#174: Growth | Leveraging Partnerships to Drive Influence and Revenue with Jared Fuller, COO of OpenEd.co

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One, two, three, four.

Exit. Exit, exit. All right. Jared, good to see you, man. We go back a little ways. I haven't, I haven't talked to you. We did a phone call maybe last end of last summer. I asked you a few questions, but haven't seen you in a bit. How are things, man? What do you do these days?

Oh, man, I'm just. Well, you know me as the partner guy, right? So like I kind of followed the D.C. dG playbook and I started a media company and then got that acquired by a SaaS company. And then I did a category creation play and then I wrote the book on the category. So it's like you might have had some influence on me or something.

Wait, so let. That's crazy. So let's unpack that a little bit. So first of all, what does that mean you did. Let's explain for people. You did the whole media company thing. So let's rewind back a little bit. Was your last job before that working at Drift and then you eventually left?

Yeah. So I was at Drift for three and a half, going on four years.

Right.

So we did some fun stuff like the Marketo and Adobe partnership and some cool stuff with six Sense and Clearbit and all of the ABM space. All the folks that listen to you in this podcast and on LinkedIn, we were everywhere.

Right?

You were everywhere. And our partnerships were an awesome part of that to amplify the reach and voice and all of that. So I kind of my curiosity with partnerships and being a lever turned in some courage and I'm like, who else can do this partner thing? Where do I go to learn? There's like no one. There's no book, there's no podcast. So I actually started a podcast on partnerships while I was at Drift called Partner up. And then that turned into a daily newsletter called Partner Hacker Daily. And then my co founder and I, Isaac Morehouse, started partnerhacker.com as a media company and mentors, role models. I was at Drift to learn. A lot of people go to companies for the wrong reasons. I was there to learn mentors and role models. Sales hacker already existed. Growth hackers, indie hackers.

Right.

So like, hey, partner hacker, it just makes sense. Just innovate, don't invent.

Yeah.

And that became a multimillion dollar business in less than one year.

So basically you came up. Where did you work at drift before PandaDoc?

Yeah, I was the VP of Sales and Partnerships at PandaDoc.

Yeah. So you came up in B2B SaaS doing sales and then partnerships. And then at Drift, you ran partnerships there and like you said, helped helped negotiate and build some of the strategic alliances, the big partnerships. And then you build this passion. Like, you start to realize, hey, I like being in this space. I like writing about this thing. I like talking about this thing. I'm going to go start a podcast. Did you start it with the attention of, like, I think this can be huge. Or it's like, hey, this is an area I'm passionate about. Let me share my take. Let's start a podcast about this. And I'm asking because I kind of think, I think I know the answer, but I think a lot of people, like, it's. I just like when I talk to somebody that has a passion for a space and then like goes and starts something and then like, oh, then this thing kind of serendipitously happens. And so what was your initial intention in starting that podcast? Was just for fun, for you to do it?

Well, I was really skeptical of starting anything in the partnership space because it is the third rail of B2B, right? You have the marketing and sales fight and partnerships. No one wants to touch it. It's like, they want it to work, but they don't want to touch it, right? It's like, give me the partnership success, but, like, I don't want to own it. You own it, you own it. So I was reticent. I didn't start the podcast with the idea of starting a company. Absolutely not. I was like, let me go see if there's a body of work behind some of these great ecosystems and programs, from HubSpot to Salesforce to you name it. We're on hundreds of episodes now, and we've produced thousands of pieces of content. So, like, I've written, listened, spoke, interviewed as much as anyone in the world on the topic of partnerships. Over time, you start to see the following started to mean something to people. And I was like, okay, people are listening again and again and again. And then I'd say, when I saw the GTM bleep show that was about to happen, Marketing, sales, and success, that SaaS 2022, 2023, like, big blip peak SaaS, as you might call it, I knew that partnerships was going to be a lever that everyone had to figure out because there's not much left other than trust. So that's when I decided, I'm like, there's actually a company here. And do I start a SaaS company, though, right? This industry is going to grow. And I was like, no, no, no, no. Build the audience, the product follows. So I'm like, I already have the podcast. I already got started a newsletter. Let's launch the site. Let's do an event, right? We built a traditional B2B media company.

I have such a similar story of, like, how I really made Exit 5 become a thing. It was like, obviously, I've been a VP of marketing. I've been a cmo. I did the work. And similar to you, you had a quota, you carried the bat, like, whatever you want to call it, you did that. But then, like, I realized, and I was going to, like, completely move away from this space. And I was like, man, I just want to go, like, do yoga and write poetry in the mountains.

Did you go to Peru, dg?

No, like, not yet. Not yet. But then I was like, man, I've been like, creating content and writing on LinkedIn and having a podcast talking about B2B marketing for so long. I just had that epiphany one day. I'm like, oh my gosh, you have the product, you don't need to go build software. Like, this could be the thing. And I think like, you, like you do so many interviews. I don't claim to be an expert. I share the things that I've learned, but I've learned so much by doing. I'm on 150 episodes of this podcast. Let's say each one of them is an hour on top of my decade of experience doing marketing. That's 150 hours of getting to talk to people like you and other VPs and CMOs and founders and whoever. Like that stuff compounds. And like, I happen to be good at the content creation piece. Like, oh yeah, don't go build software. Like, this is your unique thing. And there's other examples of this, like sales hacker we've talked about with sales hacker. And that's kind of how I stumbled into like creating Exit 5 is not just being like Dave's podcast, but like, oh yeah, there's a, there's a media company in here. So it's cool to hear you replay the hits of that story. What was the first? You said seven. You said multiple figure. I don't know what figures. You said.

Yeah, so we turned into a multimillion dollar business in less than a year.

Okay, so you turn it into a multimillion dollar business in less than a year. What was the first way that you made dollars? How did you go from. Was it like one company reached out and you're like, for me, it was like this company. Like I had a paid community. And so it was a little bit different. I already had revenue that way. But then this one company reached out and they're like, hey, can we sponsor your podcast? And I was like, yeah, I guess so. Yeah, sure you can. And here's the cost. And they did it. And they did it for three months and they wanted to book it again for six months. And I was like, whoa, we just created now I just created a hundred thousand dollar channel out of nowhere. And that was kind of the thing. What was it for you?

So I'll go back to the beginning. So I bartered to get reach.

So for example, I could see you bartering. That's a great idea, right?

So I went to Crossbeam was like the first big partner tech company that was Sass native. I went to Crossbeam, they had some good content, like a state of Partnerships Annual Report. They had an email list of 15,000 people. And I was like, hey, I'll trade you a sponsorship if you highlight the new partnerships podcast in your newsletter, right? They were like my first sponsor for the first X amount of time. And that allowed me to take off, right, and get in front of that audience and worked with them. But if you fast forward, I didn't actually monetize partner hackers probably for a year, year and a half, because it was just a podcast back then. So about episode 50 60, somewhere in there, we're like, spring of 22, I was like, okay, so we're going to turn this into a real business. We actually monetized the launch of partnerhacker.com so it was like, hey, this is the first dedicated site to like B2B SaaS native partnerships. And I got seven partner tech vendors to be the launch partners. And prior to being the VP Sales at PandaDoc DG, I actually was CEO of a SaaS company. And then prior to that, I actually own my own marketing agency. So I love creative campaigns. So what we did is we created a launch campaign. We took over an event, right? So it was like this big takeover. We had a booth, we had all of our sponsors involved. We got the entire partner ecosystem buzzing about the launch of Partner Hacker. Each of these sponsors got placement in Partner Hacker Daily. They got plugs in the podcast, they got the event that we did live. So I just, I created an experience. So the launch was a big deal. We had all of these analyst firms covering the launch of partnerhacker.com and we also helped them write really good content. So it was like a media play where we were helping them talk to the audience that they were trying to sell to. And we'd be like, hey, we're not just letting you publish, we're going to help you write. So my only hires at partnerhacker early on were like content people. We helped partner tech vendors speak to the partner audience and help them do so in a way that was helpful. Not just, hey, here's our products and our features, but like actually talking about problems because we were closer to the customer than they were.

Right.

So that was the first one. And then our number one monetization after that was events. So we did Ecosystem Week, we did the PLX Summit. I think we did big events in our first year. All which were multi six figures in revenue for us. All virtual, by the way.

Oh, interesting. Okay, so that's maybe the answer to the next question I was going to ask, because I I had Jason Lemkin on the podcast last week, and we spent a bunch of time talking after, and he's helping me with Exit 5, just giving me advice and strategy.

Right.

And I was like, what's one thing that you would do if you started Saster again? You wouldn't do it. He's like, I wouldn't do an event. And I'm like, what do you mean? That's the whole thing? And he's like, no, it's. It's insane. It's a nightmare. And we're doing our first event in September, and I've gotten a lot of mixed feedback about people who do an event. And Jason was like, do an event, but think of it as, like a. Don't make your whole business think of it as a community enabler just because it's so much work. But if you can do a smaller event, that's a gathering of people. But I think in your case, virtual event, especially in an area where nobody is actively creating content and topics around that, that's a good place. So basically my translation of that is when you launched, instead of doing, like, these a la carte sponsorships, you kind of, like, got smart about packaging and bundling and, like, really created packages as opposed to, like, yeah, you can spend X and get Y. Right.

Yeah. I mean, if you think actually, like a media company and you think about your customers that are paying you, you want to come up with some sort of package that it seems more attractive. Value add over placement.

Yeah. Right.

So, for example, it's like, hey, we'll give you a podcast spot. Okay, cool. What's your reach?

Yeah, right.

If you're selling the lowest common denominator, then all they care about is reach in the audience. But it's like, no, no, no. What we're actually going to do, I call them brand and demand campaigns, which is kind of interesting. I don't think I've ever talked about this publicly. And it was me thinking more like an agency, even though I was a media company. So what we do is we do a kickoff call, and we'd help them craft their narrative for the audience. Like, you don't just get to market to our audience. We actually consulted, helped them craft the narrative that we knew would land.

Yeah.

And then we'd feature them in a Sunday Stories. So we send a newsletter seven days a week, but only Sundays was for sponsors, and it was like the launch of their story. So they got a dedicated send to our email list, which was really good content. We actually had people being like, this is the best advertising I've ever seen.

Right.

Well, is it interesting you mentioned that? So for the first year of doing this, I was running the business by myself and I would just basically was playing whack a mole with sponsorships. Somebody would come in and say, hey, can we sponsor your newsletter? And I was like, yeah, great. You know, we have next. It's booked for the next four weeks, but, like, for June 3rd, the newsletter's open. And that was great. It was great to get it going. It was great to see the demand. But this year we. We don't do any, like, a la carte sponsor, what I would call a la carte sponsorships like that. Instead, it's like, yeah, you might pay X much bigger dollar amount, but that's going to be like two webinars, three months of podcast ads. Yep. Three or four newsletters. And the sponsors and partners that we're working with. Partner is a fancy name for sponsors. It's like, yeah, we call them partners, not sponsors.

Right, right, right, right.

But the results are much better. And especially in B2B, it's like, I hate the CPM math because people are like, well, your email list has 17,000 people on it. That means we're going to reach as many. I'm like, well, hold on. But if you got like two new customers from doing this, you would make a lot of your money back. And they're like, yes. And like, so throw out the CPM math. Let's do this bundle. And it works. It works much better.

Yeah. So that's what we do, is we'd help them build the brand with the audience.

Yeah.

Featured story, podcast spots, newsletter spots, social. So we, Our social presence was amazing as well. So we'd help them create and we do influencer content. So this is where the whole concept of nearbound comes around is like, we'd help our partners write content that we love, that we knew our audience was going to resonate with. And we're able to extract that content and place it in all of these different places, but not just that, interact with people who also cared about that content. So we had these omnichannel distribution, and at the end of the campaign, we'd always have an event, Right. A virtual event. So it was like brand and demand. And then that event was like the capture moment where we'd get 500 people to register for a partner event where we have five or six vendors, us and big names present. And that was like their best channel. So, like Tyler Calder, the CMO of Partner Stack, Came to me and was like, I'll never do another event alone. It's silly. I should always do them with partners. And the other thing that he knows, he's like, hey, almost all of my pipeline this quarter came from working with you guys. Because of that, we built brand over time, trust. And then there was a capture moment, not the other way around. Hey, let me send you to this partner sponsor. It was all offline channels. You couldn't see who was clicking into anything. And then when we did the event, it's like, hey, here's your 300 leads.

Yeah. Yeah. It's been another learning for us was like really focusing on, like, almost client service and account management. Instead of being like, they buy an ad slot and we're like, great, what's the copy? We're now being like, let's talk about it. Let us help you craft the right content and offer for this audience and, like, help them be successful. And then like, also, that's going to be the best source of new. I'd much rather have a company be like, dude, that works so well. Can we sign up for the next three months? As opposed to us having to find more, More sponsors, Right?

Yeah, that's the thing. How much easier was it for me to sell back to partner Stack and Tyler after crushing it and crushing it and crushing it? Like, they, they loved working with us and there was a competing community at the time, partnership leaders. And I could just put it one way. They only paid one of us. He's like, working with you guys is great. It's like, yeah, put the customer first, sell them something they want, deliver results. And I think we just don't think about our marketing the right way. Like, if you're a good media company, your clients love you, your readers love you.

I do want to get into partnerships, like, as lessons, maybe we'll spend like the back half of this. But I'm, I'm digging this topic and I care about it and it's my podcast, so I don't care. So you, you build partner hacker, and you eventually built it, and you sold it, and that's interesting. Did you set out to do that? Why not just continue to operate it, have a highly profitable business? Why sell it? How did that deal go down? I would love to try to understand that because I know you'll talk candidly about it. Not a lot of people talk about it. I'd love to hear Max tell a story about selling sales hacker to outreach. And so I'd love to hear, love to hear your story. As somebody who might be in that situation one day.

Right.

I'd love to have the option to do or not do that. And I'm just, I'm curious to hear how it all went down, who you sold to, what you do now, everything.

So we were experiencing really awesome growth in a space that didn't really have a voice.

Right.

All these heads of partnerships and B2B tech across all the industries. There was no centralized place where there was like a readership or an audience. And because we'd consolidated that and it was growing so quickly.

Sorry, and what were the core channels like when you say like media company? Like for us it's. We have a paid community, we have podcasts, we do content and we're doing events. What were the core channels for you?

It was own media primarily. So the website, the newsletter, the podcast and then the social. So YouTube and LinkedIn.

Right.

And some Twitter. But I mean fairly traditional from a tech enabled media company.

Right.

That's all online. And then our events. Our events were a pillar, right. That was a big part of our branded events. So it was basically a database, right. That we produce content and distributed to. And our audience trusted us more and more over time. So what ended up happening was, hey, Isaac and I had a number in mind who said, if we hit this many millions in an acquisition offer, we'll do it prior to two years.

Yeah. You ever read the book Built to Sell? So basically he talks about in the book, it's like whether you want to sell or not. Every entrepreneur and I think that anybody who says like, I'm never going to sell is lying to you. I think every entrepreneur has a number at some point and he says like, even if you don't want to sell, it's a good exercise to at least write down that number and put it away and then go to work. And then if that number comes up, then you can go and discuss it.

Right.

A hundred percent. So we had a number and we'd been working with who would acquire us? Well, our customers, right. So the partner technology companies and we started to have some conversations organically where they're like, hey, this should come together kind of like sales, hacker and outreach, right. So they started to float phrases like that maybe we should acquire you and kind of turn you into our marketing and media arm. And that kind of created a three way bid between three partner tech companies who were all paying clients of ours prior to.

Right.

So like no one would buy us if we hadn't done the thing that we were telling them that we could do for them. So all three of these were paying customers before, and the one that we knew. So we knew which one we were going to sell to at that stage, because it was. The alignment was just so good. It was way too good. And that was Reveal. So Reveal, co. They're a competitor to Crossbeam, and frankly, we've kicked their butt massively since the acquisition. Massively kicked their butt. It's been fun.

You mean you have kicked Reveals butt?

Crossbeam's butt. We've kicked Crossbeam's butt, yeah.

Okay.

So, okay, this has been fun, you know, And I love Bob. I love the team. So it's not me throwing shade.

Like, hey, but like, Reveal had cash. They've raised $50 million. Right. So, like, you have to have cash to be able to do this. And then why does M and A happen? M and A happens because the acquiring company believes that you have something that they can't do without you.

Right, Right.

And that was creating a category, actually. So here's an interesting story. Simon, the CEO of Reveal, he's the one that actually came up with the word nearbound. And the second that I heard that word, I was like, y' all don't know what you have. That is it. Yeah, it's perfect. It's like Chef's kiss perfect. And I know he didn't know what he had because I bought Nearbound.com.

Did you? Did you throw that into the acquisition? You're like, and I own nearbound dot com.

Yeah. And I said, well, this is when we knew the deal was going to happen, dg. I said, look, here's what we're going to do. And I feel so. I'm actually proud of this, because if I look back, what am I holding right here? I'm holding Nearbound, the book, which is a number one bestseller on every category, only second to Elon Musk biography in the business. You know, like, we kicked butt. We turned partner hacker into nearbound.com.

Right.

We flipped everything into a category creation play. And that was our vision. Hey, let's take the media company and do kind of what HubSpot did with Inbound. Let's create the category, let's create the event, let's create the book. So it's not the Partner up podcast anymore. It's the nearbound podcast. It's not the Partner Hacker Daily. It's the nearbound Daily.

Yep.

And we've put that lexicon and that language into the market to where really respected big people use Nearbound now. But that was the Pitched assignment.

Right.

So it wasn't just like, we're going to buy your website and your list and then like you guys are going to go do something else.

Right.

It was like very much like we're. You said you can turn us into your marketing and media arm, but it's also. And we're going to help you build this category of nearbound through the media arm. Like it wasn't just like purchase done over. Right.

Yeah. I think there's an interesting book that I. The older I get, the more I recommend it, which I didn't. I guess I've appreciated its lessons more over time than less. And it's called the Sumo Advantage and it's written by the founder of TrueCar, which is really funny, but he kind of talks about how the art of deal making in a partnership, a big alliance, like we're talking big deals and an M and A is a big deal. And one of the things he talks about is that any alliance or M and A or kind of strategic transaction requires the party. That is the little going to the Sumo. Right. The bigger party. You have to control the vision. The Sumo will never come up with the vision. You're never going to be acquired unless you have something to sell.

Right.

So when Isaac and I told Reveal, here's exactly what we're going to do when you sign this deal, they went done.

Right.

You know what you're going to do. Amazing. That's what they were buying. They weren't just buying partnerhacker. Com, they were buying the plan.

Were there any moments of like, I don't know if imposter syndrome is the white word or fear or vulnerability where you're like, it's a little bit like just taking off your clothes and standing there naked and you're like, hello, we'd like you to buy us and here's how we want it to go. Were you in a position where was that an uncomfortable ask? Did you feel like, yeah, even if they say no, like, we're going to keep building this thing.

Yeah. I mean the M and A conversations happened organically and then we took it seriously once they started happening.

Right.

How did it happen organically?

So we were launching our first event before we rebranded to Nearbound.com and the acquisition.

Right.

We were still partner hackers in the first event. We called it plx. So the X was a variable. Partner led everything. It was a five day event. Partner led marketing, partner led sales, partner led success. And we brought all of these different. We had over 120 speakers, 5,000 people for an event that didn't even exist 90 days prior. So, like in the buzz of all of this, and they're like, oh my gosh, this looks amazing. It has its own soundtrack. You have magicians that are running in between shows. We won airmeet event of the year. So like Mark Killens, you remember Mark, of course, he was the CMO at airmeet. And he was like, Jared, I'm not kidding. That was the best virtual event in Airmeat's history. So we didn't just produce an event, we produced the best event Airmeat had ever even seen. It was out of this world. It was actually great. And in that process, they were like, okay, y' all are the real deal. That's when it got serious, is that the product was great. Dg One of the things that we did is no one had ever done this in B2B before. We shipped thousands of workbooks to people's homes that had the face of every speaker QR code to their LinkedIn notes from their session. And it was like the PLX workbook, so you could actually have something. And guess what I did. I put the sponsor tags in the workbook. So you gotta be on people's home, on their desks while they're watching this event and have their partner playbook for the next year. So like we just brought together an incredible experience that was kind of hybrid in that sense. And when the partner tech companies saw that this is how you do it, this is great marketing, that's when the offers got serious.

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And what do you do now? So now that you're part of this company, what are the terms of your relationship look like and what is your job at the company?

So I lead partnerships and kind of like the media arm inside. So I'm chief Ecosystem officer if you will. So I'm continuing to build partnerships and grow. The nearbound category and what that looks like, for example, is that Nearbound, the event this year is happening at Inbound. That's pretty dang cool. This word didn't even exist a year and a half ago and now it's being co signed by HubSpot. HubSpot is one of our customers. They're one of our biggest partners. They're distributing us into their 1700 ISVs and their thousands of agency partners. And now we have 14,000 companies on the Reveal network. So we spend a lot of time and I spend a lot of my time maximizing network effects. The HubSpot relationship is a network effect. Being at their event and having Nearbound as the unofficial official partner track. So if you want to learn about partnerships and you're going to be at Inbound this year, where do you go? You go to the Nearbound event. We got our own stage, we've got our own experience, it's our own brand, and it's on the main floor. That's pretty cool.

So you're back flexing more of your partnerships muscle. But who's operating the media company now?

So co founder Isaac Morehouse is the chief market officer at Reveal. So he runs the day to day of the media brand, just making sure that the newsletter goes out on the day to day. Podcasts are scheduled, but we have a content marketing manager. I mean, the nearbound.com media team is run with about five people. It's not huge.

Got it.

Are you still involved in that?

Yeah. Yeah. So Nearbound.com and Reveal are just. It's one company.

Yeah. And then do you have. You have a bunch of upside in Reveal? Like you got cash for the deal and then some equity in Reveal?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a majority. There's a reverse merger is the technical term because Reveal was a French company. So I won't get in the complexities of that. But the lawyer bill for a relatively small transaction was relatively high. How about that?

What's it like negotiating with the French?

You know, when you're on opposite. So here's the thing. You know, we had like, the French American war definitely happened. But whenever we're on the same team, we do really well.

Right.

Like when Americans and the French are on the same team, we tend to do really well historically. But, like, that fight was, you know.

I say this with nothing but love. All of the French people that I know, they're just, they're very direct. They're even more direct than American than we think that we can be.

Right.

And so it's great.

They'll tell you, like, that will never happen. You're like, hey, here's this thing that will never happen. And you're just like, okay, well, right.

I'm thinking like, of negotiating with G or something like that. How bad I would.

Right.

Situation. Yeah. A reverse merger, huh? I've only heard that term in a rap song once. Jay Z says, IPO hove no need for reverse merger. I don't really know what it means, but I'm happy to hear that. But it was the right thing for you to do. Like, it seems like you're genuinely excited about the opportunity. And so, like, you get to keep Building this media company. Build the near bound category. It's the right home to do this. You could have done this all on your own, but now you're part of a company which gives you more skin in the game and you have bigger upside.

Yeah, absolutely. And the goal was always to build the category.

Right.

Like, I have this phrase which is probably somewhat stolen from D.C. to some degree, and I call it. There's three different types of entrepreneurs. There's builders, there's geniuses, and there's pros. Builders have a hammer and they're looking for a nail. Just like, here's my product. Where's the problem? Right. They're just product and it's all about them. That's probably 90% of entrepreneurs. And good luck to them, Right? I've started companies like that and I have failed. Then there's geniuses, which is not you or me. We're not going to create some 10x technological innovation that changes the.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I'm a genius? Speak for yourself, dude. Maybe you're not a genius, but I.

Am when it comes to product.

Right.

When it comes to. To technical innovation.

You know, I was product manager at Drift for one day. The company was 10 people. We created this social media tool called the Drift Daily. And they were like, you know what? You can PM this. And I literally did it for like two days. And then they were like, actually, just give us to Matt Bilotti and like, you write the words for it.

There you go.

There you go.

So the genius is like, what? They quickly realized DG is that great product never beats great go to market. And then the last one's, what I think is the pro. What I saw at Drift, I mean, Drift, we were an iframe on a website. Dude, come on. We were an iframe on a website. That's all that we were. But what a pro does is they pick an undeniable shift in the world, Right. Where they have, as Paul Graham likes to say, an earned secret.

Right.

There's something about them that ties to this undeniable shift. And then they own the audience.

Yeah.

And then they build the product. And that was my thesis.

Yeah. I don't even know. I don't even know what an iframe is. So, like, I just am good at the words part.

Hey, your copywriting is like, it influences everything that we do, and I do. So I just love the way you think about great content.

Thanks, man. That's cool to hear. Let's circle back and talk about partnerships now. We haven't covered this topic a lot. We've done a couple episodes on this. But you mentioned earlier, you said that I wrote this down. Partnerships are the third rail because marketing, I wouldn't say marketing doesn't want it. So you said marketing doesn't want to own its sales, doesn't want to own it. I don't think that, I don't think it's that they don't want to own it. I think typically what happens is that there's someone doing partnerships and they don't really report into either org. And I worked at a company, I'm not going to say where, when, but I worked at a company and we really battled with partnerships team because it was like a separate line item in revenue. And so like any marketing decision we would make, they'd be like, no, I hate this copy. The thing you guys are launching just is like going to piss off all of our partners. And it's like, okay, but like we're doing this much in revenue, the partner slices only this much. And so like we eventually got aligned because we eventually folded it into the person who ran sales and like it did become a much more streamlined org. But I feel like a lot of it has to do with like where does it sit. But let's just talk about what is a successful partnership motion look like for most of our listeners are in B2B SaaS. What does that look like and where should it sit and how should it be measured and what should the partner team do?

So what you just said is what it shouldn't be.

Well, yeah.

Partnerships should not be an independent business unit. It should not be a channel and it should not even be thought of as a department.

Well, so don't you think this is like why there is so much conflicts? Like I'm just going to use, I'm going to use made up numbers. But like let's say, let's say the company was doing $10 million in revenue, the partner team was delivering $1 million of that revenue. Not insignificant 10% of revenue. But it's not enough to like change all the other plans and it just created conflict inside of the company.

Right?

Yeah. And that's prototypical in B2B SaaS because in SaaS we are addicted to cheap customer acquisition. And the unit economics of the funnel and funnel math. How's that working for you in 2024 though? Would be my counter. But going back to that split, it's that partnership should be a strategy for each department, not its own number. In other words, it needs to be an overlay. Right. So you should be looking at partner attach rate over your partner bookings.

Right.

Partner bookings are for like a teleco company.

Right.

That has a channel of it distributors and resellers. And if you're SaaS native, nothing that I just said made any sense. Exactly. The partner model that people screw up and try to bring into SaaS is from a non native SaaS world. It's from when you have local partners installing hardware. Why would you take that model and put it into a cloud native SaaS realm that everything's changing so fast. So that's what I think why I felt nearbound was so important. Nearbound is how each company goes to market or lives in market and creates content with partners, sells with partners and then serves with partners. And it's about marketing, sales and success doing that. Not a partner team owning some independent channel or business unit that like somehow interfaces with marketing and sales and success. That's what was so broken about it is that it wasn't SaaS native.

Where does partnerships does the partnership team report into the CRO?

I think the folks should have a chief ecosystem or a chief partner officer as an aspiration that has a seat alongside the CMO and the CRO. I think absent that though, the very next best place to put it is underneath the marketing department. Why? Because what's the root of marketing is market. We forgot a lot about market and we focus on the ing, the active marketing. Marketing happens in a market and the market team needs to be intimately familiar with the watering holes of where customers live, their problems, their challenges, who do they trust, who do they respect, who influences them, who are their vendors, who are their agencies, who do they pay, what are their business challenges, what are their business initiatives? That's what constitutes a market. And that means that those relationships, that's nearbound. Nearbound is the relationships that connect people so you can surround the customer. Outbound was about targeting, Inbound was about attracting. Nearbound is about surrounding the customer with the voices they already trust. And I believe that should sit in the marketing team.

Yeah.

Absent it not being C suite visible.

Well that's interesting because it also that also then would change how you think about what success looks like.

Right.

So the only measure of partnership, so sale, like selling more of your product is not the only measureship of partnership success. Right?

Yes. Very myopic view.

And there's a lot of nuance here. Just like marketing, it's like we did stuff back in the day like hey David, who is the CEO for People that don't have the context of like dc, like, hey, Jared got this. There's this like Adobe Summit and we don't really have anything like baked out from a product standpoint and we're not selling anything yet. But like they got him a slot to like speak at their event. Should we go do that? Yes, of course. That's great. Great for brand perception and great to be associated with Adobe. Like if we only looked at that as well, can we. Will we get X dollars in Pipeline from this? If you. Similar to marketing, it's like if you only treat it as a direct response channel, you don't maximize what the potential can really be. Right, Right.

I just wrote an article on this for Nearbound.com about how I did this inside of Drift with Marketo. So DG, I went and visited all three North American offices for Marketo and I met with 55 CSMs and generated hundreds of referrals. But I was also working with your marketing team, like Alex, and we were doing email campaigns.

Right.

We were doing executive alignment stuff with like Jill Rowley and Sarah Kennedy. They were at the Hypergrowth event. And then what we did is we launched Conversational abm. So it was like a productized integration, right? Like we called it something in the DG playbook. We didn't just launch, hey, it's the Drift and Marketo integration, it's the Conversational abm. Adobe is the one that put out the press release, not us, which was dope. And keep in mind, this wasn't just DC David Cancel speaking at the Adobe Summit. Steve Lucas gave the keynote. So this is the keynote from the CEO of Marketo and he ends his keynote with. And that's why I'm so excited to announce Conversational ABM with David Cancel and Drift. We took over the keynote in front of 19,000 people and we didn't pay anything for it. We paid nothing. That's the power of good partnerships in working with the marketing team.

Right.

We generated. When I left Drift DG, we had over $30 million in revenue attached to Marketo. And when you and I started, guess what? We had none.

Right.

But it wasn't a relationship that was built with some like short term pipeline number in mind.

Right.

It wasn't like, oh, we need hey Jared. Like the CRO wasn't like, hey Jared, we need $2 million in pipeline from. Did you have a quota though, like at that time?

That's actually, this is very important distinction. What was the objective with Marketo? It was to become their number one Partner globally. And that's what I loved.

Right.

That objective is like we're going to be number one is measured by what and then it's like okay by number of active installs. So we had to go from pipeline to closed one to success is measured by our growth. So our attached revenue. So how much in the marketo install base was Drift's revenue? So it was a very much aligned across every department and that was our ISV or tech alliances program that doesn't count marketing agencies that we also had it was attached to overall the book. So it was like hey, it was $5 million, then 10, then 15 and 20 as long as that was growing. And we won Adobe partner of the year. So it was like boom. That's what we set out to do is we wanted to be number one.

Do you think the last couple years partnerships had a lot of momentum? Because especially in SaaS a lot of companies did layoffs. There was this kind of like return to rigor and the kind of flashy growth tactics and spending kind of went away. And partnerships is right in that sweet spot of you don't necessarily have to spend to find an effective way to drive revenue. I've really been, I don't have a lot of deep experience in this space so I'm hoping you can talk to. But it does feel like there's been a renewed momentum. I don't know, maybe this is because you all created Nearbound.

I'd love to take some credit for that.

So there seems to be some forces of people focusing more on that. Like hey, we got to do more with less here. Like how can we drive growth efficiently? Oh like partnerships is probably a great way to to do that.

So this is where that undeniable macro shift in the world. Going back to my comment about the three different types of entrepreneurs is that I said that great product never beats great go to market, but great go to market never beats great network effects. And when people start to understand that like all gains, and this is a Naval Ravicant quote, all gains in life, whether in wealth, life, personal relationships or business come from compound interest. Play long term games with long term people. What people are realizing is that the linear funnel, right, is a faucet. And HubSpot had it right with the concept of a flywheel. If you have a leaky bucket in SaaS, you cannot fix it with more marketing acquisition dollars.

Right.

The whole Chris Walker thesis on paid spend.

Right.

And what folks are doing with demand gen, that's obviously not working like it used to. There started to be in 2022, a bunch of VC firms like Benchmark Capital and that started to talk to us over at partnerhacker and then they started to release some reports that were like, hey, the number one growth strategy in 2023 is going to be partner led growth. And I'm like, okay, the VCs are paying attention now, right? And they were referencing our content and our studies and our events. And that's when I knew that like this was going to start to permeate because boards are now having this conversation. What's our partner strategy? What's our ecosystem strategy? Where do we have Flywheel or network effects where $1 in can generate $5 on return. And you'll just never get that with an ad, even if it's an ad, an email, a multi channel and SDR and an AE and csm. If you have any product value that you're generating net dollar expansion, someone else is coming for that. It's so easy to build a product today. So if you're like, hey, I got 130% net dollar retention at my B2B SaaS company, fantastic. Some other entrepreneur is going to come for that 30%. There's a competition for everything. So you need network effects, you need flywheel effects. And that's why HubSpot to this day is still my favorite role model company. You know, HubSpot DG has never missed an earnings report ever.

Never miss saying what they're they're going to do.

They've never had an earnings miss in their entire time since 10 years being public. It's pretty cool.

Sometimes I think about I've done well, I've made some money. But I was a marketing manager at HubSpot. I was running, I ran their first podcast and I worked there in 2015, 2014, before I went to Drift. I do sometimes think about if I just stayed there for, for a decade and kept getting promoted and I think I would have got promoted and like I would have done well if I just had that stock and that was my portfolio. I think I also, I would have done pretty damn well.

You would have done fantastic. Yeah, Kip is doing just fine.

Kip is great. Crip is great. We're playing golf next month. He's coming. He has a place up in Vermont and.

Oh amazing.

He owes me around to golf. I'm going to do the like. Pretend to offer to pay, but you'll pay for that. Just kidding. I love you.

Here's another cool thing you mentioned, Kip. So like at the nearbound Summit last year, DG, we had 30 minutes to President's Club. We did a live podcast with them. So that's like the biggest podcast in sales. We did a live podcast with Marketing against the Grain with Kip and Kieran.

Right.

And then we did one on the customer success side. So, like, what do you call that stuff? It's kind of partnerships. It's not traditional, it's not market. It's. We doubled our reach in every way. We brought them into our stuff. We highlighted them and made it cool. Like, we made it look like the podcast takeovers of this each day were just like, amazing. So Kip and Kieran were like. That was. That was fun. Thanks, guys. Amazing. So that's what I mean by like marketing and nearbound. Think back to like Drift and Gong. Dude, we never even had an integration, but we loved marketing with Gong. Every time we did something with Gong, we both made money.

Right?

Yeah, right. That's what I think is interesting about, like the role of partnerships is you can do things that don't have to require, like development work. You didn't have to go to the chief product officer and they got to tell you some line about, well, this will take time. Like, there's just overlapping audience stuff that makes sense to do and it's mutually, mutually beneficial. In your world. Do people still do co marketing? Like when I worked at HubSpot and in other places, co marketing was like a team. Is. Is co marketing, like rolled into this role of partnerships? And what I mean by co marketing is like, maybe not these integration level things, but like, hey, and we did some of this early days of Drift, hey, we engage you has a customer base that like, we want to be in front of. We have a good audience they want to be in front of. Let's. Let's do some webinars and some podcasts and co create content together.

So I don't like the phrase co marketing, just like I don't like the phrase co selling because it implies that we're like marketing two separate things, right. Or that we're selling two separate things. No CRO in the world wants to co sell with another SaaS company. Why? That's two opties. That's twice the deal amount. You're 50% less likely to get it. So it's more about attaching influence.

Right?

So if we were to think about an annual campaign plan or a quarterly campaign plan, right? You're going to sit down, you're like, hey, here's the strategic thing that we're doing. This Quarter. It's going to involve what emails, maybe an event at the end, a virtual thing and maybe an in person. It's going to involve podcasts, multimedia newsletters. And then all that you do from a planning perspective, DG is you go, okay, so here's our campaign. Who are the voices that our customers trust? And there's going to be names, company names and people names and that you attach as many of those as you possibly can across your social media team, across your content marketing manager, across your demand gen person that's orchestrating ads and it becomes a part of how you run your marketing day to day ops versus this co marketing thing that's like okay, your product, my product, how do we come up with a better together story? And like that's just a waste of effort. Overlay partnerships, near bound activities to your marketing team's rhythm of the business. And that's what I detail. I actually spend the more time in the book on Nearbound talking about this than I do any other department. I think it's the most effective use of anyone's time today. Because if you just think about it, you have your database, you're already marketing to your database. You work with these partners and you have five extra database. Well, your reach just, I mean, come on, this is. And they're constantly growing theirs. It's the cheapest acquisition channel for acquiring new names and building trust and affinity in market. So it's co marketing to me is about marketing two products. Nearbound marketing is about intertwining partner voices with your own. And I got a great example of who's crushed this with a scrappy team of three people. You know Pete Caputa, the agency guy that created the HubSpot program and now CEO of Databox.

Yep.

And you know John Benini.

Yep.

So like really good content and his work. They generated a million hits a month on the Data box website by interviewing a thousand marketing agencies in the course of a year. So what did they do? They just created content with all of the agencies that their target customers worked with. And that was like the genius of the data box marketing play. This wasn't a 30 person marketing team, a three person marketing team. They crushed it and they're profitable. They don't spend on ads to make this full circle.

That's like also related to the media company model. It's like we're doing this now with Exit 5. It's like all the people that we want, like the content is there. We have 3,500 paying members in our community. We have Podcast audience, we have social media followers. We don't need celebrities to create content. It's all the people doing the actual work. Let's tell their stories and share their lessons. Okay, let's wrap up and tell me something that I should have asked you or that people should know about partnerships that I, I didn't get to.

I think the biggest takeaway is that partnerships should be a strategy for each department. So, like, you need to ask the question, if you're a marketer, what is my content marketer going to do with this? Each person on your marketing team, what are they supposed to do with partnerships? And that's what I call near bound marketing. It's the answers to the test on how each person can leverage partnerships versus, hey, how should my company build a partnerships department over there? That just ain't gonna work. It hasn't and it won't. That's my quick summary.

So whoever leads partnerships doesn't just think of like one team. You truly have to be involved in the business strategy and see all the different areas where you can get involved.

And the biggest impact area is absolutely marketing. The biggest levers are in marketing to grow. The biggest leverage to, you know, retain is obviously on the success side. But I think marketing is the by far the biggest growth lever that folks have in front of them right now.

Cool.

All right, Jared, good to see you, man. Good to hang out. You gave me a lot of energy today. This is great.

Yeah.

Good seeing you again, dg. Good. Too long, my man.

Yeah. So go find Jared on LinkedIn. Jared Fuller. The best thing you can do is send him a note, connect with him there, send him a message, tell him you listen to him on this podcast. Go to nearbound.com, check out all the nearbound stuff. And yeah, maybe I do think we need to continue to shed more light. I think partnerships needs to be a regular, a more regular topic on this podcast. And I will, I will do a better. I'll do a better job of that or else I will get a message from Jill Rowley every three months yelling at me for not covering partnerships more. All right, Jared, good to see you, man. Thank you for doing the podcast. Thanks, everybody for listening. If you like this podcast, do me a favor, leave me a Review. Write a LinkedIn post. Buy flowers for your significant other or something. Do something nice. All right, Goodbye.

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