PartnerUp #106 - Send This to Your CMO - Blake Williams

What is up PartnerUp!

How do you deploy the battle-worn tactics when they haven’t been developed yet? How do you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to revenue-generating strategies and marketing plays?

You experiment, measure the results, and try again. And again. And again. But where should you experiment? How much time and resources is it helpful to spend experimenting vs doing what you know?

Blake Williams, CEO and Head of Partnerships at Ampfactor, is ready to help you go from partner-intrigued to partner-actioned. “How can we expect people to do something they’ve never done before, if they’ll get fired if they mess it up?” asks Blake.

Blake lays out an 80/20 framework: 80% of your budget and resources toward what you know works (established and tested GTM plays) and 20% to experimentation. “What’s my newest, highest, and best use of these funds?” asks Blake. “New data, new decisions, what does that look like today?”

We touch on the intersection of partnerships and demand gen, attribution for partner-generated success, how CMOs can use partners to hit their numbers, and how to measure the success of a partnerships strategy. Can you get ahead through experiment?

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Full transcript:

Jared Fuller  0:11
All right, what is up, partner up? We're back. I'm back in the studio. So I at least have a good mic. But then my video screwed up last time. So I listened to the last episode that I ran solo Isaac was out last week that we ran, I ran with Kelly serbin. So Sorry, fellas, and gals, I was very disappointed in the audio quality, just me taking accountability for recording in a industrious co working space. And then for the dozens of you on YouTube. My office is under construction. So next week, hopefully we're back to full fidelity. But I got my partner back, Isaac, what's up, man?

Isaac Morehouse  0:44
I'm just glad I don't mind the solo episodes or the episodes where I'm not President, the quality being a little lower, because like subconsciously, it makes people want me on the show more just because the you know, the sound quality will

Jared Fuller  0:55
be better that I wanted to kick this one off, before we introduce our guest. Longtime overdue for bringing him on is maybe Isaac when we were spending some time together earlier in the week in person talking about the near bad narratives. So we're kind of coming up with this adjusted framing so that we're all kind of talking about what is this fundamental shift? And we were going through the narrative that we created for partner hacker how we came up with trust is the new data, our mission statement, we're trying to do this for near bound, and really define like, what was what was the old world and outbound what was true then the outbound inbound era? And then what's true in the near bound era. And I think we I seem to have been nailed it. I think we might have and we'll have to get our guests opinion on it.

Isaac Morehouse  1:45
Yeah, I think so. I've got the I've got the narrative tinglies you know, when you're like, Oh, I think I got something here and you get the little, you know, little goose bumps on your spine. Yeah, we were talking about, you know, we were trying to like, brainstorm together, what is the what's the big shift? What's the what's the key change that makes near balance such a necessary play right now? And as we're kind of brainstorm, and we're like, Okay, well, in the, in the, you know, previous era, what was the way that you went to market? What was the way to win? Who were the kings of that era? And it's like Google, right? Because in early in the information age, everybody was asking the question, how, how do I acts? How do I set up marketing automation? How do I do? How do I write and whoever presented the best information first tended to when that could be an email that they get at the right time? That could be a Google search result? That could be it's SEO, SEM PPC? Like that was the game how it was the how economy now, the quantity of answers to how that the quantity of information is so high? That doesn't work anymore. Right? Like, think about when you go look at an ink Chris Walker does all this great stuff on refined labs about showing the results when companies put a free forum? How did you hear about us? Question in their in their signup flow? People don't say, I was looking for how to solve this problem. And I googled it or it's like, a person. They heard it from a person on a podcast or on LinkedIn or word of mouth. So we've moved from the how economy to the who, economy? Who can I go to, to ask me to help for this? Who can I go figure out what you know, the solution for this? People are looking for who not how anymore? I think that is the big shift. That is why near bound sales near bound go to market is so crucial, because if you are not working with the who, and you're just focusing on trying to answer the how you're gonna get left out, people aren't asking how anymore they're asking who Yeah, welcome.

Blake Williams  3:49
I feel like this is kind of like Plato's the cave, where inbound and outbound might be represented by the prisoners thinking, or looking at the shadows as that, as that's their reality, when that wasn't real, real reality. The reality was what happened underneath the sun, right? And the reality of what has actually always been taking place, no matter what we thought, in our minds was the truth. It has always been taking place, right? And so we can call it net new, but it's really net new realizations of how it's always been. Right? We've always done deals with people who we met on the golf course or who we meet our and our friends of our best friends. It's more about understanding what's actually underneath the light and what's really at play. Startups have grown this way. Big, big, big deals get done this way. Right. And it's more about coming out of the light. Inbound and outbound are just shadows. Yes, they're effective. Yes, they exist, but their truest form exists with what's happening under the sun with the real versions of who I

Isaac Morehouse  4:44
think when the digital era began the ability to scale all of these other efforts so fast and because they were new, they kind of worked for a while. And now the the overwhelming amount of information and means that you've got to go back to the you know, sort of the trust but How'd you do it in a way in taking advantage of the digital era that's also scalable

Jared Fuller  5:05
to tie together from what are from from the how economy to the WHO economy? I think the information disparity and the differences, who, you know, relationship based golf course more Martini lunches. Yes, that's always happened. But I think the difference is in who is we're looking for who has been to the place I'm trying to go? Right. So it's not just based on some relationship. It's based on what an experience that demonstrates of that person is at the place that I'm trying to be that expertise, that's actually tacit and is seeing the story. Right, and that that applies to how we buy everything to Kim Kardashian launching a private equity fund to the world's fastest growing chocolate bar. Mr. Beast, right it's it's Tim Ferriss, you know him but athletic greens or your whatever those things are b2b influencers, right? There's actual real b2b influencers, like on LinkedIn, that's a thing representing brands, and those b2b influencers. Like, I'll shout out Ryan riser from phone ready leads. He's an influencer for cognizant, cognizant? And it's like, well, yeah, because Ryan is objectively done. This many cold calls is like anyone, right? Like, he's done more cold calls than you. So like, hey, that's influential, he's been to the place you're trying to go. And I think that's the thread. That's more true now than ever. Because previously, that how do I and like review sites? Okay, there's a little bit of who in the review sites, but wait, hadn't? This is just a random person? Like, did they actually solve the thing? Have they done it, we really are reliant on the the experience of those people that have been to the place we're trying to go. And I think that's what underpins why now, it's even more important than ever.

Blake Williams  6:44
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the mobilisation, I think what you guys are, are hinting around, right, that data exhaust kind of clouds, decisions, and when you can distill that, that noise down into a signal, which is what our technologies are allowing us to do, folks like, you're like, reveal, crossbeam, partner, tap, whoever, those are the initial signals that are saying, Hey, we can take all of this noise and give you something, a couple of signals that you can boil down activities around, right. And if you can wrap your brain around doing something different in those, those processes, then you're off to a great start. And you're in a different direction that's closer to meeting or matching your buyers preferences. Totally, totally.

Jared Fuller  7:22
And Blake, we were the reason why we kicked this off. So Blake, for those of you who don't know, he's been, I think one of the first people to really raise their hand to help CMOS, you know, kind of coming from the ABM world today on factor, and then getting partner pilled. I think as quick as I've seen anyone to tactically helping people with it, since the economy got real fun on us all. And we've talked a lot about sales attainment, and people missing their number. And obviously, marketing budgets are getting cut. But I wanted to take a step back, if everything in marketing was based on how and search in ads and product marketing, and all of these things that are about us. And all of a sudden now there's this shift to who that means that with the economy tanking budgets going down, it's not just that there's less available budget or fewer effective ways to get that spend through, you know, Google's losing $100 billion by the month right now. Right? Like, it's not a good spot to be in. How the heck, like what's happening in the CMO world right now? Blake, you because you probably have a better vantage point on that than just about anyone at the intersect of old world, you know, you know, ABM marketing demand gen, and kind of new world nearby and marketing stuff.

Blake Williams  8:36
I think a lot of folks are kind of what I see is a lot of folks looking around at each other, like, what the fuck that we do? There's not a lot of answers out there. And I feel like everything else has already been tried and, and tested and kind of already beaten down the path. So in the conversations that I see, I think folks are talking about the new ways the things that buyers prefer, like creator led growth or event led growth, or we're talking about partner led growth and mixings the combination of those things to offset the historical or traditional direct go to go to market pathways. But there's the it's like, okay, yeah, I see that I have to go ahead and Chip onto that island. I don't know how I'm going to do that. There's wind, there's a bunch of other things in my way. And I don't actually have that muscle memory of doing this. So what I see kind of in this gap is that, you know, we shifted from how to who, but we're back at the how, like, now they they know who's the answer? How do I get there? How do I actually like what I have to design my team? What I tell my team because I've never done this before. So I'm the leader, how do I tell you this is the path of the mountain follow me. Right? If it's not a safe environment to fail in? I can't do that. And here's what generally happens and it's okay 10% of marketers are marketing and 90% of people are trying to replicate what's happening at the time. percent, right, just long enough for the 10%, to figure out that since everybody went left, they can now go right again. And they're trying to pivot. So what what we see happening, or at least what I see happening is, is this massive gap or conversation where everyone's kind of holding their breath and like, hopefully I don't get fired. And I can keep enough things that are already working, moving. And someone's going to start talking about a pathway that I can pull the trigger on, that shows me how shows me how it makes it safe, testable. And if this is the beautiful thing, I think about partnerships, partnerships is not a test. It doesn't need an MVP in itself as a construct. It has already been proven historically, since the beginning of time. Right? That it works related down to business, you see it on a global scale, and we can jump into that in a second. But the thing that you're testing is, how do I and no different than building an MVP on the outside of your company and trying to roll it back into production? How do I test the new ways of matching my buyer preferences, and then figure out a way to make it effective, effective, first, efficient, after I bring it back into production, right, trying to test something and make it efficient immediately, it just means that you're going to run a shitty test, right and figure out how to squeeze a bunch of juice out of a very, very small thing. And it's not it's not a great approach. But partnerships creates that opportunity. If I've got 10 different partners, I can go to market with a creator influence play, I can go to market with sponsored event let growth event lead growth or an experience, I can do a bunch of different things

Jared Fuller  11:34
to get that point on event like growth, like why would you ever do an event without your partners there, right? Like you have 10 partners boom, you just reduce, you know, TEDx or CAC, by everyone sharing and pulling people together, it's like, you can layer this component of that as well, the partner method.

Isaac Morehouse  11:49
So Blake, let me ask you, because I've kind of seen talking with some talking with some marketers and sort of seeing people understand the pain feeling that the things aren't working, and then kind of hearing this, Hey, you gotta go creator, Lead Community lead event, lead, partner lead. And those all kind of have like a similar flavor, right? Because they're all about connecting with the person that your buyer trusts. I've seen a lot of versions of that, that basically just look like brand marketing again, which is just okay, we're going to call it a partnership. Shout out to Asher Matthew a while ago on LinkedIn for kind of starting this debate about like, what's a partnership versus a sponsorship, okay, we're gonna call it a partnership, you're really you're just paying me to put your put your logo on something, or say we're co hosting an event. And to a lot of marketers, they're like, it's kind of like the, that's like, the first step. Like, the lazy version is like, okay, so what I just start paying communities, I start paying podcasters, I start paying, you know, like, what's that gonna get me? How do you how do you get them to think a level beyond just the sort of brand level, quote, unquote, partnership?

Blake Williams  12:55
Yeah. I don't know. I, you know, I've left communities that, that do that, that have that behavior, if it's pay to play. I'm a big, I love knowledge, because I think knowledge plus experience, kicks, everything's ass, right? It doesn't matter. It's the best thing out there. And I kind of live for this stuff. And I feed my family with it, right? So I have to love it. I feel like those types of environments, if you lose your way, as a community, if you start doing pay to play, and yes, you got to have sponsors and support your events and stuff like that. But that doesn't mean you get to be the arbiter of knowledge, right? That the natural flow should allow that good knowledge to flow up to the top. I don't know how to fix that. For folks. That's a that's a virtue thing. Well, well put, well

Isaac Morehouse  13:42
say that, say to the, if you're talking to a CMO, and they're like, Okay, cool. I want to work with communities, creators, partners. How do I do that? In a way that's not just me paying them to put a logo on something? What does that actually look like? Like? What is helping them see what a real partnership looks like in that? What's kind of your first step to give them the aha moment.

Blake Williams  14:04
So that part's funny, even in even in some of our current customers. The AHA moment, it comes in a couple of different ways. But generally, it comes when you talk about what you can just what you can do with sales. We just took a list, we pulled it out of reveal, we crossed the cross referenced it with and this was literally last night and then talked about it this morning. In an earlier meeting. We pulled the overlap list out of reveal and we've cross reference that with a tier one enterprise account list, right? And we've looked at all the overlaps. We ended up with 58 Different enterprise accounts, introductions can be done on and the marketing leaders on the other end of the of the Zoom call, and they're like, Okay, so. So how many sellers is this? And I'm like, well, it looks like we just read a pivot table. It's 18 sellers. Well, how are we getting a buy in on it? And I was like, What are you talking about? You're gonna walk over to your VP of sales, and you're gonna say, Hey, I have a way for 18 Have your sellers to go access 53 enterprise accounts? Can we make this a priority? If your CEO overhears that he's gonna say, What the fuck are you even talking about? Go do that. Right? If it's especially if it's 100k plus zero, people are gonna hesitate on that, because right now, outbound inbound, all those things are suffering. And they're still using those methods. That's fantastic. But if you can truncate that on 58 accounts, don't do for the whole pie. But 58, she's like, and she goes, Well, wait a minute. Shouldn't we do this across multiple partners? Shouldn't this be the first step? before we ever go out to a list is go see if a partner can do an introduction. My said, You've got it. And then I don't eat any weed. I'm not turning on any more lights there. But that's, that's how you, I think talking through the way that those marketing leaders can impact this, the lives of their stakeholders, is now the really empowering way. How do I make my CRO more empowered with more data? How do I empower my EVP of sales or my head of customer success, that cmo can become that hero?

Jared Fuller  16:03
He brought up? Something that I feel like once you hit that point, because I think you nailed hit the nail on the head for a very simple way to get that cmo to go, oh, yeah, well, this is a no brainer now. But then like what value add activities can I can I do as a marketing organization as a CMO to ensure that this is a play that I can continually do? So for example, I've been really on this kick around defining these near bound plays. And the reason why I'm calling the near bound plays, is that you said the word introduction, introduction and referral is one of many plays. Right? So for example, it might be, you know, those AES are doing, let's say, outbound on those accounts, there is some activity? And how might you as a marketing person, a master of messaging, and how people, you know, respond to, you know, emails, etc. help them develop, you know, per partner, let's say, a joint value proposition, right? To say, Hey, here's my value hypothesis, there's kind of two layers joint value prop company A company B, what's in it for both parties? And then what's the value hypothesis for the third component, which is the customer, right? How do you bring those things together, and then use that initial outreach? As a test? Hey, I'm thinking about, here's how we work great together. Here's my hypothesis for the customer. It looks like you are talking to six contacts over there that I'm currently not engaged with, what was missing whenever they bought from you three months ago, or what's missing, you know, the key initiative, you know, changes in personnel, different buying centers, like there's all this information that you guess what all of that information is the information you're trying to get? How are you going to get it, it's not in a public filing. It's not on their website, it's about internal stuff. So either you know, someone at the company, and you have a champion, which means you have an opportunity, you don't need to, like you're already there, or you're gonna go to a partner and get that stuff. So I think marketing can look at this and go, Well, if I just empower my sellers, to like, go do this, then hey, I can kind of take marketing credit for that, so to speak, and help my partner team and my marketing team go with sales, it's all of that stuff. There's a lot of work to do there that I think people they want, while the introduction is the net goal. It's not the only play and you don't have to start there.

Blake Williams  18:31
No, no, by all means, like, but generally, right, if you're doing something new, you gotta like, when people say they want innovation, what they really mean is they want 1% different than vanilla, so that they can get it through budget approval, and also move slightly to the left. If we keep doing one more to the right, or one more to the left, and I can stay safe. And we can keep pursuing this model. So we do two things, right. First of all, from a better together story perspective, we have a 13th dimension analysis. At the end of the day, it just helps you track the decision that you're making, as you invest in better together stories. Look back next quarter, if you didn't get the revenue that you want, look back at the decisions that you made. It's quantified. Now start trying to move those needles. At the end of the day, you need to make things that are convertible. What can the CMO do? There's a million things you can do, what you should try to understand is that, hey, where there's smoke, there's fire, if you can get 58 introductions this quarter. And you could do that every quarter as you spend on demand. And so do they, then you want to figure out how you can become a feature on their product roadmap or on their journey? When is the right point to automate this introduction? And then when you scale that with one partner, how do you do that with 10 different partners so and so if you can become a feature on the landscape, you now represent the whole mountain range that

Jared Fuller  19:47
the you just nailed that in terms of the the minds, that's a CMO mindset, you're talking like a CMO right now Blake, not not like a partner person. So like, this is the episode that you take to your cmo partner leaders. And then I want to kick this back over to you because I think this, this is, I was at the Pavilion cmo summit a couple of weeks back. And I didn't know this whenever Isaac and I were discussing, his title was like chief market officer, there's another one of my favorite people in the world who shares this title. It's laden a cannot from sixth sense. She's not chief marketing officer. She's chief market officer, Isaac, I think that's a perfect example of like, maybe chief market officer versus chief marketing officer, where you're, you're looking at that from the lens of the market, not just from the lens of like, the activities and like what that need is,

Isaac Morehouse  20:38
yeah, yeah, I remember, Jared, we have this combo. It's probably like, six months ago, maybe even longer. Time flies, but you're like, hey, we never really have titles, period partner, hacker. And I've carried the chief market officer title into my role at reveal as well. But you're like, what if? What if I was CEO, and you were CMO, but I'm Chief ecosystem officer, and you're a chief market officer, and I was like, Oh, I immediately guys, like, that's brilliant. I love it. Because I'm huge on on words and the language we choose. And I know I've talked many times about like metaphors we live by and some of that stuff on the show. This the subtle difference this makes you pause and go Wait, what market marketing is something is an activity you do to people, where market is a process you participate in with people live in the market, listen to the market work with the market, it's a process, it's a give and take, it's a constant dance. And if you're outside of it, lobbing things at it, you're you're always you're going to be disconnected so quickly, but if you're in it all the time, and there's that give and take, you know, that's, that, to me, that's like everything. And it seemed it seems so high level and like woowoo to a lot of people. But it starts with the language because the language shapes the boundaries of acceptable thought, and the frameworks that we're going to default to. And then from there, I mean, again, I talked to so many people where they're like, give me the tactics, I want specific tactics. Okay, I believe you want all this partner, let all this near bounce stuff. And that's great. There are specific tactics. And Jared, you had a great video with a couple of tactics, you've been talking about a couple of the plays here. But I always kind of feel tempted to say, Yeah, but once you really get it, once you have the partner pill moment, you actually won't need a list of tactics, you'll have more tactics than you can, your mind will just start to go crazy, because it's like the paradigm shift. Once it happens, you can't unsee it, it's like learning to ride a bike, you don't forget, you just know it, you just everything's different from here on out. So kind of like trying to get people to have that moment where the light bulb goes off. I mean, like you mentioned earlier, like, if I can just get people to have that one light bulb, everything else kind of cascades out from there. And then they'll come up with more ideas than you and I could sit in here and come up with and you know, in 20 minutes,

Blake Williams  22:54
if there's anything I learned from the military, when you're when you're showing somebody doing something new, is is tough, and is very uncomfortable. If you do something new and say, Hey, if you mess this up, I'm gonna fire your ass. And be ready. Right? There's not a lot of people who are gonna say, hey, put me right. And so tactics give you a good way to kind of take a couple bites, and not risk the whole thing. So like, you should be looking at 80% of what you're currently doing as stuff that you should try to keep stable. Right? You should look at 20% to say, what is my newest, highest and best use of these funds, new data, new decisions, what does that look like today? Right. And you should be saying, hey, if I'm not out there testing CEO CRO, whoever's above me, then I'm kind of doing you a disservice. My job is to continuously validate that we have we have the right 80% running all the time and feeding more capital into it. This 20% is a constant bellwether for where we should be heading to and running to from an org design standpoint. Partnerships create setup opportunity, it's actually already on an island for you. And I don't know if you can get any better to have a test outside of the host. But for most, most of the organizations that are out there, test it, you already have or separated from most of your core revenue production offer operations go build. It's the it's fertile ground is brand new, you got new data and new decisions to be able to mobilize and there's a million directions to run it. And if you don't know, ask the reveal team has crossbeam asked me ask a bunch of these leaders out there who have actually done it not just thinking about academically the way to do it, but are actually doing it in the field. Ask them how to get it done.

Jared Fuller  24:33
One follow up to that Blake, kind of going a little bit further down the rabbit hole is let's say there's some buy in here and okay, we're aligned. I've always found that there's this initial hesitation. It's like when you're building the operating model, and there's partner and they have their number, that partner number is normally sourced influence revenue, you know, maybe pipeline to some degree. And I'm just saying that's the operating model, right? Like what's coming down from the CFO, COO whatever. up. But one thing that's very strange is I typically don't see until you're much later stage or in a channel award is a partner marketing number. And yet, most CMOS that aren't partner pilled, yet that aren't bought into this near bound way, they think of that partner activity is like, well, hold on, that's gonna hit the partner number and not the marketing number. So it's like, how do you get the CMO to take ownership of this as a reported into from the total, you know, marketing impact on the organization is partner needs to be in that mix. Like, here, here's how simple it is for sales leaders. You want a third of your pipeline from outbound a third of your pipeline from inbound and a third of your pipeline from here about, it's really that simple. 1/3 of your activities sales leader, right, your sellers activities should be outbound 1/3 should be coming from inbound and 1/3 should be with partners. It's that simple. It's dead dead simple. From a marketing perspective, how do we get them to kind of like get to that same spot where they're thinking about their mix in having a bucket for partner? Because I often find that same hesitation with sales leaders is marketing like, oh, no, that's, you know, it's not going to hit my number because it's from a partner.

Blake Williams  26:07
Right? So let's play on your, you hit on a couple of good things there. We're gonna start with trusses data, then we're gonna get into how you measure partners, and how it's kind of wrong right now. So one trust is data, right? Trust is the new data. Your job as a chief market officer, right, or marketing officer is to somehow build trust or harvest it or then help it to be converted and then care for it. Right? We call that the four C's of demand, right? You create demand, you, you capture it, you convert it, and then you care for it after you're all of that is basically what you're doing with trust. And you're making that your job as a CMO is to build as much trust as you possibly can. You should think about this as how do I, the people that have already been there before, partnerships, we just use that example of if I if one partner can bring in 53 Different introductions a month, and I can be a feature on their product roadmap, and blah, blah, blah, we're on their journey, then if I can do that, times 10, that's 530 opportunities that we have coming in the pipeline, that's a lot of trust that I can go borrow, by just grabbing data and, and and collaborating with another marketing team through partnerships. So that seems really, really fast versus let me think about let me go talk to customers, let me go find out what we're gonna write for copy, let's create a campaign, let's get the campaign in market, let's launch let's run it, let's spend money, let's do all these other things. That seems like the very first thing that seems like a very first base type of hit before I go do anything else. Right? It also doesn't cost me anything other than having time with my with my partner team, having them do their job, which is halftime with their partners, right and getting on the phone getting revealed data, crossing data, whatever the overlap data is, get it. And let's talk about the opportunity there. How much trust is built up that we can harvest and share with each other should bring more value to our customers?

Jared Fuller  28:00
Right? Is a quick follow on to that Blake, where where I see people getting stuck is that you almost think of marketing in these Yeah, I hate to use the word channel but you know, channels, so to speak of like, Hey, I have this this lane, this lane, this lane. And it almost seems counterintuitive or backwards to add partner is another lane. In other words, if we were to talk about I don't know events, right, that might be a lane. Well, there's a partner play for events. So is that partner is that event? Yam? Well, your entire ABM strategy could be based on partner contribution to that account list. So is that ABM or is that partner? So is it here's this, you know, swim lanes of these different buckets, but then there's a partner layer underneath. How do you go about like reporting on that, so to speak?

Blake Williams  28:47
Oh, yeah, yeah. So there's a like what, like I just said, we use a foresees a demand for that. And there is a the way we think about it, is that actually underneath acquisition, we're going to create, there's three growth levers, levers acquisition, conversion and retention. Underneath acquisition, we're going to create demand and capture demand. Underneath both of those things. Underneath create demand, we're going to quantify how many future customers know our brand and, and care about it. Underneath capture demand, we're going to quantify how many future customers are interacting with our brand and transitioning their velocity to hand razors. So those are the outcomes that we want as executives underneath both of those buckets, and we're still in acquisition. And we're still going to create demand and capture demand. But for each of them, we have go to market opportunity opportunities, ABM, paid plg partner inbound community and outbound. That is an option for every see underneath the four C's of demand. So you need out of those seven, that's an operational a go to market operation, and you need to find out which one of those gives you access to high trust populations as early as possible. bool so that you can transition your velocity from they don't know or care about you to hand raisers as fast as possible. And again, four C's of demand, you have all seven of those as options. Your job is to figure out how to access high trust audiences. In Matt, and as scale, start small, and build to that. So like, how do you choose which one, that's your job to test, but every single partners is every single, it's a go to market operation that should feed every single one of the four seasons demand, I was talking

Isaac Morehouse  30:33
with a Head of Content last week about she was like, you know, hey, here's the content calendar. And we've got these different types of content that we sort of want to get out. So we want to a case study, you know, maybe once a month, we want, you know, a post, that's repurposing stuff from an event that we did maybe once a week, and we just kind of these different layers. And she was like, and then would you put like, a partner, you know, a post that we're doing with a partner, like, where did those fit in? And I was like, Are you old enough to remember transparencies? She wasn't. So then I felt really old. But what I you know, I remember the, you know, the teacher gets up there, and they got the projector screen with the clear piece of paper that yeah, you lay on there. And I said, you know, what's cool about transparencies is you could layer them on top of each other. So you could have one, and then you add another one that adds some more, you know, on top, I said, that's, that's what for your content calendar. Think of partners as a transparency, you got all your content types, your case studies, your blurbs, your repurposed event stuff, your deep dive articles, your short articles, your newsletters, you layer that partner transparency on every single one of those. That's how you should think about it. So Jared has kind of your analogy, like, is this the thing that goes underneath all the swim lanes? And I think absolutely, you can underneath or you can go over with the transparency, whatever, whatever metaphor, but that question still have. Okay, so that's my goal. I want to get one or more partner involved in every single piece of content, our team puts out which we have a goal at partner hacker and reveal. What is the measurement aspect, they're like, doesn't matter. I'm one of these guys. Jared can tell you. I don't like measuring too many things. I think most people measure too many things. I rather measured the fewest number I possibly can. So it's like, well, maybe you don't need to measure it. Maybe it's just like, let's make sure we're doing it. But if you weren't going to measure just just saying on the content component, like what are you? How are you doing? How are you working that in? It's very easy to report up your metrics, like traffic and conversions and signups and all that stuff? What does a marketing team do to say, Oh, look, this percentage of our traffic came from more partners, or we sent this many clicks to our partners, or like, where does that come in? And have you seen anyone doing that in a serious way?

Blake Williams  32:53
Yeah, yeah, I think. And this was the second thing that we talked about, that you said, Jared, about around measuring your partners, right? You really what really needs to happen is that and this might be more of a realization of what's actually going on kind of back to Plato's cave. If you'd have 10 partners or 100 partners, they are adding value to their customers, somebody those customers are sending them cash, no matter what. So there's a value exchange occurring. Because you can't sense it does not mean that it did not happen. Right. And so how you measure how your partners add value is going to be different along the pipeline. Just because your your speedometer doesn't register for for that transfer of value, just means you're not looking at the right market basket of things. And so we want to measure things for the right reason. They Daniel asked me in a Slack message just a few days ago from from deal, you know, how long should it take to create a partner lead opportunity in a CRM after an event and almost like, there should be two different types of events. Option one is a high intent invent that's meant to be an event that's meant to be a conversion, right? That should be marketed to high intent individuals or people we're trying to get to self select from low intent to high intent. If you run option one, a right type of event, we are trying to build intent. If you measure how long it takes to create an opportunity after that, if you're up a creek without a paddle, you're just doing the wrong thing. You're just doing the wrong thing. That's not meant for that. So you want to measure what really kicks ass with that is how many registers did you get that actually showed up? commented, engaged, connected with you after? Those are the types of things that matter? And if that doesn't fit into your performance plan, and you need a new performance plan, because this is about objectively and empirically witnessing what behavior is happening in front of you and calling it like it is not what you want it to be. That's a

Jared Fuller  34:55
real talk. We got a quick plug, because I know we got to, we got to wrap this one up a couple quick plug So, Isaac, one year ago, what do we do?

Isaac Morehouse  35:04
One year ago, you got up on a table in the middle of a lounge at SAS connect. And you just started screaming about trust is the new data and we launched the Parker hacker website. I was sitting there trying to furiously edit the partner hacker manifesto, like minutes before we published it. So yeah, that was at SAS connect. So guess what's coming up, SAS connect, guess who's gonna be there, we're gonna have a partner hacker crew, you will see will and Adam from partner hacker running around, I kid you not in partner, hacker tracksuits, they've got our logo all over them, they convinced me that this is a worthy expenditure. So they better prove to me that this is a worthy expenditure by having lots of great conversations with all of you, they're gonna be there with video, audio, do it on the ground interviews, turn it into some great content reporting about what's going on in the world. And then Jared is gonna be given a little talk there about near bound as well. There'll be a reveal booth, also in Jared doing a little little spiel on nearby so if you haven't signed up for SAS connect yet, it's in San Francisco. It's two days, I think it's the 19th and 20th of April, great events. But very near and dear to the to the history, if we can call it a history already of partner hacker and excited to be back there again, after so much has happened in just one year.

Jared Fuller  36:22
Call it software association.com Ghosts, go sign up. Tell the crew that we said hi. And we'll be there in full force. Blake, anything from your side off for the fine folks listening today before we piece up?

Blake Williams  36:34
Yeah, we are. You know, amp factor. My company is hell bent on creating pathways for CMOS VPS at demand gen and partner teams to explore one not only the fruitful and fertile ground of partnerships, but to the new are the pathways that match your buyers preferences and showing up to create and capture demand. So one of those things that we're doing is this partner Palooza event on June 1, it'll be a way to leverage dark social, it'll be a way to leverage account mapping, it'll be a way to leverage intent from folks like sixth sense, and pull all of that together to generate as much value as you possibly can pre event and then have a bunch of things happen. During the event day, inside of two hours, we have DJ umami who does the the music for the XFL for the rock out in Vegas, and we have Nike, influencer marketing team doing a bunch of stuff with us. So we're going to start the marketing on that, I think in about 10 days. But it'll be a really easy way for a bunch of partner teams and marketing teams to start to see how you can generate value really, really quickly. And almost risk free. Which I know is a lovely economic term right now. If you want to sign up right now. We're we haven't even launched yet, but come to me on come to me on LinkedIn. Other than that, I'll make sure that if you're on a partner team, you're gonna see it in the next six weeks. I can guarantee that.

Jared Fuller  37:58
Wow, what a fantastic episode. Fellas, thank you so much for this conversation. I think this is one definitely for the marketing books and send to your CMO, Blake Williams, everybody. Isaac, good to be back with you. Excited to see everyone at SAS connect a minute partner palooza. So all right, partner up, peace out. We will see you all next time.

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