Ecosystem-Led Marketing (ELM) isn’t new, but with the inception of tools like Crossbeam and communities like Partnership Leaders, using ELM to scale is more possible now than ever before.
If you’ve ever...
Generated leads through a joint webinar or event
Sent a targeted email referencing a prospect’s existing tech stack
Had a prospect learn about your software from a partner's newsletter, article, or social post
...Then, you’ve already begun setting the foundation for embracing an ELM strategy.
In today's edition of Crossbeam Insider, we’re covering two ELM use cases and real-world examples for each.
— Olivia Ramirez, Managing Editor
Psst! New here? Subscribe to Crossbeam Insider to get stories like this every Tuesday (and some Thursdays). 👇
Let's get right to it. Ecosystem-Led Marketing (ELM) is a strategy in which two or more companies collaborate on go-to-marketing (GTM) motions using second-party data to generate leads, close opportunities, and drive integration adoption among customers via co-marketing and targeted messaging. Second-party data, also referred to as "partner data", is first-party data that is shared, not sold, between two trusted companies.
ELM is most effective when both companies, or partners, fully embrace Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG), which includes:
Shifting to ELM from more traditional marketing efforts might seem overwhelming at first. However, once you start building the foundation for embracing ELM, the results will compound over time.
In the beginning stages of adopting ELM, keep the following in mind:
Try the crawl-walk-run framework in the beginning of a new partnership. Invest minimal efforts in co-marketing with a partner in the beginning stages of the partner lifecycle and then get more strategic with your co-marketing efforts after you’ve observed some early successes.
Put a co-marketing and adoption timeline behind every tech partnership. Map out the responsibilities of your internal marketing/partner marketing team and your partner’s marketing/partner marketing team over the course of the partnership. You can use a framework like the partnership maturity curve to identify co-marketing materials to create pre and post-launch and to establish a timeframe for reevaluating the partnership.
Track attribution early on. Work with your data ops/analytics team to ensure your sales reps can tag partners in your customer relationship management (CRM) system who have influenced opportunities via co-marketing efforts like joint webinars and events.
Avoid empty co-marketing. Use data from your attribution tracking and anecdotal wins to understand which partners to invest co-marketing efforts in. Creating partner tiers can help provide guidelines for what’s expected of each partner and what they can expect your team to contribute to the partnership. Partner tiers can also help you understand which partners to demote to a lower tier due to their lack of investment and which should be rewarded for their efforts.
Below, we'll cover two use cases for ELM and examples of companies embracing ELM today.
Use Case #1: Develop targeted messaging that converts
A traditional sales outreach tactic for a sales rep might include:
Sending a minimum number of cold outreach emails in a given day (with a less than 30% open rate)
Spending time educating their prospect about their software and convincing them of the value
Getting ghosted — or worse, losing the deal to the competition or the status quo
Modern sales and marketing teams use partner data (or second-party data) to attract prospects to their software and nurture opportunities throughout the sales cycle. Deals are 53% more likely to close when a partner’s involved. Using partner data to generate high-quality leads and provide prospects with the information they want can improve the sales experience, shorten the sales cycle, and improve alignment between your sales and marketing teams.
By understanding which prospects companies have in common with their partners' prospects, marketing teams can create targeted messaging that drives awareness, generates sales meetings, and shortens the sales cycle. For example:
Your partner marketing/marketing team can send targeted email campaigns including information about the tools in your prospects' tech stacks. By identifying which of your prospects overlap with your partner’s customers using a tool like Crossbeam, your marketing team will know which prospects are currently using your partner's software and could be interested in buying your software and adopting your integration.
Your partners can develop low-lift co-marketing campaigns, like mentioning you in their newsletter, in a Slack community, on LinkedIn, and other places your prospects frequent. This micro co-marketing motion can help show your prospects that their existing vendor trusts in your team and software and, as a result, can help generate Ecosystem-Qualified Leads (EQLs) for your team.
Your partner marketing/marketing team can learn which content would help engage your named/target accounts and who they should put the content in front of within those accounts. They can ask your partners for valuable intel about your partners' existing customers, including their business goals, their ideal customers, and pain points. This intel can help inform the articles, e-books, and case studies that your team develops to attract the right stakeholders. They can then leverage this information to drive a thoughtful account-based marketing (ABM) campaign using highly targeted messaging that engages individuals across the web and on socials. (Check out how RollWorks served their contacts programmatic ads using ABM and partner data and saw a 60% increase in engagement compared to running a traditional marketing campaign.)
Through using the above tactics, your partnerships and marketing team can generate leads for your sales team who are already interested in your software. As a result, your sales team can skip ahead in the sales conversation. These leads may also be interested in your integrations, which can help them achieve value in your software immediately.
The account mapping matrix in Crossbeam, which enables partners to see how many prospects, open opportunities, and customers they have in common with potential and existing partners
“The thing about Crossbeam that’s nice is you can see a prospect’s tech stack. You gain information that you can’t scrape off a prospect’s website,” says Sylvain Giuliani, Head of RevOps and Growth at Census in a Crossbeam case study.
“If we’re gonna do a marketing initiative around a particular integration, [Crossbeam] shows the cross-section of types of accounts and uncover key consistent themes across them,” says Josh Jagdfeld, Senior Director, Alliances, at Jamf in a Crossbeam blog post on adopting an ELM approach. “Then the marketing team is able to say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna do a campaign around this topic. This is exactly the type of persona we should target and the types of companies in our database’.”
Use Case #2: Generate leads via joint webinars and events
Combine the personal outreach from Use Case #1 with a curated event lineup, and you’re in a good place to boost your EQLs from partners.
For the fourth consecutive year, webinars are the most popular way of going to market with partners. And access to partner data means the return on investment (ROI) for joint webinars can be greater than ever before. By understanding which prospects you have in common with your partner and which of your partner's customers you could get access to, you can develop targeted invite lists that generate high-quality leads.
Additionally, when your webinar ends, you can trigger messaging from your internal team and/or your partner’s team engaging your webinar attendees in additional content relevant to them.
A few ways to nurture and engage leads following a webinar:
Send your new leads a nurture sequence providing them with other content relevant to their role, business needs, and existing tech stack
Connect your sales rep to your partner’s customer success manager (CSM) to get information about the lead, like their current business goals, buying timeline, and other stakeholders for mapping their org chart
Ask your partner to help educate your named/target accounts about the value of your software and integration
Joint events with partners can also help generate leads and open the door to sales conversations with target accounts. ActiveCampaign teamed up with Salesforce for fireside chats at Digital Summits in multiple cities. At the Digital Summits, they promoted their local Study Halls, where 30-50 attendees would learn about their Salesforce integration via hands-on workshops.
After each Digital Summit, they would reach out to attendees inviting them to their Study Halls. This sequence of joint events helped educate prospects and customers about their Salesforce integration, fill seats at their Study Halls, and drive value for existing customers.
ActiveCampaign’s fireside chats with Salesforce at Digital Summits
ActiveCampaign’s Study Halls educating customers about their Salesforce integration
ActiveCampaign and Salesforce's co-marketing playbook included joint events and webinars and resulted in ActiveCampaign getting the #1 spot for marketing automation tools in the Salesforce AppExchange.
Additionally, in a recent edition of Crossbeam Insider, we learned how Fivetran shifted the focus for their field events with partners. Rather than participating in every large event with a partner, they began prioritizing small events in the cities their sales reps were targeting each quarter. For each event they host, they invite one partner sales rep to join the event and team up with their internal sales rep. They also invite multiple partners to sponsor the event.
Through this shift, their sales reps are able to educate their target accounts about their software in person and advance the sales conversation. One event in particular generated 30 EQLs for Fivetran's sales rep, with 15 target accounts in attendance and another 15 for the sales rep to follow up with.
The account mapping matrix in Crossbeam
--
Want to learn more about ELM and Ecosystem-Led Growth?
%20(1).png?upscale=true&width=1000&upscale=true&name=Account-Mapping-Matrix-2%20(1)%20(1).png)
