Regardless of the economy, every market is a buyers’ market — a company’s success and fate are ultimately in the hands of the customer. As buyers are bombarded with emails and ads originating from massively automated marketing and sales tools and utilizing AI-generated (GenAI) content at scale, the customer experience is becoming overwhelming and impersonal. The combination of these factors prompts a change in corporate customer behavior and sentiment. Marketers need to find new and innovative ways to cut through the noise to get high-quality leads (leadgen).

Moreover, these ways need to be efficient and scalable as well. Age-old strategies are no longer as successful and cause pain and frustration when goals are unmet. Add tech layoffs, SaaS winter, corporate budget cuts, and general economic fluctuations to the mix, and businesses realize they need to do better with less. 

This means that marketing and sales organizations must rethink their Go-To-Market (GTM) motions, setting aside the classic one-dimensional waterfall funnel approach and jettisoning any other blunt sales instruments. These new motions are based on fit, not reach; they are focused on trust, not volume, and promote relationships, not commoditized automation. And as GTM motions change, so do marketing and sales tech solutions.

Tapping the partnership ecosystems

As businesses hone in on new GTM motions to engage with customers based on trust and efficiency, a fruitful resource often remains overlooked: their Partner ecosystem. The partner ecosystem refers to a group of organizations or individuals that businesses can turn to to achieve common goals and objectives. Every company and every team has a partner ecosystem that is unique to them, so why not leverage it? 

Partnerships are valuable to businesses because they bring warm introductions into the pipeline, shortening the sales cycle because of existing relationships, increasing conversion rates via social trust, and improving the adoption of products via better together value. This new GTM motion, also known as Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG), focuses on partner ecosystems as the primary way to attract, convert, and grow customer relationships.

Deals are 53% more likely to close when a partner is involved.

Crossbeam

In fact, those who integrated a partner program reported deals closed 46% faster than traditional sales methods. And deals that involve partner integrations to drive additional value are 58% less likely to churn.

The Revolution of Partner Data

Today, more companies can embrace a scalable data-driven partner ecosystem growth approach over traditional inefficient rolodex-driven motions. In the past, partner teams were struggling to move fast because there was no trusted way to exchange data among them. Even simple questions like Who are our joint customers? were hard to answer. Partner managers were facing a data standoff challenge akin to I will show you my customers, if you show me yours. 

Now, for the first time, connections can be made across entire ecosystems through secure access to ecosystem-enriched data. This data is the foundation of being able to build and run ELG securely and at scale for businesses. Let’s see how this is possible. 

Enter Crossbeam

Enter Crossbeam, an ecosystem-led growth platform that helps companies achieve efficient and scalable growth by securely leveraging data with partners. As businesses join the partner data revolution, Crossbeam works with critical parts of their tech stack and fuels the work of every GTM team. Here are the steps:

1. Find Your Partners – Crossbeam is like LinkedIn for partnerships. You can find and connect with the companies in your partner ecosystem in just a few clicks. Sixteen thousand companies are already on Crossbeam. Those partners not already on Crossbeam can get invited to join at no cost to continue to expand your ecosystem on the platform.
2. Connect and Share Data – Crossbeam securely integrates with your existing systems to build lists of prospects, opportunities, and customers. It supports the most popular data sources including the leading CRMs, data warehouses, Google Sheets, and CSVs. No matter the source, businesses have total control over what data enters Crossbeam.
3. Map Accounts – Crossbeam’s powerful matching engine identifies overlaps between your data and the data of your partners in your ecosystem. You can build powerful reports and segment by partners, sales reps, geographies, or any other dimension in the data. It takes just seconds to complete and is secure, rather than the traditional method of sharing incomplete and static spreadsheets. 

4. Drive Revenue – Armed with that data you can then tap into partner relationships and take action. You can source warm introductions, gather intelligence about your prospect accounts, co-sell with your partners, and attribute influence from your partnerships. Crossbeam automatically captures opportunities and syncs them directly to your CRM, MAP, or other revenue engagement tool your marketing or sales team may be using.  

How Do Different Teams Benefit From Crossbeam

ELG is most successful when every member of the ecosystem is communicating and working together with the same goals in mind. This includes internal teams.

Marketing teams can use Crossbeam to generate Ecosystem Qualified Leads (EQLs), net new leads that already have relationships with partners in your ecosystem. Marketers can leverage intent, relationship, and behavioral signals from their partner ecosystem to create highly contextualized account lists, specifically relatable messaging, and very targeted and warm CTAs, thereby supercharging their Account-Based Marketing efforts. For example, they can use partner ecosystem-enriched data to target accounts that are customers of their partners using case studies to highlight the joint value proposition. 

Sales teams can benefit through co-selling opportunities with partners’ sales teams to create a more meaningful experience for the prospects and improve engagement and win rates for their opportunities, generating new business. 

Customer success teams can leverage partner ecosystem-enriched data to bring more value to customers via partner-integrated products or solutions that are the right fit for each customer. This increases engagement and stickiness, leading to better customer satisfaction and higher retention rates.

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Originally Published on Martech Zone: Crossbeam: Leveraging your Partner Ecosystem to Drive Efficient B2B Growth