Building the foundations of partner product led growth to drive more client referrals, reduce business costs and scale growth and revenue.

Up until early 2023, the partnerships domain was mostly sales led. With big plans to grow and scale fast to acquire larger partners and their bigger clients, product led growth strategies were introduced. This is a glimpse into how that all happened.

• 68 new partners in 3 months
• 280 new partner clients in 3 months with a much higher conversion rate of 50% compared to Pleo customers
• Payback time was reduced by 60%

The entire partnership sign up process was manual and sales led, with several friction points that meant it could take up to weeks for a partner to get access to their Partner Portal. Then, there were plenty of manual training sessions and other repetitive information all across various platforms. In short - the partner could not sign up and get onboarded, and started with Pleo in one place. Everything required so much time and effort.

Less than 2% of partner prospects get past the second step of the sign up process. By introducing self serve product led acquisition and enablement flows, we can allow new Bronze and Silver partners to get started instantly, and allow for the commercial team to spend more time on driving impact with Gold and Platinum partners.

The consistent feedback from various partners from different markets were:

• Lack of a structured introduction to Pleo which meant repetitive work for the commercial team and the partners and their clients
• There was a single Pleo expert in the accountancy which meant they onboarded all new bookkeepers with their way of doing things - which may not be the best way of using Pleo
• Lack of a clear overview of the entire onboarding process for their clients

Challenges

1. We were flying solo without a PM. The whole team was involved in discovery and ideation through a design sprint where the initial MVP was defined along with success metrics.
2. We needed to ship 'fast'. We broke down the MVP into smaller pre-MVPs that could be delivered by the end of each 2 week sprint so that constant, gradual value was being added for our partners which gave the perception of speed.
3. We had some legacy components. Working with the content design team, we transformed overlooked informational empty states into actionable states that nudged partners towards a specific action on the page.

Self sign up for all new partners in all markets

Instead of days to weeks with several manual steps, a new accountancy can now sign up to be a Pleo partner in 8 steps, in less than 5 minutes without a Pleo human involved.

Self onboarding checklist

Partners no longer need to wait to be onboarded in their portal - they can get started instantly with the checklist that outlines the core tasks they need to do to achieve their first "aha" moment which is when they set up their client's accounting system in Pleo. Using progressive disclosure, the tasks are grouped according to specific steps:

• Set up your portal
• Set up your client
• Set up your team
• Sign the partner agreement

• 65.7% conversion rate to new partners - there could be an opportunity to collaborate with the business development team to better understand the 32% drop offs, and if we could get these users to reconsider a partnership.
• 44.5% conversion rate when partners could automatically add their company details with a search register versus a 8.62% conversion rate when a partner had to manually add their company details.
• We had 68 new partner sign ups and 280 new partner client referrals in 3 months. For the domain, we managed to reduce the payback time by 60%.

Takeaways

1. The product is intuitive and simple. Let it speak for itself and don't treat customers like idiots with detailed step by step guides for simple flows.
2. Building the MVP is one thing, but remember to optimise for maximum adoption after.
3. Never lose sight of the big picture. Positive customer experiences should bring positive business outcomes.