The Benefits of Partnership Collaboration in HR Tech
April 18, 2024
If you’re managing a GTM strategy for human resources technology, you’ll be aware of the challenges involved in selling HR tech products. It can be a struggle to expand your customer base or gather enough insights into consumer behaviors and trends.
Forming partnerships with other businesses can help you overcome these challenges, whether you collaborate on sales and marketing or product development. You can take full advantage of your partners’ expert knowledge and pool your resources to great effect.
Through partnerships, you can access new markets and increase revenue, while digital technology makes it possible to share essential information. It’s not surprising that 65% of organizations view partnerships as essential to their future growth.
But what exactly is partnership collaboration in HR tech, and how can Reveal help you maximize your business connections? Let’s find out.
What is HR tech?
“HR technology” is a wide term covering a variety of human resources software. It describes any tool that streamlines and automates HR functions, bringing extra efficiency to the teams who use it. For example, it reduces manual data entry and human errors and helps businesses to stay compliant.
HR tech solutions are typically housed on cloud platforms and sold as SaaS with a monthly subscription. They can include:
A collaborative partnership is a mutually beneficial relationship between two or more organizations, businesses, or individuals. The idea is to work together on developing and promoting new products, enhancing customer experiences, and raising the profile of each other’s brands.
Through collaboration, both entities can improve their capabilities and revenue. For example, an HR technology vendor might team up with another tech company. By leveraging solutions, such as Reveal, this collaboration would mean that they’d be able to connect their CRM data and map out their accounts, adding huge amounts of potential new leads that have already been verified.
Strategic partnerships usually involve businesses whose products or services complement each other rather than competitors. Another option is an integration partnership (where you integrate your offering into a non-competitor product) or a channel partnership where you work with affiliates or wholesalers to promote your wares.
Key struggles facing the HR Tech industry
Most industries are facing the challenges of economic uncertainty, a tight labor market, and the rise of remote and hybrid working. But, there are some struggles that are specific to HR tech businesses.
Firstly, there’s a crowded market for SaaS products, including HR software. Potential clients have many options to choose from, with competitors making similar claims about product features and capabilities. This means it’s harder to make your solution stand out from the crowd.
The tech industry is also changing rapidly, with developments like the evolution of artificial intelligence keeping tech firms on their toes. HR tech providers need to stay on top of the latest news or risk losing their competitive edge.
Meanwhile, HR teams who still use traditional methods may be reluctant to switch to digital, fearing that the transition will disrupt their operations and employee productivity. HR tech sales teams have to go all out to demonstrate the benefits of their company’s tools.
For example, if you’re promoting automated time and expense management software, you’ll need a focused campaign showing potential buyers exactly how such a tool reduces manual labor and makes sure that employees are paid on time.
HR tech vendors also need to make sure that their software is compliant and secure, in an area where regulations are regularly updated. When you’re selling to HR professionals, they’ll want assurances that storing data in the cloud, for example, won’t put employee information at risk.
Further challenges come with B2B SaaS sales, such as long buying cycles and expensive products with varying features and subscription plans. It’s necessary to communicate with multiple decision-makers in the target company, and to personalize the sales pitch for the prospect’s business needs.
How partnerships help solve these issues
Partnerships are all about leveraging each other’s strengths to increase sales and revenue. For HR tech companies, collaborating with partners helps you to widen your customer base—which is crucial in a saturated software market.
When your partners have more expertise in sales, you can tap into their valuable insights into customer behaviors. This will help you pitch your product to the right people in the right way, aiming it squarely at the prospect’s needs and pain points.
Partners may also be able to share knowledge on issues like regulatory compliance, software security, and the latest HR tech and workplace trends. Plus, you can pool your resources for advertising and marketing, and benefit from a technology leader’s capabilities for product development.
If you partner with a business leader in the industry, you will boost customer trust in your product. This is important in B2B SaaS, when you’re asking a potential customer to make a significant and long-term investment.
Forming partnerships is one thing, but the real advantage is in how you leverage them. This is where the Nearbound strategy comes in, giving sellers instant access to collective intelligence, intros, and influence from their company’s network of partners and trusted relationships.
Benefits of partnerships in HR tech
The more partners you work with, the more access you’ll have to new audiences and data. A network of businesses can each expand their reach to extra customers, demographics, and locations, using each other’s ready-made contact lists and successful sales channels.
For example, Lucca is an HR SaaS company who were struggling to assess effective partner deals and widen their ecosystem. Since then, they’ve leveraged Reveal to boost valuable partnerships and integrations as well as improve collaboration, ultimately having a great impact on critical deals with their premium partners.
When it comes to your own business, instead, you might form a distribution partnership, where you have access to existing distribution channels put in place by another company. This is useful for reselling or bundling, and pairing two complementary products—such as combining your cloud-based HR system with their cash-flow management software.
In this case, you’d be able to sell the two solutions together as a package, giving customers convenience and the opportunity to save money. Since your partner will be selling your product through its already successful distribution channels, you won’t have to set up your own.
Another option is a referral partnership, which sees each business recommending its partners to its customers. Or you could partner with a nonprofit firm or sponsor an event, enabling you to access the organizer’s customer base.
As well as getting your name out there, this type of partnership associates you with doing good in the community, which can carry more weight than merely promoting a product.
The general idea is that all parties will be able to increase brand awareness among those they otherwise couldn’t reach or might not have thought to target. In fact, selling to a partner’s customer increases your win rate by up to 39%.
With your partners’ insights into the latest trends and best practices, you can optimize your own operations and improve company performance. By pooling your sales and marketing resources, you’ll find it easier to manage your budget, reduce risks, and meet business goals.
To help with this, you should use business spend management software or ERP software, to gather your business data, track your partnership collaboration’s progress, and evaluate the benefits it has had.
While your first instinct may be to partner with non-competing companies, partnerships can actually transform potential competitors into allies—it’s often better to work with them than against them! Collaborating with a brand that’s already successful will lead prospects to associate your company with high-quality products and services.
Collaborative partnerships lead to enhanced creativity and innovation, as each partner brings a different set of skills to the table. You can share ideas for marketing campaigns, or even develop and promote a completely new product together through a co-branding partnership, like Nike does with various brands.
If you use the Nearbound GTM strategy, you’ll gain information about the best time to sell to a partner’s clients. Thanks to shared intel, you might identify sales opportunities such as when a prospect is planning a technology transformation, or when they buy a product that integrates with yours.
How Reveal can help HR tech companies collaborate with partners
As we mentioned, seeking partners and building relationships is just the beginning. To truly get the most out of a partnership ecosystem, you need to have access to critical data from your partners—and use it to identify new opportunities and make informed decisions.
This is the concept behind Reveal. As a Nearbound revenue platform, it enables you to view your partner's CRM data, bringing it into your own CRM for ease of access. This connection means you’re leveraging data from companies that your buyers already trust.
You’ll be able to see overlapping customers, new leads, and warm leads. The account mapping feature lets you cross-reference contacts and prospects with your partners, to spot potential development opportunities for each other or suitable deals to collaborate on.
Reveal also tracks partner ROI to help you prioritize and optimize your partnerships, and identify new partners. The platform helped recruitment solution AssessFirst connect with new partners and increase client integration from 5% to 20%, with an increase in lead generation by 100%.
What about data privacy and security? Reveal is fully compliant with GDPR, and offers one-way sharing for extra safety. It has a 100% exception-free SOC II report and never shares PII data.
Final thoughts
HR tech vendors face a number of challenges in selling their products, from a saturated software market to rapid developments in technology. Teaming up with partners—whether it’s similar businesses or cross-industry allies—can help you address some of these issues.
Forming a collaborative partnership leads to a wider customer base, better brand awareness, tech innovation, and increased revenue. For the HR tech industry in particular, this is a wise business strategy—and Reveal can help you make it a success.
