WTF is nearbound? (With Jill Rowley, GTM Advisor at Stage 2 Capital)

What is Nearbound really? How can you use it, and should you?

Those are just some of the questions we asked Jill Rowley who's currently building this new category.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:15) - Meet Jill
• (03:11) - How she stumbled into marketing automation
• (05:27) - Social selling
• (07:53) - Surround strategy
• (11:29) - Nearbound.. What is it?
• (16:03) - Not just about acquisition
• (19:36) - What's changed?
• (24:46) - The benefits of nearbound
• (30:15) - Software is removing the friction

Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

Guest

Jill Rowley

23 years in B2B SaaS at Salesforce, Eloqua, HubSpot, Marketo. Customer obsessed. Living in-market. Nearbound = Surround.

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone. This is Toni Holbein from Roblox. You're listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's episode, we are talking with Jill Rowley. She currently is GTM advisor at Stage 2 Capital, and previously she's been at Salesforce, at Eloqua, at Oracle, and a bunch of other cool places. We're going to talk about what the heck is Nearbound, how could you use it, should you be using it, and a bunch of other things.
[00:00:24] Enjoy.
[00:00:25] That. Let's start. So we're not doing that. Um, do you have a great kind of thing to talk about me about? He's always the, he's the BS artist, kind of, he's always finding the,
[00:00:39] Mikkel: the bridge. The path, no, because the thing I had was so silly.
[00:00:42] it's I don't have any kind of really great, leg into that.
[00:00:47] Jill: I'm good with it on the fly. That, that is literally
[00:00:49] how I work. I mean, it is like chaos in this brain. so We could, we could talk about
[00:00:56] like
[00:00:56] Mikkel: That's, good. We also have a lot of chaos. I can tell you from having been in
[00:01:00] the, bed for like just four days now with the, man flu, I feel like whenever I talk or laugh,
[00:01:05] I'm one of those guys at the bar who's been there for too long, uh, for too
[00:01:09] many days in a row and been smoking two packs of cigarettes my entire
[00:01:13] life. So
[00:01:14] let's see how uh,
[00:01:15] Toni: the radio show hosts. do you know what? I think we have material
[00:01:17] to kind of cut something up. That could be, that could be good. You know, let's jump ahead here. We'll do a post production. So whom we have here today, which is pretty exciting. Is, uh, Jill. I mean, you have been in, uh, B2B SaaS now for, uh,
[00:01:33] Like a fairly long time.
[00:01:34] I would say you've been there from the beginning. You've been one of the first, I think, 100 employees in Salesforce, which is crazy. You've worked at Eloqua, you've worked at Oracle, you've worked at, uh, Marketo. You have been a professional speaker. Obviously you've, uh, worked in, uh, you know, stage two capital as kind of a, an operator fund actually kind of raised all of that stuff and throughout your career.
[00:01:57] And we're going to drill into this a little bit later on. You have kind of evangelized.
[00:02:02] A couple of things almost start, you know, I don't want to say starting them from scratch, maybe kind of you qualify this elevator, but you have basically kind of, you know, build out marketing automation as you know, a thought leader, you have built out social styling as a thought leader.
[00:02:15] And now you're working on the next piece, which is basically near bound ecosystem, partnerships, communities, and so forth. Right, kind of, which is, which is arguably could be kind of the next frontier that we're looking at right now, right? But Jill, did we, did we, did I miss anything that I, did I, you know, add too many logos to this?
[00:02:31] Is it too few logos? What's, what's, uh, what's, what's up?
[00:02:35] Jill: Yeah, no, you didn't even, you hit the big ones, right? And, and I think the, the, the thought leader though, I didn't become a thought leader until I became a subject matter expert, and I didn't become a subject matter expert until I did the thing. That I became the subject matter expert on, that then I was able to be a subject matter expert and the thought leader, and also an evangelist.
[00:03:01] So I think it's important to note that this wasn't just earned through reading a bunch of books and doing a bunch of podcasts and speaking at a bunch of events. I did the thing that I talk about.
[00:03:11] Toni: Can you actually tell the story of how you I want to say stumbled in into marketing automation, um, you know, because I think, I think that illustrates exactly that point that you're making there and makes it abundantly clear for everyone. Like, okay, got it. She's, she's an actual expert in the field and then kind of led
[00:03:28] to the evangelization of it.
[00:03:30] Jill: Sure. I stumbled into SaaS, right? SaaS didn't, we didn't even call it software as a service when I joined Salesforce in 2000, so doing the math, that's like 24 years ago. Uh, yes, I was one of the first salespeople. Who sold SaaS and our biggest competitor at Salesforce, people won't even, if you're not old enough, you won't even know the company, but with Siebel and it was on premise software.
[00:03:57] So one of the first salespeople at Salesforce. One of my customers was Eloqua and Eloqua was literally like the first marketing automation platform That it wasn't even a platform. It was a tool. It was a product. And so Eloqua was a customer of mine at Salesforce. I was in sales I always say I'm a sales professional trapped in a marketer's body and the reason I'm trapped in the marketer's body is because for 10 years As an Individual Quota Caring Sales Rep at Eloqua, employee number 13, when I joined Eloqua, My buyer was marketing.
[00:04:34] And so for me, really, like I talk about this business acumen, but customer acumen. And so selling into marketing, I've read as many books on marketing as I have on sales. But what I'm a real student of Is the customer of the buyer. And so this business acumen and this customer acumen, and then as an individual quota carrying sales rep, sales acumen, and understanding how buying has shifted and continues to shift, that is how I stay ahead of. What we're doing in terms of, of from a go to market perspective.
[00:05:17] Okay.
[00:05:17] Everybody wants to, to, to to win customers, keep customers and grow customers. Well, what's happening in terms of how people are buying. Does that make sense?
[00:05:27] Toni: Yes. Would you, would you say, I mean, the, the next logical thing here, and maybe we just, we weave this in, is Like, the social selling piece, right? Because to a degree that is something that has also changed, right? People are, you know, generally or have always been buying from people, but social selling is now amplifying this.
[00:05:42] Suddenly it's an actual tactic that it can deploy. Right? Is that also how you stumbled into the selling, uh, social selling piece and tell, tell us a little bit more about that. Mm-Hmm.
[00:05:50] Jill: Sure, I was a rep at Eloqua and LinkedIn, I was one of the first million members on LinkedIn. I immediately saw LinkedIn not as, uh, where I posted my resume, but as literally like a database of people. And I remember early days at Salesforce. Uh, the only way you knew who worked at a company was the company website.
[00:06:20] And the only people on the company website were like the exec leadership team. Well, when you're selling software, you're not just selling to the C suite. And there's a surround strategy, right? There's multiple people involved in the purchase decision. And so, if you're selling Salesforce Automation, you want to know SalesOps. You want to know who's in charge of, of compensation, sales compensation. And so when LinkedIn came onto the market, I'm like, Oh wait, this is a database where I can go find more people at the company. What I had been doing before was like getting auto responders. Um, like a vacation autoresponders and seeing if you have questions about X, then contact Y.
[00:07:04] And then those were new names I could put in the database, in the CRM database in Salesforce.
[00:07:09] so when LinkedIn came, came on the market, I'm like, holy moly, this is a great way to go find more people who are involved in the purchase decision. So it's just this, like, this network.
[00:07:21] And that's where social selling one was doing the research. On the buyer, the buying committee and the smarty pants, people who influenced the buyer, but then it was like that research wasn't just of the, who the person was and what their skills are and their background and where they worked and who they're connected to, but it was also like what they're reading, um, what they're engaging with from a content perspective and me being able to, to also share content, so social selling evolved over time, but I was part of that,
[00:07:53] Toni: mean, the feed wasn't something that was at LinkedIn from the beginning, right? This was actually something fairly recent, like five years ago or something like this. Right. And, and I think this is what people now think about social selling is like, well, you know, you kind of post there, you get, you get known and so forth.
[00:08:08] Right. But in your case, it's almost, um, uh, it's also kind of working yourself into the
[00:08:13] organization, and using it
[00:08:15] for that. Right.
[00:08:16] Jill: surround strategy. Right. Like never like multi threaded, you never want to be single threaded in a, in an account. You want to be multi threaded within the account, right? So to power, but also I believe in like top down and bottoms up. I'm all about like, who's on the front line, hands on keyboard, but then who's also like making the decision, the purchase decision, and then who are all the people in between.
[00:08:41] Toni: And kind of, you know, I'm going to pick up on the, you know, the surround strategy because that's almost kind of the keyword for, uh, the next thing, right? Because it's, you know, while, while, um, on the one hand side, you're kind of, okay, here are all the kind of micro decision makers in the accounting to manage that.
[00:08:58] And yes, they're, you know, champion and influence and economic buy in, whatever. Um, You know, with, with Nearbound, and you tell us a little bit more about this, maybe in a second, you're almost going, you know, uh, the macro of that, right? What are the influences that are sitting outside of the account? Might be a vendor, it might be another partner, it might be another customer, it might be, you know, uh, something else, a supplier, maybe even, uh, that are sitting around the account that actually also shape a buying decision potentially, right?
[00:09:25] Um, is that also how you think about that and how that, how that evolution almost occurred or, um, how
[00:09:30] do you see that?
[00:09:31] Jill: Yeah, for sure. It is, it's external to your four walls, right? As a company, we're selling a product or a service. Um, we really get focused on what's inside our four walls, like our marketing team, our product, our sales people, our customer success people, our professional services people. Like, we're very focused on internal.
[00:09:52] And when we're selling into an account, we're thinking like, who are the people within the account? Right? So the, the, the, the, the, the change agent, the mobilizer, the economic, just like you mentioned, but, but we know that from a, who influences us as a buyer, it's, it's so much more outside of the four walls.
[00:10:16] And when I think about, like, ecosystem, right, I think about the customer's ecosystem. I think about not only who are the other, like, companies that they buy products or services from but also, uh, what are the communities?
[00:10:33] That they belong to, right? So, RevOps, right? The revenue formula. RevOps, there, are a ton of RevOps communities that people belong to.
[00:10:43] And you better, you know, you know that within those communities, they're talking about data, process, workflow, talking about strategy. They're talking about technologies. Right?
[00:10:56] And so when you're in a community with your peers, your RevOps peers, and they're talking about the tools, the, agencies, That they're working with, the podcasts that they listen to, the research reports that they read, right? the analysts that they subscribe to, there's a lot that, that, that will influence someone buying your software.
[00:11:21] Someone even becoming aware of your software outside of your four walls in those communities.
[00:11:29] Mikkel: so this is, uh, Nearbound, we're getting into here and that's really the, you know, why we brought you on the show. So super happy to have you. And I think especially on the backdrop of What is kind of a terrible year for many SaaS companies. Um, we try and really bring something tangible that's going to help people and, you know, maybe Nearbound could be, one of those.
[00:11:50] And the first, you know, when we talked about getting on the show, I was like, Well, what is Nearbound? And, uh, I was hoping maybe you could start it off just by positioning, Hey, this is what it is and what you can use it for and how it can be helpful
[00:12:03] to some of the companies out there listening right now.
[00:12:07] Jill: Sure. So I'll start with comparing it to what we already know. Because this is how our brains work. We hear something, we want to compare it to what we already know. We want something familiar. So, outbound. Uh, outbound is This is an interruptive play, right? You're sending an email, you're interrupting someone.
[00:12:27] I get emails all the time, I don't want all these emails. I get the, oh, just, just checking back, putting it at the top of your inbox. I don't want you in my, in the top of my inbox because I'm, it's not relevant to me. So this outbound is an interruptive strategy. Inbound is, okay, I'm going to create content and events and I'm going to attract.
[00:12:48] People based on the valuable content, the research reports, the webinars, whatever it is, the blog posts, the articles, the podcasts, and I'm going to bring people in. Well, guess what? There's so much content. There's too much noise, right? There are so many podcasts. There are so many research reports. There are so many blogs and articles.
[00:13:10] And so the inbound, yes, it's still of value, but there's so much noise. And so what nearbound, right, outbound is, is prospect and, and interrupt. Inbound is attract and pull. What nearbound is, is more of this surround strategy. And the customer is at the center. And you ask yourself, who surrounds the customer?
[00:13:36] Who has the customer allowed into their circle of trust? Right? Who influences the customer? Where do the relationships already exist with that customer? And you say, who is nearest to the customer? And how do I get nearer to the customer by getting nearer to those who are nearest? Think about the circle, right?
[00:14:00] So, it's this circle approach with a customer at the center. And when we talk about, like, the, movement that I'm really focused on yes, is Nearbound broadly, but it is the partner ecosystem. The, the, the era of of ecosystem, we are, we are in the beginning of it.
[00:14:20] Toni: I mean, to a degree, right. So it's. you know, especially when you put it into the context of inbound and outbound, it's, it's an acquisition
[00:14:26] strategy, right? so Nearbound is really, uh, you know, when I think about it, when I kind of hear you talk and I just want to have it confirmed or, or, or the opposite, it is, it's obviously kind of a partnership strategy, right?
[00:14:38] Kind of, okay, you know, here, someone is already in the account. How can we leverage that connection, that trust that has been built, how can we leverage that in order to, also penetrate the account is number one. And then number two, okay, who else is here? Let's just say after you've sold, after commitment is done, after you're onboarding, who else is here?
[00:15:02] With whom do we need to or could we build an alliance to kind of, as a whole, almost get more sticky here, right? It's almost those two, those two motions here that I'm, that I'm, uh, that I'm thinking what this is about. I'm just trying to verbalize it and put it in the same language maybe other people are, um, you know, listening, thinking about. Is that how you would also talk about it? And then You know, as, as one example, it might not only need to be another tech vendor, it might also be a service partner. It might be, you know, someone else. It might be, I don't know, all kinds of different, you know, suppliers, uh, you know, working with that account.
[00:15:38] That basically then is to a degree, uh, revealed, pun intended, to, it's kind of give you an idea like, ah, okay, those are, those are the folks also working here, which then gives me an understanding of like, You know, where strategically could I move on this account in order to kind of make this potentially, you know, a much, much better customer experience first and foremost, but secondarily also, hey, uh, we'll probably not get thrown out so easily.
[00:16:03] Jill: Yeah, it, it, you're, you're right on the, the acquisition and that's what everybody
[00:16:07] focuses on, right? Everyone focuses on, uh, uh, net new, right? Sourced. Revenue. So new customers, new logos, as we like to call them. Um, but in a subscription world where I choose to renew or not, the, how do you onboard a customer fast time to value? Oftentimes as a services partner,
[00:16:30] Mikkel: Mm
[00:16:30] Jill: right? So, so those are services, services partners that can get customers, um, onboarded in fast time to value. Uh, you gotta keep your customers. And so how do you expand? Your relationships within an organization that you're, you're, you're continuing to add value. And how do you then understand who are our customers that renew and what is it, what is their ecosystem look like?
[00:17:04] Right? So, so a lot of times what you'll see is that once a company has, uh, 10 integrations. Right? Your customer integrates, um, your product with 10 other products. We can use HubSpot or Salesforce as an example. That customer, the likelihood to renew, is, is, is an order of magnitude higher than a customer who has zero other products integrated or two products integrated.
[00:17:33] Right? And so that, that retention strategy of having both more tools integrated but also continuing to look at services partners to teach them how to get more value, right? And then grow the account, right? So as you HubSpot as a, as an example, I bet a lot of people don't know that HubSpot now has six hubs. So their first hub was Marketing Hub. Second hub was Sales Hub. Then they have Services Hub. They also have Ops Hub. They have a Commerce Hub, and a CMS Content Management Hub. And so now HubSpot goes from a single product, a single hub, to six hubs, and a, uh, and an ecosystem of 1, 500 tech partners that are integrated to those various hubs.
[00:18:29] They also have 6, 000 solutions partners that have expertise. Some across all of the hubs and the ecosystem integration tech partners and some that focus in specific commerce hub. And so these, these partners, if you look at how do you get customers to use more hubs, you, you have partners that have area of expertise.
[00:19:02] And so you can bring those partners in to help you win more hubs from that customer. And also then, what is that ecosystem of integrated tools? into that, that, that additional hub. So it, it, it's looking at things more holistically, not just from acquiring a new customer, keeping the customer, and then growing the customer, and leveraging the various partners that actually map to that bigger solution.
[00:19:36] Mikkel: having listened to this, I'm just wondering, how is this different just from classic And even just with services, I'm sure many companies have had, uh, services partners beforehand to help with implementations of whether it's, it's BI and so on. What's kind of changed for this to become kind of new near bound.
[00:19:53] Is there some new kind of additions that, uh, has, has changed this a bit from just being a, you
[00:19:58] know, a partner, partner kind of play or.
[00:20:02] Jill: Yeah, I think the first thing that's allowing us to look at this As a, um, a, a, a. A motion that we can operationalize. Right, if you think about, I don't know how versed you guys are in how the partnership function works today. Um, traditionally like the partnership function. hasn't been mechanized. It hasn't actually been, been operationalized.
[00:20:29] And a lot of that starts with, um, the lack of, of data. And if you think about the way a lot of partnerships work, Is you get, you get reps on both sides. So you get the, the, the Salesforce rep and the, um, uh, let's say the sales compensation tool rep. So you get the reps, the sales reps on each side and they meet at a bar and they both like exported data from the CRM and they have these Excel spreadsheets and they like look over my shoulder and take a screenshot.
[00:21:05] of the Excel spreadsheet because I don't want to email it to you, or I email it to you from my Gmail account. And so there's this like data sharing that is, is one, just a point in time. It is not holistic view of, of this partner data. And so there are new tools. Right? Reveal. We're going to reveal it. And, and it is like, it's the CRM for partnership professionals.
[00:21:32] It essentially allows you to compare your CRM data. So now I'm not looking at individual, um, uh, uh, uh, pipelines of specific reps of specific territories. I'm looking holistically, comparing what are our overlaps. So, like, two companies decide to share their, their CRM data, and what you see is who are our joint customers, right?
[00:22:02] Now you start to really understand how many customers do we have in common, and then you can look at who are one partner's customers, and in the other partner's pipeline, right? So you have a customer and you have an in pipe opportunity. How do you actually connect the salespeople to be able to not just make intros? this is where the partner, like where it all messes up because we want to go straight to, Hey, Bobby, give me an intro because they're your customer and they're in my pipeline. Let's not do the intro. Why don't we say, Hey, Bobby, how about some Intel? Give me some idea of how they made the purchase decision.
[00:22:43] Right? What are the other tools in their tech stack? Who within the organization is the one to always be the negative Nelly, the negative Nancy? To always be like, oh, this isn't going to work because of this. Or who within the organization truly might not have the title, but has the influence to drive change forward?
[00:23:05] So it's this intel, right? And then it's like influence. How come, how can we leverage that partner's influence? Right, to maybe set it up to ask the questions that will lead the buyer to our, you know, to us as a company, as a product to prioritize, right, to mention that customers that are really successful on our platform are also using this piece of technology.
[00:23:32] So it's this like influence. And then, of course, everybody wants the intro, but that isn't the only way to do partnering. And so now we're like, we're putting these new frameworks, we're putting these new models, we're putting this new technology around something that has been more of loosey goosey relationship, sharing Excel spreadsheets, but not mechanized.
[00:23:58] And when we really look at, like, how people are defining RevOps today, RevOps doesn't include partnerships. And it sits over here, barely exists. Right. And, and, and really where, where we want to get, because like where we make our investments in terms of dollars, how we allocate the, the dollars we're going to spend to market, sell, and service our customer base.
[00:24:25] That's happening today at that RevOps level, the go to market. Right. The strategy is being set, leveraging this data, this holistic set of data. But if your partner data doesn't actually make its way into your, where you're making your strategic decisions on how you allocate resources based on what is your customer acquisition cost?
[00:24:46] Mikkel: So, um, no, it was good. So I'm, I'm wondering this, I mean, this sounds like a lot. of work, like any motion, this requires quite a bit of effort to get, you know, uh, lift off from the ground. And I think if you're sitting right now as, uh, as a listener and considering, Hey, should we do PLG or. Nearbound, like, I'm just curious, what, what is the, what, what are some of the benefits you've seen?
[00:25:09] What are some of the results you've seen, um, coming from this, this kind of motion to figure out whether this, you know, is this something we should consider investing in as
[00:25:18] a company? If there's someone asking that question out there.
[00:25:21] Jill: Yeah. It's a, it's, when I think about rewind the clock to. Marketing Automation in the Martech Days. And And remind me to come back to answering the question that you asked, because what happens is I'll get lost in history. Um, and what I'm trying to do is actually just connect the dots, and I'm trying to use a story that, that anybody, any listener of yours is familiar with.
[00:25:47] So, in the, in the early days of me trying to sell the software, there were a lot of companies that just weren't ready for the software, right? They didn't even have, like, their marketing data. In, in, in, in the, in the, in the shape and the format that you would load it into a marketing automation database and actually be able to use the data.
[00:26:07] Um, they didn't actually have, um, uh, an understanding of how to optimize the funnel. And this is where serious decisions. So if, are you guys familiar with serious decisions? They created the demand
[00:26:22] Toni: demand waterfall and everything. Yes. It's basically kind of the precursor to the bowtie. Let's just say it like that.
[00:26:28] Jill: and I love the
[00:26:28] bowtie, right? Jacco at Winning by Design, because guess what? It isn't just top of the funnel, um, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel to get a new logo. Ooh, ooh, we got a new logo. Great, great. But we're in SaaS. So how do we keep the customer? How do we continue to have, like, recurring impact?
[00:26:49] And how do we grow the customer? It literally is this bowtie. Right? And the bow tie that Jacco has is more about like Internal, right, about, about acquisition, retention, expansion. And what I say about that is think about the ecosystem around, right, that bow tie. Those influences around what you're thinking about internally, acquiring, keeping, and growing, and thinking more about the ecosystem that sits around that bow tie.
[00:27:20] And how that ecosystem influences, but the demand waterfall was what we all optimized for. We all started to say marketing just doesn't like go to a trade show, scan badges, generate leads and toss them over to sales. There's a science, right? There's a science to to, to measure conversion rates. And to do things that will increase the conversion rate from top of the funnel to middle of the funnel to bottom of the funnel, there are ways to, to increase the velocity, right?
[00:27:53] How do you get someone to go top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel faster, right? How do you do it through the lens of, um, what are the different, um, events and channels, um, and things that we control within our four walls to then, um, drive higher deal values? Right? So we did all of this optimization.
[00:28:13] That, that doesn't exist when we think about partnerships and, and the ecosystem approach. Right? It, it, it isn't. There isn't, again, like that tech stack, how do you do co marketing, right? What are the tools that you need to be able to do to do co marketing? What are the co sell tools? What are the co grow tools?
[00:28:36] Like what's partner enablement look like, right? What is, what is, what is the partner experience? And so what we, what we, what we now see is the need to, to invest in understanding what this partner led partner thread motion looks like. And much like with PLG, there, there, there was a lot of content that got created.
[00:29:04] let me take Box, the company Box, as an example. They're at a billion in ARR. They now, on record, Aaron Levy, The fastest path to 2 billion in ARR is with, not through, but with their partner ecosystem. And so their partner team, the partner newsletter for Box partners is Nearbound, right?
[00:29:33] Like they are doing Nearbound sales and they're going through and teaching their partners how to actually better partner with Box, leveraging the three I's that I mentioned. Right? Nearbound sales. How are we going to share Intel? How are we going to leverage influence? And how are we going to make intros?
[00:29:54] Like, Nearbound is becoming a word, a term, that companies are using to actually describe how they're going to really operationalize and create programs and process around this motion.
[00:30:15] Toni: And, and I actually think, so I think what is happening in the, you know, the, the software players in the space starting to unlock some of this, right. It's, and I've been there myself, right. I've been one of those guys that was like, Hey, you know, this other company, they're kind of complimentary in terms of product.
[00:30:32] Let's figure out the overlap. And it's like, Sorry, I'm not going to share my customer list because, you know, it's mine and guess what they're doing the same thing, right? So really kind of the software vendors, uh, you know, pushing in this direction, they're kind of solving, um, almost a distrust problem, right?
[00:30:47] It's like, well, I don't, I don't want to show you that stuff, you know, and, and basically kind of what, what this is now enabling, and this is just to kind of make it tangible for everyone. It's almost shows you the, the Venn diagram, the overlap of your customers. that you have without revealing the customers that you don't share, right?
[00:31:04] And then you could, you know, as you establish that relationship and as that, you know, uh, data gets synced, I don't know. real time, whatever.
[00:31:12] Jill: Realtime.
[00:31:13] Toni: you, you basically kind of more and more than, uh, build trust towards the partner because at the end of the day, it's still, you know, there will still be the partnership rep that sits there and needs to execute the deal.
[00:31:22] And there needs to be trust that you need to understand how this works out. And it's going to be Bob and Mary for sure, but basically kind of now you have a database, uh, to kind of have a, you know, intelligent conversation on is number one. And number two, you can also then expand that. It's like, ah, okay, you know what, actually my pipeline, let's open up our pipelines to one another and see what that overlap looks like.
[00:31:42] Ah, okay, interesting. Or let's go even further up.
[00:31:45] Should we do co marketing? is, there stuff we can share? Do we have like a cool audience? Can we address kind of, can we kind of move into your audience? You know, what can we do? Is it even fair? Right? I have 100, 000 people in my database, you have 10, 000 people in your database, maybe I don't want to do co marketing with you.
[00:32:01] I mean, there's so many things that, you know, this is now transparency that this is giving, towards the different parties, where suddenly that collaboration It's just the, the, the, you know, the, the barrier to entry is so much lower
[00:32:14] suddenly, right? because like, it's almost like printing it out and sending the list of customers to someone.
[00:32:19] I mean, that, that is a pretty high barrier of entry. And now this is a click of a button. You can start, you know, collaborating. And I think this is where.
[00:32:27] you know, this technology is unlocking new behavior,
[00:32:30] right? and I and I agree with you, like, hey, you know, really, this is at the beginning. It's really unknown, you know, no one really talks about it, but eventually that will happen.
[00:32:39] Um, and it's, it's a really compelling story. And I, and I do also believe, Yes, I think there's a, there's a CAC Payback argument to be had that your partner led acquisition will probably be cheaper than your inbound and your outbound, right? That will probably be there, but I also do believe, and that's why I like it so much in context of the Bowtie, it's not just an acquisition play, it's also retention play, right?
[00:33:04] And suddenly you have like a tool that goes across, and this is almost, and you guys are still figuring out messaging, I'm sure, but this almost where Nearbound is kind of confusing, because Nearbound it doesn't really fit with the retention side of things to, to a degree, right? Because you put it in this inbound outbound bucket and that's all new base usually.
[00:33:21] And we want more. And, and, and, you know, it's actually, it's actually pretty cool for both sides of, of, of the bow tie. Right. So that's why I think it's really kind of an, of an unlock. Um, and then the last, you know, a thought, and I'm just rambling off here. Uh, I had kind of years like, well, the data didn't exist and therefore there was no partnership ops.
[00:33:39] Therefore it's not part of the revenue ops. Therefore it's not part of the. Strategy, so to speak. It's like, it's similar to this. Um, you know, if it's not in the CRM, it didn't happen. It's like, if it's not, if it's not in data, it's not being taken seriously anymore by, you know, most of those organizations out there, right.
[00:33:55] And kind of pushing this now into this realm, I think is a really wonderful thing that happens with it, unlocking a completely new way of. Um, of finding your way
[00:34:03] into accounts. And you know, what was it? Uh, you know, obviously kind of the three I's are awesome. Intel, intro, and, um, I forgot the third one.
[00:34:11] Influence. There you go. Yeah.
[00:34:13] Jill: I think that, uh, that, that influence is, is the new inbound. Right. And, and again, going back to you're in, I'm part of CMO Coffee Talk and it's every Friday and two time zones and it's a bunch of CMOs, heads of marketing of different, you know, divisions within an organization. And, you know, we have topics like, uh, AI is, uh, clearly one of the, the most popular.
[00:34:41] And when someone mentions Uh, an AI tool that they're using or an AI event that they're attending. You know, all these CMOs are writing down that, that, that software. So like Jasper and Rider, and now there's a bunch of others that get mentioned. And you better believe that the, the, the CMOs in that coffee talk are writing those names down.
[00:35:06] And guess what they're doing? They're going to Google. And searching Jasper and then going to Jasper's website. And now all of a sudden Jasper's marketing attribution software says that that inbound is coming from, from Google. That's not true, right? It's actually coming from outside influence. So influence is, is the
[00:35:27] new inbound. there's a lot outside of our four walls. That, that, that we're just not comfortable believing is actually happening because we can't, our attribution software doesn't actually measure that. So, you mentioned trust. There's a lot of like, trust involved in this new way. To make investments in, in your, in your go to market strategy and, and Then where you allocate, allocate the dollars.
[00:35:58] But if you look at like the 10 biggest cloud companies, every single one of those 10 largest cloud companies, Google, Microsoft, um, AWS, Snowflake, Oracle, ServiceNow, all of those companies. have the most robust, biggest, and continuing to grow partner ecosystems. And every single one of those CEOs will say that they can't grow without partners and so if you want to be one of the largest companies, or if you just want to grow, right, at a, at a faster pace, Then partners and partner ecosystem is something that you need to go start to learn about.
[00:36:49] Toni: Jill, I think we're coming up on time here. I could spend like another hour kind of discussing this through, by the way, because it's, it's a fascinating topic. And I don't think, to your point, Jill, I don't think it's been covered all that well. I think there's still lots of confusion. Is it, so yes, partnership, can I get that?
[00:37:05] Oh, she's talking about communities a lot. What does that actually now mean? And now kind of this. Dark Funnel is like also Nearbound. It's like there's all kinds of, all kinds of things kind of wrapped in here. Um, but I do believe that this is starting to shed a little bit of light into this whole space.
[00:37:19] And Jill, this was
[00:37:20] fantastic. Thank you so much for, for spending the time here with us.
[00:37:24] Jill: Yeah, I, I really appreciate it. And, and there are lots of conversations to be had with lots of people who are actually at the forefront of, of this movement. And I would recommend to You given your audience, I would say get Scott Brinker. Who is, you know, head of platform at HubSpot, who is Chief Martak, right?
[00:37:48] And who is the landscape diagram of the ridiculous now number of technologies in Martech.
[00:37:55] Toni: should be Chief, Chief Nearbound,
[00:37:57] I think, uh, Jill.
[00:38:01] Jill: oh, yes, I actually cut that out and that's, that is the, the clip I'll share on LinkedIn to promote this point. He's near bound.
[00:38:10] Toni: Yeah, thank you so much, Jill.
[00:38:12] Jill: Yeah, the new revenue formula. Here we go.
[00:38:16] Toni: Thank you.
[00:38:16] Mikkel: Thanks. Bye.