The Nearbound Daily is now officially the ELG Insider Daily!
Welcome to the ELG Insider Daily — the #1 newsletter in the world keeping thousands of GTM professionals on top of the latest Ecosystem-Led principles, tactics, and trends. Join the movement here.
SHARE YOUR INSIGHTS
The Future of Revenue survey
As a GTM leader, your experience and insights are crucial to understanding the direction of revenue strategies in our industry.
We’ve partnered with Pavilion to survey GTM leaders, and we’d love it if you could take 7 minutes to share your thoughts.
It’s completely anonymous, and you’ll get early access to the report before its official release this fall.
Take the survey here.
PRINCIPLES
Balance isn’t always 50-50
Effective partnerships aren’t always an even 50-50 split; they’re about balancing strengths to achieve mutual success.
In any collaboration, sometimes you’ll contribute more, and sometimes your partner will. What matters most is that both parties give 100% of their effort in completing their tasks.
Whether you're handling 60% of the work and your partner 40%, or vice versa, the focus should be on leveraging each other's strengths to create a win-win outcome.
True partnership means filling in the gaps for each other and aligning on a plan that drives success for both sides, even if the contributions differ from one play to the next.
TACTICS
Co-sell* like a pro
*A collaborative sales partnership where two or more companies join forces to sell their solutions together.
You don’t have to sell alone. If your company has a partner program in place, you can leverage it to sell more.
SaaS companies adopting co-selling, a fairly new ecosystem-led sales motion, have seen deals close 46% faster with a 53% higher likelihood of closing.
We spoke with John Smit, Head of Partnerships & Technology Alliances EMEA, APJ at Siteimprove, to learn how he and his sales team went from traditional sales to ELG sales.
We’ve broken the journey down into three phases:
Phase #1: The Manual Mindset
During this phase, Smit spent most of his time scheduling meetings, gathering information, and tracking partner influence manually. He had to rely on video calls, emails, and spreadsheets, making it difficult to identify mutual accounts and track sales intel accurately.
Without proper data-sharing tools, Smit could only share limited, publicly available data with partners, leading to missed co-selling opportunities. He recalls losing a promising partner because they couldn't discuss mutual prospects due to data security concerns.
Phase #2: The Data Mindset
In this phase, Smit shifted from manual processes to a data-driven approach, investing time in learning partner tech and integrating it into the GTM tech stack. This allowed for better collaboration with partner ops, automation of processes, and improved data visibility for GTM teams.
This data-driven approach streamlined onboarding, improved tracking in Salesforce, and boosted deal closure rates with partner involvement (influencing 25-30% of deals).
Phase #3: The Conductor Mindset
In this phase, Smit shifted from directly managing partnerships to empowering his sales team to co-sell independently. By building a strong tech stack and processes, he enabled faster deal cycles and more closed deals.
The sales team began actively involving partners, leading to greater collaboration and more partner-influenced deals. Smit’s role focused on big-picture strategy and alignment, driving scalable growth.
Since advancing from a “manual mindset” to a “conductor mindset”, Smit has observed the following benefit:
Partners influence 4x the number of deals than they had influenced previously to adopt the “conductor mindset”, and deals with partners close at a more than 40% higher rate than non-partner-influenced deals.
Learn more about how Smit gave the power back to his sales team to co-sell with partners.
RESOURCE OF THE DAY
Is your business ready to adopt co-selling?
Recently, PartnerStack shared the 5 signs that show you’re ready for co-selling partnerships.
According to Nicolette Lopes, Director of Channel Partnerships & Alliances at PartnerStack, experience, the five signs are:
- Your solution naturally fits with another product or service — you can identify common customers, and quick wins through account mapping.
- Your partner’s marketing team is at a place where they can effectively position you in the market.
- You have the resources, support systems, and processes in place to handle growth.
- You had a successful pilot program.
- You have the right tools in your co-selling toolbox.
Read the rest here.
Stuff you don't want to miss!
- TODAY, September 12th — Building a Value-Based Partnership Strategy — Asher Mathew, CEO and Founder of Partnership Leaders, and Chad Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder of Ecosystems, will share how to strategically align with partners to drive value, optimize resources, and sustain competitive advantage in a cost-conscious market. Register here.
- September 17th - 20th — INBOUND 24 — Join us in Boston at INBOUND to meet the newly merged team, get the most up-to-date intel on the new merged Crossbeam x Reveal product, and attend the most fun after-INBOUND parties. Meet the team at INBOUND.
- September 24th — GTMnow Live: The Future of Outbound: An Ecosystem-Led Approach — Outbound is changing and ecosystems have never been more important. Join go-to-market leaders from Crossbeam, Pattern, and Atlan as they discuss the shift towards an ecosystem-led approach in outbound sales. Register now.
- October 1st — SalesIntel Annual Summit — SalesIntel is organizing a 100% free and virtual summit where you will find specific tracks curated for sales, marketing, and RevOps and roundtable working sessions focused on sharing actionable ways to build pipelines and achieve growth goals. Save your seat here.
- October 1st - 3rd — RevCon — RevGenius partnered with Common Room, Sigma, Avoma, The Juice, and many more to bring you a 3-day virtual conference to reunite your sales, marketing, revops, and cs leaders behind to learn and discuss about the future of SaaS. Save your spot here.
You're all caught up
See you tomorrow
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