Justin Borja was somewhat of a trailblazer at Rydoo, being one of the earliest partnerships team hires—as a global partnership manager—at a primarily direct sales-based company.
Rydoo is an expense management solution; they help companies digitize their processes to become fully compliant and truly paperless. The partnerships team at Rydoo is tasked with identifying the solutions that their customers are using and persuading those companies to integrate into their platform, in turn making Rydoo more convenient for their end user.
When Justin joined the organization two years ago, he was tasked with building Rydoo’s partner ecosystem from the ground up. Currently he focuses on driving their partner program strategy and to guide his efforts, the question on his mind when it comes to partnerships is always “Where can I bridge gaps within the company?”.
Laser Focus on Quality of Partnerships
“In terms of partner strategy, I’m constantly thinking about who we can integrate with? What complimentary solutions can we partner with to make using Rydoo easier for our customers?”
The problem that Justin was dealing with while trying to answer these questions was the lack of data. He had no way of identifying if the partner he was going after had a scalable solution and an addressable market among his customers.
“It was really difficult to identify if it would be relevant for us to partner with a particular company.”
This led to a lot of missed opportunities for Rydoo. “The partnership would get signed and then…nothing. You'll only hear crickets. Neither of us would have any idea where to begin!”
Until they started using Reveal.
With Reveal’s account mapping, Justin and his team can now easily identify the number of common customers and common opportunities they share with their potential partners. It has helped Rydoo’s partnership team easily qualify all of their partners and develop a laser focus on their most valuable partnerships. In other words, Reveal has helped Rydoo vastly improve the quality of its partnerships.
“Negotiating partnership contracts is not an easy task. You spend three months negotiating with them and if the partnership doesn’t bear fruit at the end, it’s a complete waste of time.”
“This is why Reveal is easily one of my most favorite platforms, because it has been a major game changer in helping us solve that problem. I mean, if I go on to Reveal and see that we have a hundred common customers, I’m already sold on that partnership.”
Improving Retention Rates
One of the unforeseen advantages Justin is experiencing with Reveal is improved retention rates with his customers. According to Justin, “If we build an integration with a company that we share a massive overlap with, the customers are much less likely to walk away from us—just because we are already integrated with multiple solutions that they are using.”
Reveal has helped give Rydoo greater visibility into their customer’s tech stack, in turn giving them insight into what product integrations they need to invest in. “Knowing where to invest helps our retention rates go higher, ultimately enabling the sales teams to be more efficient and proactive.”
Energizing Sales Teams
Instead of waiting for leads to come to them, Reveal has pushed sales teams at Rydoo to be much more bold.
“We moved away from a passive mentality of ‘Oh there’s no new leads today? Sorry, better luck tomorrow’ . There has been a massive change mindset-wise and we’ve adopted this culture of going after partners. Now we say ‘Oh there’s no new leads today? Let’s look at Reveal’.”
Using Reveal data, Rydoo identifies which prospects on their side are customers on their partner’s side that they ultimately want to be introduced to. Leveraging this information has made sales teams at Rydoo more proactive resulting in a significant growth in their qualified pipeline.
Tripling the Qualified Pipeline
Prior to Reveal, the partnerships team at Rydoo were struggling to hit their monthly qualified pipeline targets. Using Reveal, they have succeeded at tripling their qualified pipeline coming from strategic partners with the detailed overviews that they now possess regarding customers that they should be targeting.
In Justin’s view Reveal has motivated them to rethink their partner strategy, mentioning that it has pushed them to start thinking about how they can make their processes more efficient and how they can feed the highest quality information to their sales teams. Bringing Reveal data into their CRM has been a step towards this.
“Salespeople need clear action points regarding where to go. If you give them data on an excel sheet, they’re not likely to touch it, even with a 10 foot pole. They need to see the data integrated into their day-to-day systems and Reveal does exactly that for us.”
Expanding the Partnership Ecosystem
Besides the substantial growth in their qualified pipeline, Justin mentions how Reveal has also simplified the process of discovering and getting introduced to new partners. Using the Reveal Directory which shows other companies on the platform, Justin has been able to realize immediate benefits.
“There have been multiple instances where I’ve sent a random company an account mapping invite on Reveal only for us to find out that we have a lot of customers in common!”
The expansive network of partners on Reveal has helped Rydoo connect and partner with companies that they had no idea existed but shared a massive overlap with.
