Podcasts about what kinds

This edition of the EDU Podcaster Summit features Barbara Bray from the Rethinking Learning podcast, Dr. Wesley Fryer from the EdTech Situation Room podcast, and Lainie Rowell from the Lemonade Learning podcast. Welcome to EDU Podcaster Summits: livestreamed introductions to other educational podcasters and their work. QUESTIONS THAT GUIDED OUR CONVERSATION Who is LAINIE ROWELL, what is her context in education, and what is the name of her podcast? Who is DR. WESLEY FRYER, what is his context in education, and what is the name of his podcast? Who is BARBARA BRAY, what is her context in education, and what is the name of her podcast? What KINDS of content do you publish on your podcast? Do you focus on monologues, 1:1 interviews, or multi-guest conversations like this one? What is the THEME or area of focus on your podcast? How does your podcast make you a BETTER educator? On the practical or technical side, what is one piece of EQUIPMENT or podcasting gear that you would like to add next to improve your content? How do the HEADLINER AutoVideos work? How do the handheld Zoom RECORDERS work? What have you got cooking? Tell us about your NEXT episode or piece of podcast content. How can we connect with LAINIE ROWELL and the LEMONADE LEARNING podcast? How can we connect with DR. WESLEY FRYER and the EDTECH SITUATION ROOM podcast? How can we connect with BARBARA BRAY and the RETHINKING LEARNING podcast? CONNECT with THESE PODCASTERS on TWITTER

What Kinds of Extra Duties Are You Responsible for as a Real Estate Agent?  Find out on Today’s Podcast.   Are you currently enrolled in a pre-license real estate school in the U.S.?  If so, and you need help, subscribe to my podcast for timely tips to help you pass the real estate exam on the first attempt!     You can also download valuable study aids from my website, http://www.GlobalRealEstateSchool.com Like us on Facebook ,https://www.facebook.com/GlobalRealEstateSchool/ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow me on Instagram @realestatetechguy    As always, "thank you" for listening to the podcast!

Episode #003 Questions To Help Your Family Feel Good About TreesUse these questions, if you like, to ask your grown kids to think about. It will moves the focus to outside and may feel like a gift. In this episode, I ask my boys, finance professionals in twenties, now living in London questions about going outside. Please share one childhood memory of when you were outside close to trees? Max the oldest remembered when he was 3 years old looking up and seeing tree tops together in a wooded park. According to forest bathers today, he was "earthing." He was allowing himself to be cradled by the ground. So natural. Jesse the youngest, remembered a time when we went fishing together. We had not considered that we would have to take the fish off the hook. Of course we had no plans to keep the fish. At what point in your adult life did you recognize that going outside near trees helped you to get through a difficult patch? Jesse said he became aware of all the science as I was starting my website and blog. He told me that "not everybody knows this science mom - keep going on this." Then he started to pay more attention to going outside close to trees to feel better. This is a link to my website: https://treesmendus.comMax said it was when I was diagnosed with lupus and he saw how sick I was getting the longer I stayed inside. When I decided to go outside he said everything seemed to change for the better. That is when he believed the science and wanted to read my book. What Kinds of Unexpected Things Do You Get Outside Close To Trees? Max said when he is tired from working long hours (as an investment banker),he knows that even if he is tired, he should try to get outside for a little while. He says going outside to the local park always gives him new energy -- even when he does not expect it. Jesse said after a late night of socializing, he likes to lie under a canopy of trees and sleep. He says he always feels better even after a short nap outside. Forest bathers would say he is allowing his body to be cradled by the earth -- the ultimate in letting go -- and again, "earthing." What Works To Get You Outside? Max develops outside habits and plans for when these work the best when he is scheduling his days, weeks, months. Jesse is inspired by beautiful outdoor parks in London - places of Outstanding Beauty. It is the more spontaneous adventure of finding and enjoying these places that get him to outside close to trees and nature. What Are You Still Struggling With Regarding Getting Outside? They are both aware of the Finnish research that says you need 5 hours a month outside close to trees to get all the benefits. They are multiplying that to 5 hours a week. They have outdoor time targets that they share with each other now. What is Your Favourite Thing To Do Outside? Jesse loves to golf. Max loves to run.What Tips Would You Give Other To Help Them To Go Outside? Because they are my kids and good kids they say of course: "read our mom's book and workbook Take Back Your Outside Mindset." Here is the link for that: https://www.amazon.ca/Take-Back-Your-Outside-Mindset/dp/1690766751/ref=tmm_pap_swatTheir advice is to learn the green space science, put it into action in small achievable steps in every day. And then celebrate to wire in the habit (my addition) because it feels good.

How to Sell & Offer ANY Freelance services right now (for non-teachers or anyone just trying to figure out ways to get work) Mindset- My attitude: I am not proud. I will dig ditches, wash dishes, or do anything necessary to survive. We can a) resign ourselves to defeat and give up b) lash out c) TRY to overcome. I prefer C. Obviously it is preferable to find work at higher hourly rates or generate passive income than working for $15 per hour. But if necessary, I will work for $15 per hour, or even on a volunteer basis, especially if that work affords any chance of Leveraging more opportunities. When Testing a new work/volunteer activity, dip a toe in the water. Do it once. Offer to do it for just a short period. What Kinds of Work Can You Do? Brainstorm a list of services you can provide. Write down everything. Ask someone you trust to offer you additional ideas and/or give their feedback on your list. Post your list here for feedback (in your personal post comment thread) One Time Free- I built my entire career on the "one time free" model. It's a great way to show people what you can do, and generate recurring revenue or repeat clients. -If you offer a one-time Free lesson, make the lesson 20 minutes instead of 60. if you offer to show up on someone else's live-stream, limit the time involved, or do it once as a test to see what kind of feedback you receive. Offer to do some kind of work for a new client as a "sample". It could be 5-20 minutes of your time. One free performance. One free consultation or lesson. One time free editing a paragraph of someone's copy. Free Youtube videos with call to action for people to hire you. Free emails (containing anything valuable from teaching to inspiration) w call to action Free performances on IG with links to hire your services

What Kinds of Podcast Are the Most Popular – Part Two The One on One Interview The One on One Interview: This is the most common form of podcasting. If you can book an interview with a very well known person who can give tremendous value to your particular niche audience – you can grow tremendously!   There are a lot of podcasters who use this particular format. But, you must be a good interviewer!   There are many podcasts out there where the host is not a good interviewer, and it shows. I use an interview format on my podcast, “The Kingdom Cross Roads Podcast.” I usually take at least as much time to prepare for the podcast as the length of the podcast – and usually longer! What do I mean by that? If the interview is 45 minutes in length, I usually take an hour to 90 minutes in preparation! I have an interview form that is part of the scheduling process. This form has all the basic contact information, of course. It also asks for the main topic of the interview the other person wants to discuss. The reason for that, they may be the owner or manager of a huge non-profit that is doing tremendous work. But the person wants to talk about a new book he has just published! So that is what I need to focus on during the interview!  I will, of course, discuss the non-profit and ask a couple of questions along those lines. But it is just to establish background for the authority of the interviewee. THEN, I jump into the questions about the book. In doing my preparation, I will take the information they provide, including the website, and start there. The best place to look, for me anyway, is the ABOUT ME page! I look for some interesting fact that is on the page that has almost nothing to do with the book, the business or anything else. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not spend a lot of time on that one question. But I will insert somewhere during the interview!  It may be something like, “One question I have for you, did you really get lost for two days in the jungle while in the Amazon rain forest?” I usually get a chuckle and a comment like, “Yeah!  That was an awesome time!” or something like that…and then they explain what happened! After the interview, I’ve almost always been complimented by my guests about the quality of my questions and my interview skills. Some are icons in their areas of influence! They will tell me that it has been a long time since they had someone interview them that had actually taken the time to learn about THEM! This is how I know I am following my passion for these podcasts. I spend the time to adequately prepare for each guest individually. If I do not have the time to adequately prepare, I will try to reschedule the interview so as not to waste my guests time (which would probably cause them never to come back on again in the future). You can do this as well. But you must MAKE THE TIME to adequately prepare! Next time, I will be discussing the Solo Commentary Podcast! If you find these videos helpful, please give us a rating and a comment below. It helps others to find this information as well. Thank you in advance for helping us to get the word out! Over the course of these videos and articles, I want to answer any questions you may have concerning podcasting. You can leave your questions in the comments section below. But a better way of communicating with me and making sure I am able to see your questions rapidly is by using the contact form on my website. Go to  https://podcast-training.com/contact (https://podcast-training.com/contact) and click on the contact tab. Fill out the form and be sure to send me your questions.  If your question is used on this...

What Kinds of Podcasts Are The Most Popular - Part One So, the question for today is, “What kind of podcasts are the most popular?” Over the next few episodes, I will be giving you the most popular methods of podcasting in use today. There may be a couple others that are used but not that popular. But I’m going to focus on the major ones. A quick summary, and remember, this is only a summary because beginning with the next episode, we go into detail. But so you can have the types here, they are: One on One Interview Solo Commentary Interview Panel Discussion Story Telling Podcast Fictional Story Telling Podcast Hybrid Podcast If you find these videos helpful, please give us a rating and a comment below. It helps others to find this information as well. Thank you in advance for helping us to get the word out! Over the course of these videos and articles, I want to answer any questions you may have concerning podcasting. You can leave your questions in the comments section below. But a better way of communicating with me and making sure I am able to see your questions rapidly is by using the contact form on my website. Go to  https://podcast-training.com/contact (https://podcast-training.com/contact) and click on the contact tab. Fill out the form and be sure to send me your questions.  If your question is used on this podcast, I will be giving you credit for bringing it to our attention and you will receive a FREE download of my book, “The Complete Guide to Podcasting.”  That is a $37 value and you will receive it for FREE if you send along your questions and used on this “ASK BOB” program. If you include your website or podcast information, I will be referencing that as well and putting your information in the show notes of the podcast.  Who knows, you may see some increased traffic to your website, your podcast, etc. just from asking a question.  If I get asked the same question, the first person to ask it will be getting the credit.  So IF you have a question, don’t wait!  Ask today. Just go to https://podcast-training.com/contact (https://podcast-training.com/contact) and fill out the contact form. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast in order to be notified when a new episode is being published and a new question is being answered. Remember, Keep Talking – You’re Awesome! To watch the associated video with this article, please click HERE:   https://youtu.be/X6G4JVW8Ulc (https://youtu.be/X6G4JVW8Ulc)

How do businesses use buyer intent data to increase the number of sales appointments they set by 6X? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, LeadSift Founder Tukan Das breaks down the topic of buyer intent data and provides the best explanation I've ever heard about what it is and how companies can use it to grow the number of sales opportunities. From who buyer intent data is right for, to where it comes from, what type of data you can expect to receive, how companies are using it, and the results they're getting to how much it really costs, Tukan covers it all in this not-to-be-missed interview. 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 special guests including HubSpot Co-Founder and CEO Brian Halligan, 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 Tukan include: LeadSift leverages buyer intent data to help B2B companies understand who is interested in purchasing their products or services. Tukan believes that buying intent, in general, is the most important unit in digital commerce. Buying intent can be measured from online and offline sources and is basically a probabilistic score that indicates the likelihood that a person or company will purchase something. LeadSift gathers buying intent data by crawling the entire internet and looking at public posts for "signals" - where people are mentioning specific things that LeadSift's customers want to track. Signals can include a variety of things such as keyword mentions, competitors mentions, conference mentions, and more. This process is automated and done at scale, and the data is then fed back into LeadSift's data engine and ranked. When you use LeadSift, you get a ranked list of accounts along with the key contacts that you should be going after because they are the ones that were showing the intent signals. One common use case for buyer intent data is with account-based marketing campaigns. Another use case is running audience match ads on Facebook or LinkedIn targeting the buyers that have shown high intent. There are many types of signals that LeadSift can use to generate buying intent data, but working with their customers they have discovered that signals relating to keywords perform better than signals relating to competitors. Buying intent data is useful for B2B companies with 50 or more employees and with average deal sizes in excess of $10,000 a year. Buying intent data is priced starting at $1,000 a month. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Check out the LeadSift website Connect with Tukan on LinkedIn Follow Tukan on Twitter Listen to the podcast to learn more about buyer intent data and the specific use cases that can help grow your sales funnel. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. Today, my guest is Tukan Das who is the CEO of LeadSift. Welcome Tukan. Tukan Das (Guest): Hi Kathleen. Nice to be here.. Tukan and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Great to have you. Can you tell my audience a little bit about LeadSift and yourself and what the company does? About LeadSift Tukan: Sure. My name is Tukan. I'm the CEO and co-founder of LeadSift. LeadSift is a sales intelligence platform that helps other B2B technology companies identify which accounts are actually looking for their solutions at any given time. That's the 30,000-feet view of LeadSift. One thing that I'd like to add is we have been working on LeadSift for about six and a half years. Our mission at LeadSift, and we have had a few pivots, but our mission at LeadSift has always been the same. It's around mining publicly available data to predict when a company or a person is looking to buy another product, whether it's a software product or a physical product or something like that. That has been our goal at the company, and in its current iteration, we are helping other B2B technology companies identify and predict which other companies are potentially going to buy their solution. Kathleen: That's interesting. Coming from the world of marketing, there are plenty of tools available to identify when an individual contact is interacting with your website and showing signs of purchase intent, but it sounds like you're talking about even outside of that, correct? Tukan: That's correct. What you mentioned is that's more on the first party intent when someone's coming to your website, interacting with your content, downloading the data or filling out a form. What we focus on is the outside world where they're having interesting conversations, which some of them could be potential signals of buying indicators. Those are the ones that we try to pick up and use as predictions. Kathleen: Now at the risk of getting into the territory of jargon, is this what is commonly referred to as buyer intent data? Tukan: It is. At a high level, yes, it is. Kathleen: This is interesting to me, and I was excited to talk to you about it because I have been hearing lots of people talk about this lately. I feel like it's the newest hot buzzword in the world of marketing, but there definitely appears be a lot of confusion around it, and so I would love it if maybe you could just start by demystifying. Every time I've heard somebody talk about this, they say there's all this publicly available data, and they mine it, and then they tell you who's out there. What Is Buyer Intent Data? Kathleen: I think the question I've always had is I want to understand how that really works. What is that data? How specific is it? Where does it come from? Is this GDPR compliance, all the questions that probably you get from of marketers? Maybe you could break that down. Tukan: Absolutely. I have a interesting philosophical view about buying intent. I personally believe buying intent in general is the most important unit in digital commerce. Basically, buying intent, what it means is identifying a customer in the journey of them buying a product. It is basically a probability of assigning a probabilistic score to a company whether they're going to buy your product or a product. That's all buying intent means. Now in reality, buying intent is generated both on online sources and even offline sources. It could be someone coming to your website and requesting a demo. That's a very strong signal of intent, or someone picking up the phone calling you or someone you meet at a coffee shop saying, "Hey, I want to know more about your product, buy from you." They're all signals of intent, but in reality, a lot of those signals are private to you and your own company, but that doesn't constitute the entire word buying intent. To reach the scale, you need to pick up signals that are happening on the outside world, but the reality is in a B2B setting, unfortunately, no company goes and waves a flag and says, "Hey, I'm looking to buy a new database or a marketing automation software." No one talks like that. Life would have been a lot easier. Kathleen: Well, it would be easier for marketers, but it would be hell for that buyer. Tukan: Depending if there could be a way to manage the number of requests and all those things. In the absence of that, everybody who is in the buying intent space, what they are trying to do is they're trying to come up with different proxies or signals and then combine all of them to make that prediction of this company likely to be buying a solution. As with any prediction engine, it can never be 100% accurate. It is a prediction. This is something that we tell all our customers, and I want to clarify this. I think there's a big misconception about buying intent that it is sort of like a silver bullet, "Oh, you told me this company is good market, 100% they're going to buy." No, they are no. It never works that way. If we could predict every company that was going to buy someone's software, I'd be a lot richer. Kathleen: I was going to say that we couldn't afford your services. Tukan: There you go. There you go. I'd be charging money to come into this podcast. With that being said, everybody is trying to look at these different proxies. There are a few different ways of looking at buying intent. Every company in the space has their own definition. The way I look at it or we look at it at LeadSift at a high level is there could be multiple different signals. A signal could be if we see someone engaging with my competitor on anywhere that we can publicly get, that could be a signal of intent. If I see someone engaging with a complimentary company, that could be a signal of intent. For example, our partners are Marketo, Salesforce or even Outreach and SalesLoft. We don't compete with them, but if you see someone using that product or engaging, showing interest about that product, that gives us an indication that they have a tech stack and they are showing interest about outbound marketing, so that could be interesting to LeadSift. A signal of intent could be someone researching or reading up on topics like account based-marketing. That could be a signal of intent. A signal of intent could be someone attending a specific event or a trade show. Those trade shows could be big as Dreamforce. It could be Sirius Decision Summit, or it could be niche events like FlipMyFunnel events that are happening or a webinar that is happening. If you're engaging with that content that the webinar's putting out, chances are this is top of mind for you. You might or might not be in the market right now, but you're more aware of this topic. A signal of intent could be someone growing their team. If I see someone who's hiring for a head of demand gen or someone hiring a lot of SDRs, chances are they are investing on demand generation and outbound marketing is very high. That's a good point to be. If we see someone announce a new product or launch a new partnership that might need a solution that we are doing, that could be a signal of intent. Basically, I think there is this myth or misconception around this black box approach around intent is like, "Ooh, we figured out from these publishers or whatever that these guys were researching about this topic, and that's why you should go after them." I think it's a lot simpler than that. It could be boiled down to all these different signals combining them and then coming up with a final score which are a probability saying, "These are the companies did these different things, and that's why they are more likely to be interested in your product right now." I don't know if I answered that question. Kathleen: No, those were actually really good examples. I guess the question that immediately then springs into my mind is you gave specific examples of if I'm engaging with a competitor or attending a certain conference or researching a certain product, and you qualified your definition of buyer intent as drawing from publicly available sources. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is what, and maybe this is the secret sauce, but what are those publicly available sources of information that reveal that data? Where Does Buyer Intent Data Come From? Tukan: Exactly. To give you an example, let's say you are interested in tracking a competitor or a specific partner of yours, and anytime you see someone engaging with them, that could be an interest. What we would do is we would look at the competitors that companies that you're interested tracking all their digital channels, whether it's social blogs, their forums, their YouTube channels, anything that is out there, and we would see when people are commenting, asking question or anything about them on those channels or on Quora or Reddit, ProductCon, Twitter, LinkedIn, anywhere they're mentioning something about that company or maybe they posted a webinar and they are sharing the link to the webinar, which maps to the domain of the companies. That's a signal. That's how we would figure it out. The way we do it, and there is no crazy secret behind it. If in reality all of the data that we're getting is public as I said, if you had 10,000 interns or researchers that are annually going over the entire internet, they could get the same exact signals. We just do it at scale and automate the whole process. Kathleen: You're basically finding a way to scrape all of that and then process it- Tukan: That's it. Kathleen: ... and put a formula behind what is a meaningful level of interaction. Tukan: Absolutely. Yes. Kathleen: That is a great explanation. That is the best explanation that I've heard yet about how this actually works. I feel like sometimes the people who are in the business of buyer intent data almost intentionally make it seem like this black box, but thank you for clarifying that. Tukan: Not a problem. I think there is a problem. I'm actually writing a LinkedIn post about it. I think there is a challenge there where on purpose, there is this misconception and there's a level of complexity that's added when it's not needed. Maybe they do hide some things. I don't know, but for us, it's purely crawling. It is literally crawling the entire public works for you at scale, and then getting this information. Kathleen: It makes sense. I agree with you that there is a problem because I think that the natural instinct when you feel like something's deliberately being presented as mysterious is either you don't trust it. Like, "Are you getting this data from an untrustworthy source," or that it's possibly too good to be true. I feel like a lot of people have shied away. Now, you go out and you crawl all of these sites. You look at all the interactions that are happening. You're able to synthesize that into meaningful insights for your clients. What Kind of Data Is Included With Buyer Intent Data? Kathleen: If I am somebody who is purchasing buyer intent data, what does that look like? Am I just getting a list of company names? Am I ever getting down to the individual contact level? How granular can you get? Tukan: No, that's a great question. Because of how we get the data, how we collect the data, we are probably the only company in the entire intent data ecosystem that can provide intense signals the level of a contact. When we give you an information, we would actually tell you, "You should go after Dell as a target account because their head of marketing was recently engaging with your competitor's content." That's what you get. You get a ranked list of accounts along with the key contacts that you should be going after because they are the ones that were showing the intent signals. When we, I guess, score or rank these accounts, we take into account who was the person that was showing interest in an IT services solution, a head of marketing, showing interest about the topic is okay versus if the IT director showed an intent signal. Their score will go up, so we incorporate all of that and present that data to you. Kathleen: You mentioned account based marketing earlier, and I wonder when you then return that data, you're able to get to the individual contact level. Let's say you mentioned Dell. Let's say there's 10 different influencers or decision makers at Dell who are showing intense signals. Are you able to package that together and say it's not just like a laundry list and there happens to be 10 people from Dell somewhere in the list? Is it, "Dell is the company. Here are the 10 people?" Tukan: That's exactly it. The way we presented it would say, "Here is Dell. These are the 10 people, and these are the different things they did." Kathleen: That's really interesting. I can see that being very useful because I've spoken to other companies that have pitched me on buyer intent data, but really all they're selling is a list of company names. It's better than nothing, but I wasted a lot of time marketing to the wrong contacts in those companies. Tukan: You asked a question earlier on about GDPR compliance and things like that. There is a confusion in the market because one of the things that clients tell us is, "How do you get contact level data?" If someone saw an ad on Forbes, they have an IP data that you reversed mapped to a company, but how the hell do you know who that person was? The way we do it is because we don't use cookies or we don't use IP data, we are basically crawling the web. When you're crawling the web, there is an individual who was doing an activity that gave us an indication that this makes it relevant for you to go after. That's how we are able to provide not just Dell but the key contacts that you should be talking to. All of this data is publicly available, so if your SDR was manually researching, he or she would have found this information. We just made it that much easier for them using technology. Kathleen: That makes sense. That was a great explanation. Thank you, very, very helpful. Now, if somebody is hearing this and they're thinking, "Okay, this is really interesting," can you talk through some specific use cases of how companies might use this kind of data to fill their sales funnels? Use Cases For Buyer Intent Data Tukan: I'll give a couple of examples, one more from a marketing perspective, the other more from a sales perspective how it can be used. One of our customers, they're fast growing in endpoint security space, highly competitive. Everybody in that space is super well funded, and it's a massive problem. One of the things they did was they had a list of target accounts that they wanted to book meetings with, basically try to get engagements on. They came to LeadSift, and they gave us that big list of target accounts along with it. They gave us a list of keywords and competitors that are of interest to them or topics. We work in this case was we were crawling the web picking up signals and contacts and pushing them directly into Marketo. A certain percentage of the signals were on target accounts that they were interested in during conversation into, and some of them were just green field or white field accounts or whatever they call them that fit the ICP but it's not in their target account list. We are pushing the data into Marketo, and they have it sync with Salesforce typically. That's the typical flow. When we pushed it into Marketo, they score them. Once the score reaches a certain score, they pass it over to the SDRs to go ahead and try to book a meeting with the contact that we picked up on that target account. Not just saying, "Hey, go after Dell because Dell is showing interest or talk to these three people within Dell because they were talking about these topics that you care about." That's how they did. I'll talk a little bit later about how they used interest in scoring techniques, but the result that they got was they had this started off with 100 accounts, target accounts to have discussions with. Within three months because of this contact and the signals we picked up, they had meetings with 60 of them. That was great, and over a period of six months, they got... I forget the number. It's high six figure in pipeline that they generated from those 100 accounts plus the new ones we identified. That's an example of how someone needs to think 10 signals into Marketo, push to Salesforce coupled with their account based strategy into booking meetings and creating opportunities from there. Kathleen: That's great. Tukan: One thing that we found out from them they were sharing was in the scoring mechanism, they actually found out when companies were engaging with specific keywords versus when companies were engaging with competitors, the key word engagement were actually giving them better results than competitors, which is interesting because my initial gut would have said, "If someone is engaging with my competitor, that's the hottest one I should go after." They found it opposite. It makes sense, but after, I thought, "Maybe some of them might be already too far in the buying journey. Kathleen: Too far down the funnel. Tukan: Yup. That was an interesting thing, so they adjusted the score in Marketo accordingly based on the kind of triggers. The other thing they also did was they were also looking at how many unique people within one of those target accounts were engaging. If one person engages three times, that's not as valuable as three people within the target they're gonna engage in one time each. They were using that because one person engaging multiple times might give you a false positive. They might have some prior relation, but if three people engage or like x number of people engage with this same trigger events or competitors, that's a better signal. Those were some interesting insights that we saw a customer use our data from a marketing perspective and being very successful. Who Is Buyer Intent Data Right For? Kathleen: That is really interesting. Now, in terms of the types of companies that are using this data, it sounds like it is very useful for B2B companies and companies that have a high transaction sales values or considered purchases, if you will, where more than one decision maker is involved. Is that accurate? Tukan: Yup, that's very accurate. In terms of our buyer persona, and when you look at our ICP and clients who have been most successful, so we look at companies in the small to medium sized enterprise, so 50 to 500 employees. Those are the ones. In B2B technology, 100%, and the other is their deal size needs to be meaningful. If their average deal size is, let's say, $1,000 a year, then they don't really need intent signals are even an outbound sales team, but if typically their deal size is at least $10,000, $12,000 annually, in that case, it makes sense for them. That's a sweet spot we have seen. Then there is another group of companies that we work not directly but through our partners. Those are more the large enterprises, so those 5,000, 10,000 employees. You have the HPs and the Oracles and Adobes of the world where we work with our partners. In their case, they do truly a multichannel or omnichannel marketing strategy where they take our data. They would do media buys, contents indications, email nurture, and things like that, but our sweet spot is those 50 to 500 companies that are heavy on driving sales revenue pipeline and things like that. How Much Does Buyer Intent Data Cost? Kathleen: Let's talk about the numbers then, because I'm curious. If somebody is listening and they're like, "This sounds amazing. I need to do it," what should they expect to spend, and how is the spend calculated? Is it based on the number of leads you're delivering? How does that work? Tukan: No. This is very interesting because it's not a cost per lead or ad spend or media spend type model. It's a purely subscription-based set up where you pay a flat fee, an organization wide license for your entire company, which is dependent on the number of triggers you're tracking. A trigger could be a name of a competitor or a name of a keyword or a topic or an industry event that you're interested in tracking. Based on that, they pay that fee and we push the data directly into the system. In terms of exact dollar value, it starts at around $1,000 a month. It's not crazy, but that's the price point that we charge, and it's a subscription model. Kathleen: Is there any general sense you can provide us to like if I'm spending $1,000 a month, what should I expect in terms of value? Tukan: Absolutely. Absolutely. That number changes, to be honest with you, Kathleen, based on how niche or how broad they're targeting, but on an average, all our customers get around 200 signals, intent signals a week, so roughly 800 to 1000 signals a month. That's the average. Our model is not capped on the number of signals you get. Some of our customers get a 1000 signals a day. For example, if someone is attending an event or sponsoring an event and they want to track people that are likely going to that event, they might get 400 or 500 accounts a day when the event is happening, but on an average, I would say between 800 to 1000 signals every month on unique accounts. Kathleen: I want to make sure I understand correctly. 800 to 1000 signals a month, that's 800 to 1000- Tukan: Accounts. Kathleen: ... in full contact level? Tukan: Yup. Kathleen: Really, if you're saying that you started $1,000 a month, that's for all intents and purposes about a dollar per contact. I know you don't want to call it. Tukan: No, but yeah. Sometimes you can do the ROI calculation if you do want to look at it that way. Kathleen: I mean, to me that sounds like a no brainer. I'm not being paid to say this, but it sounds like a no brainer only because if I do Facebook ads or something like that, a $1 costs to acquire a new contact, and this is a much more qualified contact, I would argue, that's pretty darn reasonable. Tukan: The way some of our customers would use the data and look at it is let's say you use it for a 90-day period, and in the 90-day period, that's a good enough period for you to then activate the data. One is us providing you the data. These are not inbound leads. Excuse me, you still need to nurture them, but assuming you ae following up with the data. Within 90 days, you should be booking 10 to 20 meetings, and then you can do the math from there on. Out of those 20 meetings you're booking, you should be having these many opportunities, and from there, they'll close. It's very easy to do the ROI from that perspective. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect? Kathleen: No, that makes sense. That's really interesting. Are there any averages in terms of results that you see your clients getting? Tukan: Yup. Few things. This is another example that I thought of is from a sales perspective. We are working with a digital marketing agency actually out of New York. They're national. They obviously do Facebook ads and different ads and inbound paid to drive leads. Reference is a big thing, but outbound is also a channel for them to generate leads. What they were finding is the number of meetings that they were generating through outbound was trying down because the way they were doing outbound is as everyone does is by static list of companies that fit our criteria and just hit them. They came to LeadSift to help them identify companies that are showing intent, potential companies that they can brand, I guess, in this case that they might be interested. They ran an email nurture campaign. That's what they're running. On an average, they're getting about 6% of the people that they're reaching out to are booking meetings with them. That is a very, very high number of people that are booking. The industry average is less than 1%, so they have tripled the number of people they're having meetings with in a month using the intense string. On an average, 6% is very high. That's of the outlier. This is not replies or positive replies. These are people that are actually booking meetings with them. On an average, we see... Assuming you have some baseline. You have an outbound process, whether it's email coupled with social and things like that. The average is at least you have twice the number of hit rate or connect rate or meetings rate than. That's the average that we see assuming you have a baseline, you already have a process set up. Kathleen: Well, and if you're not doing outbound sales, because there are plenty of companies that don't have really robust outbound sales programs, I imagine you could still take this data and create a custom audience for your paid advertising. You could do a look alike audience from that. There's a lot of different ways that if you didn't want to do direct outreach to the contacts, you could still pull them into your orbit in a subtler fashion. Tukan: Absolutely. We are seeing people doing that Facebook custom audience, Linkedin ads. That's also one of the things is to do paid media to drive people in there. Absolutely. Kathleen: Interesting. Wow. Well, that is really cool. I love hearing the details of how the sausage is made. It's the first time anybody's explained it really well to me, so I appreciate it. Tukan: No problem. Learn More About LeadSift Kathleen: If somebody's interested in learning more about either the company and its products or about this topic, and they want to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Tukan: Couple of things. The best way is to go to leadsift.com. We have a pretty simple website. There's quite a bit of... We produce a lot of content and webinars and things like that, so do check it out. Kathleen: I'll put the link in the show notes for that. Tukan: Perfect. Request a demo talk to one of us or just reach out to me at tdas@leadsift.com. Find me on LinkedIn. My Twitter is @TDas. Just reach out to me. I'm deeply passionate about this whole idea of mining intent from unstructured web. I believe there is no single source of truth for intent. There's different ways to look at it. If you want to know anything more about LeadSift or just a general idea about intent-driven marketing and sales, hit me up. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Love it. I'll put all those links in the show notes. Now, we can't wrap up without me asking you the two questions that I always ask my guests. First of those is we talked a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or an individual that you think is really killing it right now with inbound marketing? Tukan: That's a good question. I think I'm going to give altruistically different answer. I think one company, one person that is absolutely killing it is Jason Lemkin with SaaStr. I think they are doing a phenomenal job with inbound marketing, creating content that startups find valuable from early stage to growth stage or scale up. Unbelievable content they're getting. They have podcasts. They have the SaaStr show. I think Jason has probably written 100,000 answers on Quora and things like that and his LinkedIn post. I think they're doing a phenomenal job with inbound marketing. Kathleen: That's a really interesting one that I've not heard before. Tukan: I thought so. Kathleen: I might actually just then tweet Jason and see if I can get him to come on the podcast. Tukan: You would be amazing because you ask any startup founders, CEO or anybody in a tech startup space, everyone knows about SaaStr. SaaStr itself is becoming the go-to conference for all SaaS companies to go, and it is all because of Jason creating content every day and they're doing a phenomenal job. Kathleen: I love it. Well Jason, if you're listening, I'm coming for you. Now the second question is the biggest challenge that I hear marketers talk about is that the world of digital marketing is changing at such a lightning fast pace, and it's really hard to keep up with current best practices, new technologies and developments. How do you personally stay educated? What do you do for yourself? Tukan: Again, this also might be a different answer compared to what everyone else has said. Maybe because I'm not a marketer by trade. It might be a bit of a cheesy answer, but the best source for me to learn is actually talking to customers who are all marketers. When we talk to customers, we do the first five minutes of a sales call, we ask them. It's what's their process? What are they using? We get unbelievable amount of insights into what this entire world's looking like. They actually literally educate us, which we then use for other customers to get ourselves better and all that. That's one source that I think is phenomenal. The other is actually, I'm part of a few groups in Facebook and LinkedIn. One of them particularly is called SaaS Growth Hacks. It's from early stage companies, super active. There, I get a ton of insights into latest marketing trends, cool hacks and crawl tracking stories or things like that that people are trying out. There's a lot of discussion. People ask questions. People comment. I skim through it at least once a day to get some cool insights into what's going on, what's working, what's not working, what to be aware of. Those would be my two big sources of learning about the latest marketing trends. Kathleen: Those are good ones. I'm going to have to hunt down that SaaS Growth Hacks. Tukan: Absolutely. It's a great Facebook group. Kathleen: Good. All right. Well, there you have it. I will put the links for all of those things in the show notes. Now you know how to reach Tukan if you're interested in learning more about LeadSift or buyer intent data. If you have been listening and you learn something new or you liked what you heard, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That makes a huge difference. If you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at Work Mommy Work, because I would love to interview them. Thanks Tukan. Tukan: Thank you Kathleen. Kathleen: It's great having you. Tukan: Same here. It was a pleasure.  

How are some companies using account-based marketing to shorten the sales cycle, increase penetration in key accounts, and improve customer NPS scores? This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast, Terminus Co-Founder Sangram Vajre shares his insights on the past, present, and future of account-based marketing, including who it is right for and how the sales and marketing teams of the future will be able to use buyer fit and intent data to laser target the accounts with the highest likelihood of closing. 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 Sangram include: Sangram says that the easiest way to think about ABM is that it is focused marketing and sales activity. The best use cases for ABM are for companies with larger transaction value sales or those who are going after a smaller audience within a larger marketing strategy. ABM solves for a challenge that many companies experience. Specifically, it is a way to address situations where a company might be generating a lot of leads, but the sales team feels they are of poor quality. ABM 1.0 was about identifying the top 100 target accounts and going after those using targeted ads, custom landing pages, and direct mail campaigns. ABM 2.0 takes it a step further and uses buyer fit and intent data to automatically identify the best fit companies - the ones that are most likely to close - and then develop ABM campaigns around them. The ABM of the future could use artificial intelligence to take that buyer intent and fit data and then automatically build landing pages and ABM campaigns for those prospects. Sangram believes that in the future, marketing is actually going to own setting sales quotas because they will be the team that has that fit and intent data, which will make them more accurate in forecasting what can actually close. ABM is best suited to companies with a high degree of organizational readiness (meaning they are bought into the approach from the CEO down and they have a "one team" kind of mindset) and with larger sales transaction values. The three primary use cases for ABM are for acquisition, pipeline velocity, and customer satisfaction. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Terminus website Visit Sangram's personal website Listen to the #FlipMyFunnel Podcast Connect with Sangram on LinkedIn Follow Sangram on Twitter Get Sangram's book Account-Based Marketing For Dummies Join the #FlipMyFunnel Community Listen to the podcast to learn how ABM is evolving and what the most successful ABM campaigns do to get results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast.I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host and today my guest is Sangram Vajre from Terminus. He is the chief evangelist and cofounder. Welcome Sangram. Sangram Vajre (Guest): Thank you, Kathleen. Excited to be on the show. Sangram and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I am excited to have you here. I have not had anyone come on and talk about account based marketing before. Before we jump into that though, I would love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and about Terminus and also ABM in case people don't know what it is. Abount Sangram and Terminus Sangram: All right. Sure. And as you said, I started to cofound Terminus about four years ago and prior to that I ran marketing at Pardot, which took me to this to acquisition within a year of Exact Target acquiring Pardot and then Salesforce acquiring Exact Target. So all of a sudden I went from running marketing for 100 people company for 10 million revenue all of a sudden to running it at Salesforce which was just incredible. It was a moment where I think I realized, I think I understood the meaning of scale. At Salesforce, I really had no idea before that. Kathleen: Trial by fire, right? Sangram: Totally. Totally. It's an incredible machine. And then co-founded Terminus. Ended up writing the first book on account based marketing that was published in 2016, believe it or not. So I'm about to write my second book this year and along the way started and really built this community called #FlipMyFunnel, which is all about challenging the status quo of marketing and sales. We have about 10,000 people in that community and a lot of really fun. It's awesome to see so many people doing some level of account based marketing. And I'm happy to share more through examples or stories of how incredible things are happening in companies. Kathleen: I was really impressed with the community that you all have built. I had Nikki Nixon, who was the head of the Flip My Funnel community, on one of my earliest episodes and community is something that we at IMPACT are very focused on and so it was really interesting to me to hear that story of how it got started and how particularly through some of the events you've held, that community has grown over the years. Sangram: Community is something, I have a saying on the #FlipMyFunnel podcast we talk about is really that without a community you are simply a commodity. "Without a community you are simply a commodity" - Sangram Vajre Click to Tweet this quote And if you think about anything like Hubspot for example, is an investor in Terminus. And I remember spending time with both Brian and Dharmesh then they became an investor in our company and I asked him why are you spending so much time and money on inbound? And they said, look, if somebody has to go build somebody that's going to compete with Hubspot toe to toe, first thing they need to go need to go and do is build a 20,000 plus community and hundreds of thousands of other people that are not even at this event but are online, they have to go build all that moat around them in order to even start to begin to compete with them at that level. So there is so much power in community and so do and Salesforce and Drift. And so I don't think we did anything new. I just felt like we definitely stumbled on this idea and thankfully and gratefully have been able to nurture it. Kathleen: Yeah, and it might not be something new, but I am amazed at how much we as marketers talk about the importance of community but so few brands and companies actually bother to truly invest in doing it. Kudos to you for following through. Sangram: I appreciate that. What Is Account-Based Marketing? Kathleen: So #FlipMyFunnel, I've always liked that name, too, because to me it so perfectly defines in marketing speak at least what ABM is in a way that anyone can understand. But to to rewind a little bit, let's go back to account based marketing. That's really what I wanted to talk to you about. How do you define account based marketing? Because I've heard it defined many different ways. Sangram: Yeah. So I'm not gonna give any analysty kind of definition. I think everybody can find a million different answers for that. I think quite simply to me it is focused marketing and sales activity, and that's all it is, really. So if you were in B2C where you are selling Nike shoes to any and everybody in the world, it makes sense to go after any and everybody in the world. But if you're selling to, let's say Fortune 500 financial services company for your supply chain product, guess what? There are only maybe 50 of them. So why in the world do we want to create content and qualification and all the processes that we all have created that has a roadblock to it? Why not start with the best fit accounts to begin with and then expand within the reach within them and then engage them and then turn into advocates. Why not focus on the 50 as opposed to 5,000 to find the 50? B2C has that problem. B2B thankfully does not have that problem. So that's why I think ABM is so cool. Kathleen: Yeah, it definitely makes sense that that larger transaction value that small audience, or the small audience within the bigger marketing strategy. So Terminus as a platform enables companies to more effectively do account based marketing. For the person listening who is either familiar with ABM or maybe not familiar but interested in learning more, tell me a little bit about what kinds of successes you've seen companies have with it. And honestly like how does it work? So if somebody says, I want to do focused marketing, what does that really mean at a practical level? Sangram: Well. So let's walk through an example of your document before we started to record, which is a company called Masergy is great customer of ours. They are in cloud communications and computing so I think most people can relate to that as a technology company and Malachi who runs their marketing is a phenomenal guy. We had him speak at a lot of the conferences and podcasts and all that stuff. So let me walk through almost status quo ABM 1.0 if you will and ABM 2.0. And I think as audience is listening to this and maybe they can figure out where they belong in this journey that you may be or may not be right now and trying to figure out to be on. So Malachi was in one of these incredible inbound marketers where he generated 25,000 leads, got 25,000 leads and he heard all the time from the sales team is like, well, they're not qualified. They're not relevant. They're not the right people and as you might know, Forrester came out with the research in 2016 I think that less than 1% of the leads are turning into customers. Kathleen: I was going to say, I'm pretty sure every single marketer that is listening has heard exactly that complaint from their sales team before. Sangram: And that's purely because we are going after again first trying to get any and everybody and then try to qualify it as opposed to going after the right people. So the problem is something that I think we have to own that we have created to begin with. So in a status quo world, I feel if you are marketing it and that's how the challenges you feel like at think of it as the status quo, that is pretty much what's happening in 90% of the company and it's unfortunate. I think we all need to wake up and look at it and think like, hey, it's not really sales problem. It's actually a marketing problem that we need to fix. So that's kind of where I feel he found himself as well a couple of years ago. Then he moved into this, what I would call AB 1.0 where I think more and more companies are finding themselves now who are jumping on the bandwagon of ABM which is saying, okay, well that's not working. Sending these 25,000 leads is not working. What do I do? Let me find the right people. Let me just go and select top 100 accounts that my sales and marketing team can focus on. That might be on a vertical, that might be based on sales stage that you are having difficulty converting, or it might be a sector or whatever it might be. So I think most people are now finding a top 100 accounts that I want to focus on. And to your point like, well how do you do it? What you really do and most companies are doing, they're running one to one campaign for each one of these hundred accounts. That means they'll have an ad that talks to that exact company and all the people in that company. So you're running advertising through platforms like Terminus and Google or whatnot. Then you are taking them to a landing page that doesn't ask for their mother's maiden name. It actually gives them the whole information about how you can actually help their industry and them and others in their industry be successful. So there's no gating of information. It's actually now your customers are going to spend more time on that page because you're literally taking to a page that is custom made for them and then you can add direct mail or stuff like that, too, to kind of engage them. Now you can do all of these things because you're only focused on top hundred. You're not focused on everybody. So you can do a digital advertising, you can do a Linkedin campaign, you can do a direct mail campaign, you can have a landing page that is focused on them, a stream of content videos for them. It's all possible when sales and marketing is working together at 1.0 level. And the results of that one, just in case of Malachi and Masergy they have over 250% penetration rate within the accounts they want to go after compared to any other account that they're targeting. Right? I think they knocked off a month in the sales process. So now they're closing deals much faster. Now you can imagine what kind of revenue impact you have in your organization when you're actually taking one month off your sales process. So how many more opportunities can your sales team work on? So their results are fantastic, but that's just because they're able to focus on the top hundred accounts. Right? Kathleen: So if I understand correctly, I'm a company and let's say I want to land Coca Cola as an account. I might set up ads via either Google or Linkedin or what have you that are targeted just at people who work for Coca Cola and then those ads are going to direct them back to a landing page that's either about the beverage industry or I guess it could specifically be about Coca Cola. Sangram: It actually should be. It could literally say your company plus Coke equals whatever because we do x,y,z. Kathleen: Yeah, and then potentially as you said, other items like direct mail, et cetera and the goal of all this is to get in front of and raise brand awareness amongst as many people within Coca Cola or at least within the right parts of Coca Cola as possible. Is that accurate? Sangram: Exactly and the reason you want to do that at that level is because we all know in B2B the decision making is by committee where there are five, seven, nine, 10 people are the decision making process. If all 10 people have heard about you and have seen your message and they may never fill up a form but they all have some sort of input in the buying process. Well if the CFO, the CEO, the head of sales, the head of procurement, and all of them have seen your brand chances as are you going to have somewhat of an in in that company because of the brand awareness you've created, but you can't create that level of brand awareness unless you are focused on them. Kathleen: Now, how do you do this without having the intended target feel like it's creepy. Sangram: It's creepy beyond creepy. But I think we all have sold our rights to privacy in many ways when we sign up for Facebook, when we signed up for websites that have over digital kind of body language to it. So in many ways, I'm one. So we do Terminus, one of the things beyond analytics and all this stuff that we do for canvas marketing as a platform, but one of the things we do is we do is digital advertising and I'm not someone who typically clicks on a lot of ads or digital advertising. I actually hate it. And I've told the founder of this company, but I loves ad when it actually does and serve a purpose for me. So for example, if I am looking for something and if I get the right message at the right time, it is an awesome thing. Otherwise it's annoying to me. Kathleen: I was just saying this, I was taking the train home on Saturday from a week away for work and I had, this is such a side story, but it's relevant. For Christmas, I wanted this one pair of slippers. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: And I didn't get it. And all of a sudden on the train, on the way home, this ad pops up and the slippers are on sale and darned if I didn't buy them within like five minutes of getting the ad. And it's exactly what you're talking about. I mean, this is it more of a B2C example. But yeah, I mean they knew I was interested. It was the right time and it was immediate, it was an easy yes. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: And I don't like ads either for what it's worth. Sangram: Exactly, none of us do, but we all value whatever is timely and convenient for us or the needs that we have. So I may not like a cupcake ad that pops up randomly for me, but I would love an ad for the right book or the right thing that I want. And B2B software is no different. If you're looking for it and you find the right connection, then you will spend time. So a company like Masergy is finding true success because these people are not converting on their website like the status quo thing. They're actually spending more time looking at oh this is good, this is great for our financial. They seem to have a great case study with a similar customer in our industry so they get our problem. They know what the messaging is exactly what you would create because you know enough about Coke so the messaging is going to be about it so they care. Like those are the feelings that you invoke in your future customer that standard marketing doesn't really do. So that's 1.0. And 2.0 sorry, go ahead. ABM 2.0 Kathleen: Yeah, no, that's what's going to be my next question is, all right, so what's 2.0? Sangram: If that's exciting enough for be people. If you're dipping your toes that already may feel overwhelming, but the reality is that if you truly care and if the deal size is big enough and if you can truly forward the velocity, it's really worth it. Now, if you're a transactional business where you're spending like 10 bucks a month subscription, it probably is not worth doing all the effort on it. Now ABM 2.0 is really interesting because now you go from this silo approach off like everybody and anybody and I need to go in and figure out who I need to go after and see less than 1% of the customers to the top hundred accounts and now it's super targeted, super engaged and connected and all that stuff. But now I'm getting proactive around my outreach and all that stuff is to this idea of running my entire business like that. Right? Imagine all of the target accounts that you want to go after now, not just hundreds, but maybe let's say your total addressable market is 3,000 accounts, right? And you know that your product or service is suited for those 3,000 accounts. Imagine having the ability to have a fit and intent score where you will say, okay, these 3,000 accounts have fit. These are great accounts. I just want to know whenever there is intent to buy any of these accounts somewhere online, if they're researching on G2 Crowd for a similar software. I want to know if somebody in that company is reading articles that have the keywords that I care about, I want to know. Right? So the fit and intent if you can combine that beyond the hundred accounts and say of these 3,000 accounts, any account that is the right fit and intent, I need to be alerted so that my sales can be prioritizing the experience for them. And then the same play that we talked about at 1.0, I can replicate it in a prioritized way for the accounts that are in market right now. And I think that's when you're running your business on a very hyper targeted, hyper personalized at scale. Kathleen: Now how do you, you talked about intent and some of the examples you gave were things that would happen off of your own web assets. So not on your website. It might be like you said, G2 crowd, for example. How are companies able to access this kind of intent data? Sangram: Oh, there's tons of providers right now in the market place. Like G2 crowd themselves would provide the intent.  Terminus connects with like you know Bombora. Bombora is another good one. DiscoverOrg would give you that information. Linkedin will give you that information now. Even G2 crowd as a set. And so there are tons of companies who are starting to pull all this information together and we as a platform, we are trying to hook up into all of them and say, okay, well we can run this for 100, but the beauty would be then you can run this for 3,000 and not leave anybody out there who's the right fit and has the intent right now because that's when you're going to win faster at a much higher level when you know the company that's in market. So all of these companies, they're more and more companies actually coming up with this data. Kathleen: That's interesting what you said about that you're really trying to hook up with all these different platforms. Because the first question that was going to come into my head was, I'm hearing a lot of companies talk about using CDPs, customer data platforms, in order to tie together the data they have in all different places. But it sounds like the direction you're moving, that wouldn't be necessary. You essentially would be the CDP. Sangram: Sure. I mean that's exactly right. Like we, I remember the really early days. Initially our thought was, hey, we're going to look at all the people in everybody's CRM and start helping them do advertising to them. What we quickly realized, everybody's data is shit. Like it's crap. And there's nothing in there. Like a lot of them are not updating data and there's all kinds of, there's the same companies alert seven different ways in CRM, like we all have the same issues. I'm like, okay, that's not gonna work. So we only get the names of the companies from our customers and the type of persona they want to target. Then we use our own intelligence by partnering with Linkedin and D&B and NetProspex and so many different data providers so that we have a clean set off information and then we are proactively targeting them and giving intelligence back to our customers. They're like, whoa, that's great. So I think you're absolutely right. I think we are relying a lot on good data from third party sources because most CRMs and most marketing automations, the data is not clean. Kathleen: Amen to that. It's terrible. It really is. It's my biggest pet peeve is just the garbage that's in these databases. Sangram: Yeah. Kathleen: So interesting. Okay, so it sounds like the key shift there from ABM 1.0 to 2.0 is in 1.0 you're manually creating your target list and in 2.0 you have a system in place that feeds your targets to you that is essentially automated. Is that accurate? Sangram: Exactly. Right, and now you're going back to okay, you want to automated, but now you want to automate it or you want to create this personalized experience, but now you are creating that personalized experience for anyone that is in market that has the right fit as opposed to this arbitrary hundred companies that I have decided because they sound great or my sales team said that this is important. Now I'm actually running my business on the smart content. What Will ABM Look Like In the Future? Kathleen: Well now I'm really curious to hear what your predictions will be for what ABM 3.0 will look like. Cause I have some ideas that I've gotten as I've listened to you talk and I'm curious to know if they're going to be similar to what you come up with. Sangram: I don't know. I just came up with 2.0. I don't know what we get going. Kathleen: I mean the first thing I thought of was if the second step is the system basically feeds you, these are the companies you should go after. In my head, I'm thinking, well the third step is then you have a system, an artificial intelligence system, that just spins up the landing pages. Sangram: Oh yeah. Kathleen: From your relational database. It says, oh they're financial services. Well we have that template. Pop their name in and then it's really truly the robots are doing our jobs for us. Sangram: Oh you, you are spot on when it comes to personalization of this whole experience. I mean right now people are throwing bodies at it. Kathleen: Yeah. Sangram: Hey, you know what? Go create 50 landing pages. We have a customer Snowflake for example. They're running 500 one to one campaigns. 500. They have 15 people now I think six and by end of Q one, so by end of Q one they're supposed to have 15 people with the title of account based marketing. So you can think about how they are because they're like, well, does every one of them have regions and then helping to personalized experiences for it. So we are actually in some ways putting bodies in place because we don't know if there is a way to automate all of this experience because it's so rich and so valuable and so unique in many ways right now. Kathleen: I'm sure we're not far off from it. Sangram: Oh, no. Kathleen: So talk me through the one thing we haven't really touched much upon. We've talked about ABM from the marketer's standpoint. Walk me through at what point in this process in an ideal world, should sales enter into the equation and what does that hand off look like? Are they involved the whole way? The Marketing To Sales Handoff In ABM Sangram: There is no handoff. I think that's where we got it wrong. I feel like some of the blame is on me as well as part of that, that old group of people. I feel like there is no hand off. Sales and marketing hundred percent has to agree on the way this is going to work. Otherwise you can't create a personalized experience. If the sales person's not going to call as soon as the direct mail is hit to the right person, then you know it's not gonna work. If the sales person is not going to follow up when they see an increased activity of the right accounts on your website because you have get rid of all the forms and now you have five kind of right people on their website if they don't do that work that's needed to follow up on, then in the B2B world, it's still not going to work. People are not going to just come and swipe credit cards if you're selling a $100,000 product. So sales are super important. What's bigger difference I think if you want to go the predictions route is I think marketing is going to own the process of figuring out who to go after because they're going to have fit and intent data. So imagine as a marketer and you could say, hey, we want to open an office in, we want to expand our business, great. Based on the information that I have from all of these different technologies that I'm able to cobble up together, I can see that in Boston there is the highest concentration or best fit future customers. There is a lot of intense action going on over there, too. So we should open a sales office in Boston and put two people in there because based on the quota that we are hitting, it makes sense that two sales people. So imagine that a marketer can set up sales quota and not only that, a marketer can figure out the forecasting of which deals are going to close. Because a lot of times the sales would say, oh, I think 30% of them are going to close. And a lot of times, quite honestly they have no clue. Nobody has any clue why somebody went dark or what happened there. Right? But now marketer can say, hey look. And we have seen this happen at Terminus and a lot of customers say, look of these 10 deals that you planned that they're going to close this month, let me tell you, 7 of them have not even spent a minute on our website in the last month and a half. So let's get rid of the bullshit. There are only 3 that we can have a full opportunity to close. Why not just focus on these three? We know there's interest in there. Let's do more campaign. Maybe do a in house dinner over there and try to close the deals with these three because the seven, the chances are they're not going to close this month in the next two days, right? So that level of intelligence in the front portal, from fit and intent and then forecasting, is unique and new and I think the marketer is going to be in the driver's seat. Kathleen: I feel like all the sales people who are listening are going, "No way. Marketing's not going to set my quotas." Sangram: I think they want it. If they are smart to recognize the power in this thing, I think they would want it because they can actually have a higher quota at a much higher velocity and they would actually be doing what they're the best at, which is influencing the deal and closing it. But marketers can now, we are all going to be more of an intelligence provider. Here's the intelligence of who you should go after. Here's the intelligence who can close faster, so maybe focus. We are really helping sales team to do their best and I feel like the future really is going to be where sales fully embraces marketing's role in helping them win more deals. ABM and GDPR Kathleen: Interesting. One thing that came to mind as I was listening to you describe all the disparate sources of data, especially the intent data, the first question that came into my head is how does this all fit within the increasing movement towards giving users more control over their information and privacy and GDPR? Can you talk a little bit about that? Sangram: Yeah, I think it's great because you're no longer emailing people without their permission. And the advertising that you're seeing are proactive advertising and interest that you have already shown interest for, which is why you bought those slippers because you kind of wanted that. Kathleen: They had my number, I'll tell ya. Sangram: They had all information that you have willingly provided to them. So I think as long as it is helpful, I think people are going to be okay with it. I think the reason GDPR is actually good is because people are spamming, right? People send a newsletter which is all about it and people want a newsletter that's all about who is getting the email is coming too. So it's such a different thing. I think all of that is happening because we just don't know who can bite the bullet. We don't know who's going to pay the bill. We don't know who's going to buy the product or service. In this model, because you're focused on a few that actually matter, that's why you heard me never say or use the word "prospect" in the process. You're prospecting is dead because the only prospect that you don't know if they're going to be a customer or not. In this case it's all future customers because you've already done the homework to figure it out if they're best fit and can you serve them or not? Have you served other people like them or not? If it's not best fit, you shouldn't be spending any time with them at all. Who Is Account-Based Marketing Right For? Kathleen: Yeah. So there are a lot of companies that are practicing account based marketing. Tell me a little bit about who this is right for in terms of the type of company, because they're obviously, it does take a certain degree of manpower to build out these assets. There's an investment on the front end especially if they're going to buy a platform like Terminus. Sangram: Yeah, totally. So I think there are two ways of thinking about that, Kathleen. One is the organizational readiness, because no matter how many resources you have, I've seen it fail tremendously in many, many ways. And one of the one was that the organization is not ready to adopt that. So I'll talk about that in a sec. And then the other way is also to figure out like are we selling and do we know who we're selling to and as the audience really open to it? So I'll get into that as well. So organizational readiness, meaning if you have a sales driven quota or marketing, sales driven culture or marketing driven culture, then this is not going to work because it has to have a "one team" kind of mindset. This will only work when organizations fully understand the importance of doing it. And believe it or not, it starts with the CEO, not CMO or CSL. It actually starts with the CEO because it's a business transformation that we're talking about. We're talking about clarity around having aware of what your total addressable market is. I'm sure if you ask your audience right now, I would guarantee, majority of them will not know what their total addressable market looks like. How many exact number of customers they can potentially sell to this year. That was like, these questions are not something marketers jump into. Typically they are like siloed in the sales world or maybe. Like everybody, the CEO to the board, to the CFO to the CMR, everybody has to agree on the total addressable market and that's organization readiness. So if you don't have that kind of stuff, I think it's going to fail and I've seen it fail. It might succeed. but I've seen in fail more than not. And the other part is around the idea that are you selling like let's say you're selling $50,000 product which has an annual subscription which you can upserve in the next couple of months or a couple of years to $100,000 or $150,000, ABM is perfect for you. That makes perfect sense. But if you're selling for like 10 bucks, Dropbox kind of subscription fee kind of stuff, unless it has a tremendous potential then it won't make sense for you to do it because the cost of acquisition will go off the roof. So this is really for accounts that that do matter and have a higher revenues. Mid market, if you're selling to mid market and enterprises, even if you're a small shop, so this is, I want to really clarify, I've seen companies that are really small, like 10 people shop be wildly successful because they sell $100,000 $200,000 worth of services or product. And I've seen companies that are big companies, even public companies that are selling to SMB, they are not successful at all because if your target audience is smaller and it just won't work, you'll have to scale so much. What Kinds of Results Can You Expect With ABM? Kathleen: Right. And what about results? Like do you have some examples of what companies have seen as a result of doing these types of campaigns? Sangram: Well, I mean, some of it, what we talked about Masergy where their engagement rate and I think penetration within the right kind of targeted council is up by 250%. They knocked off a sales month from their entire sales process because they were able to do that. To me, that that sounds like millions of dollars. Even beyond that, 85% of their revenue came from one product and they have three more products to sell. So they have to figure out a way to upsell the other two products and they just were trying to create awareness. So now you're going apply ABM to customer marketing. So you already know the customers that have this one product, let's say cloud computing. You say, okay, now I want to run the same ad to other business units or other personas in that company making your customer like somebody in their company look like hero and show how you're helping that business owner. So if you're selling to GE and you have one business unit and you want to sell it or the business unit, it's awesome. Like that's a hundred percent ABM. So what they found out that they are creating more sticker products line and business line for them, but most importantly, and this was this was the best, that they found that their NPS score, which is the net promoter score for the customers who bought more than two products after they launched the ABM because they knew so much about them already as the best fit, went up from 70% to 90%. So think about that for a second. You're not only serving your customers and upselling your own process services, because you're serving the right people and because your focus again is on the right people, you're able to serve them, you really are able to solve their problems so you're not trying to close more deals, you're trying to close the right deals. So they're going to be more delighted than ever before because they're not going after everybody. Kathleen: That is really interesting. I have never actually heard anybody talk about using ABM for upsells and cross sells. Sangram: Actually that is the best use case than demand generation. I think because we're in marketing, we think we need more acquisition. It's actually parsed into three - acquisition, pipeline velocity and customer marketing. If you were to start ABM, if you have never jumped into ABM at all, I would say jumping into pipeline velocity or customer marketing first. Pipeline velocity, which means if there is a deal in play and you know when it's going to close, let's say 30 days or 60 days, perfect. Your sales is going to be cooperative, the finance team is going to be looking at those deal, your CFO, CRO, everybody's in it. So if you can show movement there, you get by in there, so that's the best place to start 100% because that's where you're going to see you already have a good customer, why not get more of the from the good customer? But pipeline velocity, Kathleen I think is a very understated area of focus and if you're piloting with the top accounts, it's not actually acquisition, that's the last place you want to go because you have no idea when they're going to be ready to truly buy. Pipeline velocity, customer marketing, I think that's where gold is. Kathleen: Yeah, the customer marketing stuff is so interesting to me, because we always even, I mean we're not a huge, huge company. We're probably 65 people. But we always have this challenge as an agency when we offer a new service for the first time of how do we, you know, yes, can we send an email to every client we have? Absolutely. But what's an effective way to keep reminding them that we do this now? Like for example, in the last year we added a full fledged video production and training department and some of our clients are really aware of it and others aren't. And it's just interesting to think about even just running an ad to clients saying, "did you know we do this" and directing them back to a landing page for customers only. Lots of ideas spinning now. Sangram: I think that's beauty. ABM is not a tactic. It's a strategy. It's not a tool. If somebody says that, "Hey, we use Terminus and we're doing ABM" I would say you're not, because we're not doing direct mail, we are not doing call cadences. We are not doing a lot of the other things, the landing pages. So that's not it. We're not ABM. We play a wider role in helping you enable an ABM program, but ABM is a strategy that you and your organization need to really care about and focus in the area of that you need the most help. And your use case of saying just, I mean that's the cheapest, the amount of, if you were looking at a dollar return, that's the best place to kind of put in. But we end up putting more money in acquisition than actually getting more from our own existing customers. Kathleen: Absolutely. And if you have a tiny targeted audience, it's worth spending more per click or whatever the metric is because they're warm, so interesting. So you mentioned a couple of companies. Was it Masergy? I want to make sure that everyone knows how that's spelled so they can see it. Sangram: Yeah. Masergy and Snowflake is another company. Phenomic is another company. We actually do something called internally called customer in the office. So every month we try to bring in a customer and have them share with you. That's why these stores are so fresh for me because every month I'm hearing from them literally how it's transforming their team, their sales and marketing relationship and their organization. Kathleen: I love that customer in the office thing, that's great. Keeps me really close to not only the successes but some of the challenges people are facing. So definitely if you're listening go check out those companies to see some examples. It might not be obvious on their site, I'm guessing, because a lot of this is sort of happening behind the scenes under the curtain specifically directed towards their target customers. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Changing gears for a minute, I have a couple of questions that I always ask everyone who comes on this podcast. Curious to get your take on this. The first one is company or individual? Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Sangram: Well, I mean the company probably comes to mind is Drift. I'm sure others have mentioned that as drip, like what David Cancel and David Gerhardt are doing. I feel like they're building a great category and it reminds us a lot of what we have done in the past, but I feel like they're doing it better then what we have done to be very honest. So it really, really feels good to see what they're doing. Kathleen: Yeah, their names definitely come up a lot. And I did get to interview Dave Gerhardt. I was like, "I keep hearing your name, you have to come on the show." Sangram: He's great and the team is awesome over there. Kathleen: Second question, with the world of digital marketing changing so quickly, we kinda touched on this earlier with ABM even changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and on top of all these new technological advancements and trends in marketing? Sangram: I mean, just like you, I feel like I have, I think the podcast is a great way to learn. So I listen a lot of podcasts. I listen to Inbound. I listen to Donald Miller's podcast. And I almost sometimes go back to we need older books but instead of newer ones, because I think what hasn't changed is that we are all humans, thankfully, and what hasn't changed is the emotions and the feeling. And I feel like the more I go back to that, the better it gets. So like podcasts is like the radio. It's back to radio. You're recording this thing and it's going to go live. That is crazy that it is the new thing right now. So I feel like podcasting is like the new white paper of the world. Videos are like the new blogs of the way. In many ways you're just going back to some of the older ways of communicating just one to one in a very authentic way. So wherever that authenticity line goes, I try to follow that. Kathleen: Right. And thank you for mentioning the specific podcasts that you like cause I'm always on the hunt for new ones. Sangram: Yeah. Connect With Sangram Kathleen: So I'll definitely check those out. Well, if somebody has a question, wants to learn more about Terminus, or has a question about ABM, generally, what's the best way for them to find you online? Sangram: Well, so I post on a very regular basis on Linkedin, so just find me, Sangram Vajre on Linkedin. Terminus is terminus.com. You sort of join the community, #FlipMyFunnel. Kathleen: Great. And I'll post the links to all of those things in the show notes. If you're listening and you found value here, you know what to do, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at workmommywork because I would love to interview them. Thank you, Sangram. It was great talking to you. Sangram: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

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. 

Host Brad Kearns talks to Chris Kelly of NourishBalanceThrive.com - a comprehensive health and peak performance testing and consultation program for athletes. Chris works in conjunction with Dr. Tommy Wood, a previous podcast guest. They have put over 1,000 athletes through their program, including many Olympic and world level performers. Everyone tested to date has come up with something that was compromising their performance and was addressed and resolved by this full-service testing (blood, urine, stool), consultation and healing (including supplements, and dietary and lifestyle modification). If you are an athlete looking to get the most out of your body, this show is certain to get you thinking about what you can do better. For decades, athletes have gone on a wild goose chase, looking outside the rigid confines of traditional medicine for wellness and healing opportunities. Often, this means witch doctors, questionable supplements, and wasted money. It appears that NourishBalanceThrive.com has put together the best aspects of traditional medical testing and holistic approach, and you can get a sneak preview for yourself by taking their 7 min performance evaluation that you can take for free at their website. Enjoy this show discussing the aspects of peak physical performance that are often overlooked by hard training athletes.  Chris Kelly's experience with poor health and poor medical advise brought him to realize how nutritional supplements can be the best treatment for his ailments. [00:01:10]  Is having these digestive, libido, and malaise sort of problems unusual? [00:06:55]  What Kinds of things are tested for when a person decides to test their system with your organization? [00:09:18]  What are some of the common "red flags" he finds? [00:13:03]  How does the computer analyze the information it receives? [00:16:25]  How much does this program cost?  What does one get with signing up? [00:20:40]  If there were one body part that needs the most focus, what would that be? [00:27:08]  Is there any insurance coverage available for this program?  What about people who are budget sensitive? [00:31:07]  What kinds of people are taking advantage of this program? [00:33:57]   http://pe.nbt.ai  https://youtu.be/6Wdx6b5BUBw   Nourish, Balance, Thrive Tommy Wood podcast  

Lecture by Swami B.V. Tripurari on April 18th, 2017 - Q and A: What Kinds of Rasas Are Given In Our Lineage?

Lecture by Swami B.V. Tripurari on April 18th, 2017 - Q and A: What Kinds of Rasas Are Given In Our Lineage?

We obliterate Independence Day: Resurgence and sink our teeth into The Shallows plus we also discuss Arabian Nights, The Wave, Black Orpheus and Weiner. 0:00 - Intro / Jay's Trip to D.C. 22:30 - Review: Independence Day: Resurgence 51:00 - Review: The Shallows 1:14:30 - Other Stuff We Watched: The Knick, Black Orpheus, The Wave, Arabian Nights Vol. 1, Weiner 1:45:00 - Junk Mail: Jay's Memory and Annabelle, What Kinds of Cars We Drive, Most Valuable DVD or Blu-ray, Actors That Were Miscast or a Poor Substitute for Someone Else, Film Junk Nightmares 2:07:10 - This Week on DVD and Blu-ray 2:11:15 - Outro

We obliterate Independence Day: Resurgence and sink our teeth into The Shallows plus we also discuss Arabian Nights, The Wave, Black Orpheus and Weiner. 0:00 - Intro / Jay's Trip to D.C. 22:30 - Review: Independence Day: Resurgence 51:00 - Review: The Shallows 1:14:30 - Other Stuff We Watched: The Knick, Black Orpheus, The Wave, Arabian Nights Vol. 1, Weiner 1:45:00 - Junk Mail: Jay's Memory and Annabelle, What Kinds of Cars We Drive, Most Valuable DVD or Blu-ray, Actors That Were Miscast or a Poor Substitute for Someone Else, Film Junk Nightmares 2:07:10 - This Week on DVD and Blu-ray 2:11:15 - Outro

2019 Update: For more tutorials about editing, check out my YouTube channel and Successful Podcasting course (the Logic and GarageBand courses in there will help you get started). Editing is an essential part of producing a high quality podcast, but editing can be time-consuming and difficult if you aren’t experienced with professional audio editing software like Logic Pro X, Pro Tools, or Adobe Audition. When I recorded this episode, I was spending roughly 20 hours every week editing podcasts in Logic Pro X. Over the course of the previous 3 years, I had learned a lot about how to edit a podcast quickly with Logic. When I was new to podcast editing, Youtube tutorials and blog posts were helpful, but I learned a ton just by running into various problems and learning how to solve them. My goal for this show is to share everything I've learned about audio, editing podcasts, and podcasting in general. Some of the content I want to share is better suited to screencasts (so you can see what I'm talking about), but I can share how I think about editing and some things I've learned that have made the process faster and easier, so that's what I'm going to do in this episode. Key Takeaways: Editing can be time consuming, so if you have a busy schedule already, consider hiring an editor. Every audio editing program has a learning curve, but I found Logic Pro X is nearly perfect for podcast editing. To streamline the editing process, invest in a good DAW like Logic, Pro Tools or Audition, and then create templates, channel strip templates, and learn all the keyboard shortcuts. Music should serve a purpose other than to just sit in the background and distracting listeners from what you’re saying. Invest in professional headphones made for mixing to accurately hear how your tracks sound. When editing, cut mistakes or anything that distracts the listener from the message or content of the show. Be careful not to edit out inhales. That sounds funny. After you’re finished editing and mixing, export the audio as an MP3 file (either 96, or 128kbps). Q: What is the Best Program for Editing Podcasts? In preparation for this episode, I tried editing a podcast in Garageband, Audacity, Reaper, and Screenflow. A typical podcast that I edit had two or three hosts or guests, and intro and outro music. The results were... disheartening. I found it frustrating and difficult to do the basic tasks that are required for quickly editing and mixing a show. Of the four programs I tried (not including Logic), Garageband seemed like the best option free or cheap option. If you disagree, please write in and tell me why: aaron@thepodcastdude.com Logic Pro X is what I use and love Since I'm most experienced with Logic, I'm going to talking about how I edit in Logic. If you want to edit your own show every week, I strongly recommend investing in a copy of Logic Pro X. I know it's an investment at $200, but if you produce and edit a podcast weekly, you'll end up making that money up with the time you save. Garageband has most of the features that Logic does, but it is missing a few key features that Logic has, including the ability to quickly edit multiple tracks at the same time, which is a huge time saver. Another feature that Logic has is a mixer view, which lets you see all the plugins for all the tracks in the same place. This view looks similiar to a hardware mixer used for live sound, and makes adjusting volume faders and working with audio plugins easier and faster. If you've never opened a program like Garageband or Logic before, you may feel overwhelmed by all the different buttons and options available. I would start by watching an introduction video on Youtube. You'll need to get familiar with creating a project, creating tracks inside the project, recording audio, adding audio files to your project, making edits or "cuts" to those files, moving the pieces of those files (commonly called regions) around, how to access plugins or other effects, and then how to bounce (or export) your project once you've finished making edits. Here's a screencast I recorded to show the main differences between editing in Garageband and Logic, and some of the features that Logic has that I really like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3qBMblR18 How to Reduce Time Spent Editing Podcasts Here are a few things I’ve learned that have saved me hours of time every week. 1. Create templates. After you create all your tracks and set up plugin settings, delete the unnecessary audio files and save the project as a template to use next time. You can also do this with channel strip or track settings in Logic (but not in Garageband). If you are using Garageband, you can save the project as a template by saving the project file and then using it next time you need to record or edit a podcast. You won’t have to set up all the tracks and plugins from scratch which is a huge time saver. 2. Get familiar with keyboard shortcuts. If you do something with a mouse, check to see if you can do it with a keyboard shortcut instead. This can save you hours over the course of a year. 3. Learn how to quickly zoom in, zoom out, and move things around. This is often a combination of the shift, cmmd, option or control keys plus the trackpad or mouse wheel. There’s a keyboard shortcut this is one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in Logic. It’s shift-f, which select all regions in front of the currently selected region. This has saved me tons of time. Remember: To streamline the editing process, invest in a good DAW like Logic, Pro Tools or Audition, and then create templates, channel strip templates, and learn all the keyboard shortcuts. How to Import and Sync Audio Files Most programs like Garageband, Audacity and Logic support drag and drop importing. So if you have created an empty track in your editing app, you can drag an audio file from your finder or desktop and drop it onto that track wherever you want. Here's a problem you might run into at some point: People don’t always hit record at the same time. This can make lining up the audio files challenging, especially if you’re editing 3 or more tracks. I learned to solve this with a couple of tricks. People don’t always start recording at the same time, but they often hit stop around the same time. So if the files don’t line up at the beginning, check the ending. If you zoom all the way out and look at the wav forms in the tracks, you can see the places where someone is talking, and where they aren’t. I think about the tracks as puzzle pieces, so I zoom out and try to see how they fit together. You also have to listen and see how the flow of conversation goes. If someone asks a question, there usually isn’t a big gap before the other person responds. If there is, that track may be a little out of alignment. How to Fix Audio Drift Tracks recorded on different computers may drift out of sync over the course of an hour, even if both recordings were started at the exact same time. This is just something you have to be aware of when editing a podcast. Skip to halfway or two thirds of the way through the podcast and listen to see if the conversation is still flowing like it should. You might need to nudge one of the tracks forward or backwards in the timeline. Adding Music, Intros and Outros Most podcasts I edit have some kind of intro and outro music, often added after the show has been recorded. The amount of time between the start of the music and where the talking starts is totally up to you, and will depend on the music itself. There isn’t a rule about this stuff, so try a few things out and see what sounds right to you. I wouldn’t play a full three minute track at the beginning of a show, though. Q: Should I put background music in my podcast? Personally, I don’t like background music playing while someone is speaking. I’ve heard it used well in certain shows, but they know how to use music effectively for emphasis and breaks. Music should serve a purpose other than to just sit in the background and distracting listeners from what you’re saying. How to Use Automation Automation allows you to create changes over time to volume and various other settings. This is how you reduce the volume level of a music track when the host starts talking. Automation is much easier to understand if you see it in action, so here is a link to an automation tutorial. You can also automate volume changes if you run into a situation where you or a guest back away from the mic or turn the input gain down or up significantly. I will sometimes use automation to change the volume level for a track at a specific point in a recording if compression isn’t the right solution. EQ, Compression, Mixing and Mastering Mixing and post-production are an essential part of podcast editing. The goal of mixing is to make sure the volume of all the tracks are roughly equal, so that listeners can hear everyone clearly without ever having to adjust playback volume. You can do this using a variety of different plugins that are available in many editing programs. The stock plugins I use most commonly in Logic are the EQ, Compressor, Speech Enhancer (noise removal), and the Adaptive Limiter. I typically use these plugins in that order, although I usually put the limiter plugin on the master track and not the individual tracks. These are all important plugins, so I’ve recorded some screencasts and gathered some great video tutorials for you to check out if you’re interested in learning how to use these plugins. You can find them in the resources section at the bottom of the show notes for this episode. I use a few third party plugins for most editing projects. First is Izotope’s de-clipper for fixing clipping. Clipping happens when the input gain for a track is set too high, and the strength of the signal overloads the mic and causes the waveform to distort, or become clipped. This sounds bad, but happens pretty often in tracks that are sent to me for editing. The second third party plugin I use is also from Izotope, and it’s the Dialog Denoiser. This plugin is magic. It does a great job with automatically removing background noise from a track and making audio sound cleaner. You can get both of these plugins in the RX Elements bundle, which usually costs $129 but sometimes goes on sale for $29. Headphones Matter Not all headphones are made for mixing. Some will alter the way music sounds by boosting or cutting certain frequencies. Many consumer brand headphones aren’t designed to be precise and accurate so much as they are designed to make music sound really pleasant to the ears. You’ll want to invest in professional headphones made for mixing to accurately hear how your tracks sound. I recommend the Sony MDR-7506, they’ll give you an accurate idea of how your audio sounds at an affordable price. Balancing Volume Levels My goal when mixing a podcast is to get the volume of all the speakers roughly the same. You can do this with a few different plugins, most commonly compressors. I try to get the loudest peaks of each track to land between -9db and -6db, and then I add a few db of gain to the master track or vocal bus with a compressor or limiter. What is a Bus (or Aux) Track? The way most audio programs work is that the audio signal from each track is sent to a master track. This master track is what you’ll hear when you're listening to the project, or after you bounce or export the project. A bus (or aux) track is just another channel strip that sits between the original track and the master track. If you create a single bus track, you can send the output from each of your vocal tracks to that bus track for some processing, and then the audio from that bus track will be sent to the master track. I’ve started using bus tracks recently. I used to do EQ, compression and limiting on the master track, even though I only wanted to apply those effects to the vocal tracks. I didn’t want to EQ or compress the music, because most of the music tracks I work with have already been mixed and mastered by an engineer. Now I send my vocal tracks to a bus track before they're passed on to the master track. In that bus channel strip, I have a few plugins: Dialog Denoiser by Izotope, a compressor doing a few decibels of dynamic reduction, and a limiter to make sure the loudest peaks of the audio don’t pass over -.8db. The cool thing about the bus track is that I can make changes to all the vocal tracks combined before they go to the master track, instead of applying multiple plugins to every vocal track. What Kinds of Things Should I Edit Out of My Podcast? I cut mistakes or anything that distracts the listener from the message or content of the show. Most of the time, that’s coughs of other noise in the background of a recording, any false starts or do-overs, or anytime a guest or host stumbles over words before finding what they meant to say. I also remove long pauses unless they are there for emphasis. When editing, cut mistakes or anything that distracts the listener from the message or content of the show. Many people think that a podcast should be as tightly edited as possible, with no space or pauses between sentences, but I disagree. A few seconds of silence can be used to give the listeners time to digest something important. Sometimes the silence between sentences can be just as important as the words themselves. Be careful not to edit out inhales. If you cut out inhales, your podcast will sound unnatural. (People don’t go six minutes without taking a breath in real life.) You should also try to remove background or line noise as well. There are a few plugins that will reduce background noise (expanders, noise gates) but sometimes you have to manually cut the sections of a track that have background noises. Exporting Your Finished Project After you’re done doing editing and mixing, you’ll need to export the master track as an MP3. If you’re using Logic or Garageband, you’ll need to set the end point for your project before bouncing or exporting it. This is a little gray triangle in the marquee bar that runs across the top of the editing window. This triangle sets where the file will end when you export it. Q: I see something about kbps when I go to export an MP3 file. What should I set that to? I recommend either 96kbps and 128kbps. The lower that number is, the smaller the audio file will be, but the audio quality will also be lower. 96kbps and 128kbps are both good options for your podcast, because they will sound good but also won't be big files (which take longer to stream or download). Another way to get a smaller audio file size is to bounce your files in mono instead of stereo. This just means that you’ll only have a single channel of audio, instead of stereo, which is two channels (left and right). Most music is made for stereo speakers – certain instruments or tracks are panned to come out either in the left or the right speaker. If you have a podcast that is heavily focused on music, you’ll probably want to use stereo. If your podcast is mostly just talking, mono will be fine and will make your MP3 file size smaller. After you’re finished editing and mixing, export the project as an MP3 file (either 96 or 128kbps) Q&A: Christopher asks: How do I match EQ for additional lines or replacements that might be recorded in a different location from the original recording? First, if you need to replace lines in a recording, have the person listen to the original recording at try to match the inflection of the lines being replaced. If you can’t record in the same location or with the same microphone setup, it will be difficult (although not impossible) to make the replacement parts sound identical to the original recording. Izotope made an EQ Match plugin specifically for this, but it’s part of the advanced version of RX4, which is $1200. Ben asks: Have you used Adobe Audition? How does it compare to Logic? I don’t have a lot of experience with using it, but I have downloaded and played with the demo. It has many of the same features and stock plugins as Logic, so if you’re using Windows, I think it’ll be a good choice. Cory asks: Even if I can’t hire a professional, should I have someone else listen to my podcast before shipping? I think that’s a great idea. There have been times where I’ve been doing hours and hours of mixing and mastering and my ears will fatigue and I’ll miss things. If you have a friend who knows about audio and has good ears, it’s always great to get a second opinion about your mix. Cool Stuff to Check Out: Recommended Gear: https://kit.com/thepodcastdude Podcast: https://thepodcastdude.simplecast.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepodcastdude Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thepodcastdude Successful Podcasting: http://successfulpodcasting.com Simplecast Blog: http://blog.simplecast.com/