The Competitor Program Play

Wow - I can't believe we are on issue 10 of Partnership Pocketbook! I hope you are enjoying it as much as I am!

As always, I’ll start off with a conversation I’ve had this week which makes me pumped to be in partnerships.

This one came on a call with a prospective partner.

They are a Rev Ops consultancy who will probably end up being a great partner for us at Help Scout.

After the conversation was through and we had agreed on a course of action, they asked me out of curiosity what the difference in close rate was between a partner sourced lead and a direct lead.

In my experience, the conversion rate for partner sourced leads CRUSHES the rates of direct leads.

This is because of a few factors: trust and fit.

Your partners have usually gone through some qualification with a customer meaning that fit has already been established, and the customer already has a relationship with the partner meaning they trust their opinion.

It is crazy to me that people are still sleeping on partner sources of revenue!

It has to be the MASSIVE news that Salesforce is partnering with Meta!

Companies on their platform can use WhatsApp business messages to answer customer questions, run marketing campaigns and sell directly in chat.

I for one never thought I would see the day that these two companies partnered but the combination of the two is POWERFUL!

As with any good tech partnership, the power of one plus the other equals a great additive experience of their customer base.

Good work partner teams!

Now onto this week’s issue.

It’s another tactical one. One that you can take away and use tomorrow.

I want to break down for you another recruitment play that I’ve used before and I will use again.

The competitor recruitment play.

Chances are when you are starting a partner program you are mapping out your IPP and working on recruiting some partners.

It can be stressful and time consuming.

We unfortunately don’t live in a world where there is a big pile of partners already lined up to join your program.

One thing you can look at which might simplify and speed up this process is to take a peek at what your competitors are doing.

Oftentimes, a partner marketplace is table stakes for a partner program, which means there is a publicly available website where they list all of their ecosystem. It has company names and websites listed.

Take a list of these URLs, or if you want to get really fancy use scraping tool to pull these URLs into a spreadsheet.

Next, use your sales development team to run the URLs of these sites through a tool like Hunter.io and unearth email domains that are tied to these URLs.

Once you have the list of emails, you are now ready to run a recruitment sequence.

This is where the magic happens…

The messaging.

No two tools are the same.

Meaning your product can have some secret sauce or some fairy dust which makes it stand out from the competition.

Dial the message in.

For example, Help Scout is a tool that is know for its ease of set up, transparent pricing and amazing customer support; it’s a great fit for SMB businesses.

The major behemoth in the support tooling space is obviously Zendesk.

They have a great Partner program, with a ton of partners that want to rep their product.

However, Zendesk is a tool that can be too expensive and too complex especially at the SMB level.

In these situations. partners might be missing out on revenue because their customers simply aren’t a fit for Zendesk...and that’s here Help Scout comes in.

✍️ Show them why you are different.

✍️ Show them how it’s a logical product to add to their arsenal.

✍️ Show them that they are leaving money on the table.

You will be able to get them to join your partner program.

Simple, effective, and doesn’t take a ton of effort.

That’s all for this week's issue!

As always, thank you for reading, you are all 🔥🔥🔥

I will see you all next week.

Cheers,

Ben