How to Increase Your Tech Partner Program’s Revenue by 30% (And Be a Joy to Work With)

Gorgias’ Ecosystem Profile

Gorgias is a customer service platform that’s designed for ecommerce merchants, and built to support all the tools in their stack. Gorgias unifies support over email, live chat, voice, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and SMS in one feed to help merchants provide exceptional customer experiences at scale on Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.

customer since

2019

partner programs

Technology and agency partner programs

partners

420+

partner team size

15+

use cases

Sourcing partner referrals
Collaborating with partners on co-selling motions
Driving partner-influenced deals
Automating attribution
Identifying customers for joint case studies

Having a tough time getting the attention of your partners and your internal teams? It might be because you’re making it too hard for them to work with you. 

Put yourself in their shoes: “If people come to you with a long-winded ask and it’s not clear how to execute it, you’re not going to do it,” says Chris Lavoie, Senior Technology Partner Manager at Gorgias, a leading e-commerce customer service helpdesk platform.

Chris Lavoie

Lavoie’s partnership philosophy is rooted in simplicity (and brevity). He says to make it as easy as possible for your partners and your internal teams to fully buy in to what you’re doing. Remove all ambiguity, cut extra steps — and the “Yes’s” will follow.

The partnerships team at Gorgias adopted Crossbeam, invested in Partner Cloud integrations like Crossbeam for Slack, and dedicated time to setting up co-selling guidelines, templates, and automation to help their sales team and tech partners quickly see value from Gorgias’ partner program. Suddenly, Lavoie was getting a resounding “Yes” from every direction, internally and externally.

Within eight months, Crossbeam helped influence 30% of Gorgias’ revenue growth from tech partnerships. But that’s not all — the uptick in partner-influenced revenue also allowed Gorgias to grow its partnerships headcount from 8 people to 18 in less than a year.

Today, partnerships account for nearly 50% of Gorgias’ revenue — and they’re just getting started.

“Because we had such great success with revenue on the partnership side, it added fuel to the fire to add more partner managers to try to tap into all the potential markets…expanding internationally, having more presence in EMEA and APAC,” he adds.

How did Gorgias get here? By being incredibly thoughtful about their Ecosystem Ops and running a unique set of plays. In this case study, we’re laying them all out for you so you too, can continue growing your own partner program.

Let’s begin.

When entering a new partnership, Lavoie sends referrals to his partners right out the gate to build trust and add value early on. “If I’m going to a partner asking to exchange referrals, then I’m going to make it as easy as possible,” says Lavoie. 

He does so with this two-step referral exchange process:

Step 1 – Build Account Mapping Reports in Crossbeam (And Refine Them with Filters)
The Account Mapping Matrix in Crossbeam gives the Gorgias partnerships team a single view of all the potential opportunities with a partner. Gorgias and its partners will typically begin their conversation reviewing their Account Mapping Matrix. Then, they’ll click into various boxes of the matrix to run detailed reports and apply filters based on data available in their HubSpot CRM.

For instance, Lavoie and his partner might run a report in Crossbeam comparing their customer and prospect populations, and then filter the resulting overlaps to produce a shortlist of strategic accounts for Gorgias to get warm introductions to (and vice versa).

“We’re really enjoying the filter capabilities on the populations and the reports because it helps us refine our list down,” says Lavoie.

“We can refine a list of thousands of potential accounts down to a list of hundreds or less to make it more probable that both partners can swap referrals…to make it super easy, I will build the target list for my partner and for myself,” he says.

For example, one partner asked Lavoie to narrow down Gorgias’ customer population using this criteria: all accounts that have $1-$25 million in gross merchandise value (GMV), more than 50,0000 Instagram followers, are on Shopify Plus, are only in North America, and are in the fashion and beauty industry. 

“Because we have such an enriched customer database, in a matter of seconds, I trimmed our 7,000 customers down to less than 100 target accounts for my partner, all in Crossbeam,” says Lavoie.

It made it that much easier for the partner to handpick the specific accounts Lavoie could provide warm introductions into (and vice versa). 

Partners will ask in amazement, “How do you get all of this data so quickly?” and Lavoie will instantly say “Crossbeam.” Just one or two of these account mapping exercises is usually enough to convince a partner who is on the fence about joining Crossbeam. 

Step 2 – Give Your Partner Two Pre-Written Email Templates
Once Lavoie and his partner identify which accounts they’d like to swap referrals for, he’ll give his partner two email templates to use to facilitate a warm introduction.

To streamline collaboration, Gorgias has designated Crossbeam for Slack Connect channels with a select group of partners. Each channel receives automated notifications when new overlaps occur in specific Crossbeam reports, and account executives are also instantly alerted with Slack Mentions. 

“Our interest in activity with Crossbeam has skyrocketed since the Slack integration came into play,” says Lavoie. “The Account Executive Mentions in Slack is huge. It has streamlined the process and made our AEs more proactive about seeking influence from partners on bigger deals.”

Here’s how Lavoie sets up and manages each Crossbeam for Slack Connect channel:

A “Welcome” message for a new partner from Lavoie. Image courtesy of Gorgias

“It’s just a volume play. We know these accounts have a high probability of agreeing to an intro because we are refining the criteria in Crossbeam. And if you reach out to 10 accounts and you get two or three that say, ‘Sure, I’m up for a meeting with them,’ then that’s a pretty easy and significant win,” says Lavoie.

Tip: While this process runs smoothly, Lavoie recommends being super selective about who you create dedicated Slack channels for. He doesn’t spin up a Slack Connect channel for every single partner. Instead, he reserves it for partners whom he has rapport with and has engaged in multiple account mapping exercises with. These partners have shown they are “all in” and motivated to take the partnership to the next level with their actions and willingness to lean into the partnership.

By helping his sales team advance deals with top-tier accounts, Lavoie has also rallied his sales team behind partnerships. “The account executives are automatically getting notifications when any of their larger deals are with a prospect who is using some of our partners. Now we’re speeding deals along through the pipeline, and our close rate is great,” says Lavoie.

Lavoie says Gorgias’ close rate for non-partner-influenced deals typically hovers around 30-40%. “For Crossbeam-related deals where we’re getting partner influence, the close rate goes up to 50- 60%,” he says.

To drive more partner-influenced deals, Lavoie built a Crossbeam report comparing all of its partners’ customer populations with Gorgias’ open opportunities in the Advanced or Enterprise pricing tiers (its two highest pricing plans). He has an internal Slack channel called “Crossbeam Partner Influence” which receives automated notifications for that report. The channel includes Gorgias’ sales reps, business development reps, and partner managers.

“Every time we have a new deal that is either advanced or enterprise and it’s become an active opportunity, we get a notification for that in this channel and it shows which of our [sales reps] are tied to that deal,” says Lavoie. “And then it’ll show which of our partners that it overlaps with, which makes it super easy to see which partners might be able to give us some strong influence,” he says.

For example, let’s say a Gorgias sales rep is working an “Enterprise” deal. Thanks to automated Slack notifications for that report, the rep might learn the account the opportunity is with is also an active customer of three other partners. The rep will either spin up a conversation with their counterpart at the partner’s org or they’ll ask Lavoie for assistance if they don’t have a relationship with the partner’s rep just yet.

“Then, I can reach out to the partner and say, ‘Hey we’re really close with this deal. I think a recommendation from your team will go a long way to closing this account,’” says Lavoie.

In another scenario, the rep might learn the account is a prospect of a partner. Even better! The Gorgias rep can work with the partner’s rep to strategize a joint solution or pitch to increase both their odds of winning the deal. 

Lavoie makes sure he isn’t slowing down the process for his reps by giving them the exact messaging they need to contact the partner directly. He’s pinned two sets of copy to the top of the “Partner Influence” Slack channel:

“Then for rare cases where they’re not sure who to talk to or if we don’t have them on Slack, they’ll ping me, but I’m trying to avoid that so I can save myself some time. That’s why I provide copy they can use to contact the partner directly,” says Lavoie. 

Gorgias keeps track of partner-sourced deals (i.e. referrals) and partner-influenced deals using a couple of properties on the “Deal” record in HubSpot.

The fields include:

The partnerships team at Gorgias will keep track of partner activities in one of two ways: Either they’ll manually mark the relevant fields, or they’ll automate it by forwarding email exchanges to an email alias or by Bcc-ing the alias email.

Let’s say Gorgias is working an opportunity with a strategic enterprise account that also happens to be a customer of a tech partner. Lavoie might request the tech partner to put in a good word on Gorgias’ behalf with the account and give them a pre-written email to make it easy for them to do so.

Once the partner makes the introduction, Lavoie will forward the email to an alias email address that captures the attribution (using Zapier) and automatically marks the relevant partner in the Partner Influence field in HubSpot.

An example of an email Gorgias might send to a partner to capture attribution (using an email alias in the Bcc field that triggers automation in HubSpot). Image courtesy of Gorgias.

Lavoie immediately saw the value in Crossbeam and knew the rest of his team could also reap its benefits. Rather than just “telling” them how great Crossbeam was, he showed them with a step-by-step playbook tailored to how Gorgias thinks about and manages partnerships. 

It’s entirely unique to their business.

The first page of Gorgias’ internal Crossbeam playbook. Image courtesy of Gorgias.

The six-page Crossbeam Playbook covers:

“I did this internally for our teams to learn how to use it, and I said, ‘Okay, that’s great. But I also need to teach my partners how to use this because I get so much more value if they know how to use it as well as I do,” say Lavoie.

And thus, the Ultimate Crossbeam Playbook for Partners came to life. Lavoie cloned his internal playbook and modified it to be public-facing for his partners to use. Lavoie will send this playbook to partners typically at the beginning of a new partnership to show them how serious and committed Gorgias is.

He’ll also highlight the playbook as a perk in his monthly partner newsletter that goes out to all 200+ partners.  

Gorgias highlights their Crossbeam playbook in their Partner Newsletter and makes it dead simple for partners to get started with real-time account mapping. Image courtesy of Gorgias.

Gorgias and its partners also use the Account Mapping Matrix in Crossbeam to see which of their mutual customers are using an integration so they can find the right candidates for joint case studies.

“It’s super easy to find top mutual customers with a partner and get a big piece of case study content going,” he says. 

They’ll click into the Customer<>Customer box to access an account mapping report and using filters, narrow the resulting overlaps down to a list of top five customers. Together, Lavoie and his partner will review the final five and pick the best mutual customer for a case study.

From there, Gorgias and its partner will contact the mutual customer to gauge their interest in a case study. If the customer agrees, here’s roughly what happens next:

The partner marketing team at Gorgias recently published this case study, Learn how Wren + Glory incorporated Attentive and Gorgias into their Shopify technology stack, increasing purchase volume by 230% year over year.

Gorgias used Crossbeam to identify this mutual customer for an integration case study featuring three partners. Image courtesy of Gorgias.

“We identified the mutual customer via Crossbeam and it’s great because it’s a triple threat. It was one of our tech partners and one of our agency partners who also uses Crossbeam,” says Lavoie.
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Since adopting Crossbeam, Lavoie says life has become much easier. 

“While everyone wants to do account mapping and referral exchanges, it is simply not feasible for most SaaS companies like Gorgias to do it at scale without a tool like Crossbeam,” he says.

Psst…if you’re fired up and want to learn more, sign up to watch the 20-minute on-demand recording of The Inside Track: Top Partnership Plays from Gorgias’ Chris Lavoie. (There’s even a bonus play in there!)