Channel Development is a key component of any effective revenue growth strategy. For solutions like Recurly that are highly self-service and strive to be developer friendly, the community of consultants and creative agencies that work with our platform are a growing source of new business. As the technology experts serving their clients, they are in uniquely positioned to promote Recurly. As a result, our Sales and Customer Success teams recently started an ongoing project to identify and track individuals that have worked with Recurly in an effort to align the objectives of the customer, integrator and Recurly team.

Our Approach

Identification is our first step. For the initial phase, we worked backwards through support tickets, emails and other client interactions and tagged those individuals and companies as Integrators in our CRM. On an ongoing basis it’s relatively easy for us to identify these individuals by the nature of their website or email address.

Next, we reach out with a quick introduction call or forward over a set of questions relevant to their experience:

  • What type of business are you (i.e. freelancer, consultancy, agency)?

  • What Customers have you worked with?

  • What languages or technologies do you specialize in (i.e. ruby, python, wordpress, drupal)?

  • What was the scope of the project (i.e. Recurly.js, API, Webhooks)?

  • Did you integrate Recurly with another third party (i.e. eCommerce, ERP)?

  • What types of projects would be a good fit for your agency / experience?

Finally, to close the loop, we contact our customers for feedback:

  • How was the experience working with Consultant X?

  • How long did the process take?

  • Would you use them again?

The Benefits & Strategic Goals

The new information and process has yielded a number of tangible benefits. For our customers that have limited technical staff in-house, we now have an available list of resources that we can refer them to with confidence. This helps remove a potential barrier and can speed up implementation timeframe.

For integrators, Recurly can help become a revenue driver by referring potential pre-qualified business. Additionally, by developing a relationship with our sales and support organization – they have a more direct line to information, features and providing feedback.

For Recurly, the project has been the first step towards building an affiliate and partner network. By making our solution more visible and providing additional support, Recurly has increased the number of repeat referrals from our community of integrators. This group is typically highly engaged and among some of our fiercest advocates.

Over the next year, our goal is to grow that base, provide more active outreach and think of new ways to engage and incentivize our integrators. If you’re a freelancer or agency that has integrated Recurly or just want to learn more, we’d love to hear from you!