Jessica Fewless, Vice President, ABM Strategy and Field Marketing at Demandbase, joins me, Jen Spencer to discuss partner matchmaking, the role of partner marketing, enabling partners by focusing on their customers, and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast.
Jen: Hi and welcome to The Allbound Podcast. I'm Jen Spencer and today I am joined by Jessica Fewless, Senior Director of Field and Partner Marketing at Demandbase. Welcome, Jessica.
Jessica: Thanks for having me, Jen.
Jen: Well, it's so good to have you and, you know, before we really dig into your job I'd love to hear a little bit about Demandbase and our listeners I'm sure would love to know a little more about what you guys do over there.
Jessica: Sure. Demandbase is a sales marketing and advertising technology platform designed specifically for B2B marketers. It helps to identify accounts that are most likely to buy from you and the most likely members of the buying committee. And then it helps you attract them to your website and engage them with relevant messaging, once they get there, you know. Last but not least, it allows you to deliver really helpful insights to your sales team in order to help them turn those prospects and customers into revenue for your company.
Jen: I love it. And I also love that, you know, you are in the sales and martech space, and we're seeing so many sales and marketing technology organizations who have traditionally, you know, been selling direct. We're seeing them start to adopt indirect strategies and, you know, when I was preparing to speak with you and I'm looking at Demandbase's website, it seems like you have a really solid strategy in place for your partners in terms of segmentation, you know, you've got your agency partners, technology partners, then you have consulting partners. Can you talk a little bit about how your marketing differs with each one of those groups?
Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. You know in the evolution of Demandbase... So I've been here for four years now, almost half the life of the company, and when I started, I was originally brought on to do partner marketing. But immediately at that point, you know, I would say that our company wasn't quite ready yet for a mature partner marketing function. You know, we did simple things like worked with partners and sponsored their events. You know, and co-sponsored events in the fields and stuff like that, but that was really kind of pretty surface level type of partner marketing. But more recently, you know, as the ABM category has grown, as Demandbase has grown, our maturity as a company and the maturity of our channel sales team has really blossomed. We went from having one and a half people in that role to about four people now, building out on as you alluded to Jen kind of those separate segments: the agency, technology and consulting partners. And, you know, the reason we split them out like that is, you know, it definitely helps scale our efforts as a company.
You know, eventually, you get to a point where your own sales team can only do so much and you really need the help of partners to help scale your efforts from a sales perspective. And so, you know, the reason we split out into three different categories was because our value proposition to them and their value proposition to our customers is very different with each one. You know, with technology partners, those are the partners that we have developed technology integrations with, and so really aiding those B2B marketers to kind of tie multiples of their martech stack together to either deliver additional insights, or deliver additional capabilities that they can have when they use either one of the technologies in a silo. And then when it comes to agency partners, you know, typically this is on the digital agency side or the media agency side. So once again, it's a give and take relationship, we help educate them about account based marketing because that's what their B2B customers they’re talking about. And then on the flip side, they help us because a lot of our customers and prospects are asking, "Okay, you know, typically we've been using, say, B2C advertising techniques, we know there's got to be a better way or a custom built way for B2B." And so we're able to bring those agency partners into our customers and prospects to help them solve that problem.
And then third, is our consulting partners which is kind of a combo of the two, consulting partners and system integration partners, where they can provide some strategy for the client, but they can also help with the selection of and the implementation of technology. So, you know, I think you can see that it really makes sense that we segment them out that way because each one of them is a very different audience for us.
Jen: Right. And, you know, they're gonna need different things from you. But you've really built an ecosystem, a true partner ecosystem there, and which is excellent because I'm sure you've got some of those agency partners that are interacting not just with you, but they are also interacting with certain technology partners that you might have to offer a solution, a custom solution for, you know, that end customer.
Jessica: Yeah. Definitely, I mean, it was really interesting we had our marketing innovation summit, which is our annual conference back in April actually. And, you know, it was really interesting because we had a partner mixer and it was typically those things that are a lot of glasses of wine and bottles of beer to drink and, you know?
Jen: Yeah. Yeah.
Jessica: And as it goes on it gets a little bit chummier, and more fun, and whatnot. But what's really interesting is that this year, myself and the four channel sales folks on our team spent most of the night playing almost, you know, partner matchmaker. You know...
Jen: It's interesting, yeah.
[crosstalk]
Jessica: We had a lot of consulting and agency partners there and they were like, "Well, hey, introduce me to some of your other technology partners so I can start to connect the dots," right? Or it was a technology partner who was like, "Hey, introduce me to some of these consulting partners because I think we are in the same account together and it would be good to like, compare notes." So, yeah, so that was a really interesting kinda evolution in the maturity of our partner ecosystem.
Jen: I love it. I love it. And, you know, you mentioned you've been at Demandbase for four years, but I mean, you've been in marketing for 18 plus years, right? So you've worked in non-profit, which I have too, so, we have those battle wounds together. And companies like you were at Autodesk, you were at Adobe, I'm curious about...what are some of the bigger shifts that you've seen in partner marketing over the years? And this answer might extend beyond partner marketing because I'd love to know what, you know, you're doing today that's different from what you did like even as early as four, five years ago.
Jessica: Yeah. So, I think to kind of draw back a little bit on some of my time at Autodesk and Adobe and more recently now at Demandbase, I think, you know, the role of the partner marketer has really changed. You know, it's one of those things, or it should change, maybe is a little bit more accurate. So, you know, one point, partner marketing was kind of a program or a project management role. It was one where, you know, they kind of stood in between the marketing team and the channels sales team or the partner team, and their sole focus was really on joint marketing with key partners, right?
And so then they would talk to the partner, understand what the partner was trying to achieve and brainstorm, potentially some ideas, and then we’d go back to the marketing team and say, "Hey, marketing team, what can we do here? This partner XYZ is interested in doing “A”, can we fit it in?" And, you know, I don't know about you or any of your listeners, but I found that process to be completely frustrating and unfulfilling, right? Because you'd have all these great ideas and then you take them back to marketing, marketing is like, "No, sorry we don't have the bandwidth or we don't wanna interrupt any of our other programs to fit this in or, you know, or, or, or..." Right? And, you know, now, today I feel like partner marketing managers need to be full blown demand gen marketers. Ones that cannot only brainstorm possible programs, but also be able to execute on them, and be much more proactive and who they're gonna reach out to and partner with. You know, it's definitely one of those things that has been changing although there's still that classic like project manager partner marketing person out there, and when you encounter them, I find them to be ultimately frustrating. Because you're like, "That's great, I wanna work with you but aaah."
Jen: Right. Right. Well, and I think, you know, if you look at, okay, well how did we get there? And, you know, one of the things that we see is that a lot of organizations that say, "Yeah, I wanna build this channel of partners." But they ultimately under resource that channel, and so they look for this one person who can be the 'be all end all’ and like do everything, right? Who can be the operations person, that project management person and oh yeah, they can just do marketing, they can still be responsible for the revenue too. And we just know you would not do that in any other setting. You know, you wouldn't have that one person be responsible for all things related to the direct part of your business. And so, a lot of it just stems I think just from organizations kind of skimping on the resources that need to be put into the human capital to grow a partner program.
Jessica: Yeah. Well, I agree and I think the other thing too is, and I’ve started to describe it as such, is that I kind of looked at the role of partner marketing as a bit of a Venn diagram, which hopefully everybody is not gonna glaze over when I say that but.... And I think that the two circles are the work that you do in service as the channel sales team, the work you do in service as the marketing team, and then that center section is the joint marketing you do with the partners, right? Because it isn't just about joint marketing, or in, at least in most organizations, it isn't or it shouldn't be, right? So on the pure channel side of things there's new partner recruitment, there's on-boarding, there's nurturing of those partners and those sorts of things to help the channel sales team to be successful, and actually helping those partners influence sales for your company, right?
So that's solely dedicated as a channel team and then on the marketing side, you know, there's gonna be some of the somewhat mundane but necessary part of partner marketing role, which is connecting partners with the events team for sponsorships and, you know, working together with partners, or co-sponsoring a field marketing event or those sorts of things. But also, connecting with the right partners for potential thought leadership opportunities and those sorts of things that elevate both your organizations in the eyes of your potential customers. And then in that center section is the true joint partner marketing, right? I think what most people think of when they think of partner marketing and why it's really important if you don't have the other two parts of the role, I feel like that’s part in the middle is what, like you said, gets under resourced and kind of missed.
Jen: Mm-hmm. I love that Venn diagram kind of, like look, as you were talking through it, I was picturing it and we might need to collaborate on some content for the future because I think there's something really there. You kind of touched on this a little bit, but I wanna dig in when you think about like some of the strategies that you've implemented to really help ensure your team is creating the content that's gonna keep those partners engaged, and foster long-term relationships with them. I mean, do you have any guidance or any tips for our listeners on what they can do because a lot of organizations onboard... or I guess the recruitment of partners and their onboarding of partners isn't where they have a challenge, it's then actually engaging them, and truly activating them once they've joined that inner circle.
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. I think that the biggest thing now is, you know, I think everybody thinks of, "Okay I'm gonna build a partner portal and then I'm gonna put all these things out there about our product so that our partner knows about our products, so that they can go sell our products. And in today's world, I would just call that table stakes like, yes you have to do that stuff but that's the bare minimum. You know, what you really wanna be enabling your partners with is content that's gonna help them be more successful with their clients. And hopefully, that's the benefit of your organization as well, but things that are gonna help them raise the bar. So, in our world, you know, yes we have webinars, and we have data sheets and all that fun stuff about what's going on with our product, but on the flip side of that, we definitely want to help educate them at account based marketing because that's gonna help them rise above their competitors in many cases, because a lot of the agencies and consulting partners aren't talking about account based marketing yet and so if an agency can come in and say, "Oh, account based marketing? Yeah, we're all over that." That's gonna make them look good and that's gonna help them in business which is gonna then, in turn, ingratiate them to us.
Jen: So, in addition to the supporting partners and positioning them so they can be positioned as you know, experts in account based marketing, and giving them content that's gonna help them earn business and is going to set them up for success, have there been any promotional programs or anything unique that you've created to help them be successful and keep those partners happy?
Jessica: Oh, that's a great question. Promotional programs? I wouldn't say so at this point, I think that's partially because, you know, we're just getting to that maturity of our channel sales and partner program, but we had a point this year, like I said at the marketing innovation summit, where we had a mixer and we, I mean, we have no problem getting a hundred people in the room. I think the next evolution for us is in 2018 to have a partner summit, right? An advance of that partner mixer, one where it's definitely an out bound where we can update them on the latest and greatest from us or the ABM industry or those sorts of things, but also for them to be able to provide some success stories, like, "Here's how we found success in working with Demandbase to help with kinda educate the rest of the people in the room." And, you know, then once again to network and make those connections amongst each other.
But I think that's kind of the next evolution for us is getting to that summit phase and I think to your point there around promotions, hey, maybe what we'll start to do is with some of our onboarding and our nurturing, you know, we point people to our partner portal, maybe if they check all the boxes on their onboarding report card, they get free tickets to our conference or that kind of thing. So, I'm sure we can build that kind of stuff and/or, you know, do some gamification around it, but we’ve really haven't gotten to that phase yet.
Jen: Well, it sounds exciting and there's so much time and so many great ideas, so I'm sure there'll be amazing things for your partner program here in the next couple of years. Looking back the last few years, you personally really dedicated yourself to building and executing an ABM strategy and I thought, you know, without... I mean I know we can have a whole separate conversation just about that, but I'm wondering if you can tell a little bit of what you've done and specifically why it's been important for like channel partner success.
Jessica: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, kind of talking about ABM at a really high level it's, you know, understanding the accounts that you want to sell to and then going out and finding them and selling to them, right? That's kind of the pipe dream or the promise, so to speak, of account based marketing, and it's not a dream, it's, in fact, a whole methodology around that, but, you know, when we talk about it, we actually talk about it having three key audiences. One, prospects, so selling to new potential customers. Two, your existing customers, right? They're your existing customers, you know even more about them than you do about your prospects, so you should be able to sell it to them even better, right at that whole 80-20 rule like, 80% of the work goes into getting a customer, 20% is in keeping and up selling them. And then the third audience is your partners, because if you're talking to your partners in the exact same way that you're talking to your customers and your prospects they're gonna tune you out, right? They don't really care what the shiny new widget is, right? What they care about is what you're doing from a strategy perspective, or how that shiny, new widget is gonna help them be more successful, right? So, if you just sent them to a web page that said, "Hey, look, we have this new thing." They'll go, "Interesting." If you send them an email, and you personalize your website to say, "We have a shiny new thing and it's gonna help you and here's why." Now that helps, one, attract new partners, but to also engage the ones that you already have.
Jen: That's perfect. Great. Great. Really great advice. And, you know, I'm thinking about things from their perspective, like I always do, of kind of being the little guy, and you guys have some real members on your list of technology partners. I mean, everything from like IBM, and Salesforce and Oracle to Drupal and WordPress, and Optimizely, and HubSpot, I mean, some big heavy hitters in the martech space, and for a lot of organizations, they might see those types of companies and partnerships and think, "Gosh like there's no way. Like why would these companies partner with me? I'm just kind of starting to build my program." Do you have any wisdom for gaining traction and partnerships with these kinds of tech greats?
Jessica: Yeah. That's an interesting one I think, you know, part of us just building our company is what drew these partnerships together for us. As our company grew, as the ABM category grew, right? We became more and more important to these companies. Now, to your point, when you're just starting out, not everybody has that kind of at their advantage. I think for us what we really went after was, when talking to all these partners was, how can we make your solution relevant for account based marketing, right? So I think for anybody, it's figuring out how is your solution partnered with their solution? How is that gonna make their solution more successful, right? And so, we provided that relevance and a burgeoning category that everybody wanted a part of. So, it was kind of our value proposition to working with those folks, and, you know, paid off in the end.
Jen: Absolutely. Absolutely. Are you guys still, at this point, are you still sort of like, whale hunting for organizations like that or has your focus when it comes to partner recruitment or I guess actually let me say this, are you still actively recruiting new partners? Or is your energy really focused on maintaining and engaging the ones you have?
Jessica: Yup. I would say it's probably 50-50, at this point, kind of where we spend our energy. So yes, absolutely to kind of list that you listed out earlier, those are a lot of the technology partners that we have, you know, there's kind of discrete list of technology partners that we wanna engage, bring on board and work with, and I think at this point we’ve probably got 75% to 80% of them kind of in our wheelhouse. However, on the agency and consulting side, ABM is a new growing business for them, so just like we practice account based marketing and build a target account list for the new business side of our company, where we decide who are the targets we wanna go after? And we build the marketing and sales programs to go after them. We've actually done the same thing on the partner side. So I've sat down with our channel sales team and said, "Okay, who are the next 50 partners you wanna have in both the agency and consulting categories, right? And let's develop, you know, a whole integrated marketing campaign around going out and getting them." So, exactly the same type of strategy and which might seem kind of silly to some. I mean, I don't know if it works for everybody's business model, but for us it's really, really important because just like I said, you know, even if an agency partner influences a million or two million dollars of business in a given year, that's really helping to kind of amplify our efforts, so it's worth it to us to have a broader set of those partners on board.
Jen: It makes perfect sense to me and we have a saying here at Allbound, it's "Partners are people too." And as cheesy as it sounds, sometimes we unnecessarily over-complicate channel partner, you know, that channel partner realm. And just like, you know, you're communicating with people, you're collaborating with them, you're prospecting them, you're engaging with them, same thing goes for those partners that you would like to bring into your world, so makes sense. My last question for you as it relates to channel marketing is, you know, I'm wondering if you have some kind of sound bite, some kind of concise piece of advice that you'd like to offer to other leaders in partner marketing.
Jessica: Wow. I kind of liked your last statement there I feel like that's almost... I don't think of it as a sound bite, but I think that the biggest thing is to think of your partner marketing function as a demand gen function focused on partners. You know, so that you're getting the right set of skills, people who have a marketing background, people who are used to being focused on things like pipeline and revenue because that is gonna incent the right types of behaviors and they're gonna go out and find the right types of partnerships that are really gonna make the company successful.
Jen: Awesome. Awesome. Well, before I really let you go, Jessica, I have a speed round of a couple of more personal questions that I ask all of our guests. And so I'd love for you to play along as well.
Jessica: Okay.
Jen: As long as you're okay with that. So, first question for you is what is your favorite city?
Jessica: Barcelona.
Jen: Woo! you answered that really quickly. Have you been...
Jessica: Off the top of my head.
Jen: Have you been there multiple times or just once or...?
Jessica: I have. I have and everybody talks about, you know, Paris, and these other places and I don't know, like Barcelona to me is just such a vibrant city, and it's kind of the best land of both the east coast and the west coast of the US and then plopped into Europe with all of that richness of culture, I just absolutely love it.
Jen: Wonderful. Okay. Second question, are you an animal lover?
Jessica: Oh, absolutely. Cats and dogs.
Jen: Do you have pets?
Jessica: Two cats and, you know, someday when I stop traveling so much, definitely I will have some dogs.
Jen: Yeah, it's tough to have a dog when you are not home for sure. I love all creatures. It's absolutely ridiculous, but that's great. Question number three, Mac or PC?
Jessica: Definitely a Mac. I am a convert. I was always PC until I came to Demandbase and I showed up on my first day with a Mac, I figured it out and now I look at a PC and I'm like, "Ah, how do I use this thing?"
Jen: Isn't it funny, Apple like they’ve rewired our brains, you know.
Jessica: They did.
Jen: It's unbelievable, between my MacBook and my iPhone, it's like I don't know how to do anything else.
Jessica: Yes, exactly.
Jen: All right and last question for you is, let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip, where would it be to?
Jessica: Wow, that's an amazing question. I think I would love the opportunity to travel and probably South America. Just really dive in and, you know, get to see different wine regions and coastal villages and the mountains, being able to deep into Patagonia and those sorts of places. I think you know, being able to spend a couple of months there would be pretty amazing.
Jen: Sounds great. Sounds like a good vacation. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your insights with us. It was such a pleasure just getting to know you and hear about what you got cooking over at Demandbase. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally, maybe ask about using ABM and their channel, or to kind of swap stories with you, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?
Jessica: Yeah, you can definitely look me up on LinkedIn, I'm always happy to make new and more connections there. And then also, I'm on twitter @jfewlessB2B, so I'm constantly posting new stuff there, so feel free to connect with me there, and, you know, direct message me if you have questions on anything that I've posted out there.
Jen: Perfect. Sounds good. Well, I appreciate it and I'm sure our listeners do as well so thank you for your time and thanks, everyone, for tuning in and we'll catch you next week with an all-new episode of The Allbound Podcast.
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