#102: Partner Marketing at Zapier (with Miranda Babbitt)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a Salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Zapier. Zapier is easy automation for everyone by connecting with more than 6,000 of the most popular apps B2B marketers are using. Like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Slack, Zapier lets you automate almost anything you can think of without having to write any code. And with Zapier's easy to use workflow templates, you can start saving time and impressing your boss Fast. More than 2 million businesses automate with Zapier, including top brands like Shopify, Airtable, Dropbox, HubSpot, Zendesk, even us right here at Exit 5, we are happy Zapier customers. They all chose Zapier just like us to streamline their work, save money and find more time for what matters most. That's the reason Zapier rhymes with happier.

Hey.

Every day, Zapier customers save more than $10,000 in time per year With Zapier. You can move new leads into your CRM right away. Automatically reach out to new leads Get Slack notifications for important emails Auto Generate emails with personalized content based on form inputs. Synthesize data from multiple sour Reduce human error and increase accuracy. Or just do little things like we do. Like send reminders in Slack about things we got to do in the Exit 5 community. Anyway, Zapier is awesome. You can go try it if you're in B2B marketing. It's a must have tool. You can try Zapier for free. Go to zapier.com exit5 that's Z A P I E R.com exit5 zapier.com exit5 and go get started with Zapier for free.

1, 2, 34 Exit.

Exit Exit.

Partner Marketing in all ways has become a very popular topic lately. And just because I'm going to bring you in in the the hot chat from the green room, Miranda and I were in the backstage talking about my newfound love for cats, which is very because I was always a cat hater. But it's a testament to like, you got to have open mind, right? And you don't often know until. Until you have something. And so my kids got me into cats when you had two kittens, and they're, they're great companions.

So. And I was just saying backstage that I've never actually had kittens. I've only ever had like adult cats. And don't get me wrong, like Callie. I'm looking at her right now, she's adorable at 3 years old, but when I think about what she would have looked like as a kitten, I truly melt inside. It's too much for him. I don't know. I don't know how you did it with two kittens in the house.

Well, it was an adjustment because it's different than a dog. But now I'm in. I'm Catman. Anyway, we got a bunch of people rolling in. I want you to go in the chat right now while I this is Miranda. She's going to do an awesome job talking about partnership stuff in a minute. I'm Dave, founder of Exit 5, former CMO. I'm going to play host today. I'll host us, I'll moderate us, we'll get in and out. But right now I want you to go into chat if you're listening. And you might be listening in the future on the Exit 5 podcast. So you might not be able to do this. But right now, if you're here with us live, go into the chat. We want to hear your name and where you're writing in from. Also, feel free to say if you're a cat or a dog person or you're more of like a hamster type of person, that's okay, too. But, like, I'm Dave. Like, I'm gonna write Dave. Burlington, Vermont. I'm Dave. And we're all, oh, tasks. Look at TASS is everywhere, my friend. Lately, Francisco's a dog person. Christy is in Southern California for the cats. Samantha's in Boise, Idaho. Christy from D.C. potentially unpopular opinion, dog lover. I don't know if being a dog lover is an unpopular opinion, but Miranda's in Vancouver. She likes cats. Danielle's in Burlington, Vermont. Also, team cat shout out to Burlington, Vermont. We got people from Uruguay, Toronto, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cape Cod, Cleveland, Ohio. I mean, come on, how good does that feel, Miranda?

Yeah, that's wild. This is really surreal. Dallas, I knew you had a massive podcast and following Alex, I've been following you for ages, but I don't think I've ever tuned in for a live session. I've listened to the podcasts.

Well, hey, we're live.

Come in. That's wild.

We're live. In a few weeks, this will be a podcast, but I like to do so just for anybody listening and for you to have this context. One of the things that we've been focusing on Exit 5 is we've done a lot of, like, how to become a cmo, how to be a great manager type of content. But it seems that. And that's content is great. I don't want to take away from that. It seems that the content that really hits is, oh, Katie's in Williston, Vermont. Shout out to Williston. The content that really hits with this audience is a bit more tactical. Like, and I came up with this slogan for Exit 5 a while ago, which is like, because nobody goes to school for B2B marketing. And our mission is really to help you get smarter about your job. And so what we like to do is once a month or so, we bring in someone who's inside of a company on a marketing team, just like me in the past, just like you, Miranda, now, just like you, writing in, listening onto wherever you are right now. And we're going to do a deep dive on a specific topic area. So we've done SEO, product marketing, and today we're going to do partner marketing. And I think this is a great time to do this because A lot of people are thinking about 2024 and kind of company strategy and marketing strategy changes. And so Miranda's here. She's on the marketing team at Zapier, and we're going to hear what she's been up to and what they're doing from a partner standpoint. Now, there's a bunch of different elements to partner marketing. We're not going to cover them all. We're really mostly going to talk about Miranda's role and her job. But I think this is a great primer to kind of get you inside of a top performing marketing team like they have at Zapier. And Miranda's going to take us through that. So I'll be your host. We're here for all your questions. But do me a favor. I want you to be in the chat. One of the best things about doing these live sessions is that we're all marketers and so, like, pop in and help somebody answer a question, share what you do in your team, share how, how your way of doing things is different, or challenge something that we put in here. And if you have questions, go in to the Q and A and put the questions in the Q and A because that makes me. It makes it easier for me to follow along and track them, but also you can go and upvote them. And so that's how we'll prioritize what questions to get to go in the Q and A. And then you can upvote what questions are in there. And yeah, it's Zapier, which now you know. All right, Miranda, I'm going to turn it over to you. I will pop in, pause, interrupt, we'll take questions, but we're going to let. Let it rip. And wherever you are listening right now, feel free to, you know, listen along passively. Be in the chat. We're gonna get you smarter about B2B marketing. All right, man, Miranda, you got the mic.

Love it. What an intro. And yeah, Kathy, in the chat it is Zapier because it makes you happier. But don't worry if you had no idea how to pronounce Zapier. Just know that in all three of my interviews to join this company a little over a year ago, I said it incorrectly the whole time. And I kept saying Zapier super confidently. And then I realized, oh, my gosh, they're saying Zapier back to me. Anyway, it's like your brain.

It's like if you meet somebody with a name that you don't know how to pronounce, your. Your brain Just kind of like defaults to like, I told you how to say my last name, but you just brain default to. I'm glad they hired you. I'm glad that wasn't like, yeah, she was great, but she couldn't pronounce the company name right.

Can you imagine? Yeah, that's why I didn't get the job. That would be devastating. No, I mean. So, yeah, I, I feel super lucky to be at Zapier. That's what I was saying to Dave and we were kind of chit chatting before this. It's such a cool company. And partner marketing. I mean, of course Zapier needs a partner marketing team because our product is all about partnerships. I'll give you a brief overview about what Zapier is in just a couple seconds, but just to give you a lay of the land. So today we're talking about a few things all at once. We're talking about partnerships, we're talking about partner marketing, which is really how you tell the story of why companies should partner with you and continue to partner with you. And then how we do this at Zapier. So here at Zapier, I lead the lifecycle marketing strategy for partners, which is just kind of a mouthful. It's a way to say I'm helping the partners at Zapier get as much as they possibly can out of their partnership with us by following them along the journey that they, that they have with us. So let us just jump in here if you don't know what Zapier is. And I'm just going to whiz past this. So first, yeah, a little bit about me. I've been in marketing for a little while now, maybe five years, give or take, in tech marketing and program management. Last year, I was brought on board to start leading out this lifecycle marketing strategy at Zapier. And previously I was at a cool company in Vancouver, Canada called Thinkific, where I helped launch the Thinkific app store there. So Thinkific is just this business that enables creators to set up courses really easily and then really set up an entire business around those courses. Now, what is Zapier? So, as I said in the chat, Zapier is a tool that makes you happier. Why? Because you're able to just get rid of all of the really tedious things that perhaps you've been doing, and you get a robot to do them for you. It's a tool that connects all of the other tools that you use. Let's say you get a ton of emails with attachments instead of manually Downloading each of those attachments with Zapier, you can have those automatically saved to the right spot in Google Drive or even I wanted to get better at history. I've attended too many trivia sessions where the most basic historical fact will come up and I'll have no idea. So what I did is every day I get zappier. I get this little zap into my Slack where it pulls a historical event from a Google spreadsheet. It then sends a explain it like I'm 10 version to me on Slack every day at 10am and it just says, oh, your morning historical fact is here. So instead of having to look this up every single day, which I wouldn't do, it's now just automated. So I'm getting you can use Zapier for both your business and your personal life, is what I'm saying here.

Now.

Why partnerships? So, yeah, partnerships is absolutely having a moment. And maybe that's because on my LinkedIn, I am a partner marketer. I follow a ton of people in partnerships, but it seems like there's this growing awareness of either building a partner program or scaling the one that you have. So what do we mean by partner? That's like when I'm saying I'm a partner marketer, that could mean so many different things. Just like if you say you're a social media marketer or, you know, you work on paid ads, or you're a product marketer, it's the same in partner marketing. Like, partner marketing could be those who offer channel partnerships. So at Zapier, we do have experts. And so these are people who make their living, or a lot of their living by offering like setup services for people who are wanting to get going on Zapier, but they just don't have the time to set up all of those workflows. So that would be an example of a channel partner tech partnerships. That's what I'm in. So those are typically product partnerships where two products work together to make both of the products that their customers are using just a way more delightful user experience. So for example, at thinkific, with the Thinkific app store, if a customer was wanting to launch a course, they can do that with the core product on thinkific. But if they wanted to add incredible gamification features, they could then use one of the apps in the thinkific app store to do that, to then easily insert this, like, amazing extra functionality that Zapier didn't build, or, sorry, thinkific didn't build, but they're able to deliver to their customers. Now because of that partnership and then the other one is strategic partnerships. So these are like the larger kind of splashier partnerships, I like to say. So for example, I saw one recently where it was Spotify and Uber. They formed a partnership enabling Uber riders to play their Spotify playlists during the ride. These are like the types of partnerships that have long term, you know, joint goals. They might develop a product together. It's long term co marketing.

Nice.

This is a good slide because I think it level sets for people like the different, the different types of partnerships. I think it's very easy to hear partnerships and immediately dive into a tactic. But it's like what are we trying to do from a organizational standpoint? When I was at Drift, for example, we had a great strategic partnership with Adobe and Marketo and what, what was different about that versus like you know, hey, let's do a joint webinar together and, and you know, promote each other to our list. It was like we spoke at their event, they spoke at our event. We had a targeted list of customers that we were trying to sell to together. It was truly a whole company strategic initiative. As opposed to like we're going to run a campaign for one or two weeks together.

Yes. Yeah, I think so. A lot of the time when I say I'm in partner marketing, people immediately think of just that one tactic of the co marketing. However, there are so many different types of partner marketers out there. So yeah, truly level setting what I do on a daily basis is more of those integrated product partnerships and then we have someone else on our team who is all about the co marketing and joint initiatives with other partners at zapier. But yeah, this kind of comes into. So like for each of those types of partners, really, partnerships offers kind of three key benefits to your team. So the first is that yeah, as you just said, you can reach more customers, you own your audience, but how else can you easily access the audience of those who could be likely to fall in love with you as well? So we partnered with TikTok recently actually and we were able to showcase to all of these TikTok creators who have a CRM. TikTok has a CRM in there. How can you connect TikTok to any other tool that you like? And you can do that with zapier. So we were able to get in front of a ton of TikTok creators all at once. You're also able to offer your customers more. So as I mentioned with that thinkific example, you know, thinkific didn't want to Go into the whole gamification realm of learning. Instead, they can simply partner with a company like motrain and then their products functionality completely increases, which means that customers can do so much more with Thinkific, maybe stay with Thinkific longer, choose Thinkific over a competitor. And then the last one is really like, I was reading the Partner Hacker Handbook, I believe, which is an incredible resource for anyone who wants to learn more about partnerships, Partner hacker or near bound. They have so many courses and educational resources for you. But they were saying, just like an ecosystem, with partnerships you're able to make your company more resilient because the more you're able to diversify your offerings, the more resilient you are. Just like an ecosystem. So a forest with like, you know, a ton of different trees and plants and animals, all that jazz, that ecosystem is more resilient for any changes that come its way. And we saw this for Zapier. Like, for example, you can't necessarily anticipate, like two years ago, I didn't know what open AI was or ChatGPT. I thought AI was cool. I thought it was about 10 years away. I was way off on that. But once AI became this thing, thing that everyone wanted to start actually using on a daily basis. Zapier was one of the flagship integrations with OpenAI. So we were able to just tap into this new market trend immediately. And with that launch of OpenAI, we saw tons of new signups. So yeah, I mean, of course our product is all about partnerships, but the same thing can apply to any type of partner program that you're running. Okay, a little bit about Zapier and where we have been and where we are today. So to date, we just crossed 6,000 integrations on Zapier. I was actually doing some research before this. Literally last year we surpassed 5,000 and in 2018 we had a thousand. So the rate at which new apps are coming on board is just. It continues to climb, which is probably the reason why I'm so excited to be in partner marketing is Appyer. I mean, there's just no end to the amount of partners who are coming on our platform, which is awesome. And among the partners that we have, they are pretty engaged. Around 60% of developers associated with any of the integrations on Zapier logged into their dashboard last year. And yet we do have quite a bit to go in terms of the partner lifecycle. So when I joined, we only actually had five nurture campaigns across the partner lifecycle. So I don't mean we just sent out five emails I mean, like, these are the types of emails that would help coach partners towards a certain behavior or action that will help them succeed. You'll see as we continue kind of chatting just how much that number has been beefed up and the kind of impact that that has had on our partners in terms of the strengths that we've had on our team. So when I joined, my manager was telling me, so Kim Catiala, she's amazing. She was saying, miranda, you will find so much duct tape across this entire partner marketing strategy and any of the processes that you come across. But you know what, it works. But now you're coming on board to hopefully optimize that and make it a lot more automated. Just like Zapier.

And just for context for people, like, this was only a year ago. Right. And so I think it's very easy to see like a company like Zapier and think that every single thing is all buttoned up. And I've been at a bunch of different companies and worked with or advised a bunch of different companies. I think we all look at other companies and think they must have all the secrets, they must have all the ways of doing it. And it's like so many companies has, have other channels like duct taped and not all put together. Sometimes you need to actually dive in, figure it out, hire someone, and then you're going to start to put this together. Like, I do see a lot of comments and questions from people that assume that things are more buttoned up or you have this bigger, you know, strategic level initiative that's going to make this thing work where like, it kind of just comes back to, even at a bigger company, sometimes just being scrappy and saying like, hey, we're going to do this, we're going to figure it out. And we're okay with building this thing on the fly as we figure it out?

Absolutely. I mean, when I was in my very first conversation with Kim, I remember thinking, wait, there isn't, you know, a lifecycle marketer here. Like, there aren't these robust onboarding campaigns for every type of partner that Zapier has. Like, I really built up just how advanced the marketing team must be at Zapier. And you know what? To Kim's credit, so she was very strategic with how she set up the partner marketing strategy given the amount of resources that she had. So the partner program, for example, was designed to start offering those benefits on an automated basis to those 4,000 ish partners. And that was based, I learned, on what partners kept asking for on a one off basis. And what we saw was most effective in helping them grow their integrations. So we baked that into this tiered partner program and you'll see at the silver tier you unlock a lot of benefits all at once. And so there's this systematic kind of sense of motivation for partners to continue investing in their integration. And we don't need to go back to the drawing board each time to figure out what those marketing benefits will look like. And the redemption is automatic, so no one needs to be, oh, okay, did this partner hit this number of users? Okay, that means we should offer this. It's just a nice neat recipe of exactly what we can offer to them. And that's not to say we haven't done one off deeper partnerships. So say at Typeform we had a really great joint launch with them and a ton of different co marketing activities for a while. It was maybe like over the course of a few months. And we still reference the case studies that we launched during that. But yeah, Kabir, the director of partnerships there said, oh yeah, daily signups driven by zapier are up 32% after launching those co marketing activities. So yeah, it's definitely worth doing those things. And Rafaela, I see that you're in the chat too. Yes, we love Meister Task, hearing that the users who come to you via Zapier convert three and a half times better than other users. We tell that all the time to partners. So thank you, Meister Task. You guys are awesome. Okay, so now the challenges, or better known as the opportunities, am I right?

That's how you know you've been in the corporate world for a little bit.

So cringe, but kind of so true. So some of the benefits were difficult to offer at scale. So a lot of those that you saw in the partner program, they are one off, you know, blog posts. We have a format for each of them, but we won't be able to offer that level of support to say 6,000 partners. Right. So what else could we offer to 6,000 partners at like, you know, an easier, an easier lift. As I touched on earlier, there's also minimal touch points along the life cycle for them. So they join Zapier, they're really excited. We used to launch them with, you know, social media post and blog post, but that quickly became unscalable as well. So they come in really excited and then we do see a little bit of a drop off in engagement and we also see, you know, I was actually having a debate with someone on the team the other day because there's two sets of memories here at Zapier on the Partnerships team about whether or not in the past we used to position the launch of a Zapier integration and the partnership as a whole as more of like a set it and forget it task. Once you launch with us, don't worry you've now accessed 3,000 or now 6,000 apps immediately. But in order to get the most out of your integration, you do need to treat it as a partnership. Yes, Cheryl, Nothing is set it and forget it. I feel like anyone who says that it's just kind of like a fake marketing one liner. Yeah, 100%. So because of all of those things, we have seen a lack of engagement post launch. So how has partnerships really evolved from that kind of transactional approach into more of a ongoing relationship into this transformational partnership? So at Zapier and across the board I'm finding so all of us likely listening right now, we've been asked to do more with less. I think our goals are just as high as they used to be, even before COVID So we really need to be laser focused on which initiatives as a team we're choosing to run with that will make the most impact both for us, but also for our partners. So sometimes that has now meant forgoing the more fun kind of splashy initiatives like joint webinars, simply because those can take a lot of effort, a lot of time. And instead right now we're focusing more so on initiatives that will give us sustained impact over time. So that would be things like case studies that can be recycled across multiple channels.

Today's episode is brought to you by ahrefs. You probably know ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift, at Privy, and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors. Understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24. 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place with Ahrefs. It's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself. One of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool, which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI Search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus, you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore, It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

We can use that in email intercom webinars later on. So yeah, another really cool thing that we've just launched actually in terms of doing more with less and we had to think about this really strategically as well. We just launched the very first partner course on zapier is zapier.learn.com or maybe learn zapier.com anyway, it's all about how partners can succeed on Zapier. And so a big conversation around that was okay. Is this going to provide value moving forward? We think absolutely, yes. And we're now channeling through any of our emails and intercom strategies, we're channeling people to this awesome new course which is going to be a huge evergreen benefit. I think we're also now looking at all of the integrations as partnerships. So no matter how we may have positioned Zapier integrations or partnerships in the past, whether or not we are correct that we are saying yes, I didn't forget it or not. Every time an integration indicates interest in building with us, we'll be treating it and positioning this as an ongoing relationship. So, yeah, really, it's all about making sure that they get as much value as possible the moment they start working with us. Another kind of approach to our strategy here has been this calculation that I'm totally stealing from Daniel o', Leary, GTM Partnerships at Box. He put it very succinctly, partners plus customer equals faster speed to value. And that goes both ways. It's very symbiotic. So we're saying to our partners now, hey, when your customers use Zapier, they will get more value from your product faster. And it's the same in terms of us. Like when a partner delivers a user to us, generally that lifetime value is higher than several other channels here at Zapier. So we know that when partners are positioning Zapier in a way where it's like, oh, yeah, so you've just signed up for Slack. Don't forget, you're going to get even more value out of Slack. If you add the Zapier integration to your community, then, yeah, it's a win, win, win. Now, how do we apply lifecycle marketing to partners, though? So zooming out. Lifecycle marketing and marketing in general has always been focused on the customer, which makes sense. I mean, the customer is who pays all of our bills at the end of the day. But I think it's now that we're in this era of partnerships, the tried and true tactics that we've been applying to our customer audience also need to be applied to our partners. Because think about it. Every partner that you onboard into, your marketplace or your ecosystem or your affiliate program, they represent a group of potential customers behind them. Be like 10 or 1000 or 10,000 extra signups every month. Yes, you might think that you're just onboarding a single partner, but really you're onboarding that entire community behind them. Making sure that they have all of the guidance that they need is really essential. The other thing that I think people are waking up to is both the value of partnerships, but also just how complex partners are. Just like you have Personas for each type of your partner or each type of your customer. Every partner is different. Some are a bit scrappy and off the side of the desk. Others are massive companies. You can't speak to both the same way. Okay, so now we will dig into how we're actually applying lifecycle marketing at Zapier. This is kind of the really juicy stuff that I'm sure you all came here for. So just like how Kevin Moen lacoze. I swear I tried to figure out how to say his name. It's a beautiful name. From Paris. His insight that he delivered to us in the inbox. This was after one of our automated emails went out to him because we realized, okay, he is going to be a great fit to learn more about a specific type of tactic for growing his integration called ZAP templates. It's just showing sample use cases on your website and a gorgeous little piece of ui. He says, yeah, I wasn't aware that it was possible for users to set up zaps in our ui. I'd love to see how it's done so I can push it onto the roadmap. So that came from one of the broad outreach that we ran each month. So every month we send out a quick newsletter to partners that's kind of like the bare minimum. We let them know how their industry or how their integration is doing. What are some cool events that are coming up? Are there any new case studies on what other partners have done? We then also target specific segments of partners, so we'll dive deeper, say into those who were flagging on our end as higher potential. Which means like, okay, they're already doing really well. They have quite a few users. How can we help them turn that up a little bit more? And then we take what we learn from sending these one off campaigns to target segments, the highest performers we then turn into evergreen messages. So we don't necessarily turn all of the campaigns that we send to these target segments into evergreen only the highest performers. We also keep our emails super scrappy. They're not super designed. There's not custom GIFs or GIFs, however you say it in each one. They're plain text. We write as though we are just speaking one on one to them. So a key tactic in terms of any of our lifecycle outreach that we do is identifying what partners want most. So it's not necessarily about what we want to say, it's about what our partners want to hear and what they want to learn. So as I've mentioned, partners often set up their integration and then the engagement kind of plateaus. What we've learned is that they really want data to understand how their users are interacting with zapier, which can then actually inform their roadmap and their marketing strategy. As a total hypothetical example, if we told JotForm that 10% of their users are now connecting JotForm to Mailchimp and these are the exact workflows that they're setting up. That's really what they want from us. And now we haven't just become this integration that they have. We're actually a strategic partner for them now. It's not just about sharing what they want to hear, but we need to know when we should deliver those insights. We've mapped out the partner life cycle, just as you would do with a customer life cycle, and we figured, out, okay, which areas of the journey for partners offer the most ROI if we invest further in those sections. I'm happy to share that for the past couple quarters, we were focusing all on the deepening the partnership section of their life cycle. We realized the easiest way for them to get the most ROI out of their integration is actually surfacing their integration within their product. So we went pretty ham with campaigns both via email and intercom, and case studies sharing exactly how they can do that. But then we realized, okay, a lot of the users that we're talking to at that stage, it's kind of harder to reposition how they've imagined the zapier integration and partnership once they've already been with us for a few years. So what I mean is, instead, if we focus on that build phase where there's a notable desert of outreach, we can then help to make sure that we're both telling the same story about the value of the partnership that they have with us. We're now focusing on that build phase moving forward, and we've worked closely with all of our engineers and support team members who are working with developers during that. And, and we've identified a few milestones in that build phase where we can now send automated kind of guides and tips and essentially making sure that they understand the true value that they'll get out of their partnership if they do A, B and C with us. This goes back to when I was saying how it's not necessarily just like sharing what they need to do, but why they need to do it, in our opinion. So with the campaigns that we are running about saying, hey, if you want to get more ROI out of your integration in the fastest and easiest way, with like, no engineers needed, you can use some of our embed tools. Now, when we went ham on this, this channel in terms of telling all of the different ways that other partners have succeeded doing that, we have seen a 60% increase year over year in the number of partners who are showcasing their integrations on their site. We've also doubled down on that tactic of trying to deepen the Partnership by having them showcase Zapier on their sites by a few programmatic updates. So that partner program that I mentioned earlier, we now automatically offer them benefits if they do that thing. If they put Zapier on their site, they can then exit beta earlier so they can just get access to all of the partner program benefits sooner. As soon as we detect that Zapier is on their site, same for once they have launched from beta, they can then get early access to the next tier's benefits. So say if they're bronze and they've embedded, but they don't yet have the silver tier user requirements, if they've embedded, they need fewer users to then get access to all of those silver benefits, which, as you saw earlier, was a huge amount of. Now let's look at a couple success stories and then I'm excited just to jump into the Q and A. David Atkin, CEO of Adalo, one of our partners, he received one of these automated emails that was sent out to their team and he said, okay, he never would have heard about Zap templates as an example, unless we had this automated outreach telling him about ways that he could succeed faster. With Zapier, he didn't have a partner manager, so there wasn't any like one on one guidance on what to do. So instead we're kind of offering that partner manager support on a scalable basis. So they added in their Zap templates to their site, which are just sample workflows of what their customers can automate between Adalo and any of the 6,000 other integrations on Zapier. He's like, oh, this is sweet. You know, we were hovering in the 400 monthly active user range for almost a year, as you can see. Then all they did was add Zapier onto their site and these super easy to use use case templates, and now they're up to around 650amonth. So that was a huge win in my eyes. Another thing that we've done was let Akiflow and partners like them know about all of the different benefits that they can receive super early on. So once they have joined beta, we've become a lot more proactive about telling them the different types of benefits that they can get from the partner program if they embed. And if they reach a certain rate of growth, they can get benefits faster as well. So just being a lot more proactive about everything we can give to partners has been really awesome for them at the end of the day. So now we have about 3, 13, maybe 14 nurture campaigns all the way across the life cycle. We're focusing more so on the build phase, as I mentioned. And all of these are tied to very specific actions that partners have either taken in the platform, like viewing a certain page will then send them a specific campaign or reaching a certain milestone. Like if they've reached 10 active users, we'll say, okay, now we suggest you do this. These outreach campaigns that are being triggered by actions that they're taking or milestones that they've achieved have three to four times the average of click rates, which is fantastic. That was a big win for us. And as I mentioned, so it's not all about just sending automated messages to everyone at once. We do send targeted outreach to our mid tail partners and we saw that 78% of them have now engaged with the dev platform in the past six months, which is about 15% more compared to all other public partners. Okay, that's all. And now I'm thirsty and I will take a pause.

All right, you take a drink. I'm going to sort us out. Don't you worry. I got this. This question is from Emily. What is one of the most successful always on or scalable partner marketing programs that you have?

Oh yeah, cool. This one actually really surprised me. We send a campaign to and this is my opinion of successful. So anytime a partner views one of our pages in the developer Dashboard, which is all about those embed tools that I mentioned, we then send them a automated message from our partner support team. That open rate is about 70% and has like a 20 or 30% reply rate, which to me just means that we have really automated the type of hand holding that I think those partners are really after. We wouldn't. I just was not necessarily expecting that level of engagement. Like clearly when they're visiting that page, they are ready to start exploring those tools. Until we had set up that automated outreach, we wouldn't have actually known that so many of them were like ready to actually talk to our team and place that embed on their website. So that was really interesting. Maybe one more is the adjustment that we've made to the beta phase. So as with most partner programs, but specifically here at Zapier, when you build your integration, you stay in beta for 90 days. And we really wanted to help beta partners understand that if they do add Zapier to their help docs or to an integration page in their site, they will on average have a lot more success than if they don't. And what Kim, my manager and I were talking about, I was Thinking, okay, well what's something amazing we could offer if they choose to do this thing that we want them to do? And she's like, well, how about we just use what we already have, the partner program benefits, and just say if you do this thing, you then get access to the benefits sooner. So we didn't have to invent anything else. We just accelerated their access to the existing benefits. And the reply rate for those emails is about 20%. So that's not click rate. That is reply rate of people who are like, oh, sweet. Okay, well, I do want to exit beta earlier. So, yeah, tell me, how can I do this thing? So, yeah, hopefully that helped answer your question, Emily.

All right, you're obviously, you're newer in this role. Like it's been a year and you're newer in your, you know, five or so years newer in your career in the partner world. But curious to hear, based on your last job and this job going in, how would you think about a 30, 60, 90 day plan as a new partner marketing manager? And if you don't necessarily have a template for a plan, what are some of the questions that you would be thinking about or asking based on what you've learned so far? And I'll throw in my little caveat in that I think oftentimes I see a lot of people ask about hiring and job roles when they haven't internally defined what success for this roles looks like. So it's like, yeah, we're going to hire a partner marketing person. And it's like, okay, but why? What are the strategic objectives that this maps back to? And so it seems like in the case of Zapier, they had that coming in. But what's your, what's your take on high level? What would a 30, 60, 90 day.

Plan look like for like my role if they hired me?

Yeah, like for coming in. Yeah. From a new Hyrule or maybe even just you could talk about what did your first month, three months, you know, look like at Zapier?

Yeah, it was a fire hose of information, as it always is when you join a new company, let alone one where Zapier is completely remote. So I think, I think there's about 700 employees and we're all over the world. But so there's a lot of information that's in Slack and our various remote docs. But in the first 30 days it was learning how to use the product itself, getting familiar with Zapier, some of like the challenges that I ran into, giving a ton of feedback to the product team. I mean, really every month when they bring on new people, you're getting like free customer research in a way. I mean, you are paying those employees. I guess we're not unpaid interns, but yeah, really getting to know the product and next was getting to know the existing partner program. So sometimes when you join a company that already has a partnership program in place or a partner strategy of some variety, you're able to look at things with fresh eyes. And so even looking at the partner lifecycle really early on, I was starting to map out areas that I was surprised we didn't have more outreach around and then also diving into the partner support inbox. So really seeing how partners are talking to our team about what they want to get out of Zapier and what challenges they're running into, what they want to do with us in terms of co marketing. So I'd say, yeah, that's like the first 30 or even 60 days. And then one of the very first projects that I started to take on was actually trying to revisit how we were talking to partners in all of our existing campaigns. We had really long initial emails that just packed way too much information in. So we just tried to streamline that and make sure, okay, what's the one thing that we want partners to do in each of these emails or intercom messages or help docs? But yeah, like, that's what I did to start. And then after those 90 days, it was really going a lot faster in terms of trying to map out exactly which areas of the life cycle we wanted to focus on.

Okay, this is an interesting one. How would I make potential partners give a damn or darn when you're not a brand yet. I can help answer that one, which is, it's going to be tough, right? It's like, how can you make customers care when they don't know you exist yet? So I think this would probably have to come from trying to build a personal relationship and showing potential partners where you want to go and what you want to do. I think the hard part about partnerships is there is, at least in my experience, it's often a very selfishly driven. Like now that Zapier is at this scale, you can attract brands like TikTok that want to work, that want to work with you. All right. It's going to be much more difficult if I'm Dave starting a company and I'm trying to knock on doors of big companies and trying to show them, hey, like, here's why we should partner together. But I think if you have a story even without a brand together. Yet if you have a story about what you're building, you can be pitching that to other people. I just would. It just seems like it's probably a little bit too early. I'm concerned that if you don't have a brand, why are you out there trying to build partnerships? If I have to give you a real answer, it would be try to make the case for what you're building, show them progress and updates, and show how what you're each doing can mutually benefit each other. I want to pull up a couple more before we wrap up here. This question's from Jenny. What if the org you're partnering with is experiencing a ton of turnover? It makes it challenging to build relationships when your contacts are changing quite a bit. Is this something that you've dealt with?

Oh, man, yeah. All the time. I don't have an answer for that yet. That's a really good question. I think it just speaks to. To kind of the volatility of the market a little bit in the past couple years. If I'm looking at it from, like, my perspective of working with Zapier, I think making sure that, like, every single decision or conversation that you're having with partners is documented somewhere. I mean, there are some instances where, yeah, in the past I've been having conversations over Gmail, and then it actually wasn't syncing up to, like, say, your CRM. And then all of those valuable insights that you have about another team and what they want out of their partnership are just gone forever when that person leaves. I mean, I've seen this a few times where you create like a dedicated Slack channel, and then it is a permanent record, no matter who leaves or joins. And you can just go back in time and see the whole evolution of that partnership.

It also just depends on, like, depends on how strategic this partnership is. Right. And so, like, I feel like part of this question is like, in sales, if the champion or customer success, right? If the champion of this product that you bought is leaving, that's a risk of churn, right? Like, hey, Dave brought in this product. Now Miranda took it over. She doesn't want to use this thing. But the more strategic you can make. So I think the more transactional relationships are probably going to disappear if they're based on a contact that's no longer there. But if you can make this more of a strategic level partnership, I. I think it's just one of those things that unfortunate. It's frustrating. It's part of the job there's going to be turnover and I think that that, you know, puts a wrinkle in this, especially a big part of partner marketing. Unlike other channels, it is very much a relationship driven business. Right. And so if you have no contacts, you can't get in touch with somebody there, it's going to be tough to move some stuff forward.

Yeah, yeah, I'd say it's like every. This kind of moves away from the partnership strategy and like the corporate sense. But like every contact that you work with, like add them on LinkedIn, keep in touch with them, comment if they get, you know, promotions. Like, Francisco Franco is in the chat. I used to work with him at thinkific and he then has moved to a couple spas and we've kept in touch and then we got to meet each other for the first time. Vancouver, there's just, there's tons of ways to like, look at partner marketing and partnerships as just this thing you do at work when really you are building relationships that could last your entire career. So treat those like the goal that they are, I guess.

Nice. All right, I'm going to wrap here so everybody can get a little bit of time before they go on their way, go to their next meeting, hopefully get outside, go for a walk or do something after this. Miranda, thank you so much for doing this. I want, if you can do it right, you don't do it right now if you're driving or wherever you are. But go to LinkedIn, find Miranda there, send her a connection request, send her a message, tell her that you learned one or two new things about this. Or hop over to the Exit 5 community. And we'd love to have a discussion about what does partner marketing look like inside of your org, especially as we head into 2024. I know a lot of people are looking to be more efficient, be more effective, and I think partnerships is a great way to do that. And Miranda, thank you to you for coming on and talking a little bit about integrations and life cycle. And I learned a couple new things and I'm actually thinking about, man, I got to come up with a better partner strategy for my business for Exit 5. And so I, I hope people got something from this. Thank you for taking the time to do it. Enjoy the rest of your day in Vancouver. I appreciate you. Virtual fist bump. And I'll. I'll see you later. Okay, Bye.

Bye. Awesome.

Thanks, everybody. See you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

If you're in B2B marketing, you want to grow your career. You should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros.

Whether you're deep in your career and.

Want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the E email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast.

It sounds amazing because of the work.

That they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing. And that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next doll. Use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year. Planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap, and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com officehours that's paramark.com office hours.