During events with our users, like our Pendo User Groups and Pendomonium, we like to sit down with our partners and discuss how working with Pendo helps their business. Most recently, Trevor Bunker from Applied Systems and Donovan Lytle from Anthology shared their experiences and advice. Here’s what we learned.
Watch the full recording or read the highlights below.
Learn more about the Pendo Partner Program here.
What is the Pendo OEM Partner Program?
The Pendo Partner ecosystem helps companies extend their products and solutions with the global software experience management (SXM) platform.
Pendo partners have access to a wide range of benefits, including joint go-to-market (GTM) offerings to differentiate your brand from the competition, dedicated partner teams to support organization enablement, and grow revenue.
Trevor Bunker, Chief Customer Officer at Applied Systems
For more than 40 years, Applied Systems has created innovative technology for the global insurance industry. Today, it’s a rapidly growing cloud software leader that is revolutionizing the way insurance agencies and brokers succeed.
Donovan Lytle, Sr. Director, Business Development.
As an enterprise software company that works mostly with higher education institutions, Anthology delivers education and technology solutions so that students can reach their full potential and learning institutions thrive.
What led Applied Systems & Anthology to partner with Pendo?
Applied Systems first used Pendo internally to monitor their applications and support customers. They recognized an opportunity to improve adoption and reduce churn in their subscription business by extending Pendo’s capabilities to include In-app Guides.
While these efforts succeeded with small and medium-sized businesses, enterprise customers needed a more tailored experience—which was the catalyst for exploring an OEM partnership.
On the other hand, Anthology had grown primarily through acquisitions and offered multiple products to users. They faced a critical moment when migrating from an on-premise/private cloud deployment to SaaS, cloud-based platforms. Higher education is typically change-averse, so they needed a digital adoption solution to help move users to the new platform.
After learning a competitor was acquiring the digital adoption solution they’d been using, they conducted market research for a new option and quickly landed on Pendo. They partnered with Pendo and created “Anthology Adopt.”
How did you achieve cross-functional alignment on this partnership?
Anthology
As a product-led company, Lytle’s partnerships team is closely aligned with the product team. This alignment was crucial since they manage an ecosystem of over 500 partners for their flagship product.
Despite having established partnership processes, securing the Pendo partnership required nearly a year of working with various stakeholders, from the Chief Product Officer (CPO) through product managers and other C-suite members. Their urgency was partly driven by necessity—they had 65 clients relying on a digital adoption solution with no replacement after their previous provider was acquired by a competitor, representing significant revenue they needed to protect.
“We were driven by the product need and the market hole that would be left if we didn’t serve those customers with a new solution.”
Donovan Lytle, Sr. Director, Business Development, Anthology
Applied Systems
Bunker emphasized two key learnings from their partnership journey. First, choosing the right long-term partner is critical since they would be embedding the technology in their solution for thousands of customers. After evaluating several options, including established players who showed a “lack of investment in key areas,” they chose Pendo because of its commitment to innovation, product-led growth, and development roadmap.
Second, since partnerships were somewhat new to their traditionally self-contained approach, gaining internal buy-in required validating the financial benefits to their Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Sales teams needed a new product to sell to existing customers while simultaneously driving adoption and combating churn.
This “two-for-one” approach helped secure support from product teams and the CRO when structuring pricing and packaging.
How is Pendo currently a part of your organizational goals?
Anthology
Lytle explained that Pendo is an integral part of their GTM and sales organization strategy, with quota retirement tied to sales. Their situation is unique because the higher education market already understands the value of digital adoption products, making Anthology Adopt relatively easy to sell.
This is particularly valuable because their company has over 50 different products they could sell, which can be overwhelming for salespeople. Given that sales cycles in higher education are lengthy, an easy-to-sell product with clear value is a game-changer.
Anthology Adopt connects directly to the product experience and addresses institutions’ goals of getting users onto learning management systems with minimal friction while maximizing value quickly.
With Anthology Adopt, their sales team can easily add this in year two or three of multi-year agreements, generating additional revenue.
Applied Systems
Bunker discussed how beneficial the Pendo partnership has been, emphasizing both companies’ mutual values.
He shared that Pendo has enabled them to create a “steel thread” across their entire company that underpins their defining objectives, which focus on digital adoption. Since they sell their products based on productivity and efficiency metrics (revenue per employee, productivity per employee), Pendo helps them quantify these values for customers throughout the entire sales and implementation process.
This alignment is critical because their value proposition depends on customers actually using their product. Pendo has connected every aspect of their business—from sales messaging to customer onboarding to success delivery—providing metrics and visibility throughout the journey.
What excites Trevor most is how Pendo has created complete organizational alignment. The sales teams can sell the value of ramping up new team members faster and driving competitiveness, which they then deliver through Pendo’s guides, training, and interactive features during implementation.
Every team across the company is now incentivized and aligned toward the same outcomes, with Pendo as the connective element.
What is next in your respective Pendo partnership journeys?
Anthology
Lytle discussed Anthology’s expansion of their direct licensing of Pendo onto other solutions and how that will translate to the expansion of Anthology Adopt. “For the first time, we’ve been able to turn to Pendo and see monthly product usage which is huge for our market, product, and future product development,” Lytle explained. “I expect that we will be licensing Pendo for our next largest flagship product.”
Applied Systems
There are two key areas of focus, explained Bunker: scaling the business with large customers, and expanding to mid and small markets. The team is also working on downmarket packaging—exploring lighter-touch, more scalable options like embedded content, resource centers, and on-demand support models that don’t require full-time managed services but still deliver value at a lower cost.
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