2023 is already ramping up to be a crazy year, with layoffs, IT spending pull-backs, and tech budget freezes. We’re only one week in and it’s looking nasty out there. One can feel nervousness in the air and the desire on people’s part to look for safe harbors and to keep their heads down.

Certainly, caution in the face of crisis is sound, but it’s super important for those of us focused on partner ecosystems not to lose sight of the golden rule that should guide all of our actions:

Adding value to customers and prospects by leveraging the partner ecosystem.

We can’t lose sight in difficult years of the need to find out what customers and prospects care about and deliver on their top priorities.

Even as IT budgets are constrained, companies will spend money on software that addresses their top priorities. These priorities will be based on a few foundations:

1. Becoming more efficient, improving existing processes, and making them more effective and cost-efficient in order to do more with fewer resources.
2. Spending where there is a fast time-to-value.
3. Doubling down on existing IT relationships (software and provider) to drive outcomes 1 and 2.

If you have a tech partner program, there’s a particular approach to addressing customer pain points that will allow you to succeed, and it’s based on a value model for the two parts of your partner ecosystem. The approach centers on figuring out the opportunities, pain points, and use cases that are most important to your customers and your prospects:

In this simple model, we’ve represented two different segments of your SaaS Partner Ecosystem.

• Segment 1: Platform partners you connect to, including companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, SAP, or one or more hyper scalers. For these whales where you have a validated integration, the key is to understand your USP to the Customers of your Platform Partners. How do you complete, extend, and complement the platform partners’ existing customer solutions? Consider solutions like the GoToEco Engine from Ampfactor to help drive demand with better together stories to monetize in this segment.
• Segment 2: SaaS Companies that connect to you for the same reason that you connect to the Platform partners - they want access to your customer. Consider solutions like the GoToEco Success Framework to drive opportunities to your partners, who will reciprocate in turn. We’ll be launching this as a managed service offering in 2023.

Caution is reasonable, but being relentless about leveraging your ecosystem to add value is a better way to win in 2023.

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