Ecosystem-Led Growth

BOB MOORE is Co-Founder and CEO of Crossbeam, an Ecosystem-Led Growth platform that generates leads, closes deals, and grows companies by leveraging partner ecosystems. He previously co-founded Stitch and RJMetrics, acquired by Talend and Adobe, respectively. Learn more at Crossbeam.com and contact Bob at RobertJMoore.com

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part 1 My $2.6 Billion Mistake 5
1 Muscle Memory and Scar Tissue 7
A Revolution in Business Intelligence 8
The Rollercoaster of Product- Market Fit 10
2 Disruption Is Cool Until It Happens to You 13
Amazon's Big Move 13
The Modern Data Stack Is Born 17
The Ecosystem Effect 18
3 How Partner Ecosystems Saved My Career 21
Part 2 The Ecosystem Revolution 25
4 Decoding the Confusing Language of Partnerships 27
Tech Partnerships 32
Channel Partnerships 36
Strategic Partnerships 38
Marketplaces 40
Partner Relationship Management 42
5 Why Legacy Partnerships Were Set Up to Fail 47
6 The Ecosystem Data Layer Arrives 55
7 Why Now? The Disruption of Growth as We Know It 63
Inbound Marketing and the Great AI Reset 64
Outbound Sales: A Negative- Sum Game 70
A Targeted Attack on Targeted Ads 74
Sales Intelligence: The Bundling Era 76
Product- Led Growth: A Different Animal 81
Another Door Opens 85
Part 3 Beginning Your ELG Journey 87
8 Is ELG Right for Me? 89
Value Proposition 89
Company Scale 91
The ELG Readiness Matrix 91
9 Getting Buy- In for ELG 95
Setting the Right Goals 95
Attributing Success to ELG 97
Eliminating Partner Team Baggage 101
10 Overcoming Security and Privacy Objections 107
Can I Trust My ELG Platform? 108
Does ELG Itself Expose Me to Risk? 111
11 Powering Up Your Account Mapping Matrix 121
Part 4 The ELG Playbooks 125
12 The ELG Playbook Map 127
13 Ecosystem Development: Populate Your Partner Ecosystem with Winners 131
Prioritizing Partners 133
Curating Data Access 137
The Partner Prioritization Matrix 139
14 Ecosystem- Led Marketing: Fill Your Funnel with Ecosystem Qualified Leads 143
The Ecosystem Qualified Lead (EQL) 144
Generating EQLs with Second- Party Data 146
Marketing Automation and Account- Based Marketing 148
Outbound: Upgrade Your SDRs to PDRs 151
Reinventing Event Strategy 155
Turning Investors into Pipeline Generation Engines 159
15 Ecosystem- Led Sales: Close Bigger, Better Customers Faster 163
Strategy and Buy- In: The ELG Sales Tetrahedron 164
Meeting Sellers Where They Are 170
Co- Selling 177
Hyperscaler Cloud Marketplaces 185
Training, Enablement, and Accountability 187
16 Ecosystem- Led Customer Success: Eliminate Churn and Grow Accounts 193
Driving Customer Success with Tech Partners 195
Driving Customer Success with Channel Partners 198
Conclusion: The Future of ELG 203
Glossary 205
Bibliography 217
Author Bio 223
Index 225