The study, titled ‘Invest in partnerships to drive growth and competitive advantage,’ was unveiled on stage at Impact Growth in New York City, and found that companies with the most mature partnership programs are driving revenue growth nearly twice as fast as companies with less mature programs.

Furthermore, the study finds that these companies are up to five times more likely to exceed expectations on a variety of business metrics, such as stock price and bottom-line profitability.

Additional key findings from the survey of 454 decision makers and practitioners from North America, Europe and Asia Pacific include:

• High maturity partnership programs contribute 28 percent of overall company revenues, while low maturity programs contribute only 18 percent. This increase represents an average of US$162m worth of incremental revenue for companies with high maturity programs.
• Partnership programs provide a boost on both ends of the customer spectrum: acquisition and retention.
• 77 percent see partnership development as central to their 2019 sales and marketing strategy.
• 62 percent of companies surveyed believe implementing technology to optimise partnership management will be high priority or critical to drive success as part of a mature program over the next 12 months.

Partnership programs include the management and optimisation of working with a full spectrum of business relationships and alliances, including traditional affiliates, influencers, strategic B2B partners, app-to-app, premium publishers, native software integrations and more.

Each of these partners acts as part of an indirect salesforce, leveraging existing brand equity with their audience to introduce, influence, or provide some type of significant and measurable impact on the consumer journey toward purchasing a product or service from the business itself.

The study identified what makes a mature program. Findings show that mature partnership programs all share a framework of four pillars: people, process, technology and breadth.

The most mature programs have an assigned group of people dedicated to the program that collaborate with other departments; use process to optimise the program across each partner’s lifecycle; implement technology to manage and/or automate portions of the lifecycle; and have an expanded ecosystem of various partnership types currently contracted.

Impact CEO, David A. Yovanno (featured image) said: “Businesses have always found a way to work together and refer each others business.

“But as partnerships have evolved from informal to strategic, and traditional sales and marketing channels have become challenged, we’re at a tipping point in the partnership economy.

“Forrester’s study is a validation of the mission that Impact has set forth to accomplish: helping brands realise the power of partnerships as a true driver of revenue growth.”

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