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Step 1

• Officebee is a Marketplace SAAS platform
• It has achieved $160M worth of annual transactions, 200,000+ active users, ~1.5 million products have been listed using the Officebee platform

​Step 2

User Flow

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Observations on customer experience gaps

1. Discovery of the platform is not easy, reliance on organic search as a discovery channel
2. Awareness whether this platform will solve for customer need comes as a 3rd or a 4th step. Value proposition communication comes late in the journey leading to higher discovery to consideration timeline for customer
3. Customer needs a marketplace but most of the time they are not the experts , customer needs to hire an expert to design and deploy the software at their end
4. Lastly post deployment feature request might not be scalable as this will have capacity limitations at officebee end

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Step 3

Litmus test

Do you have Product Market Fit?

No , as 2 out of 4 customers of officebee are in house marketplace companies

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Are you finding it difficult to acquire new customers or enter a new market?

Yes, as the sales have been stagnant for last 3 months

Are you looking to drive power usage?

Yes

Do you have customers making requests for an integration?

No

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👉 Final Litmus Test Result: There is a Demand gap, though the current customers are still using the product without churn, officebee is finding it difficult to acquire new customers.

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​Step 4

👉 Explain your ICP here:

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👉 Mention your brand values here:

Brand Values : OfficeBee was born from our dream of making it easier to run a business.

It is a marketplace platform that is reliable, secure and scalable. We also ensure that the platform is flexible enough to support many business use cases, so it can help its users reach their goals.

👉 Explain your current market here:

Current Market:

• Government offices using outdated internal & external procurement tools which are highly manual
• Bing MNCs who want to track their procurement end to end to enhance productivity
• Early stage start-ups wanting to establish their products online
• Small scale website and Application development companies

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👉 Selection Framework

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Core Problem? : Demand Gap

Customer feedback: Hard to discover and use

What are competitors doing: taking an ecosystem approach to solve for discovery , where ecosystem consists of SAAS marketplaces, developer communities, government procurement agencies. They are generally the experts who help end users make the final decision to use a product

Do you want to solve for product discovery? Yes

Do you want to make your customers power users? No as of now (priority is lower than discovery)

Enter a new market? Yes

Enter a congested market? No

It is basically a 0 to 1 Acquisition problem: Channel Partnership preferable

👉 Partner Selection

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The officebee is a platform where end users can get customisations done via a developer who can be trained to use the platform and build a scalable solution for the end customer

​Step 5

Company buy-in and alignment

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Stakeholder concerns: What should be the budget of the affiliate program and what should be the success metric to decide of this is working for us.

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Product team concerns: With the improvement in discovery how do they capture the varying customer request and later meet customer requirements. What should be the automation around success recognition and payout. How do we scale the affiliate program via the online product

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Marketing team concerns: how to recruit affiliates and how to identify attribution and would there be any overlaps.

Sales team concerns: How to convert the increase in traffic into successful leads to convert into revenue and what are the possible conversions to expect from the affiliate partnership channel

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Stakeholder Pitch: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IqlhsML2IxKgF_dxdRMpE_pB54PZT87mtR1kYYs3KVM/edit#slide=id.g272525abe9c_0_37

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Step 6

Outreach strategy

The partners are the top web/App developer agency who build in house tools for large corporate MNCs and then end user is a n IT procurement manager in the company

There are 2 channels that can be explored

1. Affiliate Partner : Through this partner Officebee will aim to solve for Discovery. The affiliates are typically part of professional platforms like LinkedIn, corporate social platforms like expos, collaborative orgs, comparison and tech content websites etc
2. Web/App Agencies: Here Officebee needs to develop a developer partnership program, where officebee can train the developers in using their platform to build marketplace solutions faster and also request for features . This partnership may also require few tech integrations.

Since we do not want to change anything in the product right now, we would just want to go with Affiliate partners to solve for discovery

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Outreach Message to PoC ( assuming affiliate marketing: Linkedin influencer)

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Dear xyz,

This is Meher from Officebee and I manage Partnerships and growth at Officebee. We are a e-procurement and marketplace SAAS platform providing solutions to small and medium business to scale their e-procurement requirements. We at Officebee have gone through your content portfolio and would like to explore partnership opportunities with you. Through this collaboration there is an opportunity for us to make our customers aware of the Officebee solutions and how they can sclae and simplify their procurement function.

Looking forward to hearing from you on your interest . Would love to set up a connect to take you through our affiliate partnership program.

Regards

abc

Ph. number

Outreach strategy ( Full)

• Gather initial 10 to 15 Affiliate partner POCs
• Pilot with 5 ,with the above outreach message
• Track the # of responses and type of responses
• If low/no responses - then change POC ,
• check if message/value is not clear
• Send a follow up mail detailing a.) clear value overlap and possible number of added followers they might achieve b.) a sneak peak into the best of our partner program and what differentiates us
• Based on this update messages and send to rest of the affiliates

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Step 7

Call Design

1. Before the call research on possible affiliate partner content , customers and reach and how they can bring value to us and vice versa

2. During the Call

Partner onboarding Slides : to be created

Step 8

Partner success management : to be created

• This would broadly consist of content curation support
• Demo on the product
• New features and success story mailers

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