You have the
stats that prove the value of a nearbound strategy, you have access to
email templates to action the 3 I’s of nearbound, and you even have
a book with the steps you need to follow to build your nearbound strategy and overlay it into all your departments.

But how do you exactly
track your nearbound efforts and prove the value of your strategy?

We have collected some stories of how top GTM leaders like Daniel O’Leary, Senior Director of Partnerships at Box, Alex Hernandez, Head of Events at Reveal, Nigel Liaw, Director of Technology Partnerships at Fullstory, and Loryn Ferreira, former Partnership Manager at Punchh to showcase some tactics to measure your nearbound metrics.

Let’s dive into each use case!

For your Sales team

Besides measuring onboardings and meetings booked/held, there should be some sales activities in your CRM that are tracked and tied to the partner play. Here’s where we highlight partner-influence, for example:

• Number of pipeline activities that involved partner influence

• Average deal size (with and without partner involvement)
  

• Average close rate (with and without partner involvement)

One clear example of how to track your co-selling motions or any nearbound sales metric is Dan O’Leary, who tracks deals co-sold with partners, ACV, potential ARR closed, and the average deal cycle time with partner attached.

In a conversation we had with Dan, he shared with us his favorite tracking play:
Automation

“Having the data around this is key. It’s not just the deal registration, but how we use the account mapping data, pipeline data, influencer information, and partner signals to drive valuable campaigns on both sides.

I leverage Reveal’s automation capabilities to streamline our sales processes, especially with Slack, to connect with my global team. This includes setting up alerts for changes in account activity such as the addition of opportunities and won deals, sharing insights with AEs via Slack and in meetings, and integrating Reveal data into our Salesforce CRM to show up on Opportunities and Accounts for seamless workflow and consistency.

Regular training sessions are conducted in partnership with our Ops and Enablement team to ensure the Sales team can effectively utilize these automations, data, and my team.”

Here are Dan’s results:

• The biggest deals this year, last year, and the previous year were all co-sold with partners. Working with partners is the fast track to the President’s Club.

• 92% larger average contract values (ACV), with a higher attach rate of their top product
  

• 55% higher potential ARR closed, meaning they win more of the seats. When they work with partners, the pie gets bigger, and everyone gets a bigger slice.

• 27% shorter average deal cycles

For your Marketing team

Tracking impressions and video views is great, but they don’t tell you anything about the impact partners have on marketing OKRs.

This doesn’t mean you have to stop tracking metrics like engagement, traffic, or goal completion, but if you really want to prove the value of your nearbound marketing strategy you should focus on one (or many) of the following metrics:

• Conversion rates (with partner attached)

• Open rates (on emails with a nearbound ABM list)

• Co-marketing event revenue

• Nearbound MQLs—your prospects who are your partner’s customers or prospects.
  

This is our Head of Events, Alex Hernandez’s, favorite way of tracking co-marketing event-led revenue:
Reveal’s Collaborate feature.

“I go to our 1:1 account mapping with our partner. I add the event name column (previously added as a custom property in HubSpot by our partner), filter by event name, and save that view. This allows you to identify the accounts that attended the event, their status in your company, and your partner’s company.

The next step is adding the deals you’re already working on with your partner sourced or influenced by the event to Collaborate to track how those leads are performing in comparison to your open opportunities. You can even attach the opportunity directly in Reveal and in your CRM.”

The results:
Q1 2024 results included 20% of Reveal’s open opportunities were influenced by co-marketing events.

For your Customer Success team

If you really want to track nearbound customer success metrics, your team should go beyond basic indicators like NPS, logins, or session time, and start adding partners to the equation:

• Renewal rate (with partners attached vs without partners)

• Adoption rate (with partners attached vs without partners)

• Upselling opportunities (with partners attached vs without partners)

• Retention rate (with partners attached vs without partners)

• Customer success scores

• Churn rates
  

During an interview with Nigel Liaw, he shared with us how his tech partnership program has helped their Customer Success team increase their renewal rate, and he revealed his favorite play to track integration usage to boost renewals:
creating dashboards.

“To monitor integration adoption, retention, and expansion, we developed dashboards in Looker Studio. These dashboards display data on customer integration usage.

Additionally, we validate data in Looker Studio by comparing customer overlap in Reveal. This allows us to identify customers not using the integration. We then strategize with partners to promote integration among all shared customers.

We consolidate all Reveal data into Salesforce and we build dashboards, enabling CSMs to access integration opportunities before quarterly customer reviews. CSMs play a crucial role in closing the integration loop.”

The results: Fullstory viewed an increase of 14% in renewal rate for customers with 2 active integrations or more in only 8 months.

For your Partnerships team

Making your KPI the number of partners in your partner program is useless if you have 50 partners but you only leverage two.

Yes, partner metrics can vary depending on the type of partner. But most of the time, it’s all about partner-attached (influenced or sourced).

You can measure and ensure partner-influence by tracking:

• The number of opportunities where the partner was involved

• The resulting number of deal wins secured through that partner’s involvement

• The partner’s engagement level
  

You can measure and ensure partner-sourced revenue by tracking:

• The number of new leads passed over from that partner

• The number of opportunities that moved to the pipeline from those leads

• The number of deal wins that were converted from those opportunities
  

“When you think about impact in terms of Revenue, you’re also protecting your existing customers and protecting the bottom line that way so the impact of Partnerships goes well beyond um just being able to bring in new business it’s also protecting your existing book of business which is super powerful.” —Loryn Ferreira, Senior Partnership Manager at Attentive

During the conversation we had with Loryn (back in her days at Punchh), she mentioned that her favorite play to track total partner referred/influenced opportunities regarding the number of opportunities closed and total ARR deal size was:
Reveal’s Collaborate feature (previously called Pipeline).

“Every inbound or outbound referral is attributed to the partner, tracked regardless of closure. We chose Reveal for its [Collaborate] feature, which maintains a pipeline between partners. It tracks inbound and outbound referrals, allows note-keeping, and facilitates communication. Once an opportunity is created, it’s automatically attributed to the referral, with metrics tracked in Reveal.

Once you have that data, the next step would be comparing closed opportunities against deals closed to prove the partner program’s value.

To start tracking impact, monitor win rates and revenue per close rate by adding a field in Salesforce to indicate partner involvement and using Reveal.”

The results: In 2021, Punchh drove 2x higher close rates and 50% higher revenue closed per deal thanks to partner-referred / influenced opportunities.

The importance of tracking

Tracking nearbound metrics is essential if you want to showcase the effectiveness of your nearbound strategies and demonstrate the value of partnerships across your GTM team.

By implementing tracking methods tailored to each team’s objectives, such as sales activities in CRM, event-led revenue tracking, integration usage dashboards, and partner-influence metrics, you can optimize your nearbound efforts and drive significant results.

We know that tracking is difficult for every GTM leader, but the good news is that the Reveal team is ready to help you overcome this challenge. Book a meeting with them to talk about strategy.