How AB Tasty Optimized its Go-to-Partnership Process and Sales Engagement Using Crossbeam

AB Tasty, a company name that plays on the familiar term and practice of A/B testing, is a customer experience optimization company that helps brands build better user experiences and unlock new levels of possibilities faster. You could say data-driven optimization is part of AB Tasty’s DNA, and this is certainly reflected in their Technology Partnerships team.

The Technology Partnerships team is led by Devon Boyd, who used to manage customer relationships in his former role as a Customer Success Manager. Today he has transferred many of those skills into building solid partner relationships that generate ROI for AB Tasty, using the Crossbeam platform.

Winning over the sales team

When Devon first took over the Partnerships team back in 2021, he inherited Crossbeam as a business-approved tool from colleagues who had tried it before he joined. He was quickly impressed with the instant account mapping features on the platform but his first hurdle was convincing his sales counterparts to see the value of Crossbeam, and partnerships more generally.

Back then it was the classic story: Partnerships weren’t seen as a primary revenue driver by the sales teams, so they didn’t pay much attention to them. Add the sudden appearance of a new tool like Crossbeam and they were initially suspicious and skeptical.

That was until Devon started taking Crossbeam on a tour around the individual sales executives, explaining and demonstrating how it could help them achieve their quotas faster. He would filter account mapping reports by their name and look through their accounts with them, which gave them some insight into which partners had existing relationships with some of their top prospects.

“I could show them the account  mapping and tell them ‘Look, I've got like five people you can talk to here,” said Devon. “I'm not saying the conversations are always going to be good, but if you start using it to do a lot of your qualification in the early days before you even talk to the client, you're going to understand their pain points, what they're looking for, decision makers, success criteria, why they've bought the other tools and where we fit into their tech stack. It’s gold dust.”

Once they saw how it worked, they loved it, and soon enough Devon was getting multiple requests from all sides by his sales account execs asking for their ecosystem mappings and introductions to partners. As the only Technology Partnerships Manager at the time, Devon found himself in a positive, yet tricky situation.

“I was trying to talk with every single sales person within the organization. And that was painful…but that is the tactical level of detail that makes me hit my targets. It's also the tactical level of detail that stops me from being able to do anything strategic,” said Devon. “So on the one hand, it really sped everything up, but on the other it created a whole new workload for me.”

Devon resolved this imbalance by introducing a model where each sales person owned a sales relationship with one of these technology partners (not the global relationship he clarifies, that's still Devon). But by connecting those sales teams amongst themselves, Devon’s been able to stop being the middleman and claim back more time in his day. Devon notes that the impact is multifaceted. By mapping salespeople to their respective partner, they only need to focus on learning one ‘better together’ story allowing them to drive leads to their mapped partners.

Bringing Crossbeam into their Salesforce CRM

Additionally AB Tasty have invested in the Crossbeam Salesforce App which has enabled the sales teams to get an ecosystem view directly within their Salesforce CRM for easy access to partner insights across all their accounts. Additionally, within each account record, sales reps can also see which accounts are their partner’s customers or which partners have an open opportunity with the account.

By giving this data directly in the hands of their sales teams in the platform where they work day in day out, Devon has streamlined his processes and observed a more proactive sales team. Whenever he has a meeting to sync with his sales reps, there is now an expectation for them to pull up their own ecosystem view instead of Devon having to do the work. The sales team’s increased interest in partner support, driven by insights from Crossbeam, has taken much of the upfront work off of Devon’s plate and has allowed him to better manage his stakeholder relationships.

Speeding up the go-to-partnership

From the very beginning Devon’s goal for Crossbeam had been to get all of AB Tasty’s partners connected there. To be able to easily see their ecosystem of partners from a single pane of glass.

One of the biggest benefits of this centralization was being able to assess new partnerships more efficiently and speed up the overall partnership lifecycle. Crossbeam is used right at the first conversation with a new partner to check out each other's pipeline across accounts.

“We've been able to say, yes, our account overlap and our persona overlap is so similar that actually we need to connect our tools anyway just for our joint clients,” said Devon. “But it also means that between our two tools, we can start trialing product lines for each other.”

Before account mapping with a partner, they will always sign a NDA, giving them the peace of mind to share comfortably, and even share their Crossbeam overlap overviews with each other — so AB Tasty knows what data Partner X is seeing, and Partner X can equally see what AB Tasty are seeing — which has facilitated a more transparent and collaborative partner engagement.

Devon can easily turn Crossbeam insights into actions. His team uses Slack to talk with partners directly and ask for introductions. They are also using Crossbeam data to negotiate exclusivity in their integration partnerships — getting the exclusive rights to a partner’s technology integration before they start rolling out the same product line with AB Tasty’s competitors — which becomes a huge strategic asset.

“Even just being able to have those conversations is a really good win,” said Devon. “And that has literally come off the back of looking at the data in Crossbeam. So it's kind of just sped up the ecosystem, which has been amazing.”

Gaining time back for strategy

Thanks to the no-fuss overviews provided by Crossbeam, Devon gains a lot more time for strategic thinking, and is armed with the data insight to understand where to focus his efforts to make the most impact.

As a recent example: Devon was looking at a partner whom AB Tasty had closed millions of business in common opportunities last year, then he noticed that the partner had closed double the amount in the same opportunities. Curious to understand this discrepancy, he looked at the account overlap and saw this was virtually the same between their two companies but the contact overlap was very different.

“Which allows me to go, wow, okay, We need to do something about our strategy here to be talking to the same people as them so our average order value goes up,” said Devon. “With this insight, we can unlock the right budgets and so we can have better co-sell initiatives with them.”

With further analysis, it also turned out that AB Tasty had done much less joint business together with a partner despite both selling into the same opportunities. This signalled to Devon that there is much more potential in the partner relationship, and leaves him excited to uncover more opportunities where partnerships will accelerate the ambitious growth plans of AB Tasty.

Ready to unlock hidden revenue and accelerate your go-to-partnership strategy like AB Tasty? Book your free ELG strategy call and discover how to turn ecosystem data into actionable growth.