How to Find New SaaS Partnerships (and not waste time) Part I

Imagine your inbox is flooded with dozens of brands who want to partner with you. Some are requesting to do a tech integration, others want to swap guest blog posts, and even more would like to cross-collaborate in some kind of way.

This has happened to me and it’s terrifying.

As a backstory, I first began working in partner marketing for a well-known retail electricity company back in Houston in 2012. I was new to the role and was essentially told to just figure it out.

Two years later, I had increased the number of successful partnerships from three to 21, grew residential enrollments from 4,000 a year to 25,000, and turned this channel into one of the highest performing sales channels for the company. I loved it!

Flash forward ten years later and I’ve now excelled in Partnership Marketing roles for Saas companies Bonjoro and OptiMonk. In 2021 I joined Bonjoro and my responsibility was to develop a partnership channel. My first step was to leverage our current pool of customers and affiliates – how could we turn more customers into affiliates? Then I turned my attention to our product (tech) partners and figure out which partners would it makes sense to do an integration with. Finally, I found influencers and brands who had the same type of audience as ours that we could sync up and perform co-marketing activities with.

One year later, we had achieved:

• 20+ co-webinars with influencers/complimentary brands that drove new users and awareness

• 5 new integrations and improvements on existing integrations that increased signups and revenue

• Increased our affiliate conversion rate from 4.5% to 9%

Looking back, I learned we could have had even more success if we didn’t waste time working with the partners that drove little value.

5 tips on how to find new Partnerships (tips 1 & 2 below, tips 3-5 next week)

1. Use Crossbeam to identify which companies are selling to personas that are similar to the ones you sell to. Crossbeam is like LinkedIn for partnerships. In just a few clicks, you can find and connect with companies that have overlapping customers, leads, and opportunities.

 

Crossbeam was a huge time saver for me. Anytime a company reached out and wanted to partner with us, I invited them to join Crossbeam, connect their data, and map our accounts. If we found out that we had a small or little overlap in customer accounts, then there was no reason to go any further. Best part, you can use Crossbeam’s free version to do this!

2. Research other presenters who are speaking at events where you’re speaking. For example, AWeber hosted a week-long event that consisted of a week-long marketing series for business owners, side hustlers, and entrepreneurs. I was curious to find out what SocialBee did and reached out to Roxana Motoc who was also presenting at the event.

 

During our 15-minute zoom chat, we decided to see if we targeted the same customer personas and used Crossbeam to analyze our customer account overlaps. It turned out that we had a good overlap. So, we decided to do a co-webinar together which turned out great as more than 400 people registered (from both lists). The new Bonjoro customers generated from this event was one of the best cohorts we saw in Q1 of 2022!

You too Larry

Overheard on LinkedIn

 

📧 Mika Lepisto got a 47.9% engagement rate from a cold email campaign. Here's how they did it.

👨 Alex Smith got 20,000 LinkedIn followers in one week. See how he did it.

🥬 Cool story from Simon Robert how of how Athletic Greens Went from $0 to $200M.

🙋 Noticed the gradual shift from software to audience? Good pov from Wilfred Alfred. 

🤷 How much money should I spend on marketing? Interesting post from Sarit Lamerovich. 

 

The End

Eric M.

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