Partnership Led Growth project | Smartlead.ai

1. Product Selected: Smartlead.ai
2. What is Smartlead.ai → It is a cold email outreach tool that enables users to automate and scale their lead generation and outreach efforts.
3. Stage of the product: Early Scaling to Mature Stage
4. Smartlead has 51000+ Customers and has achieved PMF, more shared below.
5. Has the product reached PMF: Yes. The reasons are as follows:Within one year of operations, Smartlead has:
   (i) 800x growth in ARR(more than Ideal for SaaS business when growing from 0-1 Stage and necessary when deciding to mature to 1-10 Stage)
   (ii) Has a churn rate of ≤ 15%(which qualifies it when compared with SaaS annual churn industry benchmarks)
   (iii) Strong WOM, Customers have willingness to pay(majority% of user acquisition is coming through organic and affiliate referrals via WOM).
6. Here is a little bit about Smartlead's core value props:
   a. Unlimited Mailboxes and Email Warmups:
   → Value: This feature allows users to scale their email outreach without worrying about limitations on the number of mailboxes or email warmup activities.
   → Explanation: Many email outreach tools impose restrictions on the number of email accounts you can use or warm up, which can hinder your ability to reach a broader audience. With Smartlead, you have the freedom to use as many mailboxes as needed and warm them up effectively, ensuring your emails always #EscapeTheSpamFolder
   b. Multi-Channel Outreach:
   → Value: Smartlead enables you to reach prospects through multiple communication channels, including Email, SMS, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more.
   → Explanation: In today's digital landscape, prospects may prefer different communication channels. Having the ability to reach them where they are most comfortable can significantly improve your chances of engaging and converting leads. Smartlead's multi-channel outreach feature provides flexibility in your outreach strategy.
   c. Auto-Rotating Email Accounts:
   → Value: This feature automatically rotates email accounts, preventing you from hitting daily email sending limits and maintaining a positive email sender reputation.
   → Explanation: Many email providers impose daily sending limits to prevent spam. By automatically rotating email accounts, Smartlead ensures that you don't exceed these limits, reducing the risk of being marked as a spam sender. This helps maintain a strong sender reputation and improves email deliverability.
   d. AI-Enhanced Warmups and Deliverability:
   → Value: Smartlead uses AI interactions in emails to humanise your email activity, improve email deliverability, and protect your sender reputation.
   → Explanation: Email deliverability is crucial for the success of cold email outreach. Smartlead's AI-enhanced warmup activities mimic natural email interactions, making it less likely for your emails to end up in spam folders. Additionally, it automatically moves emails from spam folders to inboxes, ensuring that your messages reach the intended recipients.
   e. Deal Flow Management:
   → Value: Smartlead provides a centralized email inbox, or as we like to call it, Master Inbox to manage all your deal flow and customer conversations, streamlining your sales process.
   → Explanation: Managing multiple email accounts and conversations across different platforms can be time-consuming and confusing. Smartlead simplifies this by offering a single view where you can categorize leads' intent using AI based intent categorisations, making it easier to focus on closing deals and maintaining context with your customers.
   f. Lead Generation Automation:
   → Value: Smartlead offers a powerful cold emailing API infrastructure to automate lead generation campaigns and reporting along with multiple other niche use cases.
   → Explanation: Automating the lead generation process saves time and allows you to scale your outreach efforts efficiently. With Smartlead's API, you can easily create and manage campaigns, making it a valuable tool for businesses looking to generate leads and expand their customer base.
7. Here are the Core Personas for Smartlead
   

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1. Smartlead's user journey is self serve.
2. We have 2 user flows: The first one for top funnel acquisition for new users, and the other one for Nurturing Existing users with a PLG driven motion for retaining them and other retention activities.
3. Once the user enters the product, we offer them a 14-day free trial on our top most plan which allows them to explore the product.
4. Here are some gaps identified within the product which can be solved via partnerships{P.S all of these gaps have been identified via multiple user calls and current feedback via slack community of existing users}:
   a. Access to Certified Experts/Knowledge hubs on the product - for users who are new to our product.
   b. Access to certain missing features which can improve the user experience and improve time spent on app + impact user retention:
   (i) CRM capabilities:
   For users to manage their deal flow and integrate with existing CRMs in the market.
   (ii) Email Lead Validation:
   For users to be able to validate their lead lists before sending the outbound email
   sequences to that they can observe lower bounce rates and higher performance.
   (iii) Scheduling Tools:
   For users who want end to end deal flow management - which includes meeting &
   call scheduling softwares
   (iv) LinkedIn Sequencing Capabilities:
   For users looking for multi-channel+multi touch outbound for higher conversion rates.
   (v) Workflow Builders:
   For users looking to build automated workflows using Smartlead APIs and reduce
   manual tasks in order to save time and increase efficiency.
   (vi) Lead List Building + Enrichment Softwares:
   For users looking to build their lead lists within the platform and enrich that data to
   drive better outbound/cold email performance.
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1. We have Achieved PMF, Smartlead is driving 800x growth in ARR{greater than $1M ARR - cannot reveal actual numbers 😉} and has a annual churn rate of <=15%.
2. We are not finding it difficult to acquire customers, although we do have a retention problem statement due to the lack of certain features/capabilities.
3. We are looking to drive power usage as from our current data, the churn for power users is the lowest -> between 0.7-1.8%(on a monthly level which stabilises and drops to zero by M4 onwards) and our power users drive the highest LTV.
4. We have had multiple customers making requests for integrations. We collect feedback on the basis of Customer calls which I carry out every week along with Slack community based feedback which gets collated and added to our tech/product roadmap along with prioritisation.
5. Final Litmus Test result: Partnerships required.
   

1. Who is my ICP?
   a. Startups
   b. Lead Gen Agencies
   c. Marketing Agencies
   d. Sales and Marketing Teams of B2B companies
2. Our Brand Values:
   a.Customer-Centricity - we prioritise our customer needs and offer the best in class customer support, this is something our customers always rage about. Their feedback is always values and their success is always celebrated.
   b. Innovation - developing and iterating features at lightspeed, we always want to stay ahead of industry trends and ensure our customers have every use case solved for.
   c. Reliability and Scalability - we ensure to keep our downtime low and offer the best user experience along with scale - our product scales with our users. We have users running 10 M cold emails a month(P.S that's just one user) and have a warmup pool of 800K emails ensuring top class deliverability for users.
   d. Collaboration - we work closely with our users to understand their needs and ensure we are creating solutions that cater to their use cases. Our biggest win is our APIs which are open and have enabled our users to literally build businesses on top of it.
   e. Adaptability - we are adaptable to current changing markets and this ties back to the innovation we bring with our product features and updates which enable our customers to drive more revenue growth for themselves. At this point, our platform is a key enabler for these businesses.
3. Current market:
   Our current market consists of anyone who has a use case for cold email marketing, to tie it back to our ICPs, the cold email SaaS market is vast. Some metrics to justify the statement:
   a. The Email Marketing Software market was valued at $7.5 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $17.9 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 27% from 2020 to 2027 (Allied Market Research).
   b. The global Sales Engagement Platform market size was valued at $1.45 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.4% from 2021 to 2028 (Grand View Research).
4. ​List of Potential Partners:
   a. For CRM: Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Attio
   b. For Lead List building + data enrichment: Clay, Listkit
   c. For Workflow automations: Cargo, Make, N8N
5. Partner Fitment Test

Our SOP for outreach was simple. It was me and my founder working on diving the top partners and attacking them head on with our comms. Sharing the SOP below:
1. Divide top POCs and connect with them on LinkedIn.

2. Engage with their content and foster a healthy relation over DMs on LinkedIn.

3. Initial connection request template+engagement with content template:
a. {Hi|Hey} [Name],

I’m [Your Name], [Your Position] at [Your Company]. I’ve been following your work at [Their Company] and I’m impressed by [specific achievement or post].
I’d love to connect and explore how we might be able to collaborate or share insights.

b. {Hi|Hey} [Name],

I really enjoyed your recent post on [topic of their post]. Your insights on [specific point they made] were particularly thought-provoking. I’m looking forward to reading more from you.

4. Initial Reach out for Partnership basis Engineering+Marketing+Customer Support bandwidth and buy in:
{Hi|Hey} [Name],

I hope you’re doing well. I’ve been following your work at [Their Company] and believe there’s a great synergy between our companies. At [Your Company], we’ve been focusing on [briefly describe your company’s focus/mission], and I think there’s a unique opportunity for us to collaborate.

We have a strong team across engineering, marketing, and customer support, and I believe a partnership could bring significant value to both our companies. Could we schedule a time to discuss this further?

Looking forward to your thoughts.

5. Follow up 1 until meeting scheduled:
{Hi|Hey} [Name],

I wanted to follow up on my previous message regarding a potential partnership between [Your Company] and [Their Company]. I believe there’s a lot of potential for mutual benefit, and I’m eager to explore this further with you.

Could we schedule a quick call to discuss this in more detail? Please let me know a convenient time for you.

6. Follow up 2 until meeting scheduled:
Hi [Name],

I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out again regarding the potential partnership between [Your Company] and [Their Company]. I’m very enthusiastic about the possibilities we can explore together and would love to discuss this with you.

Do you have some time this week or next for a brief call? I’m flexible and can adjust to your schedule.

Thank you, and I look forward to your response.

7. As soon as we have a response, we have a standard SOP for partnership based efforts which we carry out. Here is a sample whimsical of a partner we recently closed:


8. Since our APIs are open, the companies we want to integrate with generally use them to build on top of it and push out integrations to Smartlead. We act as an enabler for users to then send emails once their preliminary processes like list building, lead list verification and content creation are done with.

Here are some live Integrations we have currently rolled out:


9. For closing a GTM plan: We have an end to end document created and the Partner added on slack via slack connect - this enables a single source of reference ensuring everybody is on the same page(pun intended) and ensures all blockers from a communication perspective are removed and fast tracked.

Sharing a sample of the GTM rollout document we created with https://www.getcargo.io/

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For Channel Partners - our core focus was to ensure all our Power users who are also well known influencers in the email marketing and cold email space were enabled. We launched an exclusive Partner Program to enable our current set of users to drive more inbound growth for them and their agencies and also ensure more affiliate referrals for ourselves in return.

I cannot add more details since majority of the stuff here is IP but here are some impact points:
1. We have more than 30+ Smartlead Certified Partners - partnerd with top agencies and voices in the market.
2. We have driven close to ~0.5M in revenue over last year and this year in just affiliate referrals.
3. Here is the link to our Certified Partner Program: https://www.smartlead.ai/certified-partners