The Exchanges

Q Okay, great. Amazing. So, uh, now would probably be a great time to actually get into a definition of, of ELG. What does it mean? And how is that different from the way people typically think about partnerships?

A Yeah, I mean, ecosystem-led growth at its core, it's really a go-to-market motion. Uh, it focuses on partner ecosystems as this primary way to attract and convert and grow customer relationships. And it's, it's distinct from The legacy universe of partner strategy in that it is extremely focused on the impact that the ecosystem can have on your revenue. The KPIs for ELG are the same KPIs for growing your business at its core, right? If you're a SaaS business, that means it's ARR, it's customer retention, it's pipeline generation, it's conversion rates. It's all the things that matter in your sales and marketing and customer success funnels. Those are the metrics that matter inside of ELG and every playbook that you run in ELG maps directly to amplifying and improving those metrics. Um, the other thing that's extremely important and distinct about the ELG plays is the role that data plays in being able to bring them to life. So, um, there's a big why now here, right? Uh, like why, why couldn't this book have come out 10 years ago or maybe even five years ago? And, and all of that actually does have to do with, with data. Um, if you think back to Traditional ways of partnering across companies, there has always been this classic kind of game theory style problem that has existed, almost like the prisoner's dilemma problem, where the questions you often want to answer are not diff…

AI assessment note: “ecosystem-led growth at its core, it's really a go-to-market motion.”

Q And to give a simple example of how customers, uh, use cross beam. So you, you would have, um, you would have a company A and company B, and then they would say, well, I only want to share Our prospects or customers in the Northeast under certain revenue amount, for example?

A Sure. Yeah. And, and, and even more important criteria there might be, I'm only willing to share that customer with you if it's already in your data as a stage three opportunity or later, uh, or maybe, uh, if it's stage three or later, I'm going to share information about who the sales rep is on my side or some more material metadata about the deal. But if it's just in your prospects list or your leads list, or maybe it's just a stage one opportunity, maybe I'll just share the name of the account or some more kind of rolled up information. You know, maybe I'll just give you the number of accounts that overlap or, or something like that so that you can do the analysis of mapping out where there might be hotspots or a large addressable market for the partnership. But as things get more tangible and real, then you can really start to expose richer and richer data that actually drives behaviors and actions on a deal by deal basis. Um, And look, we get the full spectrum, right? There's a whole section in the book about basic security and privacy strategies that we've seen get deployed by different companies. Some of them have ironclad partnership agreements with NDAs that specifically envision doing this kind of work, and they share everything, um, and they're, they're extremely, extremely open, uh, and they use a feature in our product called Greenfield Sharing, where they just kin…

AI assessment note: “And even more important criteria there might be, I'm only willing to share”

Q Great, great. So, um, going back to the why now, uh, why does the world need a new type of go-to-market motion?

A Yeah, this is, this is a moment, right? And I, uh, this is, I think, also why The, the market pool for the book has been so strong and what led us to actually put this together, um, because I could have, you know, 10 years ago the tech didn't exist, but five years ago it did. You know, we were founded in, uh, in late 2018 and we kind of had this vision. We could have written this book then. I think the difference between then and now is that we have, we've gone through the full life cycle of the Zerp era, uh, and we've been able to have a lot of operators Founders, CROs, CMOs, sales leaders, kind of get, ah, the ability to, at a very large and wide scale, when capital was inexpensive, run every single playbook under the sun into the ground. Um, and this includes inbound, it includes outbound, it includes ads and ABM, it includes basically anything you can do to generate demand, you know, when there's not as much emphasis on your LTV to CAC ratios, and you can, uh, have a burn multiple that's up in the stratosphere. Um, every incremental strategy seems great, and in, in that era, I'd say we were kind of like thrown onto the pile as one of those strategies, right, or ELG was thrown onto the pile as one of those strategies. What's different now is there's been a huge wake-up call, again, with a confluence of multiple things happening at once, the most important and pertinent of wh…

AI assessment note: “end of the ZERP era, and this incredible, uh, seismic shift in”

Q let's say I'm a, I'm a company. I am, uh, you know, convinced of the potential of a ecosystem-led growth. Um, what do I do? Uh, how do I know that's the right thing for me? How do I get started? Is that a team question? Is that, uh, you know, buying, uh, a data scroll platform like Crossbeam? Is that like, what, what, how do I get started? Yeah.

A So the cool thing with Crossbeam is that there is a pretty robust Uh, very low lift free tier. That is basically the entry point and a very low lift thing that any company can do is get onto the platform and get connected with your first wave of partners. And, um, depending on the maturity of your business, you may have a fully developed mature partner ecosystem. And the second you log in crossing will tell you who's already on cross beam. Who's not on cross beam. If they're not on cross beam, it gives you a real easy mechanism to invite them in. They can use the free tier as well. Um, and within that free tier, This is where you can do things like, uh, do that initial analysis of just like, if we did unlock this data layer in a systematic way, how many of our accounts would actually be, you know, instantaneously enriched by data from partners in our ecosystem? How much more would we be able to learn about, you know, the every company that's in our sales pipeline right now? Which of those companies would we have more information on? Um, and we actually let you get really, really far in that journey, um, on the free tier, uh, really on purpose. It's really once you want to operationalize that data by pushing it back into Salesforce or Dynamics or HubSpot or adding a bunch of users into the platform. That's when you enter into those, those paid tiers. But, um, long before that, i…

AI assessment note: “get onto the platform and get connected with your first wave of partners”

Q When should a startup start considering partnerships in general and in the LG in particular?

A Yeah, we do. Um, I make this joke in the book that, uh, I, my team is tired of hearing me answer questions in the form of a two by two matrix. Uh, but like if you read the book, you see that there are there, There's a good handful of these two by two matrices in there, and this is a, this is a two by two matrix answer, right? Like, is ELG right for me? When is ELG right for me? Um, the two dimensions in this particular case that end up being important, one of them is, is the overall scale and state of maturity of your business, and the other one is how much ecosystem DNA is inherently built into your company's value proposition. So, Um, the scale one is easy and somewhat obvious, right? If, if you're small, then you are less likely to have kind of the gravitational pull of other companies, which means investing in a partnership will more often than not require heavier lift from you than it will from the partner. Like you're, you are, you're not necessarily going to be able to compel a huge universe of people to build into your platform or to show up and, you know, back up a truckload of really interesting data and, and hand it over to you. There's going to be some kind of investment style lift that, that happens. Um, but as you get larger and larger, your customer base grows, your audience grows, the value of someone kind of cross-pollinating their universe of prospects and cus…

AI assessment note: “overall scale and state of maturity of your business”

Q But, um, uh, it's not related. But, uh, you know, you're doing this for a third time now, and the first two times worked out, but, uh, you know, through sheer willpower and effort, why are you doing another one?

A Yeah, I, I think a lot about the hackathons that we had, uh, at RJ and at Stitch, and we have now at Crossbeam, where I love, they're my favorite days in running the company. They're the most fun, They legitimately end up influencing the product roadmap in a positive way. Stitch was born out of a hackathon and the existence of those things. And what's happening during that hackathon period is people are building stuff they want. They're not building stuff that sounds, you know, academically interesting. By and large, the things that win those hackathons are people just feel a pain day in, day out, and they go and tackle a problem quickly that goes and solves that pain in some way. And that's all entrepreneurship is. Uh, and I think if you look at RJ and Stitch and Crossbeam, uh, one, two, three, these are problems that, uh, I personally felt as someone in the business world, uh, when I was at Insight Venture Partners, RJ Metrics was just productized due diligence. This was the analytics that we were doing to evaluate, you know, whether or not a company was a solid investment. Cohort analysis, customer lifetime value, and trying to find a way to Kind of productize and abstract away all of the complicated scaffolding around doing that analysis was where RJ Metrics came from. And then Stitch was a real problem that we saw over and over again in our own business and at our customer…

AI assessment note: “these are problems that, uh, I personally felt as someone in the business world”