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When it comes to partnership tech, a few staples come to mind: PRMs, account mapping tools like Crossbeam, and partner marketplace tools, like PartnerFleet, to name a few. But the pressures of today’s market require all of us to think bigger about the tools we use and how those tools can interconnect across our organization for a smoother, more efficient platform experience. For partnership leaders, this has resulted in two major reflections:
- How can I use the tools I need (or the tools my company has already procured) to provide more impact to my partners, sales team, and customers?
- How can I better connect these tools to prove the value of the ecosystem (and my efforts) to get more leadership buy-in?
The days of partnership teams, programs, and tech operating in silos are over. It’s more imperative than ever that GTM leaders leverage their RevOps teams and sales intelligence tools to connect and leverage first, second, and third party data to help their companies get to revenue faster.
At Crossbeam, we’ve been working tirelessly to ensure that our software does the same, focusing on providing sales-focused features that allow partnerships and sales teams to work hand-in-hand through an Ecosystem-Led Growth strategy to get to more revenue faster. This work has included creating strategic partnerships and integrations with key players in the sales tech industry.
Gong: The partnership tool you didn’t know you needed
So, what’s the most powerful tool in your tool belt that you’re definitely under-utilizing in partnerships? You guessed it; it’s Gong.
Gong is a powerful Revenue AI platform designed to help go to market teams maximize their performance. By analyzing customer interactions across calls, meetings, and emails, Gong provides deep insights into what’s driving success in sales conversations, from key messaging to deal progression. It uses AI to surface trends, identify risks, and offer actionable recommendations that help sales leaders coach their teams more effectively, refine strategies, and close more deals. With Gong, sales teams can gain a clearer understanding of customer needs, improve communication, and optimize their sales process, leading to increased win rates and higher revenue.
But Gong’s power is not only valuable for sales teams. It’s also highly effective for managing and optimizing partnerships. By tracking partner involvement across deal cycles, Gong helps organizations identify key moments where partners can add value, ensuring the right collaboration at the right time.
Benefits of Gong x Crossbeam
Gong Engage has fast become a leading technology in the sales engagement space. Teams are leveraging this product to open and accelerate pipeline more effectively. And by integrating Crossbeam's Copilot into the Engage UI, SDRs, AEs, and CSMs can leverage all the ecosystem intelligence right from the place they're operating from each day.
Crossbeam Copilot allows Engage users to quickly identify key decision maker contacts, as well as champion-level contacts partners have already established relationships with. Further, knowing which partners have an active customer relationship with accounts allow for SDRs and AEs to tailor messaging and incorporate the partnerships joint value messaging.
For deals already in flight, Copilot within Engage will allow for direct collaboration with the partner that can help accelerate deal cycles or help provide intel to assess risk and unstick opportunities.
And with the Crossbeam x Gong integration, partnership teams can push valuable attribution and activity data directly into Crossbeam and your CRM, ensuring accurate attribution, planning, and sales enablement.
Here are 3 key use cases you can leverage today with Gong and Crossbeam.
Use Case #1: Gong for identifying partnership need and opportunity
One of Gong’s superpowers is giving teams the ability to keep their fingers on the pulse of customer needs by recognizing patterns through conversation analytics. For partner managers, this presents opportunities to:
- Identify key partners that customers are already working with. For example, customers keep mentioning a platform that your company is not yet partnered with.
- Identify potential prospects for existing partners. For example, a customer mentions the need for a particular tool or service a partner of yours provides.
Using Gong’s keyword and smart trackers, you can flag certain phrases and words connected to these scenarios. And the best part? Gong mentions and alerts can push into Crossbeam’s activity timeline and attribution features when there is a match.
The data collected through the keyword and smart trackers is also a powerful way to get the attention of a bigger company you’re trying to partner with. During your pitch, you can show how many times your prospects and customers have mentioned their company or a pain point they solve, as well as the dollar amount attached to the opportunities who mentioned them.
How to execute
Keyword trackers help you stay on top of what people are discussing in your company’s conversations by identifying specific words, terms or phrases. A keyword tracker can track several words or terms, each separated by a comma. If you want to track a large number (10,000, for example), put the number in quotation marks (“10,000”) so that the digits are not split when tracking. Use filters to narrow down whether words are tracked only when said by a customer, only by people at your company, or by anyone.
Full instructions on how to set up Keyword trackers in Gong may be found here.
Smart trackers are AI models that enable you to find when concepts are mentioned in your conversations, even when they are said in diverse ways. Smart trackers take into account how people naturally speak . For example, if you track the concept “Asking about integrations” smart trackers can find when customers say things like “Do you integrate with Crossbeam?” “Where can I learn more about integrations?” “Is it possible to integrate with Gong?”
Full instructions on how to set up Smart trackers in Gong may be found here.
Use Case #2: Gong for tracking partner participation and win rate
Tracking the presence and impact of a partner can be invaluable in scaling revenue. For example, if your partner is involved in a deal, Gong can easily track not only their presence, but their impact. Say goodbye to rummaging through email threads, Slack channels, spreadsheets, and PRMs—or simply taking people’s word for it—to track if your partners helped push a deal over the finish line.
Using Gong’s core platform alongside features like Forecast and the Crossbeam integration, partnership leaders can:
- Set up keyword alerts and triggers for partner involvement in deals that push to Crossbeam’s attribution dashboard.
- Push attribution data from Crossbeam to your CRM to ensure sellers stay up-to-date on the partners they can lean on during the deal, as well as further track attribution in your revenue source of truth.
- Push your CRM data back into Gong for further enrichment and insights.
- Create a partner-inclusive Forecast dashboard that tracks the impact of partners across the entire sale cycle, including metrics like ACV, win rate, and time-to-close.
How to execute
Add fields to Salesforce:
1. Partner look up field - Add the partner account
- Add your partners as accounts in SFDC and add “(Partner)” to the end of the account name to denote it is a partner account, not an account you’re selling into. Make the account owner the internal partnership manager
- Be sure to replicate this automatically from the account to the opportunity, that way the opportunity data is static if the partner account changes hands throughout the year.
2. Partnership category - Segment the partner relationship (co-sell, sourced, influenced, etc.)
- This can be as simple as a dropdown that is selected or a formula that selects the partner relationship.
In Gong:
- CRM Settings - Ensure that you are pulling in the new fields added above
- Forecast Board settings - Create a line of business with these characteristics:
- Basics section
- Specifically the “Show deals where team members are: In a specific role” setting should be equal to the Partnership Manager
- For each category (Target Attainment, Total Open Pipe, Best Case, etc.), ensure that you are filtering on Partnership Category so that only those deals are pulled in.
- Basics section
Use Case #3: Gong for partner and seller enablement
This is the use case that keeps on giving. Why? Because while you’re building out a slick and efficient revenue generation and attribution strategy in the first use cases, you’re also collecting powerful data on how you can keep doing it even better.
Using Gong and Crossbeam data, you can surface trends, identify risks, and offer actionable recommendations to both your sales leaders and your partner’s sales teams to more effectively refine your ELG strategy and close more deals.
How to execute
Here are a few ways you can do it:
- Every month, pull data from both Gong and Crossbeam and meet with your partners to discuss the trends for both successful and unsuccessful deals. Create action steps or joint training materials to share with your respective sales teams on your findings.
- In your Sales teams’ monthly pipeline or BD meetings, share these trends and materials, any significant wins made with partners (using your attribution data), as well as any insights about the impact of particular partners and how they can leverage them.
- Use Gong Engage to integrate ecosystem insights into specific messaging for demos given to new companies that your SDRs and AEs are engaging. This can include details like the tech stack they use, who the key champion and/or economic buyer is, their key pain points and goals, their buying process, and much more.
Creating check-ins, enablement sessions, and specific narratives with both partners and sellers ensures that you’re not only providing visibility into the strength of your ecosystem, but also that both are armed with the tools they need to succeed.
Drive partner revenue with Gong and Crossbeam
Are you ready to see how Gong and Crossbeam can work together (and work within your existing tech stack) to help you drive stronger partnerships and more revenue? Book a no-commitment call with the Gong team to get started.
