Marketplace

Darwinbox enhances partner ecosystem with AppDirect-powered Marketplace

Global human capital management (HCM) platform company connects 900+ customers to a suite of add-on solutions, elevating HR functionality and employee service.

Challenge

Customers lacked visibility into unique partner offerings, leading to missed upsell opportunities
Team members lacked reliable source of truth for all partner offerings available
Challenging for sales to track and manage offline conversations with partners
Disjointed process for sales team to respond to partner offering inquiries

Solution

Darwinbox Marketplace, powered by AppDirect

Results

Initial marketplace launch: Successfully onboarded 60+ partner solutions across 13 categories
HubSpot integration facilitates sales team’s tracking and updating of their pipeline
Custom SSO integration allows for seamless log-in and increased efficiency
Positive lead generation trend, indicating promising traction within a relatively short timeframe

Lack of a unified partner solutions catalog caused missed upsell opportunities

Darwinbox prides itself on being loved by HR leaders around the world. Built to make employee lifecycle management easier, the Darwinbox team is hyper focused on streamlining processes and systems for leading organizations. With more than 900+ customers in their ecosystem spanning nearly 120 countries, their software has touched the hands of over 2.5 million members of the global workforce. Since their founding, Darwinbox has established itself as a top HR innovator, delivering an enterprise grade HCM Platform with rich functionality and value based pricing.

The drive to provide more value led the team to make partner solutions readily available. Akshay Raghunath, Senior Product Manager at Darwinbox, identified a friction point during sales conversations. Typically, customers presented the sales team with a list of requirements for allied offerings. If a partner product met the requirements, the customer was connected with the partner to further the discussion.

However, this only happened if the customer was aware of Darwinbox’s partner offerings. Often, customers weren’t aware of compatible partner solutions available. This lack of visibility pushed them towards other market products, outside the Darwinbox ecosystem. This often led to integration challenges and feasibility issues with non-partners.

When customers submitted requests to the Darwinbox sales team, partners were introduced. However, the absence of a single source of truth listing all available partner offerings that integrate with Darwinbox posed challenges. This issue extended to new sales team members who lacked visibility and awareness on what solutions were available in the partner ecosystem. The lack caused delayed responses, and a manual effort to identify the right partner solution fit.

Raghunath explains, “As Darwinbox scaled and added more partners, it became challenging to manage these offline conversations. It also became quite inefficient for sales to respond to queries regarding partner offerings.”

As a result, many upsell opportunities were missed.

Raghunath shares more about Darwinbox’s journey to expand its partner network.

“As Darwinbox added more partners, disseminating information about their capabilities to both clients as well as internal, customer-facing stakeholders became cumbersome. Having a repository where all this information could be easily accessed was critical for enhancing client experience as well as improving the efficiency of the sales and partnerships teams.”

“We realized the potential of partner offerings contributing to our topline and bottom line. We had a vision of allowing third-party players to build on top of our existing platform for our clients, for which a marketplace like AppDirect was critical.”

AKSHAY RAGHUNATH, Senior Product Manager, Darwinbox

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Creating a partner marketplace: Build vs. buy

Once the idea of a marketplace was introduced, the team began evaluating whether to build or buy the solution. The option to build was quickly dismissed because such a platform is not Darwinbox’s core offering. Raghunath explains the reasoning: “It would have required massive investment from a product and engineering perspective for both development and maintenance.”

The Darwinbox team began exploring options and discovered the AppDirect platform. Through the free trial offering, they tested the platform’s core functionalities and ensured their critical needs were met out-of-the-box. Raghunath notes this allowed the team to move forward with AppDirect more quickly.

“AppDirect was easily configurable with minimal investment on the engineering side. Most of the competitors we evaluated had a backend system but the front-end had to be built by us. With AppDirect, most of our critical requirements were met out-of-the-box, which clinched the deal.”

AKSHAY RAGHUNATH, Senior Product Manager, Darwinbox

The AppDirect platform empowers customers to launch a marketplace to showcase third-party solutions or sell core offerings. As a white-label solution, Darwinbox can apply its corporate branding and maintain a similar look and feel, making it seem like an extension of the core Darwinbox product.

Other key features include

Ability to showcase third-party offerings
Ability to organize offerings by attributes, such as geography or product type
Ease of integration with Darwinbox: Custom SSO login & HubSpot integration
Minimal engineering investment
Highly configurable settings

At the end of the free trial period, the Darwinbox team decided that an AppDirect-powered marketplace would showcase third-party products, enhance the client experience, and support the partnership teams' selling process.

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3 steps to successful marketplace launch

After the free trial, the team mapped out the Darwinbox Marketplace launch plan. It include three primary steps:

Integrations

The Darwinbox and AppDirect teams collaborated closely to ensure a successful marketplace launch working through the implementations of SSO login and a HubSpot integration. Raghunath praised the collaboration: “The out-of-the-box configurations were done quite easily, and wherever there were queries, the AppDirect team resolved them instantaneously.”
Onboarding products and services

The Darwinbox team then added its catalog of solutions to their Marketplace, including white labeled products, connectors, and 3rd party partner products across a variety of categories. Early on the team added nearly 60 partner solutions, across 13 categories.

Together, these add-on options enhance the Darwinbox offering, enabling customers to customize their solutions. “The experience has been incredibly smooth, with seamless integration of partner products onto our marketplace,” explains Raghunath.
Launch

Today, within the Darwinbox Marketplace customers can search and filter by applicable products. First, they simply enter their credentials to log in via SSO. Once logged in, they can initiate a conversation with a partner via a notification system that notifies not only their internal sales representatives, but that of the partner as well.

An integral component of Darwinbox’s ecosystem strategy

Today, the Darwinbox Marketplace is a critical asset and sales enablement tool for both the sales and partnerships teams. Aastha Sharma, Partnership Operations Specialist, explains the importance of delivering a seamless experience across off and online-channels for B2B customers

“The Marketplace is a convenient one-stop destination where clients can swiftly explore and discover handpicked partner products that are pioneers in their respective categories.”

The products not only enhance customers’ experience with Darwinbox’s core offering, but increase the product stickiness as a whole. Similarly, Raghunath highlights the value of a partner ecosystem approach. “The marketplace now serves as an integral part of Darwinbox’s partner ecosystem strategy. With a wide range of product offerings integrated within our ecosystem, customers can conveniently access everything they need from a single centralized platform.”

Capturing additional leads, better product tracking

Since their official launch, the team has made significant strides, having onboarded nearly 60 partner solutions spanning 13 categories and counting. The team has also captured additional leads, which indicates the Darwinbox Marketplace continues to gain traction.

With the HubSpot integration, sales reps are benefiting from increased efficiencies since they can now easily record, update, and keep track of their pipeline where partner products are concerned. Partners also have increased visibility into opportunities.

“The response has been positive. Partners appreciate the visibility and opportunities our marketplace provides, while end-customers value the convenience and comprehensive offerings available. It is like a one-stop shop solution, simplifying their search and integration of the tools they need to enhance their HR processes,” says Raghunath.

Moving forward, the team plans to leverage the robust AppDirect platform to integrate even more partner solutions, streamline operations, and provide a seamless, unified interface for Darwinbox customers worldwide.