Cloud Software Association

No more spreadsheets! Looking for some recommendations, so this is great

Tapfiliate, LeadDyno, Ambassador, and Partnerstack are the usual suspects. There are others like Profiliate pro. Impact.com is another one a CSA member recommended, but I don’t know much about it. Then there’s ShareASale.com as well. It seems like the market has a lot of entrants.

Quite a few SaaS companies including myself have been looking at Crossbeam. It is that starting point for us. It helps remove the need for google docs to try and figure out which reps overlap. Huge time saver.

@Richard Bernstein To my knowledge Crossbeam is more of an addition to a typical referral/PRM solution where you can functionally see which accounts both companies are using

@Bob Moore Can you give context if Crossbeam can be a useful tool with tracking referrals?

Crossbeam does help a number of companies with referral tracking, but it doesn’t use traditional methods like cookie tracking, URL parameters, or lead registration. We instead allow you to compare your actual customer lists against lists provided by your referral partners (and vice versa). We draw the venn diagram for you, so you can figure out what overlaps without revealing the full underlying list.

This is typically most useful for things higher in the funnel (account mapping, lead sharing, co-selling, data enrichment, etc), but we do have companies using this is a way to verify that all referrals are being captured and counted.

It’s free to sign up: https://www.getcrossbeam.com/

What are you guys using at Smile? @Steve Deckert – Smile.io

In house but I’m currently looking at other options. We should not have built our own partner portal for agencies/channel. For technology partners building integrations it’s super useful, but not for agencies/channel in its current state.

Tell me about it. Engineering against channel is a huge expense that is never maintained.

It’s a constant battle for features that’s not worth anyone’s time, including the product team.

I’m aware of some solutions that exist, but I’m mostly interested in what other companies are actually using and if they actually like it.

Here’s one that we’re currently using for an integration partner – https://grow.pushpay.com/lp-demo-partner-planning-center.html
I want these new pages to feel like warm/personal introductions from the partner to us.

Hubspot is solid. https://www.hubspot.com/agencies/impact

Oh, I like the reviews part. Nice to have some third party validation

Zendesk does a good job of this – they separate each of their marketplace, app directory and partner directory – partners here – https://www.zendesk.com/marketplace/partners/

With each partner having a details page – https://www.zendesk.com/marketplace/partners/envoy/?source=partner_directory

20% revenue share paid lifetime to partners as long as they remain active in our program.

Active = at least one successful referral per year.

We do 20% revenue share on the subscription paid lifetime provided they’re an active partner.

Other than that sometimes we’ll drop swag on a performing partner

Gift for sales person in the company- once a quarter..

@Richard Bernstein I had the same question. We generally offer our partners a 20% residual rev share, but often the partner sales rep receives little to none of this revenue. It’s been particularly difficult to incentivize reps directly because many partners won’t allow us to provide their reps with cash spiffs. If anyone has any creative ideas, that have been successful in incentivizing partner reps, I’d love to know!

@Ryan Vanderkolk to make it more complicated, per the above spiff ideas, those are requests from different partners. Do we try and reciprocate every time, or do we have our own method for spiffing our reps and let them take the commission and split if how they feel is best. And if ours is more generous, does that upset the rep on the other side? hmmmm

All good points, @Richard Bernstein. This is a nut I haven’t been able to crack. Working in sales in the past lets me know that reps ultimately want to make money. Additionally, I know that the partner rep’s job of selling their own product/hitting their quota is hard enough. That being said, the only way I figure you can incentivize someone is by fatting their wallet and/or providing a solution that allows them to sell their core product easier/faster. The question then becomes 1. Are you allowed to pay the reps a cash spiff, 2. do you have the margin to pay said spiff, and 3. does your product/service make the partner rep’s job easier or complicate the sale pitch?

Right now we have one program, but it seems it is better to have different programs.

At JetRails, we have referral partner commission, and agency commissions. The two can be mixed and matched. It’s a form of commission split, allowing us to pay out the referral source, like one of our technology partners, as well as the agency/developers/solution providers that will be working with us to support the client. In many cases, the agency will get both fees, but it’s nice to have a pre-determined split.

So far, most of our referral partners have come to us. This has been a good way to test the business case on how/where to invest in partners.

Same as @Kasey Bayne .. and that provided us with 5 leads / day.. now we also trying to email our users and that have been working well(ish)

@Kasey Bayne I’ve had similar experiences, although I do tend to pick up some great referral partners at industry trade shows as well. At JetRails, we cater to the eCommerce sector, which can be a pretty tight-knit community.

Something that we typically recommend is understanding which companies your product sells alongside? So do your customers currently purchase Hubspot/Salesforce alongside your product? This will give you a sense of the ecosystem, and those large ecosystems will have partners that are looking to sell complementary products alongside those solutions.

This usually serves as a good place to start in building a really strong outbound strategy and understanding which types of partners might work well for a business

Agree, we’ve found what @Nikita said to be best, and try to go one step further when we can by having a joint customer as an example – The possible partner will find it that much more compelling.

I think it’s also important to segment your partner types which allows you to get more focused and personalized. At Unbounce our two major partner segments are SMB-focused PPC Agencies and Affiliates (educators or content publishers). We recruited first through our entire database and have an ongoing recruitment flywheel in our app, in email campaigns, through CS teams.

Outbound we take @Nikita‘s suggestion, but I also use SimilarWeb to find look alike partners. Then through PartnerStack, we equip our partners to succeed by providing the content, assets, and tips our top performers are utilizing. The platform also allow us to have segmented onboarding flows, challenges, and communications to each segment which increases activation rates and output.

Qualify for sure. This product is high-touch for set-up, so we need to make sure they’re representing us and the product well.

How about for low touch products… Did you qualify accounting partners at FreshBooks too or just have them sign up? When I had control of that program, I waived anyone through and dealt with yutzes on the other side. But I had not enough time to focus on each partner as the only partner person.

For the set-up I had, I ran a CPE (CPA education credit) session, so once the accountant completed that, they were in.

Clever.

There were some people that turned out not to be great that I had to deal with afterwards, but if they passed the CPE test (a 40 min webinar with 10 “quiz” questions), they were in

And a nice value add for the accountant at very low cost to us

What a great idea using professional accreditation to “pay” for their time to talk to you.

We let anyone signup.. if we see a potential we’ll train them..

That is a really interesting strategy @Kasey Bayne!

@Kasey Bayne that is such a smart idea to filter partners, nice!

We do not

Not here either (nor have I in the past), unless they were “not good” or poorly representing us. If it’s just a matter of not sending us enough business, we’d let them stay.

Only if there’s a cause or catalyst. We don’t remove them simply for being lite on referrals, although we do have stipulations about minimum #’s of referrals per year to keep certain preferred commission payout terms. It’s not a high bar, but it allows us to reward our more active referral partners.

No

Yes for sure! We did this a TON with the accountant’s channel at FreshBooks

We do a lot of this at JetRails. If we know that an eCommerce website owner needs assistance, we go out of our way to pair them up with great solution and technology partners of ours.

Yes this is super important when partnering with product companies. Generally speaking product companies don’t care about your revenue share, they want to sell their product. They want leads and sales. Setting up a reciprocal referral model will be more motivating than a one way channel model that pays them revenue share IMHO.

Lessons from my client work… I find you can’t know. Too early, you don’t have enough data. So you have to make educated bets on your investments.

Are partners knocking at your door? Then they are hot relationships and you should take them, but only if you can serve them programmatically instead of one-off. One-off is chaos.

If direct is working, then it’s more important at the beginning because you need to create channel demand in order to acquire partners. Partners like what their customers like.

But that’s half made up. It’s hard to know as there is little information to work with.

It’s tough! Right now, I’m handing requests as they come in and trying to systematize and create brandable assets. Next step is to put together a business case/ROI on if we should bring in a full time channel manager to build this out.

I did a lot of consulting in this area. The only thing I cound find that worked is the 2-step dance:

Step 1. CEO wants to take a “bet” on partnerships and hires 1 partner person to explore the opportunities and bring it to order.

Step 2. Can that partner person systematize and programmatize partnerships enough to hire someone more operationally focused to run a program? That’s a lot to ask an individual and it can come down to an individual effort.