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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!
Jared Fuller: [00:00:00] What you realize when you're a genius is that great product never beats great go to market, right? But then, then there's this other one with pro well, great go to market, never beats great network effects and for a network effect to be true, it actually needs to be based on some undeniable. Here's the answer, an undeniable shift in human behavior.
Jared Fuller: So like if you want 33 percent of your revenue to come from partners, it's very simple. That means that one third of your account list you should identify as, Hey, these are the highest likely accounts to work with partners. And then that means that one third of your sales activity should be nearbound sales plays.
Jared Fuller: So what are those plays? Well, they're called the, I call them the three eyes of nearbound sales, Intel, influence, and intros.
Alan Zhao: Welcome to the revenue rebels podcast brought to you by warmly on this show. We cut straight through the fluff and dive deep into the specific tactics that B2B revenue leaders across sales and marketing are using to find success in today's environment.
Alan Zhao: I'm your host, Alan Zao.[00:01:00]
Alan Zhao: Okay. Very excited to have on the show, Jared Fuller today. He's the CEO of Nearbound. com, which is a media company covering the news stories, tactics of the Nearbound era. And we're going to talk about what Nearbound is in just a moment. Prior to that, Jared led global partnerships at Drift, where he created and scaled Drift's ecosystem through partnerships.
Alan Zhao: For example, he built Drift's Adobe Alliance from zero to Adobe Partner of the Year. He created the conversational marketing blueprint, which is the methodology that certifies thousands of marketers on conversational marketing. And he created today what's known as conversational ABF. And not just that, he was also the VP of sales and Panadoc, where he joined the company when the office was just an apartment in San Francisco.
Alan Zhao: And then he eventually helped grow the org to hundreds of employees and 10, 000 paying customers. Today, we're going to be focusing on Nearbound. What is it and why you should care? Jared, thank you for joining us today. Happy to be here. Let's dive in. Let's do it. Let's go through a quick one minute background on yourself [00:02:00] and how you got to where you are today.
Jared Fuller: Yeah. So, um, partnerships have always just been my secret weapon, but I'm not like a partnerships person. I've, uh, I started my career as a Founder, like I own my own marketing agency. I was co founder and CEO of job hive, which was backed by foundry group. So in the HR tech space, um, and, uh, you know, from a very young age, I tried founding a bunch of companies.
Jared Fuller: So my, my resume is, uh, you know, a graveyard of dead startups. Um, but then there's also some really massive wins. So I've, uh, you know, helped create two unicorns, Panda doc and drift, uh, leading sales and partnerships at Panda doc, and then building the, um, global partner programs at drift. And then I, I got this curiosity.
Jared Fuller: Around partnerships is always being my secret weapon going. Wait a second. Who else has done this stuff before? And I come to find out it's every single industry defining and leading company has had partnerships is the core part. We're not talking, you know, 10 percent of revenue. We're talking well over 50 percent of revenue to the world's largest company.
Jared Fuller: [00:03:00] Microsoft 95 percent partner attached, right? Um, I was like, where is the knowledge? Where's this information? And, um, decided to, uh, found partner hacker, just like sales hacker, right? For partnerships. And we were acquired by reveal, um, last year. And I rebranded everything to, uh, nearbound. com released near bound the book, uh, two months ago, which was a bestseller in every category.
Jared Fuller: Um, in all of business, it was only number two to Elon Musk's biography. So I was pretty proud of that. I can't believe it. How
Alan Zhao: could you lose to Elon?
Jared Fuller: I know, right? Everybody does.
Alan Zhao: Let's uh, let's dive right into it. So, can you tell the audience a little bit about what is Nearbound? How does, how does this whole thing work?
Jared Fuller: Yeah, so, I mean, one of the things that folks often don't pay attention to in startup land, but it's, it's probably one of the only defensible modes is, um, it's called network effects. And language is a network effect. Like, your own lexicon really matters. Um, when people are using your words, that makes a difference and partnerships.
Jared Fuller: What does it mean to you? [00:04:00] What does it mean to a CRO? What does it mean to a CMO? What does it mean to a CCO to a CPO? All different things, right? And what I needed to orient folks around is that this basic tenant, the partnerships should not be a department. It should be a strategy for every department.
Jared Fuller: And what does that mean? Well, there are some other words and nomenclature that previously existed. So let's say the era of outbound, right? That's outbound equals target inbound equals attract. So what is near bound? Near bound equals surround. It's about working with the buyers, working with the folks that your buyers already trust.
Jared Fuller: So their vendors, their partners, their people, and whether that's across marketing, sales, success, or product, it's merely recognizing. You know, trust comes from helping people reach their promised land, but we only trust the people who've been to the places we want to go. So Nearbound is about how do you market with the people your buyers already trust.
Jared Fuller: Nearbound is about how do you sell with them, et [00:05:00] cetera.
Alan Zhao: Got it. So who are the players in, you said like maybe customers, integration partners, who are all the people involved here?
Jared Fuller: Yeah, so it's, and that's why it's more than just partnerships. Right? So like Nearbound includes anyone that your buyer trusts.
Jared Fuller: So that could be an influencer. It could be an advisor. It could be an investor. It could be a partner, a customer, right? Like one of the most effective channels for pretty much every single company is what? It's your customer referral program. Like those are always, those are always your best leads, right?
Jared Fuller: They have the highest ASP. They have the fastest time to close. They have the highest win rate like that is your best and it would be silly to not work with them. And oftentimes you'll see these separate initiatives like an affiliate program and then a customer marketing program and then a partnerships department and then a channel thing like.
Jared Fuller: It needs to be unified as one strategy that could be put into the go to market engine. So that way, marketing is using it, sales is using it, success is using it, not these siloed, um, disparate [00:06:00] efforts.
Alan Zhao: We're gonna talk a little bit about exactly how you implement that and what that looks like. Um, coming back into, I guess, the bigger picture of this whole thing.
Alan Zhao: I really admire one of Reveal's manifestos. I think I read it recently, and one of the ideas is that we're moving away from the how economy about what your product does and how it works because everyone can build anything with AI these days. And of course, offshore hiring of engineers into the who economy, which is about influence.
Jared Fuller: Can you talk a little bit more about that? So in 2006, a British mathematician named Clive Humby coined the phrase data is the new oil, and he was right. Data was the new oil, uh, until we polluted all trust in data as a buyer. That doesn't mean as a business, we don't use it. What I mean is how we used to buy things was that like, I don't know, let's say I'm purchasing a sales forecasting software, right?
Jared Fuller: Like in B2B, I might be like, you know, how to, you know, fix X or Y in my forecast. And I might Google that there is no way today. And you don't do it. And [00:07:00] the folks listening, you don't do this either. You don't Google problems and then read vendor data. You know, SEO driven listicle content and then be like, Oh, I need to buy their software.
Jared Fuller: What do you do? The very first thing you do is you go find someone who's done the thing that you're trying to do. Right? So I might go to modern sales pros and be like, Hey, I'm looking into fixing this problem with sales forecasting. I see some threads. I see my buddy taft who I trust, right? He's done the thing.
Jared Fuller: He's like a sales ops professional that I trust. And he says, Hey, bye, Clary. So I buy Clary and that might be 50 grand and that's how it works Right is that I have someone that I trust who's making a recommendation Because whenever I go look at all the reviews, guess what alan all of the reviews they all say 4.
Jared Fuller: 7 stars I call it 4. 7 star syndrome, right all of the software companies Um content, it's all good. It's not bad You know, the information asymmetry is out there. It's just noise. Where is the signal? The signal is in the people that has done the thing you're trying to do that you [00:08:00] trust your network. And that's how we buy.
Jared Fuller: Um, and we trust brands that deliver that same type of experience. I'll give you a B to C example. That's a perfect analogy of this. Um, I've been a Marriott customer my entire business travel life, right? I always stay at Marriott's, but I own a Tesla now. Um, Tesla made me switch to Hilton. Why? Well, whenever I'm traveling and I'm driving my Tesla Hilton partnered with Tesla to put superchargers in every single one of the Hilton hotels.
Jared Fuller: And I just happened to be staying at a Hilton for a wedding one time. And the valet's like, Oh, I'll charge your car for you. And I was like, what? That's, that's amazing. And then now I'm like, that's just such a great benefit. That's my point. I trust Tesla Marriott. It's like, Oh shoot, I got to figure out how the heck I'm going to charge the car.
Jared Fuller: It's a pain in the butt that changed my behavior based on a trusted relationship. Right? Like that fundamentally changed how I operate as a, as a [00:09:00] consumer. And, um, the, the who economy is that same exact concept is the brand is the people that you already trust is how we make purchasing and buying decisions.
Jared Fuller: And then for
Alan Zhao: smaller startups out there or players who are entering the space, they want to align themselves with as many brands that people trust as possible. Seems to be one of the nice strategies out there.
Jared Fuller: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's very simple. Uh, for an early stage startup, I'll make this very simple.
Jared Fuller: Like, how do I, you know, what partners do I go after or what relationships do I go after? And, and how do I go about finding these people? It's very simple. This is not some hypothetical list of attributes and, you know, ICP or like an ideal partner profile. Here's what it is. It's a list. Who are your best customers?
Jared Fuller: Talk to them, interview them, ask them about the vendors that are tangential that they use and trust, ask them about the agencies or the consultancies or any, you know, service provider that they pay and go through your top 10 top 20. What you'll [00:10:00] find is there's some very important relationships that really control the mind share of your buyer.
Jared Fuller: It would be very silly of you to not have a relationship with the person that they already trust, right? Because they have more. So when you do your next event or your next campaign or whatever it is. It might behoove you to partner and work with that company, right? That entity, those people, um, those watering holes, uh, of influence.
Jared Fuller: You
Alan Zhao: know, that's amazing. And I'd love to get your points on this in just a moment, exactly how you execute this type of program. Coming back into your, uh, into your experience at Drift, can you talk through a little bit about how you set up the partner ecosystem? Who needed to be involved or the tools and processes?
Alan Zhao: What was the rollout phase and what was involved in each step?
Jared Fuller: I think I'll answer this, um, a little bit differently. This, this is, uh, one of my strong opinions. Before you build an ecosystem, you need to be able to win in an ecosystem. So. Um, there's a there's a book that's really [00:11:00] difficult. Um, uh, it's called playing to win and playing to win is about strategy.
Jared Fuller: Strategy is probably the most misunderstood word in startups. Strategy is merely choice, right? I am making a choice and not all choices are equal. Your choices are actually very important whenever you're pursuing, let's say, a strategic alliance, a partnership. What ecosystem are we going to win in? So there's a series of cascading choices.
Jared Fuller: You know, what is my winning aspiration? Where will we play? How will we win and what capabilities must be in place in order for that to be true? And all of a sudden you go, Oh, I have to answer these questions. I can't just like partner with people, you know, like, what, where's the promise land, how are we going to get there?
Jared Fuller: What needs to be in place? And then you have to make a choice on which ecosystem you need to win in. And that may not be the top dog. It may be someone in between. And I wrote a really awesome piece on this. It's called partner up and play to win. Um, so I kind of bring these two strategies together and how I talk through.[00:12:00]
Jared Fuller: Um, going from zero to adobe's partner of the year, right? Um, how I went from, you know, no commercial relationship with Marquetta whatsoever and turning that into a 6 million partnership and we were nobody. I mean, we were 100, 120 person startup, um, and we start signing seven figure, you know, opportunities with the chosen partner is kind of my point.
Jared Fuller: So whenever you start to get that, Andrew Chen talks about this in a great book called the cold start problem, right? You need network effects. So if you don't have groundswell in an existing ecosystem, how do you have anything other than just more outbound? Hey, do you want to partner with me? Hey, do you want to partner with me?
Jared Fuller: You need to recognize the network effects are one of the only defensible mechanisms left in business. So, um, the goal was let's get into as many marketo accounts as possible, right? So then that became a cross departmental effort, right? So We're doing stuff with the drift marketing and brand, like focusing all in on Marketo, [00:13:00] joint campaigns, events, um, highlighting customer success stories, getting partners where we could like Marketo's partners, you know, in the beginning, it's hard, but you just keep on stacking and over time, we got to a place where, um, I was able to sit down every single CSM that was in North America at their three different offices face to face, And be like, Hey, here's exactly how we helped your other CSM close an 80, 000 upsell.
Jared Fuller: Because plugging drift into Marketo adds new contacts to the database, you're paid on net dollar retention. I'm your best partner to help you make more money and make your customers more successful and hit Steve Lucas as your CEO's number one goals. So what we're going to do now is we're going to sit down in front of Salesforce.
Jared Fuller: We're going to pull up your account list and we're going to make intros to all of that actually happened. Like I sat down at every single CSM desk. You know, we're nobody, you know, it's not like I'm, I'm like Microsoft coming around and doing this, like we're a hundred and some odd person startup, um, [00:14:00] and that was inside of the first year.
Jared Fuller: So, um, I'd say the best piece is that partner up and play to win where I detail that formula out. It's probably a 25, 30 minute read. So we could just spend that entire time, you know, talking about that one thing. And then once you have that groundswell, then we had ROI DNA, like a top Marketo partner, lead MD, a top Marketo partner.
Jared Fuller: We had other integrations that came from that. Like you start to build an ecosystem because you're winning inside of an ecosystem. If you're a
Alan Zhao: fan of the Revenue Rebels podcast, please leave us a review on Spotify and Apple podcast. Your support goes a long way in helping us bring on more amazing guests.
Alan Zhao: Thank you. That's a really great point about, you have to have the groundswell before you can actually create the operations. Is there anything you can talk about for maybe series A startups or series B startups about how to create that groundswell in today's environment?
Jared Fuller: I think the, the place to start, um, where the lowest hanging fruit is, Is probably not on the sales side, and I think that's [00:15:00] unfortunately where most startups start. Um, obviously, you have to drive revenue, and I just talked, you know, talked about how we drove like 6 million in sales for a series B company.
Jared Fuller: Um, in less than 12 to 18 months, right? Like you can drive a lot of money from doing this, but we started with marketing, and I think the reason why that's so important is, um, and I'll give you a couple like tactics, let's say events. People really crave unique, fun, like different differentiated experiences that you can bring people together for a common vision of like a future.
Jared Fuller: And for, for us, what we did in the beginning, let's say drift and gong, you know, drift and gong to this day still don't have an integration. Right. But we did lots of co marketing together. Like that goes against the traditional partner playbook, but we had a thesis. Of a world where conversations mattered.
Jared Fuller: They mattered for salespeople. They mattered for marketing people. Um, you know, and that, that mattered a lot for, you know, six cents and demand base and like a lot of this [00:16:00] other, you know, RevTech stack, we were just out there evangelizing with the people that our audience already trusted to get into new watering holes and do create things.
Jared Fuller: So we'd have like the hypergrowth conference or, you know, RevGrowth and these other virtual experiences where we're able to market outside of our own database. Right. So I think my, my get really good. At at working with partners to create experiences and content and copy and movements like create a movement, um, that makes people want to market with you and then also make it incredibly easy.
Jared Fuller: And I often refer to myself, Alan is the influencer of influencers. You know, like, I will go get people that have way bigger reach than me to talk about the thing that I'm talking about. Like, I have relatively no following on LinkedIn compared to Jill Rowley, you know, 275, 000 followers or whatever she has.
Jared Fuller: Jill's, Jill's the goat of social selling. She invented it basically, right? Um, but I would get her to evangelize it [00:17:00] because I made it easy. She loved it. Like, I would write content specifically for her. Or for, you know, Scott lease or for whoever it was, I was really focusing on being like the best possible partner to do marketing together and that's where you're reaching outside of your own database.
Jared Fuller: Like the really silly thing about marketing solo today is that like, well, you already have the database. Those are already your contacts. How are you going to grow? It's either ads or you're renting space from Google. It's a faucet, but whenever you go into the market and you can market with the people and they love doing that with you, you're marketing into inherently not your database.
Jared Fuller: Um, so I, I think marketing is where, um, that comes in and, uh, is nearbound marketing is probably my favorite, like section of the book, you know, nearbound right now is there's, there's so much to take away from that. And, uh, also operating like a media company, like, you know, like the reason why I started partner hacker as a media company, Alan, is that, You know, I, I used to tell people [00:18:00] when the content, when my content is the product, you'll never beat me.
Jared Fuller: Right. So like treat your content, like the product. It was especially in partnerships, right? Make people be like, wow, I love working with this company. People love working with us at drift because our content was the product. We treated ourselves like a media company. Um, like these were experiences that were so good that like we charge for it.
Jared Fuller: Like I sold Marketo, you know, 50, 000 sponsorships to like be a part of the experiences that we created and they would market it, you know, like I sold that stuff to six cents. Uh, Latin y cannot, you know, like, and we paid for some of their stuff here and there, but like, the point was is that when we showed up, people wanted to market with us.
Alan Zhao: So this is what you mean by, in order to get someone like Scott Lease, like Jill, you have to create good content for yourself, you have to create good, what did you mean by create good content for them?
Jared Fuller: You know what I spend probably half my time doing? Is writing stuff for other people. You know, like we can get really tactical here for a second.
Jared Fuller: [00:19:00] Like, okay, let's say, um, you use a tool like reveal or cross beam, like you're sharing data with a partner and you're like, Hey, uh, here's some customers that they have that like. I have some inbound interest, but I don't have an opportunity with great opportunity to reach out and like work with that partner.
Jared Fuller: Fantastic. Like they haven't responded to my followup emails. So I want to get an intro, right? Simple enough. You and everybody else, right? Warm intro sounds fantastic. I love those. Everyone loves those. So what do most people do? What most people do is they send a LinkedIn DM. Hey, Alan, I see, you know, this person is a customer of yours.
Jared Fuller: Um, and, uh, blah, blah, blah. Would you mind making me an intro that is so junior varsity. It's embarrassing. Like you should be ashamed. Why this person doesn't know you, they don't trust you. You're asking them to risk their social capital and do work like mental gymnastics. Okay. Make an intro. [00:20:00] Why? Um, what's the context behind this?
Jared Fuller: Like I have to go like work for you now, and I don't even understand why. Conversely, what you can do is go. Hey, I saw that this account signed up for such and such about three months ago. They've come and downloaded this ebook and they went to this webinar or whatever. Here's my value hypothesis. Um, I'm looking to get connected with this person for this reason.
Jared Fuller: Uh, If I write, um, an intro based on this, would you mind forwarding it over or letting me know? Right, like, and then P. S. here's my first draft. Hey, yeah, sure, no problem. And same thing on the marketing side, like, hey, I have this crazy vision of, like, something we're gonna do in three months. And here's exactly how you fit into it.
Jared Fuller: And I'm going to take care of the social promo. I'm going to take care of the emails. I'm going to take care of all of this based on you said X and Y. I love that. Here's exactly how you fit into this picture and why you have to be a part of this campaign. And then people are like, Oh, that's amazing. [00:21:00] Like you solved all the mental gymnastics for me.
Jared Fuller: All that I have to do is like hit send, right. Whether that's on LinkedIn or showing up to an event, it's like, Hey, here's the three bullet points and we're just going to geek out on it. And like, yeah, I do love that topic. You know, like. I often say, Alan, folks spend too much time on being ivory tower intellectuals.
Jared Fuller: They focus on their operating model and they want to spreadsheet or math their vision of the world into existence. Right? So you're really focused on internal metrics and optimization and activities, engagements, whatever those KPIs are. Guess who doesn't care about any of that? The market. The market doesn't care about your operating model.
Jared Fuller: The map, your map, is not the territory. No matter how detailed you make a map, how much does it reflect nature, a mountain range? It's very, very little. You might be able to directionally navigate, but [00:22:00] you're losing so much context, texture, and fabric. So when you live in market and you actually build these things in market, your marketing organization where you're marketing with these people all the time, you can do something like this.
Jared Fuller: In less than 90 days, I got 100 speakers for the first ever, uh, Nearbound Summit. I got over 100 speakers. I got over 5, 000 people. All just excited about the world of, like, Nearbound. They were like, yes, this is it. But it wasn't me. The people that were promoing it were other people. Right. The people that were attending all of the vibe of the energy was in the market.
Jared Fuller: So I often say like your job, if you're in partnerships is to create a movement, right? The people, what do people actually believe in? Um, and if you don't work at a company where there's like some type of movement, you got to help find that, find that ethos, that core, that passion. That's like, Hey, I'm going to go recruit people cause they want to be a part of this.
Jared Fuller: And then I make people famous, [00:23:00] make people famous, make them feel great. Make them feel like awesome for helping you, right? What that's like the Jedi mind trick. Make people feel like, man, I love helping Jared. I love helping Alan. They're amazing. That's, that's what Jill told me. Jill Rowley, you know, she said, I love helping you.
Alan Zhao: Give five X, ask for one in return. And, uh, I bet people will feel that way. I mean, you'd be the most helpful person in the room. I had a couple of questions about some other stuff, but I kind of want to focus on this topic a little bit. So marketing's job is to create the movement can in today's context.
Alan Zhao: How would you go about that?
Jared Fuller: This is a lesson I learned from David can sell this, the CEO of drift really, really well. And I'll, I'll never forget it. It's fundamental to my thesis as an entrepreneur. Um, now like, um, and I've always thought this way, I just hadn't put it into the same words. I'm like, yes, this is true.
Jared Fuller: The, there's something I call, um, you know, the difference between being, um, A builder, [00:24:00] a genius, and a pro. So, a builder is someone that's like, I have a hammer, where's the nails? Right? I have this product idea, I have this thing, like, just looking for nails everywhere. And that's probably 90 percent of entrepreneurs, if I'm honest, 80 percent at least, um, where it's, it's about them.
Jared Fuller: It's about them. And, you know, that's not to say you can't succeed that way. Broken clock is right twice a day. Um, you can. It's just very hard. Then there's the geniuses that create a 10x technological innovation that You know, really does move capabilities forward and in some way, you know, this is peter teal's kind of like zero to one thesis, right?
Jared Fuller: Those are very strange, weird people to me. I'm not one of them, right? Like you really do need them breakthrough tech. And even then it's hard because what you realize when you're a genius is that great product never beats great go to market, right? But then then there's this other one with pro well, great go to market never beats great network effects.[00:25:00]
Jared Fuller: And for a network effect to be true, it actually needs to be based on some undeniable, here's the answer, an undeniable shift in human behavior. What was true about the old world that is no longer true about the new world. And I think Andy Raskin and his strategic narrative framework does a great job of making very clear on how you market and create movements behind what I'm saying.
Jared Fuller: Andy Wright wrote prolifically about drifts. Narrative in our marketing and gongs narrative in their marketing, some luminary companies that had fantastic marketing. What's the undeniable shift in the world if you are not tied to an undeniable shift of the world and clearly can paint a world where winners win by being a part of your movement and losers lose because they're not, you're just talking about features.
Jared Fuller: Nobody cares about features. People want to know that they're not going to get left behind because the race, the rate of change and that pace is accelerating and it's only getting harder to win. It's not getting easier. What's the [00:26:00] undeniable shift in the world? Like what is the, what is that vision that you have to like manifest into existence that you can be truly passionate about?
Jared Fuller: Jocko van der Kooij for Winning by Design and other great boys. He, his advice, I had him on the Nearbound podcast was really good. He's like, look, you need to, you need to focus on something that you have, you know, like almost an earned secret about. That's like some Paul Graham, YC advice. So like if you grew up on a farm, for example, and you're like, Hey, I love farmers.
Jared Fuller: Like, then you should probably like sell into farmers or market to farmers. Like, just as an example, like where, what is something that you understand what's happening in the market more than other people? Then you need to pull people towards that future. I love that. Because AI is going to eat everything else.
Alan Zhao: Someone said this, I can't remember exactly who it was, but it's like, um, you know, really smart people can do things that no one else can do, but geniuses can see things that no one else can see. I think this is part of it. It's like, if you can see it, then you can act on it. You can see a truth that no one else can see.
Alan Zhao: Your competition, your customers, your [00:27:00] business, this is the future, this is the movement. And, uh, that's, that's the true genius of how to win in the business. That's how that's, that's what makes you a player in the game. So marketing focus on movement. And like you said, you need to find the movement, what that is.
Alan Zhao: And then basically put that message out there to as many people as possible. Now, what does sales do?
Jared Fuller: Well, I think sales, um, there's a great thing that, uh, I created called the nearbound sales blueprint. It's in the book, but then it's also available online for free. Um, you need to run nearbound sales plays.
Jared Fuller: So like, if you want 33 percent of your revenue to come from partners, it's very simple. That means that one third of your account list You should identify as, hey, these are the highest likely accounts to work with partners. And then that means that one third of your sales activities should be Nearbound Sales Plays.
Jared Fuller: So what are those plays? Well, they're called, I call them the three I's of Nearbound Sales. Intel, Influence, and Intros. And they're in that order for purpose, on purpose, because Intro is the hardest one. Intel, though, is like, hey, this company just bought from this other partner of mine, similar buyer. Oh, this role was who was involved.
Jared Fuller: Okay, great. How else would you [00:28:00] reach out to that account? Outbound, look at their LinkedIn. Hey, I saw you went to UNC. Go Tar Heels. Like, who cares? That's dumb. Junior varsity stuff. I have to imagine if they bought in 2024, you know, in the last three, six months, whatever, there was probably a business challenge.
Jared Fuller: And a business initiative. And guess what people don't post on their website or on their LinkedIn. Their business challenges and their business initiatives. That's what you actually sell to. So go to that partner and get the answers to the test. Why show up and play the game on hard mode and try to get someone to take a call with you for you to learn about their problems.
Jared Fuller: Go do the work yourself. Right. Get the intel and then that's how you can generate influence and to get the partner to go. Oh, here's my value hypothesis. Could you put this in your next beating deck with this account? Okay, great. Generate some influence and then eventually have the right to earn an intro.
Jared Fuller: So, uh, in short, I think the nearbound sales plays intel influence intro. Um, and the nearbound sales blueprint is the, is by far the most effective way to do it. And then again, as I mentioned earlier, get really good at writing emails for other people, the word for them, make it easy for them. No more mental [00:29:00] gymnastics.
Alan Zhao: Customer success. What do they do?
Jared Fuller: I think the the easy, the easiest one in customer success, um, especially if you have integrations is to make sure that like any time that you have integrations that are available. So using like a crossing reveal, it's like, Hey, there's we have, you know, let's say 50 integrations right available.
Jared Fuller: This customer that just bought is a customer of four of our integration partners. Now, during your onboarding process, should you or should you not probably try to get those integrations connected? Yes. Just get the data. It's very simple. And what you'll find is no matter how many times I say this, folks really have a hard time being like, oh, okay, so then like the CSM needs visibility and they need to make sure this integration gets connected because inevitably their best cohort of revenue are their most integrated customers.
Jared Fuller: I've yet to see a company where it's like, Oh, the number of integrations go up and our, our, our net retention goes down. Show me that company. BS. It goes up every time. It's like one of those single most lowest common [00:30:00] denominators. And yet that's not part of it. Like even with Marketo, we sold them to a thousand Marketo accounts.
Jared Fuller: And then I learned, I'm like, Oh my gosh, we only have like 250, you know, integrated. What the heck? Like that became an initiative. And guess what happened to net retention? Right. Very simple. So partnerships, what is the partnership org do? I think the partnership org is the orchestrator across every department.
Jared Fuller: Marketing, sales, success. So stop trying to build a monolithic partner team and you know, go help the rest of the company build and live in market. Um, help market, help the marketing team market with, help the sales team sell with, help the success team serve with.
Alan Zhao: Is there something the partnership person should be focused on, like a key KPI?
Alan Zhao: How many integration partners in our ecosystem or is it just about helping the other orgs?
Jared Fuller: Help the other companies hit their metrics by utilizing and working with partners, right? Like it's not about some internal metric. I think the number one metric to pay attention to is partner attach rate. Partner attach rate to marketing campaigns to sales accounts to pipeline to close one [00:31:00] revenue and then measure that cohort performance.
Jared Fuller: It's very simple. Does partner attach result in better pipeline generation? Does it perform result in better pipeline conversion? Does it result in healthier customers? And it's a binary yes or no. It's a very simple metric to measure. And what you'll find is that it tends to result in Better performance.
Jared Fuller: So like why ignore it?
Alan Zhao: Last question. What tools do you recommend for people who want to build a partnership ecosystem?
Jared Fuller: I think you need to start with a reveal, um, uh, you know, a near bound revenue platform that's data up. So you can share all this data with your partners that you can use to orchestrate against your marketing team, against your sales team, against your success team.
Jared Fuller: Um, I'm, I'm very biased in that statement. Obviously, I'm, you're bound to part of Reveal. However, like, I will say that this is how I activated all the partnerships at Drift was using a platform just like this. Like, you do need to do that. Don't, I don't think a PRM is where you start. I don't think an affiliate thing or a link tracking thing.
Jared Fuller: Share CRM data, uh, cause you have to do the account mapping. You know, uh, targeting accounts, figure it out. [00:32:00] Reveal. co.
Alan Zhao: People, check it out. Reveal. co. We use it here at Warmly. It's a fantastic tool. Jared, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. How can people find out more about you?
Jared Fuller: Go to nearbound. com, subscribe or hit me up, Jared Fuller on LinkedIn.
Jared Fuller: I post a partnerships content pretty frequently and um, nearbound. com has podcasts, newsletters, events, you know, all free. Um, we're the biggest media company in, uh, the partnerships landscape.
Alan Zhao: Please check it out. Thanks so
Jared Fuller: much, Jared. All right, [00:33:00] cheers.