When market conditions are volatile and competitive, which levers do you pull to drive growth?
Do you build new solutions to help you eradicate process bottlenecks and other roadblocks slowing you down?
Do you buy new technology and invest in new systems to help deliver efficiencies and productivity?
Or do you partner with other ready-made services and look to improve your offering to customers?
While every organisation will adopt a different approach based on access to resource, risk appetite or anticipated growth trajectory, our recent webinar made a strong case for the value of partnerships at driving sustainable growth.
In a panel discussion hosted by our Director of Partnerships, Alan Walsh, we invited Ryan Joyce, Head of Fintech UK&I at Salesforce and Rob Parker, CTO at Oxygen Finance to talk about the value of marketplaces, the power of APIs and integrated systems to drive customer value and loyalty.
Here’s a taster of some of the incredible insight gleaned from the conversation and below are three key tips shared by our panellists:
Watch the full debate: Find out how to leverage partnerships to drive growth
1. Marketplaces drive significant customer value and loyalty
According to Ryan Joyce, a large chunk of Salesforce’s value comes from its marketplace and its capacity to enable users to leverage disparate tools to enhance their offering.
Ryan spoke about the new war for attention in the industry and how that was impacting the market:
“The escalating competition for customer attention is manifesting itself in marketplaces where organisations look to meet multiple customer needs within a single platform.
“It is really important to quickly ascertain if you are able to hold your customers’ attention on your own, need to add services or add your services to other platforms. Very few can or will do all three but there is tremendous potential for growth in marketplaces.”
2. APIs deliver transparency and rapid deployment
For Rob Parker at Oxygen Finance, a partnership has to be built on openness and trust, and once you have those keystones the alignment around objectives becomes easier.
Rob spoke about how APIs give you the visibility into what the partnership will truly provide while making it easier to implement and get going with your joint proposition faster:
“APIs have a unique ability to showcase a company’s capabilities clearly versus what you have been told it can do.
“For us at Oxygen Finance, there are two fundamentals we assess when it comes to partnerships: openness and alignment.
“Openness is a testament from both sides that clearly indicates what is on offer. Alignment is all about how those partners match with your brand and credibility.”
3. Build ecosystems around data to deliver powerful insights
While Rob and Ryan were extolling the virtues of marketplaces and transparency, our Director of Partnerships explained his approach to partnerships: focus on your USP and API everything else.
New technology is designed with integration and interoperability in mind and so now is the time to define your partnership strategy to build an ecosystem that builds loyalty among your customer base while you focus on your own product innovation:
“You see too many organisations try to build everything themselves and ultimately struggle because they stretch themselves too thin. To my mind it doesn’t make sense in today’s market. You can bring different tools together and start to do interesting things with data.
“The rapid emergence of ‘Open Data’ is making data access across multiple sources easier. But, there is little value in that data unless it is turned into actionable insights.
“A lot of work goes into that, including; aggregating, standardising, cleansing, analysing, reporting and more. Partnering with specialists via API to turn data into insights and bring it to life is key and how ecosystems truly show their value.”
Looking for a validated company insights provider?
Take a look at our partnership package to see DueDil’s true value proposition and why our best-in-class API makes it easy to plug us into any use case.
