In this article you’ll learn:
Tips to introduce your Nearbound strategy
Tips to introduce your Nearbound Revenue Platform
How to source and influence Nearbound leads for your company
Revenue quotas keep increasing despite the fact that, in today’s economy, they’re getting harder and harder to reach. So, if you’re to succeed in meeting your goals and saving your company, you better get started on building a strategy that can drive deals fast.
And the only way to do this is by implementing a Nearbound GTM strategy.
Nearbound leverages relationships and partnerships to build trust and positively influence your buyers’ purchasing decisions.
Partner teams can focus on building trust with partners and help their sellers leverage that trust.
Basically, Nearbound enables Partner teams to do what they do best: Help.
That’s why Partnerships is not a department, but a layer on every department.
We recently sat down with Stuart Wasilowski, Senior Partner Relationship Manager at Cornerstone, in one of our Nearbound at Work sessions to lay out the best strategy to drive deals faster.
From introducing your Nearbound strategy to enabling your teams on your Nearbound Revenue Platform to influencing and sourcing deals, Stuart has the best tips for you.
Let’s get started.
Introducing a Nearbound strategy
Sometimes, this definition might not be enough to get your GTM teams on board. So, you might need two or three team enablement sessions. Invest this time in your teams so you can reap the investment tenfold.
To first introduce a Nearbound strategy, you have to position it as a strategy that is going to make your Sales reps, Account Managers, BDRs, Customer Success Managers, and Marketing team smarter about the work they do.
It’s about building and surrounding the customer journey with trust, and not relying on the “how” but on the “who” can help you achieve that.
Business in 2023 involves adapting to a new era where companies who partner with influencers, integrators, advisors, and advocates win in the Who Economy.
Nearbound leverages the relationships built by your Partnerships team to:
Increase the number of open opportunities by 33%
Increase win rates by 41%
Drive 2-3x more revenue
Decrease your CAC
Increase productivity per rep
You can even share this video from Stuart to explain how Nearbound works:
Introducing a Nearbound Revenue Platform
Before going and planning those enablement sessions, put yourself in the shoes of your salespeople. Understand what they do, how they operate, and how Nearbound will change the way they do business.
You can get your Nearbound Revenue Platform (aka Reveal) ready to work, but it won’t matter if you can’t get people to use and engage with it.
So, how do you get your teams to interact and engage with that solution?
You have to understand that change management is critical to the success of your solution and to the success of all the people attached to it (BDRs, AEs, Account Managers, etc).
Play one: Find an executive champion.
Get an executive sponsor that understands the role of partnerships and is actively engaged, building coalitions at their level and field. That person needs to be in constant and direct communication with your teams and the external stakeholders who are also leveraging this solution.
However, don’t confuse this executive with someone at a high level who is just pushing the rollout of the solution and who is only willing to do alliances once a quarter. Find a true champion.
Play two: Find your people manager champion.
Get at least one of your people managers on board. They will be the ones who will build a direct link between you, your new solution, and the team. People managers will help their team understand and leverage a new platform that will make their team’s work more efficient.
They have the power to communicate that the old ways of working aren’t useful anymore.
And let’s be honest if your direct boss tells you to do something, you’ll do it.
Once you identified your teams’ challenges and found your champions, you can start planning your enablement sessions.
Make sure that when addressing your Sales and Account Managers (besides including team enablement) you also include one-to-one conversations to share intent, how the new solution works, and some real-life examples (early wins) of companies that succeeded in implementing the same platform and strategy.
How to influence Nearbound Deals
All businesses have the challenge of driving more revenue than last quarter, but what they don’t realize is that they need just one thing to boost revenue:
Clarity.
Imagine having the ability to see opportunities and data that you couldn’t see before and that can easily be translated into influencing deals—that boost of revenue that you were looking for.
Nearbound in tandem with Reveal gives you the power to unlock opportunities created by the Partnerships team.
One of the beauties of implementing a Nearbound strategy and using Reveal is that you can identify the partner that can influence that deal.
Picture this: you have a client that you’re trying to renew, or even a prospect you have been chasing for months, with Nearbound you can get:
The intel (their pain points, requirements, tech stack) you need to know to target them better.
The “who’s” that can influence the deal (maybe with a recommendation from a partner or a testimonial from your buyer’s source of trust).
The right sales rep or account owner that can help you get that intro.
This is how the process can go:
As you can see, Stuart found a successful way to influence a renewal. But there are multiple ways to do it, and all of them can be uncovered if you leverage Nearbound.
You can also get clarity on which of your clients, prospects, and partners are going to an event. If you leverage Reveal, you’ll be able to find where the relationships are.
We all know that deals influenced by the trust that already lives in your ecosystem close faster. So, if you’re attending an event, and you have an open deal, what better than getting a live recommendation or testimonial from your partner to finally close that deal?
Here’s a cheat sheet to know whether you’re influencing or sourcing a deal.
How to source Nearbound deals
Once you have explained what is Nearbound and how your team can benefit from it, you’re ready to start driving revenue. The good thing is that with Nearbound you can also source deals.
One way to do this with Reveal is through the New Prospects feature.
New Prospects uncovers accounts that exist in your Partner’s CRM, but not in yours. In other words—where there is no account overlap.
They are the result of the value proposition that you have with your partner and the fruitful relationships you have built with them. These are warm leads that are ripe for sourcing.
You can push these accounts directly into your CRM using Reveal, and create accounts as they come through.
But which of these warm leads should you focus on first?
To answer this question, you should go to 360° Mapping. Rather than looking one-to-one with each of your partners, this Reveal feature allows you to have an account-level view of:
The status of your accounts
Who owns the account
The deal status
Partner presence (whether the account is a customer or a prospect for your partner)
“The 360° Mapping view it’s like getting a Google map for 50 destinations that include hotels, restaurants, and gas stations along the way, and in one click you can share that information.” - Stuart Wasilowski, Senior Partner Relationship Manager at Cornerstone.
360° Mapping also gives you a view of where all your partners are on these prospects’ accounts, which gives you an idea of the tech stack your prospect is using. Thanks to this, you can identify which of your partners make sense to work with to shorten the sales cycle and easily close that account.
To identify which of these leads has high potential, look at their Partner Signals.
Partner Signals help you to easily identify your highest potential prospects and the partners that can help convert them. We’ve also identified what we call Conversion-boosting Partners that historically correlate with higher win rates for our users, whether it’s an upsell, renewal, etc.
Conversion-boosting Partners are shown in gold below.
Now you can start building views that are relevant to you and your team based on country, open deals, owner, etc. To help you with this, you can use Reveal’s Saved Views feature.
Saved Views is a feature available on partner Account Mapping and 360° Mapping. This feature allows you to save your most frequently used filters so that you can save time and quickly switch between different views.
Once you have identified your deals with the highest potential, you can start executing.
With Reveal you have different options to action that data.
Option one: Add it to Collaborate
Reveal’s Collaborate feature is how you can manage accounts that you are collaborating on with partners.
Instead of using shared spreadsheets to track deals where partners are involved, Pipeline makes this easier by linking to your Account Mapping and your CRM. It’s a centralized place to track how partners are influencing or sourcing deals.
Option two: Reveal Engage
Reveal Engage allows you to see in Salesforce which partners are present on each account and the state of each partner. It empowers your Sales team to leverage you (as a Partner Manager) to get the intros they need to close deals 43% faster.
All they have to do is press the Get Intro Button.
Reveal Engage helps you create the right process that gets the right info to the right people at the right time to boost partner revenue.
Navigating a trust-fueled journey to revenue growth
By embracing the Nearbound approach, businesses can empower their Partner teams to enhance trust and assist sellers in leveraging that trust to accelerate deals.
If you really want to build a Nearbound strategy there’s no doubt that you need enablement sessions, not only on your strategy, but also your Nearbound Revenue Platform. Nobody becomes an expert out of the blue.
Nearbound and Reveal work together to uncover opportunities, influence deals, and source revenue.
Are you ready to source and influence deals?
