How to Build a Thriving Partner Ecosystem - YouTube

Hey everyone! Welcome to Uncomplicate by Freshworks, where we answer one question

every day with one expert. Today's guest is Cody Jones from Zapier. As you

all know, Zapier thrives on partnerships and they enable partnerships or

integrations between two products, and pretty much every SaaS company on earth

is their partner. Is that right, Cody?

I mean not everyone but we're working on it, yes.

I think that's a good note to welcome you on. I'm not

going to go into the question because I'm just astonished by the fact that

how could you have so many partners and how do you manage to do that.

So what's your advice being at Zapier, you know, having seen partnerships scale?

What's your advice for people who are trying to build a partner ecosystem or

you know, a marketplace ecosystem.

[Cody] Yeah, great question, thanks Praveen! From our end, you know, one of the most important things is to understand what you are

looking for. So if you can take, basically, marketing personas right of your perfect

partner, who would be your perfect partner and what are the attributes that

would make them your perfect partner? Write those things down, create a bit of

a kind of a list, and then go index your world of potential partners - whether

that's agency partners, software partners, resellers - whatever it might be, you can

go and get this data. At Zapier we index 62,000 software companies and

we used clear in it and a bunch of other data to apply basically weights and

measures to assert to a model of predicting their success on Zapier.

The very first thing I would recommend is saying, go figure out what you want to

do or what the perfect partnership looks like and then go index the the world of

partners, potential partners and that gives you a really good prioritized list

of who to go get on your platform, because you're gonna have to do a lot of

that to get the ecosystem rolling.

So if I'm getting this right the first step is to identify what your ideal partner is going to look like and

then start indexing them and really go hard after them. Just a follow up, a

quick 10 second question - just looking at competitors also, Cody, let's say

if I am probably a marketing automation

company looking at my competition on what they have, does it also help?

Possibly, yes. I would say that the the partnership

playbook typically only has a few different chapters of how this is done.

So if you see a bigger competitor who has more established channels and that

works, absolutely! They might have done a lot of the research for you, especially

if you're in a marketing automation that's industry, for sure.

Okay my follow-up question - because you know you have tons and tons and tons

of partners - how do you manage to kind of maintain a very cordial

relationship with all of them because I'm pretty sure you don't, you know, treat

all your 62,000 SaaS companies in the same way, right. So how do you go about

maintaining those relationships?

Sure, so we do have thousands of partners on the

Zapier platform and we love all of our partners. Any of you that are watching,

thank you, we we love you! But not all partners are equal and that's one of the

very first things that when you create your index, if you will, that it

tells you. So for us we have a very clear prioritized list of partners that are

you know going to have more value to Zapier than maybe the 1,000th SMS app on

our platform. And so, for us, we've aligned all of our resources and our partner

programs to enable the longtail partners - who are maybe lower in the index - with

really beautiful self-serve tools, and partners that are on the higher end in

our Platinum and Gold levels where we dedicate actual human resources to do

quite a bit more interesting work with them. So for us having that index and

having a good idea of how our partners are growing the two things that we

measure -- you're gonna have some sort of measurement on your end -- for us it's how

fast are you growing on the Zapier platform and how clean is your

integration, so what is the health of your integration measured through

feature requests and bugs. And so for us that's kind of how we do it but that

should orient you around how to apply resources to create a beautiful

experience for all of your partners in both a scaled way and then also more of

a handheld way.

Okay awesome. So I'm just gonna try and you know

summarize what you've told in three steps because there's a ton of information that

you have told. So you say just try to have a

persona of, you know, your ideal partner. If you have, if it's an established

marketplace, you know, going after your competitor always helps. Number two,

what you told is, segregating partners based on

the behavior. For Zapier it could be about how clean their integration is and

how fast they are growing on the Zapier platform and probably giving them, you

know, our care and probably, giving them a care accordingly, you know dealing

with them accordingly. Is that right, Cody?

Yeah absolutely! Whatever that thing

is for you whatever you measure, may be its revenue, may be its net new customer

add additions per month, I mean find those find those metrics and follow

your North Star.

Perfect, I think that was a quick

probably the best fireside chat I've had an Uncomplicate till now. Thank you for

joining us Cody, until I see you next time!

Thanks so much Praveen! I'll see ya!