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Most B2B companies overlook their biggest growth opportunity: investing in the customers they already have. Yet, customer marketing leaders struggle to secure budget, prove ROI, and drive growth.
In a world obsessed with more (more leads, more deals, more revenue), how do you make customer advocacy a non-negotiable growth strategy?
This show is for marketers who want to turn customer advocacy into a strategic growth engine. Each episode features customer marketing pioneers, revenue leaders, and industry experts sharing actionable strategies to engage, retain, and expand your client base. And not just through content, but through meaningful connection.
Because customers become champions when you make them feel valued first.
[00:00:00] Tyler Calder: The reality is, I see most organizations like Job Done Pipeline built, revenue closed, onto the next. If it's not the right pipeline, you're gonna turn those customers. That's a marketing issue, right? Marketing built that pipeline. Marketing was, getting in front of those prospects. They were building the narrative, they were setting the expectation. And so when I say it starts there, that's what I mean, are you getting in front of the right folks?
[00:00:35] Jeff Reekers: Hello everybody and welcome back to the Customer Champions podcast. I'm super excited for today's episode. Today I'm being joined by, uh, Tyler Calder, Chief Marketing Officer at PartnerStack. And Tyler has spent his career helping B2B companies, drive growth. build relationships and, uh, really build the organizations.
[00:00:54] Jeff Reekers: And so we're really thrilled to have Tyler join us today to really chat all things that kind of intersect across partners, partnerships, relationships, customer marketing, NRR, revenue growth, all the great things. And for all the customer marketing folks that have, tuned in the past, we'll really be able to get a C-level perspective of the criticality of. Customer marketing and also the metrics measurements and how you should be thinking about scaling and growing your customer marketing org with that lens from an executive mindset. Tyler brings in a really operator driven perspective as well. So we're just really thrilled to dive into all things here.
[00:01:26] Jeff Reekers: I'll stop there. Tyler, thrilled to have you on the podcast here today.
[00:01:30] Tyler Calder: Thank you for having me. I'm excited.
[00:01:32] Jeff Reekers: love to just kind of set the lens for how you view the world and view marketing as a whole. Maybe just take us through your career arc briefly and what kind of, what took you into PartnerStack and some of your, a little bit about your role here today.
[00:01:42] Tyler Calder: I'll go way back in time. I was originally interested in being a, an accountant. I was interested in finance, Until I got to school to actually study it. and then I realized I'm, I don't think I'm a huge fan of this and I don't think I want to be an accountant.
[00:01:55] Tyler Calder: and I ended up falling in love with, the marketing courses, uh, that I was taking as part of my undergrad. the marketing courses back then were, very much just brand, and everybody that wanted a career in marketing effectively either looked to go work at, a consumer package goods company or an agency that, supported CPG and I never saw myself as that person.
[00:02:22] Tyler Calder: kind of a big brand person, big creative person. I, I still had that inkling of the numbers side, from that desire to get into accounting. And then, more towards my third, fourth year of undergrad. That's really when the good old internet started to take off. So we, we saw, Facebook start to become a thing.
[00:02:42] Tyler Calder: LinkedIn, SEO was starting to take off. And really the back half of university, I just spent self-educating myself on that. Building websites, trying to sell things online, building e-commerce stores, you know, trying to arbitrage on eBay. and to me that's. That's what marketing was. and so that's, the part of it that I was falling in love with.
[00:03:05] Tyler Calder: And I remember, you know, sitting in courses and asking a ton of questions about, well, what about this digital stuff or this big brand campaign that we're talking about? What did that actually do for the numbers for the business? And nobody could really answer any of those questions. and where I wanted my career to start, I, I really just sought out.
[00:03:24] Tyler Calder: Any company that seemingly was doing this stuff well, uh, this stuff being digital,
[00:03:29] Tyler Calder: revenue alignment with marketing, that led to my first job outta school at Eloqua. so if folks aren't familiar with Eloqua, they were one of the first marketing automation platforms. they were acquired by Oracle, so they were Canada's first kind of big acquisition.
[00:03:46] Tyler Calder: I think it was about a billion dollar acquisition. and it was there where I was really exposed to just the pace of a startup. how eloquent at the time was trying to bring revenue into the conversation with marketing, trying to position marketing as a function that could be kind of part of the core revenue engine.
[00:04:05] Tyler Calder: and I just loved all of that from there. Ended up agency side for almost a decade, working with. B2B B2C Startup Enterprise, started very much in campaign management, building out paid search programs, running SEO strategies. I believe it's true for me to say we were HubSpot's first Canadian, partner agency.
[00:04:28] Tyler Calder: and so that was really my first introduction to partnerships on, on that side, as an agency partner. and saw, you know, what that was able to do for our business by aligning to a company like HubSpot and kind of the great support that they gave. and then the career just kept growing.
[00:04:44] Tyler Calder: From there, ended up moving agency side to in-house for another decade or so. and in those experiences, or at least in a couple instances, was asked to take on partnerships or launch a program. and that was a mix of launching an affiliate program, taking on a reseller program. And then when PartnerStack came along six years ago, I looked at what they were trying to build or what they had built, and the vision for what they were trying to do, and I just looked at it and saw, you know, this is everything I had needed, trying to stand up partner programs over the past few years. so very clearly solving the pain I had experienced and dove in and haven't looked back.
[00:05:25] Jeff Reekers: when you mentioned Eloqua, I believe that was, uh, mark, Oregon.
[00:05:29] Jeff Reekers: As the founder and, pioneered much of, you know, the revenue focus within marketing and B2B also pioneered much of customer marketing
[00:05:38] Jeff Reekers: as well with Influitive
[00:05:39] Jeff Reekers: and the founding of Influitive. And so a lot of us in the marketing world have been able to fall in the footsteps of a lot of the success that Mark has brought the space holistically here.
[00:05:48] Tyler Calder: Yeah. Very, very good insight. Very good thread to pull on for sure.
[00:05:52] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. And similarly, I think a lot of the, the growth on partnerships has really followed, you know, suit and, uh, categorically as well as revenue driver and maybe kind of connecting that, those threads together.
[00:06:02] Jeff Reekers: on a recent podcast, I know you're the host of the, get It Together podcast, uh, as well. And I was tuning into some of those.
[00:06:08] Jeff Reekers: And you had an episode with, Antonio Carida, I believe, and a conversation specifically framing partnerships. To think sort of beyond just the relationship and also the systems and kind of operations, behind it. And curious as you've been building out customer marketing at PartnerStack, if you kind of apply that same lens at operational Mindset.
[00:06:29] Jeff Reekers: 'cause I think a lot of customer marketers can get stuck in that just relationship and as well,what similarities do you see between those, those two functions and kind of what have you learned as you've both built partnerships and. Customer marketing functions.
[00:06:42] Tyler Calder: you know, in both partnerships and customer marketing, I certainly do think there's a tendency to lean on this idea of, oh, it's all relationships. More than anything, and I don't want to discount that. relationships absolutely are critical and, and being authentic with those relationships, I think is critical.
[00:07:02] Tyler Calder: But without sort of putting some rigor or operational backbone behind it, I think it's almost impossible to turn relationships into, maybe bad as it sounds, repeatable. Business repeatable revenue. And so when I look at the two, from an operation standpoint, we need to think about segmentation.
[00:07:26] Tyler Calder: We need to think about enablement, we need to think about automation, we need to think about measurement, we need to think about feedback loops. And I think when you start to unpack those, there is a ton of similarity between partnerships and, and customer marketing. So, you know, when we think about segmentation, and I mean, I suppose this is true for all aspects of sales and marketing and, and go to
[00:07:49] Tyler Calder: market.
[00:07:50] Tyler Calder: but when we think about segmentation. I have found with partner programs, a lot of partner teams get obsessed with, the volume of partners we have brought into the program.
[00:08:02] Tyler Calder: and how many relationships I'm able to maintain. and then sort of same on the customer side. It's, you know, look at all this great feedback I'm getting from customers.
[00:08:11] Tyler Calder: They're really appreciative of these customer programs we've run. And then it sort of stops there. and they treat all customers sort of the same.
[00:08:20] Tyler Calder: you know, on the partner side, we very much look at what is our ICP overlap with that partner. what is their contribution potential?
[00:08:27] Tyler Calder: What do we think the upside is? You know, I find one of the things, because both functions are so relationship driven, partner leaders, partnership managers, customer marketers, they don't like saying no. To partners or customers. So on the partner side, they don't wanna say no to a partnership.
[00:08:46] Tyler Calder: They don't want to unfold a partnership if it's not really doing well or there's not real mutual benefit. And then same on the customer side. Like there's a lot of ask that come from customers. You know, can you sponsor our events? Can you jump in and support us here? Can we do case studies? Can we do co-marketing together?
[00:09:02] Tyler Calder: And those are all really, really good things. And I find customer marketers kind of say yes to everything. Even if, if we don't think there's gonna be mutual benefit. So a long-winded way of saying segmentation helps with all of that. So on the partner side, like very clearly, do we have ICP overlap? Are we speaking to the same audience?
[00:09:19] Tyler Calder: Do we have a good story together? and then what's the revenue potential if we were to work together On the customer side, you know, we group by expansion potential. We group by product maturity. we have very clear. Tiers that help our internal teams focus. So to me it, it sort of starts there in terms of that segmentation rigor.
[00:09:40] Tyler Calder: And then when you get into enablement and onboarding partners and customers need a lot of the same things.
[00:09:48] Tyler Calder: we don't do this anymore, but at one point at PartnerStack, we had customer marketing and partner marketing sit together. as part of the same function because there was so much similarity.
[00:09:58] Tyler Calder: they both knew the same types of assets, the same type of product enablement, the same types of playbooks on how to get started, how to succeed, best practices, like very similar, with just slight messaging nuance. Right? That's kind of really the only difference.
[00:10:12] Tyler Calder: I recall building partnerships at, at Air Call and what we had seen so much was there's always that sort of 80 20.
[00:10:18] Jeff Reekers: As well, like the 20% that are really driving impact, and that's probably true
[00:10:23] Jeff Reekers: of just about anything, whether it's customer marketing and customers partnerships, but it can be easy to distribute your focus all across the board because you can get that attention. It's just the attention and the work doesn't always match the 80 20 of where the actual impact is coming from.
[00:10:38] Jeff Reekers: If I'm hearing
[00:10:39] Jeff Reekers: you correctly, there.
[00:10:40] Tyler Calder: Yeah, a a hundred percent right. And to me it's always like, you, you say attention. Is it the right attention? Is it the type of attention that we want? Is it attention worth our time?
[00:10:49] Tyler Calder: I think it's hard to bring that discipline to it again, you know, because of how relationship driven the functions are.
[00:10:57] Tyler Calder: But if you really wanna scale the thing, I, I think you need to be pretty, pretty buttoned down.
[00:11:01] Jeff Reekers: Fantastic. I, I, I'd love to hop in a little bit into, something we were chatting about as well and that's on the net retention.
[00:11:08] Jeff Reekers: Side, and you said something that, that, uh, really grabbed me, which was NRR starts with marketing. This is something I've always really heavily believed, but so often I've, I've talked with many, you know, CMOs who virtually have no accountability or their CEOs don't want them focusing
[00:11:24] Jeff Reekers: on net retention whatsoever.
[00:11:26] Jeff Reekers: and I just love the perspective that NRR starts with marketing and I would love to just kind of. pull that back a little bit. Where does marketing actually touch NRR in the companies you've worked in and, you know, how do you, how are you getting ahead of it before those renewal conversations?
[00:11:40] Jeff Reekers: Expansion motion. So how is marketing really driving NRR.
[00:11:44] Tyler Calder: when I say it starts with marketing, like really what I'm, suggesting is marketing. In most organizations, their primary goal is to. Build pipeline, bring customers in through the door. but then in a lot of organizations it, it stops there. and as much as they say, oh, we have great alignment with the rest that go to market, we work really closely with sales and our CS team.
[00:12:07] Tyler Calder: The reality is, I see most organizations like Job Done Pipeline built, revenue closed, like onto the next. If it's not the right pipeline, you're gonna turn those customers. That's a marketing issue, right? Marketing built that pipeline. Marketing was, getting in front of those prospects. They were building the narrative, they were setting the expectation.
[00:12:29] Tyler Calder: and so when I say it starts there, that that's what I mean, are you getting in front of the right folks? the folks that are, are actually going to, you know, onboard, quickly activate, expand, et cetera. me coming to a place where I, I think about it seriously just came through a lot of failure.
[00:12:46] Tyler Calder: like I remember one of my earlier roles after I left the agency, so this was the first time I was actually in-house. And, I was responsible for something beyond kind of surface level agency stuff. And this was a B2C organization. And, they had a launch model, so you could actually only buy from them four to six times a year.
[00:13:08] Tyler Calder: and so the launch model was you build a huge audience, you build kind of a pre-sale list, you get a lot of attention, and they've always done well with this model. I started and I get thrown right into like two months leading up to their next launch. Do a ton of marketing. I think things are going well.
[00:13:27] Tyler Calder: We end up building a presale list that's bigger, like two three x than what they've ever had before. and then when they open up and people come to buy, uh, it was one of the worst launches they had ever had. I'm sitting there thinking like, well, what the hell? Like, how do you go from having the best sort of presale list?
[00:13:46] Tyler Calder: People that have said, I'm raise my hand, I will buy when you open up to having one of the worst revenue
[00:13:51] Tyler Calder: outcomes, doesn't look good for the new marketing guy. and that's where I realized, I was like, oh, I was just worried, worried about getting people through the door, not caring about whether or not they were the right fit, whether or not they were our core buyer, core ICP.
[00:14:04] Tyler Calder: And then I made a similar mistake candidly at at PartnerStack, where. You know, we were hitting pipeline targets, we were closing revenue targets. once they started to enter year two at PartnerStack, we started to see the churn. So a bunch of those customers, not renewing. and so what that led to was us like really, really buckling down on who is our ICP.
[00:14:27] Tyler Calder: I'll give a shout out to a company. Key Play. we use them heavily, uh, to model. our market who. looks like they could be a really good account where we could provide a ton of value. And so at this point we've scored, you know, over 55,000 accounts and tiered them across A, B, C, D. On the marketing side, we only focus on tier A accounts, in terms of where we invest, where we try to build pipeline.
[00:14:57] Tyler Calder: and we do that because we know those are the accounts that are most likely to expand. With us, not just stick around, but actually like really lean into the way that we approach partnerships and our philosophy. And, it all starts there again, a little bit of a rambling way to reinforce just how important.
[00:15:15] Tyler Calder: Marketing's role is at targeting the right buyer, building the right type of pipeline. When we report on pipeline, we don't just talk about the pipeline number, we talk about what's the mix, how many of the accounts we're bringing into pipe are tier A, B, C, or D. We're always trying to shift more up to a, uh, when I look backwards, when we first started this exercise, we were about 80%.
[00:15:39] Tyler Calder: Tier C and D accounts in our pipeline
[00:15:43] Tyler Calder: now we're about 75% plus A and B accounts. So a dramatic shift.
[00:15:48] Tyler Calder: I can't emphasize enough how important it is to start there. Start with understanding who you should be targeting,
[00:15:56] Tyler Calder: because if you're bringing the wrong folks through the door and you're, you're closing them, you're selling them, like that's a huge burden on the CS team.
[00:16:05] Tyler Calder: It is you starting to just chase your tail to try to fix a problem That never should have been a problem to begin with, 'cause you probably shouldn't have sold them.
[00:16:14] Tyler Calder: And then we get into, okay, now what's the sales experience? Are we setting the right expectation? How is marketing enabling the sales team to tell the right narrative, build the right discovery questions to identify the right areas we should be really emphasizing and solving for.
[00:16:29] Tyler Calder: How do we help our onboarding team like accelerate time to value? We do that through a lot of like education and coaching and making sure that during onboarding, our customers are also being prepped for, here's what you need to do to really succeed in partnerships. Here's what best practices look like.
[00:16:44] Tyler Calder: Here are the things you should be doing now.
[00:16:46] Tyler Calder: and then like continual just sort of narrative reinforcement through our own customer marketing programs. Like are we regularly reminding customers? Sounds simple enough. Hey, you bought PartnerStack. Here are the things you can be doing with it. Here's how you can extract as much value out of the platform, et cetera.
[00:17:03] Tyler Calder: so we have marketing involved in that entire journey, I can't emphasize enough how important it is and how much easier your job becomes if you're just targeting the right people at the top.
[00:17:12] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, a hundred percent.
[00:17:14] Jeff Reekers: it can be so hard when you just get caught up in wanting to grow and
[00:17:18] Jeff Reekers: scale the business.
[00:17:19] Jeff Reekers: And you have this opportunity right here. I recall the earlier stage of, Aircall, we had a, really defined ITP in the SMB segment, smaller customers. And we had this account that was probably 50 x the size of anyone we had ever signed up before. And it was a company called MoviePass. Clearly outside of our ICP and on top of the unsustainable business model,
[00:17:43] Jeff Reekers: I will say. we signed them up. It looked fantastic. I signed off on the deal that lasted about six months. It destroyed our entire product, our backup, you know, our servers on top of the churn that we ended up eating, in the coming months. And so also, I learned the hard way on that one
[00:18:00] Jeff Reekers: through the scar tissue.
[00:18:02] Tyler Calder: Absolutely.
[00:18:03] Tyler Calder: I'm gonna say something, I, I don't know if it's, good advice, bad advice, but you mentioned at the top sort of, a C level perspective. I think the one perspective I'd layer on top of all of this is. You're gonna find yourself in a lot of, gray area.
[00:18:21] Tyler Calder: You're gonna find yourself in a lot of conversations that aren't black and white. So it's super easy for me to say, hyper targeted, don't sell people you shouldn't sell to. But the reality is you're gonna find yourself in conversations where it's like, Hey, we're lagging behind Revenue numbers.
[00:18:39] Tyler Calder: The number one priority right now isn't NRR. It's new bookings.
[00:18:43] Tyler Calder: Are we gonna make a bet that, hey, you know what, they don't look like Core ICP right now. We're willing to sell them because either, number one, we know what's coming on roadmap and we think it will expand our ability to provide value. Number two, you know what?
[00:18:59] Tyler Calder: It's okay if these end up churning in a year. that's a problem we're willing to face then. So the other thing I find is once you get to a certain level, like you're gonna find yourself in conversations where. You know what, maybe we are willing to bite the bullet. we're maybe gonna take these accounts because we think we can solve it in six months and save it before the churn hits.
[00:19:19] Tyler Calder: And so you need to be comfortable with that as well. it's not overly black and white. It's not as easy as I suggest of like, oh, just sell the right accounts and everything's perfect.
[00:19:29] Tyler Calder: And where I say that is, I find, people that are first time managers, directors, VPs, they'll go into conversations with their CEO, with black and white thinking.
[00:19:39] Tyler Calder: they're not willing to have a conversation in the gray, talk about trade offs, talk about different scenarios, and I think you need to be comfortable with that. We definitely had those conversations. but now I would suggest like at a certain point you get to a certain level of scale and maturity where you are able to kind of really hyperfocus on ICP and make trade offs and say no to accounts that maybe otherwise you would've said yes a couple years prior.
[00:20:03] Tyler Calder: So anyways, all things that I think are things folks should be conscious of as well.
[00:20:07] Jeff Reekers: what I hear behind that is, being proactive and in how you're sort of strategically thinking about things versus reactive to an opportunity.
[00:20:16] Jeff Reekers: even if it's in the gray, if you have a deal that's in. You know a C, but you're really prioritizing new bookings. Having a conversation on that is a proactive
[00:20:25] Jeff Reekers: measurement. You took the right steps operationally to make sure you're tiering your accounts. You did all the things correctly there to make sure you're set up for success. Hey, the businesses in this state though, it's supposed to have a proactive conversation versus just be
[00:20:37] Jeff Reekers: reactive to every deal that we could possibly close.
[00:20:39] Jeff Reekers: And kind of similar to what you're saying prior on, you know, partners plus customer marketing and how they should be focusing on their roles as well.
[00:20:47] Jeff Reekers: Being proactive and focusing on sort of the right opportunities versus reactive to all the, the requests, that are coming in there. I think that could actually be a good segue into building up
[00:20:57] Jeff Reekers: the customer marketing function holistically. I'd be kind of curious to peel back the evolution of that role at PartnerStack. As you've grown. So often we see customer marketing start as more of that reactive function, like a
[00:21:11] Jeff Reekers: bunch of stuff has to get done, so let's make a new role, and then that person gets, you know, tasked with a bunch of things versus, you know, let's drive this measurement over here. And customer marketing being built more from a strategic mindset. We'd be kind of curious, the evolution of the role at PartnerStack, how you view it, how it got started. Maybe just take us through customer marketing at PartnerStack a little bit. In other words.
[00:21:33] Tyler Calder: we started reactionary. we started with, The demand gen team, which was where we originally kind of built and invested within the marketing
[00:21:42] Tyler Calder: function. just fielding a lot of requests from the CS team. And those requests ranged everywhere from, Hey, can we run a renewal campaign into our customer base?
[00:21:54] Tyler Calder: Can we run some education into our customer base? this customer I think would be a really good case study. Can we get somebody working with them to help pull that together? You know, we also had a pretty meaty, G two presence, so early in PartnerStack, existence, we leaned very heavily into review sites because we saw it as one of the fastest ways to not just build pipeline, but also to just build our brand.
[00:22:19] Tyler Calder: So there, there was a huge need to keep that momentum going, effectively run review campaigns. And so, you know, we looked at all of that and said, okay, this is all important stuff. but it is pulling away from the core role of our demand gen folks. it was pulling in a lot of my time and, and so we went out and, and said, okay, we're, we're gonna invest into somebody to support our customers, come in, as our first customer marketer.
[00:22:47] Tyler Calder: and in that regard, it was reactionary. But one of the things that I really wanted to make sure we didn't do was hire somebody who was just gonna be viewed as. candidly, like subservient to the CS team and just taking orders and kind of checking off boxes and, running like a ticket system.
[00:23:05] Tyler Calder: I need this one pager, I need this. You know, can you do it? So. we hired somebody who's still here, Sid, who's awesome. Uh, he now manages both field marketing and customer marketing. came from a little bit more of a demand gen background than a core customer marketing background. And that was intentional, because, you know, he came to the table understanding.
[00:23:29] Tyler Calder: Pipeline metrics and understanding alignment to revenue and understanding measurement and, doing work to drive a specific business outcome. and he paired that with an incredible ability to build relationships.
[00:23:42] Tyler Calder: so it was reactionary, but the hiring was with the intention to bring on somebody that could scale with us.
[00:23:50] Tyler Calder: that very much had a, a revenue. Lens on everything.
[00:23:55] Tyler Calder: and so now it's evolved where customer marketing the first year was like playing catch up.
[00:24:01] Tyler Calder: we do need to be reactionary. Let's get all of this stuff shored up. Let's get it done, let's make sure we have a good base. And now, you know, it's very much about, well, what are the outcomes we're trying to drive for the business?
[00:24:13] Tyler Calder: So product adoption,
[00:24:14] Tyler Calder: expansion, pipeline. all of that fun stuff, like those are kind of the, the core two, product awareness, product adoption, expansion, pipeline, closed expansion, all of that feeding NRR.
[00:24:26] Tyler Calder: and so now when we run different customer marketing programs, it's sort of through that lens versus just a, checkbox, okay, we got this done, we got that done.
[00:24:35] Jeff Reekers: I'm gonna make a, an assumption here, but I'd imagine a similarity in that, that we kinda experience a champion itself and. I would imagine exists within PartnerStack as well. So there's the product side, but then you're also kind of elevating a space and a role and a function kind of like leading the direction of what partnerships means, which might mean a lot of different things to a lot of different organizations. and you'd said something around raising the IQ of partnership leaders and kind of bringing that into the fold. Is that partially how you think of customer marketing as well in terms of like educating the customer and bringing them along in that journey? Or is that kind of a separate initiative?
[00:25:12] Jeff Reekers: Maybe just take me into like raising the IQ and how you think about marketing to the customer base
[00:25:16] Jeff Reekers: outside of the product
[00:25:18] Tyler Calder: Yeah. a couple years ago we talked internally about what is our role in partnerships in, in the
[00:25:25] Tyler Calder: space? Are we just a platform? Are we just a piece of tech? are we more than that? at PartnerStack, we've always advocated for partnerships to view all of your indirect.
[00:25:36] Tyler Calder: Revenue channels through the lens of a single strategy.
[00:25:40] Tyler Calder: so very specifically, you know, affiliate is an indirect channel. Influencer is an indirect channel working with agencies as co-sell partners. That's an indirect revenue channel, resellers indirect revenue channel. Most organizations though, do not look at that as a single indirect revenue strategy.
[00:25:59] Tyler Calder: They look at it as affiliate is marketing.
[00:26:02] Tyler Calder: And that's kind of this performance thing. you got co-sell partners and resellers, which is very much kind of traditional partnerships. You got integration partners, that's a separate type of partner and in a lot of cases you might have a different leader in place to manage it, all different tech platforms.
[00:26:19] Tyler Calder: And so PartnerStack always said you, you know, ideally you should have one platform to help you manage all of that. Yeah. And then what becomes the biggest unlock is if you, if you get a bit of a flywheel going, so can you use affiliate creators, influencers to help build pipeline? can you then use some intelligence to route those leads
[00:26:38] Tyler Calder: in the right way. So these leads are best closed by your direct sales team. So they should go there. You know, these ones are actually best closed by these agency partners, so maybe they should go there you can co-sell with them. You know, these leads very much should be sold by these resellers.
[00:26:52] Tyler Calder: Just flip them over there. They can kind of get this interesting flywheel going. When we talked about raising the iq. of the industry, which is a pretty bold statement. that's what we meant is like, how do you actually do that? How do you build that flywheel? How do you bring to life?
[00:27:11] Tyler Calder: This idea of actually having an ecosystem,
[00:27:14] Tyler Calder: because everybody's talking about ecosystem. This ecosystem led growth. You gotta have a partner ecosystem, but nobody was talking about how to actually do it.
[00:27:22] Tyler Calder: And so that's what we meant by raising the IQ of the industry.
[00:27:26] Tyler Calder: and so we set that as a go-to market goal, like that, was something we talked about at the company level, and then we split it up.
[00:27:33] Tyler Calder: So if you are in content and brand, well, how are we producing content that helps educate. How do we turn our customers doing it today into the educators,
[00:27:45] Tyler Calder: giving them a spotlight. and then on the customer marketing side, how do we make sure that our customers are not just like very tactically, you know, pushing the right buttons and PartnerStack and adopting, you know, PartnerStack feature set.
[00:28:02] Tyler Calder: What we really want to be talking about is how do you structure your partner program for scale? how do you tie different types of partners together and get that flywheel going?
[00:28:12] Tyler Calder: how do you get salespeople comfortable co-selling with partners? Because if they're not, that's gonna be a huge blogger to a co-sell program.
[00:28:19] Tyler Calder: You know, how do you get your affiliate manager to think about affiliate more than just. performance based. I'm only gonna pay you if you drive a lead or close revenue. That's great. It's important. But affiliates can also help you move up market, down market into new geographies, help you build a narrative in a new category.
[00:28:38] Tyler Calder: So all of that wasn't just customer marketing, it was sort of company top down with. Customer marketing, playing a critical role of owning that education and that elevation of the IQ with our customer base.
[00:28:53] Jeff Reekers: I love the perspective of not just marketing a product, but, building A profession industry and elevating trying to elevatea profession essentially. it's much of what we're trying to do at at Champion as well, which is why
[00:29:04] Jeff Reekers: I think I could have an entire series on it. And we would love to get your insights on the number of things.
[00:29:09] Jeff Reekers: So maybe we'll bucket that one.
[00:29:11] Jeff Reekers: Put a pin in it, as they say.
[00:29:14] Tyler Calder: Awesome.
[00:29:14] Jeff Reekers: uh, I'd love to revisit that with,
[00:29:16] Jeff Reekers: with you at some point. but we kind of back on the, the customer marketing side of things here. we'll start to, to kind of wrap it up, but on the, on the measurements front, here's how you measure the impact of customer marketing as a whole and what numbers do you think that folks in customer marketing should just really know cold to make sure that they have that great connection with? The executive team, the CMO, the CFO, et cetera.
[00:29:40] Tyler Calder: My answer is going to very much be what I look at and what I wanna see out of our
[00:29:46] Tyler Calder: customer marketing team. and I say that because I think the caveat is there's gonna be a lot of other indicators, measurements that I think. As a day-to-day practitioner in customer marketing you need to use to manage your day-to-day to manage the function for me, you know what I'm very much interested in is, what does our, expansion pipeline look like?
[00:30:10] Tyler Calder: So, you know, how many customers have actually turned into an expansion opportunity and, and we measure that very similar to net new business. so what marketing campaigns are driving pipeline, you know, how effective are they in terms of close rates downstream? all of that fun stuff. we look at. sort of related to expansion pipeline, NRR is the big one.
[00:30:30] Tyler Calder: That's a company level metric. Uh, a little bit more of a lagging indicator where we use expansion pipeline as as a leading indicator. and then I want to see, adoption metrics. So activation, feature usage, what type of value are they seeing? and then efficiency metrics. So this one is a little bit harder in my experience to get a customer marketer to report on, but it's still something I wanna see in the dashboard.
[00:30:57] Tyler Calder: And, you know, with the help of rev ops and finance, we can get it in there. But things like cost to retain a customer, cost to expand a customer, and then all of that we segment by key play tiers. So when I say key play is an important platform for us. I mean it, it's embedded in all of our reporting, everything I mentioned, we segment by key play tier A, B, C, D, so expansion pipeline.
[00:31:23] Tyler Calder: How much of that is from key play Tier A accounts customers? you know, we'll look at, have we been able to shift customers from a key play tier B to a, like have they seen such meaningful growth and maturity in how they approach partnerships, that they've actually shifted their score in the model. So we look at those things, but.
[00:31:42] Tyler Calder: For the most part, what I just mentioned is, is kind of that exec dashboard that, we dive into.
[00:31:47] Jeff Reekers: final question for you here and then we'll then we'll wrap up. I, I imagine, for everyone listening to this episode on the customer marketers out there, I imagine there's a lot of like head nodding throughout this, this conversation, but a lot of these folks may, might not be in position to just go take. Action on that immediately. There might be a preconceived sort of perception of customer marketing within their organization
[00:32:07] Jeff Reekers: that keeps them sort of in a reactive role in a sense. what advice would you have for them to be able to sort of bring that strategy element back into the org?
[00:32:16] Jeff Reekers: If they had a meeting with their CMO, their CFO tomorrow, what advice would you have for them to kind of. Bring back to the table there to try to elevate their role and really elevate customer marketing's role internally.
[00:32:29] Tyler Calder: I think people put constraints on themselves, which really just come from a place of storytelling. Like they're just
[00:32:35] Tyler Calder: telling themselves a story. You know, the story might be accurate in the sense of how your CFO, CEO, CMO perceive customer marketing,
[00:32:44] Tyler Calder: but it's not a story that's set in stone.
[00:32:46] Tyler Calder: You can change the story and, and you just gotta go do it. and so raise your hand to say, Hey, here's a perfect example. at PartnerStack, we were talking about NRR is an issue. It's a challenge. We need to fix it. And it turned into an el ELT level discussion and I hope the team doesn't mind me mentioning this, but you know, sales pointing a finger at product,
[00:33:12] Tyler Calder: product pointing a finger at sales, CS pointing a finger at sales, you know, sales then pointed finger back at cs, like a lot of finger pointing.
[00:33:22] Tyler Calder: Nobody pointed the finger at marketing.
[00:33:24] Tyler Calder: because nobody viewed marketing's role as what we talked about, the starting point for, you know, NRR. and it wasn't just me. I, I actually give a lot of credit to our previous Director of Demand Gen Joe. he's the one who kind of raised his hand and said, I think marketing is in the best position to fix
[00:33:41] Tyler Calder: this. Is everyone okay if we go ahead and come back with a plan on how we can fix this?
[00:33:49] Tyler Calder: And so to me that's a perfect example of somebody saying, I know nobody's looking at me to help solution here. Nobody thinks that this is my priority or my challenge, but I really think this is something that I can help with.
[00:34:01] Tyler Calder: I'm just gonna raise my hand and, and try to go and do that. and that led to us introducing key play tiers that led to us hiring and investing into customer marketing. I think there's that mentality of like, yeah, no, just. Go do it or raise your hand, say, I'm willing to take this on. I'm willing to take the challenge and, and see what we can do.
[00:34:20] Tyler Calder: And I honestly do think it's as simple as that. Like just take a step back and say, Hey, what story am I telling myself that might be holding me back?
[00:34:27] Jeff Reekers: Love it. I think what a great way to, uh, end the episode here. Just go do it.
[00:34:32] Jeff Reekers: I love that. Tyler, thanks so much for joining us today and I know we're getting towards the holiday season here, so I hope you have a Wonderful, wonderful holiday season, uh, as well.
[00:34:40] Tyler Calder: Yeah, you as well. Thank you for having me.
[00:34:42] Jeff Reekers: All right. Thanks so much.