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Software is one of the biggest markets today, and thousands of companies compete in the same space. According to insights shared by Statista, the SaaS market is worth $197 billion in 2023. However, it is expected to exponentially grow to $232 billion by 2024. One could say that the market for softwares and IT solutions in terms of SaaS has become extremely crowded and overly competitive.
It has come to a point where reaching out to the target audience has become challenging for software providers. This is where SaaS Partner programs come into the picture. A report has revealed that companies with over 1,000 employees rely on SaaS applications for their day-to-day tasks and use up to 150 applications.
Using partner programs, software providers are able to rope in different kinds of partners who sell the company's products on their platform or provide referrals so that a wider target audience can be reached.
With Harvard Business Review claiming that partnerships are the key to innovation in the technology industry, 94% of executives have shared the same perception and see the innovative partnership as a necessary strategy. It is one of the most prominent techniques used by solution providers.
Importance of a Saas partner program
A SaaS partner program helps software companies achieve greater sales and recognition of their software in the market. Moreover, according to the Demand Gen 2022 Partner Marketing Benchmark Survey, 96% of the B2B executives have expressed the expectation to see an increase in revenue due to their partner’s ecosystem. Therefore, SaaS partner programs do more benefit than anything else for a software provider.
Here is a list of benefits saas partner programs provide:
- It helps in building a bigger, larger consumer base in the market.
- Builds better brand recognition especially in a new target market.
- Partners are only paid for sales they make and therefore is an effective and cost-efficient plan to achieve higher sales.
- It helps build a better customer service portfolio by providing assistance from implementation to support through partner programs.
- It is a great way to introduce your product through more popular service platforms that have a bigger audience in the market.
How to build a SaaS partner program?
For companies who are planning to build a SaaS partner program, here is a detailed plan that will help you in getting started:
1. Define partner program objectives
Firstly, companies must be clear about their objectives that they hope to achieve through a partner program. It could be higher sales, more brand recognition, breaking into a new demographic or geographic market etc. Whichever goal it is, you must be able to define them clearly so that an appropriate type of partner(s) can be chosen based on the same.
2. Identify ideal partner profiles
There are many different kinds of partners in the market such as Referral partners, reseller partners, integration partners, affiliates and agent partners. Identifying the right type of partner for your specific software solution. The choice of the most effective platform can yield you better results.
3. Create partner program tiers
You can have more than one tier of program partnership at different levels. You can start with a referral program where you are bound to get few but more solid leads. On a secondary level, you could tie up with affiliates and agents to help sell your software on their platform with a trusted backlink that increases web traffic. To improve your customer support aspect, you could sell using a reseller that provides add-on services for implementation and assistance.
4. Establish clear program guidelines and requirements
Once you have identified the right programs and built the tiers for partners, you can set up guidelines for sales and prepare contracts that guide the sales and commission process. Using the guidelines, program partners can mutually enter a contract and negotiate terms.
5. Provide comprehensive partner training and enablement
You can choose to provide partner training and this especially is important in reseller partners. These partners help in various stages and may also provide add-on features. In this case, you can send out a training team to help with implementation, product support and assistance.
6. Develop a robust partner portal
You can choose to build a partner portal that allows secure log in so that your partners can log in their information or look up details of their contract. Partner portals also allow for them to build reports and log in details of their progress and sales achievements.
7. Implement a strong communication channel
Communicating with your partners on a routine basis helps in identifying each other's progress. You can help them in issues they may be facing with your products and resolve any doubts and constantly work on your new goals. Having a SaaS partner team is a good idea.
8. Design incentive and reward programs
As per the contract, the provider and the partner can work on a mutual incentive and reward program. This can include partner bonus, commissions on sales and many other routine reward programs that you can run for them.
9. Foster strong partner relationships
Fostering a positive and healthy partner relationship helps both you, as a software provider and your partner. Having a good partner relationship team or a Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software can help in establishing constant communication with your partners and to have a strong partnership.
10. Constantly evaluate and improve the partner program
Your team must always look towards improving the partner program by continuously monitoring their performance, developing new reward programs, providing feedback and input and vice versa and using a robust partner relationship method. Working on each others’ mutual goals benefits both parties.
Top 10 best SaaS partner programs
There are many different kinds of SaaS partner platforms on the internet and for a new software provider, it can be challenging to choose one amongst others.
Choosing a platform that offers more than one kind of partner program and the partner that has a good presence in the market.
Here is our pick of the top 10 best SaaS partner programs in the market today:
1. Wayflyer
Wayflyer is a funding platform that is most useful for eCommerce companies who are looking for help with funding. It mostly helps with working capital funding by allowing you to access teams that help find funding at good prices.
Features: Helps your clients find funding for working capital by accessing a dedicated team. Clients can hope to grow stronger business wise and increase and concentrate on higher revenue generation.
Pros:
- Helps establish your business
- Earn revenue share
- Get access to dedicated team
- Definite growth
2. Xtremepush
A platform that brings together a world of technology partners, this platform is absolutely amazing for software companies targeting tech giants.
Features: Mobile based platforms for multi-channel customer experiences, target new markets and increase new customers, messaging platform for real time communication. Also provides set and management suite on a subscription basis.
Pros:
- Helps with co-selling
- Acquire backlinks
- Ongoing learning experience
- Connect using a host of communication platforms
3. Syncari
This is a platform that mainly focuses on data protection and privacy. If you are someone in the market looking for integrating and managing data across various systems and want a robust yet safe technology, Syncari is for you.
Features: Use the Syncari suite to manage data and schema changes on all systems, helps unlock business alignment for various business ecosystems, get 2 CRM licenses and great incentives.
Pros:
- Data alignment and data analysis for data confidence
- Data Automation Platform to control data
- Get 2 CRM licenses
4. Integrate
Integrate.io has been specifically designed to help companies manage their data warehouses. It has a suite of features with different offerings for eCommerce clients. It helps businesses design a whole new data platform with its suite of management offerings.
Features: Use their standard integration tools such as ETL, Reverse ETL, ELT and API for data warehouse transformation, plenty of tools for data warehouse management, Integrate and populate data using their tools across various systems.
Pros:
- Easy to use eCommerce solution
- Best suited for large corporates with huge data warehouses
- Transform and Integrate data with low code ETL solutions
- Many rewards and incentives for companies that partner with them
5. Luz
Luz is a mainstream Big Data and Data Science company that helps you get your hands on large chunks of data that is decompressed for your benefit. As an eCommerce client, you enjoy making major business decisions based on the features that Luz provides such as ROI ROI analysis, revenue share, discounts and other co-marketing initiatives.
Features: Luz helps with large data decompression and helps various stakeholders such as Agencies, marketers, affiliates and tech partners in their marketing efforts. It helps with revenue share reports, lead and ROI sharing and other Co-marketing analysis.
Pros:
- Choose any of the 4 groups (Affiliates, Agencies, Marketers or Tech partner) for exclusive suite of offerings
- Keep a check on competitor data using their suite for product data analysis
- Compile tons of website data for managerial decisions
6. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is one of the best B2B partner programs out there that help companies to detect and analyze their website traffic and use this information to create unique sales decisions and shorten their sales cycle, therefore increasing their profitability.
Features: Helps companies to analyze their business clients who visit the website, the pages that they have visited and how they were redirected to this site. Helps in making sales pitch and perform more diligently than competitors by translating their website information.
Pros:
- Analyze your website traffic and target your marketing efforts accordingly
- Make unique sales campaigns for your B2B clients
- Stay ahead of competition by using Data metrics
- Good commissions and discount based incentives
- Helps with lead generation and have a better conversion ratio
7. Gatsby
For companies who are majorly into influencer marketing and rely on social media, Gatsby and their suite of solutions can be one of the best partner programs in the market. With this fully automated influencer CRM application, you can easily transform your marketing efforts to improve your overall visibility.
Features: Gatsby works with all kinds of major platforms like Shopify, Gorgias, Kalviyo etc and helps you optimize user generated content. Using this micro influencer program, you can sync with any platform for your social media pages.
Pros:
- Fully automated CRM platform for social media influencer program
- Easily manage all your influencers with one single platform
- Create high visibility posts with influencers on Tik Tok, Instagram etc
- Get insights on all activities and all platforms at one single go.
8. Chili Piper
Chili Piper is a great meeting automation program that gives partners great benefits. If you are a marketing company that is looking to up their conversion and add revenue streams, then Chili piper is the way to go with its unique Meeting lifecycle automation platform.
Features: Chili piper works as a complete meeting lifecycle automation tool for teams and helps with improving lead generation and conversion based on meetings held. It helps in qualifying leads and allocation to improve real time lead conversion and productivity from events.
Pros:
- Helps clients improve revenue streams
- Helps improve conversion ratios with more inbound leads
- Offers co-marketing, Sales training, marketing funds for clients
- Has a suite of tools to analyze revenue share
9. Builder.io
Builder is a leader in agency based partner programs and helps tech companies to easily build and transform your digital experience efforts for clients. Builder has a unique no code required formula that can easily adapt to your business and helps grow your business many fold.
Features: No matter what tech stack you operate on, Builder.io can help you by transforming your digital experience in a developer approved method. No need for large codes. The platform offers numerous solutions such as 1 on 1 working sessions, demo sessions etc.
Pros:
- Builder.io does not work on heavy coding
- Can adapt easily to any ecosystem and targets digital marketing
- Helps businesses transform and grow instantly
- Free demo, 1:1 sessions and revenue sharing tools
10. Tapcart
Tapcart is one of the best partner programs for building mobile based eCommerce apps. If your clients are looking into simple, automated shortcuts to transform their shopify page to a robust app that offers push notifications to customers, then Tapcart is the way to go.
Features: Easy to use mobile app launcher platform that helps build multi-grib shopping pages with additional search and filter options. Also helps build communication channels with subscribers such as push notifications and message services.
Pros:
- Work with world class eCommerce partner program with clients like FashionNova
- Customer App building platform with referral support
- No code app builder for eComm sites.
- Analyze performance, co-marketing efforts
- Dedicated support team with VIP offerings and creative resources
Conclusion
These are some of the best SaaS platforms that are available today and must be taken into consideration if you are in the market for a good SaaS partner. It is important to understand how partners can help your specific business and which partner product can efficiently help you in building your business and product portfolio.
This guide helps you in setting up a partner program and to choose one or more of the best SaaS platforms in the market.
