In modern marketing, traditional approaches often miss the mark, drowned out by the noise of the competition.

However, by strategically leveraging relationships and tapping into your network of partners, you not only break through the clutter but also achieve higher success rates while delivering enhanced value to your customers and buyers.

‍Research from HubSpot, Partnership Leaders, and Pavilion underscores this shift:

• 50% of B2B companies attribute over a quarter of their revenue to partnerships.
• Marketing teams increasingly rely on partnerships to bolster brand equity, facilitate deal collaboration, and enrich data.
• Co-marketing campaigns are emerging as powerful tools, driving superior brand awareness, engagement, and conversion rates.
• Buyers heavily rely on the counsel of their professional networks and trusted advisors for decision-making.

These findings show that partnerships are no longer just a supplementary aspect of marketing—they are now indispensable for effective marketing campaigns. They provide a strategic pathway to growth and enable deeper connections with your audience.

‍Recently, Jessica Fewless, Director of Partnerships at Inverta, and Isaac Morehouse, CMO at Reveal and nearbound.com, gathered in one of Inverta’s webinars, to discuss the importance of nearbound marketing, how to build a nearbound ABM campaign, and shared a couple of tips to better leverage partner data. 

‍Let’s dive in! 

What is partner marketing? 

Partner marketing refers to a collaborative effort between two or more businesses to promote each other's products or services. It involves forming strategic partnerships with other companies, influencers, or organizations to: 

• Expand your reach: Partnering with other businesses allows you to tap into their existing customer base and reach new audiences that you may not have been able to access on your own.

• Build trust and credibility: When you collaborate with trusted partners, their endorsement of your product or service can enhance your credibility and reputation in the eyes of their customers.

• Create cost-effective marketing: Partnering with other businesses for marketing activities can be more cost-effective than traditional advertising or marketing efforts. By sharing resources and leveraging each other's networks, you can achieve greater exposure at a lower cost.

• Access to expertise: Partnering with companies that specialize in complementary products or services allows you to access expertise and resources that you may not have in-house. This can help you improve your offerings and provide more value to your customers.

• Drive mutual growth: Partner marketing fosters a mutually beneficial relationship where you and your partner have the opportunity to grow their businesses together. By working towards common goals and sharing successes, both partners can achieve greater success than you would individually.

“Filtering any GTM strategy through the lens of partnerships makes it stronger, and we want to equip marketing leaders with a framework that will let them do so.” — Jessica Fewless

Partner marketing is important for several reasons, including activities such as co-branding, co-marketing campaigns, joint events, referral programs, revenue-sharing arrangements, and nearbound ABM campaigns.

What is nearbound ABM?

So, if ABM is account-based marketing, what’s a nearbound ABM strategy?

Nearbound ABM is an ABM strategy that leverages your partner ecosystem to surround the accounts on a targeted list with influence and trust. 

When you involve partners in your campaigns you create stronger signals that can help your Sales team close deals 35% faster, 2x larger, and with a 43% higher win rate. 

“Occasionally, there might be some things that you can do solo, but that must be the exception, not the rule. If you involve the right partners in your marketing strategy, everything you do will become cheaper, you’ll increase your reach and conversion.” — Isaac Morehouse

It’s a strategy that has a collective approach that combines the power of your ecosystem, trusted partnerships, and targeted marketing to accelerate revenue growth and overcome challenges in partnerships, marketing, and sales.

The narrower your list, the better value you can deliver.  

It is as simple as planning your regular campaigns, but in a more targeted way, and attaching the right partners according to your existing strategies, accounts, and events that you’re already doing. 

The bottom line is nailing your joint account list. 

“70% to 80% of your annual revenue comes from your existent current customers. They are your original and most important account-based list, treating them with an account-based approach can help you increase retention, upsell, and cross-sell.” —Jessica Fewless

How to implement a nearbound ABM motion?

There are eight steps you and your GTM teams need to follow. The bright side of the story is that nearbound ABM isn’t about reinventing the wheel: it’s about expanding your reach by using relationships that already exist between you and your partners, and partners and your buyers. 

Here are the 8 basic steps shared by Jessica Fewless (Director of Partnerships at Inverta) to implement a nearbound marketing strategy: 

Step 1: Define Goals. Clearly outline what you aim to achieve with your ABM strategy. Align goals with overall business objectives, such as revenue growth, customer retention, or market expansion.

Define key performance indicators (KPIs) related to your nearbound ABM goals. Of course, don’t forget that you’ll have to regularly monitor and analyze the performance of your campaign.

To make your nearbound ABM work, you have to align with your C-suite on what are they expecting from you and the rest of your GTM team. In case they need a little bit of data support, feel free to leverage Reveal’s 360° Goals. 

Step 2: Identify Partners. You need to assess the strength of your partner portfolio. Identify those partners from your existing partner portfolio who are engaged, need reengagement, or the ones who are ready to invest resources like time, effort, and/or financial resources

By identifying the right partners, you not only deliver valuable content through your nearbound ABM campaign but also create an environment of trust around your prospects. They aren’t only interested in knowing 'how' to achieve their goals but also in identifying 'who' can best assist them in attaining better results.

Step 3: Build your Joint Target Account List. Connect with your partners to jointly identify who are the best people to include in your campaign. Besides including company size or market as criteria to build your list, with Reveal your nearbound ABM list filters your list of accounts based on nearbound data like technographic data, account overlap, deal influencers, win rate, deal size, open opportunities, etc, to build your account-based list. 

Collaborate with your Sales teams to identify and prioritize high-value target accounts.

Step 4: Ensure Alignment. Align with your internal teams and your partner’s organization. Aligning with your counter Partner Marketer is great, but you also have to include your Sales team in your nearbound ABM equation. 

Integrate the nearbound ABM strategy with their existing sales process. Ensure that the strategy seamlessly integrates with their overall sales process. Facilitate regular communication between your Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams.

Step 5: Allocate Resources. Implement technology and tools. In this step, you need to load your arsenal with weapons that can facilitate the personalized outreach process, list building, and tracking.

Invest in ABM platforms like 6sense or Demandbase, ABM consulting agencies like Inverta, and marketing automation tools and CRMs to analyze buyer interactions. You can also use PRMs like Allbound, Mindmatrix, or Impartner to track partner results, and Nearbound Revenue Platforms like Reveal to track your nearbound ABM strategy’s success. 

Step 6: Design Campaign. Develop hyper-targeted content, decide on the channels you’re going to be leveraging, timing, and creative elements you need to roll out your campaign.  Make sure you engage with your Marketing and Sales teams for an effective campaign distribution.

Partnership Managers should build relationships and identify key partners who can close the product and knowledge gaps to achieve customer success, plus identify and allocate partners in each of the 28 touchpoints in your customer’s journey. 

Step 7: Iterate and Adjust. Launch your campaign. This is the perfect opportunity to ask for your partner’s point of view (POV), and customer and team feedback. Remember, a nearbound ABM strategy is hyper-personalized, so asking for feedback should follow the same rules.

Identify what’s working and what’s not.

It can be the wording or even your account list—feel free to change, expand or refine what’s not working. Continuously learn from the results of your nearbound ABM campaigns. Apply insights to enhance future campaigns and overall marketing strategy.

Step 8: Celebrate Success. If your nearbound motion is recent, you have to be the cheerleader of all things partner-related. Share data and success stories across the organization to motivate your team to implement your nearbound ABM campaign. 

Two of the key elements of your nearbound ABM campaign are communication and visibility. So make sure to share everything with everyone. Keep your campaigns for the records and leverage them as learning experiences for future initiatives.

How to better use partner data

There are so many ways you can leverage partner data but, for building a nearbound ABM campaign, you will need partner data to build your targeted account list for official co-marketing campaigns. Your goals will dictate the way you build your lists. 

“By leveraging partner data, not only do you speed up the process of assembling your list, but it also helps you build a more informed target account list, leading to a higher conversion rate.” — Jessica Fewless

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself before building your targeted account list: 

• Who is in market?
• Who has already engaged with you?
• Who do my customers trust?
• Which accounts have a partner attached? 

‍Reveal helps you set up dynamic nearbound marketing account lists, and pre-qualify those lists of accounts based on your ICP directly. 

You’re not reinventing the wheel, you’re just adding one more layer of intel into your existing data set: partner presence. 

Within Reveal, you can filter according to industry size, geography, number of employees (and all the elements you use to define your ICP), and know which partners are best to help. 

Here’s how you can build different target account lists in Reveal: 

Expanding your list

Once you have connected with your partner on Reveal and you want to build a nearbound ABM campaign to expand your target account list of customers within a specific market, leverage Reveal’s 360° Goals feature to identify those customers of your partner who aren’t in your CRM.

This means that by leveraging partners you can get access to net new highly-qualified leads. 

Sourcing opportunities 

Reveal provides access to your partners' customers who are also your prospects. This is a great way to create your targeted list knowing that your partner has a closer relationship with your prospect than you. 

This means your partner can help you build a strategy to help you reach out to them, and you have the certainty that your partner will back you up by giving you intel, influence, or intros if needed. 

Whether you’re leveraging your partner's data to expand, source, or influence your list, those accounts from your partner's CRM have already higher chances to convert just by the mere fact that they already have a trusted relationship with your partner. 

‍Partners can tell you who you need to reach out to and the message you need to share with them. 

Nearbound ABM 

A nearbound ABM strategy is an ongoing process, and the key is to adapt and refine your approach based on the feedback and results you receive. Regular communication and collaboration between Sales, Customer Success, Partnerships, and Marketing teams are essential for a successful ABM strategy.

By leveraging Inverta in tandem with Reveal, you ensure that your nearbound ABM strategy is focused and successful. 

‍Learn how