23 Aug Turn on your GoToEco Revenue Engine
August 23, 2022
Don’t let entropy eat your partner organization’s Tech Partner sourced revenue success…
TLDR: Tech partnership teams can win more partner sourced revenue when they leverage a methodology that reimagines their mission, structure and operating model, enabling efficient revenue growth, increasing predictability, and delivering moonshot growth outcomes.
-Don’t let entropy eat your partner organization’s sourced revenue success
-Change is here and now is the time to act, you’re either a first mover or a slow second – which might as well be last
-The struggle is real and a new paradigm is required
-The promise: We can be better together
Don’t let entropy eat your partner organization’s sourced revenue success
Entropy is the degree of disorder or randomness in any system. High entropy means high disorder and lack of predictability, and like all entropic systems, without anything to stabilize and channel its energy, chaos and complexity reign.
There’s always a risk of entropy in a partner ecosystem. It results from the fact that between most companies today, partner team goals, revenue models, org structures, activities, reporting, trust and connections are mis-aligned and disconnected. And it’s ironic that while going to market with an integrated set of technology partners, partner team behavior, GTM processes, data and capabilities are fragmented and lack effective integration – a problem that’s multiplied for every n+1 partner relationship.
Rather than letting entropy take over, companies need to work in harmony based on aligned business processes, shared data, and effective tools, to jointly channel the energy of the ecosystem and its entrepreneurial spirit, bring joint solutions to market, and create spontaneous growth.
Change is here and now is the time to act
Most everyone today is struggling with an increase in ecosystem entropy and executive decision making is beginning to reflect the challenge. Change isn’t coming, it’s already happened. In this environment you’re either a first mover or a slow second – which might as well be last.
PartnerHacker quotes Bessemer Ventures #1 prediction for 2022 that based on “increasingly competitive SaaS markets and proliferation of APIs” … “leaning into indirect monetization from day one is becoming table stakes for SaaS businesses.”
And while the need for a change in behavior is undeniable, there’s still widespread inaction and many partnership programs are struggling to perform. Others “who get it” are making a killing and loving it.
The struggle is real
If you’re like most B2B SaaS partner teams, chances are good you’ve run into one or more of the following challenges even after having developed validated integrations in pursuit of “old paradigms”:
- No problem recruiting any old partner, but difficulty recruiting best fit partners with high ideal customer profile AND low budget allocation overlap
- Struggle maintaining high engagement outside the honeymoon onboarding phase
- Lack of strong marketing functions on either side weakening total estimated revenue production
- A one size fits all education and trust building approach fails to maintain “Top of Mind Affinity (TOMA)”
- Amazing better together stories end up as unremarkable spray and pray collateral
- High MQL production to satisfy MDF still leaves sourced revenue quota retirement underperforming and untenable
- Customer Acquisition Costs increasing especially with respect to Lifetime Value
A fundamental challenge is that the partner function sits on an island and generally doesn’t have the same level of organizational support as the direct team. Partner functions launch on the wrong foot and are forever relegated to reinforcing transactional and low leverage behaviors with KPI’s that fail to track the nuance in buyer journey progress and success. Exec teams struggle to understand the partner opportunity beyond “sourced revenue”.
A new paradigm is required
The growing complexity of the partner landscape, and the exponential pressure on partner teams to source more revenue, forces us to consider a new way of thinking with respect to the value of ecosystems. Here are some shifts that are already reshaping their understanding of the entire indirect monetization opportunity:
Under the current model, it can feel like you’re a one-armed wallpaper hanger trying to coordinate all the different internal and external partner functions needed to turn on a predictable and scalable revenue engine – story, assets, mapping, campaigns, ABM set up and mgmt, lead tracking internally and with partner, sales and CS alignment and funnel processes, attribution, OMG! Did I mention enablement and training? You had better pour yourself a second cup of coffee.
Before you start the exercise, forget everything you know about your partner team, old behavior patterns, time constraints, budget limitations, team capabilities—forget it all. And decide how your partner team is going to contribute over 50% of the growth revenues to the business in the next 24 months.
Here’s what we recommend:
-Plan: Not all tech partners are ready for joint marketing, the selection process & fine-tuned account mapping is a critical step, as is an approach to overcome the antibodies that will get in the way of driving, initially sourced revenue, with marketing, sales, and customer success.
-Build: A complete bill of materials is needed to joint market with these top partners and ABM campaigns need to be created that align partner account information with better together stories in facilitated executive buyer experiences.
-Joint DG: The demand generation engine needed to drive joint solutions and better together stories need to be coordinated, best in class, and focused on creating demand for these solutions, not as an afterthought or an experiment, but a dedicated focus.
-Program Manage: To address all the fragmentation that usually puts a fork in a revenue engine like this, you need a team that has the muscle memory for executing these types of value creation motions, can keep everybody on track, provide the dashboards, align the RevOps, course correct, and provide the hard ROI needed to earn additional investment to scale.
The promise: We can be better together