Customer Service and Sales teams. When doing this, the employees knows what your product is able to provide their clients with and they will remember you when a client is requesting something similar to your own product!

@Genesis Garcia I agree! Demo trainings and implementing marketing touches to try to stay top of mind to partner CS and Sales teams is a great way to generate high quality intros.

Some I have seen be successful: Sending out emails on the integration to segmented audiences based on their likelihood of being interested, making sure customer support/success has good materials and an understanding of the integration, offering webinars with the tech partner and a beta customer showcasing what it can be used for and marketing through normal channels/social/email, monthly featured integrations on social/website. If you're tracking failed installs or people who visit the marketing page on the integration or you have a wait list feature, reaching out to those people with support/materials/a webinar can really be effective as they have already signaled interest.

Hi @Shana Kus! I wish i would have said no to more meetings earlier that were out of focus for us. Natural to want to be open to anything, especially if you've got 1) time and 2) a quota ... but getting involved in too much that doesnt align with pure mongoose partnerships strategy will be a time suck later on. Hope thats a little helpful

So helpful, thank you! It's a vote of confidence for all of the work I've been doing on building an ideal partner profile to make sure we're able to entertain conversations that align with our strategy

Hi @Shana Kus - I recommend spending more time developing relationships with you your top 20% of partners. I cast a wide net when I began our program and was seeing good results initially, but traffic has dropped off considerably after the honeymoon phase. Identify your top partners and work closely with them to build good case studies for other partners to emulate. Scaling a program is great and will yield results, but you'll likely see better results supporting a smaller number of partners well then a large number of partners mediocrely.

Great advice, thank you!

Uh interesting!

Welcome @Matt Lubbers I’m still interested in chatting- sent you a couple emails earlier this year

Hi Curtis - are they reluctant bc they have to expend engineering resources or bc they don't see enough value in the use case?

If the latter, if you have any data from your own customer base showing they want that functionality that would be helpful - especially if you can show your current customer base is of significant size. And short of survey data, if you have a sizable customer of the partner who is willing to explain their interest in this functionality on the record (sort of like a case study) that could help.

Another thing to do would be to look at your partner's product road map and understand if and where this fits in. If it fills a hole from product's perspective in terms of where they are trying to go, you might be able to get the product team excited about it.

If you can roll this out with some partners and then track the impact on retention, reviews, or satisfaction for the partner, that could be compelling to others in the same product category.

Hi Curtis! I have experienced a higher interest in our product as well as several direct referrals from integration partners sales and customer service teams, simply because we fill out a gap in their own product.

This means, that we basically function like a retention tool for the partner, by being able to provide the feature and functions which the partner doesn't support.

So as Kelly said, if you can set yourself as a valuable asset to the partner, where your product is needed and asked for from the client, then the partner would most likely be more interested in requesting your solution.

Hey Curtis, good to meet you. Have you looked into partnering with an integration platform as a service? At Celigo, we already connect to the CRM, FSM, ERP, payments, commerce platforms. In addition, the platform can move data in both directions with a ton of other cool features like transformation, orchestration, and error handling. Feel free to check out our website and ping me if you want to have an exploratory chat.

@Curtis Davey I’d be interested to know why your engineering team isn’t able to/has time to/whatever to build inbound integrations. I think nailing down that friction point will be key in deciding if the solution is one/some of: a) building your integration capability out further, b) partnering with iPaaS, c) adopting embedded iPaaS, or d) doubling down on the “build to us” enablement messaging. All can be right answers in the right circumstances.

@Ben Astin Plenty of ways to slice and dice this classic question. The common variables I’ve seen are 1) customer demand (what integrations are users asking for? Good time to ask sales/support to track this if they aren’t currently. You can sum up ARR associated with each request and prioritize that way) 2) level of technical effort/partner’s ability to do the build or support your team doing so 3) GTM synergy - are you plugging an unsolved need for the partner that helps them close deals/feature gaps such that you can expect them to act as a valuable channel? Or are you plugging into an ecosystem that’s pretty saturated or too niche for your use case. Also want to make sure the partner even has the capability to aid GTM for you via their field or if their team is too small/impacted/inexperienced with partner motions 4) Partner buy-in - this is 100% qualitative, but if partners are excited to work with you and you don’t have to do much convincing to tell the better together story/they’re bringing their own ideas and resources to the table proactively, then you could be on to something.

It helps to have a goal that your tech partnerships align around to prioritize the right criteria - if integrations are a retention play for you, you might intentionally over-index on customer demand. If you’re goaled on sourced revenue, GTM synergy becomes more important. Hope that helps.

One thing that can help get your bearings is digging through the partner’s marketplace if they have one. If there are existing integrations in your space, there could be a strong need, you’ll just need to understand if those existing players do a good job of solving it. If there are few/no integrations, but you have customers asking for it, then you’ve stumbled on some potential whitespace.

@Eugene Krimkevich This is an awesome response and some fantastic advice. Thank you very much for your insight here. The Partner’s marketplace is an interesting one…we’re genuinely 1 of 2 or 3 people doing what we’re doing and we’re the most advanced and therefore there’s a ton of whitespace…hence the question!! We’re being inundated with requests to integrate and yet to publish our OpenAPI so have to form an orderly queue

Definitely not a bad problem to have

@Ben Astin I like to use a nine-box priority matrix to help sift through all of the integration possibilities and set some priorities. Short version: two axes with high, medium, low. One axis is effort required and the other is impact for the business. You can quantify them how it best fits your business, but my default rec is that effort looks something like Agile estimation and impact is a financial ROI impact.

Not trying to pimp our blog, but I wrote it out in a lot more detail there: https://www.blendededge.com/blog/prioritizing-your-product-integration-roadmap

Bottom line: the faster an integration is delivering value for the company the better. It gets very easy to politic certain integrations to different places in the roadmap, so you want to have a framework that seeks to normalize the decisions with unbiased consistency.

Also everything @Eugene Krimkevich said is .

Massive +1 on @Ryan Lunka’s pro tip on using a framework to “score” your integration request list. My framework looks a bit different but the bottom line is what Ryan said: “normalize the decisions with unbiased consistency.” No shortage of opinions across different teams on what should be built/why, this helps keep everyone honest.

At the end of the day everyone is always making a judgement call. We are humans and we haven’t been replaced with the bots…yet. But, injecting a framework-based set of information into the conversation will up the odds of making judgement calls that result in positive outcomes.

All of this is valuable learnings, appreciate all the input here guys. Ryan - pimp away! And I will be taking a deeper dive on the post early next week. I think you both nailed when saying it’s about implementing a simple yet effective approach that still allows the team to make a judgement call (but limit them )

kramer pimp

Seinfeld reference, for the general audience.

Following - great question!

Hi Arjun! Welcome. Please take a moment and answer someone else’s question. That will improve your chance of having your question answered.

Sure Sunir!

Awesome project! I’d also be diving into cost of ownership for each integration. You’ll want to make sure that cost is justified against the tangible (and even intangible) benefits it brings. A rough estimation of the infrastructure costs + number of person hours going into maintenance should be close enough. You’ll have to tease that stuff out with your engineering team though.

Looks like a great list. You might also show LTV for customers using X integrations vs not (if you aren't already), new customers acquired through integrations, and (if you track it) deals influenced by integrations

That’s an important initiative that will help you show the business value of the integrations as well as justify the investment, and provide insight into future ones. I did something similar a couple of years ago, and we also measured pipeline growth, sales cycle velocity and partner referrals. Good luck!

Hey Nick. We do offer comped accounts to tech partners that need sandbox access if they ask. Free Typeform accounts have developer level access too, but sometimes partners want access to features that are only available on paid plans.

We haven't done a great job of ensuring that these accounts are only being used to build integrations. However, we can easily monitor account activity by looking up the coupon code in our BI tool. Your message prompted me to lookup the code and luckily, it doesn't seem like we have any partners using the code for non-partnerships related activities.

At Facebook, we wanted every partner to use Workplace with our GTM teams, so we offered pricing that wasn't free, but was so nominal that it would have been crazy to not purchase it - which helped to unblock POCs and get us working together in the product.

I'm also a big fan of "not for resell" version to use for Dev, Test and Demos.

To me the risk isn't that people abuse it, it's actually that it's too hard to sign up, or that they don't use it at all.

Great to see you here @Nick Valluri, I am facing a similar situation at Personio where we provide a free trial account on which we have no real monitoring. I'd like to move that to a Developer account that gives more feature access (similar to paid plan) alongside a sandbox environment with both Alpha and Prod features.

Some great thoughts here, thanks all for sharing. I generally agree with the lowest friction path possible and that partners using your product is a good thing, but also have to strike a balance with a motivated sales team that, given the nature of Coda's product, sells to a lot of the companies that we also partner with.

And great to see you too @Hugues Vincent (Personio)!

@Nick Valluri and make sure sales to partners counts towards their quotas. Obvious, until you work for a company that doesn't do it

@Tom Elliott have you seen the content and best practices from Pandium? I found a whitepaper from @Kelly Sarabyn super helpful and I've shared that with some of my friends who are in GTM and Partnership roles

I have- great stuff.

Thanks @Dan O’Leary! @Tom Elliott I agree the language in the space is still evolving (ask 10 people what an ecosystem is LOL) - but one way to tackle this in sales is to look at the job titles of the company you are talking to and see what terminology they are using for people who are in charge of partnerships that revolve around integrations. IME this is mostly Technology Partnerships but can also be Product Partnerships, Platform, or Strategic Partnerships (the latter usually smaller orgs that do not have a BD person solely dedicated to product integrations yet.)

And for B2B SaaS who are selling heavily or almost exclusively to enterprises, especially in IT, then I do think it gets more confusing - there they are much more likely to also be thinking of a distributor/reseller/system integrator if you say 'tech partnership.'

@Kelly Sarabyn All true, but my question is this: if our industry set some standard definitions through an org like CSA, i.e. get consensus among members about definitions and then publish those definitions and promote them, would that help save time that’s currently wasted finding common tongue in each engagement with a partner/customer? I think it would!

@Tom Elliott I completely agree that standardizing language would benefit the space, but I don't think any particular organization currently has enough reach to create that standardization. The majority of people working in B2B SaaS technology partnerships (many in product and engineering) are not members of any partnership association, and many who are won't engage with this question or an article on it. But there is certainly no harm in trying to put definitions out there. I know one of Crossbeam's most popular articles on their blog is defining the different partnership types - so clearly people in SaaS are struggling with the terminology!

Yup. I’d like to CSA try, and see if it at least moves the needle among its own members! Perhaps we can get Partnership Leaders to endorse a glossary as well

Firneo is another one that could potentially circulate it to more tech partnerships people.

@Kelly Sarabyn Do agree that the glossary/definition-setting should happen at the trade association/org level, and not by individual competing companies? (like Pandium and Left Hook, for instance )

To actually reach widespread adoption, I think it would have to be endorsed and shared by multiple parties in the space, including associations and companies. It would certainly be more authoritative coming from a neutral organization/association than a vendor, but the reality is some vendors have a much greater reach for their content/materials with tech partnership practitioners than organizations do - though this space is rapidly evolving so that may look differently in 2-3 years. IMO, even competing vendors have a strong, shared interest in spreading awareness of Partner Operations as a field and practice.

Agree, but we need to start somewhere. I’d love Pandium’s support in making this a project of CSA.

Hell yeah to this conversation. I’d be totally open to contributing to something like this too. I don’t see why would couldn’t form a working group, per se, for starting this.

I think we have a number of people in CSA who would be able to contribute quite effectively.

Summoning @Sunir Shah to this thread, to see if he agrees this Glossary concept is something we might get CSA to work on with us

We'd be happy to participate if there is interest in putting this together.

@Tom Elliott start a google doc and have at it!

Offering a good developer experience can make a huge difference - good API docs, sandbox, easy to build with/good functionality in your API, accessible tech support, and a developer community where people can ask each other questions.

Ed, I’m usually trying to understand a few areas on the topic of fit.

• Culture fit - (this is big for me) how does the partner show up, how will they work with me, are they too aggressive / too passive • Customer profile fit (enterprises vs hobby users), • Company Stage fit - seed company vs post-IPO, need to justify if a partner is at bookends why is it good fit for me (at series C company) • Sales Stage fit - where do I believe this partner’s product shows up in my sales cycle, pre-sales, post-sales, Understand who buys our products (doesn’t have to be same persona) • Have I seen a customer do a project with that technology before • Product / Technology fit - Does it fit my product roadmap today, somethign in the future?

Around benefits when I partner, it is really about my own KPIs and if the partnership doesn’t move my boat forward, then I’m trying to filter out.

Being clean on when you would or would not pursue partnership is an important alignment exercise - what KPIs will you be held accountable for. Otherwise I find I get pulled in a lot of directions for sake of “partnership” if I don’t stay true to my goals.

hey @Edward Chan this is Swapnil from CallHippo which provides Virtual Phone System to Businesses around the globe.

By any chance, is Thinkific looking for any integration partner which will help Course Creators make calls to the enrolled students directly from Thinkific dashboard?

@Kelly Sarabyn (HubSpot) thank you for the insight, I agree the Dev Experience is really what drive organic growth as developer circles are often close-knit and having a seamless experience is such a key factor. My team and I are heavily exploring how to build out a strong community, curious to pick your brain if you had any "must have" features specific to a developer community

@Sarfaraz Rydhan Often times a large challenge I see if even if the partnership aligns with KPIs they find it hard to get approval for development as engineering capacity is one of the most precious resources in any Saas Company. Do you have any suggestions for making prospective partners align with the benefits of the partnership or tools to building a strong business case to get through this hurdle?

@Swapnil Rathod Shooting you a DM to explore further!

Sure @Edward Chan I think clear, thorough API and SDK docs and developer forums are always good to have. A developer newsletter where you can share any cool new features, apps, articles, or SDKs also helps (as well as dev email notifications specifically devoted to API/product changes). The opp to give input to your prod and dev teams. Ultimately having app contests, meetups, and free sandboxes can be popular but that can get more expensive ... as to your other point about making the business case, we have an infosheet detailing how to get more resources for tech partnerships internally. It's much more general than one specific partnership but you might be able to customize it to your space and share it with your partners so they can get more resources. https://www.pandium.com/resources/how-to-get-more-internal-resources-for-tech-partnerships

It might be helpful to give integrations some love on your website. I can see it there, but it’s pretty buried in the product pages.

Your product is unique or unique enough that a user may not just reflexively know which system they’d want this to integrate to. Having a page that talks about the API and current integrations that includes some example use cases (like what someone would do with a CRM integration) might be helpful.

In terms of leveraging _with_ your partners. 1) Make sure they have clear, succinct information about the integration, what it does, how much it costs, benefit to user, etc. 2) Have a crystal clear story with your partner about the cross-product experience the integration enables. 3) Co-market the hell out of it.

(disclaimer: I used to work there so I'm biased), but I would invest in the Zapier integration and the various partner programs/initiatives that they have in place. As you move up the tiers, there are a lot of high impact user acquisition plays like getting featured in the app gallery, or in a dedicated blog post/email. The other companies you've built integrations to also have strong partner programs, so I'd advise leaning in to those and figuring out what channels they make available for integration partners vs straight up PR.

I agree with Nick. Your app feels like a really good fit for Zapier. Not everyone’s use cases are, but for the ones that are, Zapier is an excellent platform.

Hey @Ryan Lunka and @Nick Valluri thanks so much guys, really appreciate the nudge re Zapier. Will pursue and if there's anything else you think of re the how and the what please let me know

No problem! Many of them are here and I'm sure would be happy to share some best practices @Reid Robinson @Dannielle Sakher @Emily Breuninger

Piggybacking on @Ryan Lunka’s point re clear and succinct partner enablement - best advice I’ve gotten here was working with a partner leader at Zendesk who recommended that any enablement we provide allow their AEs and pre-sales folks to “pattern-match”. Basically, when they hear x (problem) they should immediately match that to y (your solution). We literally have a section in our enablement of statements a customer might say that suggest they have a need for our product. When a partner AE hears one of those, then bingo (hopefully).

Hey Tarah! Feel free to DM me if you want to chat about Zapier. We're an open book and there's a ton of details online about how to partner with us and make the most of your integration.

#1 piece of advice I give to partners is to think about how integrations are discoverable within their product. Not to just bury them in Settings -> Integrations. Zapier has some cool tech to make what's possible with Zapier easier to see for users. We just rolled out a big update where you can copy and paste a line of code and it builds an app directory powered by Zapier. https://zapier.com/partner/embed/app-directory

Yes, we launched our partner program on PartnerStack earlier this year. Happy to answer any questions!

Thanks, Landon! I think I got the answer I needed, but may reach out to you if something pops up- hope that's okay?

of course!

Happy to help if you still need it. I have 4 instances of PS and running 9 total programs out of them.

Thanks!!

@Eric Chan @Jason Breed @Cory Snyder @Sue Fernand sounds like something y’all might have

@Sarfaraz Rydhan May I suggest you just wrote your own template here? Turn that list into a Google doc and you have a template.

You should add a log for qbrs though.

Quarter Objective, key results.

Keep, Start, Stop

I have a template Joint Success Plan that I use with our top partners, the slide below is 1 from the deck. LMK if this template would be helpful for the community and I can externalize it for sharing

@Dan O’Leary this is helpful! I can build on this for sure. Thanks for sharing this.

Is there anything similar you’d use even earlier, e.g. during discovery ?

@Sarfaraz Rydhan - I think you're looking for a few different TL;DR; diagrams for your company. It's sounds really silly, but even creating an org chart diagram, helps get a lot of data across. It helps the Exec Team understand how to leverage the Partner and how to think through a strategy.

I would think about an ROE that you establish that is both internal (amongst teams) and external (which in a way to measure engagement and success. Last, I would think about "swim lanes" that cover GTM, Product, Partnerships along a Quarterly timeline to map everything out.

If you have further questions, we can schedule a chat.

@Sarfaraz Rydhan you bet, actually would you be interested in tag teaming a shared / community doc on partner intake questions?

yeah! How can I help? @Dan O’Leary

Thanks for the tag Sunir. I agree with Eric here. You might be looking for different docs.

ROE - I do have a template for this that I am happy to share. This would involve rules of engagement for the different groups on working with partners and partner referrals.

As for many working with the different partners, I have used slack groups per partner, teams groups per partner and so on. This means we have an open communication area that isn't over thinking it.

Outside of that, I have been very clear with everyone involved with a partner that they need to keep the main point of contact in the loop. That can be done via email, crm or other communication platforms. So I created simple document of what I expect from everyone talking to a partner and shared it with everyone. Think ROE but internally.

@Cory Snyder that internal ROE template would be great to see! Would you mind sharing

Yup. Happy to share. I will send it over. I recently just put it together so partner see internal ROE and vice versa

Thanks, @Cory Snyder. Just one doc, right? Looks like the partner’s ROE, is there an internal team members ROE too?

Thanks for sending!

Yeah should be one doc. I merged them the other day to make it more transparent for internal teams and our external partners.

love this @Ashleigh Gray @Brendan Thompson @Alyshah Walji

@Rachel Shi Was literally just scrolling through the feed and reading the awesome comments and saw you'd tagged me

Great to hear your program is a significant source of revenue for the company @Sharon Halbani

have not done this, but would love to learn!

I am interested as well - seems like a good topic for a roundtable conference call :)

good call @Ghazenfer Mansoor: Ive never organized a roundtable call in CSA, should I just pick a date and put a call out to the #general channel on this topic?

sure - @Jenny Risch (Electric.ai)

Hi Nahry! Congratulations on the new opportunity.

We have a complete guide to integrated partnerships. https://www.cloudsoftwareassociation.com/2019/07/11/the-complete-integrated-partnership-launch-checklist/

We have a very extensive catalog on prioritizing integration strategies in our Masterclass series for Executive Members. Henry is a member, but should join the executive member group if you are working on this. We have more resources there.

this is great--thank you! I'll check with Henry too!

@Nahry Tak If you're looking at this programmatically, Chapter 5 of this book details what the top 50 tech partner programs in SaaS do in terms of the GTM side of their partner programs - both in terms of what they require of partners and what they offer partners. https://www.pandium.com/resources/an-analysis-of-fifty-top-technology-partnership-programs

thank you @Kelly Sarabyn (HubSpot) -- appreciate it!

@Nahry Tak This blog post might be of interest as well: https://blog.crossbeam.com/launch-tech-partner-ecosystem-integration-marketplace

thanks @Tom Elliott!

Hey @Evan Radisic I'd love to join.

I got you @Eric Chan. Ping me a blurb I could send along. I've got someone in BD and in Channel.

Let me know if I can help

Likewise, if you still end up needing help, I used to work fairly closely with their partnership team and have some connections.

What is the context? I wouldn’t call any tech partner (like another SaaS provider) an ISV, mostly because it’s somewhat of an older term.

Interesting. I prefer “B2B SaaS” but then somebody always points out that “SaaS” excludes lots of different software companies that are still good partners with usasble APIs

I have used it more in an Enterprise context where the term did resonate with folks (in comparison to system Integrators & service partner). In SMB oriented SaaS definitely not relevant.

I always think of ISVs as software providers, where as Technology partners could include software, hardware and/or platform vendors (cloud or otherwise).

ISV means Independent Software Vendor, and it is still meaningful and relevant today.

Whenever there is an underlying platform which is the primary technology sold to the customer, but it is enhanced with third-party software extensions (the ISVs) to complete the whole product solution, this distinction makes sense.

The meaning of independent means they are separately contracted by the customer (i.e. they have their own EULAs) outside the platform.

The apps in the Shopify app store are ISVs in that sense. It can apply to really any software partner.

@Sunir Shah I need to let you know, that I love this channel. It really has the tech partner focus which I was in need of before. • Maybe some weekly posts that could start some discussion/brainstorming about different obstacles and topics? • Monthly or weekly zoom meetings (which covers Europe and US timezone) where different discussions or sharing ideas could happen? Just brainstorming here

Also, maybe we could have linked useful articles from the CSA website in the top of this channel in Slack?

Monthly calls is an ace idea. I have to be kind to myself and set it up as an automated flow but I think I know how to do that.

Content organization is my top csa priority after the conference is sorted. I could use some help finding the videos and blogs that are relevant and organizing them though.

Some (self-serving) perspective here: https://blog.crossbeam.com/launch-tech-partner-ecosystem-integration-marketplace

This is really awesome - thank you!

This is the 0:1 playbook for any company who wants to setup a partner program. Well done @Nick Valluri !

I got you - yeah?

That's me! Thanks Nick (and Captain )

Late to the game but got Suresh connected to the right person as well

Interesting concept! I am in a similar spot, but hadn't considered a template of sorts to pull from. My fear is that, since each partnership tends to be unique, each contract would need a significant amount of reconstruction anyway. Following this thread to see what the rest have to say

I am separating the Product Integration from the commercial one. I am seeking to make the Commercial one fairly modular to cover the various type of engagement / benefits we'd consider

Hi Jason, yes, in my experience, many software vendors have a similar modular approach. I'm currently implementing the same approach for my company.

The framework is as follows: all partners sign a "baseline" business development agreement, which covers definitions, appointment as a business partner, trademark usage, limits of liability and indemnification, term and termination, and confidentiality.

And then, knowing that most partners operate using multiple selling motions, such as resale, referral, services, etc..., we provide addenda to the baseline agreement for each selling motion in which a partner would like to add.

This is how ServiceNow structures their program agreements if you want to dig in there https://www.servicenow.com/partners/become-a-partner.html

Thanks @Len Martin and @Andrew Edelman!

We had eerily similar statistics at FreshBooks when I was running partnerships and I did a lot of statistical analysis. That was about 9 years ago.

Thanks @Sunir Shah, I am kind of flying blind right now. What I am seeking to get to a formula that would justify my service & growth team to invest the time and effort in further educating customers on these integrations

I will tell you correlation does not equal causation; CEO was never fully convinced that more adoption = more revenue

Yep - fully aware of that as well

So we did qualitative analysis as well

“How did you hear about us?” was always a winner

and “Why did you purchase XXX over other options?”

integrations came up 50% of the time

I never got approval to run a split test to hide the integrations to show revenue drop off… because after all, they were in high demand.

At WordPress.com, the breadth of the ecosystem was definitely an ahah moment for less experienced users. During trial, when touched by service educating them on plugin had a measurable effect on likelihood of conversion.

Over longer time period, that LTV impact is harder to prove (causation vs correlation)

I mean I don’t know how anyone could argue Wordpress integrations weren’t the fundamental purpose

That being said, I live in 2021. I should stop being amazed at what people will argue.

For sure, but there we were dealing with first time site builder for the most part. They had heard of WordPress but precisely walking them through that made them buy into it vs not (again talking about non-exp WordPress users)

@Hugues Vincent (Personio) @Sunir Shah We’ve been noodling on this question for years. I think most of the “proof” is locked up inside SaaS companies that don’t want to tip their hands on the relationship between integrations and LTV or ARR growth.

Here’s some of the research we’ve done: https://lefthook.com/blog/getapp-category-leaders-integration/

Sounds like you have all the KPIs covered. The only other one I might add is that some people (not many) charge directly for integrations. So in those cases, you can show that direct revenue AND that integrations are important to those customers.

Others put integrations on higher paid plans and one way to track that other than what Sunir mentioned regarding just asking is to have an "Upgrade" button next to the integration inside your app - so you can capture when some people upgrade bc they wanted the, say, Salesforce integration.

Also, if you are in larger partner integration marketplaces, you can obviously more directly track when customers came/purchased because of the integration.

In terms of retention/churn, the best thing to do seems to track similar cohorts of customers who signed up at the same time and seem similar in profile and only seem to differ on integration adoption - and show different churn rates - obviously this requires substantial data to be accurate and can't rule out definitely that there is an unseen, untracked variable that is causing the difference in churn - but when you combine this data with the market data on how top/fast growing SaaS all have a number of integrations (and the qualitative interviews Sunir mentions), it seems to be pretty strong evidence.

@Mike Stocker is a FB alum in partnerships… I wonder if he can help?

@Kabir Mathur I work a lot with Facebook. Want to hop on a call to chat?

Product partnerships with Facebook is my speciality so if you want to chat I’m here. Just DM me.

Thanks for the suggestion @Tom Elliott!

@Reid Robinson I'd love to chat to get your perspective on working with FB. I'll DM you to setup a time to chat

pinging @Marina Shilman

There are some large companies that have done this- essentially looked for highly-adopted apps built by their partners that they then buy and take ownership of. There’s also a hybrid model of paying a third-party (IE, not your company and not your partner or customer but maybe a development shop) to build something and then sharing ownership. It can get murky when ownership/support are unclear so defining that straight away is definitely important. I personally have thoughts on what I’ve seen be successful but curious about what others have experienced.

Hi Jason. We use PartnerStack at Typeform to track the revenue generated by our Channel partners and a few tech partners too. We're pretty satisfied with the platform

PartnerStack and Allbound seem to be the most popular ones in SaaS. Integrations out of the box are not that great with any PRM. But all of them have CRM integrations, especially to Salesforce.

Unless your program is particularly complex, PS and Allbound could both be implemented relatively quickly.

If you have distributors or are in the enterprise space, Impartner might be worth looking at (though implementation would be longer).

We have this ebook which lists the majority of PRMs on the market with their features/strengths: https://www.pandium.com/resources/the-partner-tech-stack-vendor-review

high level - @Jason Doran feel free to reference the directory (sort for PRM category). https://cloudassoc.partnerpage.io/integrations

Hi @Jason Doran, we are happy to at Scalando.com. You can manage all types of partners as well as accelerate your partner, CS and Sales enablement in one platform. Just ping me

Hi Jason, I like Torchlite. Worked with Tom

It’s a good time for partnerships now. However if they are lowering fees now you know they will dramatically raise them in the years to come. We all lived through the 80s and 90s.

Take the money now and pretend you didn’t hear me when they raise the rates later, and complain loudly. :)

Taxation, or rents?

I see it as taxation - rent would suggest the ISV had some degree of control

I think he means it this way. “Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity.”

Tax is more of an involuntary obligation; but it’s closer to the pay-to-play model.

I work very closely with our product team each Q. With annual planning we prioritize for the year but, revisit each Q to align the priority. Ultimately it’s a join effort…

At Typeform, it's a joint decision made by the Partnerships and Product teams. Our tech partnerships team sits within the product org so making these sorts of decisions is a bit easier

At Alaiko it is the prodcut team in strong collaboration with the commercial department (Partner Management & Sales). We need to see the need of the clients and define the potential for a new integration and estimate the effort of building the integration and keep it up and running with updates in the future....

This is awesome! What’s the conversation look like when you’re discussing the business case and priority for a given integration? Like what are the arguments in favor and not for building it now? at all? Where does that conversation get challenging?

Hey James, welcome and nice to meet you. I think the biggest way to get buy in from AE, AMs and CS team members is showing the value of an integration pertaining to their own accounts. Do you happen to account map with your integration partners by any chance? You'll be able to uncover any low hanging fruit where you could introduce a partner to any open opportunities in your CRM. Showing them the real value and helping them close will go along way. Once other team members see their teammates benefitting from partnerships - then they will want to get on board.

Also plan lunch and learns at the beginning of each Q live or video inviting the partner in to speak with each team. The partner should provide a reward for showing up.

Lastly, you or your partner managers should align with leads monthly and just chat. You'll uncover a lot of opportunities by just meeting. I hope this helps.

Thanks Jake, got Crossbeam and Reveal to account map with the partners and we are working through these. I feel like we need a few leads to close and then we'll start getting buy in from my team and more willingness to intro customers. Definitely good advice, thanks

Awesome - yes we use both as well. Our partner managers are helping to facilitate intros and really moving these accounts along with partners in the beginning. You're right, once they get a few over the finish line with their help - they (the reps) will take ownership in working with the partners on co selling.

Hey Elsa, which company are you with?

Typeform

Great, I think I can help—what's your email address?

Are you building an integration right now and looking for their help?

Yes, exactly. We're building an app on Typeform and we want to make sure we're on the right track. We've paid to access the API etc, but we haven't heard back.

My email address is

Great, I should be able to connect you, give me a minute.

Amazing, thank you so so much

sent an email for ya

thanks so much! Really appreciate it. Did you work with Kabir when you were at HubSpot?

I did, briefly!

Cool! Small (partnerships) world

If you all ever do any marketing around hiring, reducing bias, employee activation, let me know! Would love to work together again.

I think that would be great! Particularly on our VideoAsk product.

Interested in this - same question about stages salesforce in channel-partnerships

I haven’t, but wanted to! how are you managing partners in Hubspot?

I created a separate Partnership pipeline - It's been really helpful for keeping myself on track with tasking/follow-ups.. but the stages were created really similarly to our sales pipeline, which isn't consistent with the way we recruit/negotiate with partners, so I am struggling to identify stage titles that accurately reflect where we are in the contracting process

I personally am using Salesforce object to get partners to a committed stage (that could be signed agreement or a completed integration); from there, i track ongoing enablement stages in the account object; not perfect so looking for alternatives

@Shana Kus - so you created another pipeline in the same instance of hubspot that the sales team uses? how configurable are the stages? (i haven’t tried customizing hubspot much). I have thought about adding a field to the company record to add stages and then create myself a report based on those stages. I’m dealing with a smaller number of large partners so I’m thinking this may work.

In salesforce, you can create different view (there’s probably a more accurate technical term) where you can setup your own stages for partnerships, but the company and contact records can be shared with the other teams. At my past company, we did this for two different partnership teams that had different sales stages.

@Kevin McFarland yes - created a separate pipeline in the Same instance of HubSpot that our Sales team uses. The admin mimicked the stages of the Sales pipeline assuming the journey would be the same, but it's not. Curious if anyone out there has stages identified that have helped give insight to other stakeholders that might not be as close to our process as others.

Hey Shana - I had our team create a separate "Partners Pipeline" in HubSpot as well. The stages I went with are: Partner Pipeline (anyone I'm trying to reach out to and book a meeting) Appointment Scheduled Partnership Overview (after first call) Ts & Cs Sent Closed Won Closed Lost Potential Future Partner

Love that - thank you!

@UAFEQN9K4><@UAFEQN9K4><@UAFEQN9K4 & @Cory Snyder

Hey Nick, we currently use PartnerStack. Happy to walk you through how we use it and answer any questions you might have.

Ditto @Nick Valluri

Thanks Cory and Ty - will follow up with you both

Could you speak to the specific challenges you are facing?

I see API Gateways as tools to provide a cohesive endpoint for a bunch of backend endpoints so I am interested in what the use cases might be for accelerating publishing of public APIs. For example I could see them useful in this context if engineering wants to publish APIs with different endpoints or perhaps some variation that you'd like to consolidate into a common interface.

We’re still early in the journey, but the challenge broadly is quickly publishing and managing a bunch of APIs. We’re a system of record w/ a workflow automation / orchestration tool. So our use cases are 1) publishing APIs for enterprise (large enterprise) to consume and integrate with their other systems (some IT teams are wanting to build and manage the integrations themselves) and 2) publishing APIs for ecosystem partners ( integrations we build to other commercial software and integrations partners build to us)

Curious if you’ve looked at iPaaS platforms like Tray.io, Workato, etc Kevin?

Yep! I've been talking to them. From my understanding, they are the iPaas solution to utilize your APIs to other systems. Whereas the api gateway can better enable exposing your APIs even to an iPaas. So they are complementary. If I'm understanding this all correctly

Maybe @Ambi Moorthy (Zoho) can hook you up

Thanks @Sunir Shah!

Do you need something designerly or something that people will read functionally?

The more HTML brand pretty it is, the less people read it. The branded emails are primarily about brand retention.

If you have functional goals, just keep it simple, and use the basic template. Have it come from you. Have your signature block and if you want some branding, your company logo in your sig block.

It helps to keep a consistent outline, so people can predict what they are getting from you and why they should read the newsletter.

You have a good start. Say you started with this outline (not every section needs to be filled every newsletter; and if you read the CSA newsletter, for the blocks ‘below the fold’, you can also publish them newsletter after newsletter)

Business wins Product updates Comarketing opportunities Partner highlight Event calendar

Hi, was this recorded? Thank you

@Courtney Tyson would be interested in chatting about your findings here!

What I've seen work well for the integration parters I've spoken to is 15-20% rev share (of first 12-months) for business referred from one partner to the other. It's enough of an incentive for both partners to really prioritize working closely and sharing leads!

@Trevor Schueren is on the right track. I’ve seen anywhere between 10-15%, limited to first year (not including services), with a number of provisions around lead expiration (typically 12 months) and qualification (ensuring you’re not already connected to that prospect or opportunity)

I've launched two integration partner referral programs. For the first one, I rewarded technical integration partners' sales team members with a flat fee gift card to the store of their choosing. It was easy; required no requests to our finance department.

Note, I recommend targeting your partners' customer success teams.

Also, I'm currently launching an affiliate program that will allow individuals to join our referral program.

Happy to discuss further.

I’m in process right now! It’d be great to compare notes. I’m looking at Tray, Workato, Pandium, and Intregramat

I’d love to leverage whatever you get! I’m going to need to do the same here

same here @Christine Stewart-Fitzgerald !

Hi @Christine Stewart-Fitzgerald did you get any response for your query? I am also searching a play book for product partnerships.

@Sankara Srinivasan A thx for checking in. unfortunately, no. I was hoping that somebody had something in a good format that would be easy for the executive team to digest.

Hi Derek- feel free to dig into these videos. I personally have not viewed them in their entirety.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-0fzJ9kjAg • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aa7AbkXWUo

Thank you @Len Martin! Greatly appreciated!

Absolutely, Derek. My pleasure. The one with NowSecure looks promising, based on the agenda that is displayed about 2-3 mins in.

What do you mean by rewards for integrations? Does the customer get a reward for integrating your software with a partner's software?

Hey Jesper, are you referring to Tray’s embedded platform? Or their workflow automation solution

Hey Brian, thanks for replying. In fact both.

This is what we do, so take my perspective with that in mind. We believe the way to make that type of arrangement successful is to have an established, repeatable methodology for delivering connectors and to build them on an existing framework. Hiring someone without that experience-based process and who will need to “hand code” the whole thing will probably get expensive.

I have a lot more thoughts if you’re interested in them, but I don’t want to overdo it.

Great question though!

Thanks for your input. I would like to learn more; do you have any info I can review?

@Toni Clark - i’d love to compare notes! I’m, as of this morning, also looking for the same. @Ryan Lunka - it’d be good to connect! I’m going to actively start looking for a 4rd party dev shop to build and maintain a core set of integrations for us.

I'm currently in the process of implementing PartnerStack as a PRM and referral management tool, if that's in line with what you're doing. Happy to share my thoughts and experiences so far.

Welcome, Jacinda! Funny coincidence - I onboarded OpenSpace into PandaDoc a few years ago.

@Gagan (sounds-like / rhymes-with Doug-un) an embedded iPaaS would be using your API to build your connector to their system and your API would limit the quality of integrations you would be presenting to your customers.

Unless you're talking about essentially being an embedded iPaaS reseller, an embedded iPaaS would only enable you to offer integrations based on the complexity and functionality of your own external API.

And they are relying on all other SaaS companies' APIs to define any integrations they are offering. ie them connecting your app to Salesforce is entirely dependent on Salesforce's external APIs.

Which is all to say your API is important whether you use an iPaaS or not. But how much you need to build out your APIs depends on what your customers need/want from your app in terms of integration.

We're actually hosting an event today on market and customer research for APIs and integrations if you're thinking about this issue: https://www.saasecosystemalliance.com/market-and-customer-research-for-apis-and-integrations

@Kelly Sarabyn (HubSpot) is spot on- the iPaaS will require some sort of API (even if it’s a private one.) Additionally, you’ll probably want to have a more closely coupled relationship with strategic tech partners which often results in deep integration. For that, your partners will likely want to interact with your API directly.

@Gagan (sounds-like / rhymes-with Doug-un) - the two are complementary. my product team is making a shift from building integrations to primarily (outside of 1-2 core integrations) focus on building robust APIs that then we’ll connect to an iPaaS for our services team to build integrations. So, you’ll always need APIs. the question is who builds the integrations - your eng team using your APIs, your PS team, and/or others?

PartnerStack, Everflow, and Impact (apparently they are growing their B2B affiliates) would be worth looking in to

I second PartnerStack • a bit costly compared to the others, but its the only one that checks all the boxes • even rev share threshold calculations if you want to get technical

I third PartnerStack. Easy-to-create affiliate links. Easy to keep track. Plus, they have an internal marketplace.

Fourth PartnerStack. @Eric Yanofsky was super helpful in getting us set up here and we're happy customers so far. They can adapt to pretty much any program you want to offer.

Thank you so much for your inputs!! I also thought PartnerStack would be a good option.

Would you say that you have seen a significant rise in revenue coming from this channel after implementing a tool like this? Currently we are forced to manually keep track of the kickback process, so from a management point of view, this would help us a lot, however we also need to argument that it will give us a good ROI.

Really appreciate your answers

@Sonya Bearson Could you elaborate on the internal marketplace point? Is this a marketplace for affiliate partners to discover technical partners?

Yes. partners and affiliates can find you in the marketplace. https://partnerstack.com/marketplace

This is a version of what it looks like: https://market.partnerstack.com/

Thank you @Sonya Bearson! I appreciate it

A lot of the tools and agency partners are using partnerpage and its amazingggg! So easy to navigate

does partnerpage white label so that your portal can live on your company’s site or it redirects to a partnerportal domain

@Alicia Gan have you used it personally? have you compared it to anything else?

@Alexa Lebowitz good question. I’m not exactly sure about that

Good example, also really helpful for Zapier customers like me https://zapier.com/experts/

Dan 1. great webinar last week! 2. is this a whitelabel version of partnerpage?

Hi @Alexa Lebowitz TY and yes it is. Shout out to @Andrew Edelman

Hey @Liz Barrow . We have Partnerpage powering our entire partner area. After looking at options, I found partnerpage. From first contact to going live - 2 weeks! Tremendous support, easy-to-use, my partners like being able to update when they want. Highly recommend. Let me know if you have other questions.

thanks @Jason Breed! If you don’t mind, which other options did you consider? I haven’t been able to really identify any.

Same. Liz! Definitely curious what people have flipped through

You could also try out my product! Torchlite. Happy to give you a run through….

AppDirect is an option but it's probably overkill (with the price tag to match) for most programs

thanks @Kelly Sarabyn (HubSpot)! @Susan Marshall, possible to give me a high level of how it differs from PartnerPage?

Sure.. we help you build directories that enable partners to build and manage their directory listing on their own.. but there’s a lot more to unlock as you scale - Deal Registration, Referral tracking, Crossbeam integration/account mapping and co-selling

is there a visual on your site of the public directory? I couldn’t find it

Hold please!

We don’t have anything on our site.. just our PRM stuff.. so here’s a link to one of our customer’s live portals/directories

https://www.chilipiper.com/integrations

oh gotcha, thanks! I like the interface. That said, seems you don’t highlight service partners, just technical partners?

oh no… we do both

In fact, we enable you to engage with services partners online.. hire them, pay them, etc…

then you get all the reporting on the backend

certainly. I’ve not actually seen another purpose built template like this - and we are in the website business. Other options are from a PRM (can’t remember which ones specifically) but that required a PRM purchase in addition. They I looked at

@Liz Barrow @Alexa Lebowitz ^^^^

thanks @Jason Breed

You can use the term iMaaS, which we coined a few years ago. Re: OpenChannel- many companies seem to be going with the managed service option using their agency spinoff. I think the founders are members here and are really nice guys.

@Clinton Berry You can check out: Pandium, Morphed.io, PartnerFleet, AppDirect

I hadn't seen Morphed yet, thanks Dane!

and Thank you Cristina. I have talked to Brian from openchannel a couple of times. He is so great. And that makes sense on going that route with Marketplace by Design

Also, pandium is awesome.

@Clinton Berry I didn’t realize OpenChannel was shutting down. Is that because of the Stripe acquisition?

yes

Hi Nicholas- in what context?

Apple Search Ads only has two tech partner categories: measurement and campaign management. It's hard to become one if you fit into neither

Thank you @Zhao_Supermetrics! I would expect we'd fit into the Measurement category. I'll do some more digging on that then. Thanks again

No problem at all @Dan Baddeley. Also it's easier to get product/technical support from Apple. GTM/marketing support is almost mission impossible

I will be there!

Hey, that’s amazing

I can't recall any specific content pieces that would address this, but I would check out David Skok’s blog. It's a little old, but still relevant, and he writes a ton on the science and metrics of SaaS as a business model. There has got to be something helpful there.

Following

Hey Nick, I've worked and built programs to handle both scenarios/partner types. Historically I've implemented a PRM or it's built off something like Salesforce for the order part.

Assuming I understood your question that is.

Happy to jump on a call so I fully understand and help if I can.

I think Partnerstack does some of this?

Partner Stack does handle affiliate programs, but if you're trying to do something like what I've described above (vs a standard link based affiliate program) requires a Partner Stack account on both sides and API implementation. Was thinking something more like this PayPal Referral API, where a partner can build in the handoff in to their signup flow: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/partner-referrals/v2/

Hot topic here! On this topic, my inspiration would be marketplaces like AWS or Heroku.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/what-is-an-add-on

@Liz Madsen We (Left Hook) build tech partnership integration products for SaaS companies, and often deal with data models that aren’t as standardized/consistent as we might like. My clarification question for you: does your product team need Trifacta to normalize the disparate data coming INTO your system? Or out?

hey @Tom Elliott! Sorry i missed this last week. By far data INTO the system is the bigger challenge, for sure, plus the maintenance of that data as those files evolve over time. Out is a concern too but far smaller.

@Sean Matthews Any thoughts for Liz?

Hi @Liz Madsen - when you say “wrangle all your data” do you mean refining your APIs to be conformant to a more common standard or something else? Do you plan to have external parties consuming your APIs as well?

Hi @Cristina Flaschen that's right, we are looking to standardize our APIs and the data we have for all our customers in a more standard method. We do plan to have external parties consume our APIs (we have some who do that today already).

If helpful -- the crux of our challenge is that when we integrate with our enterprise retail customers -- say Sephora -- we're building a unique integration to ingest all of Sephora's data, which might be completely different data/process from how we integrate data from a different customer. So then our team is sitting on a bunch of data that's stored differently and also requires maintenance (maybe a signal breaks when the customer changes something on their site). So we're really working to get data into our system more in a more streamlined fashion, streamline how our existing data lives within data tables today, so that we can more easily get data in and out.

I think I understand. I don’t know if Trifecta will help as I’m not super familiar but it looks more like a data visualization tool on top of your cloud storage products. I assume the data that you’re saying “breaks” is stored inside the database of your product?

Yes that's right. We're being told Trifacta can do both 1) data hygiene and 2) maintenance/analysis/alerts for the data

@Noam Horenczyk Tech partners could be integration adoption and (more importantly) impact on retention, customer satisfaction, and upsells

Tech partners can also source and influence revenue - for sourcing it can be through partner marketplaces or referrals

Influence can be through co-marketing, providing influence on active sales deals or if sales is logging it (or you can flag this in Gong or similar product as well) that integrations impacted the deal or are a requirement for the deal to close

Building on @Kelly Sarabyn (HubSpot)’s comment about integration adoption…

Ideally you built the integration under the guidance of one or more cross-product use cases that the integration enables. There should be user-oriented business metrics tied to those use cases, which means you can/should measure enablement of those metrics.

It could be something like “manual processing time saved for your user” or “value of orders processed for your user”.

Integration adoption and its impact on customer satisfaction and upsells measures inwardly. I’m advocating that you _also_ measure outwardly--how the integration provides value for your user. Likely those KPIs should be tied to the user’s outcome.

To add to this....we also look at how many integrations each customer has.

Thanks @Kelly Sarabyn (HubSpot), @Ryan Lunka & @Rachel Collie, this is super helpful!

A previous company that I was at moved them to

https://swagger.io/solutions/api-documentation/

Thank you @Jake Wallace !

You should have Swagger docs for sure. Excellent for developer experience. Additionally, we’ve been using Redocly which is kind of like a developer-managed content management system for docs and technical articles. Very happy with it.

Thank you @Ryan Lunka. Thanks for the recent webinar as well.

Hi @Jennifer Cloutier is your goal to use this company to identify potential partners who could be a good mutual fit? Have you gone through some kind of discovery process with them to highlight the perfect partner? I'd be interested in a company who could do that as well, not sure a marketing agency is the right partner though. Curious to see everybody else feedback here as well.

@Eric Sangerma yes, correct! We have gone through a discovery process and what the difference would be from a merchant a partner. It's definitely not an easy task to identify. I'm not too happy that they have asked me to scrub the list seeing that this is what we have paid them to do. But you may be right - just not the right fit and probably worth working with someone else that can identify true ISV partners.

We use the same lead submission form our Channel Partners use when submitting an opportunity track. To be fair, we're less interested in tracking the leads (important) but integration adoption is our program's driver which is easier to track. From there we can track license expansion and retention which fits into our core objectives.

What marketplaces are you listed on? We're going through a discovery of platforms currently to decide which to list on and resulting from that will be how we measure leads from them

@Marta El Bay (Surfe - ex Leadjet) - We use a platform called partnerportal.io for referral leads. The have a freemium version or paid pending your needs.

@Derek Crosen in the Salesforce World, the Demo Jam for Appexchange partners is one of my favorites

We also experimented with Live Video and had great success on Linkedin Live with a partner, check this out- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/box_join-us-on-feb-2-at-10-am-pt-for-a-discussion-acti[…]yhzr?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

@Dan O’Leary - Really appreciate the ideas and knowledge sharing! I will be sure to look into both

We’re working on a short partner video promo for LinkedIn.

Awesome thank you @Jesper Lyngbye

I guess it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. When I worked at Northeastern University, Cisco donated an IoT lab. The goal was to open a new IoT program. The instructor had his own startup so I partnered with him, Cisco, some other small IoT companies and created a hackathon with the goal in mind to gain buzz and enrollment. It worked and the enrolling class loved that the emcee was the instructor and it gave him buzz for his own business that was just launching out of stealth mode. In the B2B world and in my current role, I manage marketing for a ton of tech companies. I try to focus on a theme, then pick a skyscraper piece as the main campaign content (like an ebook), and then all the ways that one piece of content can be chopped up and repurposed. I wouldn't necessarily call that being creative, but I would call it getting the most bang for your buck and doing more with less effort.

@Bonnie Gibson Great to meet and thanks for the insight! Definitely helpful. Looking for creative ways to drive interest from prospects jointly. This is helpful

Hi Charles…might not be _exactly_ what you want, because it’s a little biased toward the integration, but we have some templates that might be helpful: www.blendededge.com/pages/integration-business-case-template

Thanks very useful!

Hi Nicolas, I work at Umbraco - a leading CMS. Did you get an answer to your question?

Hi Bryan, you might find this blog post helpful: https://www.crossbeam.com/blog/launch-tech-partner-ecosystem-integration-marketplace/

We've also got an e-book on building tech partner programs: https://www.crossbeam.com/resources/ebooks/the-partner-playbook/

Cross posting this from the SAAS Ecosystem Alliance Slack : Liz Garcia - Pandium [12:03 PM] Check out our latest podcast episode of Between Product & Partnerships . We spoke with @Ian Cugniere, the Program Manager for the App Marketplace at Aircall. In this interview, Ian talks about his transition into technology partnerships from community management and shares:

*Features of app marketplaces that are attractive to customers and partners.

*How app marketplaces and other processes can aid in identifying deals that are sourced or influenced through partnerships.

*Advice and examples of ways to provide a good partner experience at scale for long-tail partners and partner developers.

*The importance of having flexibility with partner program tiers.

Access the video, audio podcast, and transcript using the links below: Podcast Links (Available on Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, & RSS feed) YouTube video Transcript (edited)

Thank you both so much! This is immensely helpful!

That’s pretty hot

What’s Doohickey? That section needs a CTA

Yeah, that’s our integration product. The CTA is on the list.

I like the t-shirt calculator. this is a great idea

1000% open to feedback for making it better.

Thanks @Ryan Lunka! I’d be interested in reverse engineering your _Effort Estimator_ in order to help organizations lower the level of effort it takes integrate with them.

Let’s talk about it for sure.

For every partner motion, you use the exact some metrics as you would for the direct customer life cycle, but make it partner attached for when partners are involved.

If you following the customer life cycle, the SaaS metrics are

Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral

A tech partnership hits at different places in the customer life cycle. Primarily, it has product metrics. You’d evaluate an integration like you would a product feature to measure its revenue impact.

Secondarily, it has a marketing component to generate new sales. You’d evaluate it like a demand gen campaign. Partner attached MQLs (often called partner qualified leads PQL), conversion rate, time to convert, arpa, estimated life time value, estimate annual contract value, churn rate, etc.

To evaluate a product feature, you’d passively compare the average customer metrics across all accounts vs those that use the integration. The metrics product features are evaluated on are conversion rate, time to conversion, estimated churn rate, ARPA, estimated life time value, NPS.

This doesn’t resolve cause vs correlation, so you have to do a qualitative analysis.

Second, on the two critical customer survey points in the funnel (on sign up, “How did you hear about us?” and on conversion to paid, “Why did you decide to purchase?“), you’d see how much pull an integration or the integrations program as a whole delivered sales value.

• How do you assign the ownership of customers using an integration? I don’t understand this question. What are the options of who the owner could be?

• Do you distinguish a direct recommendation of a customer by the integration partner’s sales team from simply tracking who is using your integration? Yes and no. Yes, because you want to encourage your partners sending leads over with human effort, so keep track of it so you can celebrate the wins with your partners and also treat those customers well.

No, because it doesn’t matter ultimately. It’s a common mistake in partner land to focus only on sales that come with a phone call with your partner team. The goal should be winning every possible sale driven by this channel, whether or not they ever want to talk to you. You have to track passively.

The demo account is something they have to turn on. It's always easier if you are in the higher partner tiers to convince them to give you a demo account (for any of the products). Typically you start out in the Bronze tier and you have to have a compelling business case to get access to demo environments.

Ah, so they want potential partners to pay while building an integration then? We don’t have one yet. Thanks for the insight.

I guess I was thinking of the Adobe Solution Partner Program. You might have a faster track with the "Adobe Exchange Partner Program for Experience Cloud" which is specifically for technology partners/software vendors https://partners.adobe.com/exchangeprogram/experiencecloud.html

Ah this looks right, thank you very much!

@Elsa Heffernan We’ve been around the edge of a couple of these Adobe “pay to play” partnerships. I recall $5k being the minimum thrown around in discussions

How economical? You can just use Salesforce + Wordpress

@Sunir Shah Not the pricing of allbound or partnerstack. The most important element is for the referrer to identify their progress.

@Michael Leppitsch @Allan Knabe ^^

Would be curious to read the post!

@Alfredo Borgaro when you say distributors, do you mean the Tech industry distribution companies like TD Synnex, Ingram, etc? And for networking resellers, do you mean resellers involved in IT network solutions specifically for large venue and hotel markets?

There are quite a few layers across the ecosystem of partnerships so defining those is important to do as a first step, if you haven’t already.

Hi Patricia! Thanks for replying!

I'll outline the answers for easier read! 1. Yes, Distributors to us are the companies like TD Synnex, Ingram, Solution Box, etc... We are trying to push to be introduced into their ecosystem/marketplaces 2. Yes, Networking resellers (for us) normally are IT integrators or Value Added Resellers that buy from either "distributors" or "vendors" (such as Aruba, Cisco, Commscope, etc..) to deliver a full WiFi Solution for large venues or hotels 3. I'd like to add another layer now that we are into the topic, they are the "Managed Service Providers"... normally telcos that will provide a full complex (and large) solution to SMB's or smaller companies where they already sell something and its just a matter of "upselling" or "adding on" a new service such as ours. I hope this helps!

@Bernardo Robles FYI

Hi Marta, I recommend you make sure you have detailed profiles with businesses attributes that align to your customers and use cases. The various stakeholders should provide their key metrics needed, but often they need guidance, otherwise you’ll most likely only hear financial and customer acquisitions.

An important element often overlooked is capturing which partners your integration partners work with. Identify those you have in common, those you are targeting, and any competing.

Applying a scorecard to the profiles (coverage in markets, verticals, etc if you have focus areas), their performance and activities with you, potential for growth, and other data points that have been identified by the stakeholders.

Make sure you include data from what you’ve provided the partners for enablement, engagement, and other resources. It’s important that you map the expectations you have for them to the expectations they have for you.

Happy to provide some general templates and examples. DM me if interested.

We’re always looking for data-driven, precise “proof points” like this. Share away!

@Sunir Shah @Ryan Lunka This is a challenge that we currently face with our Ecosystem at the moment. We have integrations with most ecommerce solutions however we are looking to build outside that as well but we do not have the data to make those decisions at the moment. I would be interested in a demo for us if possible or some sort of test account. Let me know how we can achieve that

@Alin Tanase Just go ahead and sign up at integrationplanner.com. It’s free to get started. Play around for now, but let’s set up a workshop where I can take you through what to do and how to get value. I’ll DM you to get that arranged.

Hi Suresh, this is the tech partnerships channel. You’re not going to get very far with direct solicitation though. This is more of a support community for those of us in partnerships.

@Ryan Lunka - i basically think in 2 ways 1. Which one helps me get integrations out of the door faster 2. Which one helps me customise/improve the integration faster

Being a non-dev person, it ‘feels’ like it should be easier than it currently is

@Daniel Lancioni (Reveal.co) totally makes sense. Mind if I drill in more? You say it “feels” like it should be easier…which parts aren’t easy enough from your perspective? Why do you feel that way?

It feels like it should be easier to build and maintain integrations, than it currently is today.

You find something which you think is the solution, e.g. IPaaS, but then it has its own caveats (eg the companies I want to integrate with, aren't set up on this iPaaS).

Every potential route has a major caveat which makes the desired route implausible

If you are looking at an iPass you need to also define if you are creating connectors and putting out on a Marketplace for the customer or partner to build recipes. Or if you are embedding the iPass. We have going the imbedded model as most of our TAM do not have the expertise or staff to build recipes.

partnerfleet or partnerpage

I would throw Pandium in there as well cc: @Cristina Flaschen

Thanks @Tom Elliott! @sharon hiu let me know if you’d like to connect or you can check out our website for more details.

Ahh yes totally forgot Pandium

Appreciate the help! thanks all. Let me check in with my colleague and we might have further follow-ups

Thanks @Jake Wallace! I'd be happy to chat through this with you or your colleague as well @sharon hiu. I'll DM you my meeting link.

I built this at my last company, it may help: https://www.pandium.com/prioritizing-integrations-framework-and-google-sheet-template

Yes, thank you @Kelly Sarabyn (HubSpot)!!

I’m not sure it’s exactly what you want, but we built integrationplanner.com to help prioritize integrations. It’s free. Might want to try it out too. (Let me know if I can help.)

Hey Aidan,

I would love to connect about BuzzBoard! I think it is exactly what you are looking for!

Our specialties include: Data enrichment, Identifying your Ideal Customer Profile and Total Adressable Market, Segmenting, Prioritizing and Scoring accounts, Lead generation, and so much more!

paging @Emily Farr - this seems up your ally. no?

Welcome!

responded to the post with my two cents :-)

Great opportunity, Courtney! Let's find you an expert We also have the #marketing-opportunities channel to share opportunities like this!

Awesome, thank you @Tamara, I will post in there now :)

Hi Courtney, I’d be happy to participate! We recently launched our marketplace at https://marketplace.caspio.com/ and I’d be happy to share lessons learnt!

Hi @Nikunj Sanghvi! So sorry I missed your message! I am sending you a DM now :)

Hi @Courtney Tyson, I am working on something very much related to the topic of how marketplaces can help B2B SaaS brands grow. We should connect. Want to email me at ?

Welcome, Gagandeep!

Hey Jeff - messaging you on LinkedIn now!

Did you look at stripe connect? It lets you take a cut. https://stripe.com/connect/platforms

https://www.cloudsoftwareassociation.com/2019/07/11/the-complete-integrated-partnership-launch-checklist/

Thanks, Sunir. Reading now...

Trophy cases are indeed useless but your marketing team needs a better plan for a directory

1. the goal is to advance the customer through the life cycle. 2. Integrations collectively are a Feature. A feature is something you'd put on a brochure to sell a prospect. They prove your app isn't a dead end and it works with their stack. It checks a mental box that you fit into the customers world. 3. Directories, newsletters, email, webinars are leverage to get comarketing in trade from partners. If they want to see new accounts come in they have to trade

30% of paid conversions at FreshBooks cited the integrations as their primary reason to pick the product over competitors. I went into partnerships because I started my time there grinding away fade to face at every Barcamp and cocktail party in the United States meeting customers and the demand was clear. However marketing teams rarely talk to customers so you have to get better customer insight and prove to revenue and product that customers need the partners to advance through your life cycle.

Why do marketing teams rarely talk to customers? Don't know. But I was a computer scientist who asked that question and ended up in marketing.

Welcome!

Hi Marissa Two suggestions for you: 1. Your listing in the Zapier App Directory shows the most popular templates, which should provide a directional sense for what apps customers are connecting with most. Not an exact measurement, but a good starting point. 2. Depending on your product, native integrations and Zapier workflows often serve different use cases for different types of users. You'll likely need both in most cases and one data set may not perfectly inform the other. ◦ For example, the native Slack <> Google Drive _integration_ is a front end experience that allows users in Slack to see a file preview and quickly share permission. ◦ Conversely, a Zapier powered Slack <> Google Drive _workflow_ is a back end experience that allows IT to ensure that any files uploaded to a specific channel get copied into a specific folder. The best way to determine your next native integration is by spending time with your customers or GTM teams for their direct input. Hope that helps!

Hey @Andrew Edelman, thanks for the suggestions!

1. We don’t currently use templates, so I wasn’t aware that you can see which customers are using them. I will suggest we move forward with getting those set up so we can get additional information about engagement. 2. Yes, there are definitely different things we can accomplish depending on native vs Zapier, but we are definitely looking to build some native integrations for AddEvent <> Hubspot, for example, to remove the need for customers to pay for Zapier to get their data from our platform into their CRM. We are struggling to prioritize the correct CRMs since we don’t have much data about which CRMs we are being used with most. But it sounds like customer interviews will be the best next step for this. Thanks for the suggestions and feedback!

When you build a native integration take a look at an integration platform! It may speed your build. @Cristina Flaschen is an active member here and owns a platform that is awesome. I run one too, but we implement it in different ways with a different focus:

Thanks, @Clinton Berry! @Marissa Stone, let me know if youd like to chat, we work with a lot of companies that are either scaling out of Zapier or are looking to supplement Zapier with a suite of native integrations for various reasons.

Just wanted to flag this response I received from Zapier for you @Andrew Edelman since you mentioned it. I was already chatting with their partners team so wanted to confirm that was the case and it sounds like they have an active bug on it - just wanted to let you know in case you’re using it for any analysis!

> Zap templates should be ordered by popularity on your directory page. However, we recently discovered a bug that’s preventing Zap templates from being ordered correctly. Our teams are currently investigating a fix for this.

Also - thanks @Clinton Berry and @Cristina Flaschen! Funny enough, Brian and I had a call last week around integrations and Paragon. Both Kolla and Paragon seem like great solutions on the native integration side that we will keep in mind when we start building them out if we need quicker turnarounds!

@Marissa Stone we’re actually different from Paragon (although name is similar!) But do keep us in mind

Oh wow, I was definitely reading/moving too quickly! I’ll take a look at your website in that case!

DM'ed you

Great to see you here, Maritza!

And you @Tamara! I see you, rocking this CSA gig! :+1:

When you say “manage”, what are you looking for more specifically?

A platform like partnerfleet.io is great for creating the marketplace. If there are integrations underlying the partnerships, they could sit on top of them. (Transparently, my company provides integration software.)

Or, do you need a Partner Relationship Management (PRM) system? Modifications to your CRM to support that? I’ll defer to someone with a better perspective for that.

Hey @Francisco Franco I would be happy to chat with you about Partner Fleet and how we can support you. We are an out of the box marketplace and also can help you onboard and manage your tech partners.

Also if you are looking at PRMs here is a general overview of a dozen of those players.

https://www.partnerfleet.io/blog/best-prm-tools-for-your-partner-program

Our main purpose is to find a solution to manage the app marketplace and our relationships(including rev share) with partners.

@Kenny Browne I would love to learn more

Definitely talk to them.

DM'ed you

Hi @Tracey Saenz Happy to connect with you!

We recently created this Go-To-Market Playbook for SaaS startups and software companies- has exhaustive insight on product and feature launch and go-to-market strategies from PMMs, CMOs, Marketing Managers, Directors of Content Marketing, GTM experts, and Founders.

Covers how to differentiate your product, positioning, messaging, success metrics, channels, content formats, best practices, etc.

Can help with the GTM strategies youwant to learn to create. DM me -I’ll sent it to you.

Welcome to the community, Tracey!

Thanks @Khyati! Is it the PartnerHacker Anthology on Ecosystems? If so I've already read it and am socializing it this week with my company .

pronto

Hi Brian, would you mind sharing the passcode for your on-demand recording?

What do you mean? This is out of date, but its a list of data sets. https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis

https://github.com/APIs-guru/openapi-directory/tree/main/APIs is another one

TheProgrammableWeb.com used to be the go to resource for this stuff, but John sold it and moved on years ago

Hey Dannielle! Do you have an example of what you mean by "paid" ecosystem/API? Does this mean rev share like Shopify/SFDC?

@Sunir Shah - Thank you! Will have a look.

@Andrew Edelman - rev-sharing, but also pay-to-play flat fees (e.g. Adobe Tech Partner Program, NetSuite SuiteCloud platform)

Ah yes I personally view those programs as relics of the past only implemented by the biggest "SaaS" companies that don't see the full value partnerships provide. Only companies that big can require payment for access like that.

I have come to the conclusion us smb SaaS folk are better looking as well.

Now I have Huckleberry learning from everything we say I wonder what my jokes are doing to it's brain. Lol

Does it collect DMs as well?

no; I’m not entirely sure how to do that yet

it may be possible

Whew!

oh, lol

Maybe joking, maybe not

that’s an interesting reaction. Maybe if I can figure it out I’d use a master key to encrypt it

I don’t want to read your DMs

technically with Slack enterprise, I can.

I don’t pay for that though.

Well, people tend to consider DM conversations private so I assume there’s some that users assume aren't seen

I think the only advantage of DM archiving is the ability to see DM history, which is a big problem with the free slack

I’d want it limited to the people involved only

Mine are totally controversial…lol

I know!

lol

Haven't checked it out yet but very needed. It's overwhelming, to say the least

I’m kind of sick of the endless treadmill of half questions and half answers. Let’s get some knowledge crystallized so we can progress

https://www.cloudsoftwareassociation.com/2019/07/11/the-complete-integrated-partnership-launch-checklist/

Also graphically, this is on https://partnernapkin.com

Yes

@Shane I assume you meant an app marketplace?

@patricia rush Yep!

@patricia rush Have you launched one recently?

Multiple but definitions are important… _*marketplaces*_ where the business end user customers subscribe and manage their apps vs _*directories*_ that list approved partnerships where the user may or may not eventually link out to subscribe, may or may not be certified?

Great! Did you all build the marketplaces in-house or use an off-the-shelf platform?

Both

Which off-the-shelf platforms did you use? If you had to do it again tomorrow, how would you approach it?

Very subjective question, considering my previous comments about definitions.

Are you asking about a true Marketplace where you’re managing app susbscriptions, certifying those apps, along with service and support for all your integrated apps?

Marketplaces vs directories serve different functions

A true marketplace, like Hubspot's app marketplace or Shopify's app store. Did you use off-the-shelf software for a true app marketplace?

Both

In house built for some clients, off-the-shelf for others.

Which off-the-shelf platforms did you use?If you had to do it again tomorrow, which would you recommend for clients? Building it in-house or using an existing solution?

It is based on the need, resources, and expertise within the client’s organization,what markets they are servicing, compliance and regulations, what it is integrating with, etc.

You’re asking general questions for something that has many variables