Welcome to the
Nearbound Daily Newsletter—the #1 partnerships newsletter in the world keeping thousands of partner professionals on top of the latest industry principles, tactics, and trends. nearbound.com is a project of Reveal. Join the movement here.

PRINCIPLES

Try on some other shoes 👟

We don’t put ourselves in our customers’ shoes because it’s easier not to.

Mart Olszewska, Head of Content at Fractional, puts it like this:

We don’t open or care about most of the emails coming from brands (especially if we don’t remember who those are from).
BUT we wonder why our email nurturing sequences don’t work.

We close the annoying popups on websites.
BUT we keep experimenting with popups that we know disrupt the user experience.

We rarely download and read E-books anymore.
BUT we keep producing and distributing them as our core lead gen strategy.

But there are costs associated with not being customer-first.

• Less relevancy

• No trust established

• Lower conversions

TACTICS

How partners can fuel the entire buyers’ journey

Your customer journey is
composed of three stages: (1) Volume, (2) Transaction, and (3) Impact.

• Volume phase: involves making improvements to the customer acquisition process.
  

• Transaction phase: where those efforts are paid back and your prospect becomes your customer.
  

• Impact phase: involves making improvements to your onboarding, renewal, cross-sell, and upsell process.

Here’s how to impact the customer journey across different phases.

Volume Phase: Identify and activate your evangelist

Look at your network and find who is closest to your market— identify who your audience already trusts.

It’s about marketing with, and not marketing to. Each one of the evangelists can help you influence your deals, so choose wisely.

One of the best ways to activate your evangelists is through content creation. Select a pillar piece of content then slide it into micro content for social, your blog, a guide, etc.

Learn more about activating your evangelists here.

Transaction phase: Leverage your nearbound card

Leverage the intel and influence your partner can share—to accelerate the deal process.

Ask your partner for intel on your buyer’s procurement process and the steps involved so you can better forecast your deal.

Ask your partner for a “good word” to give your buyer a push in case they are indecisive before signing the contract.

Get the email templates to action the intel and influence plays here.

Impact Phase: Chase down integration usage

Retention begins before closed won.

Ideally, you’re looking at which integrations are needed before sending an account to your Success team (based on account mapping data from your integration partners), the onboarding plan includes their tech stack, and you’re pulling integration data into your CRM.

It’s key to have integration data on hand to see which they are actively using, and what’s being ignored.

Keep in mind that there’s a correlation between inactive integrations and churn.

Learn more about improving the impact phase here.

Key learning: Nurture partner relationships to delight and retain happy customers.

MEME OF THE DAY

What you see vs what your partners see

How most companies go about partnerships:

"Here’s how we do this, here’s what we expect of you."

A better way to go about partnerships:

"Here are our goals. Here’s how we’re hoping to achieve them. Here’s where we can help you achieve your goals. What do you think?"

UPCOMING EVENTS

Stuff you don’t want to miss!

• April 24th—What Makes a Partnership “Strategic”—Join
  Valerio Martelli
  (Sales and Partnerships Director at Wisepops) and
  Scott Pollack
  (CEO at Firneo) where they will dive into the intricacies of forging impactful partnerships in the tech sector, guided by insights from industry experts.
  Register here.

• April 24th—Partnerships Secrets: Cory Snyder Teaches Partner Recruitment—Teamwork.com’s Head of Partnerships,
  Cory Snyder, spills the tea on how he’s growing his partner program in 2024. Powered by PartnerStack.
  Register here.

• April 25th—RevOps Leadership Summit—Join Sangram Vajre (Co-founder and CEO of GTM Partners), Lindsay Cordell (Senior Analyst at GTM Partners), George Alifragis (SVP of Operating Expert Network at Metropolitan Partners Group), and Ashton Williams (Director of Strategic Programs at Slack) to learn how RevOps can propel your GTM strategy for success. Register here.

• May 7th—MartechDay 2024—Join
  Scott Brinker
  (VP Platform Ecosystems at HubSpot) and
  Frans Riemersma
  (Founder, MartechTribe) to release the latest Marketing Technology Landscape graphic. It’s a celebration of the thousands of talented people working in martech, at brands, vendors, and across the community. Scott and Frans will also be interviewing key leaders for their deep domain-specific knowledge.
  Register here.

• Nearbound Summit 2023 Recordings—The future of GTM is Nearbound. Watch the recordings to hear how B2B leaders across departments unite with Nearbound strategies and tactics.
  Listen here.

You’re all caught up.

See you tomorrow

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nearbound.com is a project of Reveal.co