At SaaSiest 2023, Alexis Petrichos, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Ecosystem Marketing at Chili Piper, shared how Chili Piper is leveraging the company’s ecosystem to innovate the product, generate more booked meetings, shorten the sales cycle, and improve customer satisfaction, leading to faster and more efficient growth.
Takeaways
- The ecosystem surrounding your organization is a strategy, not just a sales channel.
- Ecosystem relationships can improve performance for every department when approached strategically.
- Integrations fall within the heart of product innovation and differentiation.
- Partnership data can optimize everything from SDR outreach to customer onboarding and beyond.
- Consider product fit, integration complexity, and marketing potential when assessing partners.
- Approach partnerships strategically, not just for short-term revenue.
Redefining the corporate ecosystem
Let’s start by redefining the term “ecosystem” for the corporate world. In business, an ecosystem encompasses all the entities surrounding a company that impact its success, such as product partners, channel partners, customers, communities, and influencers. Viewing these connections as an ecosystem rather than just a sales channel opens up new opportunities for innovation, improved performance across departments, and mutually beneficial relationships.
Driving product innovation through integration
As B2B SaaS founders and executives, we have a duty to fulfill, and that’s innovation. We need to think about innovation that solves customer problems and makes our tools better all the time. Integrations fall in the heart of innovation and differentiation. Building integrations sometimes creates higher barriers to entry as they are complex and time-consuming to develop. If you’re quick enough to build those integrations, you’re making sure you have a differentiating factor that your competitors cannot imitate tomorrow. As an example, Chili Piper was looking for natural extensions of its product in places where buyers were spending time on software purchases. That lead the team to bring innovation to its meeting scheduling software by integrating with the B2B review platform, G2. Now mutual customers can book meetings directly from Chili Piper forms on their G2 vendor pages, creating a seamless experience.
Leveraging partnership data
Once integrations are built, the next step is tapping into the data, which is important for every part of the ecosystem. Tools like Crossbeam and Reveal enable connecting with partners to analyze customer overlaps, shared opportunities, and prospects. Chili Piper uses this data to create targeted outreach campaigns. For example, the highest performing sales development rep cadences are personalized messages to prospects who use partners like Clearbit and G2. By building integrations and connecting the data points, Chili Piper can also start leveraging that information to improve performance across SDRs.
Shortening the sales cycles
In sales, Chili Piper leverages their ecosystem to shorten cycles with partner vouchers. Although they never discount, they provide partners like G2 with voucher codes as a perk for shared customers. This extra discount comes from the partner, maintaining Chili Piper’s policy. When used, it results in 50% faster closure and 90% win rates. The partner gets increased loyalty, the customer gets a deal, and Chili Piper gets increased revenue and happy sales reps who are able to close price-sensitive prospects.
Boosting marketing performance
Beyond product and sales, an ecosystem lens also impacts marketing. Co-sponsored events, co-branded content, and coordinated campaigns with partners help expand reach and improve results.
Your ecosystem is like a magic spice
Your ecosystem is like a “magic spice” that improves all areas of the business as opposed to just a narrow sales channel. In addition to product innovation and sales and marketing effectiveness, client success has also benefited from visibility into client tech stacks, helping them during onboarding to set up integrations while the product team is actively prioritizing integrations to improve adoption and make products stickier.
Recommendations for approaching a partnership role
Alexis also shared lessons from his journey leading partnerships at Chili Piper to help others succeed:
- Be curious and lean into what excites you about the product – integrations, analytics, and so forth.
- Adopt an entrepreneurial mindset when assessing partners. Consider product fit, integration complexity, and marketing potential.
- Leverage data to identify partnership opportunities tailored to each business function.
- Approach partnerships strategically, not just for short-term revenue.
By leveraging the broader tech ecosystem and viewing it as a strategic opportunity to drive product innovation and improve performance across teams, companies like Chili Piper can accelerate their growth and business performance.
To see Alexis’ full presentation, check it out on SaaSiest TV.
