How collaborating with your ecosystem makes your revenue grow.
Today is a very exciting day. Not only for me, not only for my team (who has worked tirelessly to bring our shared vision to reality) but, I believe, for any person who has the word “revenue” as a metric in their KPIs.
Today, I am happy to present to you two massive changes. The first, as you can see, is the retirement of Sharework and the beginning of a new name with a new look—Reveal. The second, as I mentioned, is going to change the way B2B companies generate revenue.
From our Sharework experiences and community, we evolved to such a degree that we had to create a new software category to fully encompass all of the changes. That category is Collaborative Growth.
You may be wondering how we ended up with a new name and in a new category. And this is a story I am happy to tell.
Revenue is increased by 2X from the Ecosystem Influence.
Our story starts with a word our team mentions a hundred times a day: ecosystems.
Every B2B company has an ecosystem, whether it’s aware of it or not. Ecosystems are composed of all the companies that share synergies with you: they are in the same industry, target the same persona, or sell a complementary product. Picture them like all the stars that revolve around your planet. They are countless. Each of them has a specific light to shed. Yet, you don’t necessarily use that light.
Through my experiences as an entrepreneur, I was able to witness how ecosystems can transform the course of a company. I saw that the winners in the B2B game are leaders who understand the incredible value of their ecosystem, and leverage it. Just look at 14 out of the 15 largest SaaS companies and leading cloud providers. They have hundreds and up to thousands of technology and channel partners in their ecosystems that fuel their revenue strategies.
Yet, I also knew ecosystem professionals were lacking the tools to boost their productivity. This experience and this knowledge led me to co-found Sharework.
In January 2020, we launched an Ecosystem Management tool to help partnership professionals manage their ecosystem of partners more efficiently through automated account mapping.
Our tool grew quickly and organically from 0 to hundreds and then thousands of users. This rapid growth provided evidence that we were solving a real pain for partnership professionals.
What happened next was unexpected. Our community members started asking to understand the ecosystem ROI better. And as a very data-oriented team, we were happy to measure the influence of a company’s ecosystem on revenue. So, we assigned the task to our greatest mathematician and data scientist, Antoine (A secret weapon we never shared publicly before.) and what we uncovered was astounding: On average, targeting your ecosystem’s customers will increase your win rate by 43% and your deal size by 41%.
Collaborative Growth is about enabling revenue through your ecosystem of partners.
What does this mean? Revenue is increased by 2X, just from the prioritization of ecosystem leads. This effect was so profound we knew we had to name it. We call it the Ecosystem Influence.
There are two types of Ecosystem Influence. Indirect Ecosystem Influence (IEI) is leveraged by targeting the customers of companies from your ecosystem. Some of our community members multiplied their win rate 3X just by leveraging their Indirect Ecosystem Influence.
Direct Ecosystem Influence (DEI) is even more powerful. DEI is when you and your partner ecosystem are actively helping each other win deals. This can manifest in many ways such as introductions or collaborating to convert leads.
Whether direct or indirect, the Ecosystem Influence is incredibly powerful, and its results exceeded our expectations. Discovering this incredible potential reshaped our product strategy. We realized that our platform wasn’t just about managing the ecosystem or improving efficiency as we’d initially intended. It was much more than that. We realized it was about enabling revenue growth based on your ecosystem.
So, we began to include features that reveal the full power of the Ecosystem Influence. And as our product strategy broadened, so did our community base. We started seeing new types of professionals join the platform to leverage their ecosystem. At first sales, then marketers, and they joined for the same purposes: to generate qualified leads, prioritize those leads, and convert them into deals thanks to a powerful and easy resource: their ecosystem.
As we were going through this transition, one of our customers, the Head of Growth in a fast-growing tech company, spontaneously called our latest feature “Reveal” in an email, and just like that, we found the name that adequately reflected our new direction: to reveal the impact of your ecosystem on your revenue. In a sense, our new name is a testament to how collaborating with our own ecosystem makes us grow (thank you Stan Pollet!).
Reveal the impact of your ecosystem on your revenue.
So today, I am beyond excited to introduce to you Reveal, the first Collaborative Growth platform.
Collaborative Growth encompasses Ecosystem Management, but it also goes beyond. It’s not just about partnerships’ efficiency; it’s about enabling revenue through your ecosystem of partners.
Our intention for Collaborative Growth is to remove walls, both between companies and within them.
We live in a time where collaboration is everywhere. You can use platforms to share information about your daily life, share tools with your neighbors, share a ride with strangers. But up until now, there was simply no equivalent in B2B.
So, we created a platform to enable secure and revenue-focused collaboration between companies, and remove all barriers that prevented them from fully joining forces.
Collaborative Growth also removes walls within companies, opening the door for more collaboration internally between Partnership, Marketing, and Sales teams around ecosystem-based strategies.
To make Collaborative Growth actionable, we use its four pillars as the North Star of Reveal’s product vision, enabling you to:
MATCH with the partners that have the most significant ability to impact your revenue.
UNCOVER all revenue opportunities with them instantly and in real-time.
ENABLE sales by embedding your ecosystem in your sales & marketing strategy.
TRACK the ROI generated by your ecosystem through revenue-oriented metrics.
Through these pillars Reveal will be the driving force through which the ecosystem serves all revenue builders. Welcome to the future of B2B. Welcome to Collaborative Growth.
