The following article is an excerpt from “The State of Partner Sales: Studies in Excellence” from HubSpot, Crossbeam, and Partnership Leaders with a foreword from Bobby Morrison, CRO, and Ritu Khanna, VP of Global Partnerships at Shopify. 

The State of Partner Sales is a collection of stories from key players in the industry who are finding success selling with their ecosystem partners. These case studies show how unifying motions between companies and their partners, as well as partnership teams and their sales counterparts, can drive more revenue.

“It's easy to look at this partnership and call it a success because of our results.

But when we had to decide whether to prioritize this integration it was not that obvious. Because they didn't have a product yet.

Yet, I decided to shuffle around our roadmap and invest in this partnership because of the relationship we had already cultivated in the ecosystem.

The ability to create trust with a brand before you decide to invest is so critical when it comes to partnerships.”  — Alina Vandenberghe, Co-CEO and Co-founder of Chili Piper

Chili Piper’s key results: 

• 50% lower CAC from Gong-sourced deals
• 24-48 hour time to close 
• Monthly revenue approaching 7 digits 

Results reported by Chili Piper

The challenge

As leaders in their space, both Chili Piper and Gong are setting the standard when it comes to their respective domains. However, today’s tech buyer is prioritizing consolidated offerings and streamlined processes to help them save time (and money). This challenging economic situation paired with an existing strong relationship built on the foundation of a robust integration set in motion a conversation about bundling products for more competitive offerings for both companies.  

Raphael Danilo, Director of Product Strategy at Gong, shared at GTM Summit 2024,  “If you think about a sales rep who sends you an email, imagine that the email is actually good, and you're like, ‘Okay, this is interesting. I want to learn more.’ What's the next step? It's usually booking a meeting, and there's a couple of different types of workflows there that you can explore.”  

Chili Piper’s scheduling capabilities have numerous applications but one of the most powerful opportunities is in the sales engagement space. Gong offers personalized outreach at scale to increase win rates for the modern seller. However, allocating resources to their own roadmaps and/or product acquisitions to build out this functionality for both partners  would have been a massive undertaking that would have cost millions of dollars. This ignited conversations between the two partners to explore the idea of bundling their products to help their joint customers get the powerful benefits from each with a singular buying cycle to make it even easier (and cheaper) and buying from them separately. 

After extensive deliberation and negotiation that included leadership from every level of both companies, Gong and Chili Piper were able to develop a winning partnership. Both tools optimize customer interactions to generate and accelerate sales pipeline, but in very complementary ways — Gong through revenue intelligence, Chili Piper through automated meeting scheduling and handoffs. By combining forces, they were able to develop a differentiated offering in the sales tech space that drives high value to their end users. 

“Seeing our independent value propositions and how they complemented each other made it clear that this could help our customers get even more out of each of our products. The opportunity for our two brands to create a win, win, win is what fueled our teams to pursue a bundled solution with benefits for Gong, Chili Piper, and our joint customers. Together, we are able to market a comprehensive solution that fully addresses the needs of our customers and help make their buying journey as simple as possible.” — Matt Schroyer, Director of Growth and Partner Marketing at Gong.

‍In the best partnerships, each partner’s superpowers make the other one stronger, and customers get a more robust experience that solves even more of their pain points. Adopting both tools is a no-brainer, adding fuel to each company’s Ecosystem-Led Growth engine.

The Solution: Fueling customers’ sales to fuel their own

Chili Piper for Gong is designed to help sales teams close deals faster. The integration gives sales teams more momentum because it enables immediate meeting scheduling right within a customer interaction. It even lets users schedule on behalf of others and get round robin functionality.

The customer response to this new workflow has been so positive that Gong and Chili Piper’s own sales teams are finding big success by co-selling to shared prospects.

Here’s how they’re doing it:

1. Focus on your mutual customers’ experience. Technical partnerships require getting in the weeds of separate systems, but customers don’t care about what each company is contributing to the process or how it works — they just want a seamless workflow that helps them do their jobs better.

Both Gong and Chili Piper built their integration thinking about the overall customer experience above all else. This made the message to customers and prospects about the benefits of having both solutions much clearer.

2. Use a top down approach to get the sales team ELG-ready. Gong’s CRO publicly supported the integration and co-sell motion across their GTM teams. They structured the sales org so that the Enterprise Business Unit (EBU) teams were enabled at weekly first line manager meetings on how to use the overlap data and how to effectively sell to incoming leads. The partnership team also meets with sales leadership weekly to review pipeline generation. 

‍3. Enable, enable, enable. Chili Piper also worked hard to empower their sellers. They produced internal and external asynchronous video training on the integration, and set up the right reports in their CRM to ensure that they stayed up to date on incoming leads.

4. Stay on top of ongoing opportunities.  As part of their success in Ecosystem-Led Growth, Gong and Chili Piper use Crossbeam to identify and pursue any co-selling opportunity.

Crossbeam Account Mapping identifies the accounts where both partners’ prospects, open opportunities, and customers overlap — and Sales teams can see this information right in their CRM with Crossbeam’s Widget. This means that Gong and Chili Piper can connect and make a plan to co-sell to each other’s customers or shared opportunities by pitching together and highlighting the benefits of the integration and using both tools.

Alexis Petrichos, Sr. Director of Strategic Partnerships & Ecosystem Marketing at Chili Piper, explains: 

“When our sales reps can see right away that their account is a Gong customer, we always get in touch with the Gong team and collaborate on understanding how we can support the customer together. Gong is involved in those deals and Crossbeam is a very core part of our sales process right now.” 

5. Communicate and celebrate wins. Chili Piper has a dedicated Slack channel where all won opportunities are publicly celebrated. Each closed won deal is marked with the Gong logo as an emoji to ensure visibility into the fact that it’s a partner sourced deal. This helps create excitement and buy-in across teams. 

The results 

Through their integration, co-sell programs, and an Ecosystem-Led Growth strategy in Crossbeam, the Chili Piper team has seen: 

•  50% lower CAC from Gong-sourced deals
• A 24-48 hour time to close
• Total monthly revenue from the partnership approaching 7 digits

About Chili Piper

Chili Piper is the all-in-one Demand Conversion Platform, used by Intuit, Spotify, Airbnb, Gong, and thousands more. They are the only platform that consolidates Form Routing, Chat, Lead Distribution, and Scheduling. Chili Piper provides everything you need to improve conversions across your funnel—from marketing to sales to implementation and beyond. 

About Gong

Gong empowers everyone on the modern revenue team to improve productivity, increase predictability, and drive revenue growth by deeply understanding customers and business trends and driving impactful decisions and actions. The Gong Revenue AI Platform captures and contextualizes customer interactions, surfaces insights and predictions, and powers actions and workflows that are essential for business success. More than 4,000 companies around the world rely on Gong to unlock their revenue potential.