Transforming Partnerships Into Your Most Strategic Asset | Dave R. Taylor

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #239 we welcomed Dave R. Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer at Impartner based in South Jordan, UT. 

This week's CXCP guest is Unstoppable at all things marketing: ABM, metrics-based, demand gen, social, Business Development, etc. Deep SaaS expertise. Highly prone to succeed, with 5 successful exits under his belt (and counting.) 

Collegial, collaborative, passionate and driven. Currently, Dave Taylor is loving working with his amazing team and customers at Impartner.

In this episode, Dave and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team think through on a daily basis to build world class customer & marketing focused experiences.

**Episode #239 Highlight Reel:**

1. Investing in Partner Experience (PX) to grow & scale your business
2. How CX & EX can lead to the development of your PX investments 
3. Why partners can help grow your business & be a game changer 
4. Improving your marketing, sales & customer success by leveraging PX
5. How to get your partner sales engine built today for your business

Click here to learn more about Dave R. Taylor

Click here to learn more about Impartner

Huge thanks to Dave for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

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Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused business content. 

Transcript

CXCP #239 With Dave Taylor, CMO @ Impartner Full video

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady-Cesana, super excited for today's show. Guys, we are welcoming Mr Dave Taylor from Impartner. 

Dave (00:00:18) - Dave, say hello to the CX nation, my friend, a CX nation. How is it going, Adrian? Thanks for this. It's good to be here with you. 

Adrian (00:00:24) - 100%, man, no, I'm pumped. So Dave and I had an awesome conversation, guys, last week before the holiday. And and number one: super cool background, super cool experiences. Number two: really, really cool company. I think of all of the episodes that we've done of CXC, Dave, I think I think I said this to you and I wasn't just, I wasn't joking, but like this might be the first time, guys, that we spend an entire episode kind of talking about the notion of partner experience. 

Adrian (00:00:48) - Right, we talked a ton about customer experience to talk a ton about the employee experience. Dave and the team at Impartner are building some incredible solutions and some incredible doing some incredible work around the whole notion of partner experience. So, Dave, I'll let you share the story. My friend book, why don't you start off today's episode? 

Adrian (00:01:03) - Just spent a couple minutes kind of laying, setting the stage a little bit about your own background, a little bit about some of the stepping stones, for how did you get into this whole world that you're in today's being the chief marketing officer at a partner? 

Dave (00:01:14) - Yeah, you bet. Um, thanks, thanks, um, yeah, so I had. I had spent, you know, several years managing indirect sales organizations, that's, people that sell through channels, resellers, distributors, etc. And it was always a very manual process for us: kind of keep track of all the partners that we had and how we, you know what we owed them in terms of market development funds and and. 

Dave (00:01:39) - And I saw a demo of some software from a little company in Salt Lake City, Utah, that really automated a lot of that, in the same way that you think about CRM, customer relationship management- automating the way you interact with your, your direct customers. I saw a demo of something called PRM, partner relationship management, and I was knocked out by it and I- and I thought you know if I've been managing channels for the better part of a decade and I don't know much about this- I bet there's a lot of other people that don't know about this. 

Dave (00:02:10) - So so the CEO of my company and I ended up not just buying the software, we bought the company and relocated to Salt Lake City and, you know, spent some time kind of growing that business: 20 employees at the time. That was 2015, so nine years ago, and we're and we're pushing 400 now. So a lot of big growth really. What we've done has kind of proven to be the case. There's a big need for kind of automating the process of managing your ecosystem full of partners. 

Dave (00:02:40) - I did take a couple years, you know, three, four years ago- and went to New York to do to join a startup in the CX space called Stella Connect company was focused on trying to up level the customer experience in in their space and had a great time. We had a good exit. That company got sold to medallia. 

Speaker 3 (00:03:02) - It was a. 

Dave (00:03:02) - It was kind of a good deal for everybody involved. But, Adrian, we talked about this before but one of the things I learned was the concept of customer experience and partner experience are very, very similar. I mean, I know when I go into a retail shop or I know when I go into a restaurant I can tell how good the manager of that location is by how well I'm treated by the employees. If they, if they feel like the manager has their back, they treat me well and we have good interactions in the partnering space, in the indirect go-to-market space. 

Dave (00:03:35) - The first thing, the first thing that you do when you're looking to buy something, is you go to the ecosystem, you read online reviews, you go talk to people that resell the solution, you talk to partners of the vendors- yep, because you have confidence in them. If those partners can do a good job of representing a specific vendor to you and provide you with that really good experience, you're more likely to buy that vendors product. So so that we at a partner we think about that partner organization. 

Dave (00:04:05) - That ecosystem has been kind of the doormat you know to your business. When you walk to up to somebody's house and look at their doormat, if it's nice and clean and organized, you've got a good sense for what's going on. If you walk up to a business and there's a messy doormat that hasn't been cleaned in a couple of months, you can guess what your experience is gonna be like. Absolutely that partner, the way the partners manage you and interact with you as a potential customer, really represents the vendors business. They're the doormat- dormant. 

Dave (00:04:35) - That's probably not a good analogy, is it because people don't like being called a doormat? But you know I'm talking, I knew what you meant, I knew what you meant and it gives a good. 

Adrian (00:04:43) - It gives a good visual for when you walk, when you're walking up and into a business. I totally understand it. 

Dave (00:04:49) - Yeah, yeah, you know and you know so. So the examples that you think about: let's say there's a local company. Let's say there's a local company that wants to buy something- inkjet printers or network routers or something like that. Right, they're gonna call up a local reseller that they have a relationship with and they're gonna say, hey, I need 10 new routers or printers. I need 10 new inkjet printers. 

Speaker 3 (00:05:10) - I need 10 new inkjet printers. 

Dave (00:05:11) - The partner that they talk to has the opportunity to take that deal to 10 different vendors that all sell inkjet printers or network routers. In their minds they're thinking: who do I know I'm going to get a good deal from, who's going to treat me well, who's going to take me out to lunch and get me tickets to the next jazz game? I mean all of these things that they have with the vendors and that's where that business is going to go, so that partner really represents that vendor to the customer. 

Dave (00:05:41) - The correlation between customer experience and partner experience, we think is really, really strong. 

Adrian (00:05:45) - I love it, Dave. So, guys, full candidate number one. When Dave and I were catching up last week, there was an immediate reaction I had, which was just as so many of the listeners, Dave on the CX Chronicles podcast know about what we do during our day job here outside of the podcast, with serving our clients and working with a number of different strategic partners. Dave just nailed it. 

Adrian (00:06:04) - Guys, one of the biggest gains that you can get from a strategic partner ecosystem is almost like this mutual benefit of number one: having people that understand what your product or your solution can do. Period, just understanding what it can do and how it can be leveraged. Number two, maybe understanding which solutions or which potential partner options could be the best for your business, depending on your needs and your budget and your team and your level of sophistication and your life cycle of your business construction. 

Adrian (00:06:35) - All of those things matter. Then, lastly, just like if you think about any type of builder or any type of person, any type of handy person, some tools are better fit than others for different types of jobs and different types of projects. 

Adrian (00:06:48) - Dave, what's so cool about what you and the team and a partner have done is number one: you've built this partner ecosystem of excellence that you guys talked about at a length over at a partner, but you really have built a solution that allows other businesses and other companies that are relying upon partnerships or eventually get to the point of their business maturation where channel sales and partner sales is maybe one of the last parts of where to really get it over the last hump that you need from a revenue perspective or just from a market, a wallet-share perspective, and I just think it's amazing. 

Adrian (00:07:23) - And then the last thing is this: it's funny because you and I were joking about this the other day, but you hear everybody talking about customer experience here, so many leaders now talking about the employee experience. You really don't hear a ton of talk about partner experience. 

Adrian (00:07:35) - And then I shared with you- and I won't mention which partners- but I told Dave guys, I said, Dave, I've got some of our strategic partners here at CXC that I can't wait for the next partner phone call because there's support, there is a symbiotic relationship, there's scratching of each other's back, there's helping to share tribal knowledge, industry information. And then there's some partner calls where I've got to be honest with you, I'm not looking forward to it. It's probably going to be pontification about a product or a service. 

Adrian (00:08:03) - It's probably more talk about them, them, them and not necessarily how their solution or their partner ecosystem can actually benefit them. So, and you just had so many different ideas and stories and obviously you're working with all of these different folks to help kind of build out some of these partner ecosystems. So I love it, Dave. I think it's such an incredible space and such an interesting thing to be working in. Dave, why don't you, why don't you jump into the first pillar? 

Adrian (00:08:27) - Man, if you can, I'd love for you to spend several minutes kind of talking about the first CX pillar of team. Give us a sense for what the partner team looks like today, maybe what types of roles or departments you've kind of built into the picture as you're building out in partner and give us a sense for some of the folks that have really kind of come together to get you folks to this point that you're at today building a partner. 

Dave (00:08:48) - Yeah, the three- I think the three pillars of you know of our interaction with our customers at InPartner are marketing, sales and operations. And you know marketing sales at InPartner we've got a very strong relationship. The chief revenue officer and myself, chief marketing officer, we have a great relationship together and we know that we've got each other's backs on these things right. And so you know I know what my job description is. 

Dave (00:09:15) - My job description is, you know every month I have to hand him the pipeline of demand that's big enough for him to hit his revenue target and he knows what his job description is, which is to turn that pipeline into, you know, at a reasonable rate, into revenue. So really good strong interaction back and forth between the two of us and I like that. I think it's possible in an organization to succeed without that kind of symbiosis between marketing and sales. But I think the chances are a lot smaller still possible. 

Dave (00:09:46) - I've seen organizations where marketing sales don't get along well and you know there's a lot of, you know, bickering and finger pointing. You know, if you haven't seen Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross the movie, you just need to watch that and you'll see what I'm talking about. One of my favorites, Dave. 

Adrian (00:09:58) - One of my favorites. 

Dave (00:09:58) - We need the good leads man, we need the Rio Rancho leads. But you know so, you know. So I think I think having that kind of good symbiotic relationship I think is really important. Then, on the flip side of that, 

Dave (00:10:14) - Our operations team is responsible for bringing all of our new customers live. There is a little bit of work, I think. We're a SaaS product and so a lot of the go-live functionality is automated, but there's still customization work that can be done. So our operations team is responsible for saying to the customer: okay, you just spent a few thousand dollars on this solution. You're anticipating that it's going to revolutionize your go-to-market process. 

Dave (00:10:41) - Let us work with you and get you live as quickly as possible and make sure there's a smile on your face. Those three pillars of that stool, I think, are what make our customers step away from the engagement with big smiles on their face and, hopefully, the increase in indirect revenues that they were hoping for when they talked to us in the first place. So those three teams, I think, are critical. 

Adrian (00:11:08) - I love it. 

Speaker 3 (00:11:08) - So. 

Adrian (00:11:08) - Number one: you're right. You bring up this topic that so many people are familiar with, which is like this rub between marketing and sales. Number one: that's crazy because in today's world it's hard enough to build a damn business, it's hard enough to build a customer portfolio, it's hard enough to be running a healthy pipeline- that the more collaboration, the better period. 

Adrian (00:11:26) - Number two: we're entering this world of which so many customer-focused business leaders, whether they're marketing-focused, sales-focused, success-focused, operative-focused, product-focused, financially-focused- many of us are thinking about the customer journey right now. 

Adrian (00:11:40) - Right, because if you actually start to think about things in a customer journey, basis number one, you start to understand all the intricacies or the facets from the very beginning, of a customer ever becoming aware that your product or your service is even a thing in the universe in the first place, all the way down the line to retention, where you keep a customer coming back again and again and again and, even better yet, introducing or promoting your business to the next army of new customers or, in your case, Dave, the next army of brilliant partners that are going to be able to help take that channel to the next level. 

Adrian (00:12:11) - I just think it's funny how often you hear people talk about that rub, and I get it. I understand the sales and the ops rub. I get it. They are literally built in totally different worlds where you've got one set focus completely on bringing in the net, new demand, the fresh blood, the new customers, whether they're ripe or not ripe, or whether they're qualified or not qualified. Then our operative friends, they've got to deliver the damn things, they've got to make sure that things are happening. So I understand that. 

Adrian (00:12:35) - But it's just so funny that you still hear this rub, because it's funny so many of the guests that we've had on the show and so many of the people that I've had the fortune of meeting over these last several years at CXC is it's really some of the companies that get over that fast and they do have that symbiotic collaborative relationship. 

Adrian (00:12:51) - So the sooner they can find it, the faster things take off, the easier it is to increase your velocity towards scale, towards growth or towards finding that picture-perfect ICP. That's going to equal the next several quarters of successful of goals getting broken. 

Dave (00:13:06) - For us, not only do we sell partnering software, we're a partnering company, so a lot of the revenue that we generate comes from deals that our partner ecosystem bring us into. So a company checks in with one of our partners and says, hey, I really need a tool to run my indirect go-to-market campaigns and program who do you recommend? The partner says: well, let me introduce you to a company called impartner and they've got software that will help you. When I look at that, you talk about the customer journey. 

Dave (00:13:36) - I look at the customer journey and I always think that there's a whole series of steps down that customer path that start with the partner right? I mean, one of the analysts at Canals talks about how there's 28 steps in the partner journey and over half of them are owned by the partner organizations. So I look at this and I think at Impartner there is a percentage of our revenue that we generate directly. Marketing generates the demand, gets the lead, hands it to sales. They close the deal. 

Dave (00:14:08) - But there's a large percentage of our revenue that partners bring to us to introduce us to. What I find on those deals is the velocity is faster we close those deals, faster the deals tend to be larger, the renewal rates tend to be higher and the customer satisfaction tends to be higher. So all of these things work together. 

Dave (00:14:31) - When you're really working closely with your partnering organization, by the time they hand you the baton- right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah- I mean, it really is a relay- by the time they hand you the baton, you've got a higher chance of success, success faster success, bigger and ongoing happiness. 

Adrian (00:14:48) - I love that man and Dave, I know from my own personal experiences with building CXC and working with all the different companies that we've had the pleasure of working with everything that you just said in terms of those partner metrics or those partner caveats around how things will continue to go better, faster, tighter, sharper utilization man, because it's almost like some of these partner-led how things will 

Adrian (00:15:09) - opportunities, there's like clarity from the get go and everything that you just said, but then there's like almost a focus on by utilizing specific aspects of a tool or specific aspects of a solution, that's how you get some of that other stuff that you talked about, right? There's almost like a shepherd or an additional layer of support that's going along the adoption journey, which gets that utilization to take anchor faster, right? Take anchor sooner. 

Adrian (00:15:37) - And then before you know it, you've got a whole company that's actually leveraging and utilizing the tool. And then all of a sudden, all the ROIs that were spelled out in the marketing and the sales process, they actually become realities. They actually get achieved. 

Dave (00:15:48) - So, I love that, Dave. 

Speaker 3 (00:15:49) - I think that's great. 

Dave (00:15:52) - And we were talking about team, but we have kind of spilled over into the second pillar, which is tools. But a lot of this, I always recommend to our customers that it's possible for them to purchase a package like ours too soon. Because until you understand what your processes are and what you want them to be, you don't really know what the right tool is for you. If somebody were to ask me, you know, mistakes that are made in purchasing software like ours, our software is called PRM, Partner Relationship Management, right? 

Dave (00:16:28) - I would say, you know, one of the few mistakes that we see is people will buy the software before they have the team and the process in place and ready to go. And as an analog to that, we use, in Partner, we use an account-based marketing and account-based selling model, right? So, we're very ABM focused in the way we go to market. We target large customers and we reach out to them and, you know, we do a very personalized outreach. 

Dave (00:16:53) - I think we may have bought an ABM package almost a full year before we were ready to use it because we didn't know what our process was going to be. And rather than sitting down and saying, okay, now I've got this ABM tool, how do I want to use it? We backed off of that and we said, okay, forget it, scrap that. Let's manually run this process until we figure out really what we want our team to look like and our process to look like. And when we have that, now I can go look for a tool that fits the way we have this set up. 

Dave (00:17:23) - And so, you know, it's hard to separate those three of your four pillars, right? Tool, product, process. It's hard to split those apart. But I do think you have to lead with, get the team in place, understand your process, then get a tool that helps kind of automate that. 

Adrian (00:17:42) - I love that. I think you're spot on, man. And we've both seen it so many times where companies do move forward with specific tools or specific technologies a little bit too soon. And then we both have seen what not only the opportunity cost, but the hard cost is of changing that. And then lastly, you want to get into CX, EX, and PX. Like these are some of the consternation points that end up disrupting customer relationships, getting some of your best employees a little bit hot and bothered. 

Adrian (00:18:05) - Or in the early stages, especially when you only got a small portfolio of partners that really understand your product and really understand your game. And then you have to make a big change on the tech side and it impacts them. 

Dave (00:18:15) - They don't like that either. 

Adrian (00:18:16) - So it's one of those things where the faster you can start to kind of lay those maps out or plot some of those things out and really kind of work through it manually, you're right. The faster you can get to a place where you can start to kind of step on the gas with scaling, automation, leveraging AI, machine learning, all these things that everybody loves to talk about. David, I'd like to dig a little bit deeper on the second pillar of tools. 

Adrian (00:18:36) - If you can share with us, my friend, what are some of the tools that you and the team and a partner really made bets on or had to make initial investments in to get the business to where it is today? And I want you to talk about your tool, of course, but what were maybe some of the other tools that you can share around how you were able to sort of get a partner off the ground? 

Dave (00:18:53) - Yeah, for sure. Everybody has a CRM, right? And our CRM for our customer management is Salesforce. We use Salesforce. But we needed a really good marketing automation platform. In our marketing team, we do an awful lot of outreach to fairly broad industries. We're not necessarily a niche tool because most companies do have an indirect go-to-market motion as part of what they do. And so I do have things that I need to say to almost every company out there. 

Dave (00:19:23) - So in order to do that kind of broad market outreach, I needed a really good marketing automation platform. We went through several of them. We've landed on Marketo. We use it quite a bit. It's powerful. It's maybe not the easiest thing I've ever used, but it is powerful and it does generate a result for us. One of the things that we're most interested in and most excited about lately is just in the last six months, as I mentioned, we now have team and process in place. So we brought on a tool to do our account-based marketing. 

Dave (00:19:57) - We use an ABM platform that lets me build my target audiences very, very carefully. So I can specify vertical markets and intent signals and job titles and job functions, and I can build really tightly focused markets and then serve advertising up to them. And the way we view this is the ABM process is the air cover. If I identify somebody at a large.

Dave (00:20:28) - I see the large company. I see that they've got an indirect go-to-market motion. I can see the word partner on their website. I know they're going to need my solution. I can start running air cover ad campaigns to people in that company. Specifically, I can serve up ads in their browsers. 

Dave (00:20:45) - I'm sorry, I know people don't like getting advertised in their browser, but I can serve ads in their browser and so that when my sales team reach out to them and say, hey, I'd like to talk to you about the partner solution, they've seen my name and they've gained some familiarity with who we are and what we do, and so this ABM thing is a really nice layer in our tech stack. We're really excited about that. 

Dave (00:21:07) - So those are kind of the big pillars of what we do from a marketing outreach perspective: strong CRM, strong marketing automation platform, strong ABM platform. 

Adrian (00:21:17) - I love that, dave, you know what you just made me think about. So, number one, people listening to this show. They do need to understand this stuff: finding new customers, finding new leads, finding new opportunities- before you even get into the rigmarole of qualifying or disqualifying. Or are they perfect ICP, are they not? Come on, man, A lot of founders and a lot of the startup executives that are listening to this show. That's the hardest damn part of business. 

Adrian (00:21:38) - And what's funny- and I know I'm not just- I promise you I'm not just blowing smoke to a marketing exec like you, but what I'm saying is that's one of the hardest parts about getting a business off the damn ground is once you think you know what the optimal end user or the person or the guy or the gal is that needs to know about your product, your service, your solution, your willy or your where, whatever the hell it is that you're selling out there in the world. 

Adrian (00:22:00) - The next hardest part is getting a bunch of those people in a line to maybe have a conversation with you or one of your salespeople or one of your initial business development people or your sales qualification people. So I love that you're sharing that. A question that I immediately was thinking about as you were finishing that thought: how many times does a potential customer even need to see a message or see a logo or see some blurb about a business before they take action on it? You probably know this. I don't know it off the top of my head. 

Adrian (00:22:27) - I'm asking the question hypothetically. It's super high number. I wanna say it's a double digit number. I think it's well over 10 times before a guy or a gal will even think about clicking on something or taking a call or even downloading a sales or a marketing asset to see if they even wanna do the other things of setting up a disco or an intro call. But this stuff's one of the hardest parts about getting a business going. 

Adrian (00:22:47) - My friend and I think if you could figure out earlier rather than later what types of marketing activities or what types of business development sales activities increases that urge or increases that demand for more information. 

Dave (00:23:04) - Now you got a healthy pipeline on your hands. 

Adrian (00:23:05) - Now you got a healthy pipeline that actually you can hand over to your CRO, as you mentioned earlier in the conversation, and be able to start getting discos and intros set up, to start bringing those into secondary and third calls, to start bringing those into calls where they're actually bringing their executive sponsors guys and the gals that are actually gonna make the damn decision as to whether or not someone's gonna make an investment in something. 

Dave (00:23:23) - Well, and the way I think about that is so much depends on where they are in their current journey, and so the way I mean that is, if I find a company that has already recognized the fact that they're not getting as much revenue from their partner ecosystem as they should be, it becomes a strategic priority for them to increase that percentage of revenue when I engage with them. I've only got five to seven steps that I need to kind of take them down. They've already got budget allocated. 

Dave (00:23:52) - There's already people set aside on the team that are gonna go identify the solution. I've only got five more steps to go with them. But there are companies that don't recognize yet that they're not getting the revenue that they should be getting from their indirect partners and for them I've got a lot of work to do. I have to advertise to them. I have to use a physical direct mail package. So if I know that you're in Michigan, I'm gonna send you tickets to a University of Michigan football game. I mean there's all kinds of stuff I need to do with you. 

Dave (00:24:22) - I've probably got 20 plus touches with you that I need to do before you're ready to buy my software, because I'm starting way further up the chain and I don't mean to kind of keep coming back to this. But if I can engage my partner community to help take the first 10 of those 20 steps. It just makes my job that much easier. The challenge that people have is: you don't want your partners out. I mean, you know the phrase a loose cannon, right? 

Dave (00:24:52) - A loose cannon really is a cannon that's bolted loosely to the deck of the ship and when it fires you don't know whether it's gonna fire right or fire wrong. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, some partners can be a loose cannon and they can go sit down with a potential prospect and say all the wrong things right. If I can't get my partner community, my ecosystem, if I can't get my partners saying the right things at the right time to the right people, 

Dave (00:25:18) - then I've got a lot of problems. And so having a tool set like we sell, having a tool set to kind of engage with them and make sure that the partner experience is good and the customer experience with the partners is good, it just smooths the entry point into my 20 touch points before the customer is ready to buy. But I do for a net new customer that didn't wake up in the morning with budget and strategic direction in our technology, I've got 20 times I need to touch them. Ads, emails, et cetera. Yeah. I love it. It's a challenge. 

Adrian (00:25:51) - It's definitely a challenge. And then Dave, for some of our listeners that are just getting things off the ground, guys, this is why you're wondering why things are really, really hard after one or two or three or four sequence touches. Get out of here, man. This stuff is, it's double digits, as Dave just said, 20 times minimally on a touch or a presentation perspective just to even possibly get some attraction or some potential interest. 

Dave (00:26:15) - In fact, Adrian, look, social media. People think, oh, I'm just gonna send a LinkedIn request, right? There's a right way and a wrong way to use LinkedIn as a social media engagement platform. And if, and I get, you'll think I'm exaggerating, but I probably get 10 connection requests a day, but I usually just reject all of them. But if somebody engages with me on LinkedIn the right way, and there's four steps to a good LinkedIn engagement process. So, you know, think about that. LinkedIn, people think, oh, that's just one touch. 

Dave (00:26:45) - No, no, it's actually four of the 20 touches involve a social platform like LinkedIn, right? They, I'm not, we won't go into what those are, but you know, they're, you know, when you parse it out like that, there are a very, there's a very careful set of steps that you have to take and you have to do it at the right way or it just goes off the rails. 

Adrian (00:27:04) - You know, I love that you're laying this out because for our listeners, guys, like, so like one of the biggest reasons why with our CXC client engagements, we typically start off with our customer journey maps, exactly what Dave's saying. If you start to break down, you start to stratify or compartmentalize your journey and you've got awareness, consideration, conversion, and then onboarding. So even just your first, your four initial facets of a customer journey, what Dave just said is spot on. 

Adrian (00:27:28) - Number one, you start to bring the team through, talk to us about the touch points required or the actual tangible assets in the world that somebody might see in the awareness state. So then to your point, Dave, you've got maybe it's like some of the initial sales assets, the website, it might be some of the very first things you would even try to point somebody towards to learn about your product. Then you get to consideration. Now it's more strategic, dialed, more specific assets. 

Adrian (00:27:53) - Maybe it's use cases or customer case studies, or maybe it's examples of like promoting feedback. Here's what 10 of our best customers have to say about why our product's the best damn thing in the world. Then you get to conversion, man. Now you get your salespeople. Now you get the guys and gals that are making all these businesses in the world grow up into the right, right? Now you get your salespeople involved and you've got intros, discos, you've got qualification calls, you've got the sales process really getting underway. 

Adrian (00:28:17) - So you're not even getting hyper specific around how understanding the why, the why you might even be a solution. And then you get to the conversion point. My point is you start to lay all these things out. I wasn't even trying right there, guys. That's 15 to 20 different touch points. There's a whole bunch of different assets going on right there. Plus also the reason why we always talk about customer experience if done well is modern selling and why it is a team sport. 

Adrian (00:28:41) - You've got a bunch of different teams, roles, and executive leaders owning those different facets before you even get to onboarding, right? Where the customer's a paying customer or a paying partner or an engaged customer or partner employee that's actually doing things in the world. So Dave, I love this stuff, man. I could talk about this stuff for days. I'd love to move into the third pillar of process. And we're starting to hit on some of this stuff, but can you just spend a couple minutes kind of talking about in your own career, man. 

Adrian (00:29:05) - You've worked at all these incredible companies. You've ran marketing and you've ran sales of all of these different businesses that have done extremely well. Can you just spend a couple minutes kind of giving our listeners some ideas? How have you managed, number one, just process is a generic way I've seen it, but like how has Dave Taylor kind of gone about building his own personal playbook as he's become a more experienced marketer, as he's worked with different businesses, different industries, different executive leadership teams, right? 

Adrian (00:29:30) - And learned all these different things. How have you kind of wrangled process or how have you kind of gone about sort of building out your own playbook as you've kind of gone from different company to different company or different opportunity to different opportunity in your own career? 

Dave (00:29:43) - Yeah, no, that's really good. And I have, I've CMO'd at quite a few companies now and we use the term playbook fairly loosely, but I very literally have a playbook that I've written for myself where when I started a new company, I assess the company based on how closely they map to my playbook, right? And there are things that I know we need to do, to really drive demand. And so, for example, I'll sit down with the company and say, hey, explain to me, so if you were interviewing me to come work at CXE, right? 

Dave (00:30:20) - If you're interviewing me, I would say to you, so if you were 

Dave (00:30:23) - tell me about your company's differentiation between demand and leads. Because if you don't understand the difference between demand generation and lead generation, I've got a playbook that I think can help you in that process. And so, I've built this experience of knowing how these different tools work and how they flow from one to the other. I've literally written documents called Baton Pass that says, what does my marketing team do? What do we hand to the BDR, SDR team? What do they do? What do they hand to the sales team? 

Dave (00:30:56) - What do they hand to the ops team to go post-implementation? And the concept of that Baton Pass as it flows through and the process that that all goes through, we always understand that and then try and capture it into our CRM system. So I can look in my CRM and I can say, we had a light quarter this quarter, but that's okay. Because for next quarter, I've got overwhelming demand in stage three of my funnel. All we have to do is progress that to stage four. 

Dave (00:31:25) - So understanding how that all flows through the process and the triggers that you can pull to move things from one step to the next. You gave the example a minute ago of kind of knowing where people are in order to touch them with the right collateral or whatever the case may be. I know when I engage with somebody and I'm trying to sell them my PRM software, if they already have PRM from a competitor, I've got a piece of documentation here that says why I'm better than they are. 

Dave (00:31:55) - If they've never heard of the concept and they're doing it all manually, I've got a piece of documentation here that says, so I need to know where they are and I need to have a catalog of documentation. I can say that if somebody launches a company and thinks that what they need is a brochure, they're missing the point. Because today, the go-to-market motion today is about hyper-personalization. 

Dave (00:32:22) - If I can give you a document that's hyper-personalized to your vertical market, your position in the market, what you're currently using to do what I have to say, if I can give you something that's hyper-personalized to your position, it knocks five steps out of the process right there. 

Adrian (00:32:40) - I love it. And guys, what Dave is saying, first of all, Dave, I wish I was your friend. It's four years ago when I started this damn thing because in year one and year two, I didn't necessarily have clean, clear, stratified, specific assets, messages, and communications for folks that maybe were just interested in content. 

Adrian (00:32:58) - They wanted to come on the podcast and share their story versus folks that were brilliant strategic partners that I needed to figure out how I could begin to leverage their solutions, their services, their subject matter expertise versus some of the executive teams that they wanted a quick and dirty fractional CXO. They wanted somebody that could come in that already did this stuff for 15 years. They could maximize their bets or they could maximize their returns or they could expedite velocity with building out a CX and a CS team. 

Adrian (00:33:22) - It took a while for us to realize, shit, you need all this stuff to be individualized. It's gotta be specific per the target. And for some of our listeners, if you guys aren't doing that already, hit pause on this, click rewind, listen to what Dave just said again, and then immediately go back to the whiteboard around how you're gonna start doing that immediately because I promise you, not only will your take rate on some of those assets go up into the right, your conversions will begin to go up into the right. 

Adrian (00:33:46) - And then more importantly, your sales team and your marketing team or your early qualification BDR, SDR team, they're gonna start having better conversations sooner that are actually gonna equal bigger, better, more positive, impactful results way sooner. So I love that, Dave. 

Adrian (00:33:59) - Dave, I'd love to jump into the fourth pillar of feedback, man, and you know how we always split this one up on CXEP, but I'd love for you to kind of maybe spend a minute or two kind of talking about as a marketer, as a CMO, I'd love to kind of understand how you sort of think about, how are you not just collecting, but assessing and acting upon some of the customer feedback. And then I'd love to understand sort of how you're thinking about the same thought on the partner side, because I understand who your customer is right now. 

Adrian (00:34:26) - Your customer, you're trying to figure out how you can learn as much as possible and act upon as best as possible with your partners. But I'd love for you to spend just a few minutes kind of thinking about customer feedback and partner feedback. 

Dave (00:34:37) - Yeah, so to do that, I think the most effectively, you need to understand that what I look at is not necessarily feedback from customers that we've onboarded and that are using our stuff, right? That's important, and my ops team focuses on that. And we always want to make sure that we're getting our customers successful with our software as quickly as possible. What I'm focused on is, can I increase my conversion rates at different inflection points in the channel? 

Dave (00:35:05) - In other words, if I get a certain, if I get a hundred demo requests that come through my website, how many of those am I gonna convert into qualified leads? And how many of those are gonna turn into sales accepted leads? And how much of that is going to revenue? And if I need to double my revenue, I need to double the number of demo requests I get. That's sometimes a challenge. But if I can just tighten up those conversion ratios at each inflection point through my channel, it makes those goals a lot more achievable. 

Dave (00:35:34) - And so what I look for from that customer feedback perspective is 

Dave (00:35:40) - Are my conversion rates getting better? Are they getting worse? Are my deal sizes getting larger or getting smaller? And if every quarter I can see a tick up in my deal sizes and a tick up in my conversion rates, I know we've done the right thing. If we have a tick down, I say, oh, you know what? I know we thought that social media campaign was gonna be a real winner for us, but the conversion rates on that particular campaign were so low, let's never do that again. 

Dave (00:36:06) - And so the feedback loop for me is a little bit different than the end customer feedback. My feedback loop is, am I trending up as fast as I need to be trending up? Because if I'm not, I did something wrong in my process. 

Adrian (00:36:21) - That makes a ton of sense. You know, I think about early on with building CXC, you just literally called out what we were doing. I thought quantity was everything. I said, oh, the more CX and CS leaders that I go out there into the world, and I try to flash the CXC banner around, like, no, no, no, no. Now fast forward to, we're almost closing year four of building this business now, it's about quality. It's having way less, much higher quality, engaged, meaningful, respectful, almost like building true relationships and friendships. 

Adrian (00:36:54) - That's how I've been able to grow the business. That's how I've been able to get more companies to work with us. That's how we found bigger, better, more incredible strategic partners to be able to get behind us, and for us to be able to go, then have even better things to sell, or better things to equip our customers or our community with. 

Dave (00:37:08) - So you just nailed it, man. 

Adrian (00:37:09) - And I think so many founders, Dave, they do get it backwards, right? Many of us do it the opposite. You think, oh, well, I'll just gotta, if I hit 500 leads, then at the bottom of my funnel, I'll see X amount of dollars. And I've actually, our dollars at the bottom of the funnel has gone way up into the right over the last four years, by actually putting a much smaller quantity of the right leads and the right prospects at the top. 

Dave (00:37:35) - It's so good. You're so smart at this stuff, because we do ourselves a disservice by aggregating demand at the stages of the funnel. 500 leads, 500 what leads? What are the cohorts that you have in those leads? Where did they come from? What stage are they in their journey? At the two ends of the spectrum, I've got Google ads on one side, and a real ABM or account-based marketing focus on the other side. I can get 500 leads from Google ads just by increasing my spend, but they're not gonna convert very well. 

Dave (00:38:09) - They're gonna be small deals, mom and pop shops coming through my funnel, and I'm gonna waste a lot of time and effort on those. Don't get me wrong, I advertise on Google. I do that. ABM, I don't need 500 leads. I need 50 leads because they're targeted. Company's the right size. I understand what their position is in the market. I know who their competition is. So quality versus quantity, absolutely. And it depends on what you're selling. If I'm selling mobile phones and everybody in the world needs one, I'll go for quality, for sure. 

Dave (00:38:38) - But if I'm selling something specific, like a sponsorship of CX Chronicles, there's a limited number of people. I know who they are. I've gotta just get to those 50 people. I don't need the 500. 

Adrian (00:38:49) - 100%, man, I love it. What about the partner side, Dave? I guess, I'm spending a minute or two talking about what are some of the ways that you go about getting partner feedback from all the different folks that are already using a partner today? They've seen the good, they've seen the bad, they've seen the ugly, they've seen how a partner's been able to grow their business themselves. They've seen how it's been able to improve their own partner satisfaction, right? With their own customers. 

Adrian (00:39:13) - Spend a minute or two talking about like the partner feedback side. I'd love to kind of learn what things have worked or maybe where do you spend the bulk of your time or the bulk of your limited resources in terms of getting more and using more and being able to act upon more of that partner feedback? 

Dave (00:39:25) - Yeah, so if you think about the software that we sell, it's software that the vendors use to manage their partner community. But in order to do that management, the partners have to log in and they have to interact with the tool. And so in the process of partners interacting with the tool, I do gather feedback from them. What do you like? What do you not like? What processes worked? What didn't work? Were you able to find the content you were looking for? Were you able to register the deal that you wanted to register? 

Dave (00:39:53) - And then I can sit down with the vendors and say, hey, Adrian, how's it going with your partner community? Oh yeah, it's going great. Really? Because what I'm hearing from your partners is they need this and they need this and they don't need that and they don't need that. And I'm able to say to the vendor, which is my customer, I'm able to say the feedback that I'm getting from your partners. And if you think about it, their partners are really an analog of their customers. They represent their customers. 

Dave (00:40:19) - The feedback that I'm getting from your partners is you got to tune up a little bit in this space and you got to lighten up a little bit in that space. And so I do get feedback from the partners and I do sit down with my customers and help guide them in how they're using my tool to drive the engagement with their partner ecosystem. 

Adrian (00:40:35) - I love that, man. I'll tell you data. I'm not going to lie. I think one of the… Number one, I've got a bunch of introductions to make to you off the back end of this episode because I'm telling you, even in my own experience, like with all of these different customer experience, customer success focused SaaS solutions that we're partnering with, some of them do a brilliant job of minimally once a month, if not even every two weeks, man. Hey, what's going on? Not just… And not just by the pipeline questions either, man. 

Adrian (00:40:58) - Not just, hey, what can CXC bring us this month, but like, hey, what new or what different about the tool is helping to potentially shape things for your clients? Or hey, did you notice these new features with our solution? That's number one. Number two, have you used them yet? Have you poked any of your customers to see if they like these news? Everybody under their sun is talking about AI and machine learning. 

Adrian (00:41:19) - Got to be honest with you, I'm just as excited about everyone else, but like every solution provider out there in the world is talking about how AI is impacting, is revolutionizing their business. Okay, we get it. But like, I don't see a lot of these leading companies or some of these companies, Dave, that are doing billions a year in sales, I don't see them actually getting like crisp, granular, specific, detailed feedback on some of these AI solutions that they're pumping out there. And then lastly, just like temperature checks, man. 

Adrian (00:41:44) - Temperature checks. 

Adrian (00:41:45) - Like, I've only got like maybe two or three partners right now out of the 20 plus partners that we've built here at CXC that literally on a monthly basis are asking about, and I'm simplifying here, guys, but like good, bad, ugly reports of usability from the clients that we've brought onto their solutions, meaning what's the good, like what are the things that are going well, what's the bad, what are the things that they're continuing to get pissed off or annoyed by or are potentially, you know, constriction points, and then what's the ugly? 

Adrian (00:42:09) - What are the things that literally in six months, nine months, 12 months from now, what are going to be the things that are going to prevent us from getting a renewal and prevent us from not letting them go and get a price check on the next three competitive solutions? 

Adrian (00:42:22) - And I'm telling you, I think that's crazy because you'd think, man, if I was an executive in one of these large companies, I'd have a lot of opinions and a lot of expectations around how my partner and my channel side was getting some of that feedback because it's almost crystal ball-esque, man. It's the beauty of your world with a partner. 

Adrian (00:42:36) - Like partners have got almost like a different view and a different lens around how a market is going to react to some of these different things, and I think you just don't see all, you don't see many companies really understanding how to leverage that accordingly. 

Dave (00:42:51) - Yeah. No, I mean, you know, it's really true. Yeah. There's so much, you know, there's so much we could talk about with this. 

Speaker 3 (00:43:00) - Okay. Yeah. 

Dave (00:43:01) - I could keep going for another half hour. 

Adrian (00:43:03) - Okay. Well, so then, before, okay, before we start winding up, so number one, thank you so much for bringing us through the four pillars. Fire round question, because you brought it up, of course I'm bringing the fire round questions back. 

Adrian (00:43:14) - So what is one of the most entertaining customer or partner interactions that you've had since being the, and I'll parse this down for you, since being the CMO and a partner, I want to hear one of the most interesting customer or partner interactions that you've had that really kind of pushed you back in your seat and really made you think for a couple of days, or maybe, maybe it was even the type of conversation that you brought it directly back to the C-suite and you said, guys, this is what I just heard today. What are we going to do about it? 

Dave (00:43:38) - Yeah. I mean, I'll start off by giving you a little bit of a negative one. I'm never crazy about people who stand behind, you know, company policy, you know, I think always in the engagement with your customers, I think, you know, the old tried and true terminology of the customer is always right. I think that really applies. And I had a contract that I'd entered into with a vendor and, you know, and it turned out that it wasn't as beneficial for me as I thought it would be. And I'd signed a two-year contract. 

Dave (00:44:07) - So I went to the vendor and said, hey, I want out. I'm so sorry. We can't do that. And I said, well, you mean you really physically can't do that? I mean, there's not an option in your system to take the check mark out of the box for a second year renewal. And oh, no, no, we have that. We just, our policy is that we're not allowed to do that. And I said, you know, I'm telling you right now as a customer of yours that I'm not getting the value out of the product that I thought that I would be getting. And I want out of the second year. 

Dave (00:44:33) - It took them literally months to get to the point where they were able to kind of back me out on that. And at the end, at the end of the day, we did get it. I learned from that. I came back to the partner team and at the executive team level, we are committed to saying, yeah, we have policies and procedures that we operate with. But our number one policy right at the top of the page is we have to make our customers happy. We have to delight our customers at the end of the day. 

Dave (00:45:01) - And so if a customer is not getting what they need from my solution, my first step is I know we can deliver the value you're looking for. Let me engage with you to help kind of step up how we're working together because I know I can make you successful. If at the end of the day I'm not able to, I want to make you whole because I'm not interested in harvesting your revenue on a one shot. I'm interested in building an ongoing relationship, reputation with you. And so, you know, so that was kind of a key learning for me. 

Dave (00:45:29) - And honestly, Adrian, if I told you who the vendor was, you would know them immediately and you would go, oh my God, really? Because they're a very well-known vendor in this space. And I had such a hard time getting them to understand that it wasn't meeting my needs. It wasn't meeting my needs. And they didn't say, well, let's work together to figure out how it's going to be, how we can make it. You know, it was none of that. It was, I'm sorry, we're not allowed to, you know. Oh, I hate that. I hate that. 

Dave (00:45:54) - I never, I never want to let, I never want to let that kind of policy stand between me making a customer successful and happy. 

Speaker 3 (00:46:01) - I never want to 

Adrian (00:46:02) - Dude, I could not agree more. Dave, thank you for sharing that. You know what it makes me think about, man? Guys, I know I say this almost on every one of these episodes, but Dave, when I started this business four years ago, I thought that the big problem, right? The big problem was that just in the US alone, companies were losing almost $100 billion a year due to poor customer experiences. That's what I thought it was. 

Adrian (00:46:22) - Now you fast forward four years later and we've worked with well over 100 different companies and we've got almost 250 episodes where we had these incredible customer-focused business leaders like yourself coming on the show, sharing their lessons, their learnings, their stories. Now what I tell people is I say, you know, guys, I think we, and there's no disrespect to a partner because you guys are doing it right. You're doing it the right way. But now I tell people, I go, you know, we got a bit of a software problem. 

Adrian (00:46:44) - You know, within the next five years globally, you're going to see companies across planet earth spending three quarters of a trillion dollars per year on their software. But utilization rates still sit in like, if you're lucky, the 20 to 30% range. 

Adrian (00:46:58) - And what my challenge, I guess, for some of our listeners or for some future software founders, software developers, current software executives is like, guys, every one of us can look into our usability data and see who's fully utilizing, and to Dave's point, getting an incredible bang for their buck out of our solution or out of our tool versus the cohort of customers where we can literally look on a monthly report and say, shit, 5%, 10% under 20% of the seats that we sold are being utilized. What are we going to go do about it? 

Adrian (00:47:30) - And when people ask me like, you know, what do you think about world, you know, building world-class customers, experience customer success? For me, it's about like one of our biggest jobs, guys, it's making sure that that utility is there. The bottom line is you've never heard a pissed off customer that gets near to full utility out of a product or a solution, right? Like something that your car, you put the damn key into it, it starts up whether you love Ford, you love Chevy, you love GM, I don't even care about the make and the model. 

Adrian (00:47:54) - The car starts up every damn day and it gets you and your kids and your wife and your husband to work and to school and to play, you're happy, you're getting the utility out of it. You try to use something once or twice a month and it doesn't really, after a while, you're not getting the gain out of it. I think a big part of what us entrepreneurs do is make sure that our customers are getting utility from our products and our services. 

Dave (00:48:13) - Yeah, we're just closing a deal now with the big vendor in the networking space and the person that runs their ecosystem, their partnering world is a fourth time customer of ours, right? I mean, it's to the point where I almost hope that she gets bumped out of this company and into another one because I know she'll drag us into that one as well. And it all winds back to the very first time we engaged with her at a company, we focused, we doubled down and focused hard on making her successful with our technology. 

Dave (00:48:40) - You know, you talk about a 20 to 30 percent utilization rate. If I can't get her successful with my product, I wouldn't have made the second sale, third sale, fourth sale, and who knows what happens with the fifth sale with her and these successive companies that she's gone through. So, you know, every couple of years she moves to a new company and it's like, you know, holiday season all over again, the gift that keeps giving. 

Adrian (00:48:59) - I love it, man. Dave, this has been fantastic, brother. Before I let you go, man, most importantly, where can people get in touch with you or your team at a partner and where can people find out more about the incredible things that you guys are doing over at a partner? 

Dave (00:49:10) - Yeah, check us out at partner.com for companies that are interested in PRM, partner relationship management. You know, we offer gift cards for qualified demos and stuff like that. But most importantly, we'd like to just have a dialogue with you about where you are in your partnering process. Are you starting up? Are you trying to scale up? Are you running a big partner program, but only, you know, but the Pareto principle applies and out of your 200 partners, you're only getting revenue from 40. You know, where are you in your process? 

Dave (00:49:38) - Because we can help you at each step of the way. Check us out at partner.com. If you're interested in becoming an expert in this space, we have coming up in February, February 24 to 26 of next year in Austin, we have in partner con. It's a sweet one of the world's largest collections of hundreds and hundreds of partnering companies and individuals. It's amazing getting together to talk best practices. And you can find out more about that just by jumping on our website and looking for, um, multiply in partner con it's called multiply in partner con 25. 

Dave (00:50:10) - So I love that out. 

Adrian (00:50:12) - There's going to be a couple of people I'm going to push your way, my friend, because there's a lot of partner reps out there that do want to learn how to get better. They do want to figure out how to get more bang for their buck. They do understand all the intricacies that you're laying out for us. That's fantastic that you guys are taking the charge, taking the lead on that. 

Dave (00:50:23) - Yeah, good. If nothing else, drop me an email, dave.taylor@impartner.com happy to happy to help any way I can. 

Adrian (00:50:29) - I love it. Well, Dave Taylor, thank you so much. Number one, for joining the CS Chronicles podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure having you in the show. I wish you and the team over to Impartner with very best of luck. I look forward to keeping our conversation and friendship moving forward into the future, my friend. 

Dave (00:50:40) - Adrian, thanks so much for your time. Always a pleasure.