Partner Programs are fast becoming a valuable addition to many SaaS platforms. At the end of the day, creating a SaaS partnership program can massively boost your Monthly Recurring Revenue. A great example is SEMrush, they offer a monster of a partner program which helped them to grow very rapidly.
Your own marketing and sales strategy no longer need to work alone. With the advent of partner programs, your SaaS platform can now reach new heights. Partner programs can amplify your reach and broadcast your message to a much more extensive network – a win-win situation for all.
Here, we’ll delve a little deeper into the benefits and methods of building a partner program for your SaaS.
If you have no idea what a SAAS Partner Program is this might not be the right blog article for you. However, our goal is to educate, so we will give you a short description of what a SAAS Partner Program is.
First of all, SAAS stands for Software As A Service. Nowadays you don’t buy a piece of software, you take a subscription on it. You can compare it to Netflix, you pay an x amount per month to use their platform. For businesses, it works now the same, they can have a license on different pieces of software to run their business.
Now we know what a SAAS is we can move on to the “Partner Program” part. To come back to the Netflix example and let’s say Netflix has a partner program, it can work as follows. You can earn money by referring Netflix to your parents, family, friends or followers on social. When you convince others to also take a subscription on Netflix, you can earn up to 20% commission on what they pay for the service. Offering such a thing will help Netflix in their marketing & sales and will help you to generate some passive monthly income.
Now with subscriptions amounts of $10 per month it isn’t that interesting, but what if I told you B2B SAAS tools can charge above $1.000+. It would give huge benefits to both parties and basically creates a win-win.
Reading tip: Affiliate Marketing Glossary
The ultimate goal of a SaaS partner program is to generate more revenue for your business and add value along the way. To make sure your partners generate more revenue for you, you will need to have a plan to get there. Here are some key elements that we recommend to include in your partner program plan;
Tool tip: check out Reditus which is a great B2B SaaS Partner program tool.
The pro’s of establishing a SaaS partnership program are enormous. From amplifying sales and marketing initiatives to grow your business network, these partnerships are designed to benefit all parties involved. In line with best business practices, there are four main benefits to partner programs:
When considering what partner program to build for your SaaS, you will need to define what type of partner program is best for you. Do bear in mind that you do have the option of making use of multiple partnerships. This means you don't have to choose one specific partner program.
To successfully build your SaaS partner program, you must ensure that you follow three key concepts in your efforts.
First, you must align your marketing and sales activities. Having a unified activity agenda with the same goals will allow your sales and marketing teams to boost your sales and revenues. When your sales activities are in line with your marketing objectives, it is far easier to share this critical data with your partners, fostering more in-depth engagement.
Then, Automate – everything. As your channel becomes larger and more complicated once the partner program starts to show results, things can get tricky in managing the workload. Using tools that automate the communications process can eliminate the challenges of too much information flying all over the place. For example, sales enablement tools allow your sales team to put campaigns together in a few clicks, instead of to spend vast amounts of time building them.
Reading tip: How to create a Partner Program for your B2B SaaS
Finally, you need to take advantage of the Data and put it to work. With so much data available, too often much of it goes to waste. Finding ways to efficiently analyze and use this collected information will ensure that your partner program lives up to its potential. Automating this collection process will allow you the opportunity to analyze the data and use it effectively.
So, there you have it. Building a partner program into your SaaS poses almost no downside. The benefits of incorporating these programs into your offering will see sales revenues increase, grant you access to a broader network, and allow for information and technology exchange for the mutual benefit of both your SaaS and program partners.
See here a partner program tool which can help you from setting up the program to generating a monthly recurring revenue for you.