For Business Development Managers ·
What you'll accomplish
A spreadsheet cross-reference against a candidate partner's customer list used to eat an afternoon, exporting two account lists, sorting, matching by company name, and catching every misspelled variant by hand. Crossbeam automates that comparison. Once it's connected to your CRM, finding shared and overlapping accounts with a prospective partner drops from hours of manual matching to a same-day pull you can act on immediately.
What you'll need
Before you touch the product, verify the partnership has a signed agreement covering what account data gets shared and who can see it. This is not a formality. Crossbeam shows your company's customer list overlapping with another company's customer list, and if that agreement doesn't exist yet, the mapping itself may be premature or even a policy violation.
Troubleshooting: If you're not sure whether an agreement exists, ask legal or your partnerships lead before creating anything in the tool.
Sign up for Crossbeam and connect your company's CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar) as your primary data source. This sync gives Crossbeam the account list it needs to build Populations from.
What you should see: A prompt to connect a data source during onboarding, followed by a sync status indicator once your CRM data starts flowing in.
Click Data in the navigation menu, select Populations, then click Create to start one. A Population is a segment of your CRM data, for example, "open opportunities" or "active customers", that Crossbeam uses as one side of an overlap comparison. Crossbeam suggests filters based on the fields already synced from your CRM, so you're not building this from scratch.
What you should see: A filter builder with suggested fields from your CRM (stage, region, industry) and a live count of matching accounts as you adjust filters.
Troubleshooting: If the suggested filters don't match your CRM's field names, your CRM sync may be incomplete. Check the integration status under Data before proceeding.
When you create the Population, Crossbeam asks you to set a sharing default that controls how much account-level detail a partner can see about your overlapping accounts (just that an account exists, or deal stage and other detail too). Set this conservatively. You can loosen it later for a specific partner once the data-sharing agreement spells out what's allowed.
From the left-side navigation, click Lists, select +New, then choose Single Partner. Pick the candidate partner from your connected partner network (or invite them if they're not yet on Crossbeam) and select the Population you built in Step 3 as your side of the comparison.
What you should see: A mapping list populating with rows once both sides have synced data, each row showing an account and whether it appears in both companies' Populations.
Troubleshooting: If the partner hasn't accepted your invitation or connected their own data source yet, the list will show your side only, with no overlap column populated. Overlap data appears once both sides are connected.
Once both sides sync, sort the mapping list by overlap status. Shared accounts (in both companies' Populations) are your co-sell priority list. Look for accounts where the partner has an active relationship and you have an open opportunity, or vice versa.
What you should see: A table with columns for account name, your stage, the partner's stage (if the sharing agreement allows that level of detail), and an overlap flag.
Crossbeam is a data tool, not a chat interface, so there's no prompt to paste here. Instead, use these as a checklist when reviewing overlap output with an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude:
Summarizing overlap results for a leadership update:
I have a list of [N] shared accounts between our company and a candidate reseller partner. Here's the summary data: [paste account names removed, just counts and stage breakdown]. Write a 3-sentence summary for a leadership update explaining the overlap size and why it matters for this partnership decision.
Prioritizing which overlaps to act on first:
I have [N] overlapping accounts with a partner. For each, I know our deal stage and roughly how active the partner's relationship is. Help me build a simple scoring framework (not using any actual account names) to rank which overlaps deserve a joint outreach first.