By Zoe Kelly

August 30, 2022

Dedicated readers of the Crossbeam blog know that we specialize chatting to partnerships professionals to surface best practices, tips, and insights that help these folks drive to build and run the best version of their partner programs. And throughout every conversation, there has been a common thread: partnerships and ecosystem-led growth (ELG) practices drive results for businesses. 

However, tracking attribution can be difficult and requires investment into your partner processes. And getting the resources to do so can require proof of results. Thus begins a vicious cycle where everyone involved loses: you don’t get the buy-in you need and your company loses out on the opportunities ecosystem-led growth provides.

To help you tangibly show the impact of partnerships (and hopefully get more resources and headcount dedicated to them), we have compiled a list of every stat we have that proves their value. 

In this post, we cover how partnerships can be used to

• Bring in revenue

• Source ecosystem–qualified leads (EQLs)

• Generate more dollars, faster than non-partnership deals

• Help non-partnerships teams hit their OKRs

• Raise venture capital (VC) funding

• Upsell, increase product use, and prevent customer churn

• Help with exit events

• Expand into new markets

• Future-proof your business strategy 

And finally, we will cover how you can use Crossbeam to accelerate your results.

Bring in revenue

As Katy Perry famously sang, shut up and put your money where your mouth is. We are doing just that with this list of stats highlighting how partnerships can directly generate revenue for a company:

• 95% of Microsoft’s revenue flows through its partners.

• Shopify’s partner ecosystem generated over $6.9 billion in 2019. 

• Channel partners in Japan contributed to approximately 40% of Zoom’s Japan business in 2020.

• Atlassian’s ecosystem includes more than 700 channel partners that account for one-third of all business.

• TrialPay utilized channel sales to go from zero to 10,000 clients in two years.

• SugarCRM partnered with Redington Gulf to extend its platform to Redington Gulf’s network of 15,000 customers in the Middle East, and gain access to a network of 34,000 resellers and more than 70 sales offices. In 2022, SugarCRM announced a 59% year-over-year increase in new customers, which it attributed in part to international growth through channel partnerships.

• Crossbeam helped influence 30% of Gorgias’ revenue growth from tech partnerships in just eight months. Now, partnerships account for nearly 50% of Gorgias’ revenue. 

• After just one year, the partner program at HR software company Oyster was bringing in 6% of the company’s total revenue.

• In just two months of using Crossbeam, Ryan Klekas, Head of Partner Development at Bombora, a B2B intent data company, closed $100,000 worth of new business. 

• Vidyard used Crossbeam to 14x its partner-sourced revenue, going from $25K in 2019 to $350K in 2020.

• Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, and Amy Hood, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Microsoft, attributed the company’s $32 billion in revenue during Q2 of 2019 in part to partnerships. 

• Hatch boosts its close rate by 24% by incentivizing its partner’s reps to co-sell.

• As of 2020, Hawke Media attributed 40% of its revenue to partnerships.

• Shopify generated approximately $50 billion for its partners in 2020. 

• In their “State of Partner Ops and Programs 2022” report, Hubspot, Partnership Leaders, and Canalys found that 49% of organizations surveyed attributed 26% or more of their revenue to partners. 

Source ecosystem-qualified leads (EQLs)

A partnership lets you tap into an entirely new customer base, generating new, free leads from an already trusted source:

• At Yotpo, 60% of overall referrals a month on average are influenced by partner marketing.

• SugarCRM kicks off its case study with Kyloe Partners and Bullhorn by sharing how they doubled lead-gen campaigns while cutting 60% of their customer’s workload.

• Since adopting Crossbeam into its partnerships processes, 35% of opportunities for Friendbuy are either partner-influenced or partner-sourced.

Generate more dollars, faster than non-partnerships deals

Partnerships deals can generate better, faster results than non-partnerships deals. Use these stats to help prove that partnerships deals should be considered just as important, if not more important, than traditional deals:

• Highspot has observed that partners contribute 58% of the revenue generated by their top sales reps. Working with partners also influences a 60% larger deal size. 

• RingCentral upsells 3x as frequently with partners than without, and the dollar amount of those upsells is 4x the rate of upsells with no partners involved.

• Partner deals close at a higher volume and in a shorter amount of time than other sales deals at Signifyd.

• Census saw a 34% higher annual contract value (ACV) on deals with partners

• Partner-influenced opportunities close 50% faster than any other deal at Freshworks 

• Sendoso calculated that partner-influenced deals close 28 days faster on average than non-partnerships deals

• LeanData tracks partner-influenced revenue in Salesforce and have observed that deals with partners have a 40% higher average order value (AOV) than deals without partners. 

• For data automation platform Syncari, partner-influenced deals have conversion rates that are 2X higher and close faster than any non-partnership deal.

• In our 2023 State of the Partner Ecosystem Report, we found that deals are 53% more likely to close when a partner is involved.

• In our 2023 State of the Partner Ecosystem Report, we found that deals close 46% faster when a partner is involved.

• An Account Executive at customer service management agency TalentPop found that ecosystem-qualified leads are almost 100X likely close than cold leads in 34% of the time.

Help non-partnerships teams hit their OKRs

The benefits of partnerships can expand past just the partner team. Show other departments how partnerships can help them hit their goals:

• John Smit, Senior Channel Sales Manager at Introhive, says his team experimented by asking a couple of their sales development representatives (SDRs) to prioritize following up with ecosystem qualified leads (EQLs) from co-hosted events with partners. The SDRs performed these responsibilities so well that Introhive transitioned the SDRs to working with partners full-time. 

• The onboarding customer success team at RollWorks began real-time account mapping using Crossbeam in 2021 to increase integration adoption among their customers. As a result, their onboarding CSMs hit their goals faster, and they achieved:
  • A 16% faster TTFV in a two-quarter period
  • A 17% increase in customers integrated with at least one additional tech partner
  • A 7% increase in integration usage after just one quarter 

Raise venture capital (VC) funding

Looking for ways to stand out to potential investors and close that next series of fundraising? Invest in partnerships:

• At Supernode 2022, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz Sarah Wang said, “Partnerships are more important than ever. Specifically, because you are bringing in pipeline, shortening sales cycles, and increasing conversion rates. Partnerships are a ‘need to have’, not a ‘nice to have’, especially in this environment.” Wang also shared that early investment in partnerships can signify the long-term success of an investment company. “Partnerships is the #1 hire that we hear our early companies making. Our best-performing companies are relying very heavily on partnerships.” Wang invested in a company with a 50% partner-generated pipeline over one with 100% sales-generated pipeline because of the resiliency that partnerships offer. 

• As of May 2022, 70% of the top firms in the world according to Dealroom also have the highest number of portfolio companies registered on Crossbeam. 

• Crossbeam-friendly VC firms are also backers of 80% of the companies behind the Forbes 2022 Midas list.

• VCs with high numbers of portfolio companies on Crossbeam also make up the top nine VC firms with the highest investment-to-exit ratios. 

• Icelandic carbon-removal tech startup Climeworks partnered with GSI Accenture. Accenture introduced Climeworks technology to customers interested in investing in carbon-removal technology. In April 2022, Climeworks closed a $650M funding round, the largest ever in the carbon-removal industry. 

Upsell, increase product use, and prevent customer churn

Building integrations with tech partners can make your product stickier:

• Typeform customers using the company’s Zapier integration showed about 40% less churn than those who don’t use the integration.

• Jai Shroff, Senior Customer Success Manager at Freshworks, says working with partners has helped his team retain customers who were likely to churn, upsell the accounts for more annual recurring revenue (ARR), and sign them for multi-year deals. “If your company is scaling, let’s say north of $100M in ARR, partnerships is the only way to reach that billion-dollar dream. Inside sales is not going to get you there,” says Shroff.

• RollWorks customers who are using partner integrations renew at a rate approximately 30% higher than customers who don’t.

• Rollworks customers using four or more integrations had a 135% likelihood to renew vs. customers using one integration — and the delta between customers with two integrations vs. four integrations was a 32% lift. 

• “Since RollWorks and Bombora made the co-marketing flip, their integration has gained hundreds of adopters — and that number continues to grow steadily. That’s more than 50% of RollWorks’s customer base who are now leveraging the integration.”

• 75% of Lucky Orange Customers use at least one native Lucky Orange integration. “That [75%] number speaks for itself as to why integrations should be a priority within our development cycles,” says Staats. 

• Rollworks tied integration adoption metrics with their existing customer retention and renewal metrics. As a result, they knew that customers using four or more integrations had a 135% likelihood to renew vs. customers using one integration — and the delta between customers with two integrations vs. four integrations was a 32% lift. 

• The comprehensive GTM strategy between strategic partners Google and Hubspot for their integration resulted in a 232% increase in feature adoption just five months post-launch. 

• 70% of users who join through Help Scout’s startup partner program convert to paying customers.

• Six months after their first co-marketing initiative, ActiveCampaiign earned the #1 spot for marketing automation on Salesforce’s app exchange.

• After using a rebrand to expand their partnerships program, traffic to the Salesloft App Directory set an all-time record.

• In our 2023 State of the Partner Ecosystem Report, we found that integration users are 58% less likely to churn.

Help with exit events

From acquisitions to IPOs, partnerships can play a role in setting your company up for an exit event:

• PayPal partnered with Honey, a coupon browser extension, to drive more conversions in the beginning phases of the buyer journey. Then, in 2019, they bought Honey for $4 billion. Through the partnership and ultimate acquisition, Honey got access to PayPal’s 24 million merchant partners, and PayPal got a leg up on competitors like Amazon Pay by engaging buyers on e-commerce pages through Honey’s web browser extension. 

• In September 2021, Intuit announced that it’s acquiring MailChimp for $12 billion. An article on CNBC mentioned that the companies’ joint integration served as an entry point for initiating the acquisition conversation. Intuit and MailChimp first initiated the partnership conversation a year prior to the announcement and there are two Mailchimp integrations listed on the Intuit Quickbooks site. 

• In September 2021, Notion acquired Automate.io. In TechCrunch, Notion COO Ashay Kothari shared that he first learned about Automate.io because of a partnership the two companies had together. When Notion opened up its APIs to the public in May 2021, Automate.io built on its platform and opened the door to a new market of customers.

• In October 2021, Accenture acquired Xoomworks. Accenture pointed to the strength of Xoomworks’s partner ecosystem as a reason for the acquisition. From Accenture’s website: “Xoomworks shares deep relationships with Accenture ecosystem partners, including SAP Ariba, Coupa, and Jaggaer.”

• SAP acquired Qualtrics in 2018 for $8 billion, and then in January 2021, Qualtrics went public for a market capitalization of $27 billion, according to Forbes. Zig Serafin, Qualtrics’s CEO, explains that a significant reason for spinning out of SAP is to prioritize Qualtrics’s partner ecosystem and potential customers beyond SAP’s parameters.

• Demandbase acquired Demandmatrix seven months after launching a partnership. “We said, this deal is just step one in a longer-term partnership,” says Asher Mathew, Vice-President Go-To-Market, Data Cloud, Technographics, Demandbase (previously VP, Revenue and Operations at DemandMatrix).

• In CM Group’s announcement, digital marketing company CM Group says its merger with Cheetah Digital is part of its plan to add attractive products to its portfolio to drive “stickiness” and retention among its existing customers. From Wellford Dillard, CEO at CM Group:“…We will continue to be their marketing technology partner as they grow by delivering the right technology at the right time, tailored to their industry and built for the scale at which they operate,” he said.

• E-commerce company Coupang went public in March of 2021 and was the largest IPO of the year in the US, according to a March CNBC article, and the largest foreign listing since 2014. The Motley Fool shared that the growth of Coupang’s ecosystem is one of three reasons to invest in Coupang.

• In July 2021, VTEX announced the closing of its IPO. In the IPO announcement, Geraldo Thomaz, co-CEO of VTEX, stresses the importance of building a viable tech ecosystem. He says the strength of VTEX’s ecosystem has contributed to the success of the business, and thus the IPO. “The era of siloed software is ending and connected software is on the rise,” says Thomaz. 

• When evaluating media company The Hustle as an acquisition target, Hubspot used Crossbeam to measure how large of an opportunity the acquisition would be. “Using Crossbeam, I can more precisely identify the percentage of our base that is already a subscriber of The Hustle’s content,” said Brandon Greer, Senior Manager of Corporate Development at Hubspot. Specifically, Hubspot used Crossbeam to generate reports comparing:
  • The overlaps between Hubspot’s customers and The Hustle’s subscribers.
  • The overlaps between HubSpot’s prospects with The Hustle’s subscribers

Expand into new markets

Looking to expand internationally? Instead of building a business presence from scratch, strategically partner with companies in your target markets, then tap into their customer base:

• REVIEWS.io leveraged its partners when expanding internationally. Because of this, they gained 20 clients through a single agency partner just six months after launching in the DACH region and added 20-30% more clients to their customer base in DACH.

• Channel partners in Japan contributed to approximately 40% of Zoom’s Japan business in 2020.

Future-proof your business strategy

Whether it’s unexpected economic turbulence or the slow death of third-party data, the landscape of business is changing. Partnerships can be a valuable tool for navigating these changes: 

• ISV/GSI partnerships hold just as much value to the GSI that they do to the ISV. “Riley,” a VP at a company with 10,000+ partners in their ecosystem including GSIs shared that both the CEO and sales leader at their company are “ecosystem focused” and see ISVs as an opportunity to bring innovation into their ecosystem.

• At Supernode 2022, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz Sarah Wang said, “Partnerships are more important than ever. Specifically, because you are bringing in pipeline, shortening sales cycles, and increasing conversion rates. Partnerships are a ‘need to have’, not a ‘nice to have’, especially in this environment.” Wang also shared that early investment in partnerships can signify the long-term success of an investment company. “Partnerships is the #1 hire that we hear our early companies making. Our best-performing companies are relying very heavily on partnerships.” Wang invested in a company with a 50% partner-generated pipeline over one with 100% sales-generated pipeline because of the resiliency that partnerships offer. 

• In its 2022 “State of Inbound Marketing Trends” report, HubSpot recommended that marketers “future-proof [their] marketing” by “creating an incredible online presence that focuses on creating your own audience and connecting it to a robust first-party data collection structure.”

• According to Boston Consulting Group’s A World Without Cookies Report, companies planning for a post-third party data world should look for opportunities to “create a mutual value exchange with partners in order to accelerate data capture…they should boost their partnerships with second-party data providers and secure clean-room environments.” This includes the creation of a “cross-functional team to evaluate available technology, launch pilots to assess new partners and identity solutions, and research potential big bets, such as new technologies for data collection and storage, new data-capture strategies, or third-party vendor partnerships.”

How you can use Crossbeam to accelerate your results

Having access to stats that show the impact of partnerships is a valuable tool. But we can do you one better. Here’s how using Crossbeam can help you drive similar results from your partner program: 

• The onboarding customer success team at RollWorks adopted Crossbeam to real-time account map in 2021. As a result, their onboarding CSMs hit their goals faster, and they achieved:
  • A 16% faster TTFV in a two-quarter period
  • A 17% increase in customers integrated with at least one additional tech partner
  • A 7% increase in integration usage after just one quarter 

• In just two months of using Crossbeam, Ryan Klekas, Director of Channel Partnerships at Bombora, a B2B intent data company, discovered hidden pipeline and closed $100,000 worth of new business. 

• Crossbeam helped influence 30% of Gorgias’ revenue growth from tech partnerships in just eight months. Now, partnerships account for nearly 50% of Gorgias’ revenue. 

• As of May 2022, 70% of the top firms in the world according to Dealroom also have the highest number of portfolio companies registered on Crossbeam. 

• Crossbeam-friendly VC firms are backers of 80% of the companies behind the Forbes 2022 Midas list.

• VCs with high numbers of portfolio companies on Crossbeam make up the top nine VC firms with the highest investment-to-exit ratios. 

• When evaluating media company The Hustle as an acquisition target, Hubspot used Crossbeam to measure how large of an opportunity the acquisition would be. “Using Crossbeam, I can more precisely identify the percentage of our base that is already a subscriber of The Hustle’s content,” said Brandon Greer, Senior Manager of Corporate Development at Hubspot. Specifically, Hubspot used Crossbeam to generate reports comparing:
  • The overlaps between Hubspot’s customers and The Hustle’s subscribers.
  • The overlaps between HubSpot’s prospects with The Hustle’s subscribers

• Vidyard used Crossbeam to 14x its partner-sourced revenue, going from $25K in 2019 to $350K in 2020.

• Okta ventures surfaced 60 ecosystem-qualified leads for its portfolio companies in just two weeks.

• Sendoso used Crossbeam to double the number of partner-influenced deals between Q4 2020 and Q2 2021.

• By using Crossbeam to source, evaluate, and collaborate with tech partners, the four-person partner team at Dialpad launched 40+ integrations in 2021 — more than a 120% increase from the previous year.

• The team at Census used sales intel from Crossbeam to boost their confidence in negotiations and pricing discussions with clients. As a result, the census team saw a 34% increase in higher annual contract values (ACV) on partner-influenced deals vs non-influenced deals. 

• Since adopting Crossbeam into its partnerships processes, 35% of opportunities for Friendbuy are either partner-influenced or partner-sourced.

• The Everflow team uses Crossbeam to execute co-marketing and co-selling campaigns with partners. This has shortened sales enterprise cycles for Everflow by 44%. 

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