Some businesses have flooded the internet with AI-generated slop in droves. While search engines are getting better and penalising AI-content, for SaaS products to get discovered by potential buyers is only getting harder.
Frequent updates to Google search algorithms makes it harder for businesses to maintain their rankings, making it difficult to maintain consistent organic traffic, in turn making it harder (and more expensive) to scale inbound marketing.
The AI generated overviews you see on top of your search results page could be knocking off vital traffic that would otherwise be yours, especially on mobile devices. In an increasingly mobile world, this critical loss in website traffic hurts.
It's no longer enough to match keywords—content must now precisely align with buyer intent at various stages of their journey. This requires a more nuanced and strategic (and not to mention expensive) approach to content creation.
Dime a dozen AI tools have made it easier for salespeople to hyper-personalize their content at scale. As a result, buyers' inboxes are flooded with seemingly personalized outreach, making it harder for any single message to stand out.
AI tools have lowered the barrier to entry for outbound sales, allowing more businesses to engage in large-scale outreach. This has resulted in increased competition for buyers' attention.
The use of AI to scale sales and marketing today is like Tom and Jerry with AI filters. Search engines are penalising AI generated content, email filters are rejecting AI automated messages while AI tools are trying to get ahead. You don’t want to get caught in that loop, do you?
With growing concerns about data privacy, your prospects may be more hesitant to engage with AI-driven outreach, perceiving it as potentially invasive or impersonal, putting your outbound activities at risk.
With the digital space getting harder to navigate by the day, inbound marketing is unpredictable and yielding diminishing returns. Outbound, on the other hand, is getting more expensive to scale and losing credibility thanks to AI SDRs and the likes.
With inbound and outbound getting harder, AI slop dominating the internet and pandemic being a long-forgotten relic of the past, in-person sales and micro-events are back and how! But is your business ready? The good thing is even if you aren’t, partners always are.
Key markets are saturated with SaaS products, and geo-politics can make it hard to do business in some countries. Channel partners can help you facilitate entry into new markets and customer segments that might be challenging to penetrate independently.
Setting up offices in new markets, hiring and staffing, marketing and selling to an entirely new set of prospects takes time, is expensive and will most likely fail before it succeeds. Leveraging channel partners can reduce these risks and most importantly, these costs.
Entering a new market without a brand today is like taking a butter knife to a gun fight. Partners bring brand, credibility and trust, enabling you to win love and customer loyalty in new markets while they do all the heavy lifting for you.
The days of a one-size-fits all SaaS product solving a customers’ needs are over. With time there’s been a rise in more point-solutions and micro-SaaS, while customers and prospects too have become more nuanced in how they define problem statements. Your best bet then—present yourself along with complementary solutions, i.e., co-sell.
Partners not only help with sales/implementation—they can also be your eyes and ears on the ground. Partners can help fuel innovation by funneling customer feedback faster, help in developing custom solutions and integrations with other products their customers use.
By bringing onboard partners, you’re signalling that you are hungry for growth and have a sound strategy in place. This could help you in attracting potential investors to fund your growth.
Working with partners who excel at customer satisfaction can lead to higher CLTV (customer lifetime value), increased retention, and a better chance of upselling and cross-selling and maybe even generating referral business through word of mouth!
Partners typically work with multiple products and have established channels of marketing. This allows you to leverage their expertise on what channels work best in new markets and gives you the opportunity to potentially collaborate with joint marketing partners allowing you to lower costs.
Partners with their local presence, market acumen, and years of being in the business provide immediate access to qualified pools of prospects, saving you the time and effort needed to build an audience in a new market from scratch.
Building a robust partner strategy can help you predictably grow and scale your business without the need to proportionately grow your internal teams. Need to grow? Simply add a greater number of strategic partners—it’s (almost) as simple as that.
Built a successful SaaS business and looking to exit? Even in such scenarios, strong partnerships can validate a SaaS company's value proposition to potential acquirers, potentially enhancing valuation during exit negotiations.
Running a partner program allows you to tap into multiple growth levers simultaneously which allows your SaaS business to quickly adapt to changing market conditions and staying ahead of the curve.
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