60% of companies plan to expand their partner team this year

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This week’s research note includes:

GTM Research: Partner-Led Growth is on the rise . . .
GTM Poll of the Week: Can you see this poll?
GTM Problem of the Week: How can I use my ROI study through the whole customer lifecycle?
GTM News
GTM Events

GTM Research: Partner-Led Growth is on the Rise

A weekly deep-dive into new GTM research and insights

Partner-led growth is on the rise.

66% of companies say they are running a Partner-Led Growth strategy
77% say they have a partner program
60% plan to expand their partner team in 2024.

According to research we did with Partnership Leaders in the latest GTM Benchmark, 3/4 of companies plan to get more than 25% of their revenue from partnerships. (20% plan to get more than half their revenue from partnerships).

There’s good reason for companies to be embracing partners. Check out these stats about partner-sourced deals from research we did with Reveal and Partnerstack:

99% higher win rate (Reveal)
432% increase in revenue (Partnerstack)
11% faster to close (Reveal)

Read the Report on Partner-Led Growth

Is Partner-Led Growth Right for You?

Like all GTM motions, the decision about whether Partner-Led Growth makes sense for your company should be driven by the products you sell and the audiences you serve.

The 5 Types of Partner-Led Growth

Partner-led growth is one of the more complex GTM motions, because there are so many different ways to approach it.

Channels

Channel partners can include distributors, value-added resellers (VARs), system integrators, consultants, agencies, and other intermediaries who have established relationships with the target customers or have expertise in specific industries or markets.

Ecosystem

An ecosystem is a network of interconnected companies, organizations, and individuals that collaborate and depend on each other to create value and to support mutual growth. Some of the strongest ecosystems are built on overlapping or adjacent use cases, workflows, and shared data that enables customers to do what was previously not possible with only one solution.

Referral Programs

Referral programs are initiatives where existing customers or other close partners recommend a company's products or services to someone they know. Usually they make the referral in a way that directly endorses the product or service as a solution to a problem a company is actively trying to solve. It is common for a successful referral to result in incentives or rewards.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where affiliates (individuals or other businesses) broadly promote a company's products or services and earn a commission for each sale or lead generated through their efforts. Affiliate marketing is most common in driving freemium products, lower-priced products, or more transactional purchases of any size that don’t require a buying committee or a consultative sale.

Reseller

Resellers are third-party companies or individuals who purchase products or technology from a company and then resell them to end customers, usually adding their margin to the product price. There can be a wide variety of how these transactions occur (for example, on the reseller’s paper, provider’s paper, white labeled, bundled with limits, and specific rules around when it goes from reseller to a direct seller).

Read the Report on Partner-Led Growth

A Word on Nearbound

Nearbound refers to the concept of working deals together through an existing network of relationships. It’s a fundamentally different way of surfacing and finding opportunities and nurturing them through to sale. It assumes that the best prospects already live in your ecosystem because they are the customers or prospects of your partners.

Nearbound is a new philosophy, very similar to the way account-based marketing redefined how sales and marketing work together. Nearbound redefines how individuals from different companies work together to close more business. In this way, Nearbound can be an approach or layer that exists on top of any of the other indirect selling approaches.

GTM Poll of the Week

We’re testing placement of our polls to see what works the best.

GTM Problem of the Week

Send us your most pressing GTM problem, and you’ll get a short session with an analyst to answer it!

Dear GTM Partners,

We’re pretty good about leveraging our ROI study in the prospecting funnel, but would love ideas on how to make more of it at other stages of the customer journey.

Sales Leader in Fort Lauderdale

Dear Sales Leader in Fort Lauderdale,

Great question, and glad you are thinking about different ways to leverage ROI throughout the life cycle.

Here are some ideas for you.

Pre-sales and sales: You said you’re already doing this well, and it is probably the most common use of an ROI study. When you have credible, third-party-validated ROI, it can shorten sales cycles and address common objections. One additional thought here is to think of all the places in this stage of the funnel where ROI can help. Bake your ROI data into demos, testimonial videos, sales decks, one sheets, social media posts, and webinars.
Onboarding: Be sure to share ROI from similar customers during onboarding. In doing so, you’re telling your customer what kinds of things to look for and preparing them to experience the same kind of success.
Service: Consider sharing ROI case studies during quarterly business reviews or other strategic check-in points. You may be giving your customer ideas for use cases they aren’t taking advantage of yet, and you may be priming the pump for them to consider their own ROI in the future in ways that will help at renewal.
Renewal: Hopefully, by renewal time, your amazing value and all your relevant use cases are very familiar to the customer. Hopefully, they’ve evaluated their own ROI with your product and are satisfied. But not every customer will have access to business-level data that allows an ROI calculation, so renewal can be a good time to remind them of your proven value to customers in a similar boat.

Hope that helps, and we’d love to hear back and see examples if you end up using any of these ideas!

Send in your GTM Problem of the Week.