How Everflow Used Partner Data to Shave Four Months Off Of Enterprise Deal Cycles

Before using Crossbeam, the Everflow partnerships team lived in spreadsheets, collecting and consolidating information from partners to get their co-marketing and co-selling gears in motion.

But there was a limit to what Everflow could achieve.

“In any given quarter, you can only manage so many partners and so many activities,” says Ed Ceballos, Head of Partnerships at Everflow, a leading partner marketing platform.

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The Everflow team found themselves in a slump — that is, until they invested in Crossbeam’s account mapping tools and HubSpot integration.

As a result, the Everflow team is on pace to double the number of campaigns they’re running with partners in Q2 2022, and aims to double that number again by the end of Q3. “Using Crossbeam for HubSpot enables us to work with more partners in a given time period and drive partner activation,” says Ceballos.

In this story, you’ll learn how the Everflow Team:

• Shortens Enterprise Sales Cycles by 44%

• Runs a Lean Co-Marketing Machine with Crossbeam for HubSpot

• Sourced Six Enterprise Referrals From a Strategic Partner in a Month

Shortens Enterprise Sales Cycles by 44%

Selling into enterprise accounts can be a slog. Sales cycles are long and there are many stakeholders involved. To get your sales team amped about co-selling, you have to show them what’s in it for them from the get-go.

“Warm intros can only get you so far with Enterprise accounts. But sharing sales intelligence at the right time can result in 10x higher close rates. This is how our sales reps maximize the value of our partnerships. This was painful to do without Crossbeam,” says Ceballos.

Today, Ceballos builds Crossbeam reports to determine which of Everflow’s open opportunities are also customers of partners. He uses that information to kickstart conversations with partners.

To also engage his marketing and sales teams, Ceballos makes partner data available in HubSpot so his reps don’t have to log in to Crossbeam. He uses Crossbeam’s HubSpot integration to sync specific Crossbeam reports as contact lists in HubSpot to power co-marketing campaigns (more on this later). His team has also built performance dashboards and reports with partner data.

Here’s how they did it:

• The Crossbeam and HubSpot integration is configured so that specific Crossbeam reports automatically create contact lists in HubSpot (based on associated company email domains). New overlaps in those reports sync with the corresponding HubSpot contact lists.

• For every partner Everflow has, they have a custom property field on their company object in HubSpot. They’ve built a workflow that populates the correct custom property for each partner with the name of the Crossbeam population that is associated with the contact from the step above.

To tie the steps above together, let’s walk through an example: Everflow has a report in Crossbeam comparing their prospects with tech partner Bozala’s prospects. The overlaps in that report will sync with a contact list in HubSpot called Everflow and Bozala Prospects. When a new contact enters that list, a custom property called Partner Bozala on the associated Company object will populate with a value called “Prospect”.

The Everflow team can use the partner data captured in the company object to build performance dashboards and reports.

Another way to do this is to send partner data from Crossbeam directly into a custom object in HubSpot using Crossbeam’s HubSpot Push integration. With partner data flowing into HubSpot, your internal teams can easily build rich partnership performance dashboards, trigger lead routing workflows, automate sales sequences, and more.

Using this dashboard, Everflow’s partnerships and sales team track:

• Partner referrals by quarter

• Partner referrals year-to-date (YTD)

• The number of partners in each lifecycle stage (e.g. recruiting, onboarding, activating, scaling, deactivated)

• Conversion rates from integration trials to customers

• Pipeline overlap with partners for each Company Owner

• Customer overlap with partners by each Company Owner

• Overlapping accounts with specific partners (by Company Owner)

• All of the metrics above by partner type (referral, technology, and agency)

Reps review the Partner Program dashboard to see which partners have relationships with accounts in their funnel. Then, the reps tag the partners they’d like help from by marking the “Request help from partner” field, which lives on the Company (or Account) object in HubSpot. Ceballos tracks the accounts his reps need help with using Crossbeam reports.

For example: Let’s say a rep needs deal assistance from a fictitious tech partner named Bozala. They’d simply tag Bozala in the Request help from partner field on the specific company object in HubSpot. That data will automatically update in a Crossbeam report comparing overlaps between Everflow and Bozala. Ceballos will get an email notification about the new overlap and then will start coordinating introductions between his sales rep and the partner.

It’s like a rep’s own personal help request line.

From there, the rep will connect with their counterpart at the partner’s company to exchange sales intel about the deal, share updates, or ask questions like:

• Who are the key stakeholders and decision-makers? What roles did they play in the sales process?

• Did you also have to go through a four-week long legal review of the contract before signing?

• Who led the contract negotiation?

This dashboard also gives the Everflow team visibility into accounts that have competing partners attached to them so they can avoid potential conflict.

Thanks to this process, complex sales processes have become lighter. “By account mapping in Crossbeam, it shrinks our sales cycle in a large organization from nine months to five months. That’s a lot,” says Ceballos. “You get more sales weeks per year because you’re closing deals faster…it’s more deals in less time,” he adds.

By account mapping in Crossbeam, it shrinks our sales cycle in a large organization from nine months to five months

Ed Ceballos, Head of Partnerships at Everflow

Runs a Lean Co-Marketing Machine with Crossbeam for HubSpot

The Everflow team used to collaborate with partners in spreadsheets to determine which accounts to target in their co-marketing campaigns. This ate up weeks of time.

It also meant the Everflow partnerships team had to be extra selective about which campaigns they executed and with whom, limiting how much they could do with partners.

“For any program to work, you have to design it to be scalable and replicable,” says Ceballos.

“The Crossbeam and HubSpot integration allow us to wrap everything up consistently, from identifying target accounts to executing marketing campaigns in HubSpot. No need to upload anything like a third-party list or dedupe and upload data,” says Ceballos.

For example, Ceballos will build a report in Crossbeam identifying mutual prospects and refine the list using filters based on data he’s bringing from HubSpot.

💡Pro Tip: Keep your data fresh for reporting in Crossbeam by connecting your CRM as a data source. Remember, you’re always in control of your data and get to decide how little or how much information you want to share. Build lists (or “Populations”) of customers, opportunities, or prospects based on your CRM data source and then choose exactly what data fields you want to share with partners.

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The Crossbeam and HubSpot integration automatically creates a contact list in HubSpot from the report, simplifying targeting for co-marketing campaigns. Anytime new overlaps emerge in Crossbeam, they’ll sync with the corresponding contact list in HubSpot.

“Now when I agree to something with a partner, it’s not like I’m throwing a hot potato to marketing, I’m just giving them the right data they need to execute,” says Ceballos.

“If we run a Fireside Chat with a partner, we know exactly what accounts we’re inviting and there is a reason why we’re inviting them because we can see the overlap in Crossbeam. We can easily define those accounts, create the list, tie it back to HubSpot, and the rest of our marketing tech stack and our procedures can run smoothly.”

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Here are some examples of Everflow’s co-marketing campaigns powered by Crossbeam and HubSpot:

Sourced Six Enterprise Referrals From a Strategic Partner in a Month

Everflow’s sales team had been struggling to get their foot in the door at a handful of enterprise accounts — until they realized those accounts were also customers of a strategic partner in Crossbeam. Ceballos used Crossbeam to drive new co-selling motions to activate and scale the strategic partnership.

“When we connected in Crossbeam, in the first 30 days, just by exposing data about our shared territories and engaging the sales teams on the accounts they’re interested in, we got six referrals into enterprise accounts,” says Ceballos.

When we connected in Crossbeam, in the first 30 days… we got six referrals into enterprise accounts

For two of those enterprise accounts, Everflow’s reps had been trying for more than nine months to get in front of the right stakeholders. “They’re large organizations. They get many calls and contacts from many vendors every day. They have developed the antibodies and the mechanism to shield themselves from sales,” says Ceballos.

The Everflow sales team not only broke into those six enterprise accounts — but they also closed three deals with those accounts in the following six weeks.

“The close rate for deals where partners are involved compared to other inbound or outbound deals is 10 to 1,” says Ceballos.  “We’ve been consistently getting 47% of our active clients through partner marketing.”

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