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Behind the Investment: Relevize – The Future of Channel Activation
Julian Marcu | October 19, 2022| 2 min. read
With escalating competition at the global stage and increasingly demanding revenue targets, enterprise software vendors must innovate to continue to accelerate topline growth at scale. As a result, channel-led GTM and digital-first marketing strategies are becoming need-to-have for enterprise companies to hit revenue targets. Historically, channel partners were specialized to execute technical implementations and/or provide services on behalf of their partners for their end customers, but now it is critical that channel partners transition from strictly implementation partners to revenue generators.
- “The market is expanding and we can’t hire fast enough to meet the demand. The company has realized that the value the partners bring are beyond services and delivery but are also critical to support our success and our goals to now become a $15B company and beyond. There’s no way we can keep up with the growth without a channel model.” – Public Relevize Customer
The challenge in executing on this transition, however, is twofold: 1) Channel partners lack the digital GTM expertise to help accelerate their partner vendors’ GTM through digital channels 2) Legacy PRM (“Partner Relationship Management”) systems are designed as central repositories for channel partner contacts & content, and weren’t designed to seamlessly accelerate channel GTM functions; they are cumbersome, unintuitive, and require expertise to extract significant ROI. This ultimately leaves a massive gap in the market and creates a significant opportunity.
Enter Relevize, the premier Channel Activation Platform, with their initial product providing purpose-built co-marketing automation for the channel. With Relevize, a partner is guided through a templatized platform where they can easily select campaigns / specific content, edit copy, co-brand, select target buyer persona / prospect segment, and launch comarketing campaigns directly on social mediums to drive net new lead generation & acceleration.
- “So far we’re at a 38x return on our investment. These leads are larger than our normal deal size. The Relevize leads are $25K and are normally $5.5K. This was the best thing that we have ever run!”– Relevize Customer with >500 FTEs
- “A partner doing an event would be lucky to get half the lead count that we’re getting from our investment for one campaign in Relevize. The ROI for us with Relevize has been better and more visible than everything we did with events. Not only have we been able to tie back pipeline, but also closed business.” – Public Relevize Customer
As for the genesis of the partnership between Insight & Relevize, the company first came onto our radar via another member of the Insight Partners family – Fairmarkit. Fairmarkit informed us about Relevize’s vision to build purpose-built GTM technology for the channel, and given our track record of partnering with and scaling enterprise software companies, we knew Relevize was tackling a massive pain point. We quickly arranged an intro call with the CEO, Mike Nardella, in February 2021 and immediately confirmed that Relevize would be extremely strategic for our portfolio and that there would be a strong pull from the broader B2B SaaS market for their offering. We stayed in close contact and come summer 2022 Relevize had commercialized rapidly with leading enterprise vendors, which today include New Relic, Zscaler, Chili Piper, and many more. Relevize had matured to the scale where Insight could lean in heavily with our value-add resources and further accelerate their growth to take the business to the next level!
We could not be more thrilled to be leading Relevize’s $6M Seed with participation from Hyperplane, Newfund, 1984.vc, and Weekend Fund, and I personally could not be more grateful to serve as Board Director on behalf of Insight Partners. Now, post-investment we remain eager to double down on Relevize’s enterprise velocity & prolific land-and-expand motion as they create the new category of Channel Activation.
