Name: Blaine Trainor

Title: Global Vice President, Partnerships and Alliances

Company: commercetools

Industry: E-commerce

“If you want to get the money out of the house, you can take a battering ram and knock in the front door, or you can ask somebody on the inside to unlock it for you.”

Meet Blaine Trainor, an ELG OG.

Blaine has spent 25 years in e-commerce, and nearly half of those in enterprise sales at IBM and SAP. You’d have a hard time finding anyone more familiar with complex deals and grueling sales cycles.

So when he was asked to take over partnerships for SAP’s customer experience solutions, he was determined to evolve the function into a revenue-generating machine. He linked partnerships closely with sales, setting targets for both pipeline and bookings.

“I went from inheriting a business that was primarily partner influenced and/or resold,” he says, “to a business that was significantly partner sourced when we were done.”

When he was presented with the opportunity to reinvent partnerships at leading composable commerce platform
commercetools, he set out to replicate and expand upon that prior success — which required a massive change in organization and strategy. Using composable tech means implementing a solution made of integrated microservices that can be swapped out or rapidly iterated on for maximum flexibility. Ecosystem is everything for platforms like commercetools, but it matters how you build it.

Ecosystem-Led Growth isn’t just a lever at commercetools, it’s a core strategy to drive pipeline and revenue.

"Partner recruitment was pivotal to driving commercetools’ growth and reach into new markets,” he says. “Over time, the ecosystem swelled to 350 SI (System Integrator) partners, which the organization could not scalably sustain with the existing partner management strategy.”

Blaine’s partnerships team sits in the sales organization reporting into the CRO, and is responsible for 40% of the company’s pipeline. Ecosystem-Led Growth isn’t just a lever at commercetools, it’s a core strategy to drive pipeline and revenue.

Here are the essential principles of Blaine’s ELG playbook, which you can adapt to unlock value for your ecosystem, customers, and business.

Blaine’s ELG essentials

1. Go deep, not wide, and incentivize valuable partners

When Blaine joined commercetools, the company had an open door to any partner who could bring in leads. Each partner manager had as many as 40 partnerships to manage, and spent most of their time reacting to inbound leads instead of building valuable relationships.

“My observation was that the volume of pipeline was wonderful. The quality of pipeline, however, was low,” he says. “So I took a step back and presented to leadership that we were going to take a short term hit to partner pipeline volume and yet increase the pipeline quality and booking performance for the partnerships team.”

To meet these targets, Blaine reevaluated all 350 partners, analyzed their pipeline volume and quality, and identified a subset that would be most productive in terms of aligned demand-generation activity. This subset would continue to receive high-touch partner management coverage. This reduced the partnership load from about 40 to about 6-8 partners per partner manager, without adding additional headcount. He then had the partner portal rebuilt so that the entire partner ecosystem could remain engaged regardless of the level of coverage from a partner manager.

As an incentive, Blaine awarded engagement points for doing things such as sourcing a lead, influencing a deal, running a marketing program, building an accelerator, completing an implementation project, or certifying a resource. Based on those points, partners were certified as registered, silver, gold, or platinum with associated benefits.

To improve lead quality, Blaine and his team introduced a revised planning process that focused on leveraging a partner’s particular strength in a given set of industries, geographies, and customer segments. Blaine and team also introduced reporting to help ensure that partner-sourced leads were reciprocated by commercetools. “Partners are far more engaged when they know they are participating in a balanced, two-way partnership that focuses on each party’s success,” he says.

Ecosystem-Led Growth is most effective when there’s reciprocity between partners, and that can come in many forms. In this case, and possibly in yours, each partner has unique strengths that ultimately provide more value to both companies’ customers.

2. Focus on partners who will know when you’re the right solution — and when you aren’t

There are a lot of factors that go into a strong partnership. Many partners in the commercetools ecosystem are exclusively focused on commercetools as their provider of choice for commerce.

“At first glance, this seems like a winning strategy for commercetools, but this approach can actually lead to challenges with lead quality. I often explain that what’s actually good for our collective business are partners who have an informed point of view and experience on multiple commerce platforms, so that they can refine their own sales pitch to solve commerce-related business problems rather than how they will deploy one particular piece of technology,” says Blaine. “They’re armed with knowledge of the space and how we compare with competitors, so the prospect can make a conscious decision. When we receive leads from partners with a diverse platform experience in our space, they’re generally higher quality, because they’ve done the due diligence to determine we’re the right solution. The partner themselves is often going through a couple of stages of pre-qualification before we even hear about it.”

3. Know your customer’s ecosystem as well as you know your own

If you’re a company with a mature ecosystem, there’s huge value in knowing what tech your customers and prospects are already using. With this knowledge, you can plan a sales strategy that involves the right partners to make the strongest case for your combined solution.

“Before using Crossbeam, we had very little ability to share pipeline information consistently, and limited knowledge of the incumbency of our partners in our target accounts,” says Blaine. “We were doing things like bringing a partner with us into a deal without realizing that one of our other partners was already in discussions or already in that customer’s stack. We managed the information we did have with spreadsheets that were instantly out of date.”

Leveraging incumbency data is a central piece of Blaine’s 2024 strategy, and commercetools’ sales team now uses the Crossbeam Widget for Salesforce to access that information and relevant contacts right away.

“The line I gave to the sales organization at kickoff recently was if you want to get the money out of the house, you can take a battering ram and knock in the front door, or you can ask somebody on the inside to unlock it for you,” says Blaine. “I told them that Crossbeam shows you who’s in the house, and what they’re doing in there.”

In keeping with this focus on ecosystem, commercetools is a founding member of the
MACH Alliance (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, Headless), a coalition of more than 100 companies that build or enable composable tech, advocating for each other and supporting interoperability.

“The more composable elements that are part of the customer solution, the more longevity for all the composable offerings,” says Blaine. MACH is a technology standard by which almost all of my ISV (Independent Software Tech Vendors) partners subscribe to so when one of us gets into a deal, we’re creating an environment to bring the others in and around us.”