It’s no secret that here at Work-Bench we live and breathe all things enterprise sales. So when we were first introduced to Pronto by Bob Tinker, founder of MobileIron and go-to-market friend of Work-Bench, we were quickly inspired by their massive vision to rethink Partnership sales with their Ecosystem Management platform.
In a world where organizations are recognizing the value of channel and partner sales, managing ecosystems has become an increasingly challenging task. Pronto is tackling this transformation by helping companies build, manage, scale, and monetize their partner ecosystem.
Channel partnerships used to be a 1:1 game. Enterprises could survive and thrive with one standalone partner and a manually-managed process of spreadsheets and email.
However, in just the last few years, the evolution of enterprise sales has unfolded from a linear transaction to a complex web of relationships with the rise of the “partner ecosystem.” Now, organizations are recognizing that even their partners have partners, revealing a tremendous amount of untapped opportunity along with a strong demand to cross-sell across these exponential networks. An Accenture survey captured this evolution and growth of the partner ecosystem, reporting that 76% of business leaders agree that ecosystems will be the main change agent to a massive shift in current business models over the next five years.
But the majority of partnership teams are having trouble keeping up even now, as they operate manual processes of sending spreadsheets back and forth over email internally to their teams and externally to their Partners, with no system of record and most debilitating of all, the inability to calculate and measure the ROI of these partnerships.
Pronto’s platform helps Partnership teams manage their entire ecosystem relationship workflow, by unifying their partner data, enabling collaboration and planning, and measure and track ROI for each of those partnerships.
While many may believe that Salesforce can help with aspects of this, what most people don’t realize is that CRMs are meant to map 1:1 relationships. While we’re seeing companies configure Salesforce to capture some of their partner data (in unnatural, Frankenstein-like customizations), the CRM ultimately does not capture the full breadth of many-to-many relationships now prevalent in the Partnerships world.
Above all, given how prized customer data is, even sharing such opportunities with partners is fraught with risk, and why it is imperative that companies have a secure way of sharing such opportunities.
Beyond automatically identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities for partner teams, Pronto’s software streamlines these collaboration processes for partner teams like managing co-marketing, joint solutions, and analytics of which integrations are actually being used or working, so that partner teams can best understand how their products are being use.
Over 90 companies already use Pronto’s platform, including Red Hat, Juniper, BetterCloud, Sisense, and more. Pronto helps customers manage hundreds of partners with thousands in their greater partnership network, and unlocks tens of millions of dollars in shared sales opportunities.
Within the first three months of working with Red Hat alone, Pronto was able to surface and connect a double digit million dollar partner enabled deal pipeline, 93% of which wasn’t clearly evident previously.
From site reliability to customer success, we love when our Work-Bench founders have lived through the pain point they’re solving for.
Prior to founding Pronto, CEO Swaroop Kolli, managed Strategic Global Alliances and Venture Partners at ABB. There, he saw the growing need for a trusted tool that could integrate with organizations of all sizes and strategies, and keep up in the fast-changing, complex environments. From there, Swaroop bootstrapped Pronto for more than 2 years, and even cold LinkedIn messaged his first customer — the kind of GTM hustle we aim to see in every founder we back.
Swaroop’s passion for the future of ecosystem management is contagious, and we could not be more thrilled to support his massive vision. Congratulations to the entire Pronto team!
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