The Meeting Package Playbook: Building a Partnership-Driven GTM Strategy in Enterprise SaaS

Most enterprise SaaS companies see other players in their space as competitors. Meeting Package saw them as potential distribution partners. This counterintuitive approach has become the cornerstone of their go-to-market strategy.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Joonas Ahola revealed how Meeting Package built a partnership-driven GTM strategy that turned former competitors into valuable allies. Here’s their playbook:

From Competition to Collaboration

The shift began with a crucial insight: marketplace companies had demand but lacked technology. As Joonas explains: “Today marketing is heavily driven by, lets say the whole GTM is driven heavily by our partnership strategy… we do have a product which is called the channel manager that connects with the third party distribution channels like technically our ex competitors.”

This realization transformed their entire approach to market. Instead of competing with marketplaces for hotel relationships, Meeting Package could provide the technology layer these marketplaces needed.

Creating the Flywheel

The genius of this strategy lies in its self-reinforcing nature. “They have the demand but they dont have the technology that we have for the inventory,” Joonas notes. “So were kind of together with them that they give us a hotel providers that they would like to have on their marketplace and then of course we connect to them and say hey by the way, to get traffic from this marketplace you need to be a partner of meeting package.”

This creates a powerful flywheel effect: marketplaces drive demand to hotels, which need Meeting Package’s technology to efficiently capture that demand, which makes the marketplaces more effective at driving demand.

Leveraging Industry Networks

The success of this partnership strategy is rooted in understanding the hospitality industry’s social fabric. As Joonas observes: “The hotel industry is so much driven by these kinds of networks and network effects, in a sense, that the person you talk today might be working tomorrow in the other hotel. And that’s just like how the industry works.”

This insight shaped their entire approach to building relationships. Traditional marketing tactics took a backseat to event-based networking: “When it comes to marketing, I think things that have been working for us is events in general. We work in hospitality, everyone in hospitality is super well connected and you need to have the doors to open instead of just cold calling and trying to get people to come to a webinar or a call.”

Building the Right Team

Executing this strategy required a specific type of talent. As Joonas explains: “We acknowledge the fact that we need to have people who can challenge the hotels because we’re not creating a vertical, we’re changing the way they operate.”

This meant hiring industry veterans who could engage in consultative selling and leverage existing relationships. The impact was clear: deals were “much harder when you didn’t have that kind of industry knowledge or background to question those ways of operating that are in the hotel.”

The Future Vision

This partnership-driven strategy isn’t just about current growth – it’s positioning Meeting Package for market leadership. “By 2027, we want to have 50,000 instantly bookable venues globally,” Joonas declares. Their goal is to become “the biggest owner of inventory going global.”

For B2B founders, Meeting Package’s journey offers a valuable lesson: sometimes the best GTM strategy isn’t about competing with established players, but finding ways to make them more successful. By providing the technology layer that makes other platforms work better, Meeting Package has created a sustainable competitive advantage that grows stronger with each new partnership.

The key is having the courage to see potential partners where others see competitors – and building the relationships and technology necessary to make that vision a reality.