Ops Cast
Mastering Nearbound Partnerships: Navigating Trust and Strategy with Will Taylor
Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!
Unlock the secrets of partnership synergy with the astute Will Taylor, your guide to the Nearbound Go-To-Market strategy. As we traverse this new terrain alongside the head of Nearbound Partnerships at Reveal, you'll grasp how to encircle buyers with a halo of trust and value, impacting everything from brand recognition to customer fidelity and upselling opportunities. Prepare to reimagine the partnership ecosystem, where influencers, affiliates, tech integrations, and service providers become more than just a network, but a unified force for market penetration and growth.
If you've ever wondered how strategic relationships can bolster your business longevity, this conversation with Will is the key. We dissect the art of 'introduction plays,' where a well-placed referral can leapfrog cold outreaches and set the stage for meaningful engagement. This is about sculpting introductions that resonate with value and trust, and scaling them to new heights - a masterclass in crafting collaborations that amplify your brand and resonate with your audience on a level that goes beyond transactions.
This session isn't just about forging connections; it's about building an economy of 'Who' over 'What.' Trust isn't just a buzzword here; it's the currency we trade in as we navigate the intricate landscape of customer and partner relationships. Learn how to turn shared clients into shared successes, and measure the ripple effects of your marketing strategies with precision tools and techniques. We're not just talking about making impressions; we're embedding lasting imprints on the market through strategic, value-driven partnerships. Join us and Will Taylor for an expedition into the heart of network-driven growth.
Episode Brought to You By MO Pros
The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals
We've been HACKED! (just kidding)
If you love our show, you gotta be sure to tune into Justin Norris' show: RevOps FM
Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!
Unlock the secrets of partnership synergy with the astute Will Taylor, your guide to the Nearbound Go-To-Market strategy. As we traverse this new terrain alongside the head of Nearbound Partnerships at Reveal, you'll grasp how to encircle buyers with a halo of trust and value, impacting everything from brand recognition to customer fidelity and upselling opportunities. Prepare to reimagine the partnership ecosystem, where influencers, affiliates, tech integrations, and service providers become more than just a network, but a unified force for market penetration and growth.
If you've ever wondered how strategic relationships can bolster your business longevity, this conversation with Will is the key. We dissect the art of 'introduction plays,' where a well-placed referral can leapfrog cold outreaches and set the stage for meaningful engagement. This is about sculpting introductions that resonate with value and trust, and scaling them to new heights - a masterclass in crafting collaborations that amplify your brand and resonate with your audience on a level that goes beyond transactions.
This session isn't just about forging connections; it's about building an economy of 'Who' over 'What.' Trust isn't just a buzzword here; it's the currency we trade in as we navigate the intricate landscape of customer and partner relationships. Learn how to turn shared clients into shared successes, and measure the ripple effects of your marketing strategies with precision tools and techniques. We're not just talking about making impressions; we're embedding lasting imprints on the market through strategic, value-driven partnerships. Join us and Will Taylor for an expedition into the heart of network-driven growth.
Episode Brought to You By MO Pros
The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals
We've been HACKED! (just kidding)
If you love our show, you gotta be sure to tune into Justin Norris' show: RevOps FM
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by the MoPros. I am your host, michael Hartman, going solo today. Mike and Naomi will be back, I'm sure, soon. So today we are going to continue our series covering some emerging go-to-market approaches and what their implications are for marketing ops professionals, and joining me today to talk about one that they're calling Nearbound Go-To-Market is Will Taylor. Will is currently head of Nearbound Partnerships at Reveal and head of partnerships at nearboundcom, which I'm impressed you get that domain. Will has extensive experience in building partnership capabilities at companies, as well as experience in sales. So, will, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. I'm excited for our chat today and sharing all things Nearbound.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nearboundcom, I'm going to have to go check that out. I actually didn't do that in my preparation, so I failed right there, but I'll admit it.
Speaker 2:I'll be telling you all about it today anyway, so you'll learn just about everything you need.
Speaker 1:Perfect, All right. So when you and I chatted prior to this, I initially thought near bound, because I did a little bit of digging into it that near bound really was sort of another name for partner marketing. No-transcript.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the definition of near bound is surrounding your buyers with value through existing trusted relationships, and so, instead of thinking of it through the lens of partnerships, I always tell people to think of it through the lens of outbound, inbound and near bound. And, of course, partnerships are going to be layered into this, but I don't think that they're necessary for near bound to be actioned within an organization, and the reason for that is because you know traditional enterprise sales typically worked on referrals, or you know the the trope of you'd go out for a steak dinner, go golfing, and there you go. You meet your client's best friend who is also in business that could be purchasing your solution as well.
Speaker 1:I'm old enough. I'm old enough to remember a time when salespeople literally would have like a bar in the trunk of their car.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there we go Exactly so. This is the modern version of the trunk bar, and so, yeah, a lot of people will associate it with partnerships, because you do need to partner to make near bound work, but ultimately, at the end of the day, what this is touching on is there's an analyst in the space. His name is Jay McBain. He talks about the 28 touch points throughout the buyer's journey. Most companies are only at four of those touch points and that's through the traditional means of go to market those touch points, and that's through the traditional means of go-to-market. So how do you get to the other 24?
Speaker 2:Well, you need to leverage these partnerships, and that's again through this methodology of near bound where, although it is encompassing partnerships, it also can be used by sales and marketing and, in fact, the best way to implement it is having these departments adopt this mindset, because partnerships and this is what we talk about a lot is partnerships is not a department.
Speaker 2:Partnerships touches every part of the organization. You sell bigger deals, you sell faster when there's a partner involved. You get more reach and more conversion when there's a partner involved in your marketing more reach and more conversion when there's a partner involved in your marketing, and you retain more whenever there is either an integration installed or a partner involved, and so it isn't a siloed department and therefore Nearbound is also not siloed to just the partnerships function. So it truly is about engaging organizations and individuals in the ecosystem that you serve, across every part of your business, to deliver additional value to your clients so that they're thinking about you over your competitor, because you're in more places at once and more people are talking about you when you're not in the room.
Speaker 1:So that all makes sense. So something that just like literally just occurred to me while you were describing this, maybe a follow up question, Is there is a near bound strategy more appropriate for a company a certain size or stage? Is there also sort of a more appropriate?
Speaker 2:usage when you're targeting different types of size and stage of companies as your ICP or customer target. Yeah, I would say it can be implemented at any size of organization. So if I'm a net new company, the biggest challenge that I probably face is brand awareness. Nobody knows who I am because I don't have enough clients talking about us. I don't have enough money to spend on marketing, so how can I reach the people that could buy my software or solution? Well, if I partner with the voices that they're already listening to, or I'm on the podcast or in the community that my buyers are already engaging in, then that will get me more awareness at an accelerated rate than if I were to do it on my own as a small company.
Speaker 2:As a large company, you may care about upsell potential or additional retention, because those metrics are going to keep the business turning at that level that they're at. You know, let's call it an enterprise organization and what we find is organizations like Salesforce or HubSpot. Their sellers are motivated to sell more than just the HubSpot solution. They're actually incentivized to sell these other technologies and bring in solution partners, so that there's this additional retention propensity and the upsell propensity as well, this additional retention propensity and the upsell propensity as well, where and this is a stat that's very relevant in partnerships, where, for every integration that's installed, the average additional retention rate is about 13%. Add in you know three integrations to your technology, or add in, you know, service partners that are servicing your tech, and your retention is going to go up. So it truly does span across all kinds of organizations.
Speaker 2:The more specific use case across the buyer's journey will just be different and it truly does depend on what the business is focusing on as their most strategic initiative. And a quick side note like I talk about the rhythm of the business and how near bound is an overlay on the business, I'm actually creating some content around across the buyer's journey. How can you engage these different types of partners and what kinds of activities can you run, which should add more clarity to you know I'm a business I'm focusing on, you know, stage A instead of stage D. What should I do? There's going to be a lot more clarity around that. So, to answer your question, it applies to every organization effectively.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, and it just occurred to me also since I was working, because I think my assumption by asking the question had to do with, like, is this really more for early stage smaller companies? Right, but much of my career has been in kind of mid to large size companies. But I do think there is a place, could be a place, for that, and in particular, I'm thinking about, or if you're selling to larger enterprise companies, a lot of them are going to want validation that you've done something similar with other similar types of companies size or industry or both and I think the more that you have that you know available to share through multiple channels, right, especially now in this day and age where there's communities and things like that, so that all makes sense to me. I mean that that reputation piece is probably huge, right, so so that all makes sense, so go ahead. So we've talked a lot about partnerships now, but you've talked about other things I brought up.
Speaker 1:Communities is maybe one, but so what are these other? I mean, do you call them channels? I don't know if you call them channels, but what are those other? Did you say it was? Somebody said it was 28. I'm going to say those are the things like what are those 28 or some of the examples of those 28.
Speaker 2:I'm going to call it use the channels until you tell me to use something else. Yeah yeah, channels is a good way to think about it, and I would say channel in the traditional sense where you have, you know, channel sales departments in larger enterprise organizations. That would be a subset of a type of partnership. Partnerships definitely spans wider, because you could partner with an influencer and they could be maybe a bit more akin to an affiliate, and affiliates could be, you know, another type of partner. But you could also have tech partners that could integrate into your software, or service partners that you know service on top of your software. There are definitely a lot of kinds of partners, but the the way I would simplify it is wherever your customer is spending time or getting information. That is an area that you can partner, and what I mean by that is it could be a community. You can partner with the community. Maybe you pay a sponsorship to get in front of that community or you work strategically with them.
Speaker 2:I mentioned an influencer. You can work strategically with them to include them in your content and also help them distribute your content. It could be a tech partner that you're co-creating with, but essentially there are other organizations and other people that your buyers are already listening to and or already working with. They're already paying us where. Figure out who those software vendors are. They're already listening to podcasts. Find out which podcasts those are, and you know, coincidentally, just to get meta meta here, that's what I'm doing right now.
Speaker 2:The audience that you have is an audience that this information could be valuable for, and so us doing this engagement, although it's nothing terribly formal, it's still a way that we can continue to distribute educational narrative to where our potential buyers could be hanging out. Now I'm not here to pitch anything, but I'm here to share thought leadership, drive awareness, and so I'm at the start of the buyer's journey. But yeah, so the way you think about it is who are my buyers listening to, where are they spending time and who are they already working with? And the best way to get that information is, honestly, to interview your customers. That's going to give you so much information where you can figure out where are these 28 other points of influence, where are the watering holes that I could be playing within that are not my own siloed website, seo ad strategy, so on and so forth. That's how you can expand further into the ecosystem and find where should I be partnering, and then, of course, run those near bound strategies.
Speaker 1:Sure, and it makes sense to me that you would want to go where your customers are already active. You mentioned interviewing customers and you also mentioned some of that SEO, but I know there are tools like seo platforms that help you identify what are keywords that your target customers or what you think your target customers are searching for, and yada, yada, yada. Is there anything else like that to help figure out these other places where your target audience might be interacting with others, where this would apply?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say I'll lightly talk about our tool because once you connect, you can actually see what potential overlaps you have with other organizations that are also in the platform, and so what I mean by that is in our tool we'll actually show you, based on you, connect your CRM, you can see what percentage of overlap of accounts and contacts you have with other organizations, and so that can help you identify where we should start focusing, based on actual CRM data. So that's one way. The other way is honestly like take a look at where your buyer is engaging on LinkedIn, if that's where they're active. Or, you know, after you do those interviews, there's a podcast that comes up. You know a handful of times. Great, why not reach out to that podcast? Do some research on them, see what kind of keywords they're also using and topics that they're talking about.
Speaker 2:One tool that I have used in the past I don't know if it's like terribly popular, but Spark Toro is one where you can get an audience analysis based on you know some keywords and whatnot. And I know there's some other tools, but I typically go to one, the actual data in, like company CRMs, and then also asking the customers because, again, that'll give you the the clearest list of people and or organizations you could be working with yeah, yeah, and so spark toro was the one I was I had in mind.
Speaker 1:I just I wasn't sure if that was where you're gonna go. So, um, yeah, and I've seen that be a that provide some really interesting insights about. I guess to me more like long-tail places where you wouldn't necessarily expect that audience to be. That may be in podcasts they're listening to that aren't on that specific topic, but you can see where it's a little bit of like what's the prof? These profile, these target people. If you build a persona, you'd realize that like they're not just consuming business related content, right?
Speaker 1:exactly I mean, if someone looked at all the podcasts I listened to, they would be probably get an interesting I you know idea of the kind of stuff that I get interested in. And it's almost very little of it has to do with marketing or marketing ops.
Speaker 2:There you go Very little. Yeah, that profile is again. It's so hard to find with the existing tools that are out there. I'm not going to call it any specific names but just like you know contact data that's out there, it's like you can get some information on title and whatnot, but at the end of the day, like conversation is going to be best. And then actual, like converted data, not just what we think will convert, but who has actually purchased you know a similar software to you, or uh, or subscribes to a similar um uh email newsletter like yours. That's going to be the truest data of you know better intent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. All right, so you've done all this research, right? Then how do you like, how do you build the strategy to go after those different opportunities?
Speaker 2:Well, I can tell you the worst way to do it which I've seen happen a good amount in B2B which is you know, you find the influencer, you find the community, and then you say I want to just give you money and then you give me all the leads. That's never going to work. You have to work strategically with organizations to identify a common theme or this thought leadership that's actually going to help the market, not just a push of your solution. And so definitely don't just throw money at a problem. You know that's the old way of predictable revenue. Where you could when they're funded companies and there's still some out there, but it's definitely dwindling you could just throw money anywhere and burn that cash. You can't do that anymore. Most companies don't have the resources for that.
Speaker 2:So that means you have to get strategic, and so what that means is crafting a message that aligns strategically, meaning you're both headed in that direction of we're talking about, for example, for our tool. We talk a lot about how sales is evolving, and you can't just do the old model of spray and pray, cold call or cold email. You still need to do a little bit of that, but you need to provide a lot more relevancy, and why not skip the 12 to 15 step sequence and instead get a warm introduction from somebody who already works with that client? So we found influencers who had that narrative, and instead of going to every sales influencer and just paying the money to make a post, we instead found the specific ones that we then said great, let's build this narrative together. You help me, I help you, and we could actually get even more strategic with that as well.
Speaker 2:Where, let's say, they have a newsletter following and or a large LinkedIn following, we can actually take our CRM data map, that, with their existing list Maybe it's in a CRM, maybe it's in a CSV or something they export from their subscriber software we can actually validate whether or not it would make sense to work with this person or organization based on the data that we have in our CRM, which is our customer data, the prospects that are most likely to be in our ICP, and whatever other information we have, from lead scoring to ABM scoring and so on and so forth. Let me overlap that with a set of accounts that my potential partner has, and that's where I can truly validate can this person or community or organization actually help me reach this audience that I'm trying to reach? Well, you can actually see that because you can see, of their, let's say, 10,000 email subscribers, I can now identify oh great, 1,000 of my prospect accounts are actually subscribed to this email newsletter. Of course, it may make sense for me to work with them in some capacity so you can truly validate with the data. That's the best next step in strategically working with these organizations or partners.
Speaker 2:And again, there are tools out there. I'm not here to pitch ours. There's a free version of it. You can do all this on the free version.
Speaker 2:But that is what Reveal is purpose-built for is connecting data sources, to map them, to identify where do we have an overlap? And I truly believe that data is the thing that helps to provide clarity and that clarity will show the path to success. And then, of course, when your higher-ups are asking why are we working, why are we paying this influencer or why are we paying the sponsorship fee, you can validate that specifically where we can say well, they actually have access to X percent of our prospects that we want to reach. So it's definitely a business driven decision creating. Then that's going to not only convert more but it's going to align with those overlaps where, instead of again the old spray and pray message just try and reach as many people as possible you can now get a targeted list with a targeted message from a person they already trust or an organization they already work with and run towards that North star that you're both working towards together and, again, it's going to be more likely to convert at that point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, makes sense. So one of the concepts you and I talked about is you called it the three eyes for near bound. Do you want to talk through that? It feels like maybe we've covered some of it, but maybe you can tie things together Like we already talked about this, this is what this one means, or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we've been floating around this idea, initially about influence, where you can share existing trust to drive influence on people and accounts that you want to reach Meaning. When you're not in the room or it's coming from the mouth of somebody else, they're saying positive things about the narrative or your company specifically. So that's influence. That's one of the three I's that we talk about within Nearbound. Another I is where you can actually engage more strategically with these organizations or people to exchange intelligence. On the account you can say things like hey, we have an active opportunity with our sales team Partner A, maybe it's an influencer with their LinkedIn connection list, maybe it's a community, whatever it is could be a tech partner. You could then say, hey, I have this open opportunity. How do you work with them today? For the influencer, maybe it's oh, I've never talked to them. Okay, fine, with the tech partner, it could be well, we actually have an upcoming renewal with them.
Speaker 2:Things have been shaky, so this is the person we're working with. This is the procurement process, and here's the political situation in the organization. That level of information you cannot get anywhere else. You can't get that online. You can't get that from a tool that can only come from natural conversation by asking the question what is actually going on and what's the political situation, who's the actual decision maker? And that's what you can get from your partner. And so that's the second I, which is intelligence.
Speaker 2:And the last one I'll go through it quickly because it's pretty straightforward and that is introductions. That's where you run an introduction play, hey customer of mine, here's this partner and In the backend that partner is trying to prospect that account. Hey customer, I'd like to introduce you to our friends over at partner A. They integrate with our software or we have an upcoming webinar with them. We'd love to get you introduced and have a conversation because, based on how we work with you, they can provide additional value. So that play is pretty well established. And again, I think it's been a bit lost in modern day business building because we had this predictable revenue model. So I think it's having a comeback because again, there's a direct translation of trust and I always compare it to the 12 to 15 step sequence, that's over a month, month and a half. Would you rather do that and have your sales team do that, or get a warm introduction?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, and I want to, just so. This made me think right, the introduction thing. I don't want our audience to to miss this nuance, because I know I personally get requests from salespeople all the time and it typically sounds something like this hey, uh, we are so-and-so. Uh, we typically sell to this other profile that's at your company. Could you tell me who it is we should talk to about that? And it's like there's no reference point for me, other than they happen to know that I work at that company and have a certain title because they found me on LinkedIn or whatever. What you're talking about is what someone might do in a job search, right? Hey, there's a job that I'm interested in at company X. I see that. Will you have a connection to a senior person? Maybe it's not exactly the right department, but could you give me an introduction to that person who can then maybe move me along? That's really what we're talking about, right, exactly?
Speaker 2:Yep. So it's an indirect reference to a company and or person that you're trying to reach through someone or an organization that already has a relationship with them in some form. And so when people reach out to me and they go hey, will, I saw you're connected to this person, I'm looking for a job, can you make an introduction? Like, of course, I'm going to protect the relationship a bit if I do know that person and I'll tell them. Okay, you know, write me a message and I'm happy to send that for you, depending on you know what kind of information you include there, why you think they'd be a good fit for the introduction. But right there, like I get super excited about that kind of engagement because that's near bound in action, quite, quite literally. And so in the business sense, you can do this as well where, if you work with, let's say, a tech partner and you integrate with them and you built the integration because it provides value to your customers Well, you have an incentive as, let's say, a CSM or an organization at large, to make introductions to this other technology company. Again, if it makes sense based on your relationship with them and what's going on in the customer's organization, if it's all good and they're happy, then why not provide them additional value which is going to give them that additional 13% increase in retention probability? There's very little reason to say no to it, and what we find is most organizations are open to it, especially when there's either joint value or this joint narrative, meaning this person has some knowledge that, although we may not integrate, you know they could be an influencer, they could be a community. It could be vice versa. Whatever it is, you know they could be an influencer, they could be a community. It could be vice versa. Whatever it is, they are able to share additional value.
Speaker 2:So, me being the hero to make that introduction for you, my client, makes a lot of sense, especially when it comes to, again, the business metrics around retention and also expanding into, like, upsell potential and so on and so forth, and, of course, for the sales use case again, why would you run a 12-step sequence when you can get a warm intro with someone that you work with strategically and I do want to lean into specifically. It has to be strategic. It can't just be oh, you know this person, so introduce me. It does have to have a business initiative behind it and there needs to be joint value. But that's where, again, you're not just throwing money at the problem, you're not just asking for as many introductions as possible. You are focusing in on a strategic piece of value that will enhance the customer's overall day-to-day and their business, because that's what matters. At the end of the day, the customer is your boss, and so if you're not serving them with your kind of interactions, then you're not going to win in this economy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. One of the implications this brings to mind for me is if you want to leverage your existing customers as part of that strategy to do something like do the introduction piece, it is really it seems to me it'd be really really important to make sure that your onboarding and success process for those customers needs to be super tight.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, you need to have an actual relationship with them and if you don't, then I would worry about the origin of that customer. So if you're not able to make an introduction, if you don't think, yes, our relationship is so strong and so positive that I could make an introduction, I would take a double look at how you're serving customers in that way. You know some solutions. It contractually, you know, might be so small of a contract that it may not make sense. Contractually, you know, might be so small of a contract that it may not make sense. I know some organizations have, you know, like tier three type clients on the lower contract value. So I mean, that's your own business decision. But ultimately, if you're a higher ticket item, you know 10 K plus makes sense to have a relationship with the customer in some form. And if it's not positive and you don't think you could make an introduction, then yeah, I would be conscious of that because that could have implications in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's just sort of top of mind. I saw a post on LinkedIn yesterday or the day before when we're recording this. So somebody I know and I think it was more of a personal thing, but it was trying to get ahold of a company and took a screenshot of her phone and it had been literally on hold for three hours, right, and not talked to anybody and this was not the first call, right. So this was you don't want that, right, and I think that's an extreme example. That's an extreme example at the same time. I have been, I have experienced as a buyer, particularly of technology, where it stands out when companies do it really well, and it made it made you feel good, like, yeah, did you feel good engaging with them?
Speaker 1:do you feel, oh, this was a breeze, it's so different from yeah, yeah, and, and, and, if they had and I probably have I I'm trying to. I've been trying to rack my brain like thinking of a scenario where someone asked me to make an introduction to another prospect. I know I've been asked to be a reference. That's a little bit different, but I think I've probably a handful of times been asked to make an introduction and there have been times where I've said've been times where I've said yes, and there's times where I've said no, basically, or I've said sure, I'll try, but didn't really try, you know.
Speaker 1:So, it all came down to that yeah.
Speaker 2:The joint value, yeah, and so the reason you said no, I imagine, is one you thought the actual value they were going to provide wasn't going to be strong enough for you to give them the layup, and or it wasn't clear, and or you may have honestly just been too busy, which, honestly, is very, very common these days. Everyone's back to back Zooms and barely has time to do their day to day tasks, and so, actually one of the things we talk about, we actually have a resource for email templates that you can ship to people to make those kinds of asks, where I'm a big proponent, for if you're making an ask for an introduction, don't make the other person do the work Like, write the message for them. They'll modify it as they see fit. You know they're not going to just copy and paste it, but it's still less writing and less questions that they'll have, because it'll be a very specific and clear message of value. And if they're not writing you that message, then it's going to be even more likely that you're not going to take action, and you know you're the one not losing out here. You don't really care at this point unless there's some financial incentive, but even then it's like your life would continue on just as normal even if you didn't make the intro. So it truly is on the seller and the asking team, and that's why being prepared with the right data and the right message, including a templated message, is critical, and I've implemented that play time and time again where someone says yeah sure, I'll make an intro for you here. You know three of my best customers who do you want to talk to, and I'll go. You know this one, this one and this one. Here's why and here's a message that you can send to them.
Speaker 2:It leaves very little room for someone to say no to that introduction If I'm giving them the clear message of value, both in why they will make that introduction and also the actual message, especially if in why they will make that introduction and also the actual message, Especially if we're working together strategically, for example, like the tech partners I work with where there is a joint message of value and it would clearly help the client, it leaves very little room to say no to. And that's how you can start to do this at scale, where, when you put a process in place and you can see what are the specific accounts and when should we actually take action and who on the other side should we be reaching out to? Who on my partner's side, should I be asking for this information or making the introduction? That's when you can do this at scale, because now, instead of this one-off introduction that you might ask for, you can now do this five accounts every week. You could have a rhythm to it because you have that specific list that you can work with.
Speaker 2:So that's where you know everything I've been talking about. It's all well and good, but people might be thinking well, how do I scale this? Because that sounds like a lot of time and effort. Yeah, At the end of the day, you're going right where I was.
Speaker 2:There we go. I was reading your mind and so, yeah, if it's built into the business to truly deliver value to the client, like again, the customer is your boss. That's everything I remind myself of every single day. If we're not delivering value to the customer through any interaction, then it's not going to pan out well for our business, and so the same goes for this partnering interaction. So when you take that level of seriousness to it, you'll then start to think okay, well, how can we run a specific program against this? How can we make sure that the messaging is clear and is actually going to convert? That's where collaboration with your partner is going to come into play.
Speaker 2:But in terms of making it predictable, I mentioned and alluded to getting a list of accounts and seeing specifically who this partner works with, who the influencer, the community, the tech partner, the service partner, who they work with. Overlap your CRMs to get that list. Maybe it's 100, maybe it's 1,000. Nonetheless, you need to figure out what are the specific accounts that we're going to work on. If it's only one, that's okay. Then we'll just keep it to the one, we'll scale it down to that and then from there we will continue with the other partners that have even more of an overlap. But, at the end of the day, find those accounts and then you can start to chunk them into. Are we going to do a larger marketing push to them with a specific message? Maybe we can run a webinar to that specific list. We can invite them or we could focus on, depending on our relationship.
Speaker 2:Let's say, week over week, we're going to focus on five accounts make it digestible, make it actionable and again, that all starts with the data and that's going to give you that future outlook of you know, if I think more in the lens of the CMO or the CRO who might be listening to this, if you can see the potential across let's say, 10 different partners and one has a thousand accounts you can reach.
Speaker 2:Another has 50 accounts, but they're a bit more upmarket. That's how you can start to identify the landscape of where you can pull levers, where you can lean in and add additional headcount or put additional process and time towards. Maybe it's those a thousand accounts because it has the most potential. Well, now I can see that specifically and the way that manifests is I won't get too into the weeds, but it's co-marketing programs, it's running a webinar with multiple speakers that are across your partners. It's running those introduction plays, those Intel plays, and it's, of course, creating as much content with your partners as possible because that's going to increase the reach. And, again, all specifically focused on targeting those specific lists, so that it is that message that's going to convert, versus the general message that is meant to reach everybody but converts on very few.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that all makes sense. So I mean, I think what you're hitting on there are some of the ways that I think our audience would be thinking about how do I operationalize this right? And I know this is not meant to be a pitch session, but your technology is an enabler for some of this right.
Speaker 2:Yes, so you can take CRMs and map them and you can identify again which of my prospects are your customers and or which of my prospects are your prospects, which of my customers are your customers. You can split the data any different way. That's all on the free version. You can see it all in the tool. You just need to connect your CRM and it's all. Gdpr, soc 2 Type 2 compliant, so you don't need to worry about that. If you have questions, you can of 2 type 2 compliant, so you don't need to worry about that. If you have questions, you can, of course, ask me and then, depending on how savvy you are, this can be considerate like 6 cents or demand-based type data. It's now a partner signal, because if there is a partner presence on an account, meaning they purchased a software in our similar industry that doesn't compete with us, then that means we can now get access to a decision maker and or primary users. We can also get information on when they purchased and or when they renewed meaning they had money and also, of course, that partner that you can then partner with to specifically run those programs. So, depending on how savvy you are, you can actually push this back into your CRM in the premium version where you can then create a Salesforce or HubSpot report on this partner information, and I'll give you two examples of what I use. I create a report of accounts that are clearly happy with our tech partners, and the way I identify that they're clearly happy is I can pull in information into my Salesforce report where I can then see those who renewed with this partner in the last three months. That's clearly an indicator that they have money, that they're not downsizing their team, they're not trying to cut this kind of technology and maybe they're even expanding it. I can also pull in their health score as well at the partner so I can take their data from their CRM, pull it into mine to identify this is a very healthy customer. So I have that report, I send it to my sellers and they get to prospect against that list, which are recently renewed.
Speaker 2:Another one I just made a post about this on LinkedIn the other day I was actually able to create a list of accounts that didn't have any of our partners present. This is more of a retention play where I could introduce my partner to these accounts where, because I can see across all of our partners where they may have a presence. I can now pull in that data to find where there is no presence, where I can then introduce them and then likely increase that retention as well. So that's two that I use on a frequent basis. And again, you can split this any different way. It could be health score, it could be the lead score that they have, it could be that they've been a customer for 11 years. All of that information is highly relevant, especially when it comes down to identifying who the decision maker was. But yeah, again, in the free version you can still do this. You can bring in your custom fields and overlap all of that information, and you can even export that and then run programs against it as well.
Speaker 1:Got it Okay. So that's all makes sense, and I'm glad you addressed the security, like privacy stuff, because I know you and I talked that was one of my first questions, so I'm sure you get that all the time. But so something that's interesting to me is that we've had these conversations about some of these new go-to-market strategies or approaches is it feels like a common theme across them is trust building. So you mentioned I think even at some point during our conversation today, about people wanting to also protect their reputation if they're going to help you by making an introduction or whatever that might be. So you mentioned building these relationships. You, by making an introduction or whatever that might be. So like, how, like what, what are you? You mentioned these, like building these relationships that are mutually beneficial. How do you like, how do you incentivize that kind of behavior and ensure that the trust is there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I always default to again the customer. So if you have any shared clients, even if it's two shared clients with another technology or a community, they're playing in the community and they're also a client of ours. That's going to be one of the core pillars of building that trust, because if the client doesn't get value, nobody else is going to get value, including your partner. It's just going to flop. It's just going to be one of those pay to play, throw money at the problem kind of situations. And so when you focus on the customer, that's when you'll extrapolate that they will gain value from the interaction. And if the customer gains value or let's say, the audience member gains value from me engaging with this partner, then the result is the partner's probably going to make more money off of this as well, and at the end of the day, that's why every business exists is to ultimately deliver value but also make money, and so that's going to incentivize them from the monetary standpoint, the business standpoint, but then also the level of care that you take in approaching these relationships with things like the data and things like such a specific message that it's so easy for them to take action. Those are really good ways to build trust, not only with the partner, but that's going to translate to continued trust with the client. Because if you play this game of telephone where I ask you for an introduction but I give you no messaging, no reason why, then it's going to be the broken game of telephone. It's not going to land as well because it's not going to be specific. You don't work for my company, so why would you know what to say to that potential prospect? So the level of preparedness will build additional trust. Data is a great way to do that, but then also the strategic alignment. Again, if you're strategically aligned with, let's say, the influencer and you're not just paying for them to make a post and then you give them a post to copy and paste and instead you're strategically writing it with them, you're writing it in their voice, taking one of their existing posts on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever it is and, you know, reformatting it because they have a specific way that they talk or write. If you're doing that, then that's again going to land better with the audience or client base and so that's going to maintain trust for your partner and their clients or audience and it's also going to build that trust that you know what you're doing as a partner and when they work with you, it's going to really make sure that it is providing value. Where they get to maintain that trust, that's going to make them trust you even more as well.
Speaker 2:So, really focusing on not just having it be a one-off transactional interaction, treating people like people, and not that they're just another outlet for your content to be pushed through, that's a really good way to build trust and, at the end of the day, I'm a huge proponent of giving as much as you can.
Speaker 2:I was just on a call earlier today where, you know, we were talking about specific accounts and I like couldn't wait to go first because I knew that you know they protected their clients a bit more. And I was like, hey, here's all the information you would need to know about the accounts that you want to reach. So I go first, I give as much as I can first, and literally this happened right after the call. They said, not only were you so prepared, but thank you for going first. You gave us so much information that we otherwise wouldn't have. So thank you. That's so valuable. And they called out that it is building trust with them. And so you know I live this every day, so you know I'm I'm used to it, but it is to the point where, uh, there is a reaction from my partners as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's. It sounds like you know part of what you want to do is make it easy for Exactly. Yeah, so I must switch gears a little bit. So one of the things that people in marketing ops or primary audience are asked to do a lot these days is to provide data, insights, analysis, oftentimes like looking at things like even attribution or influence and contribution to pipeline things like that. How do you measure the impacts of these kinds of motions?
Speaker 2:I love that. So I won't talk about our platform. I feel like I did that enough. There is a way to do it there, but there are two other ways that I love talking about. One of them is marketing free form fields. There's some discrepancy around. Well, does it take them longer to submit? Does it reduce submission rate? From the data I've seen, it doesn't really.
Speaker 2:If you give them a free form field, if you ask how did you hear about us? Or, even more specifically, who told you about us? So not how, but instead who specifically, then you will get names of people and or influencers and or individuals that work at a partner company. That will be named and that's how you can start to track attribution. From there you can do some automation with Zapier and you know chat, gpt to do some AI lookup of is it this word or a version of this word? So if you're putting that into a spreadsheet or whatever you can zap into. That's one way to automate it, but also you can just put that in a raw data sheet. That's what we do right now and we're building some automations around the how did you hear about us? Because we do get mentions of partners. How popular Chris Walker is in uh in your community, but he did a comparison of the uh, what the marketing attribution software showed versus what the form showed, and it was yeah, it was pretty surprising.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's, he was actually a guest on our, on our podcast year and a half ago, ish, something like that. It's hard, to hard for me to remember when. So yeah, familiar with that, I think. Remember when? So yeah, familiar with that. I think most of our audience would be familiar with that. Okay, so that makes sense, so it's not. But it sounds as if, you know, some of this is a little bit of manual effort, heavy lifting, which, in my view, is really still kind of where we are with a lot of like true insightful analytics, like it's good to know that there are some things out there, whether it's, you know, automated or semi-automated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and some of the tools. The other one I forgot to mention was call tracking software so you can sign up for notifications on keywords or versions of keywords in call tracking. That's another good way to identify organic mentions. You know that's a little bit more automated. You could perhaps apply attribution with more false positives, then backtrack from there after you audit them, than you would if you put in and missed too many of them. That's another way because inevitably people are going to mention your tech partners, your service partners, influencers and so on on on calls, and that's again another practice that we do. But yeah, in short, it is still relatively manual. There's going to be some savvy ways to automate it. But yeah, if someone builds a software for that specifically tracks those things, I'm buying it.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, going down that rabbit hole would really take us off here, and I know we only have a little bit more time left. So just one thing that I probably should have covered this earlier. But something that you said to me that kind of stuck with me is that, yeah, part of what's driving the near bound approach is a movement from a how economy to a who economy. So I mean, is there anything more that you want to add to what we've already talked about, to sort of describe how that plays into it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I can do it succinctly. So previously, most of the methods for go-to-market growth was related to people figuring out how to do something. I would Google how do I do this, how do I do that, et cetera, et cetera. And the information from companies was more around how. Now anyone can create good content around the how. There's so many articles about how to rank for SEO ironically, through trying to rank for SEO. So there's a lot of quality information out there.
Speaker 2:So what buyers have learned, and especially the newer generation has become accustomed to, is they follow influencers on social media the Kim Kardashians of the world and more of the B2C world. That's now becoming the primary buyer. I'm turning 30 next week and I'm going to be buying software over the next 10 years. I don't operate on the model of following a news channel or subscribing to a massive Forbes. I don't even read any of those and I avoid those kinds of sources because they just serve me up ads and I just don't trust it. They're a faceless organization. Instead, I follow the influencers who have emotions, have a story that I can directly connect with and trust. It's all coming down to that, and so, because we're moving from this how economy to a who economy. That means businesses need to be able to tap into this, and it's everywhere from the macro, socioeconomical and cultural climate that we're in, both from a COVID, remote world all the way through to cultural changes and the buyers changing as well in terms of demographic.
Speaker 2:But it's also just. People are keeping their trust credits and their attention credits closer to themselves because they're tired of the YouTube ad that pops up. They don't want to see that. It's intrusive instead of actually providing them value, and because there's so many good sources of content, they're going to go where they actually get value, especially when their jobs are on the line and they need to learn these things. So they're going to turn to people, and relationships are what is going to convert for businesses.
Speaker 2:So if you're only focused on the traditional way, it's going to be transactional and people are picking up on that, whereas if I get an introduction, I'm going to pay attention to that immediately, pay attention to that immediately. And a really good example of this is I'll end on this there's a sales influencer in the market and he's like I don't even pick up my phone when people call me. It's silent all the time, and this is someone who built their career on cold calling, which is pretty stark. They trained people to cold call and he doesn't even engage with that anymore. And of course, he's now not training on cold calling, he's training on different tactics.
Speaker 1:Because of that, yeah, it makes sense, like you know. Again, like what stands out to me in all these conversations is there's a little bit of like. Some of these are not really new concepts, but they how and the ability to, to do it more at scale and things like that, I think, is what's really changed. So, will, thanks for sharing all about Nearbound. If folks want to check out we already mentioned nearboundcom but are there other ways that they can keep up with what you're doing and learn more? What's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. I'm happy to answer anything. I'll even, you know, open the kimono and show you the things that I'm doing, the processes that I have in place. I'm definitely not shy about that. So reach out on LinkedIn or email me W-T-A-Y-L-O-R at revealco and we can have a chat there. I'm always happy to give my time and so, yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Or you can contact me and ask me to make an introduction.
Speaker 2:There you go, and I'd be much more likely at that point to take that intro Nice, love it.
Speaker 1:All right, well, again, thank you. This has been really interesting. I think our audience is going to be really interested in hearing about this and maybe taking it back to their organizations. So, thank you, interested in hearing about this and maybe taking it back to their organizations. So, thank you, thanks to our audience for continuing to provide your support and feedback and ideas. So if you have more ideas for topics or guests or you're interested in being a guest, reach out to me through LinkedIn or through the marketingopscom community. Until next time, bye everyone.