I’ll start with work first before ending why and how we can have successful partnerships.
I grew up in the late ninetees and early 2000’s watching successful partnerships. Being a sports fanatic, I saw the beautiful partnerships between Scholes and Beckham, Saurav and Sachin, R&R of Brazil, and many more.
Partnerships can skyrocket momentum if done right.
“As we work towards navigating to a product company, I can’t help but think how can we start partnering with clients, rather than servicing them. The positioning has changed between us and the clients. Previously we were a service company. Now we are a product company.”. If you are having thoughts like this read on.
Whenever I hear the word “Product” inevitably the word “tool” comes to my mind. Adjustable wrenches, chisels, car, computer. These come to mind when I hear the word “Product”.
The software industry as you know uses the word ‘product’ to describe anything that is ‘shipped’. So if you are a SaaS Product company read on.
I will try to elaborate how I would look at leading lifecycle marketing efforts with the strategy of client partnerships.
Before I elaborate, let me set some context. I will take the example of a products company who ships AI Visibility enhancement products. They have a suite of products with the help of which your visibility in AI gets better ultimately leading to more revenue.
They work primarily in the hospitality and banking verticals. Recently they have forayed into other industries, since they try to position the tools as industry agnostic.
Before reading further, I would highly suggest you search upon how Astral Pipes as a company scaled, in a category of business which was already saturated, only with the help of their product user. That is, plumbers. Their partners.
Taking inspiration from there, and stealing like an artist, I will present a strategy with hoteliers being my users. Instead of hoteliers, you replace it with banker, and the strategy works for the banking vertical. So on and so forth.
The backbone of the success relies on the hoteliers publishing content. Infact that’s the backbone of visibility. Content. First thing I will need to identify, who are the hotel partners with whom I can partner. A shared content production journey with the help of our tools. All getting well documented.
Through this documentation, the communication that needs to be going out to the market? “see how our tools is helping you achieve higher efficiency”.
As a sign of partnerships, provide the clients with a special rate. In lieu, you get all rights to utilise any content produced by client, video interviews, recordings etc. Every possible asset would be utilised for publishing and marketing purposes.
This whole activity and strategy should be done under UGC category. That is identifying few employees who have a natural flair for creating content and giving them the free reign to produce content as they wish, as they want, in partnership with their clients.
In this UGC category, the company does not necessarily govern anything apart from the case where employees should not be portraying the organisation in any bad light.
This strategy in my observation has worked wonders for ClickUp, Ahrefs, SemRush and many more Martech Product companies. UGC is one of the pillars of growth that creates awareness about the product. The various use cases in which the product can be utilized.
The only question remains, what should employees get in return for being an internal salesforce. I’m not a CFO, so I can’t comment on that. But I can comment on how good partnerships work out. A 50-50 model. Get transparent about products pricing. Maybe the cost of building and shipping product is $70 and it gets sold for $85. Provide the $7 in an employee welfare fund.
Or transfer the equivalent sales commission you would normally give to your top sales people. That commission can be send to the employee welfare fund.
This fund is divided equally among any employee who starts creating any UGC content that helps position company in a good light, creates more awareness about products thus helping company grow.
Every quarter, employees of this esteemed “Creator Group” can utilize funds to schedule off site events, meetups, or plain and simple cash in the money.
This helps create transparency among everyone in the organization. Each and every employee may end up thinking of themselves as soldiers in a battle to capture more market share.
Who knows, in the journey of finding better partnerships, you end up finding more owners?
Partnerships can only be sccesful if the spoils of the war are shared equally. In partnering with a hotel, ensure you also provide equal if not more in return. Say, for example, in lieu of producing content you provide a heavily subsidised rate. You help them create content, with the help of your product and content experts. You bring in solutions strategy and help hotel get them implemented. You become a partner for increasing their revenue using the AI Visibility tools.
The purpose of the partnership from the SaaS organization perspective, is to see more people are getting to know about the product and its use cases. After that, the product needs to deliver.
Let me know if you are a SaaS products company, what startegy have you got in place to get more UGC out there in the wild wide world of the internet blackhole?