Upgrading Partnership Management
with Purpose-built Tools
Case Study: Pictory.ai
Company
Pictory is an online video creation software that employs advanced artificial intelligence to help users quickly turn text content into professional-quality videos.
Challenge
As a start-up tech company, Pictory pursues both product- and partner-led growth. But the more businesses they partnered with, the more difficult it became to manage those partnerships with traditional CRM software.
Solution
CoPort provides an easy-to-use management solution that’s purpose-built to grow successful partnerships.
“What I was specifically looking for, and why CoPort has been such a godsend for us, is it’s a tool that allows me to track all of the things that I need to track.”
In his role as Head of Business Development at Pictory, Marc Gawith began to realize that the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool he was using fell short when it came to helping him manage his partner relationships.
Because CRM systems are built to manage customer sales, their features don’t necessarily align with partnership management.
And for a company like Pictory, which is focused on API and technology integration partnerships, it’s crucial to keep track of all the specific tasks inherent to technology partnership cycles - from launch to ongoing relationship management and revenue tracking.
“There are very common things that you do in a partnership that you don’t do in a direct sales motion, like setting up a slack channel between the two partners,” says Gawith. “You don’t set up a slack channel with a company that you’re selling to.”
As for the features that are included in CRMs, the terminology doesn’t always translate for partnerships. For example, a business may be tagged as an “opportunity” in a certain stage, but what that means for a sales relationship versus a partnership may not be clear. “It’s not necessarily an apples-to-apples thing, it was more like trying to turn an apple into an orange.”
He was increasingly frustrated with trying to make a tool work for something it wasn’t designed to do. Not to mention spending more time in administrative tasks than being able to do the work of relationship building.
He realized that if they were serious about growing the company through partnerships, he had to find a system better aligned to their needs.
Enter CoPort, a partnership management system ideally suited for technology partnerships.
Better tools, simpler life
“What I was specifically looking for, and why CoPort has been such a godsend for us, is it’s a tool that allows me to track all of the necessary things that I need to track.”
This means no more trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, but rather enjoying the simplicity of using a tool as intended. On a platform able to fully manage partner relationships, from initial discovery to ongoing task management, mutual goal setting, and data sharing.
Gawith appreciates that CoPort provides the partnership-specific features he wanted in a clean, simple interface.
And unlike the difficulty he had working in a system where it felt like everything was a chore, “CoPort is just so easy to use, it feels natural.”
“What I was specifically looking for, and why CoPort has been such a godsend for us, is it’s a tool that allows me to track all of the things that I need to track.”
The most profound impact he’s experienced: saving time.
The fact he’s able to customize features also allows him to better track key data. When he was using a traditional CRM, it was a challenge to track how Pictory differentiated between two types of customer API charges - platform fees and usage charges. As every opportunity was treated the same, having two different values for every deal was difficult to track in the CRM.
In CoPort, he was able to create two types of opportunities within each account. This allows him to have a clear line of delineation between the platform fee - a guaranteed, fixed source of revenue, and the variable usage fee.
By separating the different values, and the likelihood to close, he can forecast at a more granular level for total opportunity, realized opportunity, and what each deal is ultimately worth. He can also quickly and easily filter the data to share it with his team.
What do partnerships mean to you?
Today, Marc manages over 80 partnerships in CoPort. From partnership onboarding to productivity management, he’s continuing to explore his usage of features as his relationships evolve. “It really has been a tool that has allowed us to grow with it.”
He’s excited to continue to build mutually beneficial relationships with Pictory partners. “At the end of the day, it's the better together story, right?
Once you've seen what they've built and how it's serving their customers, there's no greater feeling than to say we helped you build that, and we're providing the technology that brings this value to your customers. And seeing your product come to life inside someone else's UI is really cool.”
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