Your next channel strategy
ICP -> Customers -> Partners -> Growth
You know the biggest mistake I see some companies make when setting up their GTM strategies?
They consider strategic partnerships far too late in the game.
And they miss a trick because if you set this up right, you’ve got a self-growing ecosystem which you just have to nudge in the right direction.
And it all starts with understanding your ICP.
Your ICP, or ideal customer profile, is the type of customer who best suits your product and your problem statement. What value do you deliver? What problem do you solve? Why does anyone care?
Once you’ve answered those questions, you should have a fairly specific picture in mind of exactly who your ideal customers are.
Allow me to dispel the myth. Your product is not useful to everyone. You do not have a unicorn product that will revolutionise everything for everyone. You need to get specific.
Even if you do genuinely have this unicorn product without focus, you’ll never scale a team. ICP is critical for scale. Don’t believe me?
Marketing to everyone under the sun is going to cost you £££
Without focus on the value proposition for a specific type of customer and organisation, your salespeople won’t now how to storytell in meetings. They’ll end up talking about features only, and your conversation rates will suck
If you aren’t specific in who you’re selling to and what problem you solve, you won’t be able to build a functional CS organisation. Segmentation will be awful, you’ll have a mix of unrelated customers which can’t be managed strategically and they’ll never be able to operationalise any steps of your customer journey because all of your customers will be tangibly different in how they do business
Your product development process will absolutely shit itself. Your roadmap will be a list of what your customers want and need, and there will be no cohesive thread between any of these. Customers won’t be able to see your strategic vision, and you’ll compromise any value you deliver because you can’t invest in solving one problem in a compelling way
Trust me. I’ve been there. Scaling horizontally is frustrating and expensive. Go vertical before you go horizontal.
Don’t forget your ICP can grow as you grow. Don’t let your ego get in the way of your success.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. Here’s how you can set yourself up to grow almost organically. Let me tell you a story.
Once you have a nice and specific ICP, you now have a collection of prospects. You can market specifically to them, learn about and speak the language of their business and understand their challenges and goals.
This seriously improves your ability to deliver a meaningful sales pitch and close the deal. Within sectors, customers (in my experience) like to work with vendors who know their business and their pains. They want to feel like you understand their market and are actually invested in helping them. If you do this well, it won’t be long before you land a couple of clients.
Now, here’s where you start thinking about partnerships. Typically, in B2B SaaS, you’re going to have to do an integration with someone in order to get data out if you’re a service-type product. If you’re doing data visualisation, customer experience messaging, data backups, marketing automation, email management… all of the data for those things has to come from somewhere.
That somewhere is your partnership strategy.
Let me explain.
In an earlier life, I built a GTM team with a very specific ICP. We had, kind of by accident, stumbled upon a really lovely ICP with a very tangible problem. A central authority regulated everyone in this segment, as they were delivering B2C services on behalf of local councils. What this meant was that they had a vested interest in customer experience because giving bad experiences often meant they lost their tender. It couldn’t all be about customer experience, though, because they had an operation to run efficiently in order to make money.
So, knowing these struggles and having a product which could improve customer satisfaction and increase operational efficiency, it wasn’t long before we welcomed a number of these companies into our customer base.
Each one of these customers had a job management system. Because they were all in the same industry, there was a lot of overlap, but still enough different job management vendors to make my partnership expansion strategy interesting.
You see, once you’ve targeted a specific segment, you become a tool of choice. Especially if you’re adding something new or disrupting something significantly. You become the standard or the desired provider for the thing you do within that segment. That has benefits.
And for each of your customers, you must integrate into their job management system to get the data you need. Bingo, this is the partnership opportunity. You’ve now got a potential partner who has to integrate with you to keep their customer happy, meaning they clearly don’t provide the service or functionality you do. This potential partner also likely has a book of business consisting of both ICP and non-ICP customers. At this point, the ICP is less relevant, because you’re looking to engage via a partner.
Think of your partner acquisition strategy as winning partners who serve your customers. If you can sell your product directly to one or two of their customers and you have a good portfolio of customers across their target market, they’ll likely be interested in developing an OEM relationship with you. Moreover, for all of their customers that aren’t ICP customers for you, you’re expanding your reach without having the same level of impact on your CS or post-sales teams.
The brilliance of this plan is that you’re offering their clients something that they don’t do. It’s in their best interests to partner with you to 1. Keep their clients happy, but also 2. Offer a feature that their clients clearly want and is highly relevant, but they don’t have to go through the hassle of building it themselves.
Now they’re selling your products for you, both within and pretty adjacent to your ICP, so you’re now expanding on two fronts. Direct sales and through the channel.
Find your ICP.
Get specific on the customers you want to sell to and why.
Solve their problems and focus on the gaps in the market.
Work within an industry because you’ll have more luck if you know the landscape.
Find the partners who dominate the technology landscape in this sector.
Piggyback onto their sales through your partnership strategy.
Watch the revenue flow in.
The only thing you need to do is be prepared to pick your partners wisely. You can get into bed with everyone, which can generate tension between partners, especially if there’s fierce market competition.
This strategy works best with small to medium software providers. You can waste a lot of time and effort trying to partner with Dynamics or Salesforce. It’s nice to be in their app store for sure, but they won’t be selling on your behalf because you’ll make absolutely no difference to their service offering or profit margin.
Go small, go niche, go valuable.
