Every Stat We Have That Proves The Value Of Partnerships

Every Stat We Have That Proves The Value Of Partnerships

Zoe Kelly 18 min
By Zoe Kelly

Dedicated readers of the Crossbeam blog know that we specialize chatting to partnerships professionals to surface best practices, tips, and insights that help these folks drive to build and run the best version of their partner programs. And throughout every conversation, there has been a common thread: partnerships and ecosystem-led growth (ELG) practices drive results for businesses. 

However, tracking attribution can be difficult and requires investment into your partner processes. And getting the resources to do so can require proof of results. Thus begins a vicious cycle where everyone involved loses: you don’t get the buy-in you need and your company loses out on the opportunities ecosystem-led growth provides.

To help you tangibly show the impact of partnerships (and hopefully get more resources and headcount dedicated to them), we have compiled a list of every stat we have that proves their value. 

In this post, we cover how partnerships can be used to

And finally, we will cover how you can use Crossbeam to accelerate your results.

Bring in revenue

As Katy Perry famously sang, shut up and put your money where your mouth is. We are doing just that with this list of stats highlighting how partnerships can directly generate revenue for a company:

Source ecosystem-qualified leads (EQLs)

A partnership lets you tap into an entirely new customer base, generating new, free leads from an already trusted source:

Generate more dollars, faster than non-partnerships deals

Partnerships deals can generate better, faster results than non-partnerships deals. Use these stats to help prove that partnerships deals should be considered just as important, if not more important, than traditional deals:

Help non-partnerships teams hit their OKRs

The benefits of partnerships can expand past just the partner team. Show other departments how partnerships can help them hit their goals:

Raise venture capital (VC) funding

Looking for ways to stand out to potential investors and close that next series of fundraising? Invest in partnerships:

  • At Supernode 2022, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz Sarah Wang said, “Partnerships are more important than ever. Specifically, because you are bringing in pipeline, shortening sales cycles, and increasing conversion rates. Partnerships are a ‘need to have’, not a ‘nice to have’, especially in this environment.” Wang also shared that early investment in partnerships can signify the long-term success of an investment company. “Partnerships is the #1 hire that we hear our early companies making. Our best-performing companies are relying very heavily on partnerships.” Wang invested in a company with a 50% partner-generated pipeline over one with 100% sales-generated pipeline because of the resiliency that partnerships offer. 

Upsell, increase product use, and prevent customer churn

Building integrations with tech partners can make your product stickier:

  • Typeform customers using the company’s Zapier integration showed about 40% less churn than those who don’t use the integration.
  • Jai Shroff, Senior Customer Success Manager at Freshworks, says working with partners has helped his team retain customers who were likely to churn, upsell the accounts for more annual recurring revenue (ARR), and sign them for multi-year deals. “If your company is scaling, let’s say north of $100M in ARR, partnerships is the only way to reach that billion-dollar dream. Inside sales is not going to get you there,” says Shroff.
  • RollWorks customers who are using partner integrations renew at a rate approximately 30% higher than customers who don’t.
  • Rollworks customers using four or more integrations had a 135% likelihood to renew vs. customers using one integration — and the delta between customers with two integrations vs. four integrations was a 32% lift. 
  • “Since RollWorks and Bombora made the co-marketing flip, their integration has gained hundreds of adopters — and that number continues to grow steadily. That’s more than 50% of RollWorks’s customer base who are now leveraging the integration.”
  • 75% of Lucky Orange Customers use at least one native Lucky Orange integration. “That [75%] number speaks for itself as to why integrations should be a priority within our development cycles,” says Staats. 
  • Rollworks tied integration adoption metrics with their existing customer retention and renewal metrics. As a result, they knew that customers using four or more integrations had a 135% likelihood to renew vs. customers using one integration — and the delta between customers with two integrations vs. four integrations was a 32% lift. 
  • The comprehensive GTM strategy between strategic partners Google and Hubspot for their integration resulted in a 232% increase in feature adoption just five months post-launch. 

Help with exit events

From acquisitions to IPOs, partnerships can play a role in setting your company up for an exit event:

  • PayPal partnered with Honey, a coupon browser extension, to drive more conversions in the beginning phases of the buyer journey. Then, in 2019, they bought Honey for $4 billion. Through the partnership and ultimate acquisition, Honey got access to PayPal’s 24 million merchant partners, and PayPal got a leg up on competitors like Amazon Pay by engaging buyers on e-commerce pages through Honey’s web browser extension. 
  • In September 2021, Intuit announced that it’s acquiring MailChimp for $12 billion. An article on CNBC mentioned that the companies’ joint integration served as an entry point for initiating the acquisition conversation. Intuit and MailChimp first initiated the partnership conversation a year prior to the announcement and there are two Mailchimp integrations listed on the Intuit Quickbooks site
  • In September 2021, Notion acquired Automate.io. In TechCrunch, Notion COO Ashay Kothari shared that he first learned about Automate.io because of a partnership the two companies had together. When Notion opened up its APIs to the public in May 2021, Automate.io built on its platform and opened the door to a new market of customers.
  • In October 2021, Accenture acquired Xoomworks. Accenture pointed to the strength of Xoomworks’s partner ecosystem as a reason for the acquisition. From Accenture’s website: “Xoomworks shares deep relationships with Accenture ecosystem partners, including SAP Ariba, Coupa, and Jaggaer.”
  • SAP acquired Qualtrics in 2018 for $8 billion, and then in January 2021, Qualtrics went public for a market capitalization of $27 billion, according to Forbes. Zig Serafin, Qualtrics’s CEO, explains that a significant reason for spinning out of SAP is to prioritize Qualtrics’s partner ecosystem and potential customers beyond SAP’s parameters.
  • Demandbase acquired Demandmatrix seven months after launching a partnership. “We said, this deal is just step one in a longer-term partnership,” says Asher Mathew, Vice-President Go-To-Market, Data Cloud, Technographics, Demandbase (previously VP, Revenue and Operations at DemandMatrix).
  • In CM Group’s announcement, digital marketing company CM Group says its merger with Cheetah Digital is part of its plan to add attractive products to its portfolio to drive “stickiness” and retention among its existing customers. From Wellford Dillard, CEO at CM Group:“…We will continue to be their marketing technology partner as they grow by delivering the right technology at the right time, tailored to their industry and built for the scale at which they operate,” he said.
  • E-commerce company Coupang went public in March of 2021 and was the largest IPO of the year in the US, according to a March CNBC article, and the largest foreign listing since 2014. The Motley Fool shared that the growth of Coupang’s ecosystem is one of three reasons to invest in Coupang.
  • In July 2021, VTEX announced the closing of its IPO. In the IPO announcement, Geraldo Thomaz, co-CEO of VTEX, stresses the importance of building a viable tech ecosystem. He says the strength of VTEX’s ecosystem has contributed to the success of the business, and thus the IPO. “The era of siloed software is ending and connected software is on the rise,” says Thomaz. 
  • When evaluating media company The Hustle as an acquisition target, Hubspot used Crossbeam to measure how large of an opportunity the acquisition would be. “Using Crossbeam, I can more precisely identify the percentage of our base that is already a subscriber of The Hustle’s content,” said Brandon Greer, Senior Manager of Corporate Development at Hubspot. Specifically, Hubspot used Crossbeam to generate reports comparing:
    • The overlaps between Hubspot’s customers and The Hustle’s subscribers.
    • The overlaps between HubSpot’s prospects with The Hustle’s subscribers

Expand into new markets

Looking to expand internationally? Instead of building a business presence from scratch, strategically partner with companies in your target markets, then tap into their customer base:

Future-proof your business strategy

Whether it’s unexpected economic turbulence or the slow death of third-party data, the landscape of business is changing. Partnerships can be a valuable tool for navigating these changes: 

  • ISV/GSI partnerships hold just as much value to the GSI that they do to the ISV. “Riley,” a VP at a company with 10,000+ partners in their ecosystem including GSIs shared that both the CEO and sales leader at their company are “ecosystem focused” and see ISVs as an opportunity to bring innovation into their ecosystem.
  • At Supernode 2022, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz Sarah Wang said, “Partnerships are more important than ever. Specifically, because you are bringing in pipeline, shortening sales cycles, and increasing conversion rates. Partnerships are a ‘need to have’, not a ‘nice to have’, especially in this environment.” Wang also shared that early investment in partnerships can signify the long-term success of an investment company. “Partnerships is the #1 hire that we hear our early companies making. Our best-performing companies are relying very heavily on partnerships.” Wang invested in a company with a 50% partner-generated pipeline over one with 100% sales-generated pipeline because of the resiliency that partnerships offer. 
  • In its 2022 “State of Inbound Marketing Trends” report, HubSpot recommended that marketers “future-proof [their] marketing” by “creating an incredible online presence that focuses on creating your own audience and connecting it to a robust first-party data collection structure.”
  • According to Boston Consulting Group’s A World Without Cookies Report, companies planning for a post-third party data world should look for opportunities to “create a mutual value exchange with partners in order to accelerate data capture…they should boost their partnerships with second-party data providers and secure clean-room environments.” This includes the creation of a “cross-functional team to evaluate available technology, launch pilots to assess new partners and identity solutions, and research potential big bets, such as new technologies for data collection and storage, new data-capture strategies, or third-party vendor partnerships.”

How you can use Crossbeam to accelerate your results

Having access to stats that show the impact of partnerships is a valuable tool. But we can do you one better. Here’s how using Crossbeam can help you drive similar results from your partner program: 

Zoe Kelly 18 min

Every Stat We Have That Proves The Value Of Partnerships


Showing the value of partnerships to your higher-ups can be difficult, especially when you’re in the early days of building your Ecosystem. Here is every stat we have that shows the impact of partnerships. Use these stats to make the case for your next Ecosystem initiative and get the buy-in and resources you need to get started.


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