Tech Partnerships: Driving Integration-Led Growth

Rachel Collie builds Technology Integration Partnership programs from the ground up, consistently stepping into roles without existing frameworks. Her fascination lies in the intricate data flow between disparate systems, observing how customers leverage these integrations, from an ERP to a CRM or a CRM to a project management tool. Over the last decade, she has witnessed the evolution of this space from manual spreadsheet-based tracking to the ubiquitous adoption of APIs. This hands-on experience has honed her ability to define ideal partners and customer profiles and to build the foundational onboarding and enablement tools that are now considered standard yet vary significantly from company to company.

At Unanet, her first 100 days were crucial for establishing a strategic blueprint based on three key pillars for evaluating potential Technology Integration Partnerships. The first pillar focused on functional software that Unanet would never build itself, such as payroll platforms, leading to partnerships with companies like Paylocity, ADP, and UKG to serve a broad customer base. The second pillar targeted companies with many joint customers, where existing integrations made sense and offered clear potential for driving new revenue through collaborative efforts. The third pillar explored "cool, interesting technology" – innovative solutions like AI-powered proposal generation tools – representing speculative investments that could eventually address emerging customer needs and potentially lead to future acquisitions.

A critical challenge in this initial phase was managing limited bandwidth and roadmaps internally and externally. Rachel emphasizes that "whoever makes the phone call first" often dictates whether an integration gets built. The team deliberately took a strategic, small-scale approach to ensure product teams could build integrations that delivered real value instead of becoming unused logos on a website. Her primary frustration lies in inactive partnerships that fail to generate real value through integrations or revenue. The goal is always to cultivate active Technology Integration Partnerships that yield tangible benefits. This meticulous, phased approach to program building, driven by clear strategic pillars and a focus on actionable integrations, has been fundamental to Unanet's success in establishing its partner ecosystem.

Unanet operates in highly verticalized markets, primarily GovCon (Government Contractors) and AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction), presenting unique customer needs and compliance challenges for Technology Integration Partnerships. The GovCon sector focuses on federal government contractors involved in service-based work, from DoD IT services to battleship maintenance. This market is currently marked by significant uncertainty due to Washington's fluctuating policies, leading to longer sales cycles and budget contractions. However, this environment has also driven existing GovCon customers to seek greater efficiency in data usage and staff management, making integrations that eliminate manual entry and streamline data flow highly desirable.

The AEC sector also faces challenges, including potential cuts from infrastructure bills and the impact of tariffs on construction. Despite these headwinds, customers in this space seek technological solutions to improve efficiency and optimize data exchange between systems. Unanet's customer success managers play a crucial role by proactively engaging clients, inquiring about their current tech stacks, and identifying which system integrations would significantly ease their operations. These direct customer insights are invaluable, informing Unanet's roadmap for future integrations and identifying potential new Technology Integration Partnerships that address market gaps.

Compliance is a pervasive and complex aspect of the GovCon space, characterized by an "alphabet soup of acronyms" and constantly evolving regulatory requirements. Key compliance areas include DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency) reporting for time and work, necessitating robust ERP platforms to ensure accurate reporting to the Department of Labor and avoid costly audits. As Unanet moves upmarket, it increasingly relies on specialized partners to meet compliance needs in the emerging Earned Value Management (EVM) area. Furthermore, stringent security compliance, such as FedRAMP certification, significantly impacts Technology Integration Partnerships. While Unanet's core product is on GovCloud, ensuring that its iPaaS platform and partner-built integrations meet FedRAMP requirements presents a significant hurdle. Navigating these complex regulatory landscapes often requires deep collaboration between Unanet's legal and security teams and strategic decisions on managing partnerships with vendors who may not have the same compliance certifications, ensuring the integrity of the overall Technology Integration Partnerships strategy.

The lifecycle of Technology Integration Partnerships at Unanet is characterized by significant variability in development timelines, primarily driven by immediate customer demand. Partnerships with an identified customer need for integration typically develop very quickly, as there's clear motivation and immediate application. Conversely, teams that form partnerships based on the speculative belief that customers will want and need the integration often face much longer development cycles. Rachel Collie rejects the "if we build it, they will come" mentality for integrations, as it can lead to wasted product development resources on solutions lacking market validation. Her pragmatic approach mandates two key requirements for new technology partners: a clearly defined workflow of information exchange between systems and a commitment to how long it will take to build the integration if a customer requests it.

Unanet leverages a proprietary marketplace, Unanet.com/integrations, powered by PartnerPage, to manage its diverse technology partners. This platform allows partners to control and update their content, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring instantaneous information updates. This self-service model is crucial for a "team of one" like Rachel's, significantly reducing administrative overhead and streamlining the customer experience by providing easy access to partner information. While Unanet is not active on hyperscaler marketplaces like AWS, primarily due to its highly verticalized focus and the lack of perceived ROI given its lean resources, its marketplace is a central hub for its integration-led growth strategy.

Unanet now focuses on co-selling and co-marketing, shifting away from its historical mindset that undervalued technology partnerships beyond pure integrations. Rachel is actively "retooling" Unanet's sales team to recognize the strategic value of Technology Integration Partnerships. This involves educating them on the intelligence partners can provide about prospects, the power of joint demos, and how partners can remove obstacles in complex sales cycles. Unanet, while essentially direct sales driven, aims for 10% of its net new ARR to be sourced or influenced by tech partners, demonstrating a clear commitment to partner-led growth. Unanet shares a significant portion of its customer base with technology partners. It aims to raise the average number of integrations per customer from 1.5 to 2.5, recognizing that a more integrated tech stack boosts customer stickiness and lifetime value.

Optimizing Partner Operations at Unanet, particularly for a "team of one" like Rachel Collie, heavily relies on leveraging technology to drive efficiency and strategic decision-making. While Unanet's core product already incorporates AI tools for customers, such as the GovPro AI proposal generation tool acquired last year, the application of AI within the partner program itself is still in its infancy. AI's use is limited to basic workflow improvements and partner communication. However, the future vision includes more advanced AI applications, particularly for automating the "keeping the lights on" tasks that consume valuable time, allowing Rachel to focus on program strategy and building new Technology Integration Partnerships.

Rachel envisions AI agents taking on various administrative tasks, such as defining joint value propositions, updating website and CRM content, and pushing out content to partners. The ultimate dream is an AI agent that can research and evaluate potential new technology partners. Feeding the AI diligent evaluation criteria could rank potential partners, summarize findings, and help determine whether to pursue a new partnership, thereby saving significant manual effort. The challenge lies in finding and implementing the right AI tool that meets Unanet's specific vertical needs and compliance requirements, as many horizontally focused AI tools are unsuitable for their niche markets, necessitating potentially custom model training.

Unanet measures its Partner Program success by tracking the number of active technology partners, the percentage of net new ARR that tech partners source or influence (aiming for 10%), and the integration attachment rate to new logo deals. While a formal, structured quarterly business review (QBR) process with partners is not yet in place due to the program's rapid growth, it is a key objective for the second half of the year. Rachel acknowledges the broader industry conversation about having a "seat at the table" for partnerships but emphasizes the importance of a strong internal advocate. Reporting directly to the Chief Innovation Officer, who champions the partner program to executive leadership, ensures strategic alignment and support for future investments in Technology Integration Partnerships and AI-driven efficiencies.

Unanet's strategy for sustained growth in challenging markets like GovCon and AEC involves leveraging Technology Integration Partnerships to expand beyond its core SMB strengths into the upper-market enterprise space. While Unanet's ERP is highly successful with SMB GovCon clients (50-500 employees), scaling upmarket requires specific functionalities that Unanet's core product might not fully provide. This necessitates strategic partnerships with companies that either already operate in the enterprise GovCon space, offering an immediate "helping hand," or provide a full suite of complementary solutions that large enterprise customers demand. These partners fill functionality gaps, enabling Unanet to compete effectively in segments beyond its current direct reach, even against larger players like SAP and NetSuite.

The SMB segment also presents a challenge in driving integration adoption. Smaller customers (under 75 employees) often do not see the immediate ROI for integrations like payroll synchronization, as the value gained from automating a small number of employee data entries is limited. Consequently, Unanet aims to increase the overall integration attachment rate by focusing on larger companies, where the value of streamlined data flow is more pronounced. This highlights a need for targeted outbound programs promoting solution bundles to high-value customers, encouraging them to adopt more integrations and enhance their overall tech stack stickiness.

However, a significant hurdle for Unanet is the lack of dedicated partner marketing resources, forcing a "one-to-one" marketing approach by customer success managers (CSMs) rather than scalable "one-to-many" campaigns. CSMs are critical in educating customers about new integrations during business reviews. This resource constraint means that while Unanet's strategy clearly identifies ideal partners (those filling functional gaps for upmarket expansion or those with existing customer overlap), executing comprehensive go-to-market efforts to promote these integrations to existing customers is manual and resource-intensive. The future investment in AI agents for tasks like content push-out and joint value proposition planning would directly address these gaps, allowing Rachel's "team of one" to scale partner marketing efforts and drive higher integration attachment rates across the customer base, fueling Technology Integration Partnerships growth.