Podcast that helps you deep dive working and trending in affiliate and performance marketing. Whether you're running an affiliate program, managing referral partners, working for an affiliate network, employed at a digital marketing agency, or quick starting your career working in the affiliate and performance marketing industry. This is the only podcast you'll need to stay updated with. To stay updated with expertise, trends, and future predictions from a variety of digital experts helping you navigate and grow your affiliate sales. Now, over to Leanne Johnson, an industry vector with over two decades of experience. And your guide helping you make affiliate marketing.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast with me, your host, Leanne Johnston. And today I'm super excited because I've got some really interesting guys on the podcast with me. Partner Hacker exists to be one of the number one places for ideas, inspiration, news, and resources in the partnerships ecosystem. We know we are right at the beginning of a partnerships moment. We're hearing everybody speak about this. We've got people coming on board to tell us a little bit more about it. But businesses are coming together to maximize their ecosystems and to find ways to market themselves using partnerships in a performance model. And today I'm thrilled to have the founders of PartnerHacker, Jared Fuller and Isaac Moerhouse, on this week's podcast to talk about what the next decade of partnerships looks like and who will dominate to drive incremental growth within the space. Seems kind of fitting too as we close out this season of affiliate transformation on the affiliate marketing podcast. So without any further ado, let me introduce you to Jared and Isaac who are joining me to discuss the partnership economy and how this fits into traditional affiliate marketing. Welcome, guys. After that big long intro, say hello and tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got to be here with me today.
SPEAKER_02Hey, Leanne, thanks for having us so much. I mean, I've referred to myself as a market-led entrepreneur. I mean, so the first thing I would say is the market is kind of like, you know, the collective of all of us interacting and interoperating supply, demand, economics, government. I mean, so the timing is right. If we would have if Isaac and I, as much as we like each other and think that we bring some awesome things to the table, if the timing wasn't right in the market, we wouldn't be doing partner hacker today. That's primarily what brings us to this moment. But Isaac, I'll let you jump in there.
SPEAKER_03Well, I mean, Jared, you're you're underselling. So Jared is like the partnerships wizard. Like spent spent years at Pandadoc building a huge partnership there with HubSpot, kind of like a classic uh, we call it partner up play where, you know, small fish making a huge partnership with a bigger, bigger company, and then went on to Drift and pioneered some huge partnerships again over at Drift, and you know, kind of like figured out this massive unlock of partnerships and how you can you can grow so much faster when you work together with other partners and saw kind of the whole playbook that from some of the learned from some of the people that built the HubSpot Agency playbook and kind of immersed himself in this. Started a podcast called the Partner Up Podcast to bring on people to talk about this and to learn out loud about partnerships. So he's like this partnerships master. Now I've known Jared for years, but I've been I've been in a totally different field building companies, mostly in the career and education space. And you know, at the at the end of last year, so this was the end of 2021, I reconnected with Jared and was like, Hey, I'm kind of looking for my next thing. And he's like, Oh, you gotta you gotta come build this partnerships media company with me. And I'm like, B2B partnerships, what are you talking about? I don't know what you're talking about, right? And he's like, No, no, no, no. He he sent me some stuff to listen to. He's he kept dripping stuff to me. Like, just just just read this, listen to this. You know, go look go look at what Jay McBain is talking about. And it it started to click, and I kind of saw, oh, there's something happening here. Cause I've I've always been a student of I'm very entrepreneurial and I love to kind of look at like big inflection points in the market, big shifts. I love big shifts. That's something that I get really excited about. And I got it, I saw this big shift that's happening in the way that companies go to market. That kind of the era of you know, outbound getting played out, even inbound is getting played out, right? So, what's the next play here? What's happening? Who who are the people that are starting to get it? And what are they doing right? And this partnerships going to market together, kind of viewing the whole world as your sales team and your marketing team and co-marketing, co-selling. That I like it clicked for me. So Jared convinced me, even though I'm totally new to all this and I'm learning on the fly as we go about partnerships to come and do this to get partner hacker off the ground. And I to Jared's point, it's all about the moment and the market that we're in. Like the time is right. This is a this is a real shift that's happening, and we've seen that. So that's kind of some background for both of us since Jared undersold himself.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Jared had like one line there, but we we got the gist of it as well. So, okay, so how did the two of you actually meet? And and when did partner hackers start? Because it's it's fairly new, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, partner hackers, what February, the newsletter started, and then May, the website. So very new.
SPEAKER_00And then we had this amazing event, which we're going to talk about a little bit later as well. But I think you hit the nail on the head there in terms of people are starting to look at other businesses as potential partners. Whereas before we had very kind of red uh ocean thinking, very competitive thinking, didn't want to open up your database to other people, didn't want to share any of your information. And now we're sort of breaking down these silos, right? Now, I loved your manifesto. Your manifesto says trust is the new data or trust is being the new data. So, how do you guys see businesses opening up their ecosystems to trust one another with their data and develop deeper beneficial sales relationships right now? Talk a little bit about you know why partner hacker exists.
SPEAKER_02So, from my point of view, it's like the the burden of proof is on people that have insular or direct only go to markets, not the other way around. 76% of world trade is indirect, right? Amazon, your car, the grocery store, like 80% of what's in your house is because of indirect businesses working together, right, for end consumer value. But if we want to get more specific about B2B and SaaS or technology in general, it's just as evident. Every single category leader, without exception, is an ecosystem, period, full stop. And then the ones that you're like, you might try to like come up with an objection to that. Let's say like Netflix. Well, Netflix rose to the top, they owned all the content, it was a walled garden, they kick butt. Guess who's getting their butts handed to them in the market right now? Netflix. Guess who's growing faster than ever? YouTube, TikTok, right? Where the creators can be the producers and the consumers and the commentary, and then they partner and they do affiliate and they do influence. Like influence is all around us. So this myopic worldview where we grew up addicted to cheap customer acquisition as a direct result of inflated capital markets, right? Tons of capital goes into these banks, funding institutions, uh venture capital, they pour it into companies, it goes into the ad platforms, with which thereby raises their stock price, right? Facebook, you know, Meta, YouTube, and on and on, Google. And guess what happens? Well, we've gone from since I've been in Martech, you know, 200 companies in Martech to 10,000, right? We've automated our way out of influence. There is no more automation where you're gonna convince me to do something. Period. Full stop. You can't automate me and influence me, but you can go to someone I trust. So for example, if Isaac brings me something, he's like, hey, I was just talking with such and such, and I think we really need to do X, Y, Z because of ABC. I'm just like, done. Great. So, like, that's the world that we find ourselves in is that companies now are recognizing that the party's over when it comes to cheap customer acquisition costs. There's technology everywhere. And today, how we buy is not reflective of old world go-to-market marketing and sales funnels. How we buy as people is based on what we ask of other people who we trust. So that's what I mean by saying trust is the new data.
SPEAKER_00Well, we're also talking about Gen Z as well, and and how we interact online has changed. Because 20 years ago, when I came into the internet, which is a long time ago, that's the world that you were talking about just then. You know, cheap best customer acquisition, looking at different channels. But everything is blurring now because everybody can be a content curator, everybody can be an influencer, everybody can do a testimonial, everybody can refer somebody else. The technology now exists for us to do that cross-platform. So that kind of brings me to the next question because I wanted to spend just five minutes talking about this partnership economy. Because we hear these words bandied around, but people don't really know what it means. So you've you've kind of touched on it a little bit in terms of how lots of businesses are coming together to build their own ecosystems to break down silos, to break down data walls. And you've put that into your manifesto. But does that work for you know mom and pop store with a WooCommerce site or a Shopify site? Could they go and do a partnership with somebody else? Or is it just, are we just talking about big brands right now that are entering the space?
SPEAKER_03Hey, this is this is what I get really excited about when you say the partnership economy, because it's it's really, I think in terms of economic principles. So you, you know, to Jared's point, 76% of global trade is indirect. So this is nothing new. The idea that the people who are the best at, let's say, designing and building something aren't usually the same people who are the best at building trust, uh educating people, creating, you know, content around things, and you know, distributing, marketing. People specialize, right? What happened in the beginning of the digital age was suddenly the cost of distribution went so low that companies were able to do all of it at first. They were able to say, Oh, cool, we don't have to go through any third parties. We can sell directly now, right? I mean, this is the whole SaaS revolution. You don't have to go have a third-party vendor that comes and installs their box of software. You just stream it directly to the customer, great, and you get that one-to-one relationship. But the but the cost of information and the cost of digital goods being so low also meant now everyone's caught up. So there's this massive proliferation, and you're back to a world of specialization again. Where like who's really the best at creating good content and building trust with an audience? It's probably not the company that's the best at writing code, right? It's it's different cultures. So you got to partner with those people. Let everyone do what they do best and partner up for the rest, right? Nice little rhyme there. I didn't even intend that. But so you kind of, I think we like worked through this initial gold rush phase where it was like, oh my gosh, the cost of distribution because everything's digital, plummeted. We don't we don't need to sp we don't need to work with specialized people to do this. We'll just do it ourselves. And now you have to once again. And so this goes through the entire economy. This goes to small mom and pops, it goes everywhere. And this is a massive opportunity. I I live in rural Tennessee and I went to the gym recently in rural Tennessee, and there was a freezer at the front of the gym, and it said, like, uh, I can't remember the name of the farm, some farm about an hour away, some rural grass-fed beef farm. Here's your pickup location. You get a 10% discount because you're a member of the Powerhouse Gym in some other rural city in Tennessee. These two people realized that they have an overlapping market. The people who go and work out also are interested in grass-fed beef. The grass-fed farmer doesn't have great distribution from their little tiny local spot. So they partner with all these gyms and have meat freezers for pickup and delivery. And it acts as free marketing, right? And they're the gym is taking a cut, I'm sure, or charging them some kind of. This is like, this is an old story, but I think we forgot about it with the advent of the digital age. And now we're re-remembering this model, and it's got all these new benefits because you have digital added on. You can scan that QR code and join the Instagram page for grass-fed beef and do all this other stuff like that. So, yeah, I think it ripples everywhere.
SPEAKER_02And that's why we partner right there. Is uh that was beautifully said, Isaac. I couldn't have said it any better myself.
SPEAKER_00100%, because you've actually just given everybody listening to this podcast a reason to open up an affiliate program and to not just look at certain types of affiliates. Because my my drum that I've been banging on is why are you so heavily invested just on SEO and PPC affiliates? Like, why aren't you working with voucher code sites with loyalty sites? Anywhere and everywhere where your customer is hanging out, the local gym, that could be an affiliate too. They're just, you know, the the the terminology that we use, I think is actually archaic now. The word affiliate is in somebody who's referring to somebody else. It's a partner, uh essentially. It's the same thing. That the, you know, we are relearning this understanding that affiliates don't come in certain boxes, they're not like certain shapes and sizes. Now they're influencers. They're the the local gym down the road, they're you know the farm in rural Tennessee. It just is about matching consumer to supply and demand. And that's pretty much it. And it can include anybody.
SPEAKER_02Leanne, can I throw out something like from my point of view? Because I think about partnerships very broadly encompassing all partner types. And anytime I hear affiliate in 2022, it makes me feel like we're only talking about affiliate link tracking software, right? So, like when I think affiliate, it makes me feel like this is a vendor thing about, but it's not about the wider partner thing that we're also discussing. So I think that that's also part of it. Affiliate is a tight subtype of partnering at large, and it's probably the most scalable, right? It's probably the most cost effective if you can figure it out, and then you can go across channels, but that's where the world is colliding. Things that you would have called affiliate just you know X months or year ago, not that long ago, are now blending into some other things where you might call it influencer marketing. But wait, that's two B2B brands, and you can't track it. Like the affiliate link tracking stuff is breaking in all sorts of places. So we're in the midst of this massive change.
SPEAKER_03No, because this is huge, because we have, you know, so we've got all this content information for people that work in partnerships, and we'll have companies come to us. We have an education hub on our website where you can go and learn about courses that teach you on how to how to be a good partnerships manager, right? So we've had, you know, the companies that put out these courses come and say, Hey, do you want to do like an affiliate thing? Like, do you want to mention our stuff and put an affiliate link in there? And our first response is always, no, we want to do something much more than that. So it's like, yeah, the affiliate part, that's the easy part. We'll do that. No problem. We'll have a link that's trackable and we'll have discounts and we'll have, you know, we can work out the economics of it. But we don't want to just do that because our slogan is trust is the new data, right? So we don't want people to come to our site and feel like it's just a list of links that we're hoping you'll click on so we can get a couple bucks. Let's do something else. Let's do a joint content piece together. Let's put together a webinar. Let's do a survey together that we can that we can issue the results and let's create value for our shared audience. Sometimes we'll say, let's not even worry about money on the first run, because you have an audience that we want and we have an audience that you want. Let's just co-market and co-promote the first go-through and we'll both grow our audiences together. Then we can figure out longer term what's the best economics. And so it's kind of like you want to say yes to affiliate, but only if you can do something above and beyond just having a link there. I'll I'll work with anybody if as long as we can do more than that. I want to add value to that relationship.
SPEAKER_00But you see, that's the key thing, is that I think affiliate managers are so transactional right now in programs, in networks, in agencies, wherever they're working, that they're not looking at it from like a bird's eye view, which is what you guys are looking at right now, which is exactly why I wanted to get you on this podcast, because we need to change that archaic thinking. We need to change that institutionalized thinking of this is what an affiliate program looks like, this is how it should be run. It's run anyway, as long as it's performance-based and it's as long as it's making money. But we need to get people thinking about what are potential partnerships and what could they look like. And that's why I wanted you guys on this podcast. So we've spoken a little bit about your manifesto. We've spoken a little bit about what you guys are doing and how you are partner hacking the way that people should be looking at performance and partnerships. But we also spoke about that it works for every kind of business. But what are some of the key things that businesses should do if they're gearing up to really engage in this bigger, wider partnership economy that we're talking about before they get started? Because it's all great to say, yes, go out there and multiply and do partnerships. But what are some of the key things that they need to get right first before a successful partnership will happen? So is it about matching customers? Is it about understanding what the ROI value is of the partnership? Talk us through some of the kind of like key points that people need to get right before they just rush right in.
SPEAKER_02My point of view is that it's different based on company stage, right? So if you're an e small e-commerce, you know, uh digital retailer versus a B2B SaaS brand versus you know a mature company that's you know eyeing the public markets or is public, you know, different for all of them. Um so the stage matters, but here's some universal principles. And I actually I think I did a decent job, not the best. There's still a lot more work to unpack here in um the one of our latest works, the partner hacker handbook. I wrote a chapter on strategic alliances, and I think the value package that I put together in detail in that chapter is really good because it's called partner up and play to win is the name of the chapter, again from the partner hacker handbook. Some of the things that I unpack in there that I believe are universal principles is it starts with understanding who you want to partner with and what's most important to their business. Now, I don't mean your joint customers. The most common mistake that people make in partnerships is they they try to go, look at what we can do for your customers. Doesn't that make you happy? And it becomes about the customer, which duh, that's table stakes. Like, why are you going out there talking about partnering and talking about customer value? Presumably, you drew deliver customer value, you have a business, you're you're in business. If you don't, then what you know, like that that's table stakes. It's 101. Okay, so what's the next level? What's in it for the partner? And if what's in it for the partner is not something you really well understand, you're never going to be great at partnering. So you have to understand, hey, what's a top three priority that would be echoed by every executive on that team? If I went to the CEO and I said, Is net dollar retention your most important metric? If I went to the CEO and said, hey, is new trial activation from free to paid the most important thing? It better be a resounding yes, because especially whenever there's so many competing forces for attention in business. So you have to understand that. And let's say you find something like I tell a couple stories about how I've identified that and it made a difference. Like with HubSpot, um, Isaac mentioned I developed a partnership with HubSpot earlier. I found out that the most important thing for CRM, HubSpot CRM, was activation from free to paid for new trial signups, right? And I found a way to impact that. And so here's what I mean. What was some of the indicators of behavior or outcomes for the customer that influenced whether or not? Well, turns out moving an opportunity that's created in CRM. So creating an opportunity wasn't quite it, but moving an opportunity to closed one, that was the magic moment. You're 700 times more likely to convert to paid. Well, guess what we did? Pandadoc. We helped people close deals. All right, baby, now we're talking partnerships, right? There's value in it for the end company. And then we have to figure out something else where it's like, okay, how are we going to help produce that value? Well, we hacked a Chrome extension, right? There was no integration, there was no API. We proactively went out and built customer value around that to show as a partner to you, even though you're way bigger than us, here's the kind of value where we're going to help you build stronger APIs, we're going to help you activate more customers. We were all about showing HubSpot, why we were going to be so important to them around their most important metric. That's partnering. It's about them first, you showing you can prove value, and you have the first giver advantage when you do that.
SPEAKER_03That's what I was just saying. That's one of our principles is leverage the first giver advantage. Something we we talk about a lot here. That once you know you've identified someone that's a great partner, you figured out what matters to them. And it's you often people have this feeling like, how do I get their attention? How do I get them to take a call, to talk about partnering? How do I get, get, get? And if you give first, that's your in, right? Hey, it can be something small too. It can be, hey, so-and-so, uh, huge fan of, you know, huge fan of what you guys are doing over there. In fact, we just featured you in our most recent whatever, right? We we featured, we gave you some free promo. Hey, we actually sent a link about your upcoming event to all of our subscribers because we think your stuff is great. It's a give, right? So you're you're building trust by showing you're giving something, right? You're giving some value right away. So much harder for them to say no to a conversation then. So I think that's that's just that little thing alone breaks open so many, so many uh here's a perfect example following off that Isaac.
SPEAKER_02How the how partner hacker even started, or how the podcast started two years ago. I went to Crossbeam, so it's one of the account mapping um softwares in the partnerships tech space, Crossbeam along with Reveal. And I said, Hey, I'm starting a Podcast. I don't think anyone's doing it right in this space. Um, I want to give you the sponsor promo spot on the first 10 episodes 100% for free. Just because I'm using your software, I like what y'all are doing. I'm gonna give it to you 100% for free. Will you just give me a couple shout-outs to like thanks for you know producing content? That's how I started before there was ever a company, before anything else. I started by approaching Crossbeam and saying, hey, I'm gonna give this to you. If you want to give some shoutouts, that'd be awesome. And years later, you know, CrossBeam's a big customer. We've we have a fully profitable business that's worth millions of dollars now that started with giving. It didn't start with taking. That's partnerships, that's the core in the DNA.
SPEAKER_00I think that's the core of affiliate marketing too. I mean, it's always about what can you give your partners that's gonna help them or your affiliates or influences, whatever you want to label these people, these referral partners. What are you gonna give them that's gonna help them give back to you? And when you think about your program that way and you think about your partnerships that way, you can only succeed because it's not about you, it's about them. And that's sometimes I think forgotten as well. So I wanted to kind of get onto this, onto the partner hacker summit, which was on the 7th of November, which was brilliant, by the way. I did attend, I actually physically attended some of the talks. And I want you two to talk about what the key outcomes of that summit was, because there were quite a lot of people there, a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different discussions. Why why did you decide to host this summit and bring businesses together to take a closer look at how partnerships are being approached? And what were some of the key things that you guys learned from bringing all of these people together?
SPEAKER_03The the PLX Summit stands for Partner Led X or Partner Led Everything. And by the way, if you go to PLX Summit.com, all the recordings are available for free. It was a five-day event with department to buy department, partner-led startup, partner-led product, partner-led marketing, sales, success. This was one of those moments where you kind of feel something, you think you're on to something, that the market, the movement, as I mentioned, it's real. We've got indicators that there's something big happening here. And then you're like, let's let's see how big it really is. Let's take a bit of a gamble here. And that was Jared's move. He was like, look, Isaac, we got to do this virtual event. We're gonna have 5,000 people show up at a virtual event about partnerships. And it's not just gonna be partnerships people, we're gonna get people from sales, marketing, success to talk about partnerships as a strategy. And that terrified me, but it intrigued me too. Like, okay, let's try it. Could we really do it? Like, we launched this thing as much to find out if we were drunk on our own Kool-Aid as to as to deliver, like we we had a hunch, but we really wanted to see like, could you really, could you really get that many people there? Um, and so we went out and said, let's do it, let's make it happen. And it was kind of like a bold statement to say we see momentum, we see this boulder rolling down the hill, let's give it a shove, let's push it a little faster, let's let's see if we can break this open. And that was kind of the goal of PLX. Like, let's go beyond just partnerships people talking about these strategies and let's get the entire go-to-market strategy, let's get the entire company talking about these strategies. Is there are there people that actually want those conversations? And it turns out there were. We had we we didn't quite hit 5,000. We had about 4,600 people register for this event. Uh, with like, well, I mean, what do we plan it, Jerry? It was like three months of planning or something. It was crazy. So that was kind of the impetus of it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and we would we would have hit it too if I hadn't at the same time at the exact same time planned this entire thing around, you know, child number two. I had my best friend, you know, pass away. My everyone in the house had COVID. Like it was the the that three months was wild. And I think it's reflective of you know us setting an audacious goal, like Isaac said. But I I feel like we were such a we didn't even have Aaron when we started it. Like it was like three of us, you know, coordinating a movement, and then me being like half out for you know like a month. Like it was wild how much went into it. But at the same time, it's crazy to think we had people like Andrew Chan of Andreessen Horowitz, right? Mainstream, right? Nathan Lacka, the antithesis of VC, the most sued podcaster on the internet and founder of FounderPath, just raised $150 million in crazy down market, all the way to um Brent Adamson, you know, the Challenger sale, the most popular sales book of the past 15 years. I mean, we had mainstream people there and people from every department. And uh, because I've been saying, you know, partnerships is not a department, it's a strategy for every department.
SPEAKER_00100%. So, what are some of the key things that you guys learned from having all of these people together? What were some of the big talking points that came out of this event that stood out for you?
SPEAKER_02To me, it was I've been referring, I've always felt this way, but I've been referring to partner hacker as a movement company, not a media company. We're a movement company that does media, not a media company. We're the other way around. Meaning how we felt is like for those people that have been in partnerships and it's not been fully embraced as a company strategy. So if you were in partnerships at HubSpot during HubSpot's hypergrowth or at maturity or at Salesforce or at Microsoft, your world of partnering is just it's a normal job. You go home to your family, you sleep well at night, you're paid well, you're in tech, you're in a place of privilege, and you enjoy what you do. But if you've been in partnering in a company where it has not been baked into the ethos, where it's been something on the sideline is a nice to have, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and people just think of you as like an afterthought, that's a really horrible, sucky position to be in. And I have a lot of gray hair to prove that. I'm 33, but my gray hair is like I'm gonna have that gray fox look going on real quick from having to fight those fights with executives and boards of directors and people that don't get it. So for me, the biggest takeaway was this feeling of we're on the right side of history. And I don't mean Isaac, me, and the partner hacker team. I meant the thousands of people who are there that there is a better world where we can interoperate and work together. And that's, you know, our mission is to build a world where everyone can win together. And that's just a much better business environment. It's the relationships that you like, they're not about transactions, they're about long-term value, right? I've been getting value from Isaac for over a decade. He's taught me a lot through his writing and podcasts and work and the people that he's trained that like I have derivative value from Isaac. There's people that have listened to his stuff that have become better people that I have hired and worked for me. That's the way that value in the world works. That's the same way that it should work for business. I like that world. That's the world I want to live in. So for me, my biggest takeaway is we kind of have a movement. This is a moment, it is a feeling. I feel I feel a little slightly more whole. How about that?
SPEAKER_03So I'll I'll give you maybe a more um, a less uh uh more unexpected takeaway because there's some easy ones, right? Like for me, it's okay, what if what do you take away if you attend this thing each of the days? You're like, oh my gosh, there's so much ability to create value by co-innovating with companies and building your product on a on an ecosystem strategy and you know, sales day, co-selling is this really cool thing that's emerging and co-marketing, and you have you know success. Though I've already sold on all those, so those are like the easy ones, right? Like, oh you know, I I I those are my takeaways, but those are easy. Here's one that was a surprise to me. We had a surprisingly high number of people who have been in the partnerships game, often by a different name, maybe channels, maybe affiliates for decades, and they've and they've been at it and I don't want to say worn down, but kind of just like just gr grinding through, right? And then they're hearing something from this kind of new startup y version of partnerships, which has got a lot of differences, but a lot of similarities. And so seeing a lot of the kind of like older, sort of traditional, if you want to call it that, partnerships, professionals, and strategies coming to the table and saying, and and a few of them, you'll run into a few that get grumpy and are like, well, this is nothing new. I've been around, blah, blah, blah. And they're they're not happy about people coming in and getting attention by talking about things that they already knew. But most of them, that's rare. Most of them are like, oh my goodness, there's fresh life being breathed into this. Yes, yes, there's something here. And and I have something to offer. This thing that was considered boring old enterprise channel, whatever. I actually have a lot of wisdom I can bring to all these plucky young upstarts who are doing this thing that they call partnerships. I called it channel affiliate management, whatever. And you just see this cross-pollination that's really cool. You see, sort of it doesn't actually correlate to age necessarily, but just for sake of explanation, the energy of youth with the wisdom of age, so to speak, kind of colliding. And that was a very unexpected takeaway for me.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's the most exciting thing I love about this industry and why it's the only career I've ever had. Because I think every kind of five to ten years, a new cycle has come up, a new innovation has come up. The I mean, if I think about my career history, I mean, I started way back before there was even Google. I mean, it makes me sound really old, but that is how old the internet is. Pretty much my entire adult life I've spent in the internet. And this is a sec is like a third or fourth iteration of what online is going to allow us to do, what data is going to allow us to do. And I think to ignore it and just go, oh, well, that's not for me, is actually silly because a lot of the partnership tactics that you were talking about in this session can be applied to affiliate programs and should be applied to affiliate programs, which is why I wanted you guys on this podcast. So I want you guys to talk just to close off and talk to us a little bit about what you think the state of affiliated partnership marketing is going to do in the next decade, because we're at the cusp of a new movement, which I love, I love that phraseology that you use, Jared. But what do you think the big moves and changes are going to be in the decade that comes, especially as we're looking at everybody's talking about Web 3.0, like how do we get into the metaverse? Do you think partnerships are going to become a much bigger part of the way that businesses want to connect with their consumers? What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I'll I'll give a couple thoughts and I'll let Jared, he's probably got more. I think for the affiliate world, I have a hunch that deep is going to be wide. So instead of just sort of a lightweight, here's a bunch of, you know, here, go go get a bunch of people to do affiliate deals with us to set, you know, to promote our stuff and get a kickback. Saying, let's actually involve those people in product development, in content creation. Let's let them have a hand in something so that it's more than just an affiliate, that it it doesn't just give them a financial kickback, but it elevates them in some way. It helped it enhances their ability to build trust with their audiences. It allows them to deliver something special and unique, right? And so an affiliate, I think, is going to become a deeper relationship that will start to blend more with just partnership in general, right? With with other forms of whether it's white labeling or there's all kinds of different ways that it can manifest. I think that's one deep depth over breadth. And then again, because people want trust. They want, they want to have trust with their audiences and they want to be able to add value to their audiences. And then I think another one that's more like, you know, maybe in this sort of web three emerging space where it's kind of like the ownership economy. I kind of imagine, and this is sort of vague, but like creators and just everyone, you almost imagine the way their movie is made, where you have thousands of people come together and work on a project for a couple of years, but they're not all employed by a company. They're all independent, different companies, contractors, but they're all working together and then they all disperse again, right? And it's like I almost see the nature of work itself and ownership changing to where more and more people have ownership over things and treat themselves as their own company, so to speak, so that you could have sort of these multiple streams of income and payments that are being split between multiple people who contributed to a project, but maybe didn't own it. You know, you're an independent, you know, developer or whatever, you create something every time there's an API call, you get paid somehow. Some things like this where I think you start to think about what that might mean for affiliates and like maybe affiliate marketplaces where you kind of have the ability to like, you know, if you share my link and then you share my link, you get a cut and I get a cut from that cut. And like some of these things that might be possible with some of the technology, um, that's kind of where I see like ownership sort of leaking down into all the way down to the individual level, less about firms, more about individuals. But that's a that's a little vague.
SPEAKER_00That is already happening with the advancement of crypto because you can pay fractions of you know pennies for things that are getting shared. And and I'm seeing a lot of stuff in that space. So I agree with you there. Jared, what about you?
SPEAKER_02I've cited the stat a lot because uh what's rose what's more remarkable to me is that the stat didn't change between 2011 and 2022. And the stat I'm talking to is the average number of ads that an American sees on a daily basis. Deloitte's annual state of marketing report is a seminal piece of work. It's probably 50 to 100 pages long, depending on the year. And the one that shocks me the most is the average American receives 400 to 10,000 advertisements per day. There is no more room to serve me anything else. So, what does that mean? It means that we've reached a saturation point of attention, right? So you're no longer competing for someone's business, we're competing for attention. And you can go watch because I sp I sp I am a voracious uh podcast listener. I listen to a lot because I like to keep a pulse on the finger of what popular culture is really leaning into. And if you go listen to any of the most famous podcasts right now, like YouTube for like the younger generation, you'll hear them talking about the same things, like clippable things, and even if it's long format, you know, attention is the thing that we're all competing for. Well, uh I think about this this way: what's the root of affiliate? It's affinity. Affinity is this law of attraction between two people, which is about some sort of kinship and an implied mutual value where you both are looking out for the same thing, which is not either one of you, it's the family unit, right? So the anthropo, you could kind of like break down the anthropology of kinship. Affinity is that relationship in there, it's the thing that binds. So I think the future of partner marketing, the future of affiliate marketing in this next decade is about creating something that makes people feel like they have to be a part of the equation, right? The quality of content and the meaning, the purpose behind it. Like, what is the result of all of this tech? I'm dead serious. What is the result of all like we've all spent our time on B2B with this podcast and stuff? What's the net effect of it? Well, let me tell you the net effect of sales technology. For the past 14 years, Tiffany Bova, the number one Gartner analyst of all time, she's uh the head of global evangelism for Salesforce, you know, BFS with Ben Anyoff, she's been tracking this for 14, 15 years. On any given month, quarter, or year, 56% of sellers don't hit quota. That hasn't changed in 15 years of sex sales technology. Here's my point the companies that are gonna win, the partner marketing and the affiliates that are gonna win, they're gonna stand for something that captivates people and grabs their attention and creates affinity, right? This law of kinship amongst people that advances the world to a better place. And that's, you know, I all that we're trying to do and all that partner hackers trying to do, the way I'm trying to do, is to build some of that affinity and that kinship. That's why I use words intentionally. We had uh James Courier from NetworkEffects and FX.com on our podcast, and he talked about, you know, language being one of the network effects, right? So I very intentionally talk about ourselves as a movement company, right? And creating this binding effect between people. I think the things that we're talking about in this podcast, with like, you know, us very few number of people are going to be immutable laws of marketing five years from now, right? The language that we use and the affinity, the kinship, the movement, right? You'll see movement be a thing that's trying to be replicated in my perspective over the next, you know, eight years.
SPEAKER_00Well, I have to say that I 100% agree with you guys because I've been banging my drum. If you read my newsletters, affinity is a big word that I use very often. And I have a very similar mindset to you with what we're building here at Affiliate Insider. We are building a tribe of people that are invested in building partnerships, not just driving traffic from one place to another, but actually understanding the principles behind what makes a successful affiliate program and how to manage all of those partners effectively and efficiently when your program becomes really big. Um, and that's kind of where we sit as a business. But I have to say that this has been one of my favorite podcasts, and I don't want to say that because every guest is my favorite podcast, but I have never met two people that are more in tune with what my mindset is on affiliate marketing. And I am one of those oldies that comes from, you know, 20 years ago. But we are living a movement and we have been living a movement, and it is cyclical. And it has just been an absolute pleasure to have you both on this podcast with me today because even I'm thinking about new ways of how we kind of engage and talk about what we're doing here. So thank you so much for coming on to our podcast and talking about the movement that partner hacker is burning between businesses that want to work in a performance-related relationship. It's been my pleasure to host you both on this podcast today.
SPEAKER_03Thanks for having us. It's been a fun combo. Thank you, Leanne.
SPEAKER_00And that's a wrap for season nine's affiliate marketing podcast, where we have been exploring the transformation of affiliate marketing. Shortly you'll be hearing a little teaser about what's coming up in season 10, but I hope that you're still enjoying this podcast and that you're looking forward to joining us at our Amplify Summit, which is taking place on the 17th and 18th of January, where we'll be deep diving affiliate marketing, what's coming up in future, and how affiliate managers can launch, scale, and grow their affiliate programs in the year ahead.
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