If you’ve been feeling customer acquisition costs creeping up, you’re not alone. In the 2024 B2B SaaS Performance Benchmarks, Pavilion reports that companies are spending an average of 42% more to acquire $1 ARR from new customers.
In this environment, more B2B companies are turning to affiliate marketing as a cost-effective, performance-driven channel. Unfortunately, while while the path to launching these programs is straightforward, scaling them is not.
With so many moving pieces, growing a B2B affiliate program can be a complex and time-consuming process. However, when done successfully, it can be transformative for lowering your CAC and increasing ROI.
In this article, I’ll tap into over a decade of industry experience as a Top Affiliate Agency leader to teach you how to grow your B2B affiliate program. You’ll learn how to find your starting point, how to optimize growth for maximum returns, and how to win internal stakeholder buy-in.
Skip the costly mistakes and learn how the experts do it. Let’s dive in.
Understanding your B2B affiliate program stage
When we think about growth, we often focus on the end results — an increase in size, revenue, and available resources. But the secret to growth starts with inputs, not outputs.
This means taking stock of your B2B affiliate partner program to identify its current state, specific needs, and areas of opportunity. Affiliate partner programs in different stages can have completely different needs. For newly launched programs, recruitment might be the greatest opportunity. For more mature programs, the focus might shift to expanding into new markets or verticals.
To find your baseline, you’ll need to start with an analysis. Here’s how.
How do you measure an affiliate program?
A unique feature of affiliate partner programs is that affiliates have complete autonomy in deciding which programs they join. Therefore, measuring a partner program requires an internal review of performance combined with an external analysis of competitors.
Measuring performance is straightforward — report, organize, and summarize all relevant data into actionable insights. Swap vanity metrics for quality measurements and identify affiliates that are moving the needle on revenue goals.
Next, you’ll need to understand how your affiliate partner program stacks up against others. By conducting a competitive analysis, you can identify your competition and understand what’s working in your niche.
This could include combing through competitor affiliate landing pages, browsing partner networks, or tapping into agency expertise. By researching the benchmark set by competitors, you can see where your program stands in comparison and how to make it more appealing to your ideal fit affiliate partners.
Optimizing your affiliate program to increase ROI
Now that you’ve found your baseline, you can start optimizing each component of your B2B affiliate partner program to maximize growth and ROI.
Like a professional sports team, the players (or in your case, affiliates) are the core strength. But a championship-caliber team requires much more: expert coaching, the appropriate tools and tech, and competitive strategies. Similarly, in an affiliate program, optimizing every component is critical for reaching its full potential.
Your affiliate partners
Affiliate partner growth is a two-pronged approach: increase revenue from existing affiliates and increase the volume of affiliates in your program.
Most affiliate programs follow the 80/20 rule, in which approximately 80 percent of affiliate partner revenue is driven by 20 percent of partners. A common pitfall is writing off the 80 percent and not investing the attention and support they need to make a measurable impact in your business.
By designing an action plan with goals and incentives, you can effectively disrupt this ratio. You’ll get significantly more from your existing investment and reduce concentration risk.
Don’t know where to start? Establish feedback loops so you can gain authentic insights into what your partners need, their suggestions for improvement, and what gets them excited.
When it comes to adding volume to the number of affiliates in your program, focus on quality, not quantity. Take the time to refine your targeting efforts to find affiliates that resonate with your ICP. By focusing on those who can fill specific gaps in your business, you’ll generate higher-quality leads and conversions.
Your tech stack
Growth generally refers to an increase of revenue due to an increase in resources. Modern B2B tech stacks leveraging automation have challenged this definition thanks to their ability to drive revenue without a substantial increase in resources. Affiliate marketing software enables program managers to build, optimize and scale partnerships from end-to-end without overextending capacity.
This includes workflow automations, better partner tracking and attribution, automated payouts, and fraud prevention. More specifically, affiliate marketing software is built to manage a large volume of affiliates with in-depth reporting capabilities.
The trick with affiliate tracking software can be consolidating many different conversion events — often with different names depending on the company, partner or agency you’re talking to — into meaningful insights that speak to your program’s revenue targets.
If you can spend the time in setup though, not only does a specialized tech stack significantly improve efficiency, but it also frees up time you can re-invest into big picture strategizing.
Your program management
Just because affiliates have autonomy, doesn’t mean you can leave your affiliate program on autopilot. Proactive recruitment, management, and experienced tuning are what set competitive programs apart from the pack.
Like any new strategy, stumbling through learning lessons can be time consuming and costly. Consider partnering with a specialized B2B affiliate agency to decrease the risk of investing in the wrong strategies. Boots on the ground, agencies understand the competitive landscape and have extensive relationships with partners. Get immediate introductions to new and valuable partners and leverage the agency to know how to get them interested in an offer.
With extensive experience, agencies like Partner Commerce can help you manage multiple partner programs efficiently.
Share success and win additional buy-in
The secret to executive buy-in is simple: make it easy. If you’re looking for additional resources, budget, or headcount, you’re going to need to prove value.
Even though affiliate marketing is one of the most effective sales channels today, it still has some stigma and risk associated with it.
In a report by Forrester, affiliate marketing ranked as the number one strategy for customer acquisition. However, the biggest concern they found was measuring impact and conveying the value and potential to key stakeholders.
The best way to combat this is with transparency and communication. Share your program’s successes across the organization — and especially to C-suite leaders— highlighting its contribution to revenue generation, customer acquisition, and brand awareness.
Lead with numbers and let your revenue do the talking. By clearly defining value and impact, you’ll make it easy for executives to invest in your program.
Ready to scale your B2B affiliate program?
Scaling a B2B affiliate program isn’t easy, but working with experts like the industry-leading team at Partner Commerce is. Partner Commerce is a specialized B2B affiliate agency managing top affiliate programs including Google Workspace, TikTok for Business, and Zendesk.
By working with an agency, you can be rest assured that your program management will be optimized for maximum growth. To learn more, reach out to Partner Commerce here.
