How Rooom Built Distribution Through Partnerships Instead of Direct Sales

How Rooom Built Distribution Through Partnerships Instead of Direct Sales

Rooom didn’t build a massive sales team. They built integrations with automation vendors and let partners sell for them. Here’s the exact strategy.

Building enterprise sales teams is expensive. A hundred-person sales organization costs tens of millions annually in salaries, commissions, tools, and overhead. Most startups can’t afford it. Even those that can face a different problem: sales teams take years to build and longer to optimize.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hans Elstner, CEO of Rooom, shared how his team bypassed this entirely. Instead of hiring account executives and building outbound motions, they built integrations with automation platforms. Partners who already had customer relationships sold Rooom for them. For technical founders uncomfortable with traditional sales, it’s a masterclass in alternative distribution.

The Economics That Make Partnerships Attractive

Hans recognized early that direct sales didn’t align with Rooom’s business model. The math was simple. Hiring a sales team meant millions in fixed costs before closing a single deal. Partner channels meant variable costs tied to actual revenue.

“We’re building integrations with a lot of the automation vendors out there,” Hans explains. This wasn’t just integration for integration’s sake. Each partner represented an existing distribution channel—sales teams already calling on the exact customers Rooom needed to reach.

The economics work because partners are compensated on success, not on potential. No salary, no base costs, no wasted spend on unproductive reps. Partners only make money when they close deals. For a startup optimizing for capital efficiency, this alignment is powerful.

But economics alone don’t make partnerships work. The real advantage is speed. Building a sales team from scratch takes years. Finding the right partners, building integrations, and enabling their sales teams can happen in months. Rooom could access established distribution channels immediately instead of building their own slowly.

Identifying Partners Worth Building For

Not every potential partner deserves an integration. Hans had to be selective about where Rooom invested engineering resources. The wrong partnerships waste time building integrations nobody uses. The right partnerships create distribution engines that compound over time.

The first filter is customer overlap. Partners need to sell to the same buyers Rooom targets. For Rooom, that meant automation platforms serving technical teams. Companies already investing in workflow automation were exactly the customers who needed document processing capabilities.

The second filter is product complementarity. The best partnerships aren’t competitive—they’re additive. Automation platforms orchestrate workflows. Rooom handles document extraction within those workflows. Neither threatens the other’s core business. Both make the other more valuable.

The third filter is technical architecture. Partners need APIs, webhooks, and extensibility models that support deep integration. Surface-level partnerships that just list your logo on their website don’t drive revenue. Technical integration that makes your product feel native to their platform does.

Hans focused on automation vendors specifically because they checked all three boxes. Their customers needed document processing. The products complemented each other naturally. And automation platforms are built to be extended—integrations are part of their DNA.

Building Integrations That Partners Actually Sell

Having the right partners means nothing if their sales teams don’t sell your product. Hans learned that integration depth determines whether partners actively push your solution or just mention it passively.

Deep integrations make selling easy. When Rooom’s document processing appears as a native capability inside an automation platform, partners can demo it seamlessly. Sales reps don’t need to switch contexts or explain how two separate products work together. It’s one unified workflow.

This is where many partnership strategies fail. Founders build basic integrations—maybe an API connection or Zapier trigger—and expect partners to sell aggressively. But basic integrations create friction. Sales reps have to explain how the integration works, which means they need to understand both products deeply. Most don’t bother.

Hans invested in making Rooom feel native to partner platforms. Technical teams using automation tools could add document processing capabilities without leaving their existing environment. The experience was seamless enough that partners could confidently include it in their standard demos.

Enabling Partner Sales Teams

Even with great integrations, partner sales teams won’t sell what they don’t understand. Hans had to invest in enablement—training partner sales reps on when to position Rooom and how to articulate the value.

This meant creating sales materials specifically for partners. Not generic marketing collateral, but documentation that answers the specific questions partner sales teams encounter. When should they mention document processing? What ROI can they promise? Which use cases resonate most?

Hans also had to stay close to partner sales cycles. When partners brought Rooom into deals, someone from Rooom needed to be available for technical questions, proof-of-concept support, and deal acceleration. Partners won’t keep selling your product if you make them work too hard to close deals.

The goal was to make selling Rooom as easy as selling any native feature of the partner’s platform. The less friction partners encounter, the more likely they are to include you in their standard pitch.

The Tradeoffs Nobody Mentions

Partner-led distribution isn’t free. Hans gave up things direct sales teams provide. Control is the obvious one. With direct sales, you determine pricing, messaging, and which deals to pursue. With partners, they control the relationship. You’re a feature in their sales process, not the main event.

Margin is another tradeoff. Partners take a cut—sometimes substantial—of every deal they bring. Direct sales keeps all the margin but costs more upfront. Partner sales preserves cash but reduces profit per deal. Hans decided preserving cash mattered more than maximizing short-term margins.

Visibility into the sales process also decreases. With direct sales, you see every deal in your CRM. With partners, you often don’t know about opportunities until they close. This makes forecasting harder and reduces your ability to influence deal outcomes.

But these tradeoffs were acceptable because they solved Rooom’s core constraint: capital efficiency. “We wanted to build a sustainable business, not like burn through cash,” Hans explains. Partner distribution let them reach customers without burning millions on sales and marketing.

When Partner Distribution Actually Works

Hans’s strategy isn’t universal. Partner-led distribution works in specific conditions. Your product needs to fit naturally into partner workflows. You need clear customer overlap. And you need partners whose sales teams are actually capable of selling technical products.

The approach works particularly well for infrastructure products like Rooom. Document processing is a capability, not a standalone application. It makes sense as part of a larger platform. Customers don’t wake up looking for document processing—they discover they need it while building automation workflows.

This is different from products that require dedicated sales cycles. If your product needs extensive education, long proof-of-concepts, or C-suite buy-in, partner sales teams probably won’t invest the effort. They’ll focus on their core products instead.

Hans’s developer-first positioning also enabled partnerships. “Our main target audience is actually more technical,” he says. Technical buyers evaluate tools themselves. They don’t need extensive sales support. This made it easier for partner sales teams to introduce Rooom without deep expertise.

The Compounding Effect of Partnership Networks

The real power of Hans’s strategy emerges over time. Each partner integration creates a permanent distribution channel. As partners grow their customer bases, Rooom’s addressable market grows automatically. There’s no additional cost—the channel expands organically.

This compounding is what makes partner distribution potentially more valuable than direct sales. A hundred-person sales team reaches a fixed number of accounts. A network of partner integrations reaches every customer those partners acquire, forever.

For founders evaluating distribution strategies, Hans’s approach offers an alternative to the standard enterprise sales playbook. You don’t need massive venture rounds to fund sales teams. You need the right product architecture, the right partners, and the patience to build integrations that create lasting value.

Rooom’s $19 million Series A validated the model. They proved you can reach enterprise customers without enterprise sales teams—if you’re willing to build distribution through partnerships instead of headcount.