079 - The Future of Market Development Funds and Through-Channel Marketing Automation webinar

Partnerships Unraveled hosted a panel discussion titled: "2024 Vision: Revolutionizing Growth with MDF and TCMA". 

Industry experts gathered to discuss the latest trends in the optimization of Market Development Funds, and how to leverage Through-Channel Marketing Automation for accelerated Demand Generation, covering different topics such as:

- Accrual-based vs proposal-based MDF programs. How is the industry shifting and why?

- How can vendors enhance the effectiveness of their MDF?

- Challenges in getting smaller partners to participate in demand-generation activities.

- Driving partner engagement and generating demand via TCMA tools at scale. 

Moderating the session we had our Business Development Whiz Efe Senel who hosted the conversation among our esteemed panelists:

- Jay McBain, the Channels, Partnerships, and Ecosystems expert from Canalys

- Janet Schijns, a proven leader known for delivering remarkable growth outcomes for the channel, CEO of JSG

- Blake Williams, the go-to expert in Partner and Revenue marketing, founder of Ampfactor

- Alex Whitford, Channel Distribution and TCMA expert and the VP of Revenue at Channext. 

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Learn more about Channext 👇

https://channext.com/

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Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:07

Hello everyone. My name is Efe. I'll be your host today. We have some amazing guests joining us today. The title of our panel discussion is 2024 Vision Revolutionizing Growth with MDF and TCMA. Before we join, before we jump into our questions, I would love to give the mic to our speakers to let them quickly introduce themselves. So maybe let's start with ladies first, janet.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Thank you so much, janet Schein, ceo of JSG. We are a channel, go-to-market consultancy working with partners and vendors to grow their businesses. Last year we did $4.7 billion in funnel using MDF. So I'll be talking real stuff beat on the ground.

Speaker 2: 0:48

Very good, I love that.

Speaker 3: 0:50

Blake. Hey, I'm Blake Williams, ceo at AmpFactor, and just started a new company Growth Story, so it's going to be launching in about two weeks. Be sure to check it out. It automatically creates on-brand assets. Full Better Together story landing pages, decks, linkedin content and emails Perfect.

Speaker 2: 1:10

Jay, you want to go next?

Speaker 4: 1:12

Sure, jay McBain, analyst at Canalys. Canalys is Latin for channel, so we wake up every day around the world over a hundred of us thinking about all elements of channel marketing and MDF, and not only where it's been for the last 43 years, but where it's going not only in 2024, but next three, five, 10 years.

Speaker 5: 1:34

And last but not least, alex Cheers Effe. Yeah, my name's Alex Whitford. I'm the VP of Revenue at Chanext. At Chanext, we're building the world's largest channel marketplace, helping partners and vendors work more collaboratively together and access new markets Excited.

Speaker 2: 1:51

Perfect, thank you. Thanks once again, everyone for joining. I'm really excited for this. Before I start with the first question, I want to give a little backstory of how this webinar came together. So I made a post on LinkedIn about how the MDF is only available to the top partners, but when it comes to the remaining, the long tail, they often do not get a lot of MDF attention, and which my friend, good friend, lincoln Axson, mentioned Blake in the comments, where Blake said we looked at data from 500 plus channel leaders and 70% of them made the shift in 2023 to proposal-based MDF programs. So, blake, maybe let's start with that Could you explain the difference of accrual-based programs and proposal-based programs and why the shift is happening?

Speaker 3: 2:41

Yeah, I think the proposal-based programs are those integrated demand gen strategies that are focused on for a specific purpose. Generally we see them to drive up co-sell activity between a certain part in an ecosystem or a certain vertical, but they're always pointed at a specific business outcome. They might have multiple layers, they definitely have multiple channels, but all of them, again, are written up. They're not repeatable in the sense that it's not an evergreen thing. We're not just talking about webinars. We're talking about webinars, influencers, abm. How do we co-share data right, share intent, all of those things within the ecosystem?

Speaker 2: 3:32

Yeah, yeah, and I saw the same comment you mentioned, jay, and you said that the biggest hiccup in MDF isn't getting it once, it's getting it consistently and growing it. And when you talk to Jay McBain, which we're talking to right now, about the biggest hurdle, it's yield. So, jay, could you maybe elaborate on that a little bit?

Speaker 4: 3:50

Yeah, I mean the shift from accrual-based MDF to proposal-based, and I lived in the middle of this with a Fortune 500 vendor. A big part of it was cost savings From the start of time when the early programs in the early 80s, there was always part of the gross to nets the backend margins and it was about average 1% of the deal went towards MDF and it got accrued across the entire channel and the yield was always below 50% and financial people tried to forecast what that would be and how much money they would actually have to spend. But going to proposal was a huge cost saving across the 35,000 companies in the world that offer MDF. And you know proposal made it. You know there was a human intervention and a level of governance and compliance and other things that came into it. But you know companies all of a sudden repatriated 1% of their margin back to the bottom line.

Speaker 4: 4:50

So that was a key part of it. It was a financial mechanism and you know the yield pieces, now that it's proposal based, are starting to change. But again, so much money is left on the table that this is to the detriment of partners and obviously the ability to market hyperlocally and into specific industries and things like that, that the industry itself is leaving a lot of money on the table by not doing this effectively.

Speaker 2: 5:22

Yeah, and I think that's maybe a good place to go on next. By the way, I asked questions to a specific person. But please, if you want to add on, please go ahead. But there's data that I think 90% of all vendors propose some sort of MDF and about 60% of all MDF is unspent, and I heard differing data about this, some of the big vendors. The numbers are even more staggering. So what is the reason and I ask this to everyone that so much MDF is being left on the table?

Speaker 1: 5:53

Yeah, I'll start. And it lays into this proposal-based right, when you have to propose what you're going to do, it means you have to have marketing expertise. It means you have to understand what you're going to drive. You have to submit something that has an ROI that the vendor with proposal base will prove, and many times the partners don't have that Now. So what has effectively happened is that, although it is proposal based, it has become almost back to the co-op days because only the biggest partners are getting it. Only the biggest partners have the marketing teams to actualize on an effective MDF plan, put it together and go to the vendors. So you've really created this world where, at Jay's point, you saved money right, because it's proposal based, but what you really did was you cut the long tail out from ever proposing because they didn't have great marketing resources for proposal based, and you set up your biggest, baddest partners right, the ones that do a lot of value for you but may not be that loyal to use MDF.

Speaker 1: 6:52

Now, how does it go unspent? I hear varying numbers. I've heard I left nothing unspent. We left 75% unspent. Our most recent survey data at JSG we're issuing an MDF report in about two weeks at an event showed about 25 to 30 percent unspent last year. Now some of that was because people lowered their budgets right. 2023 was a challenging year for a lot of people on the channel. A lot of investor money came in. Investors challenged why you need to have that much MDF money and so they used that bucket once again to hit a financial good. I think we're going to see that pendulum shift back as those companies are realizing that cutting MDF is truly hurting the channel. To Jay's point under addressing the need that's out there. The final reason I think people don't use the MDF again is because they don't have marketing people. So the vendors that are smart and put together MDF packages and say you can just apply for one of these packages are having very little unspent MDF.

Speaker 5: 7:58

Yeah, and Janet, to your point.

Speaker 5: 7:59

I think we're all aware of the Pareto principle, but for me it's the Pareto problem right. As we start to ask more and more of partners, we start to raise the bar and the expectancy on partners, and that means that every vendor is dealing with the same thousand partners globally who definitely aren't as loyal as you really hope they were. And then they are submitting similar MDF plans to competing vendors, because why wouldn't you duplicate the work when really we are using marketing as a profit center for a lot of those partners? Right, and so for me, the absolute critical scale is which brands are going to box smarter so that they can go and get the untapped potential where the competition is less and allow you to unlock a part of the market. The other piece that I think is critical and it's great to see you calling out that MDF spend is going to increase is yes, you might take a short-term win in protecting bottom line, but then that affects top line. So congratulations, we just shrunk the market potential affecting bottom line in the future, right.

Speaker 1: 8:58

Right. In a more and more competitive world, you're spending less in marketing. That's a dumb move.

Speaker 5: 9:08

Yeah, there you go right. And and when we start to see the levers of ai, who are going to be able to scale the resource application, what a time to be pulling out of the market right yeah, yeah, great points.

Speaker 2: 9:17

uh, also, do you think this ties to the the fact that a lot of the partners typically don't have the marketing expertise to execute on MDF, and you say that? I think I had a chat with this just recently with my friend, antonio Corrida. He said that, when looking at it, most of the MDF that has been allocated to the big partners, the GSIs a lot of it. Often they find a way to use that, but a lot of the unspent MDF is probably the ones that are allocated to the smaller partners. My next point is that I think, janet, you made a poll on your LinkedIn where you asked people how satisfied are you with the current way MDF programs are being offered to partners in the channel, which a lot of people responded dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. Especially, this was more than 75%. My question to everyone here is that where is this dissatisfaction coming from? Is it more from the partners or the vendors? And how do we or, as a next question, how do we build better MDF programs to satisfy both sides?

Speaker 4: 10:26

Yeah, I'm going to. I'll attack it first. Because we ask these questions and, by the way, technology resellers, agents, brokers, dealers, are no different than any other industry. 75% of world trade is sold indirectly and every single industry has this long tail of partners. There's HVAC, there's plumbers, there's all kinds of people driving around in white vans.

Speaker 4: 10:53

But here's the psychology, human psychology answer 66% of companies along that long tail are do it for me or do it on behalf of me. And there's reasons for that. It's A you know we don't have the skills. B we don't have the resources. The time I'm struggling to make money, struggling to pay my mortgage, Every hour I spend marketing is an hour I'm not billing.

Speaker 4: 11:21

And C I mean it could be just a belief. You know, my father, my grandfather, built this business on the back of word of mouth and that's the way it's always going to be, and so I don't have a belief that marketing actually works. So, and there's other reasons. So if 66% of your entire channel audience are not kind of self-service, marketing friendly, your yield, your percentage of people engaged, are going to be low. So if I look at Chan Next and I look at the 46 companies that build platforms that do this across all 27 industries. It's almost a billion dollar business.

Speaker 4: 12:02

The actual adoption rate is 17%, which makes it one of the lowest adoption rates of 2,200 SaaS companies that we track on G2 Crowd. And so it makes it difficult for a channel marketing professional to go back to their boss every year to re-up the budget and re-up the commitment because it's showing such a low adoption. But if you take the 33% that are in that category of belief and resources and skills, you're getting 50% adoption of that small set. So the magic we learned just in the last couple of years it's not just a technology problem, it's a services plus technology To have the concierge, to have the white glove services, to have the ability and this is where JS Group, for example, has hit a home run to be able to help those partners run plan campaigns, email, social search, syndicated content, all the things necessary in front of a new digital integration first buyer. Guess what?

Speaker 1: 13:13

It's a one-two punch between services and great technology to go and drive the yield up to 100% of your partners. Yeah, and that's what's important. And it's interesting, jay, you bring that up because one of the things our data shows is that the bigger partners have half the ROI of the smaller partners when running the same campaign. Because the smaller partners are kind of close to the ground, feet on the street. If you give them 20 leads, they're working those 20 leads Because those are maybe the only 20 leads they get this year. So for them those 20 leads are super exciting.

Speaker 1: 13:43

For the big big GSIs those 20 leads are super exciting. For the big big gsis those 20 leads are not exciting, um, and so they get thrown into all the leads they're getting from all the other places and all the sales people that are calling them, from the direct vendors, and you know they get kind of tossed in there and so the roi is much lower on the mdf programs that those large partners are doing. Not to mention those large partners. A lot of times you're doing pay to play. Right, you got to pay to come to my event, you got to pay to come to my this, you got to pay to do my that. So it's interesting we see a much higher ROI in the long tail than we do in the top partners.

Speaker 4: 14:16

Yeah, and there's a reason for that too is all of the search engine. 81% of of B2B buyers start with a Google search, or now they're starting with ChatGPT and BARD and other things, but guess what it's hyperlocal. Every single search within Google assumes that you're a consumer trying to get an oil change.

Speaker 1: 14:32

That's right.

Speaker 4: 14:33

And so they produce results that show within the first five miles. I don't have Accenture location within five miles of me here, so Accenture gets pushed to page two and page three. So Facebook and other social engines are all hyperlocal. So the fact of the matter is having 100,000 partners or a million partners out there within five miles of your buyer earns you an organic spot up on all the ways that.

Speaker 4: 15:00

B2B buyers work in those first 28 moments. So that's one of those important things of why ROI is so much better down the tail. And the second reason now and it just became critical last week when Google introduced into Chrome end of cookie technology. So the big partners unfortunately all the GSIs and the CDWs and the Insights and the SHIs all the way down the solution provider 500 list all run their own marketing technology. They will take your money and put it into Eloqua, marketo, pardot, hubspot and run their own campaigns. They run their own Super Bowl ads. So guess what? It's their marketing, not yours. You don't get to see the opens, the clicks, where the mid and smaller partners will run on platforms like ChenNext. They'll use things like GrowthStory. They will use the technology. You'll see the opens and clicks. You'll see the engagement in real time. So not only is the ROI better, but your line of sight to second-party data of your customers's early moments is all about spending your MDF wisely.

Speaker 3: 16:09

Yeah, I'll jump in on that. I think what we're about to go into is this era of seeing ecosystemic data be that combination of first-party, second-party data as third-party. You know. Especially third party intent is Kentucky windage out there versus what's happening in my partner ecosystem. What, jvp, did they actually click into and how many times did they do it? How many partners are selling to the same account? There's so many important things that we can do to now understand because of this cookie change. So it's like it's a, it's a forced negative, but it's also it's better for the buyer for sure, because you're going to be more intelligent about what they need, the problems that they're looking to solve and who they're going to for it. So that path to value for them should truncate and get very, very small. Maybe those 28 touch points go to 14 or something like that, because we can orchestrate better.

Speaker 5: 17:01

And then Jay, all the way back to your, the 66% of the uninitiated right, the ones that lack belief. At Chanix, we speak to thousands of partners every month and we are starting to see less and less and less partners who don't believe in the power of marketing. They just see the skill gap as so enormous. Why? Because the CDWs and the soft cats and everyone else have this engine that works. How can we possibly compete? As Janet touched on, the ROI is so much better at the SMB right, the ROI is so much better at the hyper local, and so it's incumbent on the channel, it's incumbent on the partnership model to build technology that allows us to reduce that skill gap, because the belief is there that it works. It just feels so unattainable that why would I even go there? My granddad built this business on word of mouth, but we all recognize the TikTok ecosystem is here, it's changed, but how am I going to be able to deliver that? I just don't know how to.

Speaker 1: 18:00

But if you can yeah, and they tried it, Alex. I love this talk track. They tried it. They spent money.

Speaker 5: 18:06

It didn't work Right, so yeah and yeah you've got to blend tech and services together, and it's incumbent not just to provide the technology, but it's incumbent to educate the partners on the value that you, as a brand, can provide them. Because if you want to talk about loyalty, not only would the 20 leads be the only leads that they get all year, but the marketing solution that you provide. We've seen it not just impact end user pull ie more end users are raising their hand about a particular brand but it impacts channel push. Resellers are specking those solutions more often into customers that didn't ask for those brands. Why? Because the marketing support is helping drive that right. You are building that brand loyalty in the partners, and so I think that's where MDF or TCMA and the whole thing wraps together is how do we unlock the long tail?

Speaker 2: 18:56

Yeah, I love that, and I want to get back on the data you shared, jay, because you also shared this a few times in my comment sections. I want to touch upon that a little bit. You said that you had surveys showing offers of 66% will not engage in campaigns. That's within your partner base. For the other third, tcma tools drive 50% of engagement. So this is a problem that I hear a lot when talking to vendors, the channel marketers, partner marketers. We have campaigns, we have it in our partner portal. Our partners are not using it. Could you?

Speaker 4: 19:34

Yeah, the battle of the future. It will be a battle for data. And so let's narrow down the conversation because CMOs this week are in a state of panic. Losing the ability to buy early buyer intent from Google and Facebook and others basically strips the 13,080 SaaS ISVs that they buy from today in their MarTech stack, adtech stack, it neuters that stack. So in their careers they haven't had the conversation yet about second-party data and what that means.

Speaker 4: 20:08

So every channel marketer now is kind of being invited into marketing meetings with the CMO saying, hey, what is this and what would that tech stack look like? And then what we're getting now is guess what. It's not just one thing. You know, tcma is perfect because I get to have partners running on my platform and I get to see the opens, the clicks, the engagement in real time and take action. But there's other parts of the 28 moments if they don't use my platform, or other moments that happen outside of the platform. So if they have work being done in other places and it shows up in a system, I want to maybe add account mapping to that Data that comes out of cross-beam reveal.

Speaker 4: 20:53

Partner tap now becomes a layer on top of TCMA Attribution, which grew up in the B2C world is now a B2B strategy. So companies like Impact and Partnerize and Awin that are your Kim Kardashian affiliate companies, advocates, ambassadors, affinity, you know, influencer, super connector companies now comes into B2B. That's a whole layer of referral and attribution that we need in our tech stack. I need deal registration, I need deal registration, I need opportunity management, I need lead passing, all some PRM type technologies. So there might be five, six, seven layers of technology that now allow me to peer in through to and with partners into those first 28 moments.

Speaker 4: 21:39

Whether it's an ebook, read a podcast, listen an event, um attendee, an association board member, whatever it is that comes in those first 28 moments, the more visibility I can get with partners in real time. Fill up a data lake and then make it actionable and then offer up that data lake to large language models within Gen AI. Now this becomes the future of marketing, not only for the next couple of years, but this is the next decade. This is how we move into second-party data. And guess what? Channel marketers and those people that have always been kind of redheaded stepchildren within their own organizations now become a little bit famous because they're the ones that know how to do this yeah, and they're using some cool things right first party data, ip addresses, delight fingerprints, probability models.

Speaker 1: 22:34

You know, you're seeing now that what used to be an art is now a science, right, and we used to have a whole group of artists called marketers, and now we have a whole group of scientists called marketers, and that's what's shifting the way we have to think about things, right. And so you know, we see this where the partners have almost given up on marketing intent-based packages, which is what Jay was kind of alluding to there intent-based marketing packages that look at people's intent and help them to make good decisions in an API world. Google Fledge now API automation or whatever they're calling it helps with that. It's just become a much more scientific world.

Speaker 4: 23:17

Add to sciences. Let's go ahead.

Speaker 3: 23:19

Blake, I was going to say that this is the ultimately, when you look at the problem of enablement and the long tail, and we want ecosystems that if second party data is the outcome that we need in order to orchestrate assets effectively, then we need as many participants in our ecosystem actively driving content. If we can drive content, we start to pepper the ecosystem when accounts and contacts reach that content. Now we can light up our funnel. We all of a sudden become way more important and we dwarf what happens on a first party basis because we partner for partners. We partner so that they can solve the other problems that we can't fix with our products. Right, these personas own the entire workflow. We solve one point of friction. Our partners solve the other nine or so and each one of them are addressing three different points of pain. That's 21 indicators just in that one workflow for one persona alone that you now are starting to tap into.

Speaker 3: 24:16

Versus taking your only value proposition to market and banging that drum there won't be a board that will fund that alternative strategy. Versus going after your ecosystem and lighting that up. So the content and how you capture first party intent data and then share that across your ecosystem, for that. Global visibility starts to become really, really, really powerful when you start to talk about both the through market right, all of those things that partner to partner plays. Where do you invest and why right? How do you orchestrate orbits of partners around particular problem sets in your ecosystem that you know that your customers are trying to solve? So you start to become very, very intelligent around that and knowing that somebody downloaded a UCAS white paper versus all of that intelligence starts to. It's a, it's a no brainer.

Speaker 1: 25:10

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 25:11

Yeah, let's flip into the economics, because that's what you brought up. So let's just make it clear on first party data, the best brands in the world and these could be right up to trillion dollar brands might earn four of 28 moments. That's best case scenario. Worst case scenario you get into zero. And that's the more common case is, you're in zero of the 28 moments. They never come across one of your pieces of content. They never come across your website. So you know, when you buy a car, you know there's 365 brands of car, there's 63 companies that sell those brands and you're absorbing information because you're not going to go on 365 websites or go on 365 test drives. So, as you narrow, you're watching YouTube videos and you're reading Motor Trend Magazine and you're talking to your neighbors and friends. You do all the things you do but it's not to like moment 14, when you got it narrowed down to a midsize SUV. You know, foreign that you can go to three websites and maybe go and configure price quote that car. Then you leave the manufacturer and go back and download invoice pricing and the dealer rebates and all the other fun stuff. So you're smart when you hit the dealership. But that first party data question, like 24 to 28 of the moments are going to be second party, Third party won't exist. So now, who's going to the YouTube guy? Who's going to the Motor Trend magazine? Who's going to your neighbors and friends to surround you with your brand in those 28 moments?

Speaker 4: 26:44

Now let's talk economics. In the past, all of the whether you're talking automotive or tech or any other industry all of the economics of partnering happen at the point of sale. The front end margin, the back end margin is where the MDF sits. All happens based on volume of sales. The average buyer now has seven partners they trust. Six or more of those buyers will never be transaction based and now, with marketplaces growing at 86% in the tech industry, for example, that's growing to where all seven partners will be non-transactional. So what are brands doing to take money from what used to be a transactional? So what are brands doing to take money from what used to be a transactional world and start to spread it like peanut butter throughout those 28 moments? Every company is going to a subscription consumption business. So even the point of sale is only the first 30 days with that customer and you've got to keep marketing every 30 days forever for a customer for life. Sellsell, cross-sell, enrich forever. So marketing is not just an MDF now, is not just before the point of sale, it's forever.

Speaker 1: 27:49

No, it's the full life cycle and I think the thing we've been telling people is and the consumer world showed us this already and Jay just talked about a consumer example In the tech world in the tech space we always thought that if you built the best solution, the partners would sell your solution, offer your solution, service your solution. Now partners are going to start picking on who does the best partner marketing. The solutions have become so close, I think. The last thing I thought 3,167 security vendors. You clearly don't need 3,167 security vendors as a partner. So what partner? What one are you going to pick? They're all very similar right Endpoint, you know, pen testing, et cetera. Well, guess what? You're going to pick the one that has the best marketing. So if you're thinking just building the best widget is going to work for you anymore, it's not. It's going to be the company that can get that hyper-local, targeted digital marketing down for the partner community, particularly the long tail they're. Who's going to win? It's a new being.

Speaker 5: 28:45

Janet, you're absolutely correct. I've spent a lot of time working in distribution and that's been a partner acquisition strategy to really build out channels and from my experience, partners care about three things what type of customers do you sell to and do I also sell to them? How much money am I going to make and how easy is it to sell right? And getting the balance between money and ease of sale, You're absolutely correct, because it's not just ease of sale, it's ease of marketing to generate that sale right. And it's the brands that remove the friction and make that very, very simple to acquire new customers, retain and expand those customers. Those are going to be the ones that win over the long term and I think doing that in the long term is going to be amazing.

Speaker 3: 29:30

I want to add to that I think there's two sides of the world around partner marketing. Right, there's the channel, the more developed channel side that is used to functioning with MDF, and then there's this other side and I don't think people try to address or talk about how isvs in the, the venture funded space is very they think very differently about going to market and how they deploy capital and that kind of thing. Sometimes they bump up against and you have this venn diagram they bump up against this more mature partner marketing model. I think that a large part of that B2B SaaS ecosystem that you're talking about, the 13,000 marketing applications those folks are soon coming around to identifying I need a partner for impacting sales.

Speaker 3: 30:19

I need a partner for impacting my marketing and subsidizing my marketing. I need a partner for impacting sales. I need a partner for impacting my marketing and subsidizing my marketing. I need a partner to subsidize my retention. And how do I drive NRR up? So, yes, you are thinking about agencies, gsis and every but all the different types, community influencers, but how does it impact those core levers of growth in your business from a sales function, a marketing function and a retention function and expansion function, even because those are all different plays and it's, you know, different strokes for different folks at very different size companies, but for the tying those, those different types of partners to offset or subsidize what's happening in your, in your own business, by function. I think that's going to be a bigger thing that we see in 2024 in terms of categorization of partners.

Speaker 4: 31:08

Yeah, we're already seeing that. You know paying a partner at the point of sale or moving that to pay them at the point of value. So what happens today and it's happened for 40 years is there's a partner out there that did all the marketing successfully, did the selling, did the engineering, and you want to deal in your sleep, Absolute bluebird, and they keep you a customer for life. The average margin that you paid that partner is way too low. They stripped away all of your SG&A. They got you the perfect scenario and you want them to do that thousands of more times, but you're paying them at half the rate you should be. Then another partner comes along and wins an RFP by bidding a nickel less than somebody else who did some work, and then they collect the money and they're gone in the night and you've just paid that partner the exact same as the previous partner.

Speaker 4: 32:01

When you can measure at the point of value the 28 moments individually, you can see that that ebook that they wrote has a 3x better chance of closing your product. You're going to run back to them with $5,000 and say, hey, can you write three more ebooks? You start measuring the three new ones. They still have a 3x multiplier to them. You're going to keep running back to them with money until you're running a Super Bowl ad together. That's the point is, you're going to be at these points of value and again, before the transaction, at the point of transaction, after the co-innovation moments, the co-development moments, all the moments that come in a partnering strategy are going to be worth a quantitative value and you're going to get money from that point of sale, which has now basically been reduced to 3%.

Speaker 4: 32:52

The same as a credit card, swipe. Thank you to the big marketplaces. They've reminded half a million resellers out there that the actual task of collecting money, taking on the risk of non-payment, taking on the cost of net 30, net 60, and hiring Biff to break knees when you don't get paid the entire cost of that cycle is 3%. Anything north of 3% margin should be paid at the point of value. In other words, mdf shouldn't be just doubled or tripled. Mdf should be 10, 20, 30, 50x what it is today.

Speaker 1: 33:28

That, jay, I 100% agree, and I think we've been miscalculating right. We've been using a straight line calculation to a percentage of sales versus customer lifetime value, customer experience, retention I can't tell you how many arguments I have with channel chiefs about that don't want to use mdf for retention and I I just don't understand where their mind is going because clearly you retain, then you upsell, cross sell and continue to gain customer loyalty and revenue. So I think there's just a new education that's going to happen from the scientists, uh, to the artists about mdf. That changes the game. I think that goes going to happen from the scientists to the artists about ODF. That changes the game.

Speaker 3: 34:05

I think that goes back to an earlier question, fa, when you asked why is like I think it was 33 or 66 percent are dissatisfied from Janet's poll Right, and that's a large part of the nonpaying at all the different points of value along the way to getting to the revenue. Paying at all the different points of value along the way to getting to the revenue it's hard to do all the work and carry that laboring ore for all of that time and then also wait some 30 to 60 days to get that reimbursement whenever it comes out. These smaller companies don't want to function like a bank or a line of credit to the bigger ecosystem as they go after that value. So I think that plays a role in it too.

Speaker 2: 34:44

I fully agree. We are five minutes went ahead of time, but I want to respect everyone's time. It was a great discussion the second part of the discussion I didn't even talk, but you guys did a really good job keeping up the conversation. I hope it was valuable for everyone. Once again, thank you for joining. Any final words that anyone wants to share? And then I think it would be best to closely close the webinar. Okay, Any final words from anyone?

Speaker 4: 35:18

Yeah, so me it's getting tactical End of the cooking happening this year. We're becoming stars now in our own organization. We can push our organization to think about the processes, the programs, the technology, that that runs this, but we can elevate our entire company now. So this is this is a chance for channel marketers to stand up. This is a chance, you know, to drive your own personal careers, your own personal brand. You're waiting for that moment in your life. This is it. This is the year it's all happening, it's all collapsed into right now, and I can't think of a more exciting place in the world to be than right here on this call.

Speaker 1: 36:00

Yeah, and I will say partners, start picking your vendors by how much they can help you with this changing world of marketing. Make sure you evaluate that not just their solution, not just their sales force right, but how well they can help you and vendors that are listening. It's time to upgrade your partner program and your MDF program. With this large of a group of partners dissatisfied with how you do MDF, you must, of a group of partners dissatisfied with how you do MDF, you must find a new way. That new way is going to kind of narrow the aperture to be really around digital and supporting that long-tail partner community, and it's also going to be about the science and the data and how you help those partners navigate through the customer journey touch points.

Speaker 3: 36:39

Love that, that's it.

Speaker 4: 36:40

Yeah, all right, I'll take it Before we close out.

Speaker 3: 36:44

I get one last pitch here, buddy.

Speaker 2: 36:47

I'm happy to be here all night. I'm happy to be here all night if you guys want to continue.

Speaker 3: 36:52

All right? Yeah Well, just one more minute.

Speaker 3: 36:54

So, as we talk about you know, enabling that long tail getting more strategic. Can we double the number of strategic partners or find the strategic partners that we actually want to go a mile deep on because they can subsidize how we're growing our businesses? I think it's going to be critical. One of those critical junctures is data, as Jay and Janet also talked about, but it's the content. At least for us at Growth Story, the content is going to be the biggest piece of getting to that unlock as fast as possible, and that's what we specialize in. So, janet and Jay, I'd love to have another follow-up, if we, if we get to it, about how to pick those, how to pick those right partners based on the needs inside of the business and that kind of thing, and how you subsidize that.

Speaker 2: 37:35

So and with that, and Alex, if you're with us, I'll also give you a last chance, because you had some internet problems, but it would be unfair if we didn't give you a last chance to speak appreciate it can.

Speaker 5: 37:47

Can you guys hear me okay?

Speaker 2: 37:49

am I back?

Speaker 5: 37:50

amazing. Thanks so much. No, I think, uh, last, uh, last word for me, I think it's one. It's been insightful to hear that really, the roi and the long tail is what's going to change the game, and I think the combination with building marketplaces, building partner value and leveraging Gen AI to automate some of the manual steps, that's going to be the future, because I think the brands that can build the most value for the partners make it easy to acquire customers. They're the ones that are going to win in the long term, right, and so brands need to be incredibly focused on how you do that most effectively and scalably all right, amazing.

Speaker 2: 38:25

Thank you so much, and thank you for everyone, uh, who joined us to watch today, and hope you have a great rest of your day.

Speaker 3: 38:34

Bye-bye thanks guys.