Leveraging partnerships to drive growth & retention

Whether you're a vertical SaaS, Vertical AI, FinTech, EmbeddedTech, etc. company, partnerships are crucial for the long term success.

The right partnerships can have significant impact on new logo acquisition (channel partners), retention (integration partners) and launching new products (add-on product partners). If you're a seed, Series A, Series B, etc. company, partnerships should be a significant part of your early strategy. It does take time to build a https://marketplace.procore.com/ or https://apps.shopify.com/ depending on your business.

What partnerships can help drive logo acquisition?

• Many times partners that can help drive logo acquisition can send referrals to you, provide you with prospect lists, re-sell your product, etc. These are sometimes called 'channel partners'.
• A "channel partner" in software refers to a company or individual that sells or promotes a software vendor's products to customers on their behalf, essentially acting as an extension of the software company's sales team to reach a wider market, often including resellers, distributors, system integrators, and consultants who add value by providing additional services or customization to the software product.
• A channel partner could be a value-added reseller (VAR), distributor, system integrator, managed service provider (MSP), etc.

What partnerships can help drive retention?

• You may not initially think that partnerships can help with customer retention, reducing churn and increasing gross revenue retention over time but there are plenty of example of various partners that can drive efficiency in your organization.
• Integration or technology partners (i.e., partners that integrate with your platform) may not always be revenue generating but the more integrations your customers have with your platform the sticker your product will be over time.
• In today's world, your R&D team doesn't have to build everything and it's best to partner with the best tech companies out there to augment your product (e.g., could be as basic as https://zapier.com/ to automate workflows to start).

What partnerships can help create add-on products?

• This is really a core part of your multi-product strategy. You want your R&D team to focus on building out the core and ideally can spin up new add-on products via build, buy or partner.
• What is great about 'add-on product partnerships' is that you can negotiate great buy rates, utilize leading technology, build the front end of the product and quickly launch and iterate.
• There are so many examples of partners that you can leverage APIs or white label in today's world. The obvious ones are Stripe for Embedded Payments, Twilio/SendGrid to great a communications hub, etc. It's important to prioritize, conduct sufficient diligence and negotiate well to sign the best partners to create your add-on products.

In summary, partnerships can be a major factor for your company (e.g., drive 50% of your ARR at $500m ARR) and it's important to set the foundation early on!