Investing in Crossbeam

It’s no secret that the Cambrian explosion of SaaS applications is already leading to a massive shift in how companies reach and engage with customers. As students of this evolution, we’ve watched the decade-long Death of the (traditional) Salesman alongside the rise of inside sales, alliances, and more recently a mega wave of product led growth.  

One of the key drivers of this evolution is the indisputable migration away from an era of full suite SAP and Oracle domination. Buyers want best in class across every category–from data infrastructure, where usage is tightly coupled with ETL and business intelligence, to go-to-market software, where CRM is often paired with lead generation and sales enablement. This shift means alliance and partnership teams are forming earlier in a company’s journey than ever before as partnerships have become essential to unlocking these new go-to-market motions. 

We’re not talking about the type of partnerships that past generations of enterprise sales people will remember (aka the function where “non-revenue things go to die”). We’ve entered a new era of partnerships and if your team isn’t running partnerships in a data-driven, revenue-enhancing way, you’re doing it wrong. Full stop. The fastest growing companies at scale are using partnerships across their ecosystem to generate better qualified leads, increase win rates, shrink sales cycles, and grow deal sizes. As a result, partner influenced revenue is rising rapidly; among the fastest growing enterprise SaaS companies, partner generated pipeline can be as high as 50%. Moreover, the impact of partnerships doesn’t stop at the go-to-market team. Integrations have a heavy presence in nearly every product roadmap we’ve seen, and product teams are increasingly seeking quantitative feedback to prioritize integration partners and features. 

Today, many of these high growth companies are deploying Crossbeam as the cornerstone of their partnerships strategy. Crossbeam is a viral, B2B network that enables partnerships, sales, and marketing teams to quantify and execute on the value that co-selling and co-marketing with the right partner creates. Crossbeam replaces the manual, messy, and time-consuming spreadsheets and ad hoc conversations of the past with a secure data escrow that enables companies to share the right information with the right set of partners. For example, by knowing which opportunities are customers of current partners (and vice versa), companies can create opportunities to target marketing messaging and prompt mutual nudges on customer deals. 

The value of Crossbeam first became apparent to us in the boardroom, where we continually saw many of our top performing companies grow by nailing the partnership motion, always adding the footnote: “we couldn’t do it without Crossbeam.” The more Crossbeam customers we spoke to, the more we heard: “Crossbeam is our prerequisite for onboarding partners now,” “AEs who utilize Crossbeam data have been promoted 2-3x faster,” or even “I’m not joining a company unless they’re on Crossbeam.” The common message was loud and clear – Crossbeam is already helping companies generate incremental revenue. Many of them even asked to invest as part of this round.

Crossbeam’s CEO Bob Moore encountered the pain point of not utilizing partners effectively as the CEO/co-founder of RJMetrics where he learned that your place in an ecosystem of tech partners can be just as important as the quality of your product itself. Operating in a silo led to a large divergence in outcome relative to those like Looker who had placed itself at the center of a massive ecosystem. Taking what he had learned from his experiences founding his first company, he started Crossbeam three years ago to build the first and most powerful partner ecosystem.

In the years since co-founders Bob and Buck Ryan started Crossbeam, they have grown the platform virally to over 5,000 companies, hired an exceptional team, and continuously shipped new products (check out their latest, Partner Cloud), not to mention the countless partner ecosystem success stories. We’re thrilled to back this team as they build the network that enables companies to leverage their partners in new and impactful ways. 

In the time it took us to write this blog, over 400 partners joined Crossbeam’s network. Join them on Crossbeam today!