The key to growth is more than Capital.

By accelerating GTM maturity, we enable our portfolio companies to outpace their peers
In Revenue Capital
The Manifesto

Ecosystem-led growth, partner ecosystems & trust.

Lately a lot of new terms have sprung up to refresh what is a very old and proven rule: relationships are the currency of success.

The influx of interest surrounding Partner Ecosystems is not just indicative of the need for a new GTM playbook, it’s an alarm bell signaling current ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ methods are in swift decline. These failing channels have been adopted by every B2B org on the planet, and it’s no longer working. It’s time to crumple up the old map, toss it aside and chart a brand new courses opened up by the power of relationships.

Fundamentally, the Inbound and Outbound demand strategies upon which the growth plans of many modern companies are based, are built not to serve the successful growth of the adopter, but instead to serve the success of vendors that facilitate those strategies. These are modern maxims literally created on the misleading idea that digital channels are everything.

As a result, digital environments have become more competitive than ever, seeing their highest growth rates in over a decade at 35% in 2021. Audiences are increasingly demanding in terms of value and personalization, while also becoming more difficult to engage digitally. Combine these challenges with increasing privacy veils and the impending death of the 3rd party cookie and you see inefficiencies emerge that make current strategies untenable when used exclusively to engage your target audience.

The bottom line is this, people don’t want to talk to people they don’t trust. Buyers have always sought out trusted influencers to inform purchases, and this remains more true today than it ever has been.

In the last five years, B2B customer acquisition costs (CAC) have grown by over 60% with backbone channels like paid search and display bearing the largest increases.

The Shift

The digital tectonics are shifting, and new, more efficient channels have to emerge to provide balance.

We have deep experience in B2B SaaS

As career business operators, we’ve been fortunate to build and exit a half-dozen businesses across diverse verticals from SaaS to Payments to Services. One of those companies (LeadMD) was the top GTM consultancy in the B2B SaaS space, leveraged by literally thousands customers to digitally transform their GTM efforts. Yet, all of those diverse organizations had to solve the same fundamental problem – how to win the trust of their target buyer.

The same principals we used to build our own companies, held true for our clients, and continue to do so for the companies we invest in. At the center of everything, relationships and trust open the doors necessary to access target buyers and win the right to solve their pains.

Despite the false narratives perpetuated across most of this millennium, buyers are humans. Humans don’t buy exclusively online, they don’t even buy exclusively from people they like, but they do buy from people they trust, every time. This very human desire for authentic relationships and trusted information are the only tools that truly unlock demand and growth.

Relationships are the currency of success, and establishing trust makes all the difference between capturing alpha or falling behind.

Partner Ecosystems

How do you scale both relationships and trust?

The answer lies in the creation of thriving Partner Ecosystems.

Historically, “partner programs” have largely been a check of a box. At their worst, they were a thinly veiled proxy for pay-to-play. At their best, they were an anemic acquisition channel. In the new world of partner ecosystems, they should be a fundamental strategy for creating and extending value to both the B2B organization and its clients.

When a customer chooses your solution, or more so, they choose you, you must consider the fundamental reasoning that sparked that choice. They have a problem, or ‘opportunity’ as we say, and they have placed their trust in your ability to help them achieve their goal. Those goals are big, they’re nuanced, and there’s absolutely no way your product addresses every aspect of that need.

In Revenue Capital

At LeadMD, we called these ‘outcomes.’ We defined outcomes as the identification of the type of desired achievement that removes you from the cost lines on a P&L and places you mentally in the investment category. If you understand these desired outcomes, and more importantly become integral to achieving them, you become mission critical. You create trust.

Outcomes such as driving revenue, opening up new markets and retaining customers are both simple as well as extremely complex. They require a symphony of strategy, process and tools working together in harmony. They require partners, working together.

When you begin to consider the customer in the same way that you would a project that requires collaboration to be successful – you also begin to realize how archaic the legacy partner model has been. In the past, the view of the customer has been more akin to an asset, something to be owned, coveted, and further monetized where possible by way of renting that asset to essentially the highest bidder. Partners were anything but, they were a back-alley transaction.

Today, at HubSpot, partnerships drive 40% of the $16B company’s revenue. That’s not coincidence, that’s intentionality.

In Revenue Capital
Our Belief

In order to drive partnerships with intentionality, they have to be given the prioritization they deserve.

And this starts at the very first interaction.

Partners must be given the same experience given to your best hire: recruited, properly trained, supplied with the tools needed to succeed, incentivized, etc. We believe that true partner ecosystems are requisite both for SaaS growth as well as their long term growth and scale. And it’s not just our words – look at the highest performing SaaS companies: Hubspot, Microsoft, Adobe, etc. and you’ll see highly functioning partnership machines, firing on all cylinders. It’s time for everyone in the org – from the top down – to rethink and reprioritize how they build and execute partner programs. At In Revenue, we have two core beliefs:

  1. Venture capital must provide more value than capital alone
  2. Partner ecosystems are the critical component to accelerating and maintaining efficient growth

Tiffani Bova, the Global Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce said recently, “Trust is by far the new currency.”

We believe that wholeheartedly. By injecting capital, along with proven strategies and tactics to build a trust engine fueled by Ecosystem-Led Growth, we can fundamentally change the startup success equation.

– In Revenue