Ep. 29 - How to Automate Partnerships and Boost Your SaaS Growth with Tyler Calder, VP of Marketing, PartnerStack

You're listening to Paris Talks. Marketing. My goal with this podcast is to dig deeper into digital marketing success than any other marketing podcast out there to reveal the growth marketing strategies and tactics that are working today empowering growth at amazing companies and organizations. Keep listening as I interview founders, CEOs and marketing leaders from all around the world, primarily from companies in the tech and software as a service industries. Now on with the episode. Hi everybody. Today I'm joined by Tyler Calder, who is the vice president of marketing at Partner Stack. Tyler, how are you? Thanks for being with me today.

Yeah, I'm great. Thanks for having me. I'm excited for the chat.

Great. Can you take a few minutes to just tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do?

Sure, yeah, of course. So I'm, you know, as you mentioned, I'm currently heading up marketing at Partner Stack. You know, I've been in the marketing space for coming up on 13, 14 years and you know, that experience has been split between agency side for the first seven and a half years of my career and then you know, typically going in house and acting as that first marketing hire and coming in really just to scale the revenue engine on the marketing side. So, you know, a lot of B2C and B2B experience, but certainly the passion is on the B2B side which is what we're doing at PartnerStack.

Cool. And do you feel that you're experience in agency life in some ways help prepare you to be really a high performing marketer in some of these companies?

Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. So I also teach at the University of Toronto here, a digital marketing course. And one of the most common questions I get there is where should I start? You've had in house experience, you have agency experience, you know, and I, I started agency side so I'm biased. But you know, my, my recommendation to people is if there is an opportunity to work agency side, I think it's an opportunity people should jump at. You know, for me, you very rapidly learn various industries, you get experience on B2C, B2B. You get experience with enterprise, you get experience with mid market with SMB. At least that was true for our agency. And so for me it was almost like this lifetime of experience condensed into a very short period of time and the pace is fast, the demands of the job can be intense. But through all of that, it really does at least in my mind, prepare you for working in, in just about any other type of, of organization. You know, being able to bring a Wealth of experience and being very focused on performance. Right. You know, if your agency side clients are going to tell you if the work you do sucks, right. They're, they're gonna, they're gonna be pretty blunt about it. And, and so you form, you know, this mentality of the work's got to be good, it has to have business impact. And so I thought it was a huge advantage and even to dig into it a little bit further, the agency I was at, we were a digital marketing agency and I started as a pay per click specialist. Like very tactical, very hands on. But for me, you know, I even found that as the starting, you know, I'll say discipline, it really forces you when you think of search marketing. Like it really forces you to think about, you know, the intent of your buyer, the entire buyer journey. You're forced to dive into the analytics, you're forced to think of the creative aspect of your campaigns. So again, even, even the discipline as a starting point in one's career, you know, I think will have lasting effects. And for me it was, it was paid search and you know, a great, great place to start.

I couldn't agree with you more on that. On that. I, I actually came from a similar background because I think my entry point into digital marketing was also paid search. And I want to say 2003 or 2004, which is pretty much right as Google AdWords was, was launched.

That was the beginning.

Yeah, for me it was, it was this perfect combination of the analytical and creative. I mean I, I love to write. I, I loved what, what you could do with, with words and, and I also, I love the constraint of it because you always limited by, by characters still are. I mean there's, it's more flexible now and I think that that unification of those two worlds to me was really the, the major trigger and that's what, that's what really got me into the whole industry. And I, looking back, I see it as not necessarily a new, new form of marketing, but really it's the evolution of marketing because as you said, deeply understanding the intent behind keywords forces you to, it forces you to really empathize with the, with the user and, and improve the way that you communicate and the constraints with character limitations and titles and ad copy also it just forces you to have a really concise message and to get straight to the point and deliver your unique value proposition with limited amount of space.

Yeah, you touched on empathy, which I think is a good one and I think not to dwell too much on search, but that was My biggest takeaway, working within search, whether it was paid search or SEO, you when you think of intent, right, what is the intent behind somebody, what somebody's searching? You know, our job as a marketer is to provide, you know, a really good answer to whatever they're looking for. But the, the extension of that is to provide a really empathetic answer. And, you know, I remember, you know, one of my clients was a big, a big grocery chain up here in Canada, and, you know, they were going after keywords like, you know, what to make for a special dinner. It's like, okay, well, the most obvious thing to write about would be recipes, right? But if you really dig into the intent behind that search and you try to be empathetic around it, you know, what does special actually mean? Right? Special. Special can kind of be stressful, right? Stressful could be, hey, you're going to propose it sounds high stakes, right? It's high stakes. And so special, you know, special isn't just the food. Special is, you know, how, how do you invite somebody to that dinner? How do you set the table, how do you set the mood, how do you, you know, what music should you be playing, you know, what kind of drink should you be serving? Appetizers. And, and so to me, it really forces you to think about the experience, right? So what do I think that person might actually be thinking in their head when they search that thing? And that's carried through my entire career. So always thinking about what's the best answer to the thing somebody's searching for in a given moment. And that impacts your website experience, how you develop content, all of that.

Absolutely. That's a great example, by the way. Really, the word special is so loaded, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Let's fast forward now to today and to Partner Stack and spend a little bit of time cruising around the site. And there's this acronym that, for me, in the world of SaaS, which I like to believe I know pretty well by now, I encountered, I have to admit, I encountered a new acronym which is prm. What does that stand for? And can you describe that a bit?

Yeah, for sure. So PRM stands for Partner Relationship Management. So if you think of, you know, if you think of Salesforce being CRM, Customer Relationship Management and the platform to manage all of your direct sales, a, a PRM would be managing your indirect sales, all of all of your partners.

Got it. Yep. And I was generally not that familiar with the space here, and that led me to believe that likely a lot of SaaS companies are under Invested in this, in this channel, partner, in the partner, partner sales channel. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I would agree with that. It's interesting. So if you look at some of the most successful SaaS companies, or let's just say some of the most successful companies, one of the things that they typically have in common is they have a very robust partner channel. Those companies that have great ambition, they scale to, to where they want to go, they've often invested into partnerships. When you look at the vast majority of SaaS companies, candidly many of which don't ever get to that place they want to go from an ambition standpoint, they haven't invested into their partner channel. And so it's certainly something that we set out to do, which is, is almost democratized. This idea of indirect sales, making it accessible, easy to adopt, easy to, you know, build launch scale for every SaaS company in the world, whether you're your seed stage or, you know, whether you've, you've gone public. And what we see is companies that, that are investing into partnerships. And partnerships could mean a number of different things, right? A partnership could be an affiliate program, it could be a customer employee ambassador program, it could be agency referrals, or you could go up right into full resellers where they're reselling your technology, they're provisioning it, they're implementing it. So it kind of runs the gamut. You know, what's happened in the space is it's very fragmented and that's why, or at least one of the reasons, it's been hard for companies to adopt. If you want to run affiliate, you got to go get an affiliate program or platform. If you want to run some sort of advocacy or ambassador program, you got to go get another piece of software. If you want to run an enterprise level reseller program, then you need to go get a prm, right? And PRM has typically only been thought of as, as a reseller platform. What we've tried to do is say, well, you should really think of this as an entire ecosystem of all of your indirect sales. Let's consolidate that into one platform, one single source of truth. And so that's, that's what we've done and that's what we're trying to bring to SaaS companies. And you know, some of our customers, you know, you can go on our website and see the logos we have, but we work with companies like Monday.com, unbounce, Intuit, Bill.com Asana. That's what they're doing, right? They're they're not just looking at partnerships as this, you know, this, this channel that is under invested in. They're looking at this as something that's, you know, a board level conversation of, you know, how does this become 40, 50, 60% of our revenue? And that's what we're trying to enable companies to do.

Great. One of the big names that come to mind immediately for me is HubSpot. And I think they're back, I don't know how long ago it was, but they tell the story a lot, which is that once they really plugged into partnership model and they started selling I think really through, through agencies, that was their primary partnership model. So it was, was the agency partnerships, that channel quickly grew to a really major, major percentage of revenue. I don't know if it was 50% but it was something like maybe between 30, 40%. I'm not sure. Do you know the number or.

Off the top of my head, I believe you're right. I think it's believed. I think it's in that 30 to 40% range.

30. So it's, it's massive a company at guys and I think, well, agency partnerships make a lot of sense. What I'm curious to know is with a typical SaaS company, what is usually the entry point into a partnership model? Is it with affiliates or is it maybe with something else like ambassadors or some form of influencer marketing? Where is the most common entry point that you see?

Yeah, so there's, you know, there's what we commonly see and then there's what, what we suggest, which are probably two slightly different things. So you know what, what we commonly see falls into a couple different buckets. Right. So there's a few different scenarios. One is they already have a, let's say a reseller program in place. Right. And the reseller program, you know, maybe they have 5, 10, 15, 20 strategic partnerships on the reseller side and they're, they're looking for a platform to help manage that. And that's a common starting point. What we, you know, what we try to advocate is that's great. So you know, great starting point. Having partners that are actively selling on your behalf is fantastic. But that's like, that's right at the bottom of the funnel. You're really focused on the sale. You're missing a huge opportunity to extend that reach up the funnel and you know, leverage things like referral partners, whether they're agencies or consultants or other technology companies, whatever they might be. You know, you're potentially missing a big opportunity to Run an affiliate program to really extend that reach. I think, you know, there's some negative connotations around that word affiliate that sometimes scares people away a little bit.

Yeah. Can I ask you there, why is there a negative connotation around affiliate marketing? Yeah, I think it.

I mean, I played the affiliate game a little bit, you know, 15 years ago, and, yeah, you know, I. I get. I get where it comes from. Right. I was just doing whatever the hell I wanted. Right. I would talk about, you know, that business I was promoting in any way I wanted. I would create my own. My own. My own ad copy, my own, you know, I would take their brand and rip it apart and stitch it back together. And so, you know, if you look 15 years ago in the affiliate world, it was a little bit of the wild west, right? You had all of these people, all of these people just trying to make money, not really caring about your brand, you know, not. Not really caring about whether or not they were monopolizing or. Or cannibalizing your own paid search, let's say.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's no coincidence. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think it's no coincidence that that corresponded to a time 15 years or so ago where SEO was a lot different and affiliates could take a lot of risk and actually could easily outrank their brands. Even some shady SEO tactics. Yeah. So maybe that's also why it got a bit of a bad reputation from those days, which isn't really possible now, I think.

Well, exactly. Right. And so a lot of those things that were kind of hacky or shortcuts or were, you know, almost manipulative, if we're talking about SEO in particular, those things just generally aren't possible anymore. And then, you know, using a platform, whether it's Partner Stack or something else, you can get, you know, you can put guardrails in place. You can, you know, you can. You can gate who becomes an affiliate and who doesn't. Right. It just doesn't have to be wildly open to anybody to join. Right. So you can put criteria in place. So those negative connotations, I think, were totally fair. But if you're. If you're deliberate about how you build your affiliate program, how you incent affiliates, how you attract them and bring them into your program, you know, we have companies where one person's managing 5,000 affiliates, and it's. It's driving their business, and it's all, you know, it's. It's all. They're doing it through really great content. They're doing it through, you know, all things that help build the brand and are additive to the brand versus versus maybe, maybe subtracting. So, so that going back to the entry points, resellers is kind of one entry point. And then we advocate for, you know, there's these, all these other functions that you can use to continue to build your reach. The other entry point is they come in through affiliate and they want to start to sort of graduate, build up to it, right? And yeah, they want to build up to reseller. And so we'll help them launch, you know, what a referral program might look like and then start to mature into reseller. And then the other entry point is like we're not doing this, but we probably should. You know, there's some pain point. Whether that pain point is they've tried to do it and they didn't succeed or they're doing it a little bit, but they're doing it manually and so they need a platform or they've seen just their go to market motion kind of stall a little bit, right? Sales, marketing, like oftentimes the more you invest in there, there's, there's some diminishing returns. You know, partnerships is, is one of those things where like you are working with somebody who already has the attention of your audience that you want to sell into. Typically they already have the trust of them to some degree. Like you as an example, have a following, you have an audience, you have people that listen to your podcast. If you were to recommend a piece of software, there's credibility built into that. More credibility than a salesperson reaching out called or somebody seeing a piece of marketing material. And so we see people coming in where maybe they see their go to market motion stall a little bit or plateau in performance. And we find partnerships can kind of unlock that because you're tapping into this network of people that already have connections into your target audience. They already have that trust built in. And if you can partner with them, typically it's a phenomenal just performance channel, I would call it.

My understanding of making partner channels work well is that it requires a lot of effort in supplying those partners with unique content that they can use. Would you agree with that and are there other pretty large or unforeseen costs that are associated with really scaling a partnership channel? Well.

Yeah, so I think if you are, if you're doing everything manually and you're doing everything in a one to one scenario, right. So this partner we're going to co market with you and it's going to be completely Unique content here. You know, this partner, we're going to co market with you and there's going to be this completely unique content here that, that can become pretty time intensive. You know, what we see from our most successful companies that use partner stack is they're really leveraging a lot of the automation functionality that we've built in. So automation to help with onboarding partners, educating partners on the software, providing them with ready to go content and marketing material that they can leverage as a starting point. And so as long as you're using a platform that allows for building these really great partner onboarding experiences, partner education experiences and then partner co marketing experiences, you know, the, the upfront work is just thinking through and building that experience. But, but once you do that, like I said, we, you know, we have, we have customers where they have one person managing 5,000 affiliates, you know, one person managing hundreds of referral partners. And so, you know, at the end of the day, if you're, if you're investing in technology, at the end of the, it's just a tool, right? And so you want to think about how do I build the best experience possible. That feels highly personalized, but in reality is just a really, really well thought out, deliberate experience that leverages automation. And you can also think about tiering your partners. You'll likely have your highest value tier one partners. You might have a dedicated account manager for them, working with them one on one, but very similar to what you would do or expect for the investment into sales or customer success in terms of building those relationships. So you know, I think there, there is this notion that it can take a lot of work and is costly. But again, we've seen, we've seen vendors and companies launch their program within weeks and start onboarding partners and getting up and running. So I think the key is just being deliberate.

Yeah, yeah, that was going to be my next question actually is the speed that, the speed to effectiveness here. Because you mentioned earlier that a lot of people turn to partner channels when they start to see plateauing of direct, direct marketing channels, whether those be paid or organic. And so but maybe, maybe some of the reasons why they hesitate or maybe they postpone that decision is because they might wrongly believe that, wow, this is just going to take a long time because we've got to do outreach, you know, practically the outreach effort. I mean first we have to identify partners, we have to figure out how to outreach to them. We have to set all this up. We're not that familiar with the software space, so there's a learning curve on a new tool and all that's going to take time and maybe this is going to, you know, we might be six months to a year before we start to see the fruits of that effort. But what is the realistic time frame that a SaaS company can expect? Positive ROI on building out partner channel?

Yeah. So partner acquisition, which is sort of what you're talking about, right? Like reaching out, finding the partners, bringing them on board, that can be a challenge. And I'll come back to that in a second. You know, to answer your question directly, how long does it take? You know, it's a cop out answer, but it depends. What we see is if you are, if you're bringing some partners with you, right. You already have some partners that are actively referring you business, even if it's super informal, right. They're, you know, via email, they're just making introductions, whatever it might be. If you're bringing partners with you and you're bringing them onto the PartnerStack platform to help manage those relationships, what we see is that the average customer will start to see value within 30 days and value being their first sale. So they'll drive their first sale or a couple of sales through the partner channel within the first 30 days. And that's certainly if they're bringing partners with them. If this is a brand new program and there are no partners in place, that's where it can vary, right? If, if you're looking to launch, you know, let's say an affiliate program, that can be a little bit quicker, you can get up and running, you can start to provide, you know, your link tracking and some education and some material to get, get affiliates up and running. And, and that can be pretty quick, right. Typically we'll see value provided within, you know, 30, 40 days. There will typically see vendors become ROI positive on the investment within 6, 8, 9 months. So within the year. Now, if you're launching a huge program that's all encompassing, right, you're launching an affiliate program, you're launching a referral program, you're launching a reseller program, you know, we'll have companies that will come to partner stack to help lay the infrastructure and the foundation for that and then they'll start to build on top of it and it might take six months to get an entire fully robust program up and running. So it sort of depends on what the intention is. But the reality is if companies want to get up and running really quickly, they can.

Yeah. Would you recommend companies to just to start and just to hit the ground running with whatever you've got and then build incrementally or do you think is partner stack a good platform that allows you to start partially and then build it piecemeal up until it's the fully robust affiliates and resellers and all that?

Yeah, the way we think about it is exactly that. You know, you can think about it almost like you would with, with digital marketing, right? In the sense of, you know, I think very traditional marketers, it's all about what's my 12 month plan? And I'm going to lock into these plans and I'm going to lock into those plans before I start to execute anything. Right. And then you had this new wave of marketing that was, you know, a little bit more agile. It's, you know, let's run some tests, let's run some experiments, let's see what's working, what's working, let's double down on it, what isn't, let's just cut it, kick it out. You know, we see the same trend with partnerships starting where, you know, historically, like we've been talking about, there's this notion that it's going to take me forever, right? It's going to take me 12 months, 18 months to get up and running. You know, we've, we've heard of companies that have come to us and they've been struggling to get up and running for 12 to 18 months. And then we talk about, well, what's the quickest path to getting into market? Right, let's start there, let's get into market, let's start to run some tests, let's start to run some experiments, let's figure out what's working, what is, let's double down on it and then let's add on something else, and then let's add on something else after that. And so what I encourage companies to look at is look at your business today and what's working. Like if you have a really rabid, you know, fan base that absolutely loves your product or customer base, I should say, you know, how do you tap into that with some sort of customer advocacy or ambassador program, right. Leveraging your customer base for referrals, you know, let's start there. You know, maybe you're a really content, heavy organization. You know, you, you have a lot of people that you've already built relationships with to, you know, co author content. Start there. Maybe they could become your initial, you know, affiliates or referral partners. So I think there's this tendency of, oh, this is going to be big, let's plan out the Whole thing before we, we hit the go button. Get in the market, try to do it quickly. You know, this, this stuff starts to compound. Right. The, the faster you're in market, the, the more you'll see that value and you'll reap the benefits and, and it'll build on itself, which is what we typically see. So that, that's, that's usually what we suggest for sure.

Yeah. And can you tell me if you think about your most successful, your most successful customers stack and let's take the ones that are doing at least let's say north of 50 million ARR. So that, you know, good size. What are some of the, what are some of the percentage of total revenue that you're seeing among those best partners? Who's hitting anybody hitting over 50% coming from, from partner channel sales?

Yeah, we, we see up to 60%. Wow.

Okay.

For, for, it's almost like the bigger, you know, once you're in that 50arr. Hundred, 100ar, 100 million, you, you really do start to see people lean into partnerships because at that level you, you likely have started to see some of your other go to market functions plateau and you're, you're always going to have to be growing. Right. And so partnerships becomes that. And typically what we see is it's like, oh wow, this is 20% of our revenue right out of the gate. Oh wow, it's 30% of our revenue. Oh wow. It's, you know, we're at 50%, let's keep, let's keep investing. And so we have somewhere where it's upwards of 60%. I would say the average though is in that 30, 40% range.

Which is major.

Yeah, like I, you know, again, going come back to my, my own background. I, you know, I think of all of the years, you know, I just, I was just messing around with Facebook ads. It's like trying to, trying to squeeze as much as I could out of it. And you know, it, you know those, those more traditional digital channels typically work, but they become so competitive. Right. Your cost to acquire increases.

Yeah. There's an inflation factor. It always goes up. It will never come up.

Always goes up. No. And I think it's like, oh my goodness, if I just launched a partner program, my life would have been so much easier.

I think another interesting aspect to that argument in support of investing earlier rather than later in a partner program is if it's successful, it's going to reduce your overall cac, which means that you can actually then invest more in paid channels because it Gives you more headroom. It gives you, it gives you a higher ceiling to expand in your Facebook ads and your Google Ads. Just because you've brought CAC down solo.

The blended CAC overall, no, you're bang on, right? So what we typically see is your cost to acquire goes down, sales cycles typically accelerated. Your, your margins improve, even your brand benefits because you have so many partners out there talking about you. And to your point, when, when you do those things, you're, you're blended, you know, CAC to lifetime value improve so greatly that, that you can start to make bigger bets where, you know, where maybe the, those ratios aren't as efficient, but it still gives you kind of that safety net to keep investing into other areas. Yeah, so totally, totally agree. And just going back quickly to this idea of partner acquisition and getting up and running quickly because that's the important part. You can prep your program and be ready, but just because you have a program, you know, just because you build it doesn't mean they're going to come. So if you're not necessarily bringing partners with you, then partner acquisition becomes important. And that's, that's the other side of our business is we have this B2B network of partners that are ready to sell our vendor catalog. So think of distribution, right? Like most, most companies, especially early stage companies, are hyper focused on product, which is important. But at some point, you know, these companies realize, oh, I, I need to focus on distribution, like how am I actually going to get people to my product? And so that's the other side of partner stack is we have this pretty robust network. And I only say that because it relates to helping with, with you know, reducing your CAC and all that. We have partners that are ready to go and sell new companies that join the joint partner stack, which is, which is pretty powerful.

I was, that leads me to a related question here because I understand that the acquisition, partner acquisition is, is a major component of success here. You don't, as you said, you don't just build it and then watch them just start flooding in. I mean, you've got to make that happen. And a lot of companies, maybe that's another deterrent to getting started because they feel that, hey, yeah, we, we see the value here hypothetically, but there's a lot of investment in first of all, content and then we have to have a big partner acquisition effort and we're not really sure how to do that. My question here is, given your agency experience, is there a role for agencies to help SaaS, companies on the Partner acquisition side. And not to mention, not only that, but with the content as well that goes with it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, if you look at our own partner channel. Right. Partner Stack's own partner channel, this is.

Getting really meta now.

Yeah. Even internally we need to, I think we have definition guides that, that we have to share. So our own partner channel is largely the types of agencies that you're referring to. So we work with a lot of agencies that specialize in partner marketing, whether that be the affiliate channel, whether that be reseller and that's what they help with. They can help with partner acquisition, they can help with managing the program, they can help with content development and they're tremendously valuable. We certainly see consistently the companies that invest into the support, whether that's building the partnerships team internally, whether that's leveraging an agency, they're obviously going to reap more benefit. But again, you don't need to start there. You can still run some easy tests. So I think a lot of people when they think partnerships, they do think of these big meaty reseller partnerships and you have to go find the right ones and it becomes this business development exercise and who's going to own that? A simple test could be what just happens if you put an application form on your website. Hey, are you interested in being a partner? You know, just fill out the form and just start there. Like you might just organically get 10, 15 people apply. You know, if, if you're a very product growth driven company, you, you could have a little bit of a nudge right in the product. Right. For your customers when they're logged in. It's like, hey, if you're, if you're join, if you're enjoying the, the product, you know, refer a friend especially for.

Your, for your highest value customers. And most people know.

Yeah.

Who that is. You can, you can give them a prompt.

Yeah, exactly. So there's lots of ways that, that are really low lift that you can get started. You know, I, what I'm about to say makes sense in my head, but I think of Shopify plus a little bit in terms of how that started. Like Shopify plus, which has become a massive revenue engine for Shopify. Shopify plus is their enterprise offering. It started with literally just a checkbox on their websites, like, hey, are you interested in our enterprise product? They didn't have an enterprise product. They just wanted to see what the demand would be.

Like is this like when McDonald's put something on the menu like would you like to try the new McRib and they haven't even made it yet. But people start asking for it in that moment. They say, oh, really, sorry, we're out of them today. Yeah, if enough people every day that pretty much just says, yeah, we need to. Now we need to go out and build it.

Yeah.

Right.

So, so you can even test it a little bit and see if there's demand. Like, do you just organically have people that would love to be a partner? So, so that's, that's what we try to encourage people to think about, isn't, you know, what's the dream state? Because that can be pretty daunting. What's, what's the, the smallest variation of this that it can start today. And in some cases that might just be asking, hey, would you want to be a partner of sorts.

Yeah. Another thing that I've seen some of our clients and other SaaS companies struggle a little bit with is they think that they assume that money is the only incentive and they question, hey, are people going to have a strong enough motivation? Because they'll only earn, I don't know, they'll only earn five bucks per referral here. How much effort are they going to put in? And when you consider. I'll bring it back to the empathy topic here. You consider that now, you know, most, most of the buyers of SaaS are millennials, and their mindset is different. I'm not one of them, but I'm starting to learn more about them every day. They're very collaborative, and I think a lot of people would derive quite a lot of fulfillment, especially the millennial crowd, and simply just making a great recommendation to a friend and, and helping that person and whether, even if there's really no financial incentive, but you being the one who recommends this product which, which, which greatly helps a friend of mine or, or someone do something better. And I think people are maybe discounting that factor a little bit too. Yeah, yeah. Depending on the type of product too. But, but I think there's a space for that.

No, there, you're, you're absolutely bang on. There are lots of partners that don't care about the monetary reward. That's, that's not what they're in it for. They are in it because of exactly what you're suggesting. They, they want to provide value to either their audience, their friends, their colleagues. When you think of agencies, there's a lot of agencies that, that are referral partners for, for SAS companies. And for them, it's the value that they bring to their clients. Right. So even if I think of myself when I was agency side, right. We had our retainers and our retainers were pretty healthy to run things like, you know, their pay per click programs or SEO programs, content development, you know, but they might need a really great landing page tool to help us really accelerate what we're doing from, let's say, a paid search standpoint, getting, you know, way more personalized in a landing page experience. And so, you know, I would likely have recommended Unbounce. Right. And so this was, you know, probably seven or eight years ago, you know, we were one of the biggest users of Unbounce, our agency, and we were recommending Unbounce not because we got any sort of kickback, we were recommending it because we thought it was a great tool and we wanted to provide value to our clients by recommending best in class technology. And that's what our customers look to us for. They look to us to be those credible experts that could recommend what is a best in class tech stack look like, you know, what do you recommend I use? And so for us, it was making the right recommendation to, to continue to build credibility, to make sure that we, you know, hung on to our customers. You know, any sort of financial incentive would have been secondary to that. And that holds true for a lot of, a lot of partners that we chat with.

Absolutely. Especially for agencies, these types of recommendations move you from being just a vendor to a real partner and a trusted consultant at a more strategic level. If someone is really going to ask about how to build out the tech stack the right way, then it's, it's a strong indication and it's a real enabler. If you introduce a great landing page which, which doubles the conversion rate, you're sure to see higher ad spend coming off the back of that. So it's, it's a, it's also an enabler. If it's not a direct, you know, not if there's no direct financial reward, there will be indirect benefits. So let's, in the time remaining, I'd like to talk a little bit now about how you and your role as the VP of Marketing are putting together your strategy for getting more and more people onto partner stack. And what you described is, I think there's a few different, I guess, different stages of this buyer awareness journey. Some people are unaware altogether. Some people are certainly aware, even using alternative solutions that might be more narrowly in the categories of affiliate or in the categories of reseller. And so you've got, you can, you can get them to switch over to you, you can, you can say basically we are a rebundler here and this is what you need. You've got affiliate going well, but you need reseller or vice versa. Or you can, you can go after these SaaS, companies that have just overlooked the opportunity or maybe have postponed it because thinking it, you know, overthinking it, basically it sounds like what's more, what's more valuable for you and what's the lower hanging fruit to go after the companies that are already on a more limited platform and to position Partner Stack as a logical next step or graduation of where they are now or to go for those companies that you see are already late to the game and, and maybe seeing saturation or plateauing and they're direct paid and organic channels. And then you want to tell them, hey, this is now the time to get partnerships. How do you see that and how do you, how does your strategy look different for those two types of audiences?

Yeah, so we, we've been very deliberate in how we market. You know, our, our marketing team has only existed at Partner Stack for about a year and marketing, you know, before that marketing truly didn't exist. Partner stack was 100% driven through our direct sales channel and our own partner channel. And so when I started a year ago, I was the first marketing hire. And the sequence that we planned out was, you know, phase one is let's just get real about what's working, what's not, who are our customers, where do we win, where do we lose, Building our own tech stack, getting real about our numbers, you know, and that phase lasts a couple months. Phase two is let's just go capture the demand that exists.

Right?

And so that's the partnership people, those are people who already know that they have a problem. And that problem could be a number of things. The problem could be we have a partnerships program, but you know, we're doing it manually and it can't scale or you know, we have a program running but we're using four or five different tools to manage it. So they know that they have some sort of challenge and they know that they want to solve it through, through an investment. So that phase was, well, let's just go get them. Like, let's just go talk to them. And that's a combination of just really table stake stuff but trying to do it really well. So that's, that is paid search, right? If somebody's looking for a PRM solution, just be there. Let's just get in front of them. That is, you know, leveraging intent signals for our Sales team to target our outreach. Right. So intent signals, using tools like ZoomInfo or G2, you know, getting a sense of what companies are actually researching, PRM and partner management solutions. You know, let's use that to get a little bit more intelligent about our outreach. You know, let's leverage that intent signals for LinkedIn targeting. So really, really table stakes, just high intent digital marketing tactics. And then through that what we started to discover was, you know, we were seeing some very strong organic success with G2, the review site. And so we leaned into it. So you know, this time last year we were probably middle of the pack on G2 and so we leaned into it, you know, really had our customer base that, that you know, are rabid fans of the platform, just advocate for us on G2 and you know, we climbed to be number one there. But it's a very high intent channel. Right. People are there because they know absolutely that they want to solve, solve a problem. So that was phase, you know, phase two, Phase three is where you start to go and create demand, right? So phase two is capture demand that exists and you just have to sell them on partner stack. At that point we don't actually have to sell them on partnerships, they're already sold on it. Phase three is let's go create the demand. So let's go educate. In my mind, I think about, let's go educate every revenue leader in a company. Whether that's sales, whether that's marketing, whether that is a product team that has a revenue target, whether that's customer success with a revenue target. If you have a revenue target there, there's some sort of indirect sales program that you could run that's going to help you. And so then it becomes about educating go to market teams, right? So it's less about educating people that are already in partnerships roles, you know, educating companies that already have some sort of partnership program. It's educating people that haven't thought of partnerships to help them solve distribution. Right. That's, that's the problem that we really try to solve for, you know, not to go too deep into it, but you know, heads of marketing and heads of sales get fired at a pretty, pretty rapid pace, right? You're, you're in your seat for maybe two years, maybe three.

Yeah, well, you've got, you've got serious short term pressure, usually quarterly quarters on your head. Yeah, yeah. Two bad quarters in a row that could be enough.

Exactly. And, and, and it happens because companies haven't solved for distribution, right? You're, you're, and you know, let's just consider distribution sales. You're trying to do it through brunt force tactics, right? Hiring more salespeople, investing more dollars into digital channels, you know, running more events. Partnerships is distribution. So that's what we're trying to solve for. And so we're trying to educate the market on that. Right. Think about how this complements or in some cases becomes your primary driver for distribution. And so tactically, how do we do that? Nothing too wild, right? It's really good content. Very focused on, on trying to educate people. It's a lot of co marketing with our own partners that, that type of thing. But where, you know, me personally, I'm, I'm very, very focused on education. I think, you know, I think at the end of the day when I think of marketing, that's the role of marketing. Marketing is, is there to educate an audience and education should be actionable. Education should drive behavior change. So that, that's what we're focused on is how do we do that. And so far it's again, it's been table stakes like content webinars. But what that will evolve into are legitimate courses and certifications and for ourselves, our own strategic partnerships to, to help hit the market in, in a, in a bigger way.

I love it. That's great. I, I agree with you 100% that marketing at its core should be about educating people, not not selling to them. Especially now that people are more empowered than ever and, and they prefer to really make their own educated purchasing decisions rather than have then be sold to. So it's more about just providing them with the resources so that they can educate themselves and then make those decisions on their own.

Yeah, like we, you know, internally we say our mission is to change the way companies sell software. And the driver of that is because the way people buy software has changed. Right. They want to buy, they want to self educate, they want to buy from trusted resources and so companies need to adapt to that. The partner channel just plays a role in that through kind of matching the trusted advisor to vendor component.

Great. Well Tyler, this has been fantastic. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you wished I would have asked you or is there anything else that you'd like our audience to know? No.

We obviously spend a lot of time talking about partnerships and partner stack, which is cool, but always happy to chat to anybody who's sitting in the hot seat in the high growth company thinking about how do I contribute to revenue. Because at the end of the day if you're in marketing and you're not thinking about how you're contributing to revenue and you don't hold a revenue number. You know, candidly, you're probably going to find yourself, you know, in that two year, 10 year and probably looking for your next gig pretty quickly. So that's the main thing I would say is, is the gist of, of, of all of this is, is focus on revenue, how you're having business impact. You know, partnerships is just a subset of that, but, but lots of, lots of different ways to go about it.

Great, great. Well, Tyler, thanks very much for being with me. And that was a great, great conversation. I think I feel enlightened about partnership channels now in a new way, and I'm excited to go and start to talk to a lot of our own SaaS clients about that. So thank you for educating me and our audience and I hope that we'll keep in touch and talk again soon.

Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

All right, thank you too. Take care.

Take care.

Bye. Another great episode in the books. Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to get notified when future episodes drop, be sure to subscribe to Paris Talks Marketing on your favorite podcast player. And to learn more about SaaS Growth Marketing, visit Hop On Online. That's HopHop Online. Have a great day.