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Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast, hosted by Alan Zhao, Co-Founder of Warmly.ai.
We feature B2B SaaS revenue leaders who have challenged traditional methods to achieve remarkable results.
In each episode we cut through the fluff and dive deep into modern tactics used to achieve success: intent-based outreach, social selling, B2B Netflix, video marketing, warm calling, customer led sales, influencer marketing and more.
On the show you can expect episodes with those who create demand - marketing experts, partnerships gurus and social media superstars and those who capture demand - outbound and inbound sales experts, leaders, and practitioners.
Our goal is to shine a light on modern, effective and unique revenue generating methods and equip you with the insights you need to unlock your next strategic advantage.
We're huge proponents of signal-based selling and signal-based, data-driven B2B go-to-market as a whole. Ask us what "Autonomous Revenue Orchestration" means and we'll be more than happy to shine a light on our vision of what the field of B2B revenue will become.
For more content, check out our YouTube page and LinkedIn newsletter!
Alan Zhao: [00:00:00] There's a story that you were telling me about how you grew pipeline 150%. How did you go after Zipwhip's customers? Was it email? We
Kenneth Burke: would be potentially, three of the 10 results. On a Google search page for anything related to zip web.
Alan Zhao: All right, guys, today we have on here, Kenneth Burke, who is the VP of marketing at text request, which is a business texting platform that lets you text from office phone numbers directly from your computer. He started as an outbound sales rep and grew with the company all the way to VP of marketing.
Alan Zhao: Kenneth has written over thousands of articles on business growth for dozens of outlets, including entrepreneur. We're going to talk about partnerships today and how Kenneth drove 150 percent increase in attributable pipeline through a unique partnership channel with Twilio. Kenneth, welcome. [00:01:00] Thanks for having me.
Alan Zhao: We talked a bit about how you wanted to be a rock star starting off and how you took a circuitous path towards marketing leadership. We'd love to hear the story behind that.
Kenneth Burke: Yeah you can see some of the instruments behind me got really big into music in high school, thought that's what I was going to go to college to study and then become a rock star.
Kenneth Burke: Once I got into a collegiate program for it or undergrad realized I didn't want to spend as many hours in the studio practicing as I thought I did. So pivoted a little bit in for, or pivoted for a short time into business. I thought I would go into the music business. Pivoted again because I found psychology and thought that was really interesting.
Kenneth Burke: But then I didn't want to go to school for another five years to earn a PhD and do anything with that. So I went into sales because you can make quick money. And I had a young ego that helped me there as well. So did that burned out on it fairly quickly. It was actually how I got into text request.
Kenneth Burke: A friend of mine was helping to start the company and they were looking for salespeople. And I said, that sounds interesting. Can I [00:02:00] join? He said, sure. So here we are, but didn't last very long in sales there. And nobody was doing marketing. And for whatever reason at the time, I wanted to also be a writer.
Kenneth Burke: And so I said, Hey, there's writing and marketing. Let me try some of that. Let me try emails and social media and blog posts. And they let me, so shout out to Brian and the team are our founders. For giving me that opportunity and made a lot of mistakes along the way, but we had more successes than failures.
Kenneth Burke: And here we are.
Alan Zhao: It seems like the perfect combination of skill sets, marketing for your creative outlet, and then also your psychology. Training unintentionally. Yes. Yeah, no, it's powerful. I think marketing is a big portion of it today. It seems to be pushing towards the technology distribution, but at the center of it, I know you talk about this too.
Alan Zhao: It's understanding your customers, gathering their perspective, not based off your own perceptions or biases, but. Understanding truly what, how they're looking at the world and reframing that. [00:03:00] Absolutely. So let's dive into your guys channel. Partnership seems to be the largest channel. And can you tell me a little bit more about how that's set up?
Alan Zhao: What percentage of partnerships? Makes up your total revenue and total pipeline.
Kenneth Burke: Yeah. So today it's about 15 percent or so. We've got it really broken down into two to three parts. So we've got one, which are part one is technology partners. So those are another software company that has either built an integration with us or built an integration with them to offer a complimentary service for their customers.
Kenneth Burke: And we'll get into their. Partner marketplace or ecosystem, however you want to say it. And people will find us or their sales reps will refer clients over to us. And that's wonderful. Number two is we have some affiliates or referrals, and these are typically business consultants or somebody you actually would go to, for advice on something.
Kenneth Burke: And they the consultant doesn't want to manage things for their client, but they'll say, Hey, you should go work with text requests for your text messaging needs, and we'll take that, all day. Okay. And the number [00:04:00] three is marketing agencies and it firms. So managed service providers. So maybe it's, an agency is managing marketing and sales conversations.
Kenneth Burke: Maybe it's the it is managing customer service. Or scheduling, something like that. So those are our three buckets for partnerships.
Alan Zhao: And for each of these three buckets, how much time do you yourself allocate? And what does that look like? I don't do too much
Kenneth Burke: anymore with it daily, like day to day, which is really nice.
Kenneth Burke: A lot of it on my end is more educational and content. And so we actually did a, maybe a unique thing is we had partnered, we built our partnerships program underneath marketing, and then it got robust enough. We actually. Spun it off, branched off into its own. And so now it's actually, excuse me, merged with our enterprise sales team which is probably atypical, but it has worked well for us.
Kenneth Burke: So yeah, for me, it's largely content. If we do any co marketing, obviously, that falls under us. And then sometimes there's, there are complimentary things we will [00:05:00] do as well. So if a we'll say there's a partner event going on, we'll do some marketing around that or some retargeting.
Kenneth Burke: I mentioned education, emails, blog posts, webinars, things like that. So day to day, it's not too much, but we are fairly active in it. Still. It's a powerful
Alan Zhao: channel. It's hard to build a sales team to sell your product, but if you can get other people to help sell on your behalf that's the cheat code to, to grow rapidly and efficiently.
Alan Zhao: So partnerships. is difficult to set up, but sometimes amazing things just fall right into your lap. So there's a story that you were telling me about how you grew pipeline 150 percent in one year, directly attributable to this unique situation where Twilio acquired one of your competitors.
Alan Zhao: And you were able to migrate a large portion of their customers onto your platform. We can start from the beginning and I'll let you take it away from here.
Kenneth Burke: So from the beginning, we, so we're a text messaging software. Twilio is actually an upstream provider of ours that we have built some things out on top of their SMS API.
Kenneth Burke: So we've had a relationship with them since the beginning [00:06:00] and we had a partner relationship with them as well. Back in the day, we'll say, pre COVID where if you're They had a lead come in and the lead wasn't a good fit to want to build something using Twilio services. We were somebody that they would refer to say, Hey, you can just buy it instead.
Kenneth Burke: This is already built out use text requests. So we had some relationships there, but there's also so much turnover at a massive company like Twilio. And there's always reorganizations or reorgs, people are shifting roles all the time. So that over time became something that was tough to keep up with.
Kenneth Burke: I'll say fast forward a few years and Twilio decides to buy our largest competitor or most direct competitor, which is named zip whip. And we were a fairly close feature match. It's funny cause they were, they started in Seattle, Washington, and we started in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So opposite sides of the.
Kenneth Burke: Of the states but doing pretty much the same thing and, we weren't entirely sure what was going to happen whenever Twilio did buy them, but then [00:07:00] we heard the announcement or found out that they were going to sunset zip whip. They're going to shut down the front end. Software and basically ZipWhip had some backend infrastructure and some other things that was really valuable for Twilio's audience.
Kenneth Burke: We think that was the decision to buy them and then why to shut down the software. So that happened and we started reaching out to all of our contacts at Twilio saying, Hey, how can we get involved with this? We know all those thousands of customers that ZipWhip has been serving are going to need to go somewhere.
Kenneth Burke: Wouldn't it be great if we could keep them using a product that is at least on the Twilio platform. So that traffic. It's still going through Twilio and they were of like minds, the people we ended up working with but they weren't going to offer an exclusive, referral partnership and something like this.
Kenneth Burke: They need to be fairly neutral. And instead of saying, Hey, go to text requests, say, Hey, go to one of these three or one of these five providers, these partners of ours, we did our work to become one of the partners. We thought it made sense anyway, cause we were the closest feature match [00:08:00] already. But from there it was relationship building.
Kenneth Burke: It was. Doing webinars with the Twilio and Zipwhip teams to show exactly what we can do for people. It was doing webinars for their customers. It was providing good copy for the landing page on Twilio's website to say, check out these partners, check out text requests specifically. We also had our own team reaching out to everyone we could find who was a Zipwhip customer.
Kenneth Burke: And we used a handful of tools built with or something to see if there was a pixel on somebody's website. So we could hit them up and say, Hey, that's going away. Come use us instead. And I'll say it was amazing how many of their customers, this is a good lesson here, there's amazing how many of their customers didn't realize their, that zip whip was shutting down.
Kenneth Burke: They just missed the communications or they weren't looking for it. Which the marketing lesson there is. Nobody sees it, sees what your message is every time you say it. So just keep repeating it if it's something important. But anyway, so there's some of the marketing side and what really helped us, I think, when the lion share was that our [00:09:00] product team built a migration tool, So that with one click, you could actually move all of your data from zip whip to text request.
Kenneth Burke: And that was incredible. We just, we wanted it to be an effortless switch, even in the best of times, switching software services is a headache and a pain of the rear and you don't want to do it. And especially if somebody is forcing you off when you didn't want to do it on your own, we knew things could get touchy.
Kenneth Burke: So we wanted to make it really easy. Our customer service teams, our sales team, all of our people are really great to work with anyway. They're really helpful and kind and quick and responsive. So that definitely helped every other touch point. But yeah, there's a I'll quit rambling for a moment and you tell me what, where you want to go with it from here.
Alan Zhao: It's an amazing story. How did you guys decide to build the integration? It's already hard enough to get features on the roadmap. Sometimes roadmaps are six months out. So it's and we, with things like integrations, you're never really sure if they're going to [00:10:00] go well, because something like this hasn't really been done before.
Alan Zhao: What was that like the convincing and change management had to take
Kenneth Burke: place? Yeah. It's amazing how quickly and powerfully you can do something once everyone agrees on it. And in our case, we all saw, we knew how large Zipwhip was. We knew how good it would be to work with Twilio.
Kenneth Burke: We knew how much revenue we should be able to earn from these customers because it was so similar to everybody else we worked with, excuse me. And so I said, Hey, this is a huge opportunity. This is our Our golden goose moment, if you will, we need to make sure we take advantage of it.
Kenneth Burke: What is it going to take for us to take advantage of it? Okay we're going to need to make sure we can onboard. We're going to need to out market the other people who are the other partners on the list we're going to need to be more helpful so that people have a good experience and actually stay with us and don't go to.
Kenneth Burke: Don't decide to leave us for another vendor. We need to be as clear and helpful as we can in our product up front. One thing was webinars. I mentioned another [00:11:00] thing was we would record a canned demos and just put it on the website. That's taboo for a lot of.
Kenneth Burke: Enterprise sales companies in particular or software companies. Cause they don't want to show everything before they can talk to you. We were like, no, you're, we know you're looking, here's what you're looking for. Can we give you those answers so you can just buy even without having to talk to us?
Kenneth Burke: Yeah. So that was a little bit of the thought process there.
Alan Zhao: Can we dive in a little bit more on the planning and strategy and the order of operations of, did you guys build it first and then market? Did you market ahead? How did you go after Zipwhip's customers? Was the email?
Kenneth Burke: Yes, is the short answer.
Kenneth Burke: It was all of it in tandem. And so we were having conversations with people at Twilio at first to say, Hey, is this something we can do? Will you let us do it? And then zip web did have an open API. And if we had tried to do this before the partnership, they would have just blocked our account, because don't want you taking our customers, but since we had the partnership, they, let us use it, however we wanted, as [00:12:00] long as we were within, whatever ethical And legal got parameters when we very easily were.
Kenneth Burke: So yeah so we built that. I don't remember how long it took to actually to ship and get out there for people to use, but it was fairly quick. Our team did some good work pretty quickly there. And alongside it was. Copy for landing pages was figuring out attribution tracking.
Kenneth Burke: So if people do come to us from Twilio, can we point back to that partnership and say it was effective in working make it easy for people to schedule demos, emails, a lot of marketing went through Twilio as well. So it was creating within there. Guidelines. What were their, what was their rubric for email marketing for webinar marketing?
Kenneth Burke: How can we fit within that? But then a lot of it, we tried to skip a few steps. So, typically in a software sales process, there's a discovery call, then there's a demo maybe. And then there's talking pricing before [00:13:00] signing a contract. And first of all, we don't have contracts. So if you really want one set up, we can do it for you.
Kenneth Burke: But we're just a month to month service, come sign up, make it really easy. And but we were able to basically condense discovery demo pricing into a 15 to 20 minute conversation. Knowing these people are already very familiar with. A text messaging platform and we're very similar.
Kenneth Burke: So we just need to highlight what is similar? Where's the overlap? What are a couple of things that are different? Cause so we don't catch it off guard. And then here's how much it's going to cost. Here's how you set it up. Come on, let's go. As you target these guys. Yeah, we did. Early on zip whip and Twilio were pretty protective as you would imagine.
Kenneth Burke: So I'm not being protective of their customers. So they didn't, it's not like they were sharing info or anything like that. And it took us a while to. To find the prospects through whatever, marketing channels we were doing, webinar registrations built with, pixel tracking. Maybe the most helpful thing was Google ads and making sure.
Kenneth Burke: So two things actually. So we had a [00:14:00] two pages about zip whip on our website. So we had a blog post and we had a, an integration or product landing page. And both of those ended up ranking at the top of search results for zip whip replacement or zip whip shutdown, which is fantastic. Added to that, we, in our Google ads for those keywords and similar, So we made sure we were we paid enough to be the number one bid as well.
Kenneth Burke: So we would be potentially, three of the 10 results on a Google search page for anything related to zip web. And so we got all the traffic, our website was good enough that people could get what they wanted and make the next step, talk to us, et cetera. And that worked really well.
Alan Zhao: What keywords did you guys use and how did you come up with them?
Kenneth Burke: Two parts. And I don't know that we really came up with anything. So there we, there was the typical like business texting service keywords anyway. And we did some digging in trans. [00:15:00] There was nothing really conclusive, but it was a hunch is that if you have to all of a sudden start looking for a new service, you're just going to use the typical keywords.
Kenneth Burke: You're not necessarily going to look for zipper replacement or, Twilio is shutting down. What do I do? Or not Twilio, but and so we over indexed on those general, what we call general, but high intent purchase keywords. Like Business texting service or best SMS service in the U S things like that.
Kenneth Burke: And we also had, for zip whip alternative or zip whip replacement zip whip shut down. We didn't see much traffic there, at least not for paid. A lot of that went organic. But for the paid it, it made it like most of the traffic coming in was people who were using zip whip looking for a replacement.
Kenneth Burke: So that was interesting. Got it. That makes sense.
Alan Zhao: And for organic, did you make one blog post article?
Kenneth Burke: One blog that was, zip whip shut down. And then here's a bunch of categories or sections that were [00:16:00] variations of keywords. So how to transfer my zip whip data, how to how much does it cost?
Kenneth Burke: When is the deadline? Things like that. And then we had a landing page for the, in the integration. Did
Alan Zhao: you put the integration page at the top of the fold or did you make it more visible? A lot of times integrations are hidden. Did you have some,
Kenneth Burke: which is funny. It came up in conversation earlier today, actually, or yesterday, somebody was looking for the old page and it's still there on our website.
Kenneth Burke: You just have to look for it now, but yeah, we had a a nag banner at the top, so it was the very first thing you said you saw it say, Hey, zip web customers click here. And then it was also just below the fold. We had another section that said, transfer zip web data along with a couple other things.
Kenneth Burke: We still had our whole other. Market to market too. So we couldn't exclude all of them. I think we did a pretty good job of marrying the two.
Alan Zhao: That's a really great strategy. People also forget to use the banner. Sometimes people will look at the banner and then not even read [00:17:00] it. But for those that do, like it's a great way to drive the awareness.
Kenneth Burke: Yeah, it certainly helped. A lot of people would just come straight to the, they'd come to our homepage through whatever channel, click the learn more at the top and then get what they need on the landing page. And then either reach out to us with an easy to answer question, or that would just start to take the next step to sign up.
Alan Zhao: What would you say was the primary channel that drove the most awareness or signups for
Kenneth Burke: this initiative? So this was a two year process. Year one, it was webinars. So Twilio did a partner webinar series where they pick a week and a month and Each partner would have their own webinar and somehow we got twice as many registrations as the other partners.
Kenneth Burke: And I forget exactly how we managed that, but we did something right. So we had twice as many registrations there and that drove a ton of demos for us, a ton of purchases for us. And then we cut back on webinars the second year [00:18:00] and it was largely us calling zip web customers to book demos and just.
Kenneth Burke: I don't even remember how we got all the contact. Aside from what I've already shared, but yeah, just calling them. Hey, did you know zip whip shutting down? Oh, actually, yeah, we had heard about that. We're a partner with them, yada, yada, yada. Do you want to see how it works? It was effective.
Kenneth Burke: You don't need to say more than that. They're shutting down. They know what that means. You need, you still know it's definitely the conversation starter, right? And there's some people still hadn't heard it. Some people didn't believe us. I thought we were just lying and, That's funny, but yeah, it'd be, I don't know if you've heard, but zip Twilio has acquired zip web.
Kenneth Burke: They're shutting down. We're a partner of theirs. We're just reaching out to people trying to get them to transfer, before the deadline, so you don't miss anything. And usually we were talking to call it a gatekeeper where the decision maker is, the owner or something, and we weren't able to reach them.
Kenneth Burke: Sometimes we were. But then it would be, can we get the right person's email to follow up with the schedule of demo? Or can we just go ahead and schedule a time right now? My significant [00:19:00] minority just took a moment to actually see a quick demo, five or 10 minutes to just look at the product.
Kenneth Burke: I think that was really helpful as well, but there's, it was so varied, it's hard to say that one thing in particular happened every time.
Alan Zhao: What a great strategy, Max. It's a, it costs almost nothing, but it created absolute. Paying for customers that have a need for your product. And really, the main thing was just to get in front of them at the right time
Kenneth Burke: to get in front of them at the right time.
Kenneth Burke: And we still had to figure out what their customer journey was and match them along the way. And that was challenging for me because, whenever we went into it, I was thinking, okay, a lot of these people will be just like our normal market. Who they realize, okay, I need a texting service or I need a replacement for what I'm currently using.
Kenneth Burke: Let me just go to Google and start the process that way. And it ended up being entirely different because most of these people weren't actively looking, they were being pushed off. [00:20:00] And so how we got in front of them, how we got their attention, how we created empathy with them and made them want to actually learn more and hear from us With, it was all different, similar, very similar, but it was just different enough that it threw me for a loop for a little bit, we got all the pieces working together.
Kenneth Burke: Our team did a fantastic job and it's worked out.
Alan Zhao: The returns speak for themselves. I appreciate you sharing the story. Is there someone in your career that you'd like to give a shout out to?
Kenneth Burke: Yeah, you asked me that before we started and I was thinking there's so many people. I'll say there's two, there's one's my dad.
Kenneth Burke: He's incredible. Thank you. Thank you, sir. And number two, I'll say Brian Elrod our CEO, co founder, the guy I've reported to directly for the last nine years. He's given me the opportunities and coaching along the way. So it's been a good ride. You stuck around for nine
Alan Zhao: years. For sure. In this environment, through the tech hype cycle, when people move after one year, it's amazing to test them.
Alan Zhao: Yeah. And lastly, how can people find out more about [00:21:00] yourself?
Kenneth Burke: So about me, I'm on LinkedIn, Kenneth Burke. I look like this. If you're watching the video I also have a blog slash newsletter called Burke bits. com. And then if you want to learn more about text requests, you can come through my, my channels and you'll find them there or go to text request.
Kenneth Burke: com and find us.
Alan Zhao: Great.
Kenneth Burke: It's a pleasure having you on. Thank you. Thank you, Alan.