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.
Allan Adler has been involved in SaaS partnerships since their inception. He shares how the traditional channel is being transformed by the SaaS explosion, the rise of influence in the B2B buying process, and why ecosystems are rendering the traditional revenue funnel obsolete.
My career was born with the channel and transformed by the ecosystem. I started the leading channel consultancy (MSI Consulting Group) in the 1990s so I have been operating in the space for 30 years.
Now, I run Digital Bridge Partners, which was born to help legacy companies (on-premise, channel-focused) cross the digital divide as well as transforming the ecosystems of born-in-the-cloud SaaS companies.
Legacy partnerships models (“the channel") in software and hardware was based on a hierarchical stove pipe. Vendors would make the product and then hand it off to the channel to take it to market.
The inflection point on the other side of the digital bridge is the massive explosion of B2B SaaS ISVs; there were 10k SaaS in 2010, 185k now, and there are projected to be 1 million in 2030.
When you see this type of expansion, you know a significant transition is occurring and that it is going to have an impact on business models. Fundamentally, this is the biggest driver of the birth of ecosystems and the flywheel GTM model that has replaced the channel stovepipe.
Enterprises are still struggling mightily with SaaS. Twenty percent of their workload is on SaaS and 80 percent is still on prem. But software is gradually eating into the on-prem world and it is changing the rules of the game for partnerships.
The on-prem channel world has a different language and mentality than SaaS ecosystems. They operate from different principles.
In the old days, software and hardware had four walls syndrome where you make a product and then you ship it off. That mentality doesn’t work in SaaS.
From the get-go, you have to ask who else sells to my ICP and could integrate with my solution? A best-in-breed feature set is just not enough for customer advocacy in the long run. The only way you achieve that is to integrate with products that complement and extend your own product.
The channel is getting reconstituted in this new milieu.
I visualize the SaaS space as thousands of different planets in space. In this solar system, there are stars that exercise huge gravitational pull. These are the systems of record, the CRMs, the ERPs - the platform companies - and constellations of planets are forming around these suns.
The future of ecosystems is a series of constellations, each with their own marketplaces, that talk to other constellations, creating even greater ecosystem effects.
Every single product leader has to go through a metamorphosis from building product roadmaps to building ecosystem roadmaps.
Product led growth is a reaction to how businesses want to buy now. It is based around utilizing product innovation to accelerate customer engagement in a flywheel, from awareness to advocacy.
Ecosystem led growth and product led growth are kissing cousins. You now need ecosystem led growth to operationalize product led growth. There is nothing better than ecosystems to accelerate that flywheel, supporting not only influence and engagement but the product experience at every customer stage from awareness to advocacy.
This omnistage impact highlights another key difference between the old channel world and ecosystems.
Ecosystems understand the importance of partner influence. The old model is focused solely on sourced revenue. Influence is the future of revenue generation.
What does it mean to source a deal? Prospects are bombarded with ad impressions and cold pitches. They can’t be sourced anymore. They can only be influenced.
To be successful in today and tomorrow’s business world, you have to find people who are already in the tent with your ICP so they can invite you inside the tent. Partner with the insiders and they bring you inside.
No doubt the single greatest inhibitor in embracing this change is the absence of trusted metrics that measure what I call micro-attribution; all the points of influence that a partner contributes across the customer lifecycle.
Tracking influence is a multivariate channel. It is not going to be one tool and we are at least 24 months away from having the technical capabilities to engage in micro attribution on a comprehensive scale.
And, keep in mind, that even when the technology is there, you will always have people who are resistant to change and will cling to the way things have been done in the past.
Multivariate tracking requires understanding multiple vectors that are operating at the same time. We need a complete influence model for how customers adopt and then become advocates for SaaS technology.
One vector, for example, would be studying macro influence. How will a group of partners lift my influence currency or quotient over a particular time period? You can also audit particular customer transactions to show influence on a micro level.
Influence has an impact across the entire funnel but we need to understand what we are measuring and how we show it. This will be profoundly transformative in how we do business.
Leaders need to think about how these vectors come together so businesses can prognosticate on how ecosystem investments will translate to influence and how that influence will translate to ARR, LTV, CAC, NPS, etc.
Every revenue leader is aware of the S&M funnel that runs their day to day life. There is the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, and a prospect is passed from marketing to sales to customer success.
Unfortunately, this is a very incomplete view. Influence is actually the top of the top of the funnel. Sixty eight percent of a buying decision occurs before you ever speak to a prospect. Ecosystems are key to driving this influence, and eventually revenue leaders will incorporate this into the top of the revenue funnel. Thank you to Crossbeam and others for introducing the market to EQL (Ecosystem Qualified Leads); these will replace or at least produce a lot of what are now MQLs.
Traditional marketing and sales channels are oversaturated as modes of influence. Customers and prospects are shutting off the noise from ads, events, and cold outreach. Direct marketing spend’s ROI is on a downward trend, and organizations are going to realize they should be redirecting that investment into ecosystems.
Investing in ecosystems is how you can effectively exert influence before you have even encountered a prospect directly.
And this influence is not just exerted to acquire customers. Its influence is continuous. SaaS organizations can never stop selling as recurring revenue means customers have to be sold to and services continuously over the customer lifecycle.