#127 Bogdan Petrescu: How Partners Make Scaling Simple

How can you grow your business without growing your staff?

You form partnerships!

When you optimize your ecosystem, your partners help you grow your consumer base, introduce you to new verticals and enhance your joint offerings.

In this episode, Bogdan Petrescu, Director of Strategic Alliances at Nylas, joins Ecosystem Aces and discusses how he helps the startup scale their business through partnerships.

Bogdan shares:

• How Nylas turns partners into customers and visa versa
• How Nylas measures the success of their ecosystem
• How Nylas scales their business through partnerships

The Partner-Customer Dual Relationship

The right partner for you is the one that understands your product, its target market, and where it can be improved. Because of this, the companies in the know realize that no one makes better potential partners than your existing customers. After all, who has a better understanding of your product than your customers?

Nylas goes a step further by also doing the reverse and converting their partners into customers. This allows partners to contribute to the company’s direct revenue and not just resale or referral revenue.

The best partners are the ones that know your business. Nylas also looks for partnerships with companies that sell to the same customers. When the company found that a large group of their customers used third-party developers and consultants to activate their solutions, Nylas wasted no time partnering with these companies to optimize their offerings.

Nylas’ Measures of Partnership Success

When it comes to measuring the success of their ecosystem, Nylas focuses on the bottom line. Their main measurements are pipeline and the revenue closed from that pipeline.

However, the company also understands that while these metrics remain the north star, optimizing your ecosystem requires taking a deeper look at partnership contributions.

A challenge that Bogdan is currently taking on is how to appropriately break down the assist revenue metric.  Partners don’t equally contribute to co-sell revenue so being able to quantify one partner’s value-added against another is key to understanding the success of each alliance.

This evaluation of a partner's influence on revenue becomes even more important when you’re looking to build a partner incentive program or a way to reward partners.

Scale Your Business Through Partnerships

Nylas strategically forms partnerships and orchestrates their ecosystem to grow their business. For example, Nylas’ partnership with Google allowed them to enter the Google marketplace. This expands their channels and grows their prospective customer base. The partnership with Google also allowed the company to build their solution natively on the Google platform. This makes the activation of their offering require less work and allows the company to focus on growing the business in other ways.

Nylas’ partnerships with automation and integration platforms also help the company scale their business. With these partnerships, the company doesn’t need to supply other resources and worry about the integration of their product. This means the company can focus on closing more deals and generating more opportunities.

Links & Resources

• Learn more about how WorkSpan helps customers accelerate their ecosystem flywheel through Co-selling, Co-innovating, Co-investing, and Co-marketing.
• Join the WorkSpan Community to engage with other partner ecosystem leaders on best practices, news, events, jobs, and other tips to advance your career in partnering.
• Find insightful articles on how to lead and get the most out of your partner ecosystem on the WorkSpan blog.
• Download the Best Practices Guide for Ecosystem Business Management
• Download the Ultimate Guide for Partner Incentives and Market Development Funds
• To contact the host, Chip Rodgers, with topic ideas, suggest a guest, or join the conversation about modern partnering, he can be reached on Twitter, LinkedIn, or send Chip an email at: chip@workspan.com

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