How Sendoso Maximizes Partner Influence Results On Sales Pipeline Using The Crossbeam Salesforce App

Sendoso is the leading sending platform which effectively helps Marketers and Sales professionals create and nurture human relationships with their prospects and customers through corporate gifting.

Francois Grenier leads the partnerships team at Sendoso and his team covers two main branches of the partnership space; Referral Agency Partners and Tech Partnerships. For the Sendoso team, Tech Partnerships include those that have an integration or a joint value proposition story to tell to their customers. 

As for their Agency Partners, these are mainly Marketing and Rev Ops agencies running operations or optimizing campaigns for customers — and usually the first to know about a big marketing or internal HR campaign coming up that could use some gifting services.

Meeting Sendoso’s partner pipeline goals

The partnerships team at Sendoso is highly optimized to influence deals and support co-selling activities for the sales teams by roping in partners. They also incentivize and measure against pipeline creation. There are three main goals of the team:

• To leverage partners to expand their footprint or reach new markets via co-marketing
• To use relationship building with the partners to do lead sharing
• To make partnerships a big lever in retention because integration usage directly correlates with increased lifetime value

To meet all of these goals, they leverage Crossbeam, the Collaborative Growth Platform.

Originally, Francois was introduced to Crossbeam while working at a previous company. When he joined the team at Sendoso he said, “I was pleased to see that Crossbeam was also part of the partner tech stack at Sendoso. The main benefits of this platform for me is my ability to ensure that the partnerships ecosystem gets in the face of my customer facing teams as frictionless as possible.”

Addressing security concerns

Before being able to have this frictionless experience, François had to connect with partners on the platform which, at times, was met with one consistent concern: Security.

Sendoso’s partners and prospective partners initially met the technology of a collaborative growth platform with hesitation, particularly about data security and privacy. Rightly so, in the world that we live in today. Fortunately for Francois and his team, their Crossbeam onboarding team was able to demonstrate on partner calls how Crossbeam goes to great lengths to ensure the highest level of security for its users. Including various levels of data encryption and maintaining its SOC 2 Type II compliance certificate.

“And so the benefit of Crossbeam being a European based company was that GDPR compliance had to be baked in versus a US-based company where they had to think about it because of a certain market,” said Francois. “The other benefit if you use Crossbeam: you will be able to be more aggressive with involving partners into your co-selling playbook. And so you'll make your revenue team happier. And if your revenue team is happier than everything else it is easier for you in your role. If the revenue team is happy, then the finance team becomes happy. Then the product team has less pressure and it's like, it starts there and then makes your life easier basically.”

Removing Sales Bottlenecks using the Crossbeam Salesforce App

After successfully connecting with their partners on Crossbeam, Francois’s next step was to push this valuable ecosystem data from Crossbeam into their CRM — via the Crossbeam Salesforce App.

With Crossbeam’s Salesforce App widget displaying insights directly on their Accounts and Opportunity records, his sales teams can quickly check which partners have relationships within their key accounts, and therefore help them move the needle on deals. This direct visibility has alleviated many of the previous bottlenecks caused by sales teams needing to have Francois’ team sleuth through their CRM pipeline manually looking for every potential customer name. 

Nor do they need to go back into Crossbeam to find out partner information for each and every individual account. Francois reflects on the process he went through before using Crossbeam’s Salesforce App, “As much as that worked, it's not a scalable way of operating.”

Francois believes pushing for adoption of a tool like the Crossbeam Salesforce App by their customer facing teams is two-fold.

• The first is to educate them on the benefits of partnerships and getting a partner involved in a customer conversation. Whether it's an existing customer or prospect.
• The second is that renewal conversations can become a little more strategic by bringing a partner in to help.

In fact Francois uses “bringing a partner in” as catch-all for any partner influence on an opportunity. “It's not necessarily about having the partner actively involved in the conversation. It can be a partner just giving us a little bit more context about an account,” said Francois. “Other times, we can just package our messaging together. For example, we can give an introduction to a customer of features that the partner is rolling out.”

The dynamics are similar for their Business Development Sales team who hunt for net new revenue. The difference, Francois explains, is that they lean on partners more to get a lay of the land, understand who the key decision makers are, and develop better pitches tailored to the customer’s tech stack.

And the results of his two-fold enablement approach? Francois puts it simply:

“Crossbeam allowed us to be way more aggressive with the enablement of our customer facing teams because they can access the Crossbeam platform for themselves. Then, once we started using the Crossbeam Salesforce App we saw a massive spike in the metrics like much higher win rate, much higher ACV when a partner was involved in those deals.”

Ready to unlock partner influence at scale? See how Sendoso boosted win rates and ACV by giving sales teams direct access to ecosystem insights — right inside Salesforce.

‍Book your free demo and learn how Crossbeam can remove sales bottlenecks, power co-selling, and drive smarter partner plays.