How Sendcloud Achieved an 80% Increase in New Leads Sourced From Partners Using Reveal

February 4, 2021

minutes

Ella Richmond

Rapid reads → get buy-in using an anchor tenant

**Note: This rapid read is a quick snapshot of the tactical takeaways from Sendcloud’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.

Words alone won’t convince your leadership team. You need words backed by data.

Wilson knew he needed Reveal to execute and report on his nearbound strategy properly so he used an anchor tenant to get the resources he needed.

Use his tactics to do the same.

Start with the free plan.
Identify a partner with a very strong better-together story.
Quantify the revenue potential without Reveal.
Quantify the revenue potential with Reveal.
Build out a list of plays to action this revenue potential using Reveal.
Repeat with 2-3 more partners.

Wilson said it best:

“When you can bring to your leadership team the fact that you might have a way to action tens or even hundreds of thousands of CRM entries through a partner or with a partner. I think that’s really a game changer.”

Here’s a free resource to help you pitch Reveal to your leadership teams.

How to build your nearbound strategy

Wilson joined Sendcloud in the Summer of 2022. His very first conversation with the founders was about expectations.

“I told them that if anyone tells you that there’s a quick way to win in strategic partnerships or in tech partnerships, it’s either that they haven’t done strategic partnerships before or that they’re lying to you to get a job.”

Sendcloud already had reseller and ecosystem partnerships in place, but strategic partnerships were different. Success required a different approach and execution.

So Wilson built out a strategy, with account mapping as a core piece of it.

“I’ve always been a big believer in account mapping, and beyond account mapping, nearbound.

When you work in partnerships, your job is to essentially create network effects.

Just relying on inbound is difficult. Outbound has always been a challenge unless you’re a super go-getter salesperson…and not every organization has these killer salespeople.

This idea of working through partners or putting your data to use with partners, and enhancing your strategy made perfect sense to me as soon as it appeared.

I’ve been familiar with it for a couple of years, and then every company that I’ve worked with, I’ve tried to implement it.

That’s why one of my first priorities was to get Reveal implemented.

Account mapping software makes my strategy actionable. It makes it reportable to leadership.”

Secure resources for Reveal using an anchor tenant

Wilson had experience with account mapping software and knew he needed an account mapping tool to make his strategy actionable and reportable.

Recognizing this as a key pillar, and understanding that his team wasn’t yet familiar with account mapping, he made a plan to obtain the resources for Reveal.

“It always takes a little bit of time to educate a company and a leadership team who are not familiar with account mapping and nearbound.

So I got on the free plan first to make a case for it. I wanted to put the tool to work, to show leadership the data, and to showcase what it could do.”

Then he looked for a champion.

Wilson knew he could make a stronger case for Reveal by delving deeply into the complete story of one partnership, rather than covering many partnership opportunities briefly.

That one partner was Mollie, a payments and money management company.

“It just so happens I come from the payments business myself and we had an existing relationship with Mollie because we were just about to launch a product partnership. So I was like, okay, I think that Mollie is gonna be my anchor tenant.

The two things that matter most to our any consumer shopping online are payment options and shipping options at checkout. Everything is about making the consumer happy.

So we have a product partnership with Mollie, which is a paid returns portal that we built with them. That’s performing very well.

And what we’ve been able to do with Reveal is anchor the fact that we’ve got common customers and prospects.”

To better understand the relationship between Sendcloud and Mollie, I went to Joep Rohof who runs Mollie’s strategic partnerships to hear his take on the initial partnership pitch and the better-together narrative.

Here’s what he shared:

"Similar to Sendcloud, we recognize the opportunity of engaging in initiatives and partnerships with companies that align closely with our ideal customer profile. At the time, Mollie was also in the process of adopting and rolling out Reveal, so I sought ways to enhance its adoption within Mollie’s operations.

Together, Wilson and I collaborated on crafting playbooks to effectively uncover and act upon hidden revenue opportunities within our shared customer base, ultimately strengthening the proposition of our commerce teams and driving significant business growth."

Wilson explained why using Mollie as an anchor tenant was so important.

“It’s been a game-changer to bring my leadership team ways to action previously dormant CRM entries through a partner or with a partner.

And zeroing in on specific features—showcasing the fact that you can focus on the lead gen or on the overlap space or sourcing opportunities or influencing deals…

Mollie was my anchor tenant in establishing the strategy and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we can do on the free plan, but if you give me the budget to go on the power plan, this is what we’ll be able to do.’”

After Wilson successfully showcased the potential behind a partnership with Mollie, he found a few other partners and built their cases too.

“It took a while to build that case for the management team and leadership team, but I think that the case was well-built, coherent, and comprehensive.

It’s never easy to get budget from leadership for new tools, but you want to build the case so well that it’s an obvious ‘yes’ for them.

I made Reveal an obvious ‘yes’ through anchor tenants like Mollie.”

Implement Reveal into the company’s existing motions

After Wilson got approval for Reveal, it was time to go all in executing his strategy.

That meant two things:

Setting up the right systems and processes to facilitate Sendcloud’s success.
Backing his strategy with grit and determination.

In this section, we’ll break down exactly what this meant for Wilson, down to the plays he ran.

Play #1: Partner internally with RevOps

Goal: Get Reveal implemented into Sendcloud’s existing systems and processes

Sendcloud’s RevOps team supports the data engine that enables and empowers the company to drive revenue. Wilson knew that he needed to partner internally with them if he was going to succeed.

“Right from the beginning I worked with our Head of Revenue Operations and his team to get buy-in on the use of the tool.

I made the business case for the use of Reveal, showing them what implementing it into our brand strategy and some co-selling partnerships could do for the organization, and then once we were aligned, we worked very closely to put it in place.

Now we meet every two weeks to look at what’s working, look at what’s not, and figure out which tools, reports, dashboards, and workflows need to be updated to better serve our teams.”

(To learn more about setting up cadences with your GTM teams, read this excerpt from Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy.)

Play #2: Create custom properties in your CRM

Goal: CRM Hygiene

“All of your data is a treasure trove of information. You just need to figure out how to action it to its fullest extent.”

Most companies have enough data, they just don’t know how to action it.

That’s why it was really important to Wilson that nearbound data didn’t become something that would add to his team’s cognitive overload.

Wilson teamed up with his RevOps team to build custom properties in Sendcloud’s CRM.

“There’s going to be a ton of records so maintaining a certain amount of CRM hygiene is so important. Tailoring that in Reveal by adding custom properties and then essentially feeding that large amount of data to your Revenue Ops Team and then to your sales and your CSM teams so that you can mobilize it is super important.”

Play #3: Set up a “deal intro” channel in Slack

Goal: Get relevant information to the right people when it’s most useful

Reveal information is best received when it’s relevant and immediately actionable.

Wilson connected Slack and Reveal and set up channels to send automatic intel to the right parties. One of these channels he calls “deal intel.”

He explained,

“I’ve set up a channel called “Partnerships Reveal Deal Intel” so that sales teams and people across the revenue organization receive deal intel when a partner is attached to a customer, prospect, or opportunity.

I’ve set up per-partnership channels internally where people receive information about different partnerships or different deals.

I’ve set those up externally when we’ve got a strong relationship with an external partner using some of the workflows Reveal offers with automations on Slack.”

Play #4: Schedule meetings with your GTM teams and department heads to walk through the ways Reveal and nearbound can impact their bottom line

Goal: Company-wide adoption of the nearbound philosophy and tactics

Everyone has a way of doing things, and they’re not going to change unless you sufficiently convince them to do so.

“You have to be the biggest believer in partnerships. You have to preach and remind people. Sure, there’s a little bit of repetitiveness but that’s so important because it’s new. Not everyone gets it. People are used to a certain way of doing things.

Don’t skimp on repeating the same thing, repeating the messaging, sitting down with people, with market heads, heads of sales, team leads and AEs to just reinforce your message and show them the data, show them the results.

Show them the potential, highlight wins, and they’ll want to use it.”

Play #5: Execution-driven demos

Goal: Company-wide use of Reveal and nearbound methods

Wilson wanted to guide his teams to achieve tangible results with Reveal and through nearbound methods like the 3 I’s plays.

When referring to this stage of implementation, he used the term “grit.” It takes a lot of grit to create momentum in a direction where none existed previously.

That’s why Wilson invests time in building relationships and showcasing the value of partnerships on a 1:1 basis.

Wilson explains:

“You need to be present with the people who are going to use your tools: partner managers, sales managers, and sales/account executives. It’s about bringing them in, showing the results, and quantifying the opportunity.

I’ve been doing mini execution-driven demos with a lot of individuals in my company.

What these mini execution-driven demos look like is this:

I ask about a specific opportunity, we’ll go into the platform, look at the opportunity, and then based on that do a wider list that is based on the partner, based on the market, deal size, influencer factors, and a few other criteria.

I’ll show them the filters, I’ll save the view for them.

And they usually come to that conclusion themselves, ‘My gosh, this is amazing.’”

Conclusion

The silent killer of all partnership teams and roles is attribution. Wilson Favre-Delerue knew this when he began as the Head of Strategic Partnerships at Sendcloud.

Sendcloud already had reseller and integration partnerships in place when they hired Wilson, but strategic partnerships required a completely different approach.

Nearbound is a newer strategy that can’t be fully adopted in a couple of months. It takes time to introduce the new concept, integrate account mapping data into GTM teams’ existing workflows, and for GTM teams to begin thinking with a nearbound mindset.

So far, he’s successfully:

Set proper expectations with his leadership team.
Won budget for Reveal using an anchor tenant.
Implemented nearbound data into his company’s existing GTM workflows.

Wilson is still working towards the complete adoption of the nearbound mindset, but he’s made considerable progress including:

Launching Sendcloud’s first co-selling strategic partnership with Mollie.
Launching follow-on co-selling partnerships with Hive and Mirakl.
Building these early partnerships into a replicable, scalable process for a full strategic partnerships vertical.
Generated 400+ qualified opportunities for his sales teams in 18 months.
Lowered the CAC for partner-sourced leads by a factor of 5.

Bonus tip: The importance of experimentation

I asked Wilson: What is one thing that has been impactful in Sendcloud’s initial partnership success?

He shared:

“I think having an experimentation mentality is super important. A lot of people talk about experimentation in product, but having that experiment mentality in revenue jobs is also super important.

I love the fact that when you’re working in partnerships, there’s always a mix of the long bets and the short bets. The long bets are essentially the long-term view that you have that’s underpinned by your strategy - where you think you want to go and where you’re actually headed.

But you might not always get to where you think you were headed and that’s based on some of the short bets and some of the quick things that you’re going to do.

For me, the data that Reveal provides me is an indispensable way of doing that because it allows me to look at partners from a macro perspective—my complete book of partnerships—and it also allows me to look at my partnerships individually.

Reveal provides me with the data to run informed experiments.

I go in with the belief that 80% of my experiments will pan out and will generate revenue or something that’s important to my KPIs. Then there is 20% that won’t work and I’ll learn from them.”

Here’s a free resource to help you pitch Reveal to your leadership teams.