When you're a small but mighty team in a fast growing scale-up, collaborating with your ecosystem becomes imperative. But so is having the right tools in your arsenal to collaborate well. This was certainly true in the case of NinjaCat when they introduced Reveal early on in their partner program journey.
For Adam Gould, Partnership Development Representative at NinjaCat, his team previously did things 'the old fashioned way' - manually on Google Sheets.
But the NinjaCat Partnerships team knew that in order to scale and support the rocket ship they were building, they needed a better solution.
Collaborating to build a best-in-class platform
NinjaCat, besides having a cool company name, is a Martech provider with an edge. They deliver digital marketing performance reporting for agencies, media companies and brands with a platform that ingests data from all their various sources, processes it, and unifies that data to better visualise results.
Given the nature of NinjaCat's product, they work with a number of technology integration partners to pull in data from software services that their mutual customers use and need to report on. These are not just common tools like Google Analytics but also industry-specific data sources and any other sources that have been requested by their customers. They also rely on their partners for referrals and co-marketing activities.
"In the Martech space, it really is the ecosystem play - not one vendor can do it alone. We need to ensure we have the latest and greatest partner relationships because that's really what our business is built on." - Jessica Graeser, VP Marketing
Removing bottlenecks in partner processes
Reveal was brought into the business from an invite by one of their partners. What was apparent from the start was the synergies between NinjaCat and Reveal. Both provide platforms that harness data to drive impact and ROI. This shared focus drew NinjaCat to Reveal as the solution for their partnership team inefficiencies.
What appeals to Adam most about using Reveal is the automatic sync with their CRM and the ease of being able to invite new partners. For him the productivity gains are crystal clear: they can finally cut down on all the painful admin time spent exporting data from their CRM and matching records. The team can now repurpose that time to strengthen their partner relationships and act on opportunities.
Adam's team can see account and contact overlaps in a single glance and share relevant CRM fields to provide more context. They can identify which of a partner's existing customers are also one of their target prospects, which means they can then approach partners to ask for warm introductions to key contacts.
Through using Reveal Adam also gets insight into the full spread of tools that their customers are using, which gives them good direction on new potential integration partnerships to add more value for their users.
Proving value to sales and marketing
Today the marketing and sales teams collectively see how strategic partnerships are an important lever in the business for driving growth.
Partner referrals make up a significant part of NinjaCat's business. As partners send over their referrals, Adam's team works with their Account Executives to craft the best strategy to approach the accounts. Now the process of sending referrals is smoother than ever for partners that work across Reveal. Adam is able to pass their sales teams richer account insights and can loop in the relevant partner to help on a deal.
NinjaCat also does a lot of co-marketing with their partners to raise brand awareness including case studies and joint webinars. Since introducing Reveal, Adam's team is able to help the marketing department prioritise which co-marketing opportunities are the most lucrative to go after, using the real-time data from the platform. This has been invaluable to Jessica:
"As a small marketing team, the more we can have insights into where to focus our efforts to make the most impact, that's really key for us."
What's next for NinjaCat?
As NinjaCat continues to scale, expanding their ecosystem will remain important to their strategy. The company hit a milestone last fall when they closed their Series A round of funding. With this capital raise NinjaCat will accelerate their product development and in turn, source more technology partnerships.
So one thing they are looking to experiment with is Reveal's Suggested Partners feature in order to be matched with new potential partners. Where in the past the norm for identifying new partners had been through attending in-person events, the pandemic has inclined many companies to seek out new methods that could even turn out to be more efficient in the long run.
