Hey guys! Has anyone had some success growing through partnerships? Either through agency partnerships or tech partnerships (integrations)?

As someone agency side, albeit slightly biased as a viewpoint, we've had a lot of success working with tech/SaaS in growing strong organic acquisition channels when a) we're not treat as a vendor in silo and can ask questions of other business depts, and b) the product is workable (which a lot of people who inquire seem to forget is a key thing)

Thanks @Dan Taylor - great points! Are there any other considerations, apart from those, when evaluating a great SaaS partner?

For us, we see a lot of partner pitches that are just... buzzwords and "here is our approach to X" and talking about traffic and pageviews, versus personas and pipeline

I am also curious about this topic! Different types of partnerships (channel, resellers, affiliate marketing, product interactions, etc), depending what product and service you have.

There used to be a slack community for this but moved to circle, will add the link. Alex Glenn is all about this stuff: https://partnerprograms.io/

Thanks @Benjamin Boman! Yeah I work in the partnerships space, and it seems to be rising in popularity as a growth channel for SaaS

Hey Jono, at Digital Present we have experienced growth through partnerships. In our case, the partnerships are done with marketing agencies. We provide website development and design services for their clients when there is a need and vice versa. For now, it goes well for us and for our partners.

Hey @Ivona Zabaznovska! Love it! The Agency to Agency partnership space is something I know very little about. I love that you complement one another. I heard someone say “you should partner with another company when you’re better together than alone” which is so true in this case. How do you share leads? Like is it just when you hear they need marketing help during a call and then you do an email intro?

Yeah, exactly, the communication is very open. We either do a email intro or a discovery call where we meet with all the parties 😄

Awesome! I hope you don’t mind me asking but is there a referral commission incentive or is it purely a reciprocation relationship?😄

No problem Jono. Depending on the relationship, most of the time success fees/referral commissions are included. On the other hand, which I did not mention before, we also work with consultants and individuals, with them commissions are a must.

Thanks for sharing! Really interesting and helpful. Last question I promise😄 how do you find all these partners?

Last but certainly not least, this is the most challenging part. The marketing agencies (in our case) are 80% referral or personal contacts, the other 20% are coming from our inbound marketing efforts. Also, sometimes we do outreach, via cold email or the good LinkedIn outreach. But for both cold email and LN outreach you need to find your personas and then craft the communication messages carefully (so it doesn't scream I WANT TO SELL SOMETHING TO YOU) 😄

Good advices. Here is an article about it: https://www.crossbeam.com/blog/enablement-program-that-can-help-boost-agency-partner-retention-70/