Nigel Liaw joined Fullstory in September 2023 as their Director of Technology Partnerships to craft seamless integrations and innovative solutions that directly address and alleviate Fullstory’s customer pain points. 

Nigel’s mindset of putting the customer first has helped him build a tech partnership program that helped increase Fullstory’s customers’ renewal rate by 14%.

This is the story of how he and his team succeeded by having a customer-first mentality, leveraging Reveal, and making the most out of nearbound data.

Rapid read: Fullstory’s 5 steps to build a successful integration program

**Note: This rapid read is a quick snapshot of the tactical takeaways from Fullstory’s success. If you want to get the most out of this story and understand the context behind these tactics, keep scrolling to read the full story.

The result

The step-by-step guide

Your product may not be perfect, and that’s okay. You can rely on partners to fill those gaps, improve your customer experience, and increase the value proposition of your joint solution.

To enhance Fullstory’s customer experience, Nigel Liaw, followed a 5-step process to deliver more value to them:

1. Identify potential tech partners
2. Connect with partners
3. Build a pitch
4. Enable teams
5. Track

Here’s Fullstory’s playbook that you can use today to increase the impact of your integration program:

Identifying potential tech partners

• Actively listening to customers’ needs and leveraging insights from customer interactions as the primary entry point for identifying potential partners.
• Select your tech partners according to data like market presence, account overlap, contact overlap, your company’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), customer feedback, and your company’s strategic goals.
• Align with your internal Product team to get buy-in and support, ensuring that the integration aligns with the overall strategic roadmap. This will help your integration strategy receive the necessary resources and backing for success.

Connecting with partners

• Expand your ecosystem and connect with partners, by leveraging customers, team members, and partner introductions to facilitate collaboration and drive revenue. 
• Evaluate key elements to ensure the partnership’s worthiness. This includes identifying common customers and prospects, understanding the partner’s ICP, assessing similarities in use cases, defining the joint value proposition, and determining the added value to the customer journey.

Build your pitch

• Leverage Reveal as a valuable data source to construct the narrative and business case for your integrations, ensuring buy-in from the Product team.
• Communicate key insights such as customer pain points, customer insights, the number of mutual customers, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) of the integration, specific joint use cases with tech partners, and potential candidates for beta-testing. 

Team enablement 

• Align integration initiatives with your team’s internal goals and objectives.
• Share data points such as the partner’s relevance to customer goals, common customers, active and inactive integrations, and potential use cases with your CSMs so they can establish stronger connections with partner counterparts, understand customer needs better, and deliver enhanced value.

Track 

• Build dashboards for measuring integration adoption, retention, and expansion. By consolidating data related to integration usage, you can monitor customer engagement and identify opportunities for improvement. 
• Leverage Reveal data to assist your Customer Success teams in setting up plans and conducting informed conversations during Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). 

How Fullstory builds their integrations

If you want to make sure your partner program is successful, you have to go back to the basics. 

This means that you have to identify how you can better work with partners and how your customers can better benefit from them. 

To get this right, Kevin Crow, Global Head of Partner Management at Fullstory helped build a partner program by classifying their partners and focusing on their customers’ needs. 

“When I first started at Fullstory two years ago, I helped build our partner programs, and part of the partner operational components. It was all about systematically identifying how we better work with partners, how we aligned in accounts to work together, and how we tracked our success in Salesforce.”—Kevin Crow

Their partners are allocated in three buckets: 

1. Solution partners: Agencies and consultancies that help implement and enable customers on Fullstory by building service models.

”We have around 130 solution partners around the globe. When I started we only had 20 solution partners. ” —Kevin Crow

2. Technology partners: All of the companies that form part of their growing ecosystem of out-of-the-box integrations (and an open AP). 

“We are close to 100 technology partners.”—Kevin Crow

3. Google: Partners are listed in the Google marketplace, they have multiple integrations with them, and they do several GTM strategies together. 

To learn how Fullstory is building a successful tech partner program that helped them achieved an increase in renewal rates by 14% in five steps, I spoke with Fullstory’s Nigel Liaw, Global Director of Technology, and Kevin Crow, Global Head of Solution Partners.

Let’s dive in!

Identifying potential partners

There are many ways to identify partners. Still, Nigel’s favorite one is combining qualitative and quantitative data. The first step involves actively listening to Fullstory’s customers’ needs.

“Our first point of entry is our customers. We are listening to our customers first, and leveraging signals and intel that we’re getting from our customers, Product team, and customer-facing teams.

We also pay attention to where are heading in an industry and market perspective.”—Nigel Liaw

Once he gets the intel from his customers, it’s time to action step two: leveraging data to support those customer insights.  

“When we want to engage with a potential tech partner, we always look at where the overlap is in mutual customers to then evaluate whether or not we have the interest to go further down with the integration.”—Nigel Liaw

Nigel leverages the data he can find in Reveal’s directory like market presence, account, and contact overlap, and then matches it with his ICP and its needs to better identify potential partners. 

“Reveal is a tool that helps us evaluate the partnership, but also helps us identify where should we focus on when it comes to mutual customers with our partners.”—Kevin Crow

Connect with partners 

There’s no better way to connect with partners than by running a nearbound play. In this case, Nigel and his team tapped into the existing trust and relationships their customers, team members, and partners have with their potential partners.

This not only helps them expand their ecosystem but tap into their customers’ resources and audiences to build better and more purposeful integrations. 

“Our customers can help us with an integration to the contacts he has at the partner organization.”—Nigel Liaw

Once Nigel reaches out to their potential partner, he starts thinking about how to better share data.  

“Depending on the partner and their comfort around sharing data with us, we signed an NDA, a partnership agreement, and then we start to explore how the customer overlap will look like.”—Nigel Liaw

To make sure a tech partnership is worth pursuing, here are some elements Nigel always looks for before even trying to pitch it to their Product team:

• Who are our common customers and prospects? 
• Who is their ICP?
• What are the similarities in use cases?
• What will the joint value proposition look like? 
• What is the extra value added to the customer journey?

“It’s all about evaluating how our existing product and solution that our customers are buying can be enhanced with a partner.”—Nigel Liaw

And as always, you need to back up your integration with data. Now is the time to leverage Reveal. 

“We use Reveal to set up the program and the partnerships once we identify those partners that bring more value to our customers.

We’re primarily looking at account overlap filtering that down to our ICP and identifying mutual customers and joint opportunities.”—Nigel Liaw

Build your pitch

Now that Nigel has the data and the joint value proposition, it’s time to build the business case to ensure their Product team doesn’t say, ’Thank you, next’. 

“When it comes to using Reveal, it’s a great data source to help build the story and the business case around building the integration.”—Nigel Liaw

Whenever Nigel has to pitch an integration to his Product team he focuses on sharing customer and Reveal data like:

• Customer’s pain points
• Customers insights
• The number of mutual customers and a couple of examples
• The TAM of the integration 
• The tech partner that closes their product gap and the specific joint use cases
• Identify candidates for beta-testing and new product integrations

“There are two parts you need to consider when building your pitch. The first part consists of identifying what is the data telling you and the second part is how can you action the data or even leverage it to help you inform part of that integration process. The data around the mutual customers help us inform and prioritize our partners.”—Nigel Liaw

Team enablement

When Nigel is rolling out an integration and wants to enable his internal teams, he emphasizes how the integration will help them reach their goals—speaking the language of each team.

“We use Reveal to go and look at how many integrations are currently active on our side versus the total number of customers we have overlap with. We enable our Customer Success team on the value of the integration so they can later reach out to their customers and share the JVP of the better together story.”—Nigel Liaw

In addition to telling the Customer Service team how the new integration is going to help them reduce churn, increase retention, or expand their account list, you have to show them how. 

“A lot of CSMs focus a lot on their customers and how are they using their product. But a paradigm shift that Reveal is activating, is that this is not only about your product, but your product plus the product stack your customers are using.”—Kevin Crow

Nigel and his team build a series of workshops and enablement sessions that help them understand how to leverage partners for each use case or goal their CSMs have. 

“Consider the role of your CSMs. Are they thinking about retention or expansion? Then consider their goal and their type of customer or account list. Based on that, create specific programs or playbooks for them focused on how they can leverage the new integration based on their goals.”—Nigel Liaw

What Nigel, Kevin, and the Partnership team do is share the following data points in Reveal with his Customer Success team to help them better leverage the tech partner: 

• The partner that can help them reach their goal
• The common customers with the partner 
• The number of common customers with an active integration 
• The number of common customers with no active integration
• Which of their customers’ tech stacks do they have a great use case with
• Which of their customers’ tech stacks do they have an actual integration with

“This data can help your CSMs connect with your partner’s CSMs. In this way they will leverage your partner relationship to understand better the customer and deliver more value.”—Nigel Liaw

“We take all the Reveal data, and push it into Salesforce, so CSMs should look in Salesforce before they have a quarterly review with their customers. They should be able to look at and identify the integration opportunities. CSMs are a critical component in closing the integration loop.”—Kevin Crow

Track

To measure the integration adoption, retention, and expansion, Nigel and his team, built some dashboards in Looker Studio and all the data related to how many customers are using their integration goes to that dashboard. 

“We validate and verify the data in Looker Studio based on the number of customers we see in the overlap in Reveal. This data helps us identify those customers that aren’t using the integration. With this, we can meet with our partner and discuss some strategies to push the integration to all of our common customers.”—Nigel Liaw

“Reveal has helped us a lot in terms of preparation, from partner reviewing to helping Customer Success teams. If we’re looking at a QBR for a specific customer, we can help the Customer Success team set up their plan and the conversation with the customer.

Reveal has helped us quickly identify those low-hanging fruits regarding integrations. So every time we talk to the customer, we’re more informed and have more knowledge regarding their current tech stack.”—Nigel Liaw

The power of integrations

Buyers want to be surrounded with value at every step of their journey. But single companies can’t do this alone. 

Fullstory leaned on the trust and expertise of their partners to build a better customer experience leading to: 

• An increase of 14% in renewal rate for customers with 2 active integrations or more. 

A final word: Nigel’s and Kevin’s advice to those starting on Reveal 

There are so many use cases for Reveal, but if you’re focusing on driving customer success, Nigel and Kevin have some tips for you:

•  Leverage data to facilitate discussions not only with your customers or partners but with your internal teams too. 

“Reveal data can help you recruit partners and build internal business cases on why building a strategic partnership or an integration is important.”—Nigel Liaw

• Use overlap data to identify which integrations are worth pursuing. 

“There’s an infinite list of other SaaS technology companies that want to integrate with you. Reveal helps you be smart and thoughtful around that. As soon as you pass the use cases of the integration, the real key to understanding what the potential of the integration is through the overlap data. Reveal helps you build the integration and do something commercially thanks to the data around your total addressable market and your overlap opportunity.”—Kevin Crow

Want to learn more about how to drive nearbound customer success by leveraging integrations in Reveal? Book a call with our team. 

Let’s talk about strategy!