#99: Why Partner Marketing Is So Hot Right Now, ABM Tactics, and $100k+ Salaries (with John Short, Founder & CEO Compound Growth Marketing)

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1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit.

Exit, exit.

3, 2, 1. Dave is here. John Short is here. He's back. I was saving this during our pre talk session because I wanted to say it now. Before this, I wrote on LinkedIn that I remember when I was really excited to make 100k as a marketer in tech and that the salaries have gone insane. I said maybe I should hang up this Exit 5 thing and go back in house and make a lot more money. Yeah, I was just making a joke about salaries because I was looking into hiring somebody and I had texted some friends and said, I can't find the right person for like 80 grand. And somebody said to me, yeah, well, 150 is the new 80k. Damn, I didn't know inflation was 50%. So it's just a joke. There are some comments of people that were like, I'm just happy to have a job right now. And I'm like, yeah, that's, that's fair. I'm just making a comment about. Back in my day we used to make X. That's all.

I just wanted to take the opportunity to let you know we have a business development role open at Compound Growth. So you want to come on board and help us out?

What is business development? Is that like a BDR or is this like what is Business development?

VP of Business Development? Somebody who'd come in and help.

Oh, a vp.

Yeah. Help us drive new business. This could be a great opportunity for you, Dave.

Oh, interesting, Interesting.

We would maybe even let you help us out with our podcast, but I agree with the sentiment of what you're saying.

We're going to talk about everything because I'm just in a mood. I want to talk about a bunch of different things with you. I'm interested from a business perspective. So you, this is year three of your of Compound growth as an agency owner.

No, we're five.

Okay, five. And if you're hiring a VP of Biz Dev, to me that says like, so you've grown entirely through like word of mouth and your own network and you hunting deals. But you're now at a point where like if you want to keep growing, you need to have somebody whose full time job is bringing in new business for the agency.

Yeah. And also satisfying the demand. Like I'm not spending as much time on every single opportunity that's coming in right now as I'd like to be. It's unhealthy for me to be the only person focused on business development right now.

How has your role evolved, like, what you spend your time on this year?

Because it's been a tougher year. I've been mostly focused on sales. My coach just came on board, Chris Lidster. He kind of talked with my team and they were like, I want to see John wear his CEO hat more and less. The VP of sales hat.

Interesting.

This year, I would say probably 70% of my time goes into new business development, and I want to get on more planes and meet with our customers. I want to meet with our team more often, and I want to work probably the same amount or more on product development within the services that we deliver.

Is that dramatically different from five years ago? Because I imagine, like, when you start an agency and you had a good resume, like in a niche. So, like, you had a good resume in B2B SaaS, you had enough of a reputation and name, you go out, you say, hey, I'm starting my own thing. Initially, you're going to get clients who, like, I was working at Drift and we hired you there. Oh, I knew John. This is perfect. Now we can pay them, you know, whatever, a monthly fee. And we're working with John and then at Privy and in other places. But now you're trying to be CEO, right? Do you still have to be deep in marketing strategy also? Like, and being CEO, like, do you still have to have, like, opinions and frameworks? And do people still want to work with you directly? Like, how does that scale?

People definitely still want to work with me, and so I want to be more available as our customer base grows. But 100%, I still need to be involved in, like, the marketing strategy. I need to know what I'm talking about. And I think that's going to be really important for the person who we bring in. They need to be able to relate to the VP of marketing, the cmo, or the CEO who is having marketing challenges in their organization and so is thinking about working with us.

How big is the team right now?

30 folks at compound Growth Marketing. Yeah, it's been an interesting ride this year is we've had less tailwinds than we have in the past. I think all marketing budgets, not all marketing budgets are down, but a lot of marketing budgets are down year over year. Going back to your point earlier, like, it's going to be interesting to see what this year does to the salaries in the marketing Industry because there was so much demand and not enough supply for marketers leading up to 2023. And I'm interested to see what happens to those salaries as we have more people looking for jobs. And it felt like there were a spike the last two years in compensation, and it was insane. I felt Your post on LinkedIn when you wrote that, because I don't think I ever made above like 120 in house.

It's so true. What you said is the balance of power has shifted a little bit.

Yeah. There's that video going around. I forget if it's on Instagram or LinkedIn or maybe both of that CEO who's talking about how the economy needs to feel a little bit of pain.

Oh, I saw that. I saw that. Yeah, I saw that. Who posted that? Pom pomp. Yeah.

And it's quite unpopular.

People need to remember that you work for the company, the company doesn't work for you.

That is kind of the caricature. What I think a lot of companies are looking at what HR departments are looking at right now when they think about salaries and getting people back into the office.

There's some truth in both sides of that video, though. I'm not gonna lie. Like.

Yeah, no, it was just the way he expressed it.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was a. Came off as a huge dick. But, yeah, I just see it now as I don't have a team, I don't have employees. But, like, if you start your own business, heck yeah. You want people to be productive and, like, produce the best version of the thing that you're selling, whether it's widgets or software.

Two years ago, employees main complaint was, like, about the level of food that they were getting delivered for lunch.

Oh, my God.

We got a little bit out of hand, right?

We did. I'm not. I. I was at. I have been inside of the companies. There have been Slack channels where there's complaining about the type of Chinese food that we got.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

We were. We've come a long way.

I worked at HubSpot and they had this, like, insane snack room. They had a whole wall of, like, hundreds of cereals and candy. And then like, every Tuesday, this was. I was 20. I was there in 2015. Every Tuesday they got a delivery of fresh berries and, like, they had these massive sub zero fridges and some company would come and just like, fill these fridges with strawberries and blueberries. It was the most ridiculous thing ever. Obviously they could afford it, but as an employee there, it was insane. I didn't Ever have to like get food? I'd show up to work, you'd make a snack, make some food for yourself, go to your desk. I'm old enough to know a decade ago and it was like a big deal when like the, the boss brought in donuts on Friday.

That was exciting.

You want to talk about abm, which is something we talk about often. You want to talk about partner marketing, which I'm interested in hearing, but we're recording this heading into Q4 of 2023. Just overall, what are high level, what are people focused on in marketing? And then we can kind of shift into some of those topics like the people your customers and people that you're talking to.

ABM continues to be a hot topic. We're seeing that across the board and I attribute that to the average deal sizes that SaaS companies are selling are going up. And so as you start to see more companies selling a product for 50,000 plus, we're going to see more ABM.

Do you think that's happening? Because companies are. Almost every SaaS company sees the enterprise upmarket opportunity and they go there eventually. But because of the economy, because of churn, they don't want to do monthly deals, they don't want to do small deals, they want to sell expensive annual deals, which is better for the whole business. And so you're seeing more companies in SaaS go that direction from a go to market standpoint?

Yeah. The companies I talked to about this are less profitable within the small business audiences that they're going after. So they tend to focus more upmarket on enterprise deals. I attribute it more to just broader acceptance from enterprise level companies being willing to spend more on SaaS. They used to be spending that money on, on premise with Microsoft. All those types of companies that's enabled deal sizes to go up. Right. I think Workday has been a pioneer for that. I think there's some others out there that have helped push the average deal size up for SaaS companies. That's what I attribute it to. Less so the profitability argument. I just think more companies are interested in being able to sell to the enterprise.

Okay, I want to come back to ABM in a second, but something that I struggled with when I was in a VP of marketing role. It's hard when your company is doing is in between all of these motions. You can develop a better marketing strategy when you're like we are doing product led growth and here's the playbook or we're doing abm. Like when I think it's hard Inside of a company is they're like, there's one part of the marketing and sales team that's doing abm, but they also have this other like small business freemium type of funnel. And then there's mid market and especially in the early stages of a company it becomes really hard. I like ABM just from a, like if I'm the marketing leader or involved in the strategy, like I just like having a defined, like here's how we're going to do marketing here and ABM is the strategy that we want to use. I think it's hard when you're trying to do five, six different motions with a small team.

That was really frowned upon 10 years ago. I remember Jason Lemkin wrote an article about that. He said you can't go after the small business and the enterprise at the same same time. Plg, you see a lot more companies doing that because everybody from Dropbox to, I don't know, chorus to Gong, they all want to be able to sell across the different segments of the market. But the marketing automation system is the place where I think that's the biggest challenge. The companies that we deal with that are focused on that problem like have trouble kind of showing PLG driven leads that are coming in through a trial funnel and the enterprise leads that they're running the ABM motion against. That seems to be a sticking point for a lot of the companies.

Yeah, it's just like I think it's a John Miller, demand based engagio founder, marketo guy. I think it was him. He used that phrase like fishing with a. Fishing with a spear instead of a net. I think about that all the time and I think that analogy's been out there for a while. But like if you're selling to the enterprise, it's much easier to go identify those accounts, find the people that work there and try to get in front of them. Versus like oh, we're gonna start a podcast and have a blog and like people in that industry are gonna magically listen to that. And then after episode six they're going to go to our website and then get an email from sales and it's like that's how people think that's going to go down and they try to measure it that way and it never works where it's just like just scrap that. Go do the simpler approach.

I think that's the appeal of ABM to a lot of companies. And I also think that ABM allows you to align really well with sales because they want the big deals and A lot of companies get tripped up on kind of the qualification and figuring out what leads they should be passing to the sales team when they do the inbound motion. And so there's junk that gets let in and then the reps get upset. That feedback gets to the marketing team. Marketing team's trying to figure it out. And in my opinion, they're just. A lot of times the marketing team is just slow to react to improving or tightening the lead qualification criteria. ABM inbound. We're kind of talking about the same thing. Like, we're using a lot of the same tactics for these things. And ultimately every ABM strategy, as you get bigger should have SEO as a piece of it. And every inbound strategy should have tight segmentation of the market you're going after baked into it. So they, they all kind of roll into the same thing.

You could call it anything, you could call it blue steel, you could name it anything. It's like, does your company have a philosophy on how are you going to get customers? And I think like, you need to be able to sit down theoretically with sales, product, marketing founders and like map that out and all be on the same page of like, how are we going to get customers? Then you can call it whatever. Do you see that? Like, a company's just like, what play are you running? What strategy is this? Where like, I think what HubSpot did from a marketing standpoint, that was so smart, which is just like, we're going to go hard after. We're going to create this movement, we're going to go hard at it through content. We're not going to do a lot of these things. And this is our philosophy on marketing. Right?

They created this feeling that they were everywhere all the time.

We've done a podcast with Hillary who runs ABM at Snowflake. She's like, nope. Our go to market function at Snowflake is 100% ABM. That makes it easy for sales and marketing to go create like plans about what to go work on. I think you said it like ABM, whatever the name, people on LinkedIn get upset about all the acronyms. People, who cares about the acronyms? Can you and the people that run the teams inside of the company articulate, like, how are you going to do marketing? How are you going to get customers and then build shared plans that achieve that? That's how this is going to work better for in the long run than just like picking some acronym and trying to go and run it.

Yeah. HubSpot surrounded the mid market, made it Feel like they were everywhere. Snowflake has surrounded the enterprise and they have target accounts and they've made it feel like they are everywhere for those target accounts, no matter what those accounts are doing. Oh, man, I. You've made me super self conscious about the logo on my.

Oh, you're good. Don't worry about it. John's just wearing a shirt with the most elite country club in the world. No, I'm just kidding.

You called me out before the call on my golf.

No, I. I just was saying that anytime I wear like a collared shirt or like, if I actually have golf clothes on in a thing like this, somebody's like, did you just play golf? And whether I did or I didn't, I have to say no one's going to believe me. So I just say yes.

Getting back to abm. Sorry. I keep thinking about it because I keep looking at my image and I'm like, how do I duck the logo down below the.

The.

The video screen? So the kind of promise for me was growth of the technology in the sector. And one of the things. I actually went to the Inbound conference for the first time ever two or three weeks ago. Have you ever been?

I've been a couple times. I went to like the very first one.

Were you working there at the time?

I was not working in there at the time. It might have been the first or second. I was working at Constant Contact. And it was so cool because I got to like, get out of work for the day and go hang out at some hotel in Boston. And it was like a couple hundred people. They were doing like product demos and Volpe was doing it and everything. And then the other time I went was when I worked there. This was 2015. I stayed in a hotel. I lived in the city, but I got to stay in a hotel. So I'd be like, right there on site the night before. It was insane. I couldn't even believe that a company that I worked at put this on. And I was hosting their podcast at the time, which was called the Growth Show. And the plan at Inbound was they set it up in this glass cube. And so you'd walk down the escalators in the convention center and like, you know where they have that huge ass, like inbound sign right there. There was like a podcast booth. And I interviewed Sophia Amoruso. I interviewed Mark Maron. You know him, he's some comedian who did a podcast. I interviewed the CEO of buzzfeed. I was hosting the podcast. So, like, they set it up so I Would do a bunch of podcast interviews on site. And then I had to do some crowd hype up thing where like, they were like trying to kill time in between a keynote. And I was like going in the audience, like, man on the street, being like, all right, I'm here. I'm here with John. John. John runs an agency on the South Shore. He's been a B2B marketer for decades. All right, back to you. It was like, it was insane.

I went into the conference for 30 minutes.

It was insane.

It made me so uncomfortable. Most of my meetings are on the outside, but, like, even just hearing you talk about this, it's not my environment. A conference next year, we got to get you to come down.

I'm never going to an event ever again. That's my goal.

Until the Exit 5 con, which I'm.

Like starting to seriously consider because I think it would be awesome.

I've heard planning events is a lot of fun and you should.

I've done it. It sucks.

Yeah.

As an agency owner, why did you go to this conference?

It's in my backyard. So I just scheduled a bunch of meetings at coffee shops around there.

You were speaking, like, would you have gone if you weren't speaking?

I spoke on a panel, so that's why I went in for 30 minutes. I went through a sales training earlier this year and spoke about some of my learnings from the sales training. But the biggest thing that I got from Inbound, and it's been on my radar for a while, I think partner marketing is at the same place where inbound was in 2008. I think we're just starting to scratch the surface. And if I look across the conversations I've had this year with CFOs, CROs, et cetera, they're all focusing on partner, which to me is an indication that there's an incredible efficiency in acquiring new customer through targeting customers at your integration partners and things like that. And so I don't know if you've seen like the crossbeam CRM or Reveal CRM.

You're the second person. I'm not deep in the partner game, but I used to work with this guy at Drift, Jared Fuller. I talked to him recently and I seeing a bunch of his content and he's has a similar narrative. And I see Jill Rowley talking about the same thing, which is like, partner is the new inbound or whatever, which is like, yeah, I don't know about that. I think it's an underinvested channel and I think it seems awesome. So I'm interested to hear you you say that also. What does that mean? I think there's many different definitions of partner marketing. I've seen it as strategic product development and you're writing code and building features and partnering together at that level. But I've also seen it as like, yeah John, let's partner together and we'll co promote a webinar. We just want the 500 names on your list. So what is partner marketing?

Partner marketing to me is is all of those things. You ask a great question. I wish I had a better framework off the tip of my tongue to think about it, but I think it's the co promotion so you can get in front of your partner's audiences, but also leveraging your CRM to help identify the types of customers that you should be talking to.

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So if I go into Crossbeam or Reveal, you can see who your partners are actively talking to to help you get an introduction into those people. I think that's just incredibly powerful as a signal that somebody is starting to look for new software.

Give me an example. Like I'm this company and you look at my customers and you see this company like we think we could tell.

You this compound growth marketing is a partner with like HubSpot, let's say they don't actually share with us but we would be able to see who they are in conversations with. That's also inside of our lead database. So that is like a fantastic signal for me to reach back out to that company and say hey, I see that you're thinking about getting set up on a new marketing automation system. I'd love to set up a call to talk about how we can help you leverage your marketing automation system even better. So it's just another proprietary intent signal that you can have in order to understand. I think the co promotion is also really important. B2C has understood this, right? Tiffany came out with a Nike shoe.

Oh yeah, I just saw one that's coming right now which is now Bond Golf and TaylorMade like are both doing something together at the product level.

We've seen that in B2C but I think companies are have been so focused on the CRM and how many leads are we going to get. And they do need to focus on think about the ways that they can have their brands be associated with other brands. So yeah, when I was at Workable, Hired was kind of a fun upand cominging brand. I don't know what happened to them but I always liked being aligned with them and Other companies and there were partners who were a little bit older, less interesting products that I was less focused on being partnered with. And then you think about the opportunities on content like LinkedIn, co promotion opportunities to get in front of different people's audiences. I think it's incredibly interesting and I love how it all ties together at the bottom of the funnel with CRM data that's actionable and usable.

Those are products that people are using right now. Like these are my customers. Like tell me what their interest might be.

Like yeah, it's like a vlookup tool basically for your CRM with your partner CRM.

Oh, got it. So I could basically say like, hey John, here's a list of the 20 open opportunities we have and you're going to show us your whatever.

Right. And any ones that match it will share and any ones that don't match, it won't share. So you basically get access to see who is in your partner's CRM that's also in your CRM that you're trying to talk to.

Does any of that make you nervous? Would I want this company hitting up my customers and like blowing these deals or am I thinking about it wrong?

I think that would be a concern. That's always going to be a concern.

Just because like I think there's like good ways to do this. But 10, 15 years ago, HubSpot to talk about them a lot today they were the first to do like this insane co marketing strategy and they did co marketing. There was like nobody was really doing online marketing. They did co marketing with LinkedIn and Twitter and all these platforms. They had like literally hundreds of thousands of people sign up because nobody was doing it. But I feel like now in this example, like to really do this you would need to be very thoughtful about like how these two products complement each other. Vers the shitty version is just like oh yeah, let's. We heard that John's shopping for an agency. Boom. Let's send him an email about trying HubSpot. Okay. That seems very like table stakes to me. Versus to really do this, it's gotta be like strategic company level decision making.

Exactly. So and that starts on the promotional level and building the story about how your two companies integrate and work well together. And I think HubSpot did a pretty good job of that and continues to do a really good job of that. Other companies like Segment have done a really good job. Twilio have done a really good job with partner marketing. But I think that promotion and figuring out what's our story of how our two products are going to work really well together or how they complement each other, or the power of the integrations that you get when you work with these two tools together. And then your point about the CRM data risk of somebody coming in and blowing up a deal is legitimate. You need to invest in your partnerships, right? You need to spend time in person with the partners who you're working with and sales training across teams so they know when to make the introduction. You need to stay top of mind with them. And so part of building that relationship is making sure that you don't blow up deals. Although I'm sure it happens from time to time, but it's not a sustainable long term strategy because somebody will stop sharing their data with you.

And why do you think this topic is? Partner marketing has kind of always been a channel of marketing, right? There's like the content marketing team, the partner marketing team, the product marketing team. Why is this a thing that you're hot on now and what's changed to bring that to, to the focus?

There are two things at play. One is, I believe the rumors around inbound were that 70% of HubSpot's new revenue is coming from its partner marketing channel, which is significant. Before HubSpot, the only companies that I had heard having significant partner channels that drove like hundreds of millions in revenue was Xero and QuickBooks. So accountants were driving growth for those companies. And everybody has an accountant, right? So that always made a lot of sense.

That's a good example. Like those are two practical examples for people. When I actually bought HubSpot, I did it through an agency. I hired an agency to help me build the website. They said, okay, cool, we're gonna, you're gonna do it. A HubSpot boom purchase and then same thing. Even for my accountant, he's like, yep, I'm setting you up on QuickBooks. Boom, here's the QuickBooks. So it's like, what's the version of that for your industry? Right.

The second and why I compare it to inbound in 2008 we're seeing more ABM. I attribute that to more SaaS, companies selling their deals at a higher sales price, which has driven the increase in abm. And I think partner is a very unique channel for account based marketing because it's compounding every accountant who you go out and get is going to bring you five new clients. So it's not a one to one relationship like paid media or something like that where as soon as you turn it off or you stop Investing a dollar on every click, it's going to stop. The power of inbound, the power of SEO, the power of social is you. Every new follower you generate is going to help you get access to a whole new audience on LinkedIn. So the more followers you have, the more engagements you get, the bigger your reaches and the more followers you get. So it's this kind of compounding channel. Same thing with SEO. Every post you write is layered on top of the previous post in terms of the amount of traffic. It slowly grows over time until it becomes a compounding marketing channel for you. And so partner is the same thing. You bring on new partners, you help them to grow their businesses. Every time you sign on a new partner, if they're bringing on 5, 20, 100 new accounts into your business because they're fully integrated with you and using you as a part of their service, then that becomes a compounding channel. And yeah, you need to invest in it, but you don't quite need to invest at the same level. We're a partner with HubSpot. I talk with our partner rep, like twice a year. That's not that expensive for them to be managing that. One person at HubSpot can be managing probably 40 partners, and each of those partners are probably bringing in two to 20 new deals a year. The economics on that are fantastic.

This is a good topic for now because I think marketing, and this is why, like, I've thought you're a smart marketer from the beginning, which is like, you've always, before you started an agency, even as like, VP of marketing, you were much more focused on driving revenue than I was. I was much more like, I'm a marketer, I'm doing the marketing. And like, you were one of the first people to help me really see, like, well, yeah, but to be effective in this job, marketing is ultimately there to, like, drive revenue. And so you need to think about not just the channels that you oversee to drive revenue, but how can you drive change inside of the company. And so, like, this is an opportunity not to, like, wait around until a CEO suggests, like, try something in partner. But, like, as you're working on the marketing plan, like, you know, we're heading into Q4, right? Everybody's going to be doing marketing revenue planning for the year. This is the time to throw in those, like, bigger bets and say, like, hey, as an organization in 2024, we're, we want to, like, explore partner as a channel. Here's what we want marketing to do. Here's what we want sales to do. Here's what we're going to need from product. Like this is a perfect time to be thinking about this, but just curious to hear your thoughts on that as far as it relates to like marketing's job isn't marketing, it's driving revenue and thinking of all these channels.

The reason why I first started getting interested in partner was I thought the brand alignment that you have with other companies was powerful. So I always felt like when you are doing a co branded webinar, like there's a ton of power and recall that gets driven when you are a customer of let's say ZoomInfo and Chili Piper. When you see Chili Piper announcing that they're doing a co branded webinar with Zoom Info, even if you don't click on that link, if you're a Zoom Info customer, you're going to remember that Zoom Info integrates with Chili Piper. And if you're a Chili Piper customer, you're going to be more likely to remember Zoom Info as a brand. When you go into look at a data augmentation tool. The initial power for me is align yourself with this other brand that aligns with your interests, aligns with your view of the world basically. And then you're able to leverage them by getting in front of their audience and they're leveraging you by getting in front of your audience. It's a win win for both. And it's much cheaper to have everybody in the company post on LinkedIn that you're doing a co branded webinar with this company. Like the number of eyeballs you're getting in front of is tremendous and the amount of recall that that creative drives because you're getting in front of an audience where one person is likely a customer of that and so they're going to at least peripheral see that out, at least out of the corner of their eye that you're aligned with these other brands.

What part was frustrating that I'm talking about revenue and you're talking about brand.

I don't want to ignore the upper funnel impact of being able to get your brand out there through partner. There wasn't anything frustrating. I'm not articulate, Dave. I'm a technical marketer, not a creator.

I think that's an interesting perspective too. It's like who are the brands in your industry that you want to be seen with and where it would be valuable to be seen with and then like sometimes partnering with them is a more longer term play. I now associate you with that. Right. I think that's a Good way to think about it.

It's the same as a lot of people's podcast strategy where they look to bring people on to their podcast essentially because they want to be aligned with them, they want to get in front of that person's audience.

I was thinking about this the other day. So the whole podcast strategy, like you create content with this person, but like, even if nobody listens that, like let's say if you have somebody on your podcast and like two of you have a great conversation and connect, like, I can't tell you how many times I've had somebody on this podcast, as an example, where it wasn't necessarily like the most downloaded one, but like, oh, I met this person and then they connected me to that person, or now I talk to this person all the time. There's like these deeper relationships that you get beyond getting the marketing content too, which makes that a cool part of the partner strategy. I like that, I like that.

And then in the reverse, it's also a good way to build a podcast, right? If you get really big names to come onto your podcast, they're going to share the podcast, they're going to introduce you to new audiences and that's a good way to grow. The one podcast strategy I've heard is like an abm. Like basically reach out to anyone in your audience, try to get them on and then turn them into customers. And then the other is get big names on, get them to.

I think that can work. More people are doing that now, but I think that would. That could be especially powerful if you have a founder or CEO who has like a reputation or past history or brand in that niche. I think that's when it can work really well. It's a little bit harder when you're like a no name company and no name founder. But I'm saying that because that founder is going to have more credibility as like being the host. And why should I give this person my time to talk to this first? Like if it's very clearly going to be some like kind of half assed type interview, if you're going to do that, I would go for it, really go for it. Versus just like do zoom calls and record them with some random person on the team.

Right? What you were talking about with building the relationships offline, I think that's such an underappreciated part of marketing, especially early on, is whenever I worked in house, I was always sitting behind a computer, bidding on Google Ads, optimizing SEO, et cetera. I wish I had spent more time Actually becoming friendly with other companies in similar industries because there's just a lot of goodwill for a lack of better term that happens with that. I remember one of the companies I was at, we saw tremendous growth through the Google Web Store and partially that was driven because we had a relationship with people who were part of the Google Web App Store. Shopify, I think is similar. Like if you're trying to improve your app's ranking on Shopify, I think getting to know the people at Shopify and like with the partnership team, that type of thing can be tremendous for growing your business. And those types of offline conversations can help because they're going to spread the message about your company. They're going to want to do more co marketing and opportunities with you and they may even feature you in some of the in their App Store or whatever it may be.

Oh yeah. When I was at Privy, it was like the most trials in a single day came like once a quarter when we were featured by Shopify on like the homepage.

And were you all connected with the partnership there?

Yeah, they had a head of partnerships and Shopify had a, what you talk about partner team where they had, they worked with like integration partners and we were one of them. And so there was like a representative at Shopify but then also like Ben, the CEO had some like higher up contacts there and that was a big part. And it was like, hey, we're driving a ton of value to your people. And eventually they launched advertising in the Shopify App Store and we were one of the first people that got to do that and that became like the best channel we could very clearly measure. When we spend X in the App Store, we get y back, right?

Yeah. And do you think there were places where that benefited you that you couldn't even see? Like when the media reached out to Shopify and talked to somebody on the partner team and asked them like we're doing an article on Klaviyo. What are the other exciting apps in the App Store that you're seeing? Like, do you think you got mentions because of that?

There's like little like kind of small one off things that happen like that, whether it's a podcast appearance or blog mention or whatever, like, hey, we're writing a roundup of these tools and we're going to link to you. But there's also bigger stuff like they asked Ben had like multiple speaking opportunities in front of Shopify's customers. So many things like that that you talked about from a brand perspective came up through that partnership beyond Direct response marketing.

And I think social amplifies it too. If you have a big social strategy, like, we have a partner. I'm not sure if I want to name them. I kind of fell into this, and so I don't take advantage of it that often. But I noticed every time I mentioned them in a post, it gets spread around their internal slack like wildfire. And I get like a hundred people from that company to snap a like on my post. Those are some of my most successful posts. Those have helped me build up my followers and things like that. And the first time, it just happened because I just shot the link over to somebody I just gotten off the phone with at that company and just said, hey, you know, I mentioned you guys here, but I think overall we're like, aligned on what this strategy is. I think it was actually inspired by the conversation I had with them. So I was like, hey, check out this post I wrote up. Based on what we talked about the other day, it wasn't super promotional to them, but boom, it like, took off. Those relationships, they turn into real. It's like, difficult to value it, but the benefits are huge. Yeah.

And you only know because you're thinking of it at this level. It's like when you're like 10 levels down and you're like, how do we quantify this relationship? You're like, well, I. I can feel it. I see the response when we do this. This is great. We're going to title this one why Partner Marketing is so Hot right now. I read the own headlines here, and I just want to close the loop.

On this, throw that into ChatGPT and just see what else we get.

Do people still use that?

I don't think that's it.

People still use ChatGPT. I'm back to interns. I looked this up to wrap this up. I said that John had a golf shirt on from the most elite country club in the world. That's not true, unfortunately. It's just Kiawah, which is a public course open to the public. And tee times can be made without renting property at the resort. You can make your own tee time by calling the resort directly. 1-800-654-2924. I just. I just want to let everybody know that anybody has an opportunity to go play at Kiwa. All right.

Two of the six courses anyone can play. Two of them only members, but I've never played those.

They do have pull carts available for rent. The rain check policy is not that forgiving, but they do have pull cards. John thanks for doing it.

This your foray into advertising?

Oh, that could be it. This is like, I'm just testing the waters to see if I get a message from Kiowa, being like, wow, we had, we had six people come to our website from the number 97. Before this, I texted John. I get these emails from Char. I use, like, I really don't care about the podcast downloads and rankings. I've gotten so much value from this podcast that that's, I know that it works to drive Exit 5 members and we get content from it. So I get these emails from Chartable and it just tells me, like, and I've never done anything to optimize the rankings, right? You have the number 97 podcast in Belgium, the number 797 marketing podcast in Israel right now, or something like that. So I texted John, I said, can't wait to have you bring your hot Takes, the number 97 marketing podcast. So thank you for listening, John. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks for coming on. I'll see you later, bud.

Dave, congratulations on that. Bye.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

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