Over the past few months, we’ve written a couple of articles on the value of Ecosystem Clusters (see the series
here). These focus on how ecosystem orchestration, leveraging Nearbound co-selling, and assisting across more than one tech partner program, can drive new ARR.

The core premise is that customers want an integrated tech stack and that if vendors go to market with a cluster, they not only give customers what they want but make their own GTM more compelling and efficient. This is in sharp contrast to the impact and efficiency challenges many are seeing with traditional inbound and outbound sales motions.

In today’s article, we extend the cluster approach to include the channel and agency partners participating in services partner programs, marketing, selling, and supporting an integrated stack.

Even though the preference for integrated suites began to soar (from 29% to 59% from 2019 to 2020), few vendors have responded with an integrated GTM.
Most vendor partner programs today have a silo’d program model that doesn’t unify or harmonize tech partners with services partners. And the two programs fail to facilitate an integrated GTM experience for either partners or end customers:

An integrated GTM, leveraging Ecosystem Orchestration best practices, enables services partners to market, sell and implement more than one tech partner solution much more efficiently. Many services partners already do this as a matter of course, but it’s complicated for them, and if vendors supported them with orchestration it would make their work much easier.

Vendors who chose to integrate their GTMs and orchestrate their tech and services partner ecosystems are sitting on a gold mine. There are many synergies in an integrated tech partner GTM including the ability to create predictable revenue in the form of ‘Partner Assists’ that vastly outperform poorly converting outbound efforts. Extending that to include services partners makes the growth in Nearbound returns exponential. Consider that in many cases, vendors already share some services partner overlap. With an orchestrated services and tech Cluster, the impacts and efficiencies can be extended across marketing (better together stories), sales (better, higher converting leads), delivery (easy button for launching integrations), and retention/upselling (reduced chance of churn due to aligned services partner support and value creation).

For companies trying to create an orchestrated approach, marketplaces are only part of the answer. Even though there are 500+ apps on the
HubSpot Marketplace, 850 on
ActiveCampaign Apps Marketplace, and more than 4000 on
Salesforce AppExchange, these offerings are NOT orchestrated offerings, they are simply listings that still result in silo’d GTMs. And traditional PRM and TCMA solutions (which usually support a single tech partner speaking to their downstream channel) don’t help address orchestrated cluster requirements.

Fortunately, new solutions from companies like
Partnerhub® and
Channext have been purpose-built (as platforms) to allow more than one tech partner to work with an extended community of opted-in service partners. These build on the core account mapping and opportunity identification capabilities of companies like
Reveal and
Crossbeam. If you’re interested in building a more effective integrated vendor program that serves the ecosystem and its customers, reach out to us at
Digital Bridge Partners and we can help.