Welcome to an incredible moment in the partnership revolution! You’ve already learned how to automate management and optimization of sales contacts and leads through companies like Salesforce and Marketo. Now, you can automate your partnership program—and harness the channel with the most potential to grow your business—using Impact’s ground-breaking new Partnership Automation solution.
Why Focus on Partnerships?
As sales and marketing practices have matured, the opportunities for enterprises to gain competitive advantages in these areas through executional excellence have diminished. Consequently, enterprises struggle to grow. Excellence in sales is no longer enough, and excellence in marketing is no longer a differentiator.
Some of the fastest growing B2C businesses today, such as leaders in the Sharing Economy (Uber, AirBnB), the Subscription Economy (Barkbox, Hostgator, Aria, Zoho) and the Direct-to-Consumer Digital Natives (Harry’s, Stitch Fix, Casper) have grown exponentially.
How have they grown so quickly? They are leveraging partnerships, which act as a kind of indirect, extended sales force and marketing team, which has allowed them to rapidly expand their footprint across new markets, audiences and channels. Partnerships have been key to absolutely explosive growth.
Enter the Partnership Economy
With Partnership Automation, Impact has identified and created a way to power the emerging Partnership Economy so you can automatically:
- Find and recruit new types of partnerships
- Scale partnership programs globally
- Consolidate and manage partnership channel’s processes
Some of Impact’s most innovative clients have recognized this as a career-changing move that enables them to become agents of growth in their organizations. Barkbox Senior Growth Marketing Manager Kurt Hausman realized, “I’m not limited by just managing traditional affiliates on this platform. I now have the power to manage all sorts of partnerships with just about anyone on the planet, for example, pet shelters, pet adoption agencies and veterinary clinics. These new types of partnerships are driving significant growth for our business.”
The Partnership Channel Goes Beyond Traditional Affiliate Model
Though 81% of brands have an established affiliate program, which drive about 14% of all e-commerce sales in the United States, the traditional affiliate is only one type of partnership. Based on Impact’s data analysis, enterprises that have transformed their affiliate programs into full-fledged partnership programs have sped up their growth tremendously, with traditional cashback and coupon sites now only responsible for only 23% of the value generated by the Partnership team (based on U.S. numbers). The vast majority (77%) of revenue driven from non-affiliate sources are derived from other partnership types.
However, at most enterprises, partnership management has been a task that was convoluted, often disorganized, and dispersed across departments. Impact’s Partnership Automation brings it all together, allow marketers and partnership managers for traditional affiliates, influencers, strategic B2B partnerships and more to move away from ad hoc tools and patchwork processes. You can manage your partners’ lifecycle more seamlessly through a set of tightly integrated software solutions that help you participate in the new partnership economy and activate rapid enterprise growth.
What the New World of Partnership Automation Looks Like
With Partnership Automation, you will streamline your workflow like never before, allowing you to achieve new levels of growth that traditional channels just can’t deliver now. With the rollout of new best practices, tools and capabilities, your business-as-usual, daily operations transform to dynamic, sophisticated partnership practices that parallel the sales and marketing universe, from goal setting, quota management and pipeline management to more actionable KPI reporting, A|B testing and revenue forecasting.
Partnership Automation shifts the paradigm around how growth-focuses enterprises fundamentally think and operate in two profound ways:
- Fundamental organizational structure of enterprises changes. In many organizations, partnerships are managed haphazardly, cutting across different teams such as business development, social, PR, acquisition, and, yes, affiliate teams. Because the partnership management is spread thinly across the organization, there’s no scale in managing the partnership lifecycle, and there’s no way to stitch the different partnerships together to effectively measure the value each partnership brings. Partnership Automation allows you to centralize the task of managing an organization’s different partnerships within a single growth-oriented team. When all forms of partnerships fall under a unified umbrella, it becomes far easier to manage them and to see what each partnership does to drive growth for you: which partnerships attract new types of customers, which partnerships go the extra mile to help you close transactions, and, most importantly, how much value you derive from each individual partnership.
- Partnership Automation transcends marketing via partners. Marketing is simply one facet of your dealings with a partner. There’s also sales management, learning and enablement, business development, operations and financial components. The partnership team is, after all, responsible for managing the entire partner life cycle, from inception (when they’re planning, discovering and recruiting various partners) to close (when they’re engaging and optimizing their relationship with each partner).
Don’t miss out—harness the power of this burgeoning economy and grow your business with Partnership Automation! To find out more, contact us here or via your Impact representative.
