Stop selling your app features to agency partners - use a smoking gun instead

The Shopify agencies you want to partner with don’t need to partner with you. 

They already have a core of 5-7 tech partners that they work with to manage their clients.

And the reality is not every tech vendor has the ability to become one of the core partners that agencies refer to their clients. Many apps are not crucial to an agency’s service offerings that drive revenue and retention for their clients.

Unless you work at Klaviyo, being an agency partner manager at a less established Shopify app almost seems hopeless at this point. 

However, all is not lost for agency partner managers!

The good news is that agencies will take a call with a potential new tech partner. Because agencies know they need to keep a pulse on the ecosystem in order to recommend and build solutions for their clients. 

Instead, it’s more effective for partner managers to build a strategy that helps shape an agency’s opinion on a problem their client has rather than selling the agency on your product’s features.

What is the Smoking Gun

In order to stand out and create the agency partner channel at Loop Returns, my playbook strategy was centered around the concept of the smoking gun, which was coined by Chet Holmes in his book The Ultimate Sales Machine. 

In a nutshell the smoking gun approach is this: using market data curated over time that teaches and resets the customer’s and partner’s buying criteria towards your product over the competition.

The smoking gun approach allows you to differentiate your partner program from your competitor. 

And the best part is that developing a smoking gun orients your agency playbook towards giving value to agency partners while still driving leads to your company. 

Your agency partner playbook needs a smoking gun and here’s why.

Why feature-focused selling doesn’t serve enterprise brands 

1. The acceleration of app feature parity

If you’re relying on selling a product feature, you have a very short window of market opportunity. 

The acceleration of feature parity within the Shopify app ecosystem continues to diminish the uniqueness of feature selling. 

Back in 2017-2018, the Shopify app ecosystem was a blue ocean of potential for all app developers. At that time, it was common for a brand to install 50+ apps that each had a unique feature and purpose for their site. 

But now the Shopify ecosystem has matured. We see this as agencies are merging in order to drive revenue and support enterprise merchants. 

And brands are consolidating their tech stack in search for profitable growth. 

As a result, the GTM strategy for many apps on Shopify is to either build a suite of product offerings or integrate with other apps to increase their install base. 

For example, look at Yotpo. They started with reviews. And now they’ve positioned themselves as a one-stop retention platform that also offers loyalty, email, SMS, and subscriptions. 

Another example is Loop Returns, where I used to work. Loop didn’t build its own drop-off bars feature, which was unique to Happy Returns (another return app). Instead Loop built an integration with Happy Returns. 

As the saying goes, your app is another app's feature. It’s only a short matter of time until another app has your feature.

2. Feature selling causes buyer confusion and can slow down the sale’s cycle

“I’ve spoken to several of your competitors. Can you remind me if your app does XYZ?” 

At some point, your sales team has been asked this question during the sales cycle. And I’m guessing some of the partners you’ve onboarded have also asked the same thing. 

This question has its place because merchants do need clarity if your app integrates into their critical business systems such as their ERP. 

But when you overemphasize feature selling, it can cause the buyer or partner to think of your product as a list of features that just perform tasks. Instead your product should be seen as a solution to a business problem where the sum is better than the parts. 

Feature selling influences the buyer to assign the price of your software to specific features based on their needs. This can turn the sales deal into an “a la carte” negotiation where the merchant only wants to pay for the features they think they need. 

The buying process now becomes a twisted maze where the merchant is mixing and matching features and comparing them to your competitors, which can slow down their decision making process. Which ultimately leads to a race to the bottom on which tech vendor can provide the most amount of features for the lowest cost.

3. Few brands maximize app features

Brands love the idea of using all the features and integrations an app offers. 

But in reality, most brands will use out-of-the-box functionality. 

I call this 'operational daydreaming.'

Where buyers tell themselves in the sales cycle that they’ll use each feature and integration to maximize their results. But when you check in on them 90 days later after signing up, they haven’t turned on a simple switch to use a feature. 

And when their merchant success manager asks them why the brand isn’t optimizing the app settings, the brand will say something like “We aren’t the experts in retention. You guys are. That’s why we bought your app to help us solve for it. Can’t you set it up for us?” 

One of the ironies of buying and using apps, especially in the Shopify ecosystem, is that brand operators will choose to use an app because they don’t want to dedicate the time to build an internal solution of their own.

But when they install the app, they still don’t have the time to optimize the app functionality. 

So even if your strategy is focused on selling product features to agencies and their clients, but the client doesn’t actually use them, are they truly receiving value?

As Leo Strupczewski and Eli Weiss call out, overselling features and their impact can increase your churn and decrease word-of-mouth for your app.

Why partner managers should have a smoking gun

1. Enterprise merchants choose agencies who have a point of view 

 There are two primary factors that brands consider when choosing an agency: 

• First is that enterprise brands want to know which other merchants has the agency successfully launched on Shopify. 
• Second is enterprise brands want to work with agencies that have a point of view on where commerce is going and how their brand can win.

For agencies, having a POV is a competitive advantage.

The best Shopify agencies are able to communicate and execute on their POV within their client retainers.

It’s not enough anymore to just launch on Shopify and plug in every app under the sun.

The post-DTC era that we live in today requires enterprise brands to execute strategies that deliver incremental growth leading to profitability. 

An agency’s reputation to clients and brands is influenced by the tech/apps they solution with in order to build the site. 

So when an agency recommends an app to a client, they need to be able to provide an intentional and comprehensive reason for how the app plays a role in helping the brand achieve incremental growth. 

When the smoking gun is the foundation of your partnership strategy, it naturally nudges brands and agencies to make a decision of whether or not they agree with your point of view. 

This is a good thing because those that align with your view are more likely to become loyal brand advocates and partners that will increase word-of-mouth to your app.

2. People buy stories not features

The famous political activist, Andrew Fletcher, once said, “Let me write the songs of a nation. I don’t care who writes its laws.” 

In other words, it’s more effective to influence and inspire people by communicating through story and illustration than just writing laws that show what people should do. 

In the case of selling software, a strategy built on feature selling is like writing laws hoping to inspire people to buy. 

Features don’t move people to buy. Features can be forgotten in a sea of similar apps and competitors. 

But it’s the stories that inspire and move people to buy software. 

If you’re an agency partner manager, you should be owning the strategic narrative for how agencies should think about your software.

The story you tell to your agency partners should be made up of market data, product data, and customer data that you continually curate. 

Doing so will help you uncover insights and trends that become powerful assets to your entire partner GTM strategy. 

The data and insights you put into your story should teach agencies how they can improve their service offerings to their clients. It should highlight what problems their clients will experience if they fail to adapt to the market trends. 

And if you do this successfully it will positively influence and reposition your product in the minds of your agency partners (and their clients).

3. Teaching builds trust that creates future attention

When you teach, it’s an upfront deposit for a future withdrawal of your partner’s attention.

Trust is built when you use market data to teach partners about problems their clients are experiencing or may not know about. 

The trust you create today, through the new insights and market data you share, will influence an agency’s willingness to respond to you when you reach out in the future about one of their clients.

But when you only focus on selling features you end up breaking trust. This plays out when tech partners send their generic partner newsletter to agencies in hopes of staying “top of mind.” 

Agency account managers don’t need another tech partner flooding their email inbox with an irrelevant newsletter talking about 👏🏽 every 👏🏽 single 👏🏽 product update and webinar your company is doing.

If you can't connect how your product update doesn't impact an agency's business, you're wasting a touch point.

The consequence is that it will become harder to establish and grow your partnership because agency account managers will respond less often to your emails and slack messages. 

If you want to stay top-of-mind with your agency partners, the majority of your touch points to them should offer different and new perspectives to solving their client problems from the data analysis and insights you’re gathering. 

Go find your smoking gun

It’s only becoming more competitive for tech vendors to drive enterprise pipeline on Shopify.

Which means the value of an agency referral will continue to increase. 

The successful agency partner managers who will deliver on this will be the ones that invest the time to curate and share market data to agencies that will help them solve client problems.  

So if you’re interested in creating a smoking gun, here’s where I’d start collecting data:

1. Within each industry, there are a handful of “State of the Union” reports. Download all of them and look for themes within the survey data YoY. Don’t just look at the data from the most recent report.  
2. Look at macro economic reports within the country where the majority of your customer base is. And then compare that to economic trends in countries that your top enterprise clients are expanding into. 
3. Depending on your industry, has the rate of enterprise brands increased, decreased, or stalled in the past 5-15 years? How fast are agency clients growing within the various market segments (SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise)? How many of your competitors have entered the market over that same timeframe? 
4. What’s the top 1-2 reasons why brands are choosing your product? Have those reasons shifted YoY since the existence of your product? Why or why not?
5. How are customers solving the problem your product is solutioned for? What are the jobs they’ve hired your product for? And how has the problem impacted the client’s revenue YoY in your industry?

You should be collecting the data to these answers and more. 

You’re never done collecting data for your smoking gun. I would block time on your calendar each 1-2 weeks to source and review the data you collect.

Most of your competitors won't continually spend time researching the market, product, and customer data to share with agencies.

This is good for you because agencies will begin to see you and your product as a tech vendor worth partnering with. 

And who knows... Perhaps your smoking gun can help you become one of the top 5-7 app partners for some agencies!

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