Partnerships Led Growth Project

Step 1

Product Market Fit achieved:

→ 71k+ followers on Linkedin

→ Bragging and positive reviews on website, youtube, linkedin, quora

→ Social proof :

1. https://www.crio.do/testimonials/
2. https://www.quora.com/Can-someone-guide-me-regarding-the-Crio-Fellowship-program-Are-their-projects-outsourced-by-real-companies-or-are-these-capstone-projects-with-industry-grades
3. https://youtu.be/WTN2xBato2s
4. https://analyticsjobs.in/course-review-ranking/full-stack-development-course/#:~:text=is – 6 months.-,Pricing,9%2C999 %2Fmonth for 18 months.
5. https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-review-of-the-Crio-do-full-stack-or-backend-program-Is-it-worth-it
6. https://www.crio.do/placements/

Step 2

Customer journey-

• Customer explores Crio as a viable options
• Gets convinced by sales team/marketing media
• Enrolls themselves
• Goes to the payment stage and explores various options
• Drops off either due to inavailability of funds due to -
• • Not being able to get a loan
  • Bad interest on loan
  • Too many document required for a fresher

Pain points:

• Less lending options
• Bad interest loan schemes
• Document requirement is high

(These pain points are insights drawn from linkedin and quora searches of customers complaining about Crio and the lending service provider they currently have)

Partnership with a good lending provider who can provide a solution for these pain points will lead to better conversions on the final step and enhanced customer service experience.

Step 3

🔬 Litmus test to check whether the product is ready for partnership.

​

Applying the Partnerships Framework

​

​

Step 4 - Identifying the right partner

👉🏼 Explain your ICP here:

​

👉🏼 Mention your brand values here: Quality

​

👉🏼 Explain your current market here: Freshers & experienced professionals in the software domain

​

👉🏼 Share your list of possible partners here: Paytm, Mobikwik, PolicyBazaar, Pine Labs

​

💡Perform a partner fitment test using the template below

Scoring Method Yes - 1; Maybe - 0.5; No - 0

​

Step 5 - Outreach strategy

📝 Create a list of possible PoCs

​

👉🏼 Mention your PoC list here

​

​

​

Scoring Method Yes - 1; Maybe - 0.5; No - 0

Draft your first outreach message to the PoC. Mention clear subject, your introduction, the ‘why’, goal alignment, and clear CTA.

​

👉🏼 Outreach message here:

​

Subject: Paytm x Crio | Unlock a new market with us

Hi Vaastav,

I am Abc, leading brand partnerships business expansion at Crio

I was looking for a high quality lending partner for our Crio students and my search ended with Paytm Pay later. With us you can tap a market of more than 50k Crio learners with an average ticket size of 1.5 lakh.

I invite you to a call with me to explore this mutually beneficial proposition further which will help both us and our companies grow.

What would your strategy be to get your foot in the door to reach a meeting?

Outline the channel you’ll reach out on, the message you’ll send, and any follow-ups you might want to do. Build a comprehensive strategy from A-Z on how you’ll reach out on email, socials, cold calls etc.

👉🏼 Strategy here:

Reaching out on email, & linkedin would be the primary channels.

Subject: Paytm x Crio | Your big revenue breakthrough

Hi Vaastav,

To give you some more insight on Crio, we have been actively growing & acquiring new customers for the past few years and have a very high NPS. Our average ticket size is 1.5 lakh and more than 60% of our learners take our courses on an EMI or via an education loan from different lenders. We want us to seize this opportunity together as partners and improve the customer experience while making a profit.

Looking forward to your response!

Step 6 - First Call Design

Before the call

Research your partner’s current goals (what do they talk about on their website, social handles, content blogs, recent events, other resources)

👉🏼 Partner’s current goals:

​

Onboard more customers and identify lending opportunities to grow business

Do these goals align with your current goals?

👉🏼 Reasoning here

​

Requirement for lenders, lending at a good interest rate will boost the conversions that happen specially for people who can not afford the course directly or are not convinced with the current lending partner

👉🏼 Value prop design here

​

If Paytm decides to partner with us they get an opportunity to tap into a market of people who want to learn with Crio but can not afford the course directly or are not satisfied with current lending options available

📞 During the call

​

👉🏼 Conversation design here:

​

During the first call the conversation would be around:

• Paytm Pay later as the recommended lending partner for Crio
• Helping Paytm get more customers who borrow from Paytm to enroll in the Crio Course
• How the partnership will function and what we are willing to offer
• What is the expectation from Paytm

​

Step 7 - Company buy-in and alignment

💡 Mention your stakeholder and team concerns for this partnership. Explain how would you address each concern.

​

👉🏼 Stakeholder concerns: The ability to get the quality of loans at a lower interest rate consistently from paytm without disruption in service to the customers

​

👉🏼 Product team concerns: Product team concerns: Building a bridge between Crio & Paytm’s systems will take up significant bandwidth

​

👉🏼 Marketing team concerns: Marketing this partnership and all the marketing material would be additional overhead to current commitements

​

👉🏼 Sales team concerns: Selling this paytm pay later partner feature so that it benefits paytm would be additional effort against other payment options

​

👉🏼 Ppt content here:

​

• Partnership objective - Offer better customer experience & borrow trust from Paytm
• Value prop- Better experience by offering a high quality low interest lending partner to lenders
• Impact on your org’s north-star metric- Revenue increase- partnership lending commission
• Customer needs and user base analysis-
• Effort required from various teams - Marketing and Product effort to create and propagate the partnership
• What does success look like? - Better NPS, better user reviews, more last step conversion, incoming revenue from lending commission

​

Step 8 - Building Trust

💡 Solving for trust and engagement with the partner

1. Create a strategy for building trust with your partner at each step of the partnership
2. Create a strategy to improve transparency between you and your partner
3. Create a strategy to increase engagement with your partner </aside>

👉🏼 Strategy for trust building

​

• Show paytm pay later as the recommended option on all crio media, website & during payment
• Promote paytm pay later scheme during the sales calls

👉🏼 Strategy for improving transparency

​

• Share clear statistics of students being enrolled via different payment options and
• Why Crio thinks something works better

👉🏼 Strategy for increasing engagement

​

• Work with paytm to increase the number of people enrolled in pay later scheme

​

Step 9 - Plan and Launch GTM

💡 Before creating your GTM strategy, answer these questions:

​

👉🏼 What is the problem you are solving for?

​

• Using the partner’s brand to build more trust
• Using partner’s better lending offerings to convert customers with more ease

👉🏼 Is there demand for your offering?

​

• Customers need low/no interest plans to make decisions with speed and ease
• People who can’t get loans easily might find it hard to pursue the course

👉🏼 Who’s your brand offering for?

​

• Aspiring Software Engineers
• Software Engineers

👉🏼 Where does your ICP spend most of their time?

​

• Hackerrank
• Netflix
• Instagram
• Geek for Geeks

💡 Create a value matrix for your mutual customers.

​

​

💡 Create a co-marketing strategy for your partnership, include the teams involved, timelines, and effort. If the co-marketing activity is on the partner’s real estate, please mention the approach you'll follow to convince your partner.

​

​