Podcast appearances and mentions of pete caputa

LinksTry Benchmarks ExplorerLearn More About DataboxSubscribe to our newsletter for episode summaries, benchmark data, and moreIn this episode of "Metrics & Chill," Pete Caputa, CEO of Databox, chats with Jamar Diggs, a YouTube consultant, and Germeen Guillaume, an expert in nonprofit accounting. They explore how Germeen's focused content strategy on YouTube helps her connect with smaller nonprofits, driving business growth and outperforming industry benchmarks. Tune in to discover how data-driven insights and value-driven content can elevate your YouTube game!Links:Follow Jamar Diggs and Germeen GuillaumeExplore J Diggs Media

Agency clients often want more strategic consulting from the agencies they hire.  At the same time, many agencies feel like the services they're delivering are often undervalued by the clients they serve.If both of these are true, then why are so many agencies caught in what Pete Caputa calls the “Tactician's Trap” where it feels like you're on an endless hamster wheel selling implementation services without being valued for the strategic insights you can provide to your clients.Today's guest, Max Traylor, known as The Consultant's Consultant, unpacks a (maybe slightly controversial) chapter from his book The Agency Survival Guide, entitled Burn Your Implementation Business to the Ground.Now, whether or not you're whether to do that quite yet, in today's conversation you'll hear Max explain:His own journey from selling marketing services to productized consultingThe 1 simple tweak that lead to a 10x price increase for one consulting packageThe 3 steps to start selling strategy that you're already capable of deliveringResources Mentioned in Today's Episode:An Agency's Guide to Measuring And Improving Billable Utilization (Ebook) Connect with Max on LinkedIn Agency Survival Guide: How to Productize Consulting Services by Max Traylor Max Traylor's Consultant's Survival Guide How to Prepare Your Agency for an Acquisition w/ Karl Heasman The Business of Expertise by David C. Baker The Go-Giver by Bob burg and John David Mann Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy by Jared Fuller The Client (a film by Umault)Pete Caputa's LinkedIn Post about the "Tactician Trap"Want to watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube?Check it out here: Agency Life Podcast on YouTube Have a question about today's topic? Text it to us here!Want to get more content to support your agency life? Subscribe to the Agency Life newsletter, check out past episodes & find more content at teamwork.com/agencylife. This podcast is brought to you by Teamwork.com.

Peter Caputa explores building successful partnerships and the unique value partners bring. He talks about differentiation, customization, network effects, joint value propositions, unique data access, and turnkey marketing campaigns. Pete also discusses collaborative growth, leveraging customers and partners for effective marketing, and the shift from access-based to outcome-based pricing in SaaS. TakeawaysSuccessful partnerships involve creating a unique value proposition for partners.Differentiation, customization, and network effects are crucial in partner programs.Joint value propositions, unique data access, and turnkey marketing campaigns contribute to successful partnerships. Collaborative growth is a key strategy for effective marketing and business scaling.Leveraging customers and partners can lead to referrals and build effective flywheels within marketing and sales processes.The shift from access-based pricing to outcome-based pricing is a significant trend in the SaaS industry.Professional services firms face challenges in prioritizing and delivering outcomes for their clients in a market with a plethora of options.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Successful Partnerships02:53 The Power of Differentiation and Customization06:02 Joint Value Propositions and Unique Data Access09:07 Turnkey Marketing Campaigns: A Key to Successful Partnerships24:19 Leveraging Customers and Partners for Effective Flywheels32:29 The Shift from Access-Based to Outcome-Based Pricing in SaaS36:10 Challenges and Opportunities for Professional Services Firms

LinksTry Benchmarks ExplorerLearn More About DataboxSubscribe to our newsletter for episode summaries, benchmark data, and moreIn this episode of "Metrics & Chill," host Pete Caputa, CEO of Databox, chats with Andi Graham, CEO and Founder of Big Sea, about scaling a marketing agency and success in the purpose-driven space. Find out:How Andi transformed Big Sea from a local web design agency to a specialized marketing company for nonprofits, healthcare, and human servicesLead generation tactics, including a unique grant program for nonprofits and robust email marketingThe importance of metrics and benchmarking for data-driven growth, alongside effective content strategies like SEO and landing pages

Want to win more clients (and keep them longer) in 2024?Of course you do!Offering a free benchmark consultation as part of your sales process might just be the key to doing both this year.In this episode with Chris Nault, Founder and CEO of Growth, he breaks down the process and results from his agency's 5-week experiment of adding a benchmark consultation into their sales and renewal processes.In this episode, you'll hear from Chris:When and how to invite clients into a Databox benchmark groupHow it can impact your close rates (for both new & renewal business)sThe role benchmark data can play in on-going client managementHow to leverage benchmark data to build a tight-knit community for your clients and prospectsResources Mentioned in This Episode:Connect with Chris on LinkedIn5 Reasons Your Firm Should Offer a Free Benchmark ConsultationThe State of Agency Operations ReportDatabox (Free) Benchmark GroupsHow 200+ Agencies Invest in Their Own Marketing w/ Pete Caputa & Karl SakasWant to get more content to support your agency life? Subscribe to the Agency Life newsletter, check out past episodes & find more content at teamwork.com/agencylife. This podcast is brought to you by Teamwork.com.

What got you here won't get you there.  You've probably heard that phrase before.  And it probably couldn't feel more applicable than it does right now as we round out 2023.So, the question is: Are you going to keep doing more of the same?  Or do something different in 2024?If you're in that latter camp, then you're going to get some encouragement (and hopefully some useful ideas to implement) from today's guests, Pete Caputa and Karl Sakas.You probably already know, but in case you don't:Pete is the CEO of Databox, a business analytics platform that helps agencies provide transparent performance management to their clients.Karl is an author, speaker, consultant and the founder of Sakas & Company, a consulting firm helping agency owners work less and earn more.Their two organizations recently teamed up to survey over 200 agencies about their own marketing efforts. The survey continues to collect new responses even up to the time of this recording, and the insights have been published (ungated, I might add) in their new report, How High Performing Agencies Market Themselves.As we unpack this new report with Pete & Karl, you'll hear:Why most agencies would fire the agency if they had themselves as a clientHow much agencies are investing in their own marketing todayWhat channels your peers are investing in (and which are yielding the highest ROI)Pete and Karl's advice for you to change the status quo in 2024 (remember what got you here won't get you there)Resources mentioned in today's conversation:Read the full report How High Performing Agencies Market ThemselvesGet your copy of The State of Agency Operations Report (2023)Register for the upcoming webinar Lead to Loyalty: How to Optimize Your Client Lifecycle with HubSpot & Teamwork.comConnect with Pete on LinkedInConnect with Karl on LinkedInGet a copy of Karl's book Work Less, Earn MoreJoin the (free) Databox Benchmark GroupsConnect with Tamara Omerovic on LinkedIn Want to get more content to support your agency life? Subscribe to the Agency Life newsletter, check out past episodes & find more content at teamwork.com/agencylife. This podcast is brought to you by Teamwork.com.

Click here to try Databox free, or learn more.Pete Caputa and Yoram Wijngaarde share lessons they learned, building companies from $1 to $10 million in ARR. If you liked the episode, share a takeaway you learned on LinkedIn!

Click here to try Databox free, or learn more.In this episode, Pete Caputa interviews Doug Davidoff, CEO of Lift Enablement, to learn how he grew revenue by 3x by going after bigger contracts from bigger companies.Links: Follow Doug Lift Enablement The HubSopt benchmark group If you liked the episode, let us know on LinkedIn!

Click here to try Databox free, or learn more.Learn a better way to do marketing and sales, by partnering with your target customers.Links: Create your own private benchmark group Read the "Collaborative Growth" article If you liked the episode, let us know on LinkedIn!

Click here to try Databox free, or learn more.Read the full report (here)Pete's LinkedIn Posts Most companies are still cutting and pasting into spreadsheets/slides Picking metrics is hard. Few do it correctly. Marketing is the most measured activity. Is that a good thing?  Sharing company performance transparently is not the standard, but it probably should be. Seven habits the highest performing companies implemented.

Join host Adam Michalski as he interviews Pete Caputa, CEO at Databox (previously VP of Sales at Hubspot). Pete and Adam discuss the early days of building out HubSpot's Partner Program and all the learnings that came with it. We then get into Databox and how Pete thinks about partnerships as CEO of the growing business analytics company. Topics Covered:What the founding story was of HubSpot's Partner Program - how did it happen?What the early days of building HubSpot's Partner Program were likeHow did the evolution of partnerships come about at HubSpot and how did they scaleHow Pete thinks about partnerships at Databox given all his experienceWhere Pete sees the future of B2B partnerships headingPartner with Databox:DataboxPartner with DataboxPartnership Jobs:North America Channel Lead - CrownpeakDirector, Product Partnerships at KlaviyoBusiness Development Manager - Consulting Partners at ProductboardSponsors:Partnership LeadersPartneredSubscribe at www.partneredpodcast.com.Interested in joining the podcast? Reach out to hello@partnered.com.

A lot has changed in the way people buy. Modern customers are more likely to educate themselves. They tend to only reach out to the company when they really need help. Today's guest believes it's not a bad thing. After all, there are many ways for businesses to turn it into their favor. Meet Pete Caputa - sales and marketing expert who used to work for HubSpot but eventually became their 7th largest agency partner. Pete is CEO at DATABOX - a versatile analytics platform built to help organizations understand how they are doing business-wise. In this episode, we're talking about the advantages of having free versions of the product, the importance of picking the right metrics and building a solid management system, the impact of company culture on sales, and more. Why companies shouldn't struggle with offering a free version of their product? How to understand the real cost of customer acquisition when your company is doing sales and marketing? Will sales ever be completely automated? Why keeping focus is extremely important for a business? Enjoy the episode! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ►Visit DATABOX website https://databox.com/ ►Find Pete Caputa on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/pc4media/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This series is brought to you by OneIMS - a leading digital marketing agency helping businesses win new customers. ►Request your FREE marketing ROI audit at https://www.oneims.com/ ►Follow OneIMS online! Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/OneIMS/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oneims/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oneims/ If you enjoyed this video, please share it. To make sure you never miss an episode of Coffee with Closers, please subscribe.

Welcome back to another episode of PartnerUp!: The Partnership podcast. Today our hosts welcome the powerful Pete Caputa of HubSpot channel fame as their guest.These are some topics they discuss:· Jared introduces Pete as his long-time mentor and talks a bit about Pete and how he built himself up in the market. Pete mentions a site to find other SAS companies and their partners and Kevin asks him a question regarding the usage of the site in his company.· Jared asks for some selling advice for others and Pete explains his special way how he handles it. Pete mentions the trick with referrals and how it helps him chase a more productive goal. Pete continues to talk about the importance of correct education in the sales market and how he handled one-to-one coaching.· Pete mentions how he changed his technique when teaching people sales and how it helped him and others around him to sell more. He continues to explain how he sold speed of growth and how he packaged into different separate packages and sold it based on customer needs. Pete also talks about his secret trick to selling marketing packages.· Kevin asks Pete about the importance of patience and Pete explains his position. Pete talks about his personal experience and how he managed to “ruin” Christmas due to not having enough time and being angry about not reaching his quotas. Pete continues to explain how his position in the company was changed after this period and how in the long-term it helped him.· Pete talks about his advice on what to do differently from Hubspot. He continues to explain how to not find partners and offers a more productive alternative.· Pete talks about his checklist for partner enablement. He continues to explain the need for training programs and how it generally helps. Jared asks Pete about more advice about active participation and training. Pete shares his top two methods to do so. Kevin continues to ask about adaptation to new companies and which skills do you take with you and which skills you leave at your old workplace.· Pete shares his thoughts on conflict elimination and self-service. Jared and Pete talk more about help documentation and whether they should be formal or less formal. Pete talks more about certification and where exactly does it help. · Pete expresses his opinion about webinars and how they tried to implement it at his company. He also continues to explain how he works deeply with partners and how it is important to share knowledge and technology with each other.· Kevin asks about the success metric concerning campaigns and Pete explains the different ways people approach it. Jared talks about the philosophical divide in partner marketing. Pete talks more about co-marketing and the benefits it may bring to your business.· Kevin asks Pete about how to be remembered by other companies. Pete shares a personal story and some insight on the topic. Pete also emphasized motivation and the importance of it. Pete talks about how the market has shifted and the difference between today and when he began and where he thinks opportunities are.· Kevin asks about the most common question Pete gets asked. Jared foreshadows what a future episode might be about and thanks to Pete for coming to the podcast.Sources:· CrossBeam (Sponsor): https://www.crossbeam.com/

Billion dollar companies rely on competitive intelligence to stay ahead in their markets. What lessons can the rest of us take from how they use CI to make better decisions? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Cipher Systems VP of Marketing John Booth talks about what competitive intelligence is, and how companies can use it to inform decision making. Cipher's customers are some of the largest companies in the world, and they have highly specialized units dedicated exclusively to competitive intelligence. Not every company has the budget, or the team, to support that, so John explains what the rest of us should be looking at, and how we should use information about our competitors to develop marketing and business strategies. Highlights from my conversation with John include: Many marketers use the terms data, information and intelligence interchangeably, but they are very different things. Intelligence is the product of analyzing information and data, and it requires people to do it. There's also a lot of confusion around the difference between business intelligence, market intelligence and competitive intelligence. BI is the information you have within your own business, whereas MI is the information about what is happening in the market.  Competitive intelligence is information about your markets and also your competitors and how that influences your ability to sell within your markets or deliver the services that your business does. There are three kinds of software tools used in competitive intelligence: 1) Generic tools like Sharepoint or Google Alerts that can be used or many things: 2) Specific tools like Klue that are built to fulfill a very particular need, such as sales enablement; and 3) Purpose-built tools like Cipher's Knowledge360, which are built specifically for competitive intelligence professionals. Before any business engages in competitive intelligence, it should start by developing a deep understanding of its differentiators, strengths and weaknesses. Resources from this episode: Connect with John on LinkedIn Visit the Cipher Systems website Listen to the podcast to learn more about competitive intelligence and how businesses both large and small can use it to get an edge.   Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. This week, my guest is none other than my husband John Booth. Welcome John. John Booth (Guest): Well, I mean, it only took 150 some odd episodes for me to get an invitation. Kathleen: Saving the best for last. So I don't know if my listeners know this, but John and I, so John and I used to own a marketing agency together for 11 years and somehow miraculously, we're still married. And when people ask me what he does now, I always say he does the same thing I do just at a different company. He is also a vice president of marketing. He is VP of marketing for a company called Cipher Systems, which is in the competitive intelligence space. So John, for those who may not know you, who may not know Cipher, can you just tell my audience a little bit about yourself as well as about Cipher systems and what it does? About John Booth and Cipher Systems John: Sure. So as Kathleen said, I was a part of our digital agency for about a dozen years or so. And before that I held different sales positions started out in the staffing world and then held lots of different positions there. But since Quintain, I have joined Cipher systems and Cipher is a small, there's probably about 20 of us now, competitive intelligence firm. John: And we'll give to the definition of that because it's, I think it's very important. I see a lot of similarities in the competitive intelligence to what I saw in the content inbound marketing world maybe 10 years ago. So it's it's a, it's a developing industry and I think more and more people within the organizations, particularly certainly larger organizations are finding the need for, and using competitive intelligence today. But so we have a classic kind of services side of the business. And, and then in addition to that, we have a technology or a software side of the business where we have a software platform. It's a cloud based competitive intelligence platform that acts as a knowledge management system, as well as the competitive intelligence tools for all of your competitive Intel and dashboards and reports and newsletters and, and information like that. Kathleen: And what kinds of companies does Cipher work with? John: So Cipher works with large organizations. So our ideal buyer has more than a billion dollars in revenue. Typically at least 5,000 employees, they're headquartered in the United States and they operate in industries that have one or one of two key kind of characteristics. The first is they're either highly regulated. So think financial services, insurance, healthcare, or the industries are incredibly competitive. So think about things like technology government contractors those types of industries. So those are, those are kind of the, the ingredients that make for the need for competitive intelligence. Kathleen: So side note, I just think it's really funny this doing this interview because I am interviewing you like I don't know the answers to these questions already. But everyone listening doesn't so I still need to ask them. So one of the reasons I wanted you to talk about who you work for or with the kinds of companies you work for is that, it's the thing that I have found interesting, kind of watching as you've worked there is that prior to you working at Cipher, you know, I was familiar with the field of competitive intelligence, you know, roughly but there are such different levels of it, right? I mean, the stuff that you guys do, like you were saying, it's really big companies that have, you know, the stakes are high. They have a lot to lose. It's highly competitive or regulated or this or that. It's serious business. And they have teams of people whose jobs are just to do competitive intelligence. And then you have like the kind of competitive intelligence that, that smaller companies do where you're like, I've got a Google alert on my competitor, you know, that sort of thing. And so it's, it's very interesting to me the different shades of it. So segwaying from that, you mentioned defining competitive intelligence. So like how do you guys see it? What is it, how do you define it? What is competitive intelligence? John: So so there are a couple of key definitions, just so the audience and, and the two of us are on kind of the same page here. So the first one is the difference between let's define data, information and intelligence. So an example of data might be the number three. Okay. So that is data. Alright. Information is a series of data pieces. So an example, a pretty example of information is a streetlight. So a streetlight has three different colored lights, right? Red, yellow, and green. All right. And so when red is on, I stop when yellow is, I slowed down or hit the gas. And when green is, I continue on my way. So that is, so that is information. So there's several different data points there. There's the number of lights, what the, the, the meaning of those lights. Intelligence is the product of analysis. So intelligence requires people today. So so you might hear a lot of the impact of artificial intelligence on competitive intelligence and market intelligence and things like that. So today, intelligence requires a human being to perform some type of analysis and deliver some types of insights to the business that's intelligence. And that is that's what has value. So just simply gathering information, there's no value that's delivered to the organization. It's not until a person actually applies the filters and understandings and kind of teases out what this might mean that there is any value delivered, and that is intelligence. So then I'm going to define three other terms that are often kind of used interchangeably. And they shouldn't be much like a, when we had our agency often found that people would use marketing, advertising and PR interchangeably, when, as marketers, we all know that those are completely different you know, services and they mean different things, but to the lay person, they kind of get interchanged interchangeably. So competitive intelligence market intelligence and business intelligence are often interchanged kind of the same way. So let's use business intelligence. So business intelligence, we define that as the, the information that the business intelligence is based off of information on your business. So if you think about if all of the information that we have within our four walls of our business, that is our business intelligence. Okay. So if you manufacture something that might be how many widgets that you can manufacture in an hour and how many people you need and the profitability of those widgets, et cetera. So business intelligence really means focused on your business, right? No external sources or information, it's all internal data. Market intelligence is just that it is the market. It might be trends in the market. It, it might be consumer behavior and how consumers are responding to certain trends or, or things along those lines. And then competitive intelligence is information about your markets and also your competitors and how that influences your ability to sell within your markets or deliver the services that your business does. Kathleen: So earlier you mentioned that competitive intelligence requires people, but you guys sell competitive intelligence software. So like, how does that work? John: Because software, obviously it doesn't have people in it, but so think of it as think of it as this. What's a good analogy? So if I am a marketer and I have a tool like HubSpot, which we love, because it allows me to host my website, allows me to post and schedule my social. It allows me to have my content and edit it and do keyword work. All of that helps me with my marketing strategy and deliver a strategy. So you wouldn't buy HubSpot and say, Oh, well, HubSpot is going to do my marketing strategy. It's, you know, it's going to, you know, help me be a better marketer. Yes. But it still requires people to deliver that strategy. You know, you you're using a tool. Yes. but the tools can never, they, there are at least the tools today can not replace what an analyst, a researcher, a strategist, a person, a marketer, could be a product marketer. You know, what a person does. What kinds of tools are available to support competitive intelligence? Kathleen: And I feel like there's this vast array of tools out there for competitive intelligence. Like I mentioned earlier, it's everything from a simple Google or all the way up to a platform like you guys have that is used by huge corporations. So maybe you could speak to like, kind of what that landscape looks like. John: Right. So one of the one of the things that we're trying to educate people that are looking for tools are the different types of tools. We believe there are three different kinds of tools out there. There are what we call generic tools, and those are tools that are typically they've been built for a different purpose, but they're often adopted or adapted to a competitive intelligence use. And a good example of that is SharePoint. So SharePoint wasn't built for competitive intelligence, but SharePoint is, it can be an adequate kind of knowledge management source. It can, you know, you can have teams adding information to it and downloading information. You could even, you know, use some of the collaborative features there, et cetera. And so that's like the use of a generic tool. And then you have your your second type of CI tools, a tool that is built for a specific really for a specific person purpose. And, and an example of that is, so there's a company, one of our competitors, Klue. And they do a very good job of sales enablement. So if you have a large sales team and you want to empower your sales team to close more deals, and you want to give your sales team the resources that they need to have the right information at their fingertips, when they're on calls and and kind of, and, and sell against other competitors, they're a great tool for that. And then you have the third category, which is kind of that the tool that is built specifically for competitive intelligence and, and those are tools that do primarily three things. They gather information. So they're going to allow you to aggregate information and that information could come in from newsfeeds. It might come in from subscriptions to information, the research that you have it, it might be internal documents that you have kind of those business intelligence documents that we talked about. It might be information that your sales or marketing team uncovers maybe during the course of their day. So one of the things that, that we help companies with is most companies have just, just dozens, if not hundreds of nuggets of information within the organization, but they just don't have the ability to give it visibility. So, you know, it's, you know, the salesperson that knows what he's up against for a particular deal, because the prospect shared this with them and it's sitting within his inbox and he's the only person that has access to his inbox. So the product marketing team that is getting ready to do the roadmap for their product, can't see what the customer, the prospect is looking for because they don't have access to this information. So that third tool allows all of this information to go into it. And then with our tool, we use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to automatically tag this information. And we use semantic learning for it to identify things like location company and individuals by reading through and analyzing the, the, the content that you're adding to the system. So, there are those types of tools and, and it's interesting. We did some research a couple of years ago. The pharmaceutical industry is by far kind of the most advanced commercial, competitive intelligence kind of industry. Most other industries, they're still kind of developing CI practices and, and most outside of the pharmaceutical industry. And I kind of call that life sciences. So not strictly just pharmaceuticals. Most organizations have I think it's like 1.2 people working on their CI. So not big teams, not, not at all. How can marketers use competitive intelligence? Kathleen: Yeah. It's so interesting. It's such a specialized field. I feel like you know, now coming back to kind of, the focus of this podcast obviously is inbound marketing. So a lot of marketers are listening and this can seem very unapproachable because like, for example, if you guys, you work with really large companies and they have these dedicated people let's start with what, how are those companies using competitive intelligence and how is that helping them make better business decisions or get better results from their businesses. And then we can kind of bring it back down to, for smaller companies, what are ways they could begin to approach this? So let's begin some like actual examples of how this plays out. John: Okay. So so I think that that, that the marketers marketers today, this is, this is my own belief. I believe they're, they're waking up to this need for competitive intelligence because your inbound marketing is no longer delivering the results that you were seeing before. So for just about a decade or so, we have as marketers, we've been really focused on the content I'm creating and attract, creating content, solving problems, answering questions, et cetera. And we've been rewarded with that with prospects and customers and results, and kind of the, you know, Marcus shared approach. They have questions kind of, you know, answer their questions and, and, you know, you'll be rewarded well. In the beginning that was really, really successful because there were fewer people doing it and, and the people that were doing it for the most part were really doing it. You know, it's not until much later that you're downloading the ebook and it's actually just 18 PowerPoint slides with two bullets on each slide and has nothing to do with an actual book. So we have to, as marketers look for things that are going to give us results. And so, as we were focused kind of internally on what we're talking about, what our prospects and customers are talking about, we're really ignoring what was going on in our market and our competitors. And so we were ignoring these macro issues. And so competitive intelligence is kind of the other side of the equation. So you know, you've take your prospects and your customers, and that's one piece of success. And then, but, but you can't do that in a vacuum. Those that do SEO work understand that. So you find out what your teams are, you know, what you want to rank for and what your competitors are ranking for. And then you do SEO work to help change those rankings. Well, your competitors, don't just sit still. They're also looking at what's going on in the market and looking at the actions that you're doing. And so, you know, we found this need to to address, well, how do I understand what's going on in the marketplace and how do I position myself against my competitors or the other options that that my prospects and customers have. So that's a long roundabout way of explaining how companies are using competitive intelligence to better deploy their resources. And so when, when you're doing this before, you can get to actually doing competitive intelligence work, you have to have a really clear understanding of your differentiators and, and your vulnerabilities. So that's where, you know, somebody who wants to begin doing competitive intelligence work, I would challenge them to to, to sit down and do the, the work on how are you different from your competitors, you know, and, and where do you have overlap and where is that overlap? Where does that lead to, or where could you be vulnerable because of that overlap? What impact does competitive intelligence have on businesses? Kathleen: So the larger companies that you guys work with, obviously have that part figured out. They, you know, they have their teams in place, they understand their differentiators. So when they undertake competitive intelligence, how are they using it? Like in practical terms to get better business results? Do you have some case studies or some success stories or anything like that that you can share of how, like, how does competitive intelligence produce better outcomes for these companies? John: Yes. So this was this was a very kind of rude awakening coming from the marketing agency world where you know, you have clients and you're working with clients and you're doing great work for them. And you ask your clients, Hey, you know, would you mind providing a testimonial, a quote, being a part of a, you know, a white paper case study you know, sharing your experience and, and usually it's, Oh yeah. You know, they're very supportive of that when you are in the competitive intelligence world, nobody wants to talk about the tools that they're using, what you're doing for them, because by nature of it, you are, you know, you're giving away intelligence for your competitors to use against you. Kathleen: You know what other industry is like that? Cybersecurity. I know that, of which you speak. John: So let me, I can talk in some kind of in general terms. So we estimate and Cipher has been around for 20, 25 years. We estimate that most most people doing CI work spend about 70% of their time gathering and organizing information. If we go back to the definitions that we had of data, information, and intelligence, data and information add zero value to the business. So you're spending 70% of your time on things that have no value add to the business. Only 30% of your time is on the analysis, developing the insights, you know, all of that information that your CI consumers, whether it be your sales teams, your, your C suite, your product development team, your marketers, they all need this information, but the bulk of your time is spent gathering it and, and organizing it. And, that is because your business is complicated and information comes in lots of different forms, and some of it is structured. And some of it is unstructured. You know, you have information internal reports. You have, as I mentioned before, you have emails that are received from salespeople. You have teams that are out in the field and going to trade shows and seeing you know, what your competitors, their messages at their trade show boots, you have competitor websites that are changing and messaging. And so so what our tool does is it automates a lot of that. For example we have many customers before they started using our tool Knowledge360, that would have 18 number. And some of them would have more that would manually go out to competitors' websites and look at their websites and look for changes in their websites. And that could be pricing changes if you're in an industry or, or, you know, a market that is price sensitive, you want to know about those changes. And, you know, it could be messaging changes. So by using a tool like Knowledge360, we can automate that. And so the tool goes out, it gathers the information. It says, Hey, this page has changed. It highlights the, the, the new information, you know, and, and that's, that's there in one color, it highlights the information that has been changed or removed and another color. And now an analyst can take a look at that and say, Oh, this is really meaningful. You know, so that's, that's an example of how are a tool like ours or how anyone can use competitive intelligence. So, to monitor the messaging that your competitors are using, or if they have a pricing page, you know, you can, you can monitor that for changes in their pricing. How do companies use competitive intelligence? Kathleen: So it sounds like the tool itself can be used to save time to streamline the process, but like, what are these companies doing with this information? How, like, why are they spending all this money on competitive intelligence? What is it doing things successful? John: So if you think about this so it's helping them be successful by giving insights and providing this intelligence that your decision makers are looking for. And ultimately, hopefully you're, you're enabling them to make better informed decisions. So if you think about think about someone that has you know, you're wearing glasses, but they have blinders on, and you can only see right in front of you. And you're making your decisions based on your field of vision that is just in front of you. Now, you take those away and you have a wider field of vision, and you have more information. You may, you may make a different decision. Kathleen: What's an example of something, a marketing thing that I might do differently based on the information I would find? John: So here's, here's an example. So if I have a, let's say I'm a nationwide company and I compete with someone on the East coast. Okay. And they're a good competitor. I went against them. Sometimes they went against me sometimes. But I have offices on the East coast and also on the West coast. Well, if I had a CI department, one of the things they might be monitoring or looking for is job postings with my competitors. So if all of a sudden, one of my competitors is posting a sales manager position in the Seattle market, and they're not in the Seattle market. And one of my key customers is in the Seattle market. Oh, that's something that I want to know about because it looks like my competitor is coming into, if they're going to invest in building out a sales team, putting an office in Seattle. Now, all of a sudden, my sales people that have only had to deal with maybe the competitors that were in that local market without this East coast competitor, they now need to be aware of this new competitor coming into the market. And that may change how we position ourselves. It may change how we price things. It may change, you know, the terms of her contracts. It could have all types of different information, you know, of, of business decisions that we make. How Cipher uses competitive intelligence for itself Kathleen: So I'm assuming that you guys are, as I like to say, drinking your own champagne, because I don't like the phrase eating your own dog food. So how does Cipher use competitive intelligence? John: So so we use this fantastic tool called Knowledge360. It's very comprehensive. We have several dashboards that we use. And one in particular that is called our competition crusher. And so with our competition crusher dashboard, it's a feed of news announcements on it's a feed of social. It has intelligence that our salespeople gain talking to prospects and customers. Our marketing team will add information like messaging changes that we might see and all of this battle cards. So if we know we're going up against a particular competitor, we want to, you know, we want to draw attention to these benefits of using our product. And, and if we know that there are gaps, you know, we want to ask our prospects about, you know, the gaps that we know our competitors have. So, that's one example of how we're using it to kind of gather all of that information, organize it in a way, you know, and the beauty of using something you're using a tool that provides dashboards is the dashboards are updated in real time. So unlike, you know, most people, if they have any experience or exposure to CI work it's typically a part of the, you know, quarterly sales meeting. And there's somebody that comes up that says competitor ABC is doing this. And then, you know, they share the PowerPoint deck and, you know, a quarter later another report comes out, but there's a lot of time and a lot of change that goes on between, you know, the publishing of those two different reports. And, you know, you may make different decisions having a dashboard that's always on always available, always monitoring. You're always getting the most up to date information. And so we share that with our leadership team, our sales team, marketing team, customer, all of them add to, and, and consume information from those dashboards. Prediction markets and the future of competitive intelligence Kathleen: And then real quickly, because I feel like this could be an entirely other podcast episode. I feel like with competitive intelligence, you're looking at things that have already happened, right? You guys have something I find fascinating, which is this other side to your business where you can do much more predictive stuff. It's super cool. And you have something called predictive markets. So can you, somewhat quickly because we are coming up on our time, just give people a sense of what I mean, cause that's really like competitive intelligence looking into the future, if you will, or trying to figure out what's gonna happen in the future. So how does that work? John: So that is really cool stuff and it is relatively new. So Cipher systems and another company Consensus Point, we merged towards the end of last year. Consensus Point is a a research company. So as competitive intelligence professionals, they gather information and they do research. You have two primary types of research yet. Primary research and secondary research, secondary research being research that's available to anyone and those might be market reports or things that are publicly available and anyone has access to those or they're not restricted. Primary research is research that you do, you hire someone to do on your behalf and that's information that you have. And that if, if done correctly and on the appropriate things could be a competitive advantage having this primary information or more information about a particular topic. Well, what you're talking about is predictive markets research. So if you think about primary research, most people are familiar with polls and surveys. And so that is a traditional kind of primary research method that is it's, it's very effective for certain things. It's also riddled with problems for other things, for example human beings in general, we are very poor predictors of our own performance. So you know, just ask anyone with a child and ask them how bright their child is. Nobody is going to tell you that their child is below average average, you know, they're Oh, you know, top 1%, 10%, 5%. Well, that's not true because most of us are average. Kathleen: That's why it's the definition. 90% of us are not in the top 10%.  John: That's exactly right. So what a prediction market is, is it is think of a market, probably one of the most common is the stock market. So, you know, the stock market is a platform where people have are placing wagers on whether or not, you know, the value of a company is going to increase or decrease. So if you think about this, and this is a great book that I'll have to give you. It's by a poker player. I'll give it to you so you can add to the show notes, but basically if you ask somebody, you know, do you think Apple stock is going to be higher than it is the value of it is going to be higher in one month from today's point you know, you might say, yes. Okay, well, how much are you willing to bet it's up? So if you put real money, your hard earned money, like how many shares of Apple stock are you willing to purchase at today's price? Check out "Thinking In Bets" by Annie Duke John: You know, and it is, are your beliefs, do they change? So a prediction market is, you are using the social behavioral characteristics of individuals and their collective kind of wisdom of the crowd, thinking about whether or not the probability of something becoming true or taking place. And so that is a much more accurate indicator of actual events that happen than simply asking someone in a survey or a poll. So now, what we're so excited about is the two of those together. So now you know, our platform, not only do we help aggregate information that you're gathering and do that analysis on it, we are now adding this research component to the tool as well, so that you can do your research. You can, you know, you can store it within one central repository and you can make it available to the organization as it needs to be Kathleen: Cool. And I know you guys are using it for things like trying to predict what the world post COVID is going to look like and all kinds of other really interesting forward looking applications. So thank you for sharing that. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: We are now coming towards the end of our time, so I wanna make sure I squeeze in my couple of questions that I ask everybody. The first is, of course we are all about inbound marketing on this podcast. So is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? John: Let's see, you know, I I just recently became aware of a tool MarketMuse. I think that they're doing a very good job with their messaging, kind of very classic, kind of inbound marketing freemium model, et cetera. So I would say that they're one company that does a really good job of inbound marketing. And I have to say then another one that comes to mind and you know, full disclosure here, I'm a customer and and a big fan of Databox. I think Databox, and Pete Caputa's doing a phenomenal job there. He cranks out more content and they use their chat panel to support customers and are really all about helping customers solve problems. And they're, they're doing a fantastic job. I think, of inbound marketing. Kathleen: Yeah, Pete's awesome. And fun fact, he was a very early guest of this podcast. So if you want to get some insight into how Pete does marketing, you can listen to that episode with him. And I will put that link in the show notes. Question number two. The biggest challenge I hear marketers share with me is that so much changes so quickly in the world of digital marketing. So how do you personally keep yourself educated and up to date on everything that's going on? John: I have a hugely unfair advantage being married to a fantastic marketer who is constantly scouring the interweb for the latest and greatest tool and slacking me at home because yes, we have our own personal Slack channel for our youngest son and Kathleen and myself. But, selfishly I rely heavily on what you share with me. Kathleen: Well, that's a valid answer and it's true. I mean, it's so funny. So we're sitting here, it's during the COVID pandemic and of course we're still working from home. So I am up in my office, which is on the second floor of our house. John is in his current office, which is smack dab in the middle of our kitchen. And we are Zooming with each other from two rooms away and yes, we Slack each other from two rooms away all week long. So we are the big old marketing nerds that do that. How to connect with John Kathleen: All right. If somebody wants to connect with you learn more about Knowledge360, ask you a question about competitive intelligence. What is the best way for them to connect with you online?  John: I would say the best way to connect with me is via LinkedIn. John Booth, like the guy that shot Lincoln, but not related. And if you want to learn more about Knowledge360, you can go out to Cipher-sys.com or TryK360.com and learn. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Awesome. I will share that in the show notes. Thank you for joining me, John. I know you have a busy day. We are recording on a Sunday and I'm pretty sure there's like some kind of house project that you want to be working on instead of recording a podcast with me. And if you're listening and you learn something new and you like what you heard, please, head to Apple podcasts, leave the podcast at five star review. That is how other people find us. And I would really appreciate it. But that is it for this week. Thank you, John. John: Thank you, Kathleen. Kathleen: And happy father's day. Because we are recording on father's day. You're the best for doing this for me. Thank you. Alright. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening everyone.

15-Minute Strategy Podcast EP39: Better Behavior Around Your Data [Sprocket Talk] In this episode, we talk with Pete Caputa from Databox about implementing better behavior around your data and measurements.

15-Minute Strategy Podcast EP38: Better Behavior Around Your Data [Sprocket Talk] In this episode, we talk with Pete Caputa from Databox about implementing better behavior around your data and measurements.

15-Minute Strategy Podcast EP37: Better Behavior Around Your Data [Sprocket Talk] In this episode, we talk with Pete Caputa from Databox about implementing better behavior around your data and measurements.

Gabriel sits down with software partner and good friend Pete Caputa, CEO of Databox, to discuss opportunities that Databox can provide in a time where it's more important than ever to understand your data. From focusing on what you can control to understanding how each part of your business is performing, this episode is filled with valuable content.

In this episode we talk to Peter Caputa about how he went from struggling entrepreneur to Hubspot VP to CEO of a multimillion dollar ARR business! 2:00 - Why did you decide to join hubspot? 4:45 - The reason you joined hubspot was because of the financial benefit or something else? 6:27 - What started your idea of creating the hubspot partner program? 10:45 - Why did he continue to push hubspot partner program after being told no so many times? 12:00 - How old were you when you were creating hubspot partner program? 13:20 - What are the characteristics of someone who is successful at a start up? 15:00 - Do you think joining a start up is the right way to get rich? Or why should people join a startup? 16:20 - How to see a rocketship company 18:00 - How did you negotiate for more equity over time? 19:11 - How Pete won 50,000 shares of hubspot stock 23:15 - How do you view the long term goal of Databox? 26:51 - What was the ARR when you joined Databox? - few thousand dollars. - 1.1M in july 2018 - jan 2019 1.7M - 2.8M Arr - check blog post called how to manage performance during crisis 28:00 - How COVID-19 has effected Databox. 32:00- How to make your SEO better using Databox 34:00 - Why did he choose the go to market strategy that he chose for Databox 41:00 - Does Databox have direct sales reps? 43:20 - Is Databox hiring? 45:00 - Databox on remote working

In this episode of Coffee Talks, our Agency Strategist, Kara, had the amazing opportunity to sit down with Pete Caputa from Databox. Kara & Pete discuss the creation of Smart Lists, the correlation between Wistia & Databox, and just the overall importance of data monitoring.

Clodagh Higgins consults & coaches owners of Digital Marketing & Sales Agencies on how to run a successful and profitable business. She was consulting with HubSpot pre IPO being employee 45. Working on the Hubspot partner program with Pete Caputa, she was exposed to hundreds of agencies so she has a unique inside view into what the best agencies do that the others don’t. She is also an EOS advocator and a published author and sort after speaker. She knows more about the day to day stresses and slings and arrows of running an agency than most. She says; 'growing an agency today is like you’re on a boat, but at the same time, you’re building a bigger boat and hiring a crew, while you’re sailing towards your destination.' If you are at all interested in: -Hiring, she’s been around the block a few times, she knows how to find and keep rockstar employees. She gives you the playbook to just take away the pain that all agencies have in that area. -Growing a profitable agency -Hubspot -Culture Check out her talk at Inbound 2019 here: https://youtu.be/kGurBCOD-JM

Pete Caputa, CEO of Databox, talks about their strategy of creating an ecosystem for agencies to learn about Databox, and how building out a partner program helped Databox grow to $1.5M in annual revenue. Visit https://www.leadquizzes.com/podcast for the complete show notes of every podcast episode.   Topics Discussed in this Episode: [01:48] Pete’s experience at HubSpot [05:07] How Pete got involved with Databox [07:45] How Databox started [10:32] Building out the partner program at Databox [12:41] Pricing for Databox [13:16] What they do to attract more agencies to Databox [15:25] How they define top partners [16:02] How they went about finding agencies [17:37] Their strategy of creating an ecosystem for agencies to learn about Databox through article contributions [21:21] Creating surveys and getting input from different agencies [22:00] Why they outsource the writing of articles [24:36] The Databox free program and why they decided to keep it [28:28] How they got more users to use their software [30:00] How they come up with ideas to help improve adoption [32:27] When Pete felt that Databox was going to fail [34:42] The one thing they did that had the biggest impact on their growth [35:38] The area that Pete was personally involved in growing at Databox   Key Takeaways: Agencies are being bombarded by software companies right now, and so the product really needs to work for them. The first thing that software companies get wrong is they start a partner program and they don’t even think about how the agencies are going to do their work. Most agencies hesitate to spend even a few bucks a month and so it’s good to set up the price so that it’s a very minimal amount of money per client, and it’s very easily justified by any time savings they would get from automating. The nice thing about agencies is they kind of pay attention to each other and they learn from each other, so once you get a few partners on board, it becomes a lot easier to be more credible with the rest. Action Steps: Invite agencies to contribute to articles that you’re writing as a way for you to get in front of them without being promotional about what you do. Consider offering a freemium product by looking at its benefits to sales and marketing.   Pete said: “I realized there was a real pain point for agencies, specifically, in that they were manually producing their reports at the end of the month for every client by logging in to multiple tools… and realized that we could automate a lot of that process for them.” “I look at marketing combined with a freemium product and to me, it just feels like a cash register because, especially with organic content marketing, once you figure something out, it produces returns for you for a long time with very little care and feeding.”   More from Pete Caputa: Pete’s LinkedIn Pete’s Twitter (@pc4media)   Tools and resources mentioned in this episode: Databox   Sponsor link 14-day Free Trial to LeadQuizzes   Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast! And don’t forget to leave me a rating and a review on iTunes!

Pete Caputa, CEO at Databox and former lead of HubSpot's Agency Partner Program, joined us for an interview about the Predictable Performance methodology and advice for agency owners. *** More Information *** Want to learn more about ZenPilot? https://www.zenpilot.com Want to join the Agency Journey Insiders group on Facebook? https://www.facebook.com/groups/agencyjourneyinsiders Want to see how your agency revenue lines up with industry benchmarks? https://www.zenpilot.com/benchmark Want to learn the EXACT process we use to help marketing agencies implement processes and systems they need to scale without reinventing the wheel? https://www.zenpilot.com/freedom #AgencyJourney

How do companies with successful channel marketing programs increase customer lifetime value by 150% while decreasing the cost of customer acquisition by up to 75%? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast I'm joined by Bryn Jones, the CEO of PartnerStack - a SaaS platform that enables companies to build and manage partner channel marketing programs.  PartnerStack's clients range from startups to publicly traded companies like Intuit and Shopify. What they all have in common is channel marketing, and the insights that Bryn has gained by working with them have made him an authority on what it takes to build a successful partner channel. In this week's episode, he talks about the types of companies that are a good fit for channel marketing (TL;DR - it's just about everybody), when to start a channel, what it takes to build a successful channel, how much it costs, and what kinds of results you should expect. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with keynote speakers including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Bryn include: PartnerStack helps companies grow through partnerships by providing the technology layer that enables them to build a partner channel marketing program. Approximately 30% of the software sold every year is sold through channel programs. Partner channels are the best way to get in front of the late adopters and laggards in the market, which is the majority of the market. Bryn believes that partner channels can work for any type of business. The best way to start a partner channel is to identify four different potential types of partners, and the work with ten companies in each category (so 40 total). From that initial 40, you will be able to identify which category is the best fit for your business. Companies with partner channels, on average, have customer lifetime values that are 1.5 times higher than those without channel programs. When it comes to partner incentives, start with basic recognition (ex. thank you notes). When you're ready to scale up, cash rewards tend to work better than coupons or gift cards. HubSpot, Shopify and Intuit are all companies with best-in-class partner programs. Bryn says that companies that have partner programs aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business. The most successful partner channels aren't selling incentives, they are selling value that the company (that offers the partner program) can go through and then provide to the partner. When creating a new partner channel program, start by building out a portal and automating communication with partners. Make sure to create case studies about your partners' successes. Companies with $3 to $5 million in annual revenues are generally a good fit for starting a partner channel.  If you're serious about doing this, and doing it well, be prepared to hire a dedicated full-time person to work on your partner channel and give them at least six months to become successful. The typical partner channel program can increase customer lifetime value by 150% and decrease the cost of customer acquisition by up to 75%. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the PartnerStack website Email Bryn at bryn@partnerstack.com  Bryn Jones on Twitter Connect with Bryn on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn more about what types of companies are a good fit for channel marketing, when to start one, and what the specific characteristics are of the most successful partner channel marketing programs. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guess is Bryn Jones who's the co-founder and CEO of PartnerStack. Welcome Bryn. Bryn Jones (Guest): Hey how are you? Kathleen, how are you? Bryn and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I'm great, thanks. How are you doing? Bryn: Good, good. I'm in California today, so doing some last minute travel right before the year ends, getting in front of customers. Kathleen: Nice. The last minute hustle. Hopefully you get to wrap that up soon and have a little down time for the holidays. Bryn: Yeah, yeah. No, it's ... I mean, that's the great thing about enterprise software is it's pedal to the metal, but the holidays does leave a little bit of time for people to rest and recuperate, so looking forward to getting back into the office next week and putting a solid plan together for next year. Kathleen: Yeah, it sure beats being in retail this time of year. Bryn: Absolutely. About PartnerStack Kathleen: So before we jump into our conversation for today, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and about PartnerStack, and what it does. Bryn: Yeah, perfect. Yeah so PartnerStack, we're a three year old company. Three years ago we got into a business incubator called Y Combinator. We went in as an idea, and we came out as a semi-functioning product. But what it is that we do is we let companies grow through partnerships. What that means is we're the technology layer that lets companies go and build partner or channel programs. So an example of this would be Intuit. They drive about 20% of their revenue through accountants, bookkeepers, and financial institutions. Except this whole process is incredibly challenging to 1) manage, and 2) actually ensure that it's in fact successful. We're the layer of technology that lets marketers get back to being marketers, and get away from being administrators. Kathleen: I definitely feel like it shows that you went through Y Combinator, because you have your value prop and pitch completely nailed down, which I know that gets drilled into you when you go through these incubators and accelerators, that being one of the, obviously the most famous ones. So what led you to wanting to create the solution? Was it something from your background or experience? Did you see that pain point? Bryn: Super interesting. So my other founders and I, we actually built another company while I was in graduate school. The company was like Slack, except it was pretty much worse in every other way in that the product wasn't as good, we certainly didn't have the revenue growth, and we definitely weren't able to go fundraise. But what we realized is we could instead innovate on business model. I don't think enough technology companies go through and do this, and so we started working with a network of agencies. These networks of agencies, they would send us business, and we'd simply send them a commission. This was incredibly interesting, because people started reaching out to us saying, "Hey, how are you managing your channel program? How are you managing your partner program?" Quite frankly, we just said, "What's that?" It took us down this big path where we realized, there's a ton of software sold each year, and 30% of the is coming through channel partners. This is kind of like the last fossil inside of a technology company, that technology hasn't had to go through it and understand distribution. But really it's the best way to get in front of the late adopters and laggards in the market, which is the majority of the market. Kathleen: Yeah, that's really interesting. I have been a participant in channel programs. I've been a value-added reseller, a partner, whatever you want to call it, for quite a few years, with several different technology companies. But I have never been in a company that had a partner or reseller program. So if somebody is listening and they're the in-house marketer, what would you say are the questions they should be asking themselves to understand better whether a channel program is right for their business? How To Know If A Channel Marketing Program Is Right For Your Business Bryn: Gotcha. We firmly believe that channel works for everyone's business. The reason why we believe that, is because we can see that is in fact true. Specifically in software, it works really well. What it really it comes down to is: Who are your channel partners? Is it more of an affiliate? Is it a larger partnership with a bank? Is it a partnership through accountants and bookkeepers? Everyone has a specific channel partner that will work for them, and you might not get it right the first time. So really it's a process about running experiments where you're first off, trying to determine the channel partner profile. You do this by finding 10 channel partners and making them successful, and then replicating it over, and over, and over. Now the best way that we recommend for companies to go on and do this, is to write down four different channel partners they believe will work, and go and try to backfill it. So it ends up resulting in you actually getting 40 channel partners onboard. The reality is, is one of those groups will work really well. One of those groups will work sort of well. The other two groups will in fact fail, so that's the starting point of a channel program. It does work for everyone. It depends on what your goals are. This isn't a marketing channel that you turn on overnight and it immediately starts pumping out lots of revenue. But the reason why people need to go through and invest in it early, is because the lifetime value, sorry, the cost to acquire customers through channel is actually less expense than through any other means. Then the lifetime value of those customers is significantly more. We're seeing in our customers it's up to 1.5 times more, and so it's an investment worth making early days, because it's the only thing that's going to let you go through it in scale. Kathleen: Now you said when you were talking about that this, that channel can work for everyone. Do you mean everyone in software, or everyone period? Bryn: Well, it's interesting. I think everyone period. Technology companies are the ones where we've gone through it and focused, but most other sectors are using channel in some way, shape, or form today. The best example would be the way Toyota sells their cars through a network of dealerships. They don't think of that as channel, but certainly it is channel. Those dealerships are owned by independent business people, and that relationship is always challenging. So nontraditional sectors have done a very good job at understanding channel. It just hasn't been formally called that, and so what we're seeing in the space is actually some of the most innovative stuff, is really coming out of agencies, in the way that they go through and manage their referrals, because it drives so much of their business. Kathleen: Yeah, it's funny when you say that these other industries are doing it without calling it channel, because what first came to my mind was specialist physicians. For example, I've worked for years with a client that does laser eye surgery. They get all of their business through referrals. I had a call the other day with a company that just does medical imaging, so MRIs, all of their business. Nobody goes in the phone book to pick out where they're going to get their MRI. It all comes through a referring physician. So in the medical field, it's incredibly common. I think we as consumers experience channels all the time. I think a lot of people just don't know that there's a name for that. Bryn: Yeah, it's the infrastructure underneath of the way that those referrals go through and work, and so our thesis is that this is actually much more scientific than it has been. There is a way to go through and do it. You can optimize that process, and when you optimize that process, you just get a better ROI. How To Start A Channel Marketing Program Kathleen: Yeah, so if somebody is listening and they think a channel could work for them, you mentioned that the first step is to figure out four, let's call it buckets, of types of channel partners, and to backfill those buckets, 10 partners in each bucket, so you've got 40 partners. Then it sounded like what you were saying is to do almost an A/B test, only I guess in this case it would be an A/B/C/D test, and figure out which of those is working the best. Is that accurate? Bryn: That's 100% accurate. You create the buckets, and you're trying to build a persona behind it. Where is this person located? What is their age demographic? What is their occupation? Maybe most importantly, what is the reason they are sending me business? You go through and you run those A/B tests, and you try to figure out who's going to most effectively send you the business. When you do, you have to figure out what's the incentive you will then go through and provide them. Is it a discount? Is it a coupon? Is it a reward? Is it cash? We've seen companies go through it and work through this. It could just be as simple as co-marketing material, writing a blog post, or featuring people. People like to be recognized for the work that they do. I mean, it could quite frankly be as simple as sending a thank you letter. But no one has enough process, we believe, behind the way that you go through it and recognize, and incentivize people to help you grow your business. Structuring The Right Incentives For Channel Partners Kathleen: Have you seen any evidence of what types of incentives tend to produce the best outcomes in channel programs? Bryn: It depends on what the goal of the channel program is. We find, as funny as it sounds, very basic things work, so just general recognition; thank you letters, acknowledging that you did in fact receive benefit, and that you appreciate that. Most people drop the ball there, and so that's a very basic step that can be done. "Hey, you know what, thank you for sending me Sally over. Got her all setup and it was really great. You really helped me out here." That's the most basic version of that. Then it can go all the way up to cash rewards. Though some people sometimes think, "Oh cash, that doesn't feel very good, maybe that's not what I want to go through it and do," the reality is, it works more often than gift cards. From the data that we've seen on our platform, cash works more in building a program that can infinitely scale, than just coupons, because what ends up happening, or gift cards, what ends up happening is you just bring in people to your program that just want to get gift cards. There's a very small segment of the population that only wants that, and so it's a very misleading idea. I mean, we always tell people, "If you were to go through and partner with Amazon, you couldn't pay them in Amazon gift cards, so why do you think that you can build a longterm scalable program where it's like this?" Kathleen: Yeah, I would tend to agree with that, having been on the partner side. I would think that gift cards could potentially work if your ideal partner is an individual, truly an individual person, because then their incentive is, "Sure this is money I can spend on myself." But if your partner is any kind of a company, gift cards have to be used by somebody. I think what's attractive about it ... I used to own my own marketing agency, and we were partners with a lot of different organizations, probably the most prominent of which was HubSpot, which has a very good partner program, 20% in perpetuity of any monthly recurring revenue that you sell. What was attractive about it for me was that I was in a business where there wasn't a lot of - what's the word I'm looking for? - residual income, if you will. You're selling your hours, your time, it's not super scalable. But a partner commission changes the game a little bit, if you can accumulate enough to make it meaningful, so I would agree with that. Bryn: Yeah. No, and that's what we're seeing. I mean ultimately if you go through and invest in the channel, what you want to do is you want to enable people to be able to earn a living, build a career, build a business off of the channel program that you go through and build. If you accomplish that, then you will have an incredibly successful channel program. That is an optimal end state that I think that everybody can go through it and work to, as long as people understand that it's doing the basics really well. But you have to be working towards, "How is this a longterm sustainable channel that runs and operates completely on its own?" There's many different touchpoints that get you there to that. Bryn: It's interesting that you mentioned HubSpot. I mean, we always point to them as the leader in understanding channel at a very early day. Peter Caputa, and the work that he did to really create a community around it, it's not just about money. It's teaching people how to build services around software, and that had never been done before. Yeah, it was incredibly impressive the way that that's happened. Kathleen: Yeah, Pete Caputa, he's an amazing guy. He's also who introduced us, so shout-out to Pete. I have to underscore what you just said, because it's kind of blown me away. I mean, becoming a part of that partner program was a major game changer for my business and therefore as a result, for my life. I've said that to him. In fact, I said that to him on his birthday this year. But the thing that amazed me about it was how almost religious people got as part of that partner program. I mean, I always saw a ton of value in it, but there were partners ... It was incredibly common to hear people say, "I bleed orange, or I drink the orange Kool-Aid," because HubSpot's logo is orange, which are pretty extreme statements if you really think about the meaning behind them. People who would paint their office walls orange, buy orange clothes, I mean it really was this incredibly evangelical approach to being a part of a partner program. You don't see that very often, so I think that that's to me the clearest manifestation of the value that Pete delivered to the partners that joined in the HubSpot partner program. Bryn: Yeah, and you know what, there are other programs that are like this that work well, specifically in SaaS I can point to Shopify. Shopify has built thousands of agencies in this point in time that help people go through and service Shopify stores. Excuse me. It all comes down to the fact that they know they aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business. "They aren't selling an opportunity to earn a commission. They're selling an opportunity to do business." ~Bryn Jones   Click to Tweet this Though it sounds very different, you're selling a partnership. What are you bringing to the table when you're setting that partnership up? It starts very low in the funnel, all the way from the thank you letter, to the coupon, to the recognition and the co-marketing stuff, and then all the way up to cash. So there is a step by step process in which you go through and built this. But it's just having a key, like, treat your partners the same way you would treat your employees. Bryn: If you come at it with that type of approach, and though it sounds very soft, you can unpack it, and they are very, very, very specific things that you can go through, to do to make that work. What Makes For a Successful Channel Program? Kathleen: Yeah. Now in my experience, as I mentioned, I've been a member of quite a few partner programs. What's really interesting to me anecdotally, is that, I think in every case the platform that I was a partner for, and I'm thinking of SAS software partnerships right now, in every case the platform was a great platform that delivered plenty of value. But the degree of value that I would say I derived and the platform did out of the partnership really varies. So there would be some companies like HubSpot, where my company, myself, the company I'm with now, we're very invested in that relationship. Then there's others where it's just like a failure to launch. It never really gets off the ground. At least in my experience, very little of that has to do with the actual incentives. You might have comparable incentives across five partnership programs, and have five very, very different results. So can you talk a little bit about ... For a company that wants to start a channel program, once they put that incentive in place, what are the other building blocks that are necessary to set partners up for success, and to have a longterm, really thriving partner relationship? Bryn: Yeah, so I mean the first and most important thing is that you aren't selling incentives, you are selling value that you can go through and then provide to the partner. That's not some abstract thing. You actually need to teach and train the partner how to go through and sell your product, or make the recommendation for you. You need to invest heavily, heavily in training and education materials that partners can through and access, so that they can understand how to sell your product. "You aren't selling incentives, you are selling value that you can go through and then provide to the partner." ~ Bryn Jones   Click to Tweet this Bryn: It's not like selling to a customer. It's again, selling a relationship. It's the same way as you would onboard an employee, so that's the first step that needs to occur. You need to understand that there needs to be an investment into understanding the value. For you as a company, you need to understand what the partner wants out of the relationship, because again, it's not just money, and so you need to spend some time to go through and do that investigation. They may not tell you. In fact, they probably won't, because they even know. But often what we find it is, is you as a company understand the value of your product, but I need to be trained the same way as an employee would be. That takes a lot of hand holding, beyond ... Specific things, you could put a learning management system in place, invest in technology. If you're going to invest in technology to employees that you bring on, whether that be through Slack, your CRM, many of the marketing automation tools that are in fact out there, you need to invest in technology to go through and then support your partner ecosystem. That technology starts with a learning management system. You should probably go through and create a basic portal. I'm not going to go through and hawk our platform, but then there are other things you need to go through and consider. You need to be building email campaigns to ensure that partners, once they come on board, they are in fact getting engaged. You need to think of it like a pipeline. Top of funnel is opening up and bringing new partners in, and then mid funnel is really how do you ensure that partners are moving through that pipeline. You need to determine when you should go through and reach out to them. If you can go through and do it, you're not going to make everyone successful all the time, but there's at least a lifeline. You're building a lifeline for them to reach out to you when they need help. That's why channel is a longterm investment. But those are some of the specific things we can think through. Then there's even more granular stuff. Build case studies, not where you talk about your product, but where you talk about your partner, and their company, and their clients, and the way that they're going through and selling, and the struggles that they're going through and facing. If you can build those case studies, and you can work alongside the partners to actually promote them inside of your blog, that's how you quickly build a community. Kathleen: Absolutely. That's been my experience, is that a lot of, especially if you're working with agencies for example, well, and I would think that this is true of most partner relationships, that that agency, that company, that is your partner is running their own business, they have a lot going on, their number one focus is not the partnership generally. So the easier you can make it for them to be successful, it's almost like, "Can you spoon feed success to them?" This is what HubSpot did really well. It had phenomenal partner onboarding. The partner success managers are great. They gave us a ton of content that we could white label and use in own marketing. I mean, that's making it easy. We needed to get leads as an agency, and HubSpot would just give us all this content, whether it was eBooks, or infographics, or what have you, that we could put our logo on and send out, and even change, customize copy. Making it that easy made it easy for us to invest in the partnership, so I would definitely agree with what you said there. Bryn: Yeah, just treat your partners like they're employees. For the people that are the marketers really driving these initiatives inside of organizations, I recognize one of the hardest challenges that everyone has is actually getting buy-in from executives. The best way to go through and communicate this to executives when this comes up, is to walk them through that. If these people are going to provide us a lower cost to acquire customers, a higher lifetime value, why aren't we willing to treat them the same way as we would any salesperson, or any other marketer that were to come on here? If you really push that and understand how aggressively you can go through and push it, it's very surprising how quickly finance comes in and says, "That makes sense." It's also important to understand that this isn't something that gets turned on and works overnight, but is the only way that you will truly continue to scale up longterm in the business. Then the other thing where we see people fail often is when they think there's one partnership that will work. "Oh, this one partnership is going to change the direction of our company." That's where you see a lot of scar tissue, you know? People have learned their lessons. Lots of scars have come from thinking through this one partnership with this one big company, that's going to change everything. Where reality is, those partnerships, to be frank, I have never seen them lead to anything, and so don't do that. That's certainly not the place that you want to go through and start with, because it costs so many resources, it takes so much time, and the likelihood of the payoff actually happening is actually very low. Kathleen: It's also incredibly risky. When I hear that, I think about a portfolio investment strategy. If you went to your financial advisor, they would never say to put all of your money into one stock. It could be an incredibly well performing stock, but they would never say put everything into that one stock, because you would have all your eggs in one basket. If that thing disappears, if that partner disappears, even if it is a successful relationship that does bear fruit, if all of the sudden in year two something happens and it goes away, what are you left with? Nothing, you have nothing. Bryn: I feel so bad. I'll tell you from our experience. One of the most challenging things for use when we first started PartnerStack in 2015 was customer development. The reason being is, we would go out and talk to partner, or channel, or community managers. No joke, we tracked it in our CRM, and 30% of the time, they would end up losing their job within six months of a conversation happening. We went back and looked at why they were losing their job, and very often, very high percentage of the time, it was because the pursuit of one single partnership. To this day, we've never seen that payoff. It's something that we always, always, always warn people about. You cannot under invest in this channel. It takes time, and there is no silver bullets, there's just a lot of lead. If you get that buy-in, and you communicate that across the company, it ultimately will be something that's successful. I mean, look at HubSpot. 40% of the revenue comes through channel. You can go through and look at companies like Shopify. When they IPO'd, 25% of their revenue was coming through channel, and so it's a huge, huge, huge opportunity. It's the only way you'll go through it and hit scale. It's just making sure you have buy-in. When Should You Start A Channel Program? Kathleen: So is there a certain point in a company's maturity when starting a channel program makes sense? It sounds like it's somewhat resource intensive to do it well, so is this something that you've seen companies do right out of the gate successfully? Or do they need to have a little time, and experience, and track record underneath them before they should move to starting a channel? Bryn: It's my belief that channel, when you make the investment, you can do it very early. The way you can do it is, it's very important to collect the data required to build those personas that we discussed, those four different buckets. The sooner you can start collecting that data, the better those personas become. We think that starting early is good. But when you start, you have to think of it as an experiment. All you're doing when you put a channel program in place, is you're putting a sign on the door that says, we're open for business. You should expect nothing to come through. You should just track it, and collect the data on it. Where we see it start to really work is when companies hit that three to five million inflection point, and it's because, simply put, companies have it figured out. They know where to collect payment information. We've seen people, and have had instances where people got really upset where channel programs didn't work. We've gone through, dug into their program and realized, they actually forgot to collect payment information. This doesn't fix a broken product or a broken process. But it will accelerate growth once you hit those inflection points, so I say three to five million is typically when you want to ... you know you ... If you're in a three to five million dollar revenue run rate, in order for you to hit 15 to 20, you're going to need to invest in channel in some way, shape, or form. The sooner you do it, the better. But that being said, we've worked with companies who have had less than 250,000 dollars in revenue, and have now grown revenues upwards and over three million dollars in revenue, because they really invested and understood channel. So there's no wrong time, but there's certainly an optimum time. What Does It Cost To Start And Run A Channel Marketing Program? Kathleen: Yeah. From a resource standpoint, walk me through what a company should be prepared to invest, in terms of staff to support this; level of effort, budget. I know you can't give me specifics, but give me a general sense of it they want to go in with their eyes wide open, what does it take to do this well? Bryn: You need a dedicated person on this program at the very least - one person where their job is to figure out channel partners. That is what their job is. You can't pull them off and having them do case studies. Or you can't pull them off and doing smaller tasks that go through and then pop up. You need to give one person a responsibility. You need to make one person responsible for channel. That one person can, within a six month period, should be able to generate significant revenue. I don't mean cover the cost of their salary by any means, but we've seen it go through and happen. But it will be a substantial amount of revenue, and you can see the path of growth going forward. If you interrupt that person, if you put them on different projects, if you say, "Okay, not only are you managing channel, but you're going to manage community too" very, very clear and concise in what their role was. Their goal needs to be, first to recruit partners, then to take those partners and turn them into people that actually engaged. Once they are in fact engaged -  engagement looks like training, day to day communication, opening and reading emails - once they are in fact engaged, they are actually starting to send you business or have ideas of how they will go through and send you business. But you need at least one person dedicated to it. I cannot stress that enough. Then after the fact, you hit a point where you decide, do you want to solve this with people, or do you want to solve this with technology? That's typically where PartnerStack comes in. We've seen companies, you would be very surprised at how big companies can become, just managing this with people. Though it's a really good thing, because they're figured this thing out, it's also very expensive. So there are companies where there are several hundred people working on channel alone, manually at the end of each month calling people and asking, "Hey, did you close this account? Did you close that account?" Oh, there's a channel conflict. That being where a partner sends business, and then a sales rep goes and closes it. Who are you paying the commission to? That's why it's important, once you hit that one to three mark, that you need to put technology in behind it. I mean, we've talked with companies where they've overpaid channel partners millions of dollars each year, because it wasn't gone through and tracked correctly. So there does need to be technology at some point in time. You do need to convince finance that it's worth an investment. But it's very easy to go through and point to. Kathleen: I can definitely speak from the user standpoint about why that is important, because I remember ... Again, we're part of several channel partner programs. I would say HubSpot is, again, is the most professional in terms of how it's run. But it's also evolved a lot over the years. When I first joined that partner program, we were still entering our leads into a dedicated Salesforce portal. Now they've got lead registration seamlessly a part of their CRM, which is genius. You don't have to leave the environment you're working in. To me, lead registration is one of the biggest pain points. I'm part of other partner programs where there is no good system. You have to email your partner rep. It's so imperfect. Then once you've done that, you don't know how to track it, because there isn't a portal that you can look in. So it's messy, and if that's messy, then I think that slows things down quite a bit for the use. I know for myself, if you don't have a clear sense of, "Alright, what am I working on? What is closed? What's in the pipeline?" it's hard to be effective. It's hard to get excited about it too. Bryn: Yeah, I think that this is all about optimizing for the partner's experience, and so everything that we do, every investment that we make is to try to enable that. So we try to automate programs as much as possible, as much as you possibly can, because that improves the partner experience. If you can improve, build the perfect partner experience, those partners will more likely than not be successful on your platform. But the reality is, is where partnerships and channel, today in 2018, is where sales operations was in 2000, where is didn't exist before things like Salesforce and HubSpot. Where marketing automation was in 2005 to 2008, that's the state of things today. So if you go back and compare to sales operation and marking automation, and you see the structure, the infrastructure, the requirements, and ultimately the returns that the investments in fact made, it's easy to go through and justify something further up front. Fortunately today, there are ... We're not certainly the only people in this space. We see other people do a really great job of stuff, and there's a lot of options for when that comes up. But at the end of the day, you have to optimize for partner experience. Your partners are going to tell you. Quite frankly, if they're not telling you, they're telling you. Silence is negative feedback, and I don't think people quite realize that too often. PartnerStack's Partner Channel Kathleen: Now, does PartnerStack have a partner channel? Bryn: Yes we do. We do have a partner channel. We've had a partner channel since day one. Since year one in our business, it's driven revenue for us. Certainly like everybody, you can through ... There are improvements for it to go through and be made. But for us, working with agencies has been, it's so much fun, because all the sudden, we're training people how to add another service line to their business. We're training them that they can go to their clients, and they can differentiate themselves on the market and say, "Hey, not only can we do email marketing, can we manage your website, can we do PR, but also we can know how to go through and manage the channel." When we walk agencies and our partners through that, the level of excitement that they have is unbelievable, because quite frankly, there are only so many new services that can be launched. This is something that's unique. We've seen agencies be very successful and generate a lot of new business of it. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect With A Partner Channel Marketing Program? Kathleen: Yeah. Walk me through the results. You have your own partner program. You work with companies. Obviously by definition, everyone that is a client of yours has a partner program. Can you tell me a little bit about the kinds of results you're seeing, either for yourselves, or for the companies that are using your platform? Bryn: Yeah, so I won't use specific customer names, but I will talk about some of the results that we've seen. We've seen early stage companies go from 250,000 dollars in revenue, to over a million five in revenue, in less than 16 months. This is completely bootstrapped, a team of four people moving upwards of a team of 10. We're driving upwards of 50% of their revenue, and it's awesome to see. We work with larger companies where people have hit annual milestones for their partner program within 24 hours of launching with our platform, because all of a sudden there was a way to go through and track stuff. Those people go through and get promotions because of it, which is incredibly exciting. I think that there are over 100,000 partners that are on our platform, that companies go through and work with today. What's unique about us is we believe very firmly, again, in partner experience. For us, that actually means enabling partners to join a broader network, where they can go through and pick other packages, and services that they can go through and promote. Companies go through a buy-in to this, so it's worked really well. It's been fun to watch. It's so fun to watch people go through it and be successful in their jobs, whether they be partners or companies that we've gone through and worked with. I mean for us, it accounts for 30% of our revenue, and drives 40% of our leads. We have a unique system in that there's a tiered version of it where you're dropped in. We give you an opportunity. We train you, and if you are in fact successful, we can move you to the next tier, and so I know that my customer success and sales teams love our partners. It's just fun to work with them. Kathleen: Now you started out talking about how prevalent channel programs are for software companies. I know for that particular vertical, two of the most important business metrics that they track are cost of customer acquisition, and lifetime value of a customer. In fact that ratio of LTV to CAC also is very important. You mentioned in the beginning that partner programs can really help optimize that. What have you seen, as far as how much does having a partner program enable you to bring that CAC, or cost of customer acquisition, down? How much does it extend the lifetime value? Bryn: Yeah, so we're seeing lifetime value for some of our customers to be over 200%. Median is about 150%, more than what they're currently used to. Anything over what they have now, everyone is happy with. But median returns, 150%. But we're seeing people as much as over 200%. The CAC is the thing that is incredibly interesting. We enable companies to go through and experiment with different incentives. Today you could go through and launch a bonus program where you pay an extra hundred dollars. Next month, maybe that that's not what you're going to go through and do, so we've been able to go through and test that. We've decreased CAC upwards of 75% in some companies. Kathleen: Wow. Bryn: Yeah. Some companies get really aggressive with their programs in the beginning and over invest, and actually try to not do that, because they're looking to improve engagement so much. But it's a result of not only are you unloading the cost of sales, I mean, this is the thing that people don't talk about enough, it's actually the cost of support after the fact. It's very hard to go through and quite frankly quantify that. But with our big customers that have those resources, those massive, massive finance teams, they've gone through and done it. That alone is enough for their finance teams to go through and invest in the tech to through it and support it. Kathleen: Wow, those are some impressive numbers. Well, so interesting, and this has really been the first time we've talked a lot of about channel programs on this podcast, so I'm really glad we had an opportunity to chat about it. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: I want to switch gears, because I want to make sure we have time for the two questions that I always ask all of my guests. My loyal listeners will have heard me say this time and time again, but I would love to know from your standpoint, we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast, so company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Bryn: That's really interesting. One of the companies that we see that has been doing a really great job of this, and that have been actually using their partner network to go through it and do it, is Intuit. Intuit has turned to their community to build content, and it's working really well. It's been very cool to see such a big company go through it and move so quickly, to go through it and take advantage of the opportunity. There's of course smaller companies that we've seen do a good job on this. But Intuit is the best example. Of course, I'm going to be biased with it. Intuit is the best example because they've leveraged their channel, their partners to actually create the content required to drive those advanced sales. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting, especially because they're such traditional industry, that a lot of people think of as very stodgy, so knowing that they're at the forefront of that is really fascinating. Now I'm going to have to take a look at Intuit's content, which I would normally not look at, now that I'm not a business owner anymore. But I did used to be in and out of QuickBooks every single day of my life for 11 years, so maybe I'll pay it a visit again. Kathleen: Second question, the world of digital marketing is changing at a lightning pace. How do you personally stay up to date and on top of all the new developments? Bryn: It's so tricky. One of the things that I've been doing lately is actually cutting the number of tools and technologies that I use way down. So instead of being spread out across all these social media platforms, I just focus on one. Kathleen: Which one? Bryn: Oddly enough, I go through and focus on LinkedIn. That's where I get most of my value from. I'm also following things on Twitter. That's certainly an area. But at the end of the day, with all this extra noise in the environment, I actually listen to people. I'm going through referrals more. I'm talking with my peers and asking them what works. I actually have a number of people through Y Combinator that I have biweekly calls with them still, that we've been continuing for three years now. We talk about it, what are the best things that we're seeing in the market. We also ask our customers when we're in the middle of doing any type of sale. We say, "Hey, just out of curiosity, do you have any new tools or technology that you're using?" As much as it's going through, researching and seeing what's out there, it still goes back to the basics. For me, it's limiting my consumption of technology, and going to the source, going to people, because I think with this influx of tools that are on the market, it's so hard to know which one is the best one to go through and pick. You have to go through and use referrals the way that you've always had to. So it's interesting, it's this weird thing that kind of through it and happened. Kathleen: Yeah, for me it's my podcast. I call or email people like you, because I'm interested in learning more. I interview you, and that's how I learn. If other people listen too, great, but I always say I would do it even if nobody listened, because it's- Bryn: Yeah, that's such a ... Maybe we'll have to start doing one, because that sounds like a really great idea to go through and learn how to, to go through it and talk with people. Talking with people is very underrated. Kathleen: Yeah, I would so agree. I've learned more doing this than I have doing anything else honestly. Well if you start a podcast, let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear about that. Bryn: I'll be calling you and we'll get you on there, first thing. Kathleen: There you go. How Reach Bryn Jones Kathleen: Well, so much fun talking with you. I've learned a lot about channel marketing, and I'm sure there are people listening that want to learn more, might have questions. What is the best way for them to learn more about PartnerStack, as well as connect with you as an individual online? Bryn: Yeah, so I mean, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on there. Connect with me, message me. I usually get back within 24 to 48 hours. People can reach out to me through email. It's first Bryn, B-R-Y-N @PartnerStack.com. You should check out PartnerStack or PartnerStack.com. Message one of our support or sales reps. We'll get you on the phone, and mostly walk you through what the potential is. One of the biggest things we push on people is like, "Hey, maybe now isn't the right time to go through it and invest in technology. Maybe you need to figure out your four buckets before you come through it and buy the platform." We love talking about this. We don't think enough people are talking about this, and so if you're interested, feel free to reach out any time, happy to always have a conversation about this. Kathleen: That is the mark of a great salesperson by the way - the salesperson who tells you, "You're not ready for us," and tells you what to do in order to get ready. Awesome, well thank you so much Bryn. If you are listening and you found value out of this or you learned something new, you know what to do. Please leave the podcast a review on Apple Podcasts, or on the platform of your choice. As always, if you know someone else that's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love for them to be my next interview. That's it for this week. Thanks Bryn. Bryn: Thank you so much. 

On today's podcast, Caputa and Moseley walk through all of the sales lessons they've learned in the last 22 months of working together. Things like: - What it is like to sell to companies who are already using a free product. - How our product team helped streamline his sales process. - How our marketing team helped position our product more effectively to new users. - How our customer support team helps users adopt the product and buy on their own. ...and more!

In the first of our brand new Grow North interviews we interview Pete Caputa, a man with an appetite to challenge convention, the CEO of DataBox and the ‘godfather’ of the HubSpot partner program - now over a $100 million sales channel for the marketing tech giant. Pete walks us through his personal growth journey from joining HubSpot as salesperson number 4, how he test his theory (and then the data) of using partner relationships to challenge internal thinking, his relentless pushing on the senior team to open up a new channel and his eventual success in getting his way. Effectively dramatically changing the course of HubSpot’s growth and building a network of global well supported, nurtured agencies. We speak to him about that appetite to challenge convention, his work ethic driven by his hard working parents and his journey into his role as CEO at DataBox, a tool that has fast become integral to the agency community. Pete goes on to give us insight into creating the growth platform driving over 2,500 monthly sign ups on DataBox and their plans moving into the next six months - well, some of his plans. This is a fascinating interview with one of the leading figures in the SaaS community. Mentions of note during the interview: DataBox: www.databox.com HubSpot: www.hubspot.com Pete’s Twitter: @pc4media BOOK | Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross

As we start the Wayfinding Growth show, Remington and I chat about how it was interesting to get a light into Pete’s thoughts around Impulse Creative as well as the two of us joining forces. We chat about being aware of yourself and your space for a couple of minutes. We then chat about Pete Caputa’s long history of marketing and measuring success through agency life, first at HubSpot and now Databox. We also dove back into the story of folks growing out of HubSpot. Charting The Course map-oldIn the Charting the Course section, we dig in deep this week. We start off by chatting about leadership needing to grab hold of predictable performance and run with it in order for it trickle down through the company and culture. We then talk about the methodology that Pete mentioned in last week’s episode. Remington gives us his thoughts around the five points, which are: Select key initiatives for the quarter. Set your monthly goals around your initiatives. Adapt your plans to those goals, weekly. Constantly monitor your progress. Share results in real time. We even brought up Marisa Smith and EOS and how Pete mentioned that as he talked about the methodology. Watch to learn more. *** More Information *** Want to learn more about Impulse Creative? https://www.impulsecreative.com Want to learn more about HubSpot? https://www.impulsecreative.com/learn/hubspot Want an in-person HubSpot or Inbound workshop? https://www.impulsecreative.com/services/hubspot-workshops

As we start the Wayfinding Growth show, Remington and I chat about how it was interesting to get a light into Pete’s thoughts around Impulse Creative as well as the two of us joining forces. We chat about being aware of yourself and your space for a couple of minutes. We then chat about Pete Caputa’s long history of marketing and measuring success through agency life, first at HubSpot and now Databox. We also dove back into the story of folks growing out of HubSpot. Charting The Course map-oldIn the Charting the Course section, we dig in deep this week. We start off by chatting about leadership needing to grab hold of predictable performance and run with it in order for it trickle down through the company and culture. We then talk about the methodology that Pete mentioned in last week’s episode. Remington gives us his thoughts around the five points, which are: Select key initiatives for the quarter. Set your monthly goals around your initiatives. Adapt your plans to those goals, weekly. Constantly monitor your progress. Share results in real time. We even brought up Marisa Smith and EOS and how Pete mentioned that as he talked about the methodology. Watch to learn more. *** More Information *** Want to learn more about Impulse Creative? https://www.impulsecreative.com Want to learn more about HubSpot? https://www.impulsecreative.com/learn/hubspot Want an in-person HubSpot or Inbound workshop? https://www.impulsecreative.com/services/hubspot-workshops

In this Wayfinding Growth episode, we talk with Pete Caputa from Databox about Predictable Performance Improvement. He shares where companies are, where they should head, and the pirates to watch out for along the way. He also shares some information around tools you can use as well as how Databox fits into the mix. *** More Information *** Want to learn more about Impulse Creative? https://www.impulsecreative.com Want to learn more about HubSpot? https://www.impulsecreative.com/learn/hubspot

In this Wayfinding Growth episode, we talk with Pete Caputa from Databox about Predictable Performance Improvement. He shares where companies are, where they should head, and the pirates to watch out for along the way. He also shares some information around tools you can use as well as how Databox fits into the mix. *** More Information *** Want to learn more about Impulse Creative? https://www.impulsecreative.com Want to learn more about HubSpot? https://www.impulsecreative.com/learn/hubspot

In this episode of Ground Up, Emma Brudner, the Director of the HubSpot Blog, joins Pete Caputa to chat about all things blog related, including: - The data behind the performance of the HubSpot Blog - What HubSpot's organic strategy looks like - The pillar/cluster model - How the blog team is structured, and more...

Our mission in season 1 of Smash The Funnel – The Podcast is to teach all of our listeners about the new buyer journey. We want you to understand how to apply tactics and metrics to that journey, and how to incorporate technology as well. In this final episode, we’re talking with Pete Caputa, CEO at Databox, about how to build dashboards for using metric and analytics at each stage of the new buyer journey. We discuss moving from tactical data review to stage data review, and we highlight the interesting insights that come with this switch. You’ll never think about data in the same way after joining us for this conversation with Pete.

Website redesign projects are typically of high strategic importance to companies, but they can be painstaking and time consuming. On this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Belch.io Founder Charles Drengberg talks about how he has shortened the amount of time needed for website redesigns, made it easier and faster to update sites over time, and in doing so, helped clients see a greater return on their website investments. Listen to the podcast to learn more about Charles's approach to website redesign projects and how you can apply these lessons to your own site redesign. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. Today, my guest is Charles Drengberg, who is the CEO and co-founder of Belch.io. Welcome, Charles. Charles Drengberg (guest): Thanks, Kathleen. I appreciate you having me on. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. A little story before we get into this. I met Charles at HubSpot's INBOUND Conference in 2017, and I was standing at IMPACT's booth. We sponsored the conference and had a booth in Club INBOUND. If you've ever been to the conference, it's a huge conference. I think there was like 20,000 people this year. Club INBOUND is like the central nervous system of the conference. Everybody passes through there. It's a packed space. We had our booth and I was working. Charles was at the booth next to us and was super friendly and came over and introduced himself. I just wanted to tell this story because it's one of the things I really love about, at least my experience that I've had to date in the HubSpot world, which is that whether it's other HubSpot partner agencies or other sponsors at the conference ... I think some other conferences you go to and people feel competitive. Like, "What do you have at your booth? Why are people there and not at mine?" For whatever reason in the HubSpot world, things are so collegial and friendly. I just appreciated that. I remembered our conversation and enjoyed it, and then was very excited when I had the opportunity to have you on here. Charles: Yeah, I feel the same way. It's a little odd at first when you go to the HubSpot Conference, because you're like, "When is the shoe going to drop?" I've been to a lot of different tech conferences, marketing conferences, and there's definitely more of a family feel. Everybody wants to work together. They have the same mission, so it feels organic. Kathleen: Yeah, it's really refreshing. I think part of it is that INBOUND mindset of, "It's not about keeping things secret or holding things in." It's, "If you've got a great product or a great service, you shouldn't be afraid to," as one of my mentors used to say, "Open the Kimono and share it with the world." You don't worry about competition, you worry about doing your stuff better than anybody else, right? Charles: Absolutely. Kathleen: Charles before we jump in and talk about websites, which is one of the things we're going to discuss today, I'd love it if you could tell our audience a little bit about you. You have kind of an interesting background that has spanned the service industry, as well as SaaS and IT and technology, so tell us a little bit about your history. Charles: Yeah. Every time I tell this story to different people in different positions in marketing, it's interesting, especially with agencies, it's interesting to hear everybody else's story. Sometimes they line up, and sometimes people are like, "That's crazy that you're at this point coming through this path." Where it really started was, I guess, 10, 12 years ago, something like that, a friend and I started a sports blog. I had been writing content and getting published in local newspapers and magazines and things like that for different stuff, like sports and news and politics and a lot of satire and comedy type of writing. We started a sports blog. When we started that sports blog, we had no money. We were doing it for fun. I learned a lot from that process. We grew very, very quickly, so I was forced to learn a lot of things, like how to build a WordPress site once you maxed out what you could do on Tumblr is, I think, where we started originally. I had to learn how to build a website. I didn't have capital to start it up. That was my first time even learning how to code anything. I used to ask my wife how to add embed codes to MySpace, I think we went back that far. Once we did that, we grew to about a million readers a month, visitors a month unique. It kind of spiraled into something else where a friend of mine brought me onto his team. He was working at an IT services organization, it was a Microsoft partner. He knew I was a sales guy. He knew I was a content type of person. He knew I had a lot of ways to use digital to help him get this off the ground within that organization. I only spent about a year and a half, two years with them, but I learned a lot about what was happening in corporate marketing, where the deficiencies were with the agencies we were working with. Even our internal team at the company that I was at, they were doing ... A lot of the things that they were trying to do were right, but the execution wasn't there. I felt like I needed to step in and start doing some of that stuff myself. My entire salary and compensation was tied to success. I kind of introduced the idea of putting content out there and bringing people in, teaching them about cloud, launching Office 365 and the cloud products. We had a lot of success. I think our company became best region partner of the year for Microsoft Cloud, which was a big step for them at the time. I proved what I believed, which was put out good information, be helpful, bring people in and then just have a good process of continuing that through the sale. As I got more confident with that, a lot of people started pushing me towards doing this on my own. I had clients at night. I had startups that I was helping write pitch text for. It was all stuff I learned with my first couple of companies, my first couple of online businesses. We had a lot of success with the small clients. Then, eventually it flipped. Once you're doing more work and making more money at night than you are during the day, it's time to make that the day job. I opened up Big Presence quietly, very gently, in 2014 and just worked with contractors for a year, got my footing, found what I wanted to do. Found HubSpot as the right solution, bailed on Marketo because it just wasn't a good fit for small businesses at the time. Once we got HubSpot in place, I started hiring people in 2015. From there, it's turned into let's create products. Let's create things that people could use that make their lives easier, and that's where we're at today with Belch, which we created out of Big Presence originally. Belch is a HubSpot builder. It's a visual builder for pages, for emails, creates templates but also curates the actual pages. We're just literally trying to make marketing easier for digital marketers who are being asked to do five jobs at once when, in the past, they only had to do maybe one or two, be a content writer, maybe do email marketing. Now, they're doing branding pages and campaigns and strategies. We know it's piling up on them, because we've watched it up close. We're just trying to make it a little bit easier for everybody now. Kathleen: Yeah. It's really serving a big need in the marketplace. I mean I know this because, gosh, I owned a digital marketing agency for 10 years before I joined IMPACT. Like you, I am very self-taught in a lot of things. Maybe, unlike you, I don't have as much of the technical background. While I know enough to be dangerous with a WordPress install, I wouldn't say I'm the best website builder on the planet. In the earlier years of my agency, I was super scrappy. I would get out there and figure it out and build little websites, but I would be way out of my depth today. Things have evolved so much, even WordPress, and HubSpot has too. I think that's because, at least in my opinion, what marketers are asking to be able to do on these platforms has gotten more and more sophisticated. We want to be able to use smart content. We want to be able to create these really slick experiences that are super mobile friendly for people. What you gain in functionality and features, you might lose a little bit in user friendliness. I would never try to build a website today. I would be terrible if I did. I would certainly never charge anybody for it. I think there are ... And HubSpot tries really hard to be user friendly. I think it is a very user friendly CMS. At the same time, the average person jumping in can be very overwhelmed. Most of us are visual learners. To have a builder that is more visual and doesn't require you to understand any CSS or HTML or anything like that is a tremendous, tremendous asset not only for when you first build your site, but when you have to then maintain it. Let's be honest, getting a website launched is just the first step. Then, you have your whole marketing life ahead of you where you have to add content and update it and make changes. I see a tremendous need for it, which is one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you. Charles: Yeah. It's become obvious. I mean I picked WordPress as my platform of choice in 2013. I knew where it was going. I had watched it evolve pretty quickly from 2009 to 2013. The introduction of page builders for WordPress was huge for a lot of people, especially small agencies that don't have developers. I went the hard route where I had to learn how to actually code for whatever amount of time until we got to a point where I could hire a good developer that could do those things for me. Then, we found page builders. It was, for me, it was like an a-ha moment. I knew it was going to get this point. MailChimp, Unbounce, LeadPages, all the ones that have good drag and drop builders that are really intuitive, are easy to use, that's where all software is going. Software is meant to get easier, not more complicated. The people using it are going to have probably less technical knowledge than ever when you're talking about marketing. Most of the people working in there are 22 to 28, and it's one of their first jobs, their first, second, third job. They don't have those skills yet necessarily, unless they want to be a developer. Not a lot of developers want to work in marketing. We're trying to get rid of the need for developer in marketing, because we just know that people don't have them, especially HubSpot customers. That's the whole reason our agency exists I think. Kathleen: Yeah. Even where you do have developers who want to work in marketing, because we certainly have a bunch of them on our team, those really good developers are incredibly hard to find. I think my experience has been, not so much with IMPACT, but with other companies with which I've worked, they get poached really easily by big tech companies. I work out of a home office in Annapolis, Maryland, even though IMPACT is up in Connecticut. In this area, this is where I used to have my agency, most good developers would get hired by Under Armour, because they're the 800 pound gorilla in town. They can pay a lot of money and there's some pretty sexy projects that you can work on. A lot of the agencies in Baltimore really struggle to find and keep developers. If they find them, they have to pay them ungodly sums of money. That's not necessarily an option for a lot of companies out there. I would add, a lot of companies don't have enough work to keep a developer occupied full-time. If you're a company that is selling, I don't know, a widget for construction or something, you're probably not updating your website so much that you constantly need to have a developer on staff. Charles: Right. The other thing that we're seeing, agencies are a little bit different. We have developers at our disposal and we can use them for those things. One thing we've learned on the agency side is the customers that we deal with don't have a developer. Or if they are a software company, which a lot of my clients have been software companies, they don't have anybody that's going to step into marketing and help out with marketing. They're building applications, they're doing things that are more mission critical maybe to the operations side of the business. For us, we're looking at helping agencies is one thing, especially smaller agencies, but customers too. Those are people that they go direct to HubSpot. They might not have an agency attached yet and they still have one marketer who has to design the assets, who has to write the content, who has to put it into HubSpot. If they get hung up on trying to build a custom template and that's somewhere they're uncomfortable, it slows things down. They end up cutting corners. They start using the same templates over and over. We know for a fact that reduces the conversion rate on those templates that you're using over and over and over all the time.  Kathleen: We've talked about why there's such a need for this. Clearly, having a good website is important. Clearly, keeping your website up to date is important, but it's challenging. I want to take a step back from what we've been talking about here, which is why Belch came into existence, and I want to talk about really the underlying pain point, which for most companies is having that awesome website and in my years of doing this, I've seen so many companies come to me with dramatically outdated websites or they don't have a website at all if they're a new company and they need to either do a redesign or create a website from scratch and particularly in cases where companies are redesigning sites, that can be a very long drawn out, very, very painful process, but it's vitally important for them to get to the other side because that's where they know they're going to have a site that accurately reflects what they do. That is a better selling tool for their business, et cetera. You've been involved in a lot of website redesigns. I mean, that's really what led you to creating this product. Do you have any examples of a website redesign projects where there have been pretty dramatic improvements before and after? Charles: Yeah. I hate to say to us but a lot of the clients we've worked with for the last three or four years were in bad shape or like what you're talking about. They had something but it wasn't serving them at all. One thing we do is we literally will track people before we do a redesign, see what people are doing on the website and specifically find what we need to improve, so that when afterwards, we're looking back at the stats, we're seeing numbers on average, double organic traffic on a redesign on the month or two or three, whatever we measure following a redesign. So organic traffic is usually number one. Most companies with a bad website, SEO is the last thing that we're going to probably do with a bad website. So we see traffic there, but the bigger part that we really focus on is conversion rates. If we're getting people into the site, we're obviously going to be more and more work to push into the site. But if you're not converting people on the site, you're not getting data from people when they come in, like email addresses to reach out to them later, you're missing out on a lot of opportunity and that's the biggest place that we focus is, just get email addresses, let's build databases. People with bad websites generally have bad databases, usually fed by salespeople who bought lists. So one, we're coaching them and teaching them, that's not gonna work anymore. GDPR is a good reason to pull out in 2018 to point to. But it also just doesn't work. Lists are dead. It's the worst thing ever to be on a call team and have to do cold calls, which I've done in the past. So when we do a redesign, we're trying to solve problems, but the biggest ones that we see are organic traffic through the roof after a redesign, and then also the conversion rate, usually double or triple within a couple of months than they before. Kathleen: So can you share maybe a story of when you've been able to do that? Charles: Sure. So one company that I can point out is XQ Innovation. XQ does something that's really cool, which we're partners with them and we're friends with them now, one of the owners is a former fraternity brother of one of the guys that works for me. So that's how we got introduced to them. What they do is executive coaching, emotional intelligence training. They work with executives, they work with teams, they help them communicate better and they do it all based on like data driven assessments. So anybody out there that's listening to you or done DISC assessments and gone through that whole thing, it's that but like on steroids. So what we did with them, if you went to their website a year and a half ago, it looked like an institutional website with tons of content, which was good. They had a lot of tons of content, lots of research, lots of studies and all these things. But I think if you went to it, you would never have hired them necessarily because yiou didn't really know what they did. It was very confusing. We're going to coach you on this, some classes for this and help you with that. But it wasn't focused. So we did a rebrand for them last year, I think, the beginning of last year. A full rebrand and then redesign the website. The key was really who are they and what do they do. So I sat down with their ownership and helped them decide like, "This is who you are, this is who I think you guys are, because that's who you are to us." They said we nailed it on the first try. So now when you go to their website, it's very, very clear, XQ Innovation, which is at www.xqinnovation.com, if anybody wants to look at it. It's very clear what they do. It's very clear how they help people. They have their free assessment on there, which is kind of their offer right now. We have eBooks and stuff like that too but a free assessment is what everybody should try because it'll give you a report, tell you exactly who you are, what your behaviors are, kind of tell you why your behaviors are the way they are in many ways. Then if you take it with somebody else on their team, they can match you up and say, "This is how you two need to communicate with each other." It changes the dynamic of a company when you go through it as a team. So with them they've seen an immediate lift. I think they're in Bahamas right now doing a training for a huge furniture company down there that they got from their website, that they wouldn't have gotten before and that's a big deal for them. They're a small startup, but everybody needs what they do. They just needed to present it in a new way. I think we've done a good job with that because they don't really call me and they just ... They're always on a trip. They're always meeting with a new company. We've used every aspect of HubSpot, it's going to do that for them. So we built the HubSpot site using Belch, so we could get it up quick and easy for them and now we're just running everything through HubSpot as far as marketing too. Kathleen: So if you had to say what the top three or four factors were in kind of the transformation that you made on their site that delivered such great results. It sounds like if I'm hearing you right, one of them is putting in place a really good lead magnet, which is this free assessment. Another was the messaging, being really clear about what they did. What would you say the other two would be? Charles: I think simplicity of the design of their site. There's not a lot of content on it right now. There's content on their blog and resources and things, but if you go to their services pages, you want to learn about their assessments, you want to learn about their coaching programs, it's very straightforward. It's only enough to get the conversation going and hit the pain points that people have inside their business and let them self identify. Because we want them to talk to the guys at XQ, the whole team at XQ because once they talk they can find out what the real problem are, is. For example, if I went to their website three years ago before I met them, I would have thought my problem was getting the most out of the younger people on my team, how do I motivate them, I don't have enough time, maybe I'm not the right coach for them and I'm not and we found that out through the assessments, but I wouldn't have hired them because I wouldn't have seen that part of it. When I look up on their site now is performance. When I see the word performance, I'm immediately drawn to it. Then when I go and talk to them, they'll say, "Oh, well that's not your problem. Your problem is really that everybody just needs to be more self aware." That's something that we're working on as a team. It wasn't me being a bad coach. It wasn't them being lazy or anything like that. It was people needed to be in the right job with the right responsibilities that motivated them and we needed to know what motivated people and some people don't know what that is. So they helped us kind of understand like I'm not motivated by money, I'm motivated by helping other people and I'm motivated by building something that can be proud of but not necessarily money. So learning that about myself helped me understand like, "Okay, I need to focus more of my time on this. Let somebody else worry about the money aspect of what we're doing because that's not going to motivate me everyday." If I have to look at it, I'll probably get annoyed after awhile. Kathleen: Yeah. I don't think there's anybody who couldn't benefit from learning more about those aspects of themselves. I think that's so powerful. I'm a huge believer in DISC. I've probably taken it 20 times over the years. I used to teach a class that involved it and I've used to make everybody at my agency take a DISC when we hired them and I've taken a number of times. Anybody who knows me would not be surprised at all to know that I'm super high D, but I'm fascinated by what it can tell you because it's not about ... I always look at those assessments and I think it's not about like, "Okay, this is who you are, get used to it." It's just it's self awareness, it's understanding what drives you and what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are and learning how to adapt from that. The best example I ever saw of what to do with that information is I took a communications class about two years ago and it was a company that I wound up sending everybody who worked for me to take this class and the man who taught it had everybody do DISC. Of course I came in with my usual extremely high D and then I think I have some C and I'm like barely any I and S at all. So you show everybody your results and then at the end of it he says, "Can anybody guess what I am?" Everybody was kind of stumped on that one and it was so interesting because he's probably one of the best listeners I've ever met. Like really able to pace himself in conversations and let ... Draw other people out and this and that and if you know anything about DISC, you know that Ds like I am are super impatient, we like to ... We cut people off a lot. We interact. We talk over because our minds are thinking fast and we're impatient and we just want to get it out. I was totally shocked that he had the exact same DISC profile as me and we could not have been more different. I was like, "Wow, you're my role model. I aspire to be you because I never would have pegged it." Charles: Sounds very similar to my situation with Joe at XQ. We're the same profile, actually three of us, Joe and Cyrus, we're same profile, but Joe's 60, I think he's in his 60s. Sorry Joe if you're not. Cyrus is my age. So it's funny because we're watching Joe and going, "I want to be as relaxed as him. I want to be as calm as him," and that's literally what I work all the time. It's just slowing the D down, that's the problem. Kathleen: Yeah. It's like they're more evolved human beings. Charles: Yeah, self awareness for everybody on our team has been huge. So, that project was probably as beneficial for us as it was for them. I know they're doing better, but we're also doing better just working with them. Kathleen: That's so cool. Well, I can't wait to take that assessment. I'm curious, how long did that website redesign project take you guys? Because I know from experience these things always A, take longer than you think and B, they generally take a very long time. Charles: Yeah. This one didn't take very long at all. We have iterated on it since then, initially, I would say from start to finish maybe a month and a half or two. Kathleen: What? Charles: The key was that Joe and Cyrus were very trusting of me in making a lot of the decisions of how we want to lay this out, what the content needs to be. Because I think I put a lot of energy into the brand development and helping them identify who they really are that Joe admitted this to me, he's like, "I just want to let you do it because I'll just get in away. I don't know marketing." One of the greatest things you can ever say to a marketing agency by the way, I don't want to get in the way. Kathleen: I trust you. Yeah. Charles: So it went quicker. Then we built it with Belch. So if we have built this just with built our own templates and we did it with the design tools inside of HubSpot, probably would have taken an extra 25 to 40 hours somewhere in between there of development time, but I didn't have to pass it to a developer. I'll admit I can't build on HubSpot that well, that's not my thing, but I can build with Belch. So as I was designing it, I was building it with Belch and publishing the pages and then just linking up the pages inside of HubSpot. So we were ready to launch it instantly. There was no hold over, there was no waiting. There's no staging and moving it or anything like that. So it was a little faster than a normal project and the site's not that big. So I don't want to take too much credit. Kathleen: No, but what I think is meaningful about what you just said is it would have taken an extra 25 to 40 hours of development work and if you consider that most marketing agencies bill out somewhere between call it $125 to $175 an hour, that's what? That's at least $3,000 to $5,000 of money saved. Charles: Right. Kathleen: By using Belch to design because you didn't have to spend that extra 25 to 48 hours. Charles: Right. Kathleen: Or 40 hours rather to hire a developer. Charles: Yeah. The other good part about it is like saving money is a big part of it, obviously. Saving the pass through back and forth from design to developer, developer needs to change something because it's not going to work, we don't have to think like that when we're designing and building with Belch because we know what it's capable of. We know what's going to work so we don't design something that's not going to work inside of it and if we do it's custom and we're just going to build up inside of HubSpot anyway. But it's a lot more clear cut and the steps are a lot faster because there's not as many people having to touch it. My designers can literally be my developers at the same time, which is huge. Kathleen: Yeah. And then you avoid that game of telephone that happens when you have your designer sketch something out, and then it goes to a developer, and it may or may not always come back looking exactly like the designer wanted, so you don't have to deal with that at all. The thing that I find kind of compelling about the value proposition is shortening the time to develop this site. I mean, yes, it's nice to save a couple thousand dollars, but for most of these companies, that's ... They would be willing to spend more to get something great, but what's really valuable is getting the new website faster. When, you know, you were talking about how they're traveling all over doing these workshops and things from leads they got on the site, every month, week, whatever that the site has not been launched is a week, or a month, or what have you of time when you're not getting those leads, and it's lost business opportunities. Charles: Right. Kathleen: So, the time to realize ROI from the project is much shorter if you can finish that website faster. Charles: Yeah. That, and after the project, adding new pages, adding new content, changing the content. So, the way that Belch works is, we're not an external builder that isn't going to work inside of HubSpot. It's not going to be a static template that you can't change. We've written it, and we've integrated it in a way that, you publish something out of Belch, and it goes into HubSpot, it still functions as if you had built it in HubSpot. You still have rich text editing, you still have all the modules that you would normally have, so for our client, if they don't want to call us all the time, they're a startup, so they don't really want to spend 150 an hour on us doing custom development on it or whatever. So if they want build another page, they literally could just use some of the existing templates, and they can just clone them, change their content, anybody on their team, and they have no developers over there, anybody on their team can build a new page, add a new service, and add a new row, put something else on a page that didn't exist before, so their cost, long-term, is much, much lower than it would have been if we had built it custom, and then they're locked in to stuff and had to call us every day. That's good for an agency to keep getting calls and keep bringing in money, but eventually a client may get tired of paying for things that they don't see as necessary, and they see all these flashy tools every day in their emails saying, "Website builder," and "Build a website in an hour," which you see on TV with Wix all the time. It's like, please stop telling people that because it's making it hard for us to validate what we're doing over there. It's not that easy. Kathleen: Yeah. And I think when agencies create websites in a way that their clients can't update them, it breeds resentment. Because, I can tell you, we have a client at Impact that we're working with, and we're about to redesign their website, and they came to us from another HubSpot partner agency, and one of the reasons they came was that agency built their site in a way that it was totally locked down, and this client couldn't go in and change or update anything without not only booking the agency's time, and sometimes that can take a little while, but paying them, and it's ridiculous. It is completely ridiculous. If you have people on your staff who are able to do this, they should have the ability to update a website, and it just bred such resentment on the part of the client that they couldn't change anything. We can't change anything in it they way they set it up. So, this other agency, they're going to have to unlock the functionality, or what's probably going to happen is we're going to completely redesign the site because they just don't want to deal with it. It's a horrible situation, and I would actually say to anybody listening, if you are not from an agency, if you're in a company that has a website, that is a major red flag, in my opinion. This is something that I've believed strongly since I started my agency a long time ago, which is that you should never be shackled to the agency you're working with and dependent upon them. The relationship should be one of, more of them empowering you, and if you want them to take things off your plate to save time or be more efficient, great, but you should never be completely dependent upon them. Charles: Yeah. Kathleen: And that goes for, you should have all the passwords to everything, you should ... I'm a big believer that you shouldn't have your agency host your website. You should have your own hosting account. You should own all of that because your website, in this day and age, is your most important marketing asset, so why would you give some other company control over it? It's crazy. Charles: Right. Yeah. Kathleen: Anyway, end rant. But ... Charles: It's a good rant, though. It's what I preach, and I'm still in it, so I'm still doing this with people every day, and every time I run into a site like that I pull my hair out, I get frustrated, I get angry at the other agency, and that's why we build on WordPress, on HubSpot, on Shopify. Everything is built so I can hand it to my clients and say, "Do as much as you can with this. I want you to be able to use this. I want you to be spending your time in there and building. I want you calling us when there's something that you don't know how to do, or there's a strategy that needs to be created, or a new process needs to be developed, or there's just skillsets that you don't have internally. I want you to call us for that, but managing a website in 2018 is something you should be able to do on your own." Kathleen: Yeah. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the old Gold's Gym membership model where you had to commit to 12 months, and then if you didn't submit your cancellation in, like, the two-day window 30 days before the 12 months ended, you literally had to, like, send them your death certificate to get out of the membership. I mean, I remember, and I will say it on air, I had my cousin who owns a company in New York fake an employment offer letter so that I could get out of my Gold's Gym membership because they were never going to let me out of it. I literally was going to be like an indentured servant to Gold's Gym for the rest of my life. And what you've seen is that that model has disappeared because people hate it, and if you are in a position where your customers are literally lying to get out of your agreements, something is fundamentally broken in your business model. Charles: Right. Kathleen: And that's what that reminds me of, is just, you know, trapping people into keeping their websites with you is not a way to grow a great business. So ... Charles: And I think this is why we all get along at the HubSpot INBOUND Conference. Because I think all of us feel this way, and if we all had this conversation with a hundred people we met at INBOUND, it wound be the same thing.  Kathleen: God, I hope so. Charles: Yeah. Kathleen: Yeah, it's terrible. So, listeners, if that's your situation, run, flee, get out of it, and find another agency. Charles: Absolutely. Kathleen: Well, cool. That's a great ... it's a great story, and I think it holds some important lessons. You know, it's all about, you've got to have a high-performing website, and it shouldn't take forever to build it, it shouldn't cost an ungodly sum of money, and then you should be able to maintain it going forward. Barring, you know, really highly customized or specialized features, you should be able to add content, add pages, so that not only are you moving fast, and being agile, and keeping the site up to date, but you're keeping your costs down, and you're not dependent upon an agency. Charles: Absolutely. Kathleen: So, if somebody is listening and they're interested in using Belch, who is it right for? Charles: Really, anybody that's creating landing pages, website pages, or emails for HubSpot. Right now, the HubSpot ... I'll give you an example. We built an additional tool that goes side-by-side with our builder. So, if you want to try the builder, it's app.belch.io, and you can go right in. All you do is log in with your HubSpot account, so everybody should at least go try it. You get free trial. As you enter into it, you can publish for free, so don't worry about having to pay to publish anything. But even just something simpler for people that maybe want to kind of put the toe in the water, we built a form styler, too, using the same technology, the same kind of interface, at forms.belch.io, and all you have to do is go in there. You can either put the embed code for your HubSpot account if you don't want to connect it to the form styler, or you can connect through HubSpot and pick any form in your database and change all aspects of the design of it, the width of it, the height, the padding, colors, background, inputs. Anything that you can do CSS, you can do with the builder, and it takes ... Anybody can use it. So, we want creatives, we want marketers, we want the people that are driving marketing to be the ones that are building marketing, and we think it'll be faster, more affordable, more will get done. We're trying to break that mold of, just use what's there, and just plug in whatever you have. We want people to feel like, "I need an email that has this, this, and this in it. I'm going to go make it," and a half hour later it's ready. It should be that easy, and we're just trying to get people there a little bit faster. Kathleen: So, we've talked a lot about websites, but now I want to make sure that I understand correctly. Belch can be used by a non-developer to design a website, an email, style a form ... Anything else on that list? Charles: And landing pages. Kathleen: And landing pages. Okay, great. Charles: Yeah. Kathleen: And that form builder tool, is that a free tool that anybody can use? Charles: Yup. It's free. Just, forms.belch.io. We're leaving it open. We want people to learn how to use our builder, and that's really just ... That's something that ... I'm also just tired of seeing the default form out there, the HubSpot form. Kathleen: Yeah. Charles: No offense to HubSpot, but just tired of seeing people with that on their site. You should have that branded. It should look clean. That's the gateway to your lead, and if you're just leaving it there, and it looks like whatever, people are not going to treat it with the same respect, so we want people to be able to do that. You don't have to call a developer to style your form.  Kathleen: Nice! Well, I will definitely put links to all of that in the show notes, so check that out if you're interested in styling your forms, gettin' 'em stylin'. All right. So, before we wrap up, two questions for you that I ask all of my guests. The first is, and I'm curious to hear your answer because you've been in different aspects of the world of inbound marketing, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Charles: Yeah. It's hard to pick one, so I'm going to give you three, but for three different reasons, too. Design, I'm always about Google's marketing whether it's what they put up on their site and draw people in with, the videos they make. The emails: how simple, and clean, and to the point they are. So, I always look to them for design inspiration. When it comes to content and substance, Shopify has done a really good job over the last two and a half years of upping their game as far as creating good content, but also sending email marketing that feels really tailored to me. I don't feel like I need to swat it down or unsubscribe. I feel like if I don't need it, it's okay. I can look at it later. But they do a good job of giving me the right content. And then I'd say methodology. Databox, which is also a HubSpot ... A lot of HubSpot agencies are using it. We are, too. The method that they're using for inbound marketing is awesome. Like, I'm even learning from what they're doing over there. Give Pete Caputa some credit 'cause he knows marketing very well. They're good at creating content through their users, through their customers, which was something that was, like, why didn't I think of that? That's a good idea. If you have a lot of users, and they're engaged, they want to contribute to your content and say, "Here's how I'm doing it," "Here's how I'm using your tool," "Here's a great way to do this," that's something that we could all learn from. I think they're doing a really good job of it. Kathleen: Yeah. I actually interviewed Pete Caputa for the podcast. He was one of my earlier guests, and he talked in detail about how he does those crowdsourced blog posts, and I think he got a 600% increase in organic traffic in six months doing that. And it was funny. When I interviewed him, he said, "I tell people all the time how I do this, and nobody ever goes out and copies it, so who's going to be the first one?" And I haven't seen too many people do it since then, so I'll put that link in the show notes, too, and people can check that out again. Charles: We're on our way. Well, I'm watching very carefully. I talked to Pete last week ... Kathleen: Nice. Charles: So, I'm going to be doing more and more of that. We're kind of more focused on getting the app ready for everybody, and we launched it only a few weeks ago, so ... The web app we only launched about three weeks ago, so for us it's, we're building that up, and we're having those conversations with customers, and now we're going to start creating that type of content 'cause it works. It's a great way to get people involved. Kathleen: That's great. I can't wait to see what you guys do with that, and then you'll get the gold star badge for being the student who finally did what Pete told everybody to do. Charles: Perfect. Kathleen: Second question. With the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date and how do you educate yourself? Charles: That's a good question. Being that I'm in the thick of it so much and we're working with so many other technologies that are kind of at the front, I feel like I'm in it. So, when things are changing, we're part of the change and we're usually leading some of the change; but I read everything. So, I'm subscribed to every newsletter that anybody's probably subscribed to for marketing and I'll take an hour or two every other day to read through those and find things that are new; because I'm only focused on new. I'm not looking at optimization necessarily, I'm not looking at other tricks, I'm looking for what's coming out. So, when something comes out, we can be out in front of it and know this is going to be impactful for these clients or these clients, or this is something we need to wrap into Belch that's going to help people do things. So, Google's newsletters, everything. SEO partners, development, marketing, AdWords. All of it, to me because I am the technical side, I understand enough of it. I know how it drives things for marketers. I know how it affects different parts of marketing or sales. So, I'm watching everything that's happening with cloud platforms. From posting to partnerships, to acquisitions; and then our partners. So, Shopify, HubSpot, WP Engine, Amazon, Google obviously and then a lot of the other ones. Even SharpSpring nowadays. We're talking to them more and more. Watching what they're doing and watching the features of the ad and the thing that they're focused on and the things that they talk about are generally a good indicator of what's happening with their customers and if we have customers that they have, we'd need to be paying attention to it too. So, even little things like news. This is something that's important, or a new hire. Sometimes just watching who HubSpot hired, or who Google hired, or Shopify hired will tell you a lot about what they're about to do the next year or two. So, I pay attention to those things too, just in small press release that kind of go unnoticed because you can get out in front of things that way. Kathleen: Yeah, there's just so much information out there and so much to absorb that I always liken it to drinking from a fire hose. Charles: Yeah. Kathleen: It's tough. But yeah, you kind of have to know which companies you admire and follow those. Charles: Absolutely. Partners are a good thing to do. If you have good partners and they're doing good content, which all of ours do great content. It makes it a little bit easier because they're doing a lot of the hard work for you but a lot of the times, we're bringing stuff to them and saying, "This is something you don't realize is a problem yet but you should." Because we're ... I work in the agency world, we do different things. From eCommerce to software companies, international companies. We hear about things and we feel it coming a little bit sooner than maybe the bigger players, who might not be thinking about it yet but when you're down on the ground, you feel it and you know you have to do something different. Which is why we built something like Belch. We saw the complaints, we saw people didn't want to pay for custom templates and that generated a need for us. So, hopefully everybody else sees the value in it now too. Kathleen: That's great. Well, if somebody has a question about what you've talked about, wants to reach out to you individually, what's the best way for them to find you online? Charles: Yeah, you can just email me, Charles@Belch.io. That's really ... I spend all my time in my inbox. Not on Twitter, doing much over there. So, yeah. Just email me directly, especially if you want a demo. I'm happy to walk people through how to use it. Not everything is obvious as far as benefits of Belch. So, we like to hear what people are thinking about trying to solve and if you're trying to build a website, there's a right way to do it. There's tricks and there's work arounds to making the HubSpot CMS more user friendly as far as managing a website. So, we're helping people through those things and we're building things into our app every day. Literally every day something new is coming in there and we need people to tell us what they want. So, my best conversations are customer feedback calls, where they're saying, "Hey, this is awesome but what if it could do this?" Or, "What if it could do that?" And it's cool that people are willing to tell us what they want because we can build it. We just need to know that there's a real need for it. So, you can always reach out to me via email. Kathleen: All right. I'll put your email on the show notes too and thank you so much for joining me this week. Really interesting to hear about how the product came about and where it's heading and the problem that it's solving. If you are listening and you liked what you heard today, I would love it if you would consider giving the podcast a review in iTunes or Stitcher, or wherever you happen to listen to podcasts; and if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me, @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you, Charles. Charles: Thank you, Kathleen.

What's the quickest and easiest way to turn your sales people and subject matter experts into content creators? On this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, marketing agency coach Max Traylor talks about "The Rockstar Creative Method" - the process he's used to make reluctant sales people and subject matter experts into rockstar content creators by having them interview clients and then turning that into a video show. Listen to the podcast to learn more about Max's process and how he's used this approach to grow his own business. Transcript Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. Before we get started today, just one quick announcement. I'm excited to let everyone know that the podcast now has an Alexa skill. So if for some crazy reason you want to hear my voice talking at you for one hour a week out of your Alexa, now you can. All you have to do is go into your Alexa app to the skills and search "Inbound Success" and you should find it. With that, I want to introduce my guest today who is Max Traylor. Max is an inbound agency coach, a marketing strategist and a product strategist. Welcome to the podcast Max. Max Traylor (guest): Hello Kathleen. Max and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: It's great to have you here. Max: It's great to be here and I'm already learning things based on your Alexa ... Kathleen: My Alexa skill. I'm not convinced there's anyone that actually wants to hear me talking for an hour every week in their Alexa, but should there be, we have provided that option. I'm interested to have you here because every week, this podcast is me talking to somebody who's a practicing marketer, who's doing something really well, and we try and pick apart what they're doing well. Many of those guests have been inbound agency owners and a lot of people think, "Oh, if you run an agency, you must really be an expert" and many of those people really are. What I think is interesting about this particular interview is, I'm interviewing somebody who helps the agency owner. So this is like "the expert behind the expert." So for agency owners that are struggling to take their business to the next level, you're a great resource, but you also yourself are directly somebody who advises on marketing strategy and the product positioning of services, which is an area that I think is just ripe for discussion. So that's enough of me tooting your horn. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself and what you do. About Max Traylor Max: Well, your introduction sounded really good. I'll probably borrow from that.  Kathleen: You can pay me later. Max: Yes, thank you. I ran an agency for about five years...very traditional, what everybody says to do. And during that time I really, I really fell in love with the strategy part, which was when clients paid me for my knowledge and not necessarily doing the work, but advising them on what was most important, creating plans that could be executed by other project managers. So I fell in love with strategy and somewhere along the line, I accidentally productized what was in my head. We took our process for delivering a content strategy ... we took our process for delivering content marketing services and we turned that into a strategy that we called the Content Marketer's Blueprint. After that, I was exposed to this world of licensing intellectual property, of creating online classes, these residual business models. And I always grew up with that with my dad working from home and he'd always say, "Digital, scalable, residual Max", and I had no idea what he was talking about until that day that I accidentally created a product. So I like working with experts in their field that are really knowledgeable on a particular topic and have created processes of their own. For those people, I help them productize what's in their head. For agency owners, I help them do more strategy work because for the people with the most knowledge and the most experience, I think that concentrating on delivering strategy and playing the role of the strategist is really the way they can provide the most value. And then over the years, I've experimented with a lot of alternative marketing methods for myself and I like to package those up and work with marketing and sales software companies when I'm doing my marketing strategy work. So definitely a problem with shiny object syndrome, but I've limited it to three. So that's nice. Kathleen: I want to go back to what you said about "digital, scalable, residual" because as soon as he said that in my head, what popped up was my father. My father who was in real estate, unlike your father, and he always said it was "location, location, location." I feel like digital, scalable, residual is the location, location, location of marketing. So I love that. Max: Yeah. Well, I always wondered why he was at home everyday and taking me to Disney World and now I'm able to provide value to clients by sitting next to my pool. So I feel like I've gotten at least a piece of it, but it's sort of a mentality that I've always had looking at the opportunity for marketing entrepreneurs and more broadly the opportunity for sales consultants and marketing consultants alike. The current state of content marketing Kathleen: You've been in this inbound marketing space for a while and you've been in it as an agency owner, as a strategist, as a consultant. You've worn different hats and I'm sure if you're anything like me, over the course of those years, you've seen inbound marketing evolve quite a bit. When I first got into this business it was like all you had to do was throw up a 500 word blog once a week, and it was that old field of dreams "if you build it, they will come?" model and you didn't have to work that hard because not everybody was doing it. Now the landscape has changed so dramatically and I'm curious -- as somebody who advises both companies on their actual marketing strategy, but also agencies on how to grow, I would love to hear your take on how that landscape is changing and what you see as the key drivers going forward. Max: Well, in the beginning it was a land grab. Google changed a couple of their rules to where people actually had to provide value and the way most people interpreted that was, "I create a bunch of blog articles and I really increase my traffic, and then I put some little buttons on my website that gets people to fill out forms and I can call those people and generate some new business." In the early days, that's what it was because it was the early adopters that really had all the opportunity in the world, and they didn't have to work too hard. It was very easy to provide more value than the black hat SEO folks of the past that were using trickery to increase their traffic. It was very similar to in the early U.S. when we were all moving west and the government would literally give you land grants. All you had to do was go out there and that's kinda what the early days of inbound were like. All you had to do was create some content people would show up at your front door. But now we live in a very saturated market and every industry is becoming saturated. I talk to a lot of people in the manufacturing space that say, "Well, not a lot of people in our industry are creating content and all the other people are focused on inbound in our industry." That's just not true. I mean google inbound marketing for manufacturers, google anything that a potential customer of a large industrial manufacturer would be googling. There's pages and pages and pages of content. So we're forced to get more creative, we're forced to provide more value. In my opinion, what we're shifting from is organizations trying to make themselves attractive via content and we're shifting to an era of personal brands where it's real people that are creating the content. It's not some marketer in a dark room somewhere trying to repeat what you've said. It's actually the subject matter expert that's creating content and generating conversations with their target audience. Kathleen: Yeah, I would agree with that. It's funny, I always ... People talk about setting a high bar or a low bar, and when I'm thinking of the evolution of inbound marketing, I always in my head think of it like a game of limbo. So it's almost like the opposite, where we started out with a really high bar and everybody could just slightly bend backwards and limbo right through it with their short little blogs. And the bar has gotten progressively lower over the years and now you have to bend a lot farther backwards. It's a lot harder to do it and there's far fewer people/companies or brands that are putting in the work needed to make it through that bar and get to the other side and really see success. I don't know why in my head I kind of reversed the bar analogy, but yeah, it's harder work. Max: No, that's an appropriate analogy. Not to be confused with, like you said, setting the bar high or setting the bar low. Kathleen: We're setting a really low bar. Max: Exactly. Obviously that's a broad suggestion to say, "Be more creative, create better content." "Great, okay. How do I do that?" The simple answer is focus more. The more focused you are at providing value to a specific industry, or even a sub industry in a lot of cases, because of how saturated these markets have gotten, but also a horizontal practice area. And I see that the companies that are creating content for a specific type of target buyer with a very specific problem, are the ones having the most success. And the more you can dedicate yourself to that focus, it's almost like taking that bar and raising it up a little bit more, so it's just a little bit easier to get under it. Kathleen: Now what do you say to people who hear that and say, "But if I get super specific, I'll be alienating all those other people out there." Max: So you just described 99% of people out there. Kathleen: Yeah. Max: And I'm kind of thankful for it because that's what keeps the 1% having fun. The 1% ... You just have to do it. I mean, if you've ever invested for a year in content trying to generate opportunities and you haven't focused on a particular industry area, let me know how that worked for you. Kathleen: Yeah. I work with Marcus Sheridan, a man who lots of folks listening probably know, and he is famous for saying "the riches are in the niches." Max: Yeah. Kathleen: And it's true. Max: He's a smart guy. Kathleen: Yeah. Max: Why 99% of people don't listen to you, don't listen to him, don't listen to me? It's fear. It's fear that they are limiting their opportunity, when in fact the exact opposite is happening. You cannot be everything to everyone, and I try to interview experts all the time in sales and marketing and startup consulting. No one has ever, ever, ever said, that I respect as a consultant, "Oh, you should go more broad." Kathleen: Right. Max: Never. Not once.  Kathleen: I would be willing to bet that inbound agency owners are some of the biggest violators of this because the agency space has gotten very crowded and there's lots of general, "full service inbound agencies" out there. So I'm sure that they are not necessarily practicing what they preach all the time either. Max: So that's the weirdest thing about agency owners. Most people can sit there and bask in the fear and say, "No, I'm not going to go that specific because I'm afraid that I'm giving up all these opportunities." But agency owners are the only ones that day in, day out tell their clients that they need to focus without focusing ourselves. Kathleen: Yeah. I would agree with that. So one thing is getting specific in your content. How important it is it also to have a strong point of view? Max: I mean, when have you ever enjoyed a conversation when somebody didn't have a strong point of view? Like I said, this is becoming more about individual conversations. It's becoming more about a personal brand and somebody's actually enjoying listening to somebody. Regardless of if your opinion is met with a rejection or if it pisses people off or if people are really refreshed by your point of view, you have to have an opinion. And if you don't have an opinion, it's just boring. Kathleen: I think I know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you also find that 99% of people come back to you with the same response on that as they do on getting specific? That they're afraid that if they take a strong stance, they're going to alienate a lot of people. Max: A hundred percent, which again is ... It's sort of a natural market defense for the people that are willing to take those risks and be specific and have a specific opinion. If everybody was doing it well, then it'd be much harder to stand out. Luckily, there still exists a land grab today. We haven't gotten all the way to the Pacific Ocean. We've reached like, California, and California is still reserved for those that will focus and have a clear opinion as they provide value for that specific marketplace. Kathleen: Excellent. All right. I'm taking over San Francisco. Max: Yeah, right. I'll meet you on the beach. The Rockstar Creative Method Kathleen: So when you work with folks these days, obviously you're evangelizing the need to continue to produce content, but to do it in a way that is very focused, that it has some sort of point of view. If I were your client and I said, "Okay, I'm ready to go." How would you generally advise me to get started? What's the best way to produce that content? Max: Well, the content is about answering questions and there's a lot of very smart people that have written books about that. That's what inbound marketing content is. It's taking the most burning questions, the most valuable questions when answered, and projecting that out into the marketplace to attract people with those problems. I've found that over the years the best content -- if you think about content in a broad sense, not just what we sit down and write on our blog -- the best content being created is between the actual buyer and a subject matter expert. And we spend thousands of dollars and years trying to recreate that magic. And I've come to the point where I've stopped trying to recreate that magic and instead encourage more of those conversations. My advice to somebody getting started with inbound marketing, is do not pay someone to blog for you. Reach out and have a conversation with your target buyer. Call it research, call it an interview, call it you're writing a blog and you want their opinion. But if you're creating content and you aren't speaking with your target buyer, you're doing it wrong. That is what inbound is all about, is answering people's questions. Why not start a new relationship, get someone's real question and provide value right then and there? Capture it on video. Capture it on Zoom. You get an audio automatically, just like this podcast that we're doing on Zoom today, and there's transcription services at ten cents a minute that gets you 80% accuracy. There is a blog right there. You do an hour long interview. I never do hour long interviews, but if you do a 20 minute interview at ten cents a minute, that's $2.00. Kathleen: Yeah. Max: It's going to take you $2.00 and a little bit of elbow grease and putting your fear aside to reach out, interview someone in your target market and get a video resource, audio resource and text. Post that on your blog. And the only- Kathleen: And that's funny that you say that because that's basically the process I follow for this podcast. Like Max said, we're on Zoom right now. I don't actually use the video. It's something that maybe we'll evolve into at some point, but I sometimes use stills from it. But I send it off, it gets transcribed by Rev.com and it's amazing the accuracy and yeah, that's how the show notes come about. It's super easy, fast and inexpensive. Totally worth it. Max: Doing it video is probably the most difficult thing that you can do. I happen to love doing video, and I really like the relationships that get created as part of these interviews, so I choose to do it on video, but the concept is including your ideal customers in the content creation process. You could get on the phone and interview them and write down what they're saying. I don't know why you would do that because there's ... You just shouldn't be doing that, but regardless of how you do it, creating a new relationship in the beginning of the content creation process, it's taking inbound -- the typical process for creating content, where you put in all the work, hopefully to get paid off at the end -- and it's turning it on its head and saying, "Wait a minute, I'm trying to generate relationships with my ideal customers. Why don't I do that first and let the content creation come as a natural byproduct?" Kathleen: Yeah. I love that. And just to be clear, I don't have anything against video. In fact, we're big fans of video at IMPACT, but I selfishly don't use video for my podcasts because then, every time I recorded one, I would have to put a lot more effort into looking good, and I personally feel like I have a face for audio. We have a lot of really great webinar guests at IMPACT, and we did a webinar recently with Mari Smith, who, if folks haven't heard of her, she's this amazing Facebook marketing expert, and she did the webinar in a way that you could see her via a live feed through her DSLR camera, and everybody on my team was just like, "Wow, she has set a new bar," in this case, a high bar, "for how to look phenomenally camera ready." And after that I was like, "I can't be on video ever again until I get a stylist and a wardrobe consultant," so... But I think there's something to that. When it comes to creating content, I've always said go with what you're most comfortable with, because if you try to put yourself in a position you're not comfortable, you're not going to do it and you're not going to stick with it. So for me, in this case, I really love the audio format. I'm comfortable with it. It's easy for me. I don't have to blow dry my hair and put on makeup for an hour before every podcast interview. I can just show up and have a great conversation, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, the most important thing is that you get great content out there, and if that means video, great. If that means audio, great. Whatever you're going to really love doing, I think is the best format. Max: Kathleen, that is so important. I hadn't really thought of that before you were mentioning it, but the most important thing with content is that you're consistent with it. And people will say, "Well, it's not about writing 10,000 blogs a week. It's about getting great content." Yes, but in some respects you do have to be consistent. That's the nature of the personal brand. That's how you're going to continue to grow your audience, continue to provide value. You do need to be consistent, and the one thing that prevents people from being consistent is they hate doing it. So here's a tip. Write down all the things you hate about creating content, and simply don't do those things anymore. If I had created a list back when I was writing blogs, it would be speaking with an editor, trying to write what was in my head. So what did I do? I removed that. I no longer write articles. I do video interviews, and I don't need to try and write down what's in my head because of these great transcription services. So the number one thing, to your point, is it's got to be fun. Kathleen: Absolutely. Max: Boy, what a cool rule to follow. Kathleen: You said earlier, "Don't ever hire anybody to write blogs for you," and I would just caveat that and say that I have seen that work, but really it only works well where the person or the company that's writing the blog for you is phone interviewing you. So if you were my client, and you just said you don't love to write, and if I was like, "Max, we need to get written blogs on your site," the only way that can work in an outsourced scenario is if you and I do a 30 minute phone call and I record it, just like you're talking about doing, and I give that recording to a writer, because then what they're really doing is just massaging your own words and turning them into a written format. If you're not doing that, it's really, really difficult to get an authentic sounding, detailed, meaty piece of content that works really well. Max: Yeah. And maybe that's the opinionated me having an opinion on it that isn't always going to be right. I think there's definitely a place for professional writers that have developed knowledge and expertise in certain areas. That's my caveat to it. If you're going to hire somebody to do your blogging and actually be the one contributing the expertise, they have to be experts. If you, yourself, are the subject matter expert, and it's your expertise, then the more you can make it easy for your writer to not have to reinvent, to not have to make up, to not have to sound like an expert, to literally take the words out of your mouth and provide the flow, provide the organization. But the words, the insights need to come from the subject matter expert, and we have the technology to very easily capture those words exactly. Kathleen: One hundred percent. So, all right, let's go back for a second. You started talking about how everybody should start by talking with their actual customers, or somebody who's a representative of their customer. Walk me through that. Give me examples of where you've done it or where somebody that you've advised has done it, and what does that look like when that content is produced and published? Max: Yeah, so I actually did this by accident. When I went out on my own as a consultant, I knew that I wanted to have fun, and I knew that having beers with people that were truly experts in their space was something that I did during marketing events in Boston once a year, and it was a great time. So I said why not do that like all the time?  I created this show, this video show, called Beers With Max, and all I knew is I wanted to interview people that were experts in their industry and that had a business model that was more than delivering a service one-to-one, they had some type of productized intellectual property, because I wanted to motivate and give confidence to people that were stuck in a traditional one-to-one services model. That's how it started, and what I realized is that, by reaching out to people with that genuine message and saying, "Look, I want to have a beer with you online, and we'll ask some questions, and here's the people that I'm trying to motivate. What do you think?" I just kept getting more yeses, and so I started raising the bar in the traditional sense of the analogy, and I started to reach out to established authors and speakers and CEOs. And it turns out, people are very willing to have an open conversation sharing their challenges, sharing what they've done to be successful in their own right. Good people are sort of naturally motivated to give back, and that's what I'm trying to do with my show, is get people to talk about what they've done to try and inspire others. And what happened by accident is a lot of those relationships turned into new business, because I wasn't trying to sell people things. I was actually talking to my grandfather last night, having dinner, 93 years old, and he goes, "You know, I was never ..." He made a lot of money, put it that way. He said, "You know, I was never able to sell things, but people bought from me," because he never tried to sell them anything. He just created a relationship, and I think that's what naturally happens when you're including people in your process of educating the marketplace. So, that's how I get all of my clients today for product development. That's what I use Beers With Max for. And then I started to say, "You know what? Maybe I'm not the only one." I had a client that was a marketing agency focused specifically in providing services to the publishing space. So we created a show happy hour, and we reached out to distributors who we knew had relationships with hundreds of publishers, and we said, "Great, we're going to have a cocktail and we're going to interview you about the biggest challenge in publishing companies." And magically, every time we interview a distributor, that distributor sends out a message saying, "Hey, check out this interview that I did," to the hundreds of publishers that they work with. Bam, new business created. I've got a technology client who is a differentiator, and their opinion is that people that are investing in sales enablement and sales coaching are being failed by technology. They don't feel that the current sales technology landscape is supporting sales enablement and sales coaching. So that's what his show Technical Difficulties is about, and he reaches out to CEOs of his target audience, interviews them, and the magical part is, anyone that says yes to that interview is, by default, his ideal ideal customer. They have to be investing in those things or else they wouldn't agree to an interview about investing in those things. Social Mixers is a show by an agency I work with that specializes in social media. Again, I always try to have an alcohol theme because I think it says "no prep required." It's going to be fun. Kathleen: You know what it reminds me of? Have you ever seen Jerry Seinfeld's show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee? Max: Someone made that reference when they heard about Beers With Max. I haven't seen it myself, but yes, I've- Kathleen: It's awesome. He has these other comedians, and they literally ... Every episode is him driving a different car. I don't know where he gets all these cars, but he matches the car to the person that he's with. And so one week it'll be ... It was like, I think he did one with Garry Shandling. He's done one with Sarah Silverman. They just literally film him in the car, getting coffee, and talking about, as Jerry Seinfeld does, random things. So it sort of reminds me of that, but I love it. I love the concept. Max: Well, I wonder how much a collaborative ... I'm sure Jerry Seinfeld makes his money through relationships and through different gigs that he's interested in, so I'm sure he's got a very similar payoff of interviewing different comedians. Kathleen: Yeah. And every comedian he interviews is pretty high profile, and as you say, they share it, and that just amplifies the audience that much more for him. So that's neat. Now, they've got all these different shows. Are these all video shows? Max: They're really whatever. In the beginning I was like, "Wow, you need to do video because video automatically makes everything more productive." Google likes video more in email -- higher click rates and such. But what it comes down to is what people enjoy and what they're comfortable with. I can force a client to do a video interview and it's awkward and it's weird, and that's just not sustainable. So sometimes it takes the form of research, and it's not a video conversation. Sometimes people are writing books and they want to gather opinions. It's whatever they're comfortable with, and it's whatever they want to naturally produce. I want to produce a show because I'm charismatic and I just love getting on video. Other people like writing books, they're serial authors. Great. You've got another book coming out, go interview people that you want to feature their insights in your book. So whatever makes you tick, include your customers in the ticking. Kathleen: And I imagine that there's so much you learn in the process. As marketers, we always come back to one of the cornerstones of any good marketing strategy is your audience persona -- understanding that target audience. I imagine even if you never got any new leads from doing this, you would still reap so many benefits from learning more and more about your target audience and that would make you better in other ways. Max: Yeah. You know, my grandfather said one other thing last night that really resonated with me. He said, "Nobody's going to buy from you unless you know what you're talking about." If I was ever asked, "Max, what gives you the right to charge me money, to charge money for what you think we should do?" I would say, "Hey, you're not getting it from me." I spend every day thinking about new leaders in the market to interview, and that's what I do. That's the only way I can have some relevance in this fast changing world. So unless you've got somebody having the amount of conversations with different experts, unless you've got somebody that's that dedicated to learning, maybe we should listen to me. Kathleen: What makes any consultant qualified, right? When you first start consulting, you've got to start somewhere, and it's about, I think, innately being able to connect dots. I used to be a management consultant, so most management consultants I know don't come from a deep level of technical expertise in the industry to which they're providing their consulting. They are people who know how to connect dots and who know how to research and learn quickly and package that information in a way that's useful for their client. Max: Yeah. Well- Kathleen: Not saying that you're not an expert, just saying that I think that's an interesting element of pushback that you got. Max: Well, you know, that's an interesting thing, the concept of an expert. I look at a strategist as a dot connector. A strategist will help a client identify what the most important opportunities are and come up with a plan to pursue those opportunities, but then you've got a very different type of expert, and that is an expert that has focused their lives and their learning on a particular practice area or a particular industry, and those experts are the tools that a strategist has available to them. So like in my strategy work, for example, I pitch it in three ways, but one of the ways is I am going to help you build your A-team, because if somebody is a Linkedin expert, but is also an SEO expert, but also knows how to do Facebook advertising, guess what? They know how to do a bunch of things relatively well. It's like a bed of nails. If you'd lay down on a bed of nails, you're not going to get pricked. It's dull. It's nullified. Kathleen: Jack of all trades, master of none. Max: That's so much more prominent today, as you've got thousands of technologies, and the different practices in marketing are just ... The complexity is skyrocketing, so what we need is a group of people that have focused in particular areas, and as a strategist we can identify when it's the most appropriate time to bring in those experts. And again, creating focus is the best thing you can do in this increasingly complex marketing landscape. Kathleen: Yeah. So you've had your show Beers With Max for how long now? Max: A little over two years. Kathleen: Okay. And you've already mentioned that that has resulted in new business opportunities for you. Max: All of the business opportunities. Kathleen: And how have those come about? Like if somebody is listening to this and thinking, "Okay, I'm going to test this approach," is it that old "Field of Dreams" thing, like "If you build it they will come," or are there certain things that you advise people do in order to maximize the likelihood that listeners will turn into leads? Max: I'll use the Field of Dreams analogy. It's kind of like going out into the cornfield, finding somebody, and dragging them by the hand back to your house and going, "Look, here he is." I don't have to build the shit. He's right here. And excuse me, I don't know if you're- Kathleen: No, you can say that on here. Max: I won't say it too many times, but I got excited. Yeah, it's, what is the downside of having a conversation with your ideal customers? I think the thing that holds people back from trying it, is the fear of reaching out. It's the same reason they do in marketing and wait for leads to show up. We have to combine reaching out with the noble idea of.inbound marketing -- educating the marketplace and actually providing value. So it's a combination of reaching out and actually having a conversation with the people you want to work with, but as my 93 year old grandfather would say, "Don't try and sell to them." This is about learning. This is about educating the marketplace. And people that are willing to collaborate with you on that and share that vision oftentimes are your best customers and they're a joy to work with. So it comes about, again, this was an accident, and it was probably the best accident that ever happened to me, but I'd reach out and I'd start off with a 15 minute conversation before the show about what they were up to, what challenges they'd seen in the marketplace, what they've done that's unique, and then they would ask me that and now we're introduced. Now we know who each other are, and then when do an interview, and we have a beer, and it's fun and people show up. Maybe some relationships are created. But we're having an interesting conversation, and what happened was nine times out of ten people would say, "Hey, I'm interested to learn more about what you're doing. That was a fun conversation. I'd have fun having another conversation." And that never happens when you're trying to sell something to them or to somebody. So create as many accidental conversations, but just have faith that creating value and speaking with people that you might eventually want to work with is gonna build some lasting relationships. I'll never forget the conversation I had with my grandfather. Literally last night, he was like, "I built really incredible relationships with people I happen to do business with." And that's how he was able to be so successful whilst being a terrible salesperson. Kathleen: One of my favorite things about this interview is that I have gotten so many little knowledge bombs secondhand from your dad and your grandfather. Max: Well they certainly don't come from me, so - Kathleen: It's great, I love it! There was a famous twitter account a few years back called Shit My Dad Says. So there you go, I'm saying the word, too. And I feel like you have a "Shit My Grandpa Says" opportunity, because there's so many great little tidbits of advice there. Max: Well, if I had to learn from people, it would be people in their 90's. They tend to have a lot of experiences. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. So you have a great name for this approach to creating content. Can you share that with everybody? Max: Well it's really if you take the approach of doing a video interview and then you get the audio as a natural byproduct and you get the text as a natural byproduct, I look at that as the pinnacle of what you can do in creating content and it's worked so well for me. I call it the "Rockstar Creative Method," because you kind of have to have that rockstar mentality to do a video show. You don't have to be a rockstar, but that's sort of the persona you take on is that you're going to host a show and it's about the person you're interviewing and there are other ways to do it but rarely do you get all three consumption formats. You get video, you get audio and you get text. So if you want to be a rockstar, there you go! Kathleen: I like the Rockstar Creative method. You heard it here first. Kathleen's Two Questions So changing gears for a minute here, I always ask my guests the same two questions and as somebody who's been in this industry for a long time, I'm very curious to hear what your responses are going to be. The first question is, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Max: Well, you know, I knew you were going to ask that and I was hesitant at first, but you guys are probably -- and when I say you guys I mean IMPACT Branding -- probably one of my best examples of doing this. Because Kathleen, you don't just have your show. If you look at all the shows and podcasts that IMPACT is doing, you're taking all of the most valuable personal brands within your organization and you're applying this method. From everything we've talked about about personal brands and creating content and including folks in the content creation process, I mean you guys are doing it perfectly. Once you understand what you're looking for, you could do content marketing really well without this. It's that traditional way of creating content and hoping for people to show up. If you got in early enough, if you're one of the early movers west, congratulations! Because you probably have a lot of traffic and you generate a lot of opportunities, but for individual entrepreneurs that are just getting into this or companies that were a little late to the game, they need a golden ticket. They need something different. You look at new companies that just started out that are so successful like DataBox, pretty much overnight they've created an incredible blog and the whole strategy was to use their partners to generate content. And guess what? That's exactly what HubSpot did. They took their content team and expanded their efforts by using their partners and their ideal customers collaboratively to generate content. And now that you're looking at it through this lens, you look at all the most popular blogs, and the blogs and the content isn't being created by one person or faceless marketers. It's being created by real subject matter experts in collaboration with the people that would potentially buy their products or services. Kathleen: Well thank you for the very kind words about IMPACT's content. I mean, I will say that we're very fortunate, because we're an agency full of marketers, that we have so many people on our team who are very comfortable creating content, and so with almost 60- employees, we have a very deep well from which to draw that content out. Pretty much everyone in the company contributes once a month to our blog, but we also do -- as you noticed -- we have a lot of people that are even more prolific and have decided to start podcasts. It's kind of funny, because we didn't set out to have whatever it is, five or six podcasts that we have now. It's just that we had a lot of people who said, "You know what? I'm just gonna do this." And the company said, "Great, go ahead and do it!" And we wound up with almost our own channel of podcasts, if you will. Max: It's a collection of personal brands which I love to see because I think people are buying from people, and people are attracted to people. Is it the IMPACT brand that's so attractive or is the cumulative of the six personal brands that are doing shows all the time and the other 60 personal brands that are experts in their own right creating content as well? I'd tend to say the latter. Kathleen: Yeah and what you said about DataBox is very true. I had Pete Caputa who is the CEO on as one of my earlier guests and I think the title of that episode was How to 6X Your Organic Traffic In Six Months, and exactly how he did it is what you said. He used all of his network, his audience, his ideal customers as contributors and it made it much easier for him to create content. It made it easier for him to go faster with a small staff, and now his staff is getting much bigger because they've been successful and it's been like this kind of cumulative effect. So it absolutely does work. Max: Well it was actually Pete that made me realize what I was doing, what I was accidentally doing. It was a webinar that he was on, and he said, "If you're not creating content with your target audience you're doling it wrong." Kathleen: Yeah. Max: A light bulb went off and I was lik, "Oh, yeah. That's what I'm doing. That's why this is so great." Kathleen: Well, and the funny thing about Pete -- I think he said this when I interviewed him -- he was like, "I talk about this all the time, about how people should be doing this and how it's worked for us." And he's like, "You would be amazed at how almost nobody actually does it. They hear me say it. They know it works, but they just don't go do it." So he's like, "I want to see who's going to be the first one to listen to this episode and do it themselves." That's why. I think you have the opportunity for that last number of people to get to California as you were saying earlier. They know what it takes to get to California. Somebody has told them where the path is and how to get there. They're just not doing it. Max: All you gotta do is follow directions. The directions are right there. Kathleen: Yeah. Max: Yeah, no, he's very right. That's been my experience as well. Even when people pay for this advice and strategies to lay out exactly how they should be doing it, the resistance is a lot more than you'd expect. Kathleen: Absolutely. Well, you talked earlier about how you advise companies and what they're buying is not only your expertise, it's the cumulative expertise of you plus all the people that you're regularly talking to. And so that leads me to my last question for you which is, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? Max: Talk with experts all the time. My favorite book right now is by David C. Baker, it's always on my desk. It's not today. The name of the book is Business of Expertise. He sort of addresses this question in that an expert won't know everything. An expert will know what he's not an expert in. That's what defines an expert. But he will have an opinion on everything. So it's this process of, how do you consistently build your opinions on different things out there in the marketplace? And for me, the best way that I've found to do that is to actually speak with the experts. They tend to be pretty willing to share their experiences and the biggest insights that they've gained over the years. So I would say get out and talk to the people. You can subscribe to their blogs and this and that, but nothing beats actually speaking with somebody that's dedicated their life to a particular practice area or industry segment and just listening to them. And having no preconceived agenda on what you're going to talk about. Just, "Hey, learn me something! What are you up to? What's going on in LinkedIn these days?" You'd be surprised at what you'd hear and those conversations make that bag of knowledge, that list of opinions that you have so valuable for somebody that doesn't know where to start. Kathleen: Absolutely, that's exactly why I do my podcast. For me, it's all about learning. I learn something new every single time I talk to somebody, without fail. Max: Yeah, like when I was paying for a college education, why didn't I have a different professor every day? Kathleen: That's a great point. Max: That would have been amazing. Want to get in touch with Max? Kathleen: Yeah. Certainly would make it less boring sometimes. Well, this has been so great, and if somebody wants to get in touch with you and ask a question about what you've discussed here or wants to talk to you about helping them with some coaching, what's the best way for them to reach you online? Max: Maxtraylor.com, it's very easy to find the little button that says "Book a time," and there's some videos on me if you haven't gotten enough of my opinions. It would be a fun conversation and given the nature of my learning, I'm really interested in talking to anybody that's got something on their mind because I typically learn from it and sometimes create some content out of it. Kathleen: All right. Well I'll put a link to your site in the show notes and so if you're interested in reaching out to Max, make sure to check those out. Have you reviewed the podcast yet? If you listened to this podcast interview and liked what you heard or learned something from it, I would really appreciate it if you would consider giving the podcast a review on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you know somebody who is doing really kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thanks, Max. Max: Thank you, Kathleen. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate the invite. Kathleen: For me as well.

Pete Caputa shares the story of two agencies with a shared vision that leveraged each other's strengths in order to expand their capabilities and grow.

Pete Caputa joins John to talk about the goals, processes, and discipline that helped Databox surpass its first million in ARR.

Pete Caputa, Doug Davidoff and Mike Donnelly discuss why, especially if you're part of a software company, it's essential to offer a freemium product.

Takeaways Trial and Error: In the absence of data in the early days, you have to lean on good selling principles. What does that mean? The only thing prospects care about are their problems — not yours. You have to work diligently to understand your buyer and figure out how they talk about their pain points. Doing so will allow you to test different positioning statements and align your features not only to their pain points but also to your own price points. Qualify with Goals and Challenges: Qualifying with BANT may be the least enjoyable conversation for a prospect — especially when it’s done too early. Oftentimes, prospects will lie to you to either get off the call or lie to you to keep you on the call (so they can steal information from you). By leading the conversation around what their goals and challenges are, you’re able to better determine whether you should continue having a conversation. Quit Thanking Prospects for their Time: If you’ve uncovered a real challenge or helped a prospect identify a plan to get them to a goal, why would you thank them for their time? Think about it, if they got more out of the call than you did, shouldn’t they be thanking you? The idea behind this is to maintain equal business stature as opposed to thinking you’re less than them. Full Notes https://www.salestuners.com/pete-caputa Book Recommendations Baseline Selling by Dave Kurlan Sponsors What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do. The pipeline-centric system is strategically built on a proven selling methodology that keeps teams focused on the only thing they can control in sales – actions that push deals to close.

Reporting is one of the biggest issues marketers face - getting everyone in one place, creating them in a timely manner and having them be meaningful at the end - I hear this time and time again. Hands up, we've had the same issue here. In our mission to solve the issue we found Databox, which we now use for all our client reporting. As Databox has helped us we thought it could help other marketers so we invited Pete Caputa, CEO of Databox, on the show to talk more about reporting and the ways to make your reports even better.

Hear how Pete Caputa, now CEO at Databox, worked through internal resistance to build HubSpot’s Partner Program (on nights and weekends) into a global community that now represents ~40% of the company’s annual revenue.

Brian Signorelli, Director of the Global Sales Partner Program at HubSpot, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss adding value to your partners, channel best practices, identifying good partners from the start and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.   You spent the last 5 years at HubSpot in various partner roles, really climbed up into the role that you're currently in now, I think it would be great if you could share a little bit about HubSpot for people who are not very familiar with the company, and what your role is there today.   So, real simply, we're a software company. We sell software to mostly small and midsize businesses generally up to about 100 employees; they could also be divisions of larger enterprises as well and the software that we sell helps teams generate more traffic to their website, convert that traffic into leads and ultimately convert those leads to customers and that is through our sales and marketing software platform itself. That's Hubspot in a very very small nutshell. I'm focused on building HubSpot's kid of second partner program. Listeners might already know about our agency partner program, that was founded in 2008-2009 by Pete Caputa who is now the CEO of a company called Data Box, ironically their office is in the same office as HubSpot, and so I had the opportunity to learn what it takes to build a successful partner program directly under him. That was the first partner program that HubSpot built. We've grown that up to over $100 million in revenue, 2k partners globally and it accounts for a significant chunk of HubSpot's overall business, I started this late in 2016, early 2017 a project to build out HubSpot's second partner program which is tied directly to our sales products, whereas the agency partner program was originally designed around our marketing platform which is our flagship piece of software from 2006-2014 until we brought out the CRM and sale products in late 2014. So that's what I'm focused on now   I think it's really important that you've identified that the partners we've been working with for our marketing solution, may not be the same partners who we're going to work with to bring our sales solutions to market. One of the frequent conversations we have on the podcast is about building our your partner personas, and really understanding the most appropriate partners to be working with to help you achieve common goals together, So this is beautiful. Since you began working on  the partner programs over at HubSpot, I'm curious about some of the biggest changes you've seen occur.   - --   Our value prop for partners has changed over time. Kind of ironically, sometimes the success of a business can mean the failure of a partner's business, or at least the health of the overall ecosystem. Back in 2012 it was different as a marketing agency to be an inbound marketing agency. It was a novel concept. Today it's not a novel concept. And so we have to kind of rethink exactly what was our value prop, or how were we helping partners. And so we have a significantly different value prop today than we did 5 years ago. Part of that too is a reflection of the fact that HubSpot is a multi-product world, and for the most part CEO's and just willing to accept website traffic and leads being generated by a marketing agency hired, they're expecting that agency to own the entire customer lifecycle, and we've had to adapt our own value prop to match that reality of what the market is demanding.   There was a blog post you wrote that was really great, titled “7 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Sales Manager”, where you share your hindsight. What are some of the key things you have learned about scaling partner programs that you wish you knew when you first started being involved with partner programs?   So I joined at an interesting time. I kind of jumped in midstream. The agency partner program at HubSpot had already been around for 3 or 4 years. By the time that I joined so I didn't see it from the very beginning but for any business thinking about building a partner program there are some things that you should give some really serious thought to Voice break in some way shape or form you'd want to run up against different types of things will touch on some of them we've overcome some of them we haven't. If you have not have a channel sales program today give really deep consideration as to why you're building a channel in the first place. Sometimes businesses do this to enter new markets, Sometimes they do it to run the entire still sometimes to replace an entire Services Division and sometimes it's just about grabbing as much market share as you possibly can. Those are all very different things, and the primary motivator as to why you're building a channel in the first place is going to impact every single decision about building that program You're going to be moving towards so give it some serious consideration and realize that this is not something that happens overnight. This is a very long term very long time to payback type of play, this is not something that you will Start in January and finish in June. This is something you will start in January and will see results in 12 to 24 months that you're seeing significant Revenue contribution. This stuff takes a lot of time.   ---  There are plenty of businesses out there too that have 100% of sales through the channel and if so just stick to that because if you start double dipping, you can start to erode your program. You can alienate your entire partner base.   Another article I saw you wrote just last month was titled “How We've Started Building HubSpot's Second Channel Sales Program”.  In the article you said something that really stuck with me, you said “add value to Partners first and worry about extracting value later.” I would love for you to share a bit about the Sales Partner Program you're working on building now and what you do to add value to Partners. --   How can partners apply Inbound Sales and Inbound Marketing to grow in the channel? Can you share some of the best practices you have implemented at HubSpot?   This is going to sound silly, but the absolute best partners, are the best students first. If they're going to partner with us, they need to understand what inbound marketing and selling is. They're awesome students, they get certified, they take our sales training. It shows the partners' commitment to how serious they are to working with us, and it enables to all speak the same language. The best partners do three or four things on a really consistent basis. They create content on a regular basis. Literally the easiest way to create content is to answer the questions your prospects are asking. Every single time you write a blog post to answer those questions, it gives you another opportunity to get found.   The second is that, when these partners are starting to generate more website traffic, and generate leads. The best partners actually contact those people. We're getting all of this data, and message etc, but we're not calling them. Why aren't you calling them? The good partners proactively engage.   The best partners, they understand what a marketing funnel looks like.   I've got one more “official” question for you. Where do you see the future of partner programs going? What are you most excited about for the upcoming decades of sales and marketing in the partner world?    The businesses that provide a disproportionate amount of value to their partners first, and really treat them as an extension of their own team, will win and have richer, more thriving networks.   The future of partner programs is going to look much more like a B2C relationship than a B2B relationship. Partners are people, and I think that what we're seeing, is that we are all living today in this on-demand economy. In our personal lives, the on-demand economy is right in our face. When it's so easy to get whatever you want in your personal life, and then it's so difficult to get what you want in your business life… there's a disconnect.

Jay McBain, Global Advisor at Channel Mechanics, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss shadow channels and the shift from IT buying power, verticalization (or hyperfocused vectorization), the future of the channel and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jen: Welcome to The Allbound Podcast, I am Jen Spencer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. And today, I'm joined by Jay McBain who co-founded the company ChannelEyes, currently serves as Chairman Emeritus of the CompTIA Vendor Advisory Council and Managed Services Community. He is a Board member of the Channel Vanguard Council, the Ziff Davis Leadership Council, and CRN Channel Intelligence Council. In short, this man knows channel. Welcome, Jay. Jay: Thanks, Jen, really appreciate it. Glad to be here. Jen: Absolutely. Well, it's good to have you. And especially, really wanting to get caught up with you and what's going on in your world and I'm sure our listeners are also really interested about five months ago, you took on a free agent status. You said, "Okay, I'm leaving ChannelEyes," which was the channel tech startup that you helped co-found. So catch us up, what's had your attention the last year or so? Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I had spent the last while at ChannelEyes as CEO and they're working on some really interesting stuff around predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. And I think in the next three to five years, most of us in the channel will be using computers to help us do our daily tasks...help us with our daily tasks and get us to the finish line faster. And I think now that the company transitions to a CEO that can better position the company with some of the leading CRM players in the market like Salesforce and Microsoft. And who knows, further down the road, to really make something happen. Jen: Great, great. So what are you focused on right now as a channel professional in your world? Jay: That's a great question and I was at CompTIA last week and probably answered the question at least 100 times so... Jen: I'm sure. I'm sure. Jay: One of the answers is I spent almost 20 years working at IBM and Lenovo in different channel roles including channel chief roles. And they were always Americas based, either North America or full Americas, and I never really got a lot of exposure to Europe and Australia and Asia-Pacific. And what I've decided to do in the last five months is work closely. I've been to Australia and going back again working with a very large telco there, I'm working with this great company in Ireland which is where I'm sitting right now in Ireland. The company is called Channel Mechanics and they've really looked at the channel management space and they've done some really innovative things. So looking internationally but also looking obviously to work with some very interesting challenges, which I'm sure we'll touch on on this podcast. Jen: Great. So let's, dig in to some of that. I've followed a lot of what you've been writing about specifically around channel, something that you previously called out, is that a large number of channel programs that tend to get stuck in the exact same place. And you wield it down to two key conclusions. So one, that some vendors will simply win because their product wins. And then two, that other vendors will win because they know how to influence the channel. So I'd like to know, what do you mean by that? Jay: Yeah, this is one of my kind of personal passions and I think it started when I read the book "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. He's got this great chapter early on in the book. I think it's chapter 2, about Paul Revere. What a great connector Paul Revere was in 1776 and why that won the day more so than riding a horse through all these towns, and why the other person who left on horseback that night wasn't successful. And this idea of influencers or connectors and super connectors, when I moved to the United States from Canada in 2009, I looked at the market and looked at the millions of people that participate in the channel and I didn't have 15 years to catch up to the relationships that I had in Canada at the time. So I kind of boiled it down and said, "What is this influence and how would you measure it?" And in 2009, I generated a list of the top 100 most influential people in the global channel and I did it again, actually, about 4 months ago on my blog. And seven or eight years had passed and it's interesting to see people have changed positions and everything else. But it's a very analytical numeric way of assigning scores for people's influence. And just to give a quick synopsis is back in 2009, I figured out that there are 16 magazines that channel people read. There's 150 trade shows globally that channel people go to. There's thousands of vendors. There's dozens of distributors. There's bloggers, thought-leaders, associations, analysts. When you look around this web of influencing sites, what people read, where they go, and who they follow, it's across different mediums but they're all available. So I took and read every magazine. I wrote down every name of everyone in the magazines. I went to most of the trade shows in my first year and took note of who the keynote speakers, and the advisory council, and the board members, and all the key people at these events. I did the same for peer groups. I did the same for the associations and analysts. And as I came around, I came to about 1,000 names. But what was more important to me is how visible they were across multiple different communities. In our channel, it's so wide and diverse. But more importantly, it's decentralized. Channel partners don't have the time to go and read 12 magazines. So they tend to focus on one community and at most, maybe two to get their information to reinforce their expertise and to really peer network. And we look at these organizations, there's about 30 of them in North America that they're a part of. And I was really looking at how many people influenced in more of these 30 communities. And really, for me, reach was more important than maybe... that's all I could find out on Google. I couldn't find out how important they were in each community but I could definitely measure their reach. And so, I just added this really simple spreadsheet, and I just started adding check marks beside each name every time I saw them more than once. And after 1,000 names and thousands and thousands of check marks, I just sorted by whoever had the most check marks. And interestingly enough, in 2009, Larry Walsh, who was long time CRN editor, kind of patriarch of the channel, but he ranked number one and I didn't know who Larry Walsh was but I knew I had to go meet him. And then, all the way down the list I wanted to meet. And as I met probably 20 to 30 of the top 100 people, the other 70 came rushing to me. Not because I was important but because they sensed that I was doing this and talking to these important people and maybe I was important. But to a connector, they don't want to be left in the dark. So it's really important to them to know what's going on and to be able to kind of stay on the inside of things. So it was kind of really fascinating and over the last seven or eight years, I've written a lot and I've studied the level of influence that people have in the channel and there's a direct correlation between people having a high influence and carrying their company to great new heights. Jen: I think that holds true, regardless of what sort of industry or what segment of the market you're in, especially from that leadership perspective. I think it's also interesting, we talk to a lot of folks who are not your traditional type of channel organization, not your traditional enterprise IT company. Maybe they're a small or more mid-market size organization, software company, ready to kind of build a channel. A lot of folks are looking at an agency-based program. Upcoming on a future podcast episode, I'm going to be interviewing Pete Caputa from HubSpot who's now at Databox and has assured us that he's building the agency partner program to end all partner programs. And so when I think about influence, I think about an individual like that. So would you say that this concept of influencing the channel is just as strong in the evolution of where channel is going? Is it even more important than ever? I mean, what is your take on it because looking at 2017 compared to 2008, not that much time has gone by but there's been a lot of change in that time period? Jay: Well, there absolutely has, and some of the things I wrote about later last year, I call them shadow channels. But I've got this personal belief that your average vendor, their channel program is going to grow by at least 5X in the next three or four years. And the reason really goes back to the customer buy-in journey. And people at HubSpot know this very, very well but over the last 10 years, 90% of all IT decisions 10 years ago were made in the IT department. Makes sense, CIO. And today, it's flipped completely where 72% of all decisions are made outside of the IT department. It's now the VP of sales and marketing, operations, and finance, and HR, and all the way down the line that are making big technology decisions that are business decisions. And what's happening to traditional vendors is sometimes they're not in the room. Well, most cases, they're not in the room. When a VP of marketing like yourself is making a technology decision, a lot of times you don't have the person who's fixing your printer in the room. Jen: Wait, wait, hold on. Jay, I'm the person who fixes the printer here, so should it be someone else fixing... Jay: Oh. Jen: Just... Jay: That's right. Startup life, you know. Jen: Startup life. Yeah, I know, I'm sorry, I had to insert that. I had to insert that. But no, no, I agree with you 100% what you're saying, right? So I buy technology all the time and we do have someone here who's responsible for overseeing all technology and he has a zero influence on what I choose to buy to run our sales and marketing team. Jay: Right. And so, in the sense of if you put yourself under traditional vendor's space and you're trying to install traditional hardware, like you're selling software or other services, and now you need to get in front of Jen Spencer and, you know, who are you using to influence you. You might have somebody from HubSpot or Marketo in the room. You probably have somebody from your industry in the room that's a tech expert on your industry. In some cases, this could be accountants. They could be legal firms. They could be digital agencies. In your case, it might be a digital agency in the room. You could also have other ISVs in the room that play in ecosystems like a Marketo or HubSpot or Pardot or whichever one you play in. They're going to be in there because they know how to drive more leads for a company specifically like yours. You may have a startup in the room that's built with piece of technology and you're going to be one of their early customers so they want to make sure it succeeds. But you look at the five people in the room and it's not the printer person. It's not the person that installed your phones. So in other words, it's not the IT department. And so, if you're a traditional vendor spending all your time trying to recruit MSPs and solution providers and VARs from days gone by, guess what? You just missed out of a technology decision because your influence isn't in the room when it was made. Jen: Right. Jay: Now put yourself in the shoes of...let's talk VP of marketing and let's talk ambulatory care...healthcare clinic, midsized, 50 doctors, in the Northeast U.S. And in the room with that VP of marketing, again, it's probably that person from Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, whatever it is, Eloqua, probably somebody that is an expert in healthcare driving leads for midsized clinics who's had success in the past, with five other clinics of the same size and scope. But these five people are different five people than what the IT department would have in the room. And so, you're not talking about routers and PCs, and you're not talking about, traditional licensing and everything else. You're talking about driving more leads or you're talking about a marketing problem. And to be relevant, vendors either a) need to train their current channels to be valuable to the VP of marketing in the clinic, which is less likely to happen. It's more likely that they then have to go and recruit and nurture these five other types of partners, and you call them alliances. You can call them whatever you want but the incentive is different, the way you manage them and measure them is different. The entire relationship is different. But the point is, there's so many more rooms that you have to be influencing now that your channel program is just invariably going to grow. Jen: So, you call these “shadow channels”, and when I think about like shadow marketing, shadow IT, usually, it's a very negative connotation to it. There's work going on that's outside of your viewpoint, that is in most cases negatively-impacting whatever the core function is. But what you just described doesn't sound negative, right? So are these shadow channels, is this the future? Is this a good thing for these organizations? Jay: Yeah, well, there's good and bad. And depending on the audience that I talk to, is which one I'll start with. The good news is businesspeople are now making business decisions around technology. All companies are becoming technology companies and all other professional organizations and industry, association, everything else, are becoming technology-based just because that's the way world works. All 27 industries now are pretty much 27 tech industries depending on agriculture, fisheries, or whatever they do. You know, that's become such a big role. So, the world has changed. And the reason it was called shadow IT or rogue IT is back in the day, where 10%, and then it became 20%, and then 30% of decisions are made by these people who have no idea what's going on with technology and they don't understand security and they don't understand backups and disaster recovery and they're not of the adult in the room which, you know, the CIO or IT department would claim to be. And so they were rogue, they need to be stumped. Well, the fact of the matter...and these are Gardener numbers, by the way, 72% of all the decisions today are now made outside of IT, so it's no longer rogue or shadow. It is literally the new normal. And the prediction by 2020 is that 90% of all decisions will be made outside of IT. So in 10 years, there's been pretty much a 180-degree turn in terms of where the decisions are made. And this isn't changing. And businesspeople are making business technology decisions and that's the way the world should work. It's been a big boom for SaaS companies. And it's been pretty hard for technology companies and hardware companies, specifically, because they're trying to still find their place in these conversations when these decisions are being made outside of their normal feasibility. Jen: It makes perfect sense and it's a good opportunity for consultants, for people like yourself to let you go in and really help some of those organizations along this evolution of the way that channel and selling today, tech buyers today has definitely changed. I want to ask you now about another topic that you've written about, that you spoke about. You talked about channel vectors or vectorization. And you said that verticalization is being replaced by hyperfocused vectorization. So I'm hoping perhaps you can clarify what you mean by that. And then, I want to explore, what today's executive needs to consider as he or she is scooping out plans to grow through channel over the next 5 years, because there are a lot of these organizations that maybe they've hit $10 million in annual recurring revenue and they're looking at, "How do we get to $100?" And they're looking at channel as a way to do that. So what do they need to know from this new vectorization perspective? Jay: Yeah, it's another example of me making up a word and then all of a sudden... Jen: I love it. Jay: It's really good for Google SEO if you actually make up your own word. It's actually pretty cheap, first of all. But all kidding aside, let's go back to the healthcare VP marketing in a midsized clinic. And you're looking at the 5 people in the room and 10 years ago, for an IT provider, it was okay to say, "Hey, I got to move from being a generalist to a specialist." "Well, what are you going to do?" "Hey, well, I'm going to specialize in healthcare." "Well, that's fantastic." So what they do is they go out and read HIPAA and HITECH, and, they get a couple people certified, and they can talk their way out of a paper bag when it comes to patient records and compliancy and even some legal. But again, the world in this journey has changed things for them. So if you're that VP of marketing at a midsized clinic and you have somebody in your office that says, "Hey, I know a lot about healthcare." You're like, "Well, that's great. That's one of the vectors. What would be even better is if you knew not only healthcare but midsized clinics, so the sub-industry. The fact that you put in a solution for a 500-doctor firm probably doesn't have a ton of relevance to me because I don't have those resources. So that's another thing. The fact that you installed in Colorado may not be as relevant as it is in New York because of the different statewide bureaucracy and everything else. I mean, there's just that 50 different systems in 50 different states. So if you start asking these questions, there's actually five vectors. And as a VP of marketing in a midsized clinic, you're not going to ever get that perfect person who has all five. "Listen, I've just done the last five clinics exactly your size, just down the street. I've just done your competitors. They're the guinea pigs. I know exactly what to do. Here's my price. I can get started right away." That would be perfect. That doesn't work. So all you only end up doing is, "If somebody knows healthcare that's better than not knowing healthcare." I put that in quotes, air quotes. But that's one vector. So, flipping it aside, "I want somebody who knows my business. I want somebody who's been successful in my sub-industry. I want to know somebody who's been successful in marketing. I don't care if you put in an accounting app, or I don't care if you put in an IT solution. I need the drive leads. I need you to be focused on my line of business. I need you to be focused on my sub-industry. I need you to focus on my region." So these are the types of things that you push back on. And if you can get two or three out of five, it's much better than just getting that generalist in the room who might have one out of five, or none out of five. Jen: I think that's such a good kind of point to make and maybe even to end on here, because we've talked about how the channel is no longer just a channel. It's no longer just kind of a one-way street or even a two-way street. I mean it is a complete ecosystem. The story you just spun about healthcare IT, about being able to plug in to Salesforce to really put that on steroids to make it work for somebody to do their business, I mean that is absolutely our present and our future of the way that sales ecosystems are growing. And organizations that embrace it, organizations like Salesforce, organizations like Microsoft, that embrace that type of channel environment are reaping the rewards of it, the benefits of that in addition to their partners as well. So I love it. I'm glad you invented the word vectorization. I'll have to start using it. Jay: Great to participate. I've actually wanted to do this since you started. But one of the key things is you asked me to look forward five years. Jen: Yeah, absolutely. Jay: Vendors need to look at the toolset that they're using. And many of the tools that they're currently managing the current triangle of gold and silver and bronze partners they have the same program they built 20 years ago, they need to refresh their tools. If they're going to grow their channel by 5X, they need to seriously look at a tool like GoalBot, take collaboration to a completely different level. They need to look at a tool like Channel Mechanics. They need to look at new, fresh thinking around how to do this because if you try to force-fit your old ecosystem, your old infrastructure into this new world, it's going to be very, very difficult. And many vendors are now realizing that and looking for those right SaaS companies and others to plug together, to kind of manage these new channels, measure these new channels and set these new channels. And in the end grow with these new channels. Jen: Absolutely. I mean, it's that old saying that, "What got you to where you are today may not be what's going to get you to where you want to go tomorrow." And so, I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. Thank you so much. I'm not going to let you go just yet, though, Jay. So since you said you listened to the podcast, you've been excited about being on it, then I'm going to ask you some other questions. So you already know this is coming. Jay: I know it. Jen: Okay. All right. So, yeah. Well, I'd like to ask some more personal questions just so we can kind of shake things up and get to know a little bit more about you as a person. So first question I want to start with is what's your favorite city? Jay: Oh, that's a good one. I have traveled to 27 countries now. All of that spent on vacation, one of the blogs I write is "Rollerblades and Red Bull," the idea is to get to every country in the world. Right now, it would be tough to say the absolute but I would say Prague. Jen: Prague, awesome. I haven't been there but I've heard amazing things about it. So I heard it's a really beautiful city. Jay: Very, very difficult to rollerblade in, by the way. Jen: Okay, I won't try that, at least not the first time I go. Okay. Question number two, are you an animal lover? Yes or no? Jay: Yes, we have...we just actually...we had two dogs and one cat. And they were all 13 or 14 years old and we lost them all within 6 months. But, we're kind of in that mode now. We've got two young daughters as well I've got two daughters in college. But we're thinking about the family pets now and looking at different breeds so very excited to rescue some new pets. Jen: Oh, good. Well, you have to keep us posted. We love pets at Allbound. Our pets have an Instagram account called "Allbound Critters." So when you do have a new pet join your family, you have to let me know so I can give you guys a shout-out there. Jay: Will do. Jen: Okay, next question for you, Mac or PC? Jay: Well, being a 20-year IBM and Lenovo guy, the answer's going to shock you, I'm 95% Apple. So from iPhones to Watch to the laptop I'm on right now, everything, except for real work, is on an Apple. When I talked about analyzing the thousands of people that run this industry and running all these AI and macros and heavy, heavy lifting, I have one super-powered, liquid-cooled, top-end gaming machine at home that I do serious work on. But everything else is Apple. Jen: Everything else is Apple. All right. All right. There you go. And last question. Let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to? Jay: That's a good question. So back to visiting every country in the world, the next, probably Middle Africa. Jen: Oh, what interests you about Middle Africa? Jay: A) that I haven't been there. Jen: Okay, yeah. Jay: I've been to most regions... You know, when I see the weather report that has 50 or 60 cities, most of them...well, almost of them I've been to. So now, I'm in the mode of, "I've got to go to dangerous places now." You can't go to the Middle East. A lot of Africa is off-limits. But it gets much harder to travel once you've knocked off the easy ones. Now you've got to start knocking off ones that have government warnings, or can add a little bit of risk. So that's what entices me about going to Middle Africa and maybe at Uganda, or Kenya, and help build schools or do something good for the world. Jen: Sounds wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for joining me, for sharing some of your time with us, especially calling in from Ireland where I know it's late at night. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally, what's the best way for them to connect with you? If folks want to talk about going to Kenya with you, or they want to talk about fixing their channel, how should they reach you? Jay: Absolutely. My website, my blog that most of what we've talked about today, is jaymcbain.com. It's jaymcbain.com. There is at least 50 ways on there that you can contact me through every social and my cellphone and everything else. If you just want to hit me with a quick tweet. It's the letter "J" mcbain, M-C-B-A-I-N, so jmcbain. Hit me there and we can go from there. Jen: Perfect. Well, thanks again, Jay. Thanks, everyone else, for tuning in, and catch us next week for an all-new episode of The Allbound Podcast. Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to The Allbound Podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the Resource Center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone

Peter Caputa joined HubSpot as employee 15. After petitioning to start HubSpot's Agency Partner program, HubSpot's CEO reluctantly let him in 2009. Pete was responsible for the program and the team as recently as January 2016. The program is now responsible for 40% of HubSpot's new customers and cited as a major factor for leading HubSpot through a successful IPO and its accelerated growth rate since going public, not to mention the success of many marketing agencies and their clients. In This Episode You'll Learn Four Steps to Optimize Your Partner Program: Step 1: Think Marketing (Not Sales) When Recruiting Resellers Step 2: Solve Your Resellers’ Challenges First, Then Focus on Their Clients’ Challenges Step 3: Don’t Sell a Product — Sell a Platform Step 4: Keep the Barriers to Entry Low Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: 7 Steps HubSpot Used to Scale It's Channel Sales Program 22: How Client Success Accelerates Sales w/Dean Robison @InsideSales, Dan Steinman @ Gainsight, Jim Steele @InsideSales More sales advice from Pete Caputa

Jared Fuller, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at PandaDoc, joins Jen Spencer to share how he scaled the channel program at PandaDoc from less than 1% of total revenue to over 13% in his first six months at the company. What are a few key strategies you've implemented to make PandaDoc's channel program such a success? I reached out to channel leaders who have built something from scratch with a similar SaaS portfolio. I berated Pete Caputa, the VP of Sales at Hubspot, and convinced him to join our board of advisors and get on a weekly call with me. I found someone who was much better than me at building a channel program. When it comes to boosting inbound leads, what types of content are you producing to do that, and what has been the biggest driver for PandaDoc? There are two types of partners at PandaDoc that I'm responsible for: our channel program and our strategic alliances. How we drive inbound traffic is by co-hosting events ––thought leadership webinars, where we'll bring out a topic, for instance, “The Sales Enablement Stack: How to Build a Process from Lead to Close.” We'll evaluate best practices with a partner like Close.io. They bring the thought leadership on how to make sure deals don't fall through in the pipeline and we'll supplement it with how to put together the right content, how to send the right proposal, how to customize the content, etc., and we'll deliver that to both of our customer bases and generate leads. Co-marketing for us has been key. It makes sense to do those same type of events with our channel partners. How did you get your sales team bought-in to the PandaDoc vision? I screen candidates for vision. I believe if you can't find alignment in vision the rest of the deal is dead. I typically paint a very clear vision of why I believe in PandaDoc and see if they feel the same. We're documents, which could be the most boring thing in the world, but if you can get excited about changing something that hasn't been different since Microsoft Word launched 30 years ago...if you believe in that, the rest is incumbent upon the team and the process to ensure they're successful. How did you empower them to exceed quota? I've come to realize there's a massive difference between management and leadership. Management does things right. Leadership does the right things. I'm a horrible manager, but what I know I'm great at is trying to imbue a vision and a sense of passion, urgency and desire upon the people I work with. If you don't have those, let's part ways. So we've been doing a lot of training around that empowerment piece. They understand that the people who are successful at PandaDoc are doers. For sales leaders trying to grow their strategic partnerships, what tips can you share with them? When you're starting a partner program, you have to understand people's interests. You have your interests as a company, you have your partner's interests, and you have your partner's client's interests. And of those, you think the best thing you can do is solve for your partner's client's interests. That is actually fundamentally flawed. You have to focus on your partner's interests. How can you help them grow their business? Want to hear more from Jared? Don't miss out — listen to the rest.

In this episode of Inbound Agency Journey, we're joined by Pete Caputa. Pete has worked at HubSpot since 2007 and is the founder of the HubSpot Partner Program. In this interview, Pete shares the background story on the program and where things are moving in the world of inbound sales. Enjoy!