The Ecosystem-Led Growth manifesto
With Support from:
Efficient growth
is more important than ever.
While creating and sustaining growth
is harder than ever.
The old playbooks are failing
Outbound
is dying.
3rd-Party Data
is commoditized.
Online Ads
are less effective.
AI
becomes the big equalizer.
Cash
is king.
Over the past five years, sales efficiency for public SaaS companies has been plummeting
The vertical orange shading indicates COVID.
Source: Tomasz Tunguz, October 2022
Because the Old playbooks rely on volume, not efficiency
Outbound
Keep trying to hire more AEs & SDRs.
3rd-Party Data
Everyone has access to the same signals.
Online Ads
Increased spend for worse payback.
AI
GenAI multiplies everyone’s output.
Cash
Capital is burnt.
- Massive sales layoffs
- Marketing budget cuts
- Undifferentiated value
- Unsustainable exec turnover
- Short-term decision making
- Far more expensive new capital
The solution? Leveraging your own ecosystem
Leverage your partner ecosystem as your company’s most efficient, scalable growth lever. We call this Ecosystem-Led Growth.
Proprietary
A network of partners unique and exclusive to your company.
Scalable
Increases in scope and impact as your company grows.
Measurable
Generates attributable, high-quality sources of revenue.
Efficient
Proven to convert faster and better than traditional outreach.
ELG
Ecosystem-Led Growth is a revolutionary new go-to-market motion that focuses on partner ecosystems as the primary way to attract, convert, and grow customer relationships.
Ecosystem-Led Growth leverages your network of partners, community, and marketplace via data, technology, and processes to drive growth at scale, in essence operationalizing the value of the data equity of your ecosystem.
Ecosystem-Led Growth impacts partnership teams, but also Boards, execs, marketing, sales, customer success, product, finance, ops teams as well. It is cross-functional by nature and our aim is to raise awareness of it in the C-Suite as an enabler of efficient growth.
The new playbooks
- Generate Ecosystem-Qualified Leads (EQLs) at low acquisition costs via warm intros and social trust from your partners.
- Product Led Growth. Your product and growth teams infuse partner data into product experiences to increase conversions and upsell customers.
- Increase average contract size with ecosystem selling.
- Shorten your sales cycle by advancing, qualifying, and closing deals faster through the power of the connections in your ecosystem.
- Increase win rates by leveraging the connections in your ecosystem to box out competitors and drive up conversion rates.
- Expand existing customers with customer success teams using their partner ecosystem to increase stickiness, eliminate churn, and grow existing accounts.
Ecosystem-Led Growth powered companies:
SUPERCHARGE
Demand Generation
saw 14x partner-sourced pipeline
SKYROCKET
Efficiency
40x’d sales response rates
AMPLIFY
Deal Sizes
drove 34% higher ACVs
DRIVE
Retention & Expansion
saw 4x the upsell size
What Ecosystem-Led Growth is not
- A single-company effort - ELG is not a brand; it is a go-to-market motion that involves multiple products, technologies, data, agencies, communities, and above all believers and practitioners that use ELG for efficient growth.
- Just for partnerships - ELG is cross-functional; while partnership professionals play a big role in ELG, we believe that all revenue teams, sales, marketing, customer success, finance, ops, have their role to play as well; in fact, for ELG to be successful it requires cross-functional involvement and commitment.
- Another ‘led-growth’ buzzword - this manifesto is about the point that ELG is here to stay, that ecosystems have the power to drive efficient growth in a differentiated, measurable, and scalable way; we know companies that are extremely successful running ELG already and we aspire to raise more awareness.
- Fully figured-out - we still have a long way to go in terms of people, tech, processes to operationalize ELG and we can work together to get there.
ELG pioneers