A Small Team’s Guide for Using Crossbeam to Scale Your Integrations

Your small but mighty partnerships team has a lofty target to hit for your integration adoption KPI, so what’s your gameplan?

One way to hit that metric is to add more integrations to your ecosystem — but running one-off processes and juggling multiple spreadsheets for account mapping can only get you so far. It takes a repeatable and scalable process to source, vet, develop, and nurture new technology partners into a growth lever for your business.

Luckily, there’s much to be learned from fast-growing partner ecosystems like Dialpad’s. The AI-powered communication and collaboration company needed to scale and innovate its suite of products faster through integrations. To make it happen, Bridget Silvi, Director of Strategic Alliances at Dialpad, baked Crossbeam into her process for sourcing, evaluating, and collaborating with tech partners.

The result: Silvi, with support from her four-person cross-functional partner team, launched 40+ integrations in 2021 — more than a 120% increase from the previous year.

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By kicking manual spreadsheets to the curb and using Crossbeam’s real-time account mapping tools, Dialpad’s partnerships team has gained a new level of speed — without adding more headcount. “Crossbeam has helped me templatize the partner onboarding process,” says Silvi.

Discover how Silvi and the Dialpad partnerships team use Crossbeam to evaluate new tech partners, vet integration opportunities, and streamline early adoption for newly released integrations.

Skip “Hunches” and Guesses with Data-Backed Account Mapping

Before using Crossbeam, Silvi managed the partner evaluation process in static spreadsheets and often estimated the value of a potential partnership based on industry data. For example, here’s how Silvi might evaluate a partnership with a CRM company: “We’d say ‘This is a CRM partner whose customer base is 70% SMB.’ We then would make assumptions based on that data to estimate overlap. We also would sift through our Salesforce data with keyword searches for our partner’s name to see which of our customers are mutual,” she says.

Today, Silvi doesn’t have to rely on hunches because she has the right data. “Crossbeam makes you more confident in your numbers because you’re not guessing. You save time trying to get buy-in on decisions like ‘Should we partner with this company?’ or ‘Should we build an integration?’” she says.

Crossbeam’s Account Mapping Matrix is the starting point for what Silvi calls “Phase Zero” of a partnership. Silvi uses the Account Mapping Matrix to explore a partnership’s potential and compare Dialpad’s populations (groups of people or companies) with the partner’s populations in real time.

The matrix shows Silvi and her partner their shared opportunities in a single view. “It’s a helpful guide in the initial ‘Are we going to partner or not?’, but then once you’re actually partnering, the reports are more important,” she says.

Silvi will build reports in Crossbeam to see which of Dialpad’s customers and open opportunities overlap with partner’s customers (and vice versa), and she’ll drill into the results using filters. “It gives you real data that is specific to you and the partner. It’s very actionable because it’s a reliable comparison of the two customer bases and the potential for adoption and growth,” she says.

“Crossbeam has made it easier to weed out the noise and really focus on the partners that matter. Now, I have quantitative metrics about why I’m deciding to invest in a partner…Crossbeam has helped me build more of a data-backed analysis.”

Crossbeam’s reports also help the Dialpad team determine how to best work with a partner. “Partners expect everything to be 50/50, and truthfully a lot of them aren’t. So, if you can use the data from Crossbeam to be like, ‘Look, this data is telling us that 75% of leads are going to come from us, so we’d like to explore a referral agreement,’ then it helps inform those types of decisions and set expectations early on,” she says.

When exploring the opportunity for an integration, Silvi considers these factors:

• Customer use case and value – Would the integration make customers’ lives easier? How would they benefit from the integration?

• Customer overlap – How many customers do Dialpad and the partner share in common? This number helps forecast the audience or the total addressable market for the integration.

• Scope of work – What are the technical requirements for this integration, and what kind of investment is required? How can we scope this out over several development milestones?

• Potential for New Customers – How many new customers can we acquire based on overlaps between our prospects and our partner’s customers?

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Find the Right Early Adopters for Integrations

In the pre-Crossbeam days, Silvi and team would contact a broad group of customers to gauge their interest in joining an early adopter program (EAP) for a new integration launch. But now with Crossbeam, driving EAP participation is more of a science because Silvi can work with her product and customer success teams to narrow down the right accounts using Crossbeam’s reports.

“Now, with Crossbeam we’re very specific. We thread the needle and say, ‘Okay, who has the right license type on our side, who has the right license type on their side, and are they healthy?’ Then, we can extend more one-to-one, white glove invitations because we know those customers are very likely to use that integration,” says Silvi.

For example: Let’s say Dialpad builds an integration with a tech partner called Holver. Both companies would build a report in Crossbeam to see which customers they share in common, and then narrow down the results using filters.

They’d filter the mutual customer report based on the license type required for each company and then layer on data from their customer success solution to make sure the final list of accounts are eligible to test the integration and are also healthy accounts. Then, Silvi would send the final list to her customer success team so they can invite those accounts to join the early adopter program.

Additionally, as integration adoption increases, Silvi uses Crossbeam reports to determine which accounts she and her partner should contact for a case study or a customer testimonial. “We then take that shortlist of matching customers and we will do outreach like ‘Do you want to be in a case study or do you want to be in a webinar?’ So, we’re using [Crossbeam] throughout our go-to-market program,” says Silvi.

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Silvi says life without Crossbeam would be painful. “It’s a lot harder to scale the growth that we’ve had in our app ecosystem. It’d be a lot harder to do that if every single partner of ours had to be a manual account mapping exercise,” says Silvi. “Without Crossbeam, we would need to hire a much bigger team to sustain our growth.”

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