E-commerce Partnerships: An Interview with Casey Armstrong, CMO of ShipBob

Casey Armstrong is the CMO of ShipBob, and he previously led marketing and operations for BigCommerce. We talked to him about trends in e-commerce, the growing importance of tech partnerships, and his strategic advice for other partnership teams.

Are there trends you are seeing in e-commerce partnerships?

There are two things that I would highlight. As e-commerce continues to evolve, sellers’ needs from their tech partners continue to intertwine at an extremely fast clip.

Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce have democratized selling online. The competition across e-commerce brands has ramped up greatly, and so people have to get more sophisticated in how they operate - in how they are selling, how they are shipping, how they are marketing, and what they are selling.

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It is paramount that all the technologies they are using talk to each other seamlessly.

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In order to compete, merchants and retail stores need the most accurate and clean data in real-time in order to make the right decisions for their business.

From the side of the tech vendors who are servicing the merchants, the market opportunity size around integrating software has continued to grow. This is true of all different tech solutions, whether marketing, shipping, sales or customer management tech. I don’t see this slowing down in the foreseeable future, both in the United States and around the world.

Related content: The E-Commerce Ecosystem: Industry Trends and Best Practices

For efficient customer acquisition and retention, these technology partnerships are more important than ever. Offering an integrated experience where all the tech is integrated increases product stickiness and customer satisfaction.

In addition, often, it can also be a dealbreaker if your tech doesn’t integrate to core technologies. For example, at ShipBob, like many others, we use Salesforce as our CRM, and if a marketing or sales technology does not integrate with Salesforce, it is immediately off the table.

What do you consider best practices when choosing whom to partner with?

This is something people often look at too late. Many companies just take a spray and pray approach, or pick partners based on how much they like them.

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It should all start with your customer base and their ideal profile. Ask yourself, “What are my customers’ biggest pain points and how can I find partners who alleviate those pain points?”

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I have made this mistake before, but as with most things, start by going deep with your customers and their needs.

To be effective, tech partnerships often require partnerships, marketing, product, and engineering teams to work together. How does this play out in practice?

Generally, coordination across teams is not set up properly. This is to no fault of any specific team, but for startups and fast-growing companies, processes change quickly and at different speeds across each respective team. This is where a data-driven approach to partnerships becomes even more valuable. You have to be able to judge what has the best impact for your current partners, and what is driving new business.

I would recommend getting the product and engineering teams involved early. Once they get the first integration done and if you can prove out the ROI, everybody will start to see the benefits.

Related Content: How to Measure ROI on Tech Partnerships

Product and engineering teams want to build solutions that customers are actually using, so it’s on the partner team or the team leading the integration to drive the adoption.

Partnership teams sit in different places in organizations. Do you have thoughts on the best way to structure the team and whom it should report to?

There is definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution. It depends heavily on the skill set or experience of the leadership team. Partnerships should sit with whoever is going to be able to best run the team effectively.  

What do you consider best practices for tracking ROI on partnerships?

I would treat it similar to how you would treat another marketing or outbound sales channel. You can utilize a similar approach in tracking partnerships. You want your partners to drive net-new revenue and customers, plus assist in expansion and closing efforts.

Do you have any marketing advice specific to partnerships?

There is no silver bullet to partnership marketing. First, look at your business and your business model. For example, if you have a lower average customer value with a large customer base and self-serve sales model, your approach is going to be very different than what you would do if you have very high average customer value with a smaller customer base and more hands-on sales process.

Partnership marketing should take a well-rounded approach. From the digital side, such as webinars or content, to in-person events. Everything should be coordinated together with a shared goal and shared message.

And this is extremely important, get one-to-one intros through account mapping or account management. This enables you to find those larger customers, and it is equally, if not more important, than the more scalable marketing activities.

What’s your advice for companies trying to get more attention and marketing resources from larger partners like BigCommerce, Slack, or Salesforce?

You should try to provide as much upfront value as possible before you ask for anything, just like with any effective sales or marketing. Once you do ask for something, make it as easy as possible for the larger partner to deliver.

For example, for a huge partner, we were able to get something off the ground quickly only because we provided the copy, design work, the tracking, and the emails. We asked them what potential blockers or hurdles there would be internally on their side, so we did nearly everything. All they had to do was upload and hit send. Had we not done that, it would have taken months or even quarters to launch it.

The partnership world is a very interesting space. A lot of people get into these roles and stay in them for a good chunk of their career. They need to be good at sales and they know the product, but fundamentally they are people people. The best way to start with a larger partner is offering value to their customers, but then build the relationships. That will help your company and it will help you for the long term.

Plus, honestly, it can be a lot of fun.

Related Content: Lessons Learned from the Partner Marketing for Ecosystems Roundtable

As a company scales, how does a partnership program have to change?

From a technical and product standpoint, your API and integration infrastructure needs to be uniform and easy to use. Whether you build that in-house or by utilizing a solution like Pandium, it has to be done. Otherwise, when you scale, you will create a lot of headaches for your team and for your customers.

Think through what it costs to build the integrations, and how much do you offset that, and see what that payback period is so you can make decisions more holistically.

Have you tracked revenue on tech partnerships at companies you have worked for?

Yes, we did track the revenue. This looked different at ShipBob and BigCommerce, but at both companies, we saw a huge ROI from certain partnerships.

Any other strategic advice for partnership leaders?

Ruthlessly prioritize and review what you are doing because there are seemingly endless partners. You are going to have to say no a lot when you want to say yes. Your partners should understand you have to put your customers first.

Be careful not to over promise. We have partners who have promised or committed to certain things. We shared this with customers, and then it never happened or got greatly delayed. Sometimes that can happen for extraneous reasons, but you have to communicate and be careful not to commit to what you can’t deliver.

We all can make this mistake, but it can hurt the relationship, whether it’s with the customer or partner.

On the flip side, when you do get wins, you should highlight your partners and celebrate them. Send pizza to their office, or something fun as a thank you.

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Learn how ShipBob transformed their ROI on tech partnerships and integrations by using Pandium.