This year has been marked by the economic downturn and freeze of funding for the vast majority of companies. The cash burn rate has become an even more important metric, and the longer the runway, the better. Hiring plans have slowed down, and marketing budgets have been adjusted downwards.
In the meantime, one thing that kept winning is the world of partnerships. When done right, it enables organizations to accelerate their revenue growth without hiring and spending too much. This is the way to sustainable and scalable growth.
What Happened in the Partnership Ecosystem?
The Partner Tech Ecosystem is pretty much at a seed stage compared to others such as the Martech, the Data space, or Cybersecurity. The number of newcomers is quite low and the Partner Ecosystem Category is still quite empty if we refer to the G2 grid.
Still, here are three interesting facts to keep in mind:
Regardless of the sector, companies that invest more in partnerships grow at a 6.7 times faster rate. This is the proof that, done right, your ecosystem could triple your qualified pipeline. This is what we call Nearbound. It’s the most powerful revenue channel, and you can read more about it here.
What Happened at Reveal?
A Greater Network
How long would you stay at a party if none of your friends were there? How much fun would you have? Well, the value of Reveal for partnerships is similar to a party with or without friends. It only gets higher with more and more partners onboard. And we’re proud that 8,000 companies are now part of this amazing network!
The Collaborative Growth Academy
Being a Partnership leader is more than (just) driving sales, but about learning and guiding your team. We truly believe that who shares wins, and that’s why we decided to create The Collaborative Growth Academy—a free online learning hub for Partnership professionals. Our academy not only helps Partnership Managers to get a seat at the revenue table but also helps the C-level and other GTM teams understand the true and measurable value of partnerships.
Throughout the year, we collaborated with 8 experts including Daniel O’Leary (Director of Partnerships at Box), Loryn Ferreira (Manager of Partnerships and Alliances at Punchh), and Stanislaw Wasowicz (Regional Director Alliances EMEA at SmartRecruiters) to create 5 masterclasses, 3 online courses and 3 templates.
Our product engineering teams were busy this year cooking up and serving your most requested features. Here are a few highlights:
An Upgraded Partner Directory
Our Directory is one of the most used sections of the platform. And this year we added more data insights to help our users find the very best partners to collaborate with. From being able to filter by company type or ecosystem, to giving you an overview of your mutual account overlaps and contact overlaps. We’ll keep removing the guesswork and reveal the data you need to find the right partners to kickstart 2023.
Not everyone is ready to connect their CRM to an account mapping platform, we get that. But that shouldn’t mean you are stuck manually uploading static CSV files every time you want to use account mapping! So it was a breath of fresh air when we released Google Sheets
The Reveal and PartnerStack integration brings together the best way to find high-value leads you share with partners, with the best way to track and reward partners for turning those leads into paying customers. Instead of inefficient manual steps to track leads from account mapping, partnerships managers can now send a lead from a Reveal account mapping directly to PartnerStack to track the registered lead and automatically reward partners when it closes
Top partnership managers don’t only rely on account overlaps with partners for revenue, but they also leverage data on the non-overlapping accounts. In other words, their partner’s customers not present in their CRM today are new qualified leads for their sales teams to go after. But it’s a little defeatist to have those high potential accounts sitting in Reveal and not flowing into your CRM, where your sales team are working. Our product team certainly thought so. So this year, users could now export new leads from Reveal into their Salesforce CRM as new account records to route to their SDRs or to fuel a new marketing campaign.
After a while post-lockdown, it was about time to meet people, and not just over Zoom. So we organized in-person events in New York, Seattle, London, and Paris. Overall, 300 Partnership professionals gathered with the same desire to connect. We got to personally meet our customers and prospects globally, and provide an opportunity for the industry to connect with one another.
We also attended major B2B events like Web Summit, Stack’D, and SaaStr Europa to spread the word on the value of partnerships in a company's GTM strategy. Plus, we partnered with Partnership Leaders to sponsor Catalyst 2022—the biggest B2B partnerships in-person event—and with PartnerHacker to sponsor PL[x] Summit 2022—the biggest B2B partnerships virtual event.
The Nearbound Concept
At Catalyst we introduce Nearbound as a concept—finally giving a name to the most game-changing revenue channel today. It consists of leveraging the full power of your ecosystem. The companies close to you. This revenue channel influences your entire revenue funnel from lead acquisition to customer retention, increasing your win rates by 41% and your deal size by 43%.
Data shows that Nearbound is the top GTM channel that turns valuable ecosystem data into exponential revenue.
Starting the year with 20 Revealers, Reveal has now welcomed 40 talents from across the globe 🌎 From Product, and Engineering, to Customer Success, and Sales, most teams have seen their size doubling or tripling. It has enabled us to keep satisfying our customers, delivering more value throughout our product, and more effectively onboard more companies in the network.
We’re hiring
Looking for your next career opportunity? We have a lot of open positions in different teams: Sales, Marketing, GTM, Engineering, Customer Success, Finance, and more.
Check out our careers page, and if you don’t happen to see your ideal role, don’t hesitate to connect with us!
This year was a hell of a rollercoaster ride, and we can’t wait to see what’s next. 2023 is going to be huge!
