SPEAKER_02

Discover Affiliate Mastery at AM Leaders. Join us on October 23rd in London, UK, for a game-changing affiliate manager training event. Learn from industry leaders, fine-tune your program management skills, and stay ahead with the latest affiliate marketing strategies. In partnership with other partner and approvals, this interactive workshop is your path to affiliate programme management success. Don't miss up on this opportunity to learn from the best minds in the industry. Tickets are only £399, and if you already have a PR live ticket, enjoy a £50 discount with the AM as an additional event. Visit Aproverst Media.com and click on AM to balance to secure your spot.

SPEAKER_01

Hurry because seats are limited.com. The chapter and verse of everything you need to know about running a successful affiliate program for your business. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies and matec providers who operate, support, or manage affiliate marketing programs around the globe. If you want to launch, scale, and grow a successful affiliate marketing program, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is constantly changing. And tune in to industry experts who are getting behind our mic to share tactical insights and practical knowledge to help your affiliate program grow. Here you'll discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing, how to run your affiliate program successfully and gain industry insights from experts and practitioners from around the globe. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else. Now here's your award-winning affiliate and performance marketing host, an industry veteran, your affiliate marketing guide and the founder of Affiverse, Leanne Johnston.

SPEAKER_02

Welcome everybody back to this week's episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast. And today I'm joined by the Director of Partner Marketing for Jasper Del AI, Alec Badricki. Alec, how's it going?

SPEAKER_00

It's going well. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_02

I'm super excited to have you on because AI seems to be the big topic that everybody is chunking about and talking about in my world at least. And there's nobody better to bring on to talk about this than you. So before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about how you got into affiliate and partnership marketing?

SPEAKER_00

I've been in partners pretty much my entire career as it pertains to being in the tech space. I joined HubSpot about 15 years ago as a consultant to help their newly growing channel partner program. I was on the services side, so working directly with them. And then shortly after that, moved over to the marketing side to kind of have more impact at scale. And then, you know, I helped grow their channel program, their tech partner program, helped with their affiliate program, then moved over to Airtable to help with their partnerships and ecosystems. And now I'm a Jasper, as you mentioned, helping with their channel partners, tech partner marketing, and of course affiliates as well. So been it my entire career and kind of just found my way in. And I I love uh working in the space. I love, you know, forging partnerships and working with constituents that, you know, are outside of an organization that could help it grow in scale.

SPEAKER_02

We're gonna talk about that a little bit because growing a SAS program or partnership program is actually quite difficult and quite different to normal affiliate programs. And I do get asked this question quite a lot. But before we get into that, I have long since been a fan of Jasper.ai. I think I was one of the early users when it first came out, and I was tinkering with it and figuring out how I can use it to write, you know, and produce content. But prior to Chat GPT becoming the kind of next big thing, can you talk to us a little bit about what Jasper is and the background as to what it does and why it's a little bit different to other AI tools?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, sure thing. So uh Jasper is a generative AI tool, and generative AI is all about using artificial intelligence to create copy, to create creative, etc. Jasper has been around for a couple years, and it was kind of actually the first generative AI platform on the space before ChatGPT came around. We actually had access to OpenAI's API before they launched ChatGPT. They did, the entire world kind of like blew up with AI being a thing. And us, you know, being a first mover, it was great. Uh, we got early funding, but then we kind of realized we're like, hey, we need to like pivot and focus on something in order to stay, you know, relevant and successful in this space. So our pivot was more towards marketing teams. So if you look at ChatGPT or um, you know, some of the others in the space that just focus on copywriting, uh, we've really pivoted heavy into the idea of uh focusing on marketers and marketing teams. So solving for their specific use cases. So whereas like a you know, a generative AI copywriting tool might help you make you know more content. What we care about is not just more content, but more effective content because marketers care about not just you know producing great content, but also making sure it performs well, learning from that and continue doing that. That's where we're kind of going and how we differentiate ourselves in the AI space.

SPEAKER_02

So that must be one of the biggest reasons or one of the biggest areas that you think AI is going to disrupt the way that we market to customers and also to our affiliates, because content is a big part of everything that we do in performance marketing, whether it's working with traditional kind of SEO type or blogger type affiliates, or through even right now, into the kind of influence and creator economy. So, what do you think AI is about to disrupt in this particular space, both for the customers' benefits in terms of the end user that receives this content and the partners themselves?

SPEAKER_00

So I think like AI has drastically lowered the barrier to getting content shipped, at least as it pertains to generative AI and creating content. So I think with that, and we're already starting to see it, you're just going to see a ton of content proliferation. There's just going to be so much more out there right now. And I think it's going to be more important than ever for those who are producing content with the intention of having that content lead to a business outcome, to one, stay ahead of like where the SERPs are going in terms of how they're going to be, you know, grading their content that's published on the web to ensure it's ranking correctly. And then two, making sure that they are producing content in such a way that uh pieces with those guidelines. We're already starting to see it with like how Google is starting to introduce generative AI into their search mix, how they're starting to favor, you know, more uh novel, uh original ideas, and they're trying to combat this probably incoming wave of crap content, right? Because people are getting in using these tools and saying, hey, now it takes me one tenth of the time to create two times as much content as before. Uh, but they're not really putting like polish on it, they're not putting the human element, they're not putting the strategy behind it, they're probably just putting the prompt and saying, give me a blog post on these ten things. Great, done, shipped. And I think that's going to lead to a lot of really bad content for reparation. So advice for marketers in this space is to, you know, stay ahead of, you know, where i the industry is going in terms of what's going to create successful content and really have a strong point of view on how you will leverage these tools to reach that outcome. Because AI is not just replacing it and you're done. You still need to incorporate that human element into it to ensure you're writing strategic, valuable, and original content that gets found and used.

SPEAKER_02

You've touched on a word there that I just want to kind of dig into a little bit is the original content. Now there's a lot of talk happening about who owns this content that's created by AI. How do you kind of make sure that it's not copying or scraping from other places around the internet, whatever the case may be? Like, what are your thoughts on how we should be managing all of that or thinking about managing it?

SPEAKER_00

If we're up to me, like I'm not, you know, the legislative power to be in order to like, you know, put these rules into place. And in uh if I talk about a little bit about how I'm designing some of the partner programs here at Jasper, I'm requiring partners to lead with transparency, especially those that are using AI to create content on behalf of their clients. I think there's a lot of folks out there that are starting to say, like, I get a competitive advantage, and I'm not going to tell my end client that I'm producing it using AI, and you know, I'll get it done half the time and they'll still charge me the same amount of money. I think it's more important right now, um, especially as AI tools are taking off, to be very transparent about its usage and upfront, especially when you're serving a client. So to your point around original content and how you it's kind of murky. Like I think there's going to be a lot of thrash in these next couple months and years as people kind of figure out, you know, what is the right principle. You know, you see different regions around the world who kind of treat it differently. So it'll be interesting to see where the chips fall. But in my opinion, if we're up to me, it's you know, being transparent about your usage of AI and being ethical about it too, not you know, trying to say, like, write this as if you are uh Stephen King, uh, right? Like, not trying to blatantly rip off somebody because of it. So that's that's that's generally my stance. Uh I I mean I can't enact the laws, but I generally think that AI should be looked at as a tool uh and not a replacement or a um sort of a means to copy something else uh entirely, right?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I mean we use time-saving tools and things and trackers and things in our day-to-day jobs anyway. I mean, from you know, time tracking and agencies to all sorts of other things. That transparency, I think, is is very, very important for affiliates to actually also be transparent with their affiliate managers, not just about the content that they're writing for the customer, for the end user. There's a lot of talk about people, you know, creating uh AI policies in their in their contract terms with affiliates where they they're gonna have to, you know, pre-approve content or you know, look at content and and really say like you can use AI tools for this kind of content, but not for this kind of content. So a lot of people are looking at it right now. I wanted to touch on this in your own program as well because we spoke so much about what you guys have done that's successful, and I know a lot of people are gonna want to hear this, but what is it that you do to make your partners understand your tool and and get successful with with it when they join? Because a lot of affiliates join B2B SaaS programs or, you know, um SAS tool programs, and then they sort of just they join, but they never really do anything. And do you think it's because there's this misunderstanding of what the product is and does? They know that their customers need it, but they don't actually know it. So what do you guys do differently at Jasper?

SPEAKER_00

I think a requirement is to fake uh have folks use it. We're going to start to institute a training requirement as well and certification in the coming quarters. So uh you heard it here first, but uh it'll be uh down the road a little bit as well to ensure that you know not only are affiliates, you know, promoting the product effectively, but they're also like understanding it pretty deeply as well. What's very unique about a product where it's for marketers is that you can require your partners that are also marketers to learn it and use it and for them to be more successful too. So there's almost like a compounding value there, which is great. But I want to really lean into that in the coming quarters. So we have a Jasper certification. Uh, we're building out more AI certifications as well. I don't think I'm going to make it like, you know, taking like the bar exam for you to become an affiliate, but at least being familiar with the product and using it is going to 100% be, you know, something that we require in the next couple quarters as we, you know, look to make even more uh improvements in the program.

SPEAKER_02

I guess you'd have a lot of affiliates using the platform anyway, because they will, you know, affiliates need content creating tools. So I guess it's easy for you to make it make them a master of the tool anyway, because they're probably like, you know, 90% of them are probably using it. But what about other SaaS products? Like, you know, products that affiliates wouldn't norm normally naturally use. Like, how how do you think that affiliate managers can make that transition from the affiliate signing up to the affiliate actually getting active? Do you think that it has to be an academy process or do you think short form videos still work? Like, what has your been experience? You've you've worked on multiple different SaaS platforms.

SPEAKER_00

I I think the education is important. One because it kind of it kind of distills down the people who are most serious about joining your program and learning the product and actually wanting to talk about it, as opposed to those that are probably like, hey, I'm just gonna make a quick book and just promote this to my you know uh audience. Um so I think there's there's probably something there that's that's beneficial in terms of a barrier to entry that makes a lot of sense um to implement. And and two, like, you know, learning the product deeply is only going to help them better market it to their end clients. So while I wouldn't say that like, you know, if you're like a CRM or a finance tool that like you should require an affiliate who wouldn't use it in their natural tool set to like drive affiliate marketing to actually like purchase or use or get like a discounted, you know, uh subscription to it, I would encourage some sort of you know benchmark training that they would have to go through in order to be accepted as an affiliate into the program. Um so you A, are confident that they know the tool and B that it's a forcing function for them to learn it so that they can better communicate it to their audiences.

SPEAKER_02

And I think it's also about like forcing because you know, some affiliates are techies. They're not, they don't, they don't want to sit and have a face-to-face conversation. Some are and some aren't. And it depends on who who you're dealing with. But I really feel like that first onboarding, first touch experience that an affiliate has in your program sets the scene for how they're going to develop as a partner later on. And we often want to rush to the sales part. We want to go, oh, somebody signed up to the program and they're in. So let me try and sell them this promotion or this offer or this thing. And they forget about that kind of training and getting to know you phase and the courtship almost gets fast-tracked. And maybe that's why, you know, with SAS Tools, it doesn't actually like you get many programs that I look have at have hundreds of affiliates joined, but only very few become active. And I think a little bit of time and energy needs to be spent on that initial, like getting to know you phase almost strip feeding that even.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and you know, it's what's interesting too is like if you look at you know an affiliate, they can't put all their eggs in one basket with one tool, right? Because programs change, you know, they might change the affiliate program. Like you need to kind of diversify the amount of tools that you partner with in terms of promoting them. So then it creates that, you know, that challenge where, hey, I can't like purchase and learn all these tools and do affiliate marketing. So there's a balance there too, right? So uh I think it's important to have training, but not to be like so super deep that you're gonna turn away some people who would be legitimately good affiliate that just don't have the bandwidth to like go deep on one tool because it's not indicative to the way that they do affiliate marketing.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and they might be marketing multiple different things, and you know, yours is just one of them. So, like how do you differentiate that partner to somebody who's going all deep? We spoke at length about the strategy that you have in Jasper's partnership program, and I want to kind of uh delve in into that right now because it seems like the right time. But first of all, you've got a very robust affiliate program that you've built. But can you talk us through how you segment your partners and what offerings you have in place to continue in drive scale? Because more often than not, strategies are oh, we need an affiliate program, and that just lumps everybody together. And you you can't actually manage all of these different partners in the same way. So talk us through your strategy behind that and hopefully help us to educate some of the other affiliate managers that are tuning in.

SPEAKER_00

You know, the the way that the partner programs are sort of structured along our go-to market is really with what is the offering that the partner offers to the end customer. If we look at affiliates, which was, you know, a very large part of Jasper's initial growth was partnering with these, you know, these um affiliates that would promote our platform and help us grow and help them grow and help our customers grow. They were promoting Jasper to their audiences. And we made sure that these audiences were aligned with our core persona. We had a product-led growth motion where you know you could sign up for a creator or a team's account. It was very easy for affiliates to promote those things. You didn't need to talk to a sales rep in order to get signed up. So it was a very easy sort of, hey, the offering here is that the affiliates are going to promote Jasper to their audiences and get them signed up to using the product. If you look at other parts of our go-to-market and the other offerings, uh we have a solutions partner program. And the offering that these partners offer to our customers is services around the Jasper product. So after the customer signs up, they need help like building a style guide or a brand book or something that you could use to power Jasper even further. And sometimes these partners are even building the content on behalf of the client. So like a managed services partner, but also a referral partner too, because they are looking at their clients and saying who would be a good fit for AI-powered content creation. Okay, let's bring this client on and partner with Jasper to get them set up and go. They might be writing the content, the end client might be writing the content, but at the end of the day, the partner's kind of guiding them through this, through the sale and through the post-sale services that this uh solutions partner would offer. The other type of partner that we have is a tech partner, uh, a little bit different. These are the ones that would leverage our APIs or STKs to build an integration into Jasper with an ancillary tech stack platform, or leverage our APIs to embed Jasper's generative AI functionality into their platform. So it's a little bit of a technology um sort of partnership right there. But they're offering is the integration or the functionality within another SaaS tool that they could uh show to their customers as well. Marketing promotion from affiliates, services and referral motions from uh the solutions partners, and then uh integrations and embedded integrations from the tech partners. So that's you can kind of look at the go-to market and that's kind of the partners.

SPEAKER_02

So, how long did it take you to figure out that there were actually three different types of like funnels into your partnership program? This has obviously been honed over time, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's it's over time, and it really depends on the you know the business strategy of the organization. Right now we're a hybrid product-led growth and sales-led growth organization, predominantly product-led growth in the early days. We did not have a sales team. But then once you build a sales team and you have a you know an upmarket product that's going to be, you know, very much aligned with these solution partners, that's when you can justify saying, okay, now we need a partner program that kind of helps us scale that side of the business. The affiliates helps you scale that side of, hey, we we need distribution, we need to partner with these organizations to get the word out, and we have the product-led growth sort of mechanism to make it happen. Um, but then as you mature or kind of start to think about sales-led growth, that's when some of these other partnerships start to pop up as well. Even the tech partnerships too, because we're starting to partner with, you know, or try to close mid-market or larger businesses who want to integrate or, you know, build deeper functionality with our platform in either, you know, their tech stack or another tool that they're using. And they say, hey, you know, this is great. You have tech partners that integrate with this, et cetera. Whereas some of the smaller customers on the, you know, they're just using it for a couple of different things, but the more sophisticated customers need the more robust technology or a uh working with a solutions partner to do the post-sale services delivery. So it it just depends on you know the growth of the company and and and where it's at.

SPEAKER_02

And do you create the programs like how do you figure out the commercials then for these different types of partners? Because you can't you I mean, I know you don't have a one-size-fits-all program, affiliate program. And we use the word affiliate quite loosely here because like affiliate to me is anybody that refers somebody for a commission of some sorts and and pay on performance. It's not a type of different part, like it's not an influencer or creator or SEO or blogger or whatever. How how did you figure out what those commercial terms need to be? Did you actually work with the partners to figure that out? Or did you just look at your kind of balance sheet and go, this is how it needs to be?

SPEAKER_00

Uh, it's I mean, it's um it's a multi multifaceted uh approach of you know, working with with finance and working with the ops team and working with the sales team to kind of figure out like here's the sales team commission, and you know, if we need to have partners that are referring, you know, sales deals and a sales rep needs to come in and help close it, like how who gets the piece of the pie here and here and here and here. So it there's a lot of different conversations that layer up to it. Uh what's good though is there's a lot of industry standards if you look at a lot of different companies and how they do it. Um, you know, like 15 to 20 percent is a typical like referral rate uh for both affiliates and for like uh referral solution partners. But um, you know, that you can go with that as a benchmark and start to work your way from there. But again, like you know, it also depends on other factors. You know, if you're a first mover in the space, that's great. Uh, you might not want to start with a huge commission because at some point you might need to walk it back as you know, more competitors enter the space and you can't continue to pay out like you know, 40% over, you know what I mean? Like, so there's those types of considerations you need to look at as you launch this thing. But to answer your question, the commercials, it's just conversations with partners, conversations with customers, conversations with internal teams to kind of figure out the right sweet spot. There's a lot of supply and demand discovery too. Like, you know, is there enough services on the customer side that would warrant having solution partners fill those gaps? Can we identify that, figure out what those offerings are, and then be able to connect them with the solution partners who would be able to deliver on that? It's you know, it's it's a it's a it's a relatively like easy exercise, but I think what complicates it in this space is AI is so new, like nothing's ever been written here. So, like what are these AI-powered services? So we're also like trying to pioneer that simultaneously. So it's exciting, but like at the same time, you have to like pull from the old book and like write the new book at the same time.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so build the plane and fly it, as they say, all at the same time. Okay, so how difficult is it to build a successful affiliate program in SaaS? Because you've done this multiple times for big, big companies. I mean, HubSpot is kind of like the you know, holy grail of SAS products. What are some of the tips that you can share with affiliate managers that are not as experienced as you that are running these SAS affiliate programs? Give us like the three golden nuggets of things that you need to get right if you're running. And growing or launching and scaling a SAS affiliate program, like in your opinion?

SPEAKER_00

I think I think the first one is start with the customer and really understand, you know, what the the benefit of bringing affiliates or partners into the mix would be. I think a lot of organizations sometimes would be like, we need to like bring in partners. And then you do, and they're not meshing with what customers actually need. So it's like really digging down to your customer base and saying, like, okay, are there like ancillary services that these customers might need that we can't fulfill? Do we envision a world where you know we're growing so fast that our own professional services team can't keep up with the demand of these services? In that case, it's like, okay, maybe now we could justify building a uh, you know, a partner program where, you know, not only do these businesses uh refer business, but they also offer services. And then taking a look at those organizations and is like, you know, what do they care about? Do they care about a commission? Do they care about a discount? They probably care about their services revenue. Uh a lot of these like consultancies and agencies that I work with, their margins are razor thin and they really care about the services revenue. The commission's icing on the cake, the discount's icing on the cake for the software. What they care about is the revenue that they're going to make off the services. So if the customers don't want services, and you know, the you know, so you can kind of do the math, and you're like, okay, and then maybe it's not the right time for a problem. So I think first it's kind of like just dig into the customer and understand what the demand would be, and then use that to justify what type of partnership program might be warranted based on the demands of the customer. Second piece of advice, I would say like once you check the boxes there, do a really do your due diligence, understanding what the commercial incentives are for the partner. Don't start like wait, like I think a lot of people like jump in and they're like, let's give them 50% commission for life. And everyone's like, Yeah, you get a lot of partners that are really excited, and you join and then and then like two years down the road, you're like, uh, the finance team is like, I don't think it's gonna work out anymore. And then you gotta be like, sorry, you know how we like, and you gotta walk it back, and then you know, the partners are mad, and it's like, you know, so it I think it's really easy to try to get partners excited and join to show that really quick uptick, but you know, meet somewhere in the middle or just be very careful about how you approach that because you know, typically uh it's a balancing act, right? Like yeah, it's almost like um one of those scales, like you could put all this on one side and that's great, but all of a sudden it just i the the scales tip, so you gotta really just figure out uh the right incentive model early on and don't end up on pleasing the partner. Always solve for the customer. Again, go back to point one, like solve for the customer and then you will solve for the partner. I think too many times people try to solve for the partner first, and uh then you kind of rub yourself into a corner. And then I think the third piece of advice that I would say is just keep educating everybody internally about the value of partners, show it, like go overboard. Um, I think sometimes if you and this is this is like a you know a pitfall that I fell into a couple times, is coming from an organization like HubSpot that like partners was in their DNA. Going to an organization, like you cannot make that assumption that everybody's gonna get it, everybody's gonna be on board, and everything's gonna be gonna have sunshine and rainbows. You need to show success early on, keep showing success, keep singing that, like, and just keep hammering it over the head. You know, that that that's something that I've run into that I I didn't anticipate uh being difficult. It's not that people don't think it's gonna be successful or don't want to help you, it's just like they haven't seen what a successful, you know, channel or partner program can be at an organization, and you're trying to build one, but you need their support so much early on. Partners are like a layer around an organization, and you need to like get the whole organization aligned so that the layer can be successful. So really making sure that you address that as frequently as is possible is is important.

SPEAKER_02

I want to be cheeky and add a fourth thing there, if you don't mind, because I think all of all three of them are incredibly important. But the fourth thing is also to have a little patience. And you touched on that in in number two, where you said, you know, you really need to involve everybody in the channel, everybody around you as well in your organization, and you need to be showing the small incremental steps and values that partners bring, whether that's lowering your kind of SEO costs because now you've got a lot of brand reach out there, or whether it's, you know, getting you great customer testimonials because an affiliate's taken a customer on a journey and and you know helped them to 10 time X their business or whatever it is, you know, like you've got to be telling everybody else in the organization this came because we had a partnership with this partner and they did this piece of work and really making it clear what the benefits of a partnership program is because it isn't always just the bottom line. It's not always just the numbers going up month on month on month. It's the added value that they bring to the business too. And and sometimes we don't see that because we, you know, we focused on targets and you know, how many partners did we sign up this month and all of that kind of stuff, but we don't see the incremental value that they're doing on the backside as well.

SPEAKER_00

I think that that is, yeah, you hit that on the head. I think that is uh and in the patience part two, right? Like it takes time. Uh, an analogy I use is, you know, if you look at like direct and partner channel as like two ways to grow revenue. I I use like an apple for direct. I show like a picture of an apple, and it's like, hey, you sell a direct deal, you get an apple like this week. That's great. For partner, I show like a little seedling. I'm like, it might not be huge right now, but then you look 12 months down the road for both of those, like the apple for the direct, like maybe they expanded a little bit, maybe bought a little bit more of your product, and maybe there's like two or three apples now. But if you look at the partner, that that sampling is now a tree with apples on it. And you're like, that's that's what we're trying to build, right? We're trying to build, you know, something that's exponentially worth uh the initial investment. Uh, but it takes time and it takes nurturing.

SPEAKER_02

And then you forget about the seasonals, like the trees are not gonna blossom once, it's gonna do it like year on year on year on year. And then you start to see the value of a partnership channel. But many people don't see that unless they've grown a program from zero to hero and spent like six or seven years growing a program or four or five years growing a program from start to finish. And I think that's the value that people like me who've been in the industry for 20 odd years have grow have literally launched programs at zero dollars and left when they were 27 million dollars. Like you you just know that it works, you know, because you've been around the block every year to see that seedling grow to a tree. So totally agree with you. And I love that analogy. Thank you for sharing that with us. It really is a great, a great visual representation of what partnerships is. Last question for you, because we've kind of extracted a lot out here in 20, 30 minutes. Where do you see the future of affiliate and partnerships headed? Because you've been around the block, this age, your food first radio. Like, what do you see in five years' time from now in the B2B SAS, like in the SAS industry?

SPEAKER_00

I think it's it's gonna be continually, if not more important than ever, to have strong partnerships, partner programs, partner incentives for you know B2B SaaS. Um and I say that because of coincidentally, the advent of AI. I think there is so much partnership to be had with how these like tools are being built. You have large language models like Anthropic and Cohere and Open AI that need to partner with organizations like a Jasper to build like a user experience to deliver on those LLMs, right? Who knows where the space is going, but to me it feels like there's many different layers to building value on AI. And I think we're past now the phase of shiny object. Holy crap, ChatGPT was cool, and now people are kind of bagging off, they're like, okay, like what is the utility here? And now it's on us to really figure out like, you know, how do we educate audiences? How do we get them on board? I think being in like LinkedIn a lot of the times, like we get into our own little AI SaaS bubble, and we're like, it's moving so fast, but it's like, yeah, but 99.999% of the world hasn't even caught up or understand its utility. So now it's like, yeah, now it's up to us to like go back and educate and show them the way. And with that, I think there's so much opportunity for us to partner with organizations and then for partners to educate end customers on AI, acceptable use, how to use it, to be the authority for their clients. There's just there's so much potential here, I think, around education and partnering with organizations that it's gonna be more important than ever. So that's my take.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I love it. I think I think it's it's a hundred percent spot on. And I'm excited. I mean, like, you know, I've loved this industry for 20 years. The next 10, I'm certainly gonna be a part of it. But after that, I don't even know what's gonna happen. But I'm super excited about what because I really do feel like the next 10 years is gonna grow a lot faster than what the last 20 have, just because the technology is gonna help us. It's been amazing to have you on this podcast and to share all of these nuggets for B2B SaaS affiliate managers who are growing programs to learn from the kind of experiences that you've had. And and thank you so much for coming on and and sharing these nuggets because I'm sure they're gonna help a lot of people out there in our community. So I really appreciate you being here on the podcast with me this week.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01

This podcast is brought to you by AMP. The Affiliate Manager Performance Program is designed for ambitious affiliate program managers working at brands, agencies, or affiliate networks that are looking to grow and scale their affiliate programs and partner performances. We've already helped hundreds of affiliate program managers from a range of industries get the best out of their affiliate partnerships and build consistent sales within their affiliate programs. With just one hour per week over a 12-week period, this program is unlike any other. You'll learn proven tactics, tested strategies, and access decades of experience with industry veterans who have launched, scaled, and grown multi-million dollar affiliate programs around the world. Book your seats on our next cohort by visiting our website, affiversemedia.com, and hit the training menu. From there, you can register your interest for our next cohort launch or simply contact our sales team to find out more. That's a wrap for this week's affiliate marketing podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down, why not head over to Apple IT and to give us a five-star review? Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and our YouTube channel so you never miss another insightful episode or one of our free webinars ever again. Tune in next week for more digital affiliate marketing insights, trends, tips, and content to keep your affiliate and performance marketing fresh and your partners for driving consistent sales.