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.
Many companies do not have marketing analytics for their in-app marketplace and even fewer share these analytics with their partners. Adding these analytics can drive more revenue and improve retention.
Pandium now offers these analytics as part of our white-labeled marketplace. Customers can now view analytics for their marketplace and share this data with their partners if they choose to.
Let’s take a look at what kind of analytics you can see and how you can use these analytics to drive more revenue.
On your Integration page, you can easily see all the integrations in your marketplace, how many customers have installed each one and how much activity there has been. This can be useful for assessing which integrations are most popular with customers. If you want to dive into more analytics, though, you can click on Site Metrics.
This overview screen will appear for your integration marketplace and for any integrations you have embedded inside a partner’s marketplace.
On the right, you can set the time frame for when you want to see analytics. Views of your marketplace will give you a good sense of how many customers are interested in and interacting with your integration marketplace.
Tracking this over time can tell you how engaged your customers are with your marketplace and integrations. If they aren’t, you may need to improve your marketing information or the quality of your integrations.
Related Content: How to Track the ROI of SaaS Integrations
Bounce rate can also flag whether your marketing materials or integration quality needs improving. If people are checking out your marketplace but then just leaving quickly, you need to improve what you’re offering or how you’re describing it.
The number of visitors can let you know how widespread the interest in integrations are. If you have only a few visitors, then you might want to do outreach to other customers to find out why they aren’t visiting.
Down below, you can get even more detail. You can see which pages your customers have visited. This can be useful for ascertaining customer interest in particular integrations. It can also give you some insight into how often customers are looking at their settings, scheduling, and installed integrations pages.
Page views are good for flagging when customers are viewing the tile page for a Beta or Coming Soon integration. This is valuable in ascertaining customer interest in particular integrations and can help prioritize your integration roadmap and investment.
Another use of page views is identifying when customers are frequently viewing a page but not installing. This likely means the integration is missing a key functionality or that the marketing description is confusing.
“Events” drill down even more deeply into how your customers are interacting with your integration marketplace and integrations.
The default Events that are shown are View, Sync, Configure, Delete, Schedule, Install and Connect.
These events show the customer and integration. For example, if you display the “Install” events for the last 30 days, it will show which customers installed which integrations. This is useful for tracking integration growth over time as well as comparing customer interest in different integrations.
Similarly, excessive “Delete” events can flag when an integration is offering a poor customer experience, and cases where customer support might need to reach out to help.
Related Content: Tactics for Scaling Partner Marketing and Attribution Tracking
Events can also be used to identify customers who viewed a particular integration but did not install. This can be key to increasing integration adoption, as follow up can assist in any issues with installation or uncover needed configuration changes to the integration itself.
If it complies with your data policies and agreements, you can also share this list of customers with your partners, as it may be their integration or they may be invested in increasing adoption. Salesforce, for example, offers this information to their technology partners.
Excessive “Configure,” “Schedule” and “Sync” events from particular customers or for particular integrations can also flag an issue with the integration or marketplace materials and necessitate help from customer support.
This data can also be suitable for sharing with partners as they may also be providing support for the integration or own the build.
To see all these elements in action, watch our product video:
To summarize, here are the ways you can drive substantial revenue and business value by implementing marketplace analytics (which come out of the box if you use Pandium for your marketplace infrastructure).
These are only some of the ways you can leverage marketplace analytics to drive value for your customers and partners. As a Pandium customer, these analytics now come with your white labeled marketplace. Request a demo to learn more and see it in action.
