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As a graduate of Y-Combinator, PartnerStack has been rooted in helping some of the world’s fastest growing SaaS companies scale. Companies like Asana, Monday.com, Unbounce, Intercom, and Intuit all use PartnerStack to manage and scale their partner programs, and onboard thousands of partners into our platform.
There are a few unique aspects to PartnerStack, which has led us to becoming the #1 platform on G2.
PartnerStack is the only solution that has both the PRM and a B2B focused marketplace that connects vendors with partners. On average, our marketplace drives a 30%+ lift in revenue for customers.
We are extremely focused on partner experience, which is a big distinction for us. Most PRMs are focused solely on the vendor experience. But if both sides of this equation are not having a good experience, then it becomes a problem.
And with PartnerStack, all of your channels can be managed from a single platform - affiliate, referral, reseller and ambassador. We see a lot of companies, agencies, and resellers choosing our platform to help them consolidate their channels into a single view.
How is your partnership team structured at PartnerStack?
Our team is still relatively young, as we launched it in April. The majority of this year has been building relationships and working with both agencies and resellers.
I lead the team, and we have an incredible Account Manager that works closely with our partners, as well as a partner marketing manager that works on any co-marketing efforts we run with partners.
Our partnership team is currently focused on two core areas:
We often work with sales when one of their SaaS prospects wants to launch PartnerStack right away but doesn’t have the internal bandwidth. In those cases, we connect them with an agency partner who we know can do it right away and do it well.
Technology partnerships are also on our radar. We have recently built a number of integrations. One of our goals in 2021 and going into 2022 will be to further build out our technology partner program and our own integration marketplace.
We also plan to enter the app marketplaces of other SaaS vendors, especially CRMs like SugarCRM or Hubspot. CRMs are good partners for us because, with the exception of Salesforce, no CRM has a PRM as part of their product offering. So our software is complementary rather than competitive. And it benefits our customers to have those systems integrated.
“If you’re planning to scale your partnerships at all, you need the infrastructure in place to do this.”
<center>- Nikita Zhitkevich<center></center></center>
What advice would you give for organizations trying to think through who their ideal partners are?
Ultimately, everything has to come down to revenue. Whether you’re pursuing referral, reseller, or technology partnerships, you have to tie them back to driving revenue.
Especially since you need the support of other departments in your organization, whether it is collaboration with the sales team or the product team to help build integrations, the benefit to the business needs to be very clear.
For agency and reseller partners, I would advise looking to see if they power similar products to yours. I’d also think about whether the partner will continue to evolve over time in the direction you are going and whether they truly understand your product and space.
Organizations are using more applications than ever and with tens of thousands of applications to choose from, the average tech company is using 155 apps.
While this software explosion has been a boon of functionality, it has also caused problems. Business users have to spend more time moving from one app to another, downloading and uploading data, and patching together their applications. This process is frustrating and costly.
No matter what industry or vertical you operate in, your customers need to use your SaaS application with their other software - and they want to be able to do this without having to manually transfer their data, or persuade their IT department to build custom integrations.
The solution?
Build an in-app marketplace with embedded integrations. In-app marketplaces empower your customers to seamlessly connect to their other software without ever leaving your app. This integrated ecosystem around your core product significantly enhances the power and functionality of your app without requiring you to build more features.
Public and In-app marketplaces also create many marketing opportunities for SaaS companies, as they are a way to build brand equity, get discovered, and educate potential customers on the solutions they provide.
In the rest of this article we'll go into further detail on why SaaS companies should invest in building an in-app marketplace and the benefits.
In a 2022 study of APIs, integrations and app marketplaces at 400 SaaS Companies, at least 73% of the 100 largest SaaS companies offer an in-app marketplace to customers where they can discover and install apps.
86% of those companies offer a public marketplace to showcase and educate users and prospects on their integration offerings. These companies also offer an average of 621 integrations and a median of 94 integrations. From the data it's clear that it is not only large or top 100 companies who see the value and are making the choice to invest in app marketplaces. Even 31% of seed stage companies in this data set have a public marketplace despite only having a median of 5 integrations.
This can demonstrate that even early stage businesses see the value of integrations to customers - even if they can’t yet deliver many yet.
Integration marketplaces are also known as app stores, app centers or app directories.
Almost all app centers have a similar style of rectangular tiles for each integration. Sometimes service partners or extensions will also have tiles in the center, though most companies put service partners in a separate directory.
Public Integration Marketplaces
Public app marketplaces are mostly to demonstrate to users and potential customers how integrated a solution is. It also serves to educate them on what data can be moved between a solution and other apps, and how they can use integrations to execute tasks and solve business problems. The most basic public app center will just display the name of the software the integration connects to, and perhaps link to their website or explain what the company does.
As a public app center becomes more sophisticated, there will be additional features, including:
In-App Integration Marketplaces
In-app marketplaces are different than public marketplaces in that only logged in customers can view them. In-app marketplaces are technically more complicated because they require recognizing the individual user and then surfacing information relevant to them, and enabling them to install integrations on their account.
Sometimes the marketing content on a public and in-app marketplace is the same, but other times, the in-app marketplace is more focused on integration functionality and installation instructions, while the public marketplace focuses on higher level value propositions.
Functionality that is added to an in-app marketplace includes:
Because in-app marketplaces are more complicated to build, SaaS companies usually offer a public marketplace before they provide an in-app marketplace.
However, in-app marketplaces are important to customers being able to discover and find integrations that they would benefit from at scale. It also can enable easy management of currently installed integration.
Now is the Time to Get Serious about B2B Ecosystem Marketing
Ecosystem Marketing via B2B app marketplaces may be one of the biggest opportunities in SaaS today. A public and in-app marketplace is an attractive marketing channel to both organizations and their partners, as solutions can be showcased in front of a targeted customer base presumably in their ICP.
If you’re a smaller company, being part of a marketplace, or having partners with well known, credible brands integrate through your marketplace, can serve as social proof and allow you to capitalize on their user’s trust.
As a larger or mid-sized organization, you can showcase how much of a connected experience you can offer to your customer.
Along with marketing your interoperable capabilities to potential vendors, marketplaces enable organizations to educate their customer base on their ecosystem, it's apps, and how they can utilize them to meet their needs. Some marketplaces even offer marketing analytics that can offer new insights into customer app behavior on the marketplace and with specific integrations.
Multiple forms of content can be added to marketplaces to enhance, extend, or customize a platform’s functionality, and educate customers on how your product will simplify their tech stack and make their lives easier.
The SaaS companies that grow the most rapidly are those that allow others to build on their platform (ex. Shopify), are embeddable into other platforms (ex.grammarly), or allow for both (ex. Stripe).
If you’re in B2B tech, you probably offer at least one app or tool or widget in at least one of the app marketplaces out there. If your products can in any way be described as a platform, it's a good idea to run your own ecosystem too.
Control Your Customer UX
B2B loyalty is up for grabs, and customers are more willing than ever to switch suppliers. Whether your customers need to integrate your app with 5 or 5,000 other solutions, building an in-app marketplace allows you to control the UX of your customers’ integration experience.
With some iPaaS tools, customers might have to learn a visual builder interface to connect integrations which, depending on how technical they are, can be time consuming or challenging, resulting in them having to reach out to customer support.
Additionally, when an iPaaS is not embedded in your app, like in the case of Zapier or Integromat, customers have to leave your app to install, manage, and pay for their integrations – leaving the customer experience entirely out of your control. This leaves the possibility of lackluster support that organizations have limited control over.
Establish Competitive Advantage
Whether a product is designed to be embedded in hundreds of other systems (ie.Twilio) or designed for hundreds of systems to run on it (ie.SalesForce), companies who offer their customers a seamless integration experience are able to leverage an entire ecosystem of products to increase adoption, attract new leads, decrease customer churn, and increase upsells.
In the eCommerce space alone, B2B marketplaces have already become a big growth driver. By 2024 it’s predicted that B2B marketplaces sales could reach an estimated 3.4 trillion USD according to the Digital Commerce 360 report.
Unless features are considered a core competency of your product, providing integrations with existing product would allow you to meet customers needs in less time with fewer resources. Customer tested integrations in addition to an in-app marketplace enables SaaS companies to highlight consumer-ready software solutions, making finding impactful solutions easier and faster for customers.
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