SalesTechStar Interview with Bob Moore, Co-Founder and CEO at Crossbeam

Bob Moore, Co-Founder and CEO at Crossbeam shares more on the benefits of ecosystem-led growth for B2B teams in this quick chat with SalesTechStar:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Bob, tell us about yourself and more about the story behind Crossbeam?

Crossbeam solves a simple problem that I encountered in every one of my past companies: It’s hard to share data with partners, so it’s hard to turn partner ecosystems into growth channels. Simple questions, like “how many customers do we have in common?” or “are our sales reps selling to any of the same companies right now?” have left revenue teams historically stumped. The best legacy solution was emailing around spreadsheets of lead lists for “account mapping” but these were insecure and ineffective for so many reasons.

We came up with Crossbeam to serve as a secure third-party to connect systems of record, create visibility into partner data, and bring new go-to-market strategies to life. Our customers call this “Ecosystem-Led Growth” or ELG. In fact, our research shows deals close 46% faster and are 53% more likely to close when an ELG strategy is used.

We’d love to hear your view on partnership models and how they’ve evolved, especially more on how leading technology brands use this channel to drive more growth?

Modern cloud computing has radically transformed the nature of business-to-business partnerships. By building, selling and delivering products through digital channels, the barrier to creating a “winning together” partnership is lower than ever. This has led to an explosion in the size of the overall partnership ecosystem and the playbooks that companies can use for Ecosystem-Led Growth. Look no farther than the cloud marketplaces of AWS, Microsoft, and Google to see massive investments in modern partnerships and co-selling motions.

When big tech focuses on GTM motions, it often inspires smaller companies to do the same. A recent survey by Pavilion, a community of high-growth Go-To-Market leaders, shows 48% of GTM leaders say Ecosystem-Led Growth or co-selling with partners have received increased focus at their companies in the past year.

How are you seeing the latest trend of ecosystem led growth redefine revenue objectives and what fundamentals should B2B sales teams keep in mind when using this method to boost business revenue?

The past several years have changed the best practices of revenue growth. From data privacy regulations to the disruptive forces of AI, the old playbooks have stopped being ROI positive. This is leaving companies looking for more proprietary strategies that can scale. ELG answers this call, allowing companies to create a new set of playbooks out of an existing resource: Their partner ecosystem. Adopters of this new playbook are training and enabling sales reps to ask “what’s the ELG play?” on every single deal in their pipeline — whether it’s customizing messaging and approach based on ecosystem data, enlisting a partner to provide account intelligence, or directly co-selling with a partner. These tactics increase close rates, shorten deal cycles, and drive higher customer lifetime values. The fundamentals are simply to connect the dots between existing partnerships and the places your sales team looks for deal intelligence, namely your CRM. This is precisely what we do at Crossbeam.

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When setting in place a partnership format, what should sales and business leaders keep at the forefront of their strategy?

It’s easy to get stuck in the “touchy feely” trap when talking about what makes for a good partnership. And while the personal relationships and politics of partnering are important factors, the modern Ecosystem-Led Growth playbook calls for much more. Measurable success of your program will be rooted in things you can measure, such as the size of your overlapping market and the impact of the partnership on your go-to-market metrics. Crossbeam does this for you: Overlaps in your CRM data can paint a clear picture of the serviceable obtainable market that you share with a partner, and simple analysis of overlapping accounts can show you the lift in customer value, revenue, and engagement that emerges when a partner is involved in the account. Put these together and you can paint a clear picture of which partnerships warrant the time and investment of traditional hands-on relationship management.

A few thoughts on the impact of AI on the future of marketing and sales and partnerships (as well as the technology that drives partnerships) and how you feel partnership models will evolve in the near future?

AI will be a force multiplier for partnerships for all the reasons it’s poised to revolutionize other areas of work: Creating new interfaces for getting work done, making existing team members more effective, creating informed recommendations, and conducting massive context-aware customization. In short, higher quality work will get done by smaller teams with greater professionalism. But there’s an exciting second story at work here: Partnerships will also be a force multiplier for AI. As it turns out, the most important input to modern LLMs is context — data from your partner ecosystem represents a rich, proprietary source of contextual data that can make AI agents smarter about your business. As a result, any AI-powered technology that helps go-to-market teams make better decisions and take better actions will do a better job if it can access data about where partner relationships exist, and can learn from what partners know about target accounts. This is the very same data that powers ELG playbooks and results from using Crossbeam.

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