When I was given the opportunity to build and lead the Partnerships team at Coalesce in February 2022, I had little traditional alliances experience. I had primarily worked as an enterprise salesperson with a knack for partner-led sales.
But I understood a few things:
- Coalesce was coming out of stealth with a game-changing solution for a problem experienced by nearly all data teams and Snowflake customers: data transformation.
- There are thousands of third-party consultants and data experts helping Snowflake customers transform data. Most are incentivized to make it faster and easier.
- Partnering with those experts was the most effective way to gain traction in a crowded modern data stack landscape.
I knew gaining attention would be an uphill battle. How does a startup with only a handful of customers get the industry giants to pay them heed?
We started from first principles, with a simple question:
How do we get Coalesce in front of those people who are committed to helping Snowflake customers transform their data more effectively?
This kicked off a grassroots campaign aimed at a few potential partners:
- Consultants focused on Snowflake work; specifically, teams that sell results and earn business by getting to those results quickly.
- Snowflake go-to-market teams that benefit when their customers quickly build data products valuable to the business.
- Fivetran go-to-market teams that desired a data transformation partner more philosophically aligned with their automated approach to moving data.
As Y Combinator founder Paul Graham put it, great startups are built by doing things that don’t scale. So we set out to find these people, oftentimes one by one, and began winning together.
Fast forward almost three years, after 4x-ing revenue in 2023 and raising a $50M Series B, we can proudly say our amazing Coalesce Partner Network is responsible for referring more than half of our business. Coalesce wouldn’t be what it is today without the countless people at Snowflake, Fivetran, Hakkoda, Resultant, phData, Sigma, and more who believed in our team and product.
Where we go from here
The future at Coalesce is exciting, and as our customer list has grown, so too have our ecosystem partnerships. The data industry is full of fantastic, best-in-class cloud technologies that become even more powerful when data is transformed in a scalable and understandable way.
In the future, you can expect wide-ranging integrations with existing and new technology partners via our growing list of APIs.
Our new integration with Fivetran is now in private preview and will be available to everyone soon!
And stay tuned for a variety of catalog integrations, collaboration with Cube’s best-in-class semantic layer, and deeper co-mingling with Sigma’s next-generation analytics and business intelligence platform.
The list goes on.
You can also expect extensive industry solutions from our consulting partners that blend these technologies and provide their clients with seamless, best-in-class modern data stacks that deliver value at scale.
Growing our Coalesce Partner Network
Coalesce has accomplished a lot with our partners so far in our journey, and the secret to our success is that every department in our company has our partners in mind in all they do. Every single Coalesce employee is in the Partnerships business.
From my seat, this is what makes Coalesce so special, and I’m excited to lead the charge in scaling that dynamic as we grow.
The one thing you can always count on is the Coalesce team working hard to make sure our partners and customers win when we win.
If you’re into that kind of thing, reach out and let’s chat!
