Zapier Global Partner Program Launch
Date: Fall 2017
Methods: Competitive analysis, influencing value proposition, messaging & positioning, user research (survey design & analysis)
Collaborators: Partnerships Marketing, Product Management, Product Design, Design & Research Management
Challenge
Through competitive analysis & user research, I uncovered insights that enabled the development & launch of a global partner program that has led to significant customer acquisition with 5k+ SaaS integrations and a company valuation of $5B.
Process
The Partnerships Marketing team collectively spent several hours every day, answering repeat questions about building integrations when they needed to cultivate impactful & lucrative relationships with partners.
Defining success
All of our success measures were qualitative. One success measure was to increase the number of integrations, but we did not set a target.
Another measure of success was that the Partnerships Team wanted to save time by automating some of the integration building & launch process.
In hindsight, I should have inquired about the exact amount of time spent on emails and/or answering the same questions repeatedly before launch, so that we could see if this metric changed after launch.
Conducting the competitive analysis
The Partnerships Marketing team wanted to build a formal partner program to automate and streamline the process of building integrations with Zapier, which would lead to an increase in user acquisition.
I partnered with a Product Manager & a Product Designer on researching and comparing competitor partner programs.
One major insight from the analysis was that competitors required at least one meeting with someone on their partnerships team in order to learn about their partner program.
We knew we could set ourselves apart by:
- making it easy & accessible to learn about our partner program through public documentation & enablement content
- allowing companies to start building their integration immediately, without having to meet a Partnerships Marketing team member.
Conducting user research with current partners
To ensure that the partner program addressed current partner needs and future opportunities, I developed a survey to better understand the partner experience.
Some of the survey questions were:
- How has your partnership with Zapier been so far? How can we improve it?
- What challenges (if any) do you have in sharing your Zapier integration with your users?
- What types of tools, resources, or services do you wish Zapier offered to its partners, like you?
- What resources would you like to see so you can better understand your tool’s integration with Zapier?
I exported the survey responses into MURAL (a collaboration tool), and partnered with my manager on organizing the insights from the survey responses into common themes.
Utilizing research findings to inform messaging & positioning
We used insights from the competitive analysis and the partner survey to inform the first iteration of the value proposition, messaging & positioning for the partner program.
One important theme from the survey was the strong need for cross-promotional and co-marketing opportunities after partners launched their integration.
Testing messaging with current and prospective partners:
Product Designers created high-fidelity mockups based on the results of the competitive analysis & survey results.
I coached the Product Designers on planning & conducting usability and messaging testing.
The messaging & copy for the partner program was finalized based on the testing results.
Launch results
Since its launch in 2017, the partner program has scaled from 800 to 5,000+ integrations worldwide, which is significantly more integrations than any competitors, making Zapier the market leader in automation SaaS.
The partner program accounts for 40% of Zapier sign ups and it’s a main customer acquisition & revenue source for the company. According to this Forbes 2021 article, the company has surpassed $140M ARR and has a valuation of $5 billion.