Since the first cavewoman partnered with her neighbor so they could work together to gather more food, strategic alliances have been a mutually beneficial way for two parties with similar goals to grow.
From a B2B SaaS sales lens (say that five times fast), strategic alliances can significantly help in numerous ways—primarily by providing warm introductions to prospects and insider information to help close deals.
If you want to grow your sales pipeline and find it hard to use traditional channels to do so, a strategic alliance might be the savior your B2B SaaS company has been looking for.
What Is a Strategic Alliance?
Everyone has their own definition of what a strategic alliance is.
Simply put, a strategic alliance is a partnership between two companies that allows both to achieve more together than they would on their own.
This is achieved by sharing customer data, insights, and overlap to uncover opportunities and close more deals.
From a B2B SaaS lens (that’s you), partners in a strategic alliance sell complementary products, services, or solutions in the same marketplace.
Imagine a small town in Italy where a pasta maker and a sauce maker meet up one day and one suggests, “Hey, if you tell your customers about me, I’ll tell mine about you?”
Everyone wins.
Pasta man sells more pasta. Sauce man sells more sauce. The town gets to enjoy more delicious pasta.
This is the nature of a strategic alliance, and it's a strategy that can take your sales team to the moon.
What Are The Major Benefits of A Strategic Alliance & Why Do They Work for SaaS Companies?
Harsh reality: there are more companies than ever with SaaS products similar to your own.
That’s ok, though, because we will take advantage of strategic alliances to get an edge on these companies and close more deals.
Let’s go over some of the major benefits of a strategic alliance and why these partnerships work particularly well for SaaS companies.
- Cost-effective growth opportunities in a crowded market
When you partner up with a complementary company, they can provide warm introductions to prospects that can benefit from adding your product or service to their tech stack.
Not only does this help you bypass a competitive, crowded market, but it also helps your team save a ton of money that would have been spent on marketing, man-hours, and other prospecting efforts.
- Access to key decision-makers at prospective companies
Say goodbye to hours spent finding the right person to talk to, or worse, having a deal fall through because you weren’t speaking to a key decision-maker.
- Partners can provide warm introductions to the EXACT person you need to talk to who has the power to buy your product or service and a genuine interest in doing so.
These referrals can lead to a 70% higher conversion rate.
- Access to historical data, including geographies, markets, and buying trends
A lot of your team’s time is spent exploring markets, buying trends, and data to help you break into prospective companies and sell your products and services.
Partners can provide this information for you based on their company’s current customer list and prospecting efforts.
This only helps to speed up your team’s time to close and make that money!
- The ability to scale faster than would otherwise be possible
Traditional sales growth strategies (cold calling, in-person meetings, rounds of golf) take time. A lot of time.
What is one thing that B2B SaaS companies don’t have a lot of? Time.
You need to grow quickly, and strategic alliances allow you to do so.
By leveraging a partner's clientele to get warm introductions, insider information, and personal recommendations, you can fill your pipeline and decrease your time to close dramatically.
Real Life Examples of A Strategic Alliance
At the start of this article, we talked about the pasta guy and the sauce guy as an example of a strategic alliance. (They are thriving, by the way.)
For a real-life example of someone who is #winning the strategic alliance game, we asked our customer Henry from impact.com to let us know how partnerships help his team close more deals.
This is the kind of stuff that we love to see, and we would love to see it for you too.
Is Your Team Ready For A Strategic Alliance?
Now, we’re glad you’re excited about strategic alliances. You should be.
But are you ready? This is kind of a chicken and egg scenario.
Here are a few key questions you need to ask yourself before you dive into the world of strategic alliances.
- Do you have the ability to accurately measure the outcome of your partnerships?
SQLs, demos booked, introductions made.
These are all metrics that you need to keep tabs on during the course of your partnerships.
How will you measure and keep track of these metrics? Spreadsheets? Google docs? Pen and paper?
Make sure you have a plan in place to measure the value of your partnerships accurately.
- Who will be responsible for the success of the partnerships?
Every good partnership revolves around someone holding down the fort and making the most of the collective efforts.
For startups, this will likely be the founder.
For larger teams, this will likely be the VP of Sales or a Partnerships Manager.
You need to have someone ready to take charge of your strategic alliance efforts to ensure partnerships are providing mutual value.
- Do you have the right tools to achieve success?
Alright, shameless plug here, but it’s our blog, so deal with it.
A platform like Partnered allows teams to scale quickly and start closing more business in less time.
In a few easy clicks, you are set up and ready to start gaining valuable insights from your partners.
The Partnered platform is integrated with Slack and Google Chrome so your team can have conversations and get deals started where they are already spending time.
It’s pretty awesome if we do say so for ourselves, but you can be the judge.
Conclusion:
A strategic alliance is one of the most powerful ways to grow your pipeline and close new customers.
A mutually beneficial strategic alliance will allow you to navigate through a lot of the noise and manual processes of prospecting and skip right to the good stuff—closing more deals.
With the help of a strategic alliance, B2B Saas companies of any size can join forces and boost each other's competitiveness and bottom line while saving each other massive amounts of time.
Now, go out and start forming some partnerships!
Get started with Partnered today!
Using a platform like Partnered is the simplest and most effective way to allow your sales team to reap the rewards of a strategic alliance partnership. Partnered is a fully automated platform that crunches partner data and pushes key insights into the laps of your sales team, allowing your team to save time prospecting and use powerful insights to close more deals.
If you’d like to check out how Partnered can help your team boost sales and close more deals, get started for free today!
.jpg)
