Orchestrating Ecosystem-Led GTM To Produce Hand-Raisers

Orchestrating Ecosystem-Led GTM
To Produce Hand-Raisers

B2B marketing relies on audience and authority: do you have the right group of people to talk to, and can you speak to them with credibility? Unfortunately, in an era of digital apathy, reaching the right people is increasingly difficult. On top of that, buying groups are expanding at the same time organizations become flatter. The result is that champions have less time to research new solutions. Compounding both of these issues for marketers is the fact that peer-to-peer recommendations and reviews from experts are increasingly replacing traditional vendor research.

Building an audience, and building trust with that audience, is necessary, but it can also take time. That is, if you’re doing it alone. Luckily, most solution providers operate in an ecosystem of overlapping tech, agencies, experts, events and industry communities that serve as rich mines of fresh audience expansion if managed correctly.

At the end of the day, your sales team just needs some warm prospects to raise their hands.

By working with this ecosystem to create insight-driven content together, promote into each party’s audience, and pull through to warm interactions with buyers at target accounts, companies can boost their pipeline. In many ways, this is similar to traditional methods of demand creation and demand capture. Adding in an ecosystem layer, however, expands the audience and brings credibility right from the start.

A typical B2B SaaS ecosystem

Too often, when companies think about “joint go-to-market,” they immediately jump to formal commercial relationships. While these can be great ways to drive additional revenue through the channel, the marketing team can start with a broader view of the ecosystem.

The landscape will look different for every company, depending on their place within the market, how close their solution is to the end user, and how their tech works with other providers. That said, some common buckets of partners to think about include:

• Complementary tech – other tangential solution providers within the industry; may or may not have a formal integration; overlap in Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and end users; joint objective is to get in front of each other’s audiences for lead gen
• Industry agencies – hands-on-keyboard service providers within the industry that may use one or multiple tech providers; may or may not have a commercial relationship; joint objective is to go after whitespace for new clients
• Channel sellers – resellers and marketplace partners within the industry, may also include consultants with a tech advisory commission structure; joint objective is to sell more of a solution into the channel to increase the revenue base
• Community providers – event organizers, thought leaders, training professionals, and community managers; joint objective is to deliver valuable content to the audience in order to increase engagement, reach, and credibility

Most companies have a mix of partners from these buckets, but some may find that they have an easier time to activate one area versus another. For example, many adtech companies rely heavily on their ad agency partners to promote new use cases that bring in new clients.

Quick tip: ask your sales and customer success team to spend 10 minutes writing down any partner, solution provider, or industry influencer that a client has mentioned on a call (or extract the data yourself from your sales engagement platform). You’ll likely find 20 or more ecosystem players across these buckets right away.

Depending on the partnership, some of these players will be managed by the partnerships team, some by product, and some by account management. Don’t let commercial structure be a blocker to growth. As mentioned above, each of these partners has their own vested interest in joint go-to-market activities. Often, co-marketing is the easiest place to start.

Drive more hand-raisers from the ecosystem

Besides generating new leads from a fresh source, one of the chief advantages of co-marketing with a partner is that you get to tap into their credibility from the very first touch. By definition, anything they’re promoting to their customer base, opt-in email list, or LinkedIn followers has the benefit that it’s coming from a trusted source.

An easy place to start is by creating a piece of content together that both parties can promote into their respective audience. This could include:

• A joint webinar with tips and tricks around a seasonal event. Bring 3 or more partners together to each share a use case, then open it up for Q&A.
• Publish a How-To article on your blog, written from your partner based on their expertise. Ask them to include a case study, or an anecdotal use case.
• Write an insights-driven downloadable report that includes data points from a few solution providers that carry expertise in different areas around a core theme, e.g. optimizing profitability for a category.
• Record a fireside chat-style video by simply recording a 10-minute discussion on a recorded Zoom call. Frame it around 3 key questions that you can edit into 3 distinct videos to post on LinkedIn.

Quick tip: share your promotion strategy with your partner in advance. Not only does this bring good will to the engagement, but it also creates an expectation that they will commit to the same level of promotion. Ask them to share their plan. Make it easy for them by providing them the same social and email assets you’re using, and co-branding with both logos.

The above tactics will generate authority, but now you need to get interested buyers to take action. Work with an industry expert who has a built-in audience to host an educational activation, either on a webinar or at an in-person roundtable, and take the conversation a level deeper. For those who can’t attend, this is where your demand generation engine should kick in. Now that you have some great co-branded, highly credible content, break it up into actionable tips that you can promote over a multi-week lead nurture program.

Layer in joint account selling

Marketing is often the easiest starting point to an ecosystem-led GTM strategy, and it’s also where companies that are just starting out with partnerships will see the quickest returns. However, to really supercharge pipeline at the enterprise top end of the market, joint sales and customer expansion are key. 

Taking an Account-Based Experience (ABX) approach, marketing and sales can work together to identify the “next best sale” for each new business and customer growth account. From there, marketing or partnerships can do a partner overlap analysis: which of these accounts already work with one of our partners? In some cases, it might make sense to do a joint whitespace analysis as well: which of these accounts are we both trying to target? 

Create a combined messaging framework with your partner, and use it as the basis for joint collateral, sales outreach, and call-to-action, to ensure alignment across everyone involved. This doesn’t have to be comprehensive. For example, a data analytics company and an adtech company might focus specifically on “New-to-Brand measurement” as the best use case to promote as an entry point. 

To do it at a slightly broader scale, co-host a virtual share group for multiple prospects, with each share group focusing on a specific use case. 

An integrated campaign to drive demand

To get started, pick one specific audience group. This could be Pricing Managers at Household Brands in North America. Or CX Developers at Retail and Hospitality Sites in the Mid-Market. With your audience in mind, you can build your campaign: 

1. Create a messaging framework and content outline for the core use case you want to educate this audience about. 
2. Crowdsource data points or anecdotes from 3 subject matter experts in the community, including your customers and at least one partner who can help promote the content. 
3. Combine the insights with your own perspective and create an informative report that can be hosted on your website. Share your promotion plan with anyone who contributed to the content, and share your assets with them. 
4. Bonus: ask your contributors to also self-record a 30-second video of them talking into their phone or laptop camera about the insight that they shared. This is your LinkedIn content. 
5. Select one partner to host an educational roundtable together on the same topic at an upcoming industry event. 
6. Print the insights content into a professionally formatted booklet and distribute it to attendees of the roundtable. Print a few extra copies for your sales team to distribute at the event as well. 
7. For your highest value accounts that either did or did not attend determine which ones overlap with your partner. Pick one use case to message the account about together and ask for a call to discuss the use case. 
8. Promote takeaways from the roundtable to everyone else. Each use case is an email and an ad. Track engagement on the landing page and work with your BDR team to craft a warm message to anyone who visits the content. These are your hand raisers. 

A Kyn client in the data analytics industry deployed the approach listed above and generated $1.1 million in pipeline over a 3-month period.

Kyn, formerly known as Medium Marketing, helps tech companies turn relationships into revenue. We do it through insights-driven content, community-centered field marketing, and tailored account-based experiences. Your next customer is out there, and they’re likely already engaging with your ecosystem. Let’s talk about how you can reach them.