B2B Partnership Models

1. Agency Partnership
2. Referral Partnership
3. Technology Partnership

The legendary psychedelic rock band, “Pink Floyd” used the line, “Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all, together we stand divided we fall”. This captures the essence of partnerships!

Partnerships have been like a breath of fresh air in a world where lead generation through sales and marketing is witnessing saturation.

A survey by Demand Gen Report (DGR) found that 96% of businesses expect to increase revenue due to their partner ecosystems. Intriguing, isn’t it?

Talking of partnerships, the RevOps-led B2B partnership models have been one of the cornerstones in our growth as a technology-focused revenue operations agency, along with our partners as they broaden the horizon of business opportunities, facilitate risk sharing, and enhance the brand image.

B2B Partnership Models

Agency Partnership

In an agency partnership, a business partner provides services to its partner. That’s it? 🤔 Well yes, but it’s time to have more clarity. 😀

On the virtue of a strategic partnership with us, The Spot On Agency (which specializes in digital marketing for healthcare software companies), enhanced its workload efficiency by leveraging HubSpot.

They were facing challenges with HubSpot operations, managing marketing ops for a diverse client base, and ensuring timely and efficient delivery of services due to a lack of in-house experts.

Their collaboration with us involved handling tasks such as web design, lead generation, content creation, marketing workshops, and branding, with a significant emphasis on HubSpot-related activities for their clients.

By utilizing HubSpot’s SEO tool, we bolstered their online presence for better outreach.

Through our portal audits, there is a significant improvement in their portal’s utilization for their clients.

And it doesn’t end here! With the backing of our pool of RevOps experts, they have geared up to take on the additional requests and marketing ops responsibilities from their clients, which had seemed daunting earlier.

Agency partnership can be a game-changer due to the following reasons:

• Reduces your dependency on in-house experts.
  
  
• Helps you minimize the cost and hassle of hiring, training, and onboarding.
  
  
• Brings to the table the proven expertise of your reliable partner, almost as if you have a “complimentary expertise” at your fingertips.
  
  
• Empowers you to venture into offering services that you were not confident about.
  
  
• Beyond numbers, partnering with reputed agencies does a world of good to your brand value, which pays off in the long run.

Referral Partnership

A referral partnership is all about having partners that happily recommend your brand to the people and businesses who they believe are the right fit. And that’s exactly what Canvas Marketing Solutions did.

One of their clients, Hireacamera needed expertise to get the GA4-related work done. And so, they were recommended to us. Our GA4 experts delivered to fulfill all the requirements and since we could find the client via Canvas Marketing Solutions, we shared a part of our service charge with them.

One key aspect is, that you don’t have to limit yourself to what your partnership is primarily focused on, the boundaries can be pushed. And that’s where co-marketing comes into the picture.

In this, the marketing campaign brings together different brands to share expertise, become each other’s word of mouth, and promote the products and services to each other's audiences.

For instance, Hustle Fund is one of our referral partners.

• We appeared as a guest speaker for one of their webinars to share the experience of working in our domain. In this in-person event in the US (Founder Friends), a lot of founders from various companies took part. Events like these are key to your networking strategy (which can lead to more referrals gradually).
  
  
• We also collaborated to create our first YouTube video on automating your lead gen.

Referral partner program benefits include the following:

• The idea is so simple to execute, that it creates a network of partners who can recommend the clients to one another.
  
  
• The degree of instilled assurance is high in the clients' minds as they are being recommended by a company that they already trust and believe in.
  
  
• The high satisfaction level sets the platform for future transactions as well.
  
  
• As we saw in the example above, this partnership model becomes the doorway to the new customer base.
  
  
• Referrals one after the other create a multiplier effect to boost your brand’s visibility.
  
  
• Your ROI thanks it as there are either little or no upfront costs.

Technology Partnership

Technology partnership strategy is similar to that of a referral partnership. Here your referred partner offers services related to technology (no prizes for guessing that 😋), largely within its niche.

To drive the point home, let’s take a look at Potion, which happens to be one of our technology partners. We refer our clients and partners who wish to increase their conversion rates by leveraging their personalized videos, AI-driven outreach, video prospecting, and video Email.

And it’s not always about a direct referral to Potion. For instance, we even create content about how our partnership with Potion can bolster your conversion rate so that our clients, partners, prospects, etc. get educated about their offerings and services.

Let’s take another example, HubSpot happens to be our tech partner and we are their gold-certified solutions partner. This instills confidence in our potential partners and clients to render our services or refer their clients to us.

You should consider leveraging technology partnerships for the following reasons:

• It brings some of the best tech-related service providers under the wings of your strategy building.
  
  
• You get to choose the tech partners who have a great deal of expertise within their niche.
  
  
• Like a referral partnership, it becomes an avenue for enhanced brand awareness.
  
  
• Apart from the usual referrals, the second-party data can strengthen your lead generation pipeline.
  
  
• Facilitates sharing of risks in the evolving modern tech landscape.

Final Words

Moving on, some of our notable partners are Syncari, Apollo.io, Hustle Fund, Funnel, Dealhub, Intercom. Oops, rather we should call them our power-packed Avengers! 💪🦸

And we feel delighted to be their Nick Fury, who brings them all together to provide a 360-degree solution to businesses, fulfill the requirements of their clients, and relish a RevOps journey together that’s built on mutual growth.

We at fractional CMO, would be delighted to be your trusted partner and together, assist you in gathering the right tech stack and implementing streamlined marketing ops, customer success ops, sales ops, etc.