Digital Bridge Partners announces the first standardized Nearbound process for monetizing Tech Partnerships–The GoToEco Outbound Referral Playbook

It‘s no secret that unlocking ecosystem potential will be more challenging than ever in 2023. Companies are facing significant organizational and economic headwinds, including constrained demand, downsizing, decreased budgets, and even in some cases, a deprioritization of partnerships.

In this environment, partner organizations are struggling to:

• Deliver consistent value to a growing customer base.
• Deliver value to partners in a scale-able way.
• Achieve rapid time-to-revenue with new partners.
• Increase retention by capturing customer demand for partner solutions/services in real-time.

Finding cost-effective, scale-able, and rapid ways of creating revenue with partners, hitting quota, and delivering customer outcomes will be even more important — and potentially difficult to achieve in 2023.

The Digital Bridge Partners Outbound Referral Playbook helps address these challenges. The Playbook is a proven partner revenue creation method that drives referrals to your most important partners at scale, resulting in improved partner reciprocity (boost in received leads, closed ARR), and positive customer outcomes (retention, boost in NPS and CLTV).

A proven approach

Unlike other approaches that aren’t purpose-built for the unique needs of technology partner relationships and don’t create meaningful or consistent sourced revenue, The Outbound Referral Playbook provides a proven, actionable, and predictable revenue engine, backed by real-world case studies and implementation support.

Facing all of the above challenges, Gorgias – a leading customer support help desk for eCommerce brands - developed the original iteration of the outbound playbook, which quickly led to the following explosive results:

• 2-3x revenue generation to and from partners.
• Partnerships driving >50% of new monthly ARR.
• 3x more referrals to partners en route to 2x more referrals from partners.
• Rapid time-to-revenue, tier progression, and record revenue milestone achievement.
• Improved customer retention, NPS & LTV.
• Multiple prestigious awards as “Best Partner” from major B2B SaaS players.
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“Almost immediately we were able to 3x the number of leads we sent to partners – resulting in higher revenue yield per partner and higher customer retention. Digital Bridge Partners helped us build an expanded playbook, that we’ve been able to scale easily and even teach our partners to do the same.” – Billy McClennan, Head of Partnerships @ Gorgias

Playbook solution

The Playbook is designed based on the Principle of Reciprocity and a set of core best practices that drive a Reciprocal Revenue flywheel:

The Principle of Reciprocity is a basic law of social psychology - in most social situations, we pay back what we receive from others. Reciprocity creates a stake in partners’ welfare: if you help a partner win, especially in a downturn, the partner wants to reciprocate and invites you into their customer base. 

Consistent referrals of a partner into your customer base are the secret sauce of GoToEco value creation; nothing is more powerful, builds more trust, or drives customer retention.

A number of core best practices layer on top of the revenue flywheel to drive Playbook success:

1. Begin the Program by Creating Customer Buy-In. Leverage simple, clear, and compelling insight surveys to drive referral interest with customers as an added value engine for their business.
2. Leverage a clear and consistent playbook to ensure simplicity, speed, and scale. Playbooks ensure optimal efficiency & productivity (whilst preserving precious bandwidth for partnership managers to focus on generating referrals from partners) and delivering on promised value.
3. Track the Right Metrics and ensure value is made crystal clear. Tracking the right metrics enables constant improvement and ensures that value can be communicated broadly.
4. Ensure Sales, Customer Success, and partnership managers Buy-In. As the gate-keepers of your customers, you need the success team (and sales to a lesser extent) to buy into the vision, believe in the impact potential, and support (work with) you when making decisions on partner referrals. Partnership managers will be critical in offering input on referral situations and deciding which partners are most appropriate.
5. Focus on the right partners. Leverage a complete yet simple-to-navigate master partner directory containing the information needed to make an accurate determination of partner fit for a customer referral.

Using the playbook

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Digital Bridge Outbound Referral Playbook in conjunction with PartnerHacker, who recently joined forces with Reveal to bring Nearbound motions to the forefront of partnership operations.

If you, your CRO and CFO want to learn more about how the Playbook can generate net new revenues in a downmarket with minimal investment:

• Get in touch with us or book time directly with our Engagement Partner at Digital Bridge Partners and playbook architect, Chris Lavoie.
• Visit our website to learn more and gain access to the Case Study.