Forrester Study Takeaways: “Invest In Partnerships To Drive Growth And Competitive Advantage”
In April 2019, Forrester released a study titled, “Invest In Partnerships To Drive Growth And Competitive Advantage”. Forrester surveyed 454 companies in the US, Europe, and APAC to evaluate the role of partnerships in driving revenue. We decided to provide you with a snapshot of our findings and provide you with some key takeaways.
Key takeaways from the study (credit: Forrester):
“Three in four respondents (77%) see partnership development as central to their 2019 sales and marketing strategy.”
“Firms with the most mature [partner programs/ are driving 2x faster revenue growth than companies with less mature programs, and are up to 5x more likely to exceed expectations on a variety of business metrics.”
“Over half of the companies we surveyed (52%) get more than 20% of their revenue from the partnership channel. On average, partners contribute 23% of overall company revenue.”
“49% of respondents have seen a boost in revenue and 45% have seen a boost in brand awareness from their partnership program initiatives in the past year.”
“Partnership channel revenue growth rates for high-maturity companies outpace low-maturity companies by 2.3x (28% versus 12%). High-maturity companies also report nearly 2x faster revenue growth at the company level (30% versus 16% to 17%), signaling the importance of partnerships to overall business growth.”
“High-maturity companies strongly agree that the growth of the partnership channel is instrumental to their competitive advantage at a rate 4x higher than low-maturity companies (57% versus 14%).”
Partnership types
Given that we are in the business of partnerships, it was great to see that the growth in the various types of partnerships is set to continue to expand. Keep in mind, that Resellers/VARs/MSPs are mostly present in large enterprises vs earlier stage companies. Also, the geography and industry that the company is selling into will play a large role in the type of partnership that is implemented.
Key Priorities, Investments, and Priorities of Partner Programs
It’s clear that growing revenue and retaining customers are common priorities. The benefits of partnership programs clearly align with these priorities and investments.
CoSell.io was built to help companies with partnership programs uncover new sales insights through prospect and customer overlaps. These insights can directly correlate with growing revenue and retaining customers. The new sales insights lead to more targeted and executable efforts:
- Co-sell (new business sales)
- Co-success (customer retention)
- Co-market (brand awareness)
Partnership Maturity
Forrester buckets the maturity of partner programs into high maturity (top 20%), average (middle 60%), and low maturity (bottom 20%). It’s clear that high maturity partner programs result in higher revenue growth, company valuation, and profitability than average and low maturity programs.
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Sources: Forrester
