Unlock the full potential of your business with ecosystem-led growth strategies, as we explore the transformative power of partnerships and secure data sharing with Bob Moore, the pioneering force behind Crossbeam. Discover how powerful collaborations can elevate both B2B and B2C companies.
In our conversation, Bob Moore takes us on a journey from his early days as a data enthusiast to his groundbreaking work dismantling data silos with Crossbeam. Gain a deeper understanding of how B2B marketing has evolved since the 90s and learn why traditional account mapping methods are no longer sufficient in today's digital age. Bob shares how Crossbeam's platform enables companies to leverage shared data, enhancing decision-making, growth, and collaboration. We'll also examine the rise of ISV partnerships driven by the API economy and the cloud, highlighting how secure, third-party data escrow solutions can offer a competitive edge.
Explore the power of ecosystem-qualified leads (EQLs) and how they can boost customer lifetime value by integrating insights from various partners. Bob and I discuss how shared market intelligence allows smaller businesses to compete with industry giants and the strategic benefits of publishing a book as part of a multi-year marketing plan. Learn how platforms like Crossbeam facilitate data-driven collaborations, showcasing the limitless possibilities for growth in a data-driven world.
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Speaker 1: Ecosystem-led growth.
00:00:02
It is not just a buzzword, it is a game changer, especially
00:00:06
for B2B, but it can be as well for B2C companies looking to
00:00:10
scale in a data-driven world.
00:00:12
What if you could unlock powerful collaborations, ensure
00:00:16
secure data sharing and leverage cross-company partnerships to
00:00:20
amplify your growth?
00:00:21
Today, I sit down with Bob Moore, the visionary behind
00:00:26
Crossbeam, to break down the strategies, tools and real-world
00:00:30
applications that can transform your business approach, From
00:00:33
ecosystem DNA to the innovative concept of ecosystem-qualified
00:00:37
leads.
00:00:38
We're gonna cover this and a heck of a lot more, so stay
00:00:41
tuned to this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach
00:00:44
Podcast.
00:00:47
Speaker 2: Digital social media content, influencer marketing,
00:00:50
blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter,
00:00:54
facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing
00:01:02
there's a lot to cover.
00:01:03
Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or
00:01:06
business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert
00:01:10
advice.
00:01:10
Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer
00:01:16
is your digital marketing coach .
00:01:20
Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing,
00:01:26
one episode at a time.
00:01:27
This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schafer.
00:01:35
Speaker 1: Hey everybody, this is Neil Schafer, your digital
00:01:38
marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 371 of this
00:01:42
podcast.
00:01:43
As always, I want to give you my view of the latest news from
00:01:47
the blogosphere.
00:01:48
I guess one of the interesting points of data that have come
00:01:52
out recently is a survey of marketing decision makers.
00:01:56
On what areas do they think that they need to improve upon?
00:02:01
And some of the answers were, you know, customer acquisition,
00:02:06
lead generation, sales conversion, data privacy, et
00:02:09
cetera.
00:02:10
The number one answer for brands top areas for improvement
00:02:14
was actually brand awareness.
00:02:16
This, to me, was a shocker because I suppose the type of
00:02:20
clients that I work with as a fractional CMO and the clients
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that I hope to serve in my upcoming book, digital Threads
00:02:29
for them, brand awareness is more of a fluff, more of a
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unmeasurable, easy to just throw a lot of money down the tube
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and unsure of the potential ROI versus customer acquisition,
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customer retention, sales conversion, lead generation.
00:02:43
So there are many ways to look at marketing.
00:02:46
My friends, I do not look at marketing and don't get me wrong
00:02:49
, brand awareness is that top of the funnel.
00:02:51
It is critical, but there are a lot better ways or objectives.
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I believe that you can spend marketing budget more
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efficiently and be able to measure your spend, which for me
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, being a data-driven, kaizen, pdca marketer, has always been
00:03:06
central to what I do and the advice that I give you.
00:03:08
Another interesting data point that I'd like to introduce to
00:03:12
you that came out over the past week is the annual survey from
00:03:15
the podcast host.
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They interviewed and I know this is gonna be very specific
00:03:19
to podcasting, but since this is a podcast and you're listening,
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I hope that I have your ear they ended up interviewing 511
00:03:26
podcasters or those that planned on launching a podcast soon,
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and I want to give you this information to not only
00:03:34
encourage you if you've been thinking about doing a podcast,
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but also to give you some specific advice.
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So, for instance, the number two answer to how long have you
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been podcasting was 22% have not launched yet, so a quarter of
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the people interested in podcasting don't have one yet,
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and then 21%.
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It's been less than a year, in fact.
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Me I started this podcast it was originally called Social
00:04:00
Business Unplugged.
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Gone through a few iterations, I'll probably go through a few
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more.
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I started this podcast in January of 2013.
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So I've been podcasting over 10 years.
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I am only one of the 7% of the people that were surveyed, so it
00:04:12
is not too late to get started.
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Podcasting is the main data point here and, interestingly
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enough, I always thought podcasting was about interviews.
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But the most popular format was solo, like every other episode
00:04:25
that I do at 29%.
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Remote interviews, like the one I'm doing today, came in at 26%
00:04:30
.
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So pick your poison.
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And then I was really happy to see that my current podcast mic,
00:04:35
the Shure MV7, costs about $270 on Amazon, but maybe you can
00:04:39
steal a Prime Day deal coming up was the number three most
00:04:42
popular used mic at 6.3%.
00:04:44
The Blue Yeti, which is a $100 mic, actually is the most
00:04:47
popular at 16.6%, and the Samsung Q2U was another $100 mic
00:04:53
was the second most popular at 8.1%.
00:04:55
So it does not have to cost a lot of money to get started as
00:04:59
well.
00:05:00
In fact, 40% of podcasters say they've owned their mic less
00:05:04
than a year, and the most popular, like the one I'm using
00:05:07
now, is a USB mic.
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I literally plug it into my computer, my MacBook Pro, and I
00:05:12
use the Apple Free Software GarageBand to record this and
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then I send it to my editor who edits it.
00:05:17
So it does not have to be that complex to begin and record a
00:05:22
podcast.
00:05:23
And just one more data point here, and if you're interested
00:05:26
in the links to any of these, they do appear in my weekly
00:05:28
newsletter Make sure you go to neilschafercom slash newsletter
00:05:31
and sign up to get the full details and links.
00:05:33
But when asked, where do you record your podcast?
00:05:36
58% said record in an ordinary untreated room.
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Ladies and gentlemen, I am recording this podcast in an
00:05:43
ordinary untreated room.
00:05:45
I do have carpet right and I do close the doors, which helps,
00:05:50
but it is not treated with any special soundproofing.
00:05:52
So there you go.
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I hope that that data gives you the encouragement, the
00:05:57
confidence, that if you wanted to start a podcast, you could as
00:05:59
well.
00:06:00
And if you are podcasting, maybe that gives you some more
00:06:02
advice as well.
00:06:03
And if you are podcasting, maybe that gives you some more
00:06:06
advice as well.
00:06:06
Another sort of news for the week is you know, meta in front
00:06:09
of our eyes, has sort of launched AI into WhatsApp,
00:06:10
instagram, facebook, but there's still a lot of confusion as to
00:06:13
actually how to use it within these Meta apps.
00:06:15
So there's a great article that came out from readwritecom that
00:06:18
actually gave the step by step on how to implement the AI to
00:06:22
help improve your user experience in these apps.
00:06:24
So once again, go to neilshamfordcom slash newsletter
00:06:26
if you're interested in any one of these articles.
00:06:29
So for my personal updates.
00:06:30
Well, if you are on my list or if you've gone to any of my
00:06:33
social profiles or if you've been listening to any one of my
00:06:36
podcast episodes recently, you know I'm getting excited for the
00:06:38
imminent launch of my Kickstarter for digital threads.
00:06:42
I've already received five author proofs from Amazon.
00:06:46
I will be unboxing them and live streaming that unboxing and
00:06:48
you'll be able to see the archive video.
00:06:50
So probably by the time you listen to this, if you go to one
00:06:53
of my socials, you should be able to see it there.
00:06:55
Excited to well, sort of nervous, because you never know
00:06:58
how things are going to look the digital files look when they're
00:07:01
printed.
00:07:01
But I'm hopeful that there won't be any issues and, if
00:07:04
everything goes right, I am literally planning on launching
00:07:07
that Kickstarter next week.
00:07:08
So if you want to get these early bird specials, where this
00:07:14
will be the cheapest that you'll be able to get my book, and
00:07:16
you'll get the book before it goes on sale on Amazon, which is
00:07:17
tentatively scheduled for October 1st, make sure you sign
00:07:20
up for the pre-launch so that you can get informed when I do
00:07:24
launch the official Kickstarter and because the early bird
00:07:27
specials are going to have an expiration of about 48 hours, so
00:07:30
make sure you go to neilschafercom slash Kickstarter
00:07:32
to stay up to date.
00:07:35
So today I interview Bob Moore.
00:07:37
Bob is a pretty incredible data nerd.
00:07:41
He has actually founded and scaled three different SaaS
00:07:42
companies centered around business intelligence and data
00:07:43
nerd.
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He has actually founded and scaled three different SaaS
00:07:45
companies centered around business intelligence and data
00:07:48
infrastructure.
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His first venture maybe some of you have heard of it called RJ
00:07:51
Metrics, was actually acquired by Magento, which later became
00:07:56
part of Adobe right.
00:07:57
Following this, his second company, stitch Data, was
00:07:59
acquired by Talend.
00:08:00
And now he is on his third iteration of a company called
00:08:04
Crossbeam, which is a leader in this new world of ecosystem-led
00:08:09
growth, and he's actually the author of a book of the same
00:08:12
name which you should check out as well.
00:08:14
He has always been about empowering businesses to
00:08:16
leverage their own data effectively and in that area I
00:08:20
think we aligned a lot, and my background is B2B and obviously
00:08:24
this is more applicable to B2B, but I do ask them about the B2C
00:08:27
approaches, even within influencer collaborations, if
00:08:30
there's a way to leverage data in a third-party protected silo,
00:08:35
which is sort of what Crossbeam offers.
00:08:36
So I think that this is a conversation that will get you
00:08:40
thinking of new ways to partner with other companies,
00:08:43
collaborate with other people, but all centered around data,
00:08:51
and if it doesn't click yet, I think it will by the end of the
00:08:53
episode.
00:08:53
So, without any further ado, here is my interview with Bob
00:08:54
Moore of Crossbeam.
00:08:56
Speaker 2: You're listening to your Digital Marketing Coach.
00:08:58
This is Neil Schafer.
00:09:04
Speaker 1: Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer, and welcome to
00:09:07
another live stream edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach
00:09:10
podcast.
00:09:11
Partnerships.
00:09:12
You have probably thought about them in your marketing there.
00:09:16
If you work in a B2B company, you might have this concept of
00:09:19
partner marketing.
00:09:20
We have affiliate marketing, performance marketing all these
00:09:24
terms that we hear of in marketing but if you're in B2B,
00:09:28
you might recently have heard of something called ecosystem
00:09:31
marketing or ecosystem-led growth.
00:09:34
So I'm going to turn back the clock before I introduce my
00:09:36
guests, because back in the 90s, I sold semiconductors and did
00:09:41
biz dev and a little bit of marketing in Japan and in Asia,
00:09:45
and this concept of ecosystem was very, very intuitive because
00:09:49
we had partners like system integrators that would generate
00:09:52
leads for us.
00:09:53
Some of them became resellers.
00:09:54
We also resold other software vendors.
00:09:57
We partnered with non-competitive people in the
00:09:59
space, because I was in semiconductors and then, after
00:10:02
embedded software and in order to complete a project, there
00:10:06
were a lot of other companies that we had to work together
00:10:09
with.
00:10:09
We could choose to do so directly, with benefit, or
00:10:12
indirectly, without benefit.
00:10:13
So obviously that was a long time ago, but today that is what
00:10:17
we are going to talk about this concept of ecosystem-led growth
00:10:20
in marketing.
00:10:22
And just a side note, I'm going to introduce you to the
00:10:24
co-founder and CEO of a company called Crossbeam, and Bob
00:10:29
actually wrote the book literally on ecosystem-led
00:10:31
growth, a company that I did not know about until I was actually
00:10:35
working as a fractional CMO for a startup that was basically in
00:10:38
the same space as Crossbeam, and I realized that they really
00:10:41
are the gold standard thought leader in that industry.
00:10:44
And just one more note before we proceed forward I'm really
00:10:47
excited because Bob wrote a book , a book on ecosystem-led growth
00:10:51
, which is what Crossbeam is all about.
00:10:52
This is actually a topic that I just last night submitted my
00:10:57
speaking topic for for content marketing world to talk about
00:11:00
publishing a book as the ultimate content marketing
00:11:03
channel.
00:11:04
As you know, I am leaning into getting my books published this
00:11:08
year for the first time in a while, so I think we have a lot
00:11:11
to talk about.
00:11:11
Hopefully, I won't take up too much of Bob's time, because I
00:11:14
have tons of questions and I think I'm going to be really
00:11:16
inspired, as will you.
00:11:17
So, without further ado, bob, welcome to the your Digital
00:11:20
Marketing Coach podcast.
00:11:21
Speaker 3: Hey, neil, thanks for having me here.
00:11:23
Really excited to do it and dig in on this topic.
00:11:26
Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, and I think what I talked about
00:11:28
hopefully resonated with you, but obviously this is post-COVID
00:11:33
2024.
00:11:34
The concept of ecosystem, with all the things we can do
00:11:36
digitally, I'm sure, has really changed.
00:11:38
So before we get started with that, though, I always like to
00:11:41
get the backstory Before Crossbeam how did you get
00:11:44
involved in this ecosystem space that you're in today?
00:11:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is actually a great question
00:11:50
because a lot of people just assume that maybe I come from
00:11:54
the partnerships world, or the personas or the workflows side
00:12:00
of what Crossbeam does is the thing that inspired me to start
00:12:03
working on this problem.
00:12:04
The truth is, I'm actually just a huge data nerd and my
00:12:08
background is really deeply rooted in data science,
00:12:12
statistics and kind of the applications of data-driven
00:12:15
decision-making inside of businesses.
00:12:17
So this is my third SaaS company.
00:12:19
The first two were both in the business intelligence and data
00:12:23
infrastructure spaces.
00:12:24
So I had a business called RJ Metrics that was acquired by
00:12:28
Magento, which is now part of Adobe, and a company called
00:12:31
Stitch Data, which was acquired by Talent.
00:12:34
And a consistent theme in those companies was we helped
00:12:37
businesses use their own data to make smarter decisions right,
00:12:41
get that data in the right places, get it in the hands of
00:12:43
the people who can use it the most, and figure out how to
00:12:46
invest resources in acquiring more customers or closing the
00:12:50
customers better or figuring out the best ways to cultivate
00:12:53
better customer relationships over time.
00:12:55
But there was one thing thematically in those companies
00:12:58
that always bugged me, which was every company, no matter how
00:13:01
great their technology was internally, was really just
00:13:05
operating inside of a silo of their own data and what their
00:13:08
own company could see.
00:13:09
And as companies scale and as the market for building
00:13:14
technology products and services evolved, it became really clear
00:13:18
that any given company's data silo was not the full story and
00:13:22
not the full picture.
00:13:23
Data silo was not the full story and not the full picture.
00:13:27
And even in my own companies, by the time we got to a couple
00:13:32
dozen employees, even we started looking for the answers to
00:13:34
questions like hey, we've got a technology partner that we very
00:13:36
often end up having customers in common with.
00:13:38
We'd love to know the answer to how many customers do we have
00:13:42
in common and who are they?
00:13:43
Or, even better, are my sales reps currently trying to sell
00:13:48
into any of the same companies that their sales reps are trying
00:13:50
to sell into?
00:13:51
Because we knew when that was true, we had higher close rates,
00:13:55
the ACVs were higher, the customers were less likely to
00:13:58
churn.
00:13:58
There were all these reasons pushing us toward a universe
00:14:03
where we could sell our product as part of an ecosystem or part
00:14:05
of a stack, but there was a missing data layer, because it
00:14:08
was very, very difficult to draw the Venn diagram between our
00:14:12
data silo and the data silo of a partner company that we work
00:14:15
closely with Technology reasons, privacy and security reasons
00:14:19
just a whole universe of things working against us.
00:14:22
So we ended up doing what just about every other company on the
00:14:25
planet does, which is this age old process called account
00:14:27
mapping, where we email spreadsheets back and forth
00:14:30
between us and the partner company.
00:14:31
Those spreadsheets are these very weird quasi redacted sub
00:14:35
lists of accounts that we think might be relevant, based on some
00:14:39
typically qualitative set of conditions, and you do that
00:14:43
maybe once a quarter, more likely every six months or a
00:14:46
year, and you get this very kind of makeshift ad hoc swag doing
00:14:53
something to use your partner ecosystem to promote growth.
00:14:56
And frankly, that process is terrible.
00:14:58
Everybody does it but it's terrible.
00:15:00
And the real genesis of Crossbeam was after we sold
00:15:04
Stitch.
00:15:05
I had this moment to take a step back and look at the biggest
00:15:08
problems and the biggest opportunities that I encountered
00:15:10
in the 15 years before and it felt like if there was a way to
00:15:13
solve for this missing data layer, a way to solve the
00:15:18
prisoner's dilemma problem of how did two companies answer
00:15:21
these questions about where their data intersects without
00:15:23
oversharing or without breaking the promises that they've made
00:15:26
to their customers.
00:15:27
If you could do that, then there could be a really compelling
00:15:30
universe of outcomes and new playbooks and new strategies
00:15:33
that could be layered on top.
00:15:35
So Crosby and Mazar attempt at solving that problem, and we do
00:15:38
it basically by offering what amounts to an escrow service for
00:15:42
data.
00:15:43
We're the secure, independent third-party platform that is
00:15:47
trusted by everybody who sits in between companies when they
00:15:51
want to collaborate and allows them to connect their systems of
00:15:54
record.
00:15:54
And then Crossbeam does all the hard stuff it ingests that data
00:15:57
, it structures it in a unified, universal data model so it can
00:16:00
be compared across companies, no matter what their own internal
00:16:03
data looks like.
00:16:04
And then it provides this trust and security layer on top that
00:16:10
allows every business that's participating to have total,
00:16:11
absolute control and auditability over who can see
00:16:13
what, when and under what circumstances.
00:16:15
And by allowing people to make those controls, you basically
00:16:19
unlock a new means by which you can know where and how your
00:16:25
ecosystem can help you build pipeline, help you convert deals
00:16:28
and contribute to the growth of your business overall, and that
00:16:31
set of playbooks is what we call ecosystem-led growth.
00:16:35
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
00:16:35
So let's take a step back.
00:16:37
So I'm going to generalize and put things in silo just for the
00:16:41
purpose of explaining this in simple terms for the audience
00:16:45
that might not be familiar with the terms in the industry.
00:16:47
So originally it sounds like the concept you came about from
00:16:51
was partner marketing, sales reps, distributors all going
00:16:56
after similar customers that we're all trying to gain.
00:16:59
How do we map that data together to make it efficient
00:17:04
for, obviously, for the partner managers or whoever's in charge
00:17:07
of those ecosystem management, to be able to better manage,
00:17:10
predict that pipeline, close more business, as well as those
00:17:14
individual sales reps or distributors to better
00:17:17
understand where they are, what their strengths are, what are
00:17:21
the deals that they should go after because maybe their
00:17:23
competitors in the same ecosystem are not going after.
00:17:25
Does that summarize the general concept, would you say, or am I
00:17:28
missing something?
00:17:29
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, I would say one of the tricky areas we
00:17:32
get into and I talk about this in the book a little bit when it
00:17:34
comes to partnerships is that partnerships is such a
00:17:38
overloaded term that it has come to include things like you're
00:17:42
describing, which is more your classic channel partnership,
00:17:45
where you may have distributors, you may have resellers, you may
00:17:48
have system integrators, folks that are basically serving as
00:17:52
the last mile of sales and service and support when it
00:17:55
comes to vendors or product creators bringing their products
00:17:58
to market.
00:17:59
That's kind of partnerships in like yeah, that's your world,
00:18:01
that's partnerships in the classic sense.
00:18:02
And then there's also this entire newer wave of
00:18:06
partnerships that has emerged since the API economy and kind
00:18:10
of the cloud and digital transformation revolution, which
00:18:13
is what you would traditionally call ISV partnerships, right,
00:18:17
like vendor to vendor or tech provider to tech provider,
00:18:20
building these integrations between their products that
00:18:23
actually make them kind of a better together solution or
00:18:26
something where they can actually co-sell and cross-sell
00:18:29
directly via direct sales teams kind of into each other's
00:18:31
customer bases.
00:18:32
And the reality is that the problem we solve is applicable
00:18:36
in both of those worlds.
00:18:37
And in the world that you describe, where you've got kind
00:18:41
of a distributor model, you're exactly right.
00:18:44
Imagine a world where you need to team up with other companies
00:18:47
to bring your products to market , to implement those products,
00:18:49
to service those products, but you don't have data transparency
00:18:52
into who's working with whom until you're so late in the
00:18:55
process that you're basically in a completely tactical world.
00:18:58
You know.
00:18:59
What this does is basically allows people to adjust the
00:19:03
aperture of their lens around how and where and at what points
00:19:06
they collaborate with outside companies, so that they can be
00:19:09
involved earlier on in knowing who to focus on, who to work
00:19:12
with, how to position those sales, how to win deals against
00:19:15
competitors, et cetera, and basically leveraging that
00:19:17
partner ecosystem not just for the implementation details after
00:19:21
a sale is made, but actually to be the most prolific source of
00:19:25
new leads and differentiation.
00:19:27
That exists inside of the way that you sell as a business and
00:19:30
that's really at the root of what we try to deliver in that
00:19:33
space.
00:19:34
Speaker 1: Got you.
00:19:34
So from an industry perspective , obviously B2B, b2b, saas, but
00:19:39
do you have consumer facing brands that also would you
00:19:43
consider part of this ecosystem marketing or ecosystem platform
00:19:48
that you have?
00:19:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, there definitely are.
00:19:50
I think the thing to keep in mind here is, you know, if you
00:19:53
take a step back and just think about the applications of having
00:19:58
a secure, independent third party kind of trusted data
00:20:02
escrow sitting in between two companies, the B2B use cases are
00:20:06
really, really straightforward because you kind of have all
00:20:09
this CRM style data right that is universal in its form and
00:20:15
function as it relates to how those companies go to market.
00:20:17
If you look at it more in the consumer space, there's a whole
00:20:20
other universe of applications that show up.
00:20:23
But the level of care that tends to get taken around making
00:20:30
sure that you're being very, very, very cautious about
00:20:33
protecting personally identifiable information and
00:20:35
things that kind of exist at the human level rather than
00:20:38
existing at the company level.
00:20:38
It just kind of changes some of the playbooks.
00:20:40
But the cool thing is you know, if you think about what you can
00:20:43
do with like Crossbeam in the middle, it's not just sharing
00:20:47
data on an individual record basis.
00:20:48
There's also a lot from an analytical and statistical
00:20:51
perspective.
00:20:52
So if you're, for example, a e-commerce company, that's a
00:21:00
retailer, and you're trying to figure out if you want to do
00:21:02
some kind of cross-promotional list send or you want to have
00:21:04
some kind of embedded advertising in the shipments
00:21:06
that actually go out to the recipients of partners' products
00:21:09
.
00:21:09
And you want to figure out, hey , basically, are there ways we
00:21:12
can go to market together with folks that sell into our same
00:21:15
ideal customer profile but that aren't necessarily competitive
00:21:18
with us where we're not competing on wallet share?
00:21:20
Historically, a lot of that is kind of for lack of a better
00:21:24
phrase like based on vibes, right, like it's a little bit of
00:21:27
what's the marketing language, what's the brand language,
00:21:30
what's the what we're trying to communicate to what segments in
00:21:32
the market, and that stuff works really well.
00:21:34
But you get that classic, you know, henry Ford problem, right,
00:21:36
it's like half my advertising works and half doesn't.
00:21:39
I just don't know which half what.
00:21:41
What some of these ELG practices allow you to do is answer
00:21:44
questions on an aggregate statistical basis, right, like,
00:21:47
look at a set of potential companies where you might embark
00:21:50
upon a co-marketing strategy and actually be able to answer
00:21:54
the question okay, what percent of our existing customer bases
00:21:57
actually do overlap?
00:21:58
And when those customers do overlap, are they better
00:22:02
customers or worse customers?
00:22:03
Are the repeat purchase rates higher?
00:22:05
Does it indicate something about, hey, if someone happens
00:22:08
to already be using or consuming this other consumer product.
00:22:11
It actually increases the likelihood that there'll be a
00:22:13
great customer for us and also consume our product.
00:22:16
And by and large, you know that the answer tends to be yes.
00:22:19
Right, just because it's a bit of a persona identifier in
00:22:21
itself that somebody is a consumer, or of multiple,
00:22:25
particularly with direct to consumer, like modern kind of
00:22:27
digital channel products.
00:22:28
So there are that's just one example, right, but being able
00:22:31
to do large scale kind of customer studies and customer
00:22:35
profiling based on not the individual people but the
00:22:38
aggregate groups and cohorts of potential buyers, it can really
00:22:42
help you identify where your ideal customer profile is, what
00:22:46
buying behaviors out there in the market actually make them
00:22:48
better and more loyal to you, and then identify potential
00:22:51
partners and other parties that you can do co-marketing
00:22:54
strategies with, so that could be done on an individual.
00:22:56
Speaker 1: So obviously we talk about ecosystem having multiple
00:22:58
entities, but just you.
00:23:00
Your platform is set for not just data escrow but data
00:23:03
analysis.
00:23:03
Just uploading your various data to Crossbeam would allow
00:23:07
you to perform this type of analytics.
00:23:09
Is that a correct assumption?
00:23:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right.
00:23:11
I mean, you can even in our free tier, right?
00:23:13
We offer a pretty generous free tier and you organize your data
00:23:16
in these things called populations, and a typical
00:23:18
population would be something like a customer list.
00:23:20
So you know you can sign up for an account, you can use a CSV
00:23:24
or Google Sheets to upload a customer list.
00:23:27
You know, use something very straightforward like an email
00:23:30
address is a unique identifier, and then you can have trust in
00:23:34
the way you set up your data settings that that information
00:23:37
actually never makes its way to any of your partners, even if
00:23:40
you connect with a bunch of them .
00:23:41
You can set your settings to only allow for aggregate
00:23:43
statistics, right, and it'll give you kind of at least a
00:23:45
baseline.
00:23:46
Hey, what's the overlapping portion of this set look like
00:23:49
with partner A versus B versus C .
00:23:52
So it's a great if you think about kind of a crawl walk run
00:23:57
strategy.
00:23:57
As you gain different levels of depth and sophistication and
00:24:00
kind of rules of engagement with different parties in your
00:24:03
partner ecosystem.
00:24:04
You can always start out with just the numbers, right, and
00:24:06
then drill in with more deep dive use cases from there.
00:24:09
Speaker 1: I'm thinking because I do a lot of work in influencer
00:24:11
marketing.
00:24:12
There's a compelling use case of being able to basically
00:24:16
source databases that influencers have of their
00:24:18
audience, whether it be email address, what have you and then
00:24:21
being able to analyze that compared with your own ideal
00:24:23
customer profile and use that as a way to analyze who are the
00:24:26
right influencers to work with.
00:24:28
So it sounds like your platform is very universal in its
00:24:31
potential application.
00:24:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really true, and while we've kind of
00:24:35
done the best in B2B right, we have some 18 companies that
00:24:39
are largely in B2B that use us today.
00:24:41
There's a really enticing universe of applications that
00:24:45
exist inside of.
00:24:46
I mean, we've seen plenty of B2C applications.
00:24:48
We've seen applications in healthcare, applications in
00:24:51
gaming, applications in education.
00:24:54
The nonprofit world has kind of been increasingly adopting the
00:24:58
cross-stream platform, so B2Bs are bread and butter, but you
00:25:02
can kind of use your own theater of the mind around how to apply
00:25:06
this stuff in any given vertical.
00:25:08
Speaker 1: Absolutely so.
00:25:08
We've sort of tiptoed around this definition of ecosystem-led
00:25:12
growth.
00:25:13
We've talked a lot about the ecosystems that exist, so how do
00:25:15
you define ecosystem-led growth and why is it especially
00:25:19
important today?
00:25:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really just a set of go-to-market
00:25:23
motions that help companies use their partner ecosystems to
00:25:28
drive pipeline, convert more deals and grow their existing
00:25:31
customer base.
00:25:32
We don't think of this as something that's necessarily a
00:25:35
function that lives in the partner org and also dies in the
00:25:40
partner org.
00:25:41
This is a strategy that gets applied at the company level and
00:25:44
that has really really big implications primarily in the
00:25:47
go-to-market organization.
00:25:49
So the idea here is not that ecosystem-led growth is about
00:25:53
adding more partners or about growing the ecosystem for the
00:25:57
sake of growing the ecosystem.
00:25:58
It's this question of if our company's positioned in a way
00:26:01
where it's able to participate in or even have its own
00:26:04
ecosystem around it, how do we then parlay that presence in the
00:26:09
ecosystem into actionable playbooks that we can run as a
00:26:13
business, that are going to allow us to grow?
00:26:14
And those playbooks, those are ELG playbooks that we can run as
00:26:15
a business that are going to allow us to grow.
00:26:15
And those playbooks, those are ELG playbooks, and that's really
00:26:19
the core.
00:26:20
Speaker 1: Gotcha and I'm assuming if sort of fast
00:26:22
forwarding to where should people go after they listen to
00:26:24
this podcast.
00:26:25
But I'm assuming that your book Ecosystem-Led Growth actually
00:26:29
has information on how companies can build their ELG playbooks.
00:26:33
Is that a correct assumption?
00:26:35
Speaker 3: Totally totally right , you know and this is the funny
00:26:37
thing with books, right, because everybody's got 100
00:26:41
books on their shelves that got shipped to them by somebody.
00:26:44
I'm looking at it right behind you, right?
00:26:45
And I think the thing I love about the way we pulled this
00:26:49
book together is that this is not like a marketing brochure,
00:26:52
right, you barely see the word crossbeam inside of the first
00:26:56
half of the book, and a big part of that the reasoning behind
00:27:00
that is because we built this book because of the sheer demand
00:27:04
and requests around people getting the specific information
00:27:08
in their hands, right, like there is a bit of a revolution
00:27:11
going on inside of boardrooms, inside of venture capital firms,
00:27:14
inside of CEOs' offices, where the idea of applying and
00:27:20
leveraging ecosystem strategies in order to create that next
00:27:24
lever of growth for a company is more and more compelling,
00:27:27
particularly in the macro environment right now, where
00:27:29
cash is king and people are looking for strategies that
00:27:32
really stand out and work.
00:27:33
So the book was really pulled together to do exactly what
00:27:35
you're describing, which is to be this authoritative, extremely
00:27:39
actionable, useful source.
00:27:40
On what is this ecosystem-led growth stuff?
00:27:43
Is it right for my company and when?
00:27:45
And then, assuming that the answer is yes, or that we should
00:27:48
explore it.
00:27:48
What are the actual playbooks and what are some examples of
00:27:51
how great companies are applying them?
00:27:52
So it's all of the above inside of the book, kind of laid out
00:27:55
in that exact order.
00:27:57
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
00:27:57
So I want to hone in a little bit on one thing you just said
00:28:02
there, which is how do I know if ecosystem-led growth or ELG is
00:28:04
right for my company?
00:28:05
We have a lot of people representing a lot of companies,
00:28:08
some B2B, some B2C that are listening.
00:28:09
So is it something that is universal?
00:28:13
But you just got to brainstorm to find the right application.
00:28:15
Are there, I suppose, with B2B, if you already have a partner
00:28:18
program, it's a no-brainer, but are there certain industries
00:28:21
where it may not be the most appropriate?
00:28:24
Or are there industries where you might want to avoid it
00:28:26
altogether?
00:28:26
We'd love to hear your-.
00:28:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there are right.
00:28:29
I make this joke in the book.
00:28:30
My team at Crossbeam is tired of hearing me answer questions
00:28:35
in the form of a two by two matrix, but it is kind of like
00:28:38
my love language is the two by two matrix, so I answer this one
00:28:42
in the book with this two by two right, where there are two
00:28:45
dimensions or two inputs to this question of is ELG right?
00:28:49
For me right now, inside of my company, one of those dimensions
00:28:52
is just overall scale.
00:28:54
How large is your business?
00:28:56
There is a benefit that comes with scale when it comes to
00:29:00
ecosystems, because as you get larger the gravitational pull of
00:29:03
your business and any ecosystem activity around it just becomes
00:29:06
larger.
00:29:06
If you have a larger customer base, if you have more of an
00:29:10
ability to execute as a marketer , as a sales operation, et
00:29:13
cetera, then the attractiveness of a partnership with you
00:29:17
becomes larger and larger and the extent to which prospective
00:29:20
partners may bear the brunt of any activation energy that needs
00:29:24
to exist for a partnership to happen gets larger and larger.
00:29:26
So just the incremental lift to grow and expand gets lower and
00:29:30
lower as your scale gets large.
00:29:33
So that one dimension is scale, but the other dimension I think
00:29:37
is the more interesting one, which is this concept that we
00:29:40
describe called ecosystem DNA, right?
00:29:42
Like how much is the core value proposition of your business
00:29:47
wrapped up in participating in a partner ecosystem of some kind?
00:29:52
So a great example of that would be like if you look at my
00:29:56
first two companies, right?
00:29:57
The first one was called RJ Metrics.
00:29:58
We were a software product but we were what you would call a
00:30:01
suite solution, like we were a one-stop shop.
00:30:04
So if you bought RJ Metrics, it was kind of all you needed.
00:30:06
We were an analytics platform but we ingested all the data, we
00:30:10
stored it for you, we had the dashboards and the modeling
00:30:13
layers for you.
00:30:14
We had the interface that you could log into.
00:30:16
You didn't really need to integrate it with anything.
00:30:18
You just kind of show up and upload your data and it delivers
00:30:21
you a value proposition and it's like okay, see you later.
00:30:23
It's completely single player mode, completely isolated.
00:30:26
It was a very, very low ecosystem DNA company, because
00:30:30
our value proposition didn't necessarily get much better or
00:30:33
worse when you happened to be using other products as well.
00:30:36
Like it was, it was a standalone product.
00:30:38
And then there is high ecosystem DNA in my second company,
00:30:42
stitch Data, where at Stitch we were basically middleware.
00:30:46
So we built these data pipelines that helped you, you
00:30:48
know, pull all of your data out of all the SaaS products that
00:30:51
you use.
00:30:51
We had like 70 or 80 integrations.
00:30:52
Out of all the SaaS products that you use, we had like 70 or
00:30:54
80 integrations and then we would deposit that data into a
00:30:56
cloud-based data warehouse like Snowflake or Amazon Redshift or
00:30:59
Google BigQuery or something like that.
00:31:00
It was all partners all day.
00:31:02
You literally could not use Stitch unless you were also
00:31:05
using at least two other SaaS products, because you needed
00:31:08
somewhere to be pulling data from and you needed somewhere to
00:31:09
drop the data out into.
00:31:10
So there wasn't a single deal that we worked on where there
00:31:17
wasn't some kind of better together story, where our value
00:31:18
proposition was actually wrapped up in this more complete
00:31:22
strategic objective that the customer was trying to achieve
00:31:25
through multiple products being stitched together, which is why
00:31:27
we call it Stitch.
00:31:29
So in that company, our ecosystem DNA was nearly 100%
00:31:33
right, and you can think of most modern SaaS companies that
00:31:34
build products.
00:31:34
Our ecosystem DNA was nearly 100% right, and you can think of
00:31:36
most modern SaaS companies that build products.
00:31:37
Their ecosystem DNA index is pretty strong because they'll be
00:31:40
built on the Salesforce ecosystem or they'll be built on
00:31:43
the Shopify ecosystem or particularly in B2B.
00:31:45
It's almost a given that if you're in SaaS, in the cloud, in
00:31:49
the modern landscape, you've probably got APIs and you're
00:31:51
probably hooked into other products and that goes really,
00:31:53
really highly.
00:31:54
But yeah, if you're in a more traditional kind of legacy
00:31:56
business, if you're in you know something that is more
00:31:59
classically, you know single point of consumption and value
00:32:02
story.
00:32:02
It might be a little, a little lower.
00:32:04
So then then you bring me to the two by two matrix, right?
00:32:06
So you look at the ecosystem DNA on one dimension and you
00:32:09
look at scale on the other, and you can kind of do this in like
00:32:11
a four box, right?
00:32:13
So if you're in that bottom left corner and you have very
00:32:16
low ecosystem DNA and you haven't achieved, you know, a
00:32:19
material enough scale that people have started to kind of
00:32:22
knock on your door and say, hey, how can we figure out how to
00:32:24
win together here?
00:32:25
This is probably the quadrant where ELG is not right for you
00:32:28
right now, and I think we label that as like the weight quadrant
00:32:31
.
00:32:31
It's, you know, when you then move up to that top left
00:32:36
quadrant where your ecosystem DNA is low but you have a large
00:32:38
amount of scale.
00:32:40
This is a really interesting area for you to go and collect
00:32:43
data right At this magnitude.
00:32:45
You will have people knocking on your door saying, hey, maybe
00:32:48
it's not a product integration, that's a solution here, or maybe
00:32:51
there's not a particular avenue for a service to be bolted onto
00:32:55
what you do.
00:32:55
But there could be some really interesting stuff up funnel
00:32:58
right, like we could do some co-marketing or some kind of
00:33:01
demand generation or cross-pollinating of our
00:33:04
audiences, not necessarily based on this assumption that our
00:33:07
products are better together, but based on this assumption
00:33:09
that we may be able to reach the same people at a lower
00:33:14
incremental cost basis by going out to market together.
00:33:17
And you get into all these questions of okay then what
00:33:19
partners should I work with and in what ways there and we have a
00:33:22
lot of playbooks in the in the book about this and you can use
00:33:25
things like Crossbeam to answer those questions in kind of where
00:33:28
and how does that Venn diagram overlap in the most promising
00:33:31
way with what partners?
00:33:32
And there are some really interesting things that start to
00:33:34
unlock in that quadrant.
00:33:35
Even though your ecosystem DNA might be low, the bottom right
00:33:38
quadrant, if you stay with me here, is that your scale would
00:33:41
be small, but your ecosystem DNA is very large.
00:33:44
There's a lot of companies in here and this is a quadrant
00:33:47
where it is invest, invest, invest because you can use
00:33:50
ecosystem-led growth techniques.
00:33:52
If you are a one-person operation inside of that
00:33:54
quadrant, your scale may be very small, but if the value
00:34:02
proposition of your product is modified or enhanced by the
00:34:03
existence of other offerings whether they are products or
00:34:05
services that exist in your market, part of the way you
00:34:08
create value for your customers is embedded in how interoperable
00:34:11
and the ways your product interoperates with other
00:34:14
products and services.
00:34:15
Ecosystem-led growth is your way of life, whether you know it
00:34:18
or not, and the way that your buyers are buying is probably
00:34:22
more impacted by what other technologies and services they
00:34:25
have already purchased or procured and consumed than it is
00:34:28
by actually the features and functionality of your product
00:34:30
itself.
00:34:30
How well you click into their technology stack or the way they
00:34:34
run their business is going to drive that decision-making
00:34:37
process, and ELG is absolutely critical to bring on board.
00:34:40
So, even at a small scale, if your ecosystem DNA is high or
00:34:43
you aspire for it to be high, this is worth reading and worth
00:34:46
looking at.
00:34:47
And then the top right quadrant.
00:34:48
It's like you know, gas up the jets, pour the rocket fuel on.
00:34:52
It's working.
00:34:54
You've also achieved scale.
00:34:55
This is where you start to see, particularly in later stage,
00:34:58
publicly traded companies et cetera, where they have an
00:35:00
ecosystem play.
00:35:01
If you listen to their earnings calls, if you kind of look at
00:35:05
the S1s of IPO companies that have an ecosystem around them.
00:35:09
That word ecosystem is very, very prevalent.
00:35:12
It's described as a moat, as a differentiator, as an accelerant
00:35:15
in growth.
00:35:16
It's just absolutely undeniable in modern late stage highly
00:35:20
successful technology companies that it's part of their primary
00:35:23
playbooks.
00:35:24
And ELG is just.
00:35:26
You don't have to be told to invest more because it's
00:35:28
probably what got you where you are and that's the rocket ship
00:35:31
quadrant.
00:35:32
Speaker 1: So it sounds like in consumer marketing.
00:35:34
I guess one thing that CMOs often talk about is the customer
00:35:38
experience and that is the ultimate differentiator.
00:35:40
But on the other hand, I'm thinking that the ecosystem play
00:35:44
is of similar, if not, depending on the company, much
00:35:47
greater value, especially in B2B .
00:35:48
Do you think that those two work together, compete with each
00:35:53
other, very complementary?
00:35:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question.
00:35:56
A lot of what I just described it's like right down the middle
00:35:58
makes perfect sense in B2B, right.
00:36:00
So the question is, how does that parlay into the consumer
00:36:03
universe?
00:36:03
And I would use a really similar paradigm.
00:36:05
I would just say that the question of what it means to
00:36:09
have ecosystem DNA ends up being kind of a more interesting
00:36:13
thought experiment for companies in the consumer space.
00:36:15
I used the example earlier of, like direct-to-consumer
00:36:18
retailers, like online retailers and particularly ones that are
00:36:21
full stack and kind of develop their own products and that
00:36:25
universe.
00:36:25
I think the question would be if there is not a hard requirement
00:36:31
that a consumer uses your product and another product side
00:36:34
by side in order for it to get value, the question becomes more
00:36:37
of a little bit of a brand question, which is does the use
00:36:39
of your product and another product represent something
00:36:43
about a certain lifestyle or a certain lifestyle decision that
00:36:48
tends to correlate with a customer of a certain profile
00:36:51
that makes them more or less attractive?
00:36:53
Right, like, if you have a particular demographic or
00:36:57
particular profile of buyer that you are going after, you may
00:37:01
have a large kind of Gaussian distribution of how well the
00:37:05
people that buy your products on any given day actually fall
00:37:08
into being right down the middle in that segment, versus people
00:37:11
that are just kind of one-off purchasers or that buy it for
00:37:15
aspirational reasons but don't really fit in that demographic.
00:37:17
And how do you know, right Out of the hundred or thousand
00:37:20
people that buy every day, like which ones to invest more, in,
00:37:23
which ones to kind of be more aggressive pursuing?
00:37:25
How about of the ones that kind of abandoned their shopping
00:37:27
carts or never put something in the cart to begin with, like,
00:37:30
how do you know what segments to really focus on?
00:37:32
This is a really interesting angle to go about narrowing that
00:37:36
field and that view of.
00:37:38
Okay, this is actually a really promising indicator that if
00:37:42
someone has also purchased this other product over here, we know
00:37:46
that to be representative of them being very likely to be
00:37:48
right down the middle in terms of our you know the lifestyle
00:37:50
type that we're going after, and it just provides you with the
00:37:53
secondary confirmation within your data set that there's some
00:37:57
kind of you know, deeper values level alignment between you and
00:38:00
another product that you might potentially co-market with or do
00:38:04
some kind of cross promotional product integration with more.
00:38:07
Otherwise, try to try to win together, even if it's not a
00:38:10
hard physical requirement, like it is in the Stitch example,
00:38:14
right that you have to use A in order to use B?
00:38:16
Does that make sense?
00:38:17
Speaker 1: It does, and I'm thinking just to put it in real,
00:38:19
simple terms.
00:38:20
This is a physical retail store , but Starbucks will sell stuff
00:38:23
at the register that aren't necessarily Starbucks branded
00:38:26
little snacks.
00:38:26
But what snacks should they sell?
00:38:28
What is their customer most prefer to buy?
00:38:31
What could have the highest profit margin?
00:38:32
I think that in an online space , we can think about it the same
00:38:36
way.
00:38:36
They're in your store.
00:38:37
They have an account, they're checking out.
00:38:38
What other items can we add to increase that customer lifetime
00:38:42
value, whether we produce them or not, is a mindset that
00:38:45
probably more and more brands should have, in my honest
00:38:48
opinion, and it sounds like your platform can help them make
00:38:51
that transition.
00:38:51
I think that's really right, right.
00:38:53
Speaker 3: It's one thing to do a market study and know that
00:38:56
you'll sell a certain volume of products or there's a certain
00:38:59
appetite or demand that might exist.
00:39:01
It's another question to say, okay, well, now there's 20
00:39:04
brands, come to the stores and be upsold and add more things to
00:39:07
the cart.
00:39:07
Which brand is resonating with that segment?
00:39:08
Inside of my universe, that's the kind of question you can
00:39:23
answer with the LG.
00:39:24
Speaker 1: And it's almost like you can become the Costco
00:39:26
without having to be the Costco, meaning Costco will often buy
00:39:30
third-party brands and then, once they see the sales numbers,
00:39:33
they become Kirkland brands and then they OEM them.
00:39:35
So but you can do it without having to go through the process
00:39:38
, just through that data and a little bit of experimentation,
00:39:40
I'm assuming.
00:39:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is great.
00:39:42
I mean the big box retailers, you know, I think their
00:39:44
superpower it's widely known is their data right, like they have
00:39:46
so much volume that they have the ability to kind of
00:39:50
understand these kind of major trend lines going on inside of
00:39:54
markets at large just by the representative sampling of how
00:39:57
much economic activity goes on inside their stores.
00:39:59
But it's this classic example I gave at the beginning of the
00:40:02
call.
00:40:02
Right, that's a data silo, and if your data silo happens to be
00:40:05
massive, then you may not actually need to run a lot of
00:40:10
these ecosystem plays to answer big questions.
00:40:12
But what about the other 99% of businesses out there?
00:40:15
This is a way to basically kind of collaboratively enhance your
00:40:20
ability to understand your market in order to be more
00:40:23
competitive and more thoughtful about how to go up against some
00:40:25
of those bigger players.
00:40:27
Speaker 1: Right, so you talked about the playbook and without
00:40:30
people having read your book, I'm curious if you could provide
00:40:33
just a sample for the marketers and everyone else listening
00:40:37
that gives them a sense as to what would go into a ELG
00:40:42
marketing playbook to generate leads.
00:40:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll give you a really straightforward one and
00:40:47
this is in the book.
00:40:48
We talk about ecosystem led marketing and sales and customer
00:40:52
success.
00:40:52
We kind of go up and down the go-to-market funnel.
00:40:54
But the marketing section I love and I think it's
00:40:57
particularly important right now , in this era where post, like
00:41:03
you said, post-pandemic, post-interest rates coming back
00:41:06
with a vengeance, the ability to generate demand and do it in an
00:41:11
economically efficient way is probably more important than
00:41:13
ever.
00:41:13
So one of the things we introduce in that marketing
00:41:16
section is this concept of the ecosystem qualified lead.
00:41:19
Right Marketers are very familiar with marketing
00:41:21
qualified leads right that typically folks that come
00:41:24
through some funnel and have some kind of engagement with
00:41:26
your properties.
00:41:27
That indicates a likelihood or propensity to buy and if you're
00:41:30
in a business with sales reps, they get handed off to sales
00:41:32
teams.
00:41:33
If you're in a business that is more direct to consumer and has
00:41:35
its own funnel, then maybe they have some kind of different
00:41:37
experience or prioritization within your product.
00:41:39
But at the core, a marketing qualified lead is a really
00:41:42
helpful concept because it's basically an indication of
00:41:45
intent or likelihood or willingness to buy.
00:41:47
That allows you to treat those leads differently.
00:41:49
The ecosystem qualified lead is a very, very similar concept.
00:41:53
It's an indication of a lead being someone that is more
00:41:57
likely or has a higher propensity either to buy or to
00:41:59
buy at a higher level or be a higher lifetime value customer.
00:42:02
So the difference is, instead of qualifying the lead by doing
00:42:08
it lower in the funnel, when they embark on some kind of
00:42:10
journey on your website or they engage with some kind of asset
00:42:14
of yours, it's actually happening based on the
00:42:17
collective knowledge that you can pull in about that lead from
00:42:20
everybody else who you've connected with in your ecosystem
00:42:23
who's sharing insights about that lead with you.
00:42:25
So in the B2B universe, this comes up all the time.
00:42:28
Using my Stitch example, right, like if I'm closely partnered
00:42:31
with multiple other product companies and I know that when
00:42:35
someone uses my product alongside these other products,
00:42:38
they tend to be more likely to close, they tend to pay more,
00:42:42
they tend to be more loyal.
00:42:43
Than being able to kind of cross-reference my leads or my
00:42:47
opportunities against the customer sets of those partners
00:42:50
of mine allows me to basically run a magnet over the long tail
00:42:53
of all the badges I've ever scanned at a trade show or
00:42:56
people that have signed up for my email list, and pluck up the
00:42:58
ones that are, you know, particularly right now as a
00:43:01
result of recent activity, actually more likely to be a
00:43:05
hand raiser, more likely to be someone that might potentially
00:43:07
buy, and that inherently makes them ecosystem qualified.
00:43:10
And that universe is ever changing.
00:43:12
Every single day you know new people, make purchases from
00:43:15
partners or enter the sales pipelines of partners, and the
00:43:19
more partners you can get to provide you with at least kind
00:43:21
of high-level insights into how and where that Venn diagram
00:43:25
intersects with the people you are trying to sell to or
00:43:27
thinking about targeting, then the more you can basically buy
00:43:30
these segments.
00:43:32
Well, not buy, you can craft through your ecosystem these
00:43:34
segments or these lists that are very, very relevant and worth
00:43:37
targeting.
00:43:37
So in the B2B universe, it's the exact same concept, right?
00:43:40
It's this question of if we can identify these partners with
00:43:44
whom we know we have an aligned interest and a better together
00:43:48
story, or that purchasing or being interested in product A
00:43:51
makes you implicitly more interested in product B.
00:43:53
The question would then be can we use that to qualify either
00:43:57
individual targets or at least segments right, or channels
00:44:00
through which you might acquire leads or basically become
00:44:03
smarter on the very, very early stage qualification process, to
00:44:08
make you more likely to be spending time and energy with
00:44:10
those people and accounts that'll convert.
00:44:13
Speaker 1: Makes a lot of sense.
00:44:14
I just wish that we had Crossbeam back in my day,
00:44:16
because I could have made a lot more money with my sales bonuses
00:44:19
instead of relying on a partner contact with a spreadsheet and
00:44:22
their opinion of what I might be interested in rather than based
00:44:26
on the data.
00:44:27
So great application of data and really kudos on building
00:44:31
this great company.
00:44:31
So just final question for you what led you to write the book?
00:44:36
You mentioned that people were asking about it, but writing a
00:44:39
book obviously is a lot of work, and you hooked up with Wiley,
00:44:42
which is obviously one of the major publishers.
00:44:44
Any backstory to all that?
00:44:47
Speaker 3: I'll tell you what I have always loved writing.
00:44:49
I geek out about it.
00:44:50
I've got no shortage of history , writing eBooks and blog posts
00:44:54
and other things throughout my entire career.
00:44:56
You know, writing eBooks and blog posts and other things
00:44:58
throughout my entire career.
00:44:59
The difference here is that, frankly, I would have written a
00:45:03
book on whatever I was working on at any given time in the last
00:45:05
15 years, right Because of my, like inherent interest in
00:45:06
writing.
00:45:06
The difference now is that they let me and by they I mean Wiley
00:45:11
right, and the publishing industry at large we got a book
00:45:14
deal, and you can only get a book deal if you have this
00:45:18
independent assessment made by a publisher that there is
00:45:20
actually significant material pent up demand for a particular
00:45:23
subject matter at a particular point in time.
00:45:26
Five years ago, if I had pitched this book, I don't think I
00:45:29
would have gotten a book deal.
00:45:30
It so happened in my past companies, I think, like we
00:45:32
weren't the right company in the right place at the right time
00:45:34
to compel an audience to learn from what we had to say about
00:45:38
this.
00:45:39
But there was a really, really big why now that got Wiley
00:45:43
really excited about the prospect of pulling something
00:45:45
together here and the validation coming from them in offering us
00:45:49
that book deal and that distribution and the ability to
00:45:52
actually be printed by a real publishing house.
00:45:54
And get real, you can walk into Barnes Noble and pick this
00:45:57
thing up on the stores.
00:45:58
In May we have airport bookstores.
00:46:00
We're going to be in 70 or 80 airports across the United
00:46:03
States on shelves there.
00:46:05
So like you can't just do that yourself by publishing an ebook,
00:46:09
right?
00:46:10
So the fact that we were able to kind of tap into this
00:46:13
entirely new distribution channel for this message through
00:46:16
Wiley made us say, okay, the time and investment in kind of
00:46:20
pulling these ideas together and doing a really, really good job
00:46:23
of it is justified and we know that it will reach people
00:46:27
because Wiley's done the work to know that it will reach people.
00:46:29
So that's kind of what pulled it all together.
00:46:32
Speaker 1: That's fantastic, and I'm just curious and a little
00:46:35
bit selfish because, as I mentioned, I'm working on this
00:46:37
proposal for content marketing world.
00:46:39
But did the concept of content repurposing because it sounds
00:46:42
like you are also a content creator like myself that the
00:46:45
concept of content repurposing, either in writing the book or
00:46:48
once you've written the book, of repurposing those assets and
00:46:50
other assets, was that part of the book writing process and did
00:46:53
you find some inherent value that you might not have thought
00:46:56
of before as you went through the process?
00:46:59
Speaker 3: Oh, definitely.
00:46:59
I mean this book is a small piece in a much broader category
00:47:04
creation play that we've been running for multiple years now
00:47:07
and we'll continue running for multiple years in the future at
00:47:10
Crossbeam.
00:47:10
You can almost think of it as like a bow tie type strategy,
00:47:13
right when it's content repurposing on the way in and on
00:47:16
the way out, because the content of the book itself you
00:47:20
know, some of the best stories and anecdotes and quotes and
00:47:23
testimonials and things that we source for the book were
00:47:27
actually from speakers at our company conferences over the
00:47:30
course of the last two or three years who kind of you know some
00:47:33
of those talk track themes have been.
00:47:35
I'm going to open up my playbooks and share these kind
00:47:38
of inside never before seen secrets from within my company
00:47:40
from these awesome, awesome people and being able to say to
00:47:44
watch those talks and look at the ones that were best reviewed
00:47:46
by the crowd and the questions the crowd had in the Q&A as the
00:47:49
follow-ups and use that to inform what stories to tell and
00:47:52
who to quote.
00:47:52
That's where, kind of like the book itself actually is this
00:47:55
consolidation of existing content, just kind of repurposed
00:47:58
and being able to pull that together and synthesize it in a
00:48:02
way that is cohesive and makes sense and add a bunch of new
00:48:04
content on top.
00:48:05
That's the book process.
00:48:06
And then now this thing is the gift that will keep on giving
00:48:08
right as a marketer, because we have that core content.
00:48:12
We have these stories to tell.
00:48:13
There are excerpts that have already shown up on our blog.
00:48:16
It gives you this opportunity to frankly have conversations
00:48:19
like this the why now on doing a podcast tour and having great
00:48:23
conversations like these ones.
00:48:25
Having a book that has just come out is a great why now for
00:48:28
that and a great motivator.
00:48:29
So, yeah, I would view this not as kind of a.
00:48:32
The book is not a moment in and of itself.
00:48:35
It's kind of a cornerstone of a more comprehensive, multi-year
00:48:38
strategy around bringing this stuff out to the market.
00:48:41
Speaker 1: And you now by default become.
00:48:43
You were already the category leader, but having a book out
00:48:46
with that name really cements Crossbeam as the category leader
00:48:50
, right?
00:48:50
Speaker 3: So yeah, and I'm inspired by folks like Nick
00:48:53
Mehta, who wrote a book literally called Customer
00:48:55
Success right.
00:48:56
Nick's the CEO of Gainsight, which is the kind of marquee
00:49:00
customer success software company, the HubSpot founders
00:49:07
who wrote the book Inbound right , which is now it's the name of
00:49:08
their conference and it's kind of this iconic thing that's
00:49:10
bigger than their own company but where their company is kind
00:49:12
of the lion's share owner of the market cap in the inbound space
00:49:16
.
00:49:16
It's a page right out of those books.
00:49:19
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:49:19
So, Bob, thank you so much for your time.
00:49:20
Is there anything that you want to tell about Crossbeam or
00:49:24
about your book that we didn't talk about, and where can people
00:49:27
go to learn more about you, your company and your book?
00:49:30
Speaker 3: Absolutely so.
00:49:31
Crossbeamcom is the place to go if you're curious about joining
00:49:35
the Crossbeam network.
00:49:35
Connectedpartnerscom is the place to go if you're curious
00:49:37
about joining the Crossview Network, kind of kicking the
00:49:41
tires, seeing how it works, partnering up with other
00:49:42
companies to kind of do some of that data analysis I mentioned.
00:49:43
I'll mention again we've got a really awesome freemium product
00:49:46
right so you can sign up for free, connected Partners for
00:49:48
free, upload your data for free.
00:49:49
It's really only when you want to add more than a handful of
00:49:52
users or operationalize that data in big ways that you enter
00:49:55
into our paid tiers.
00:49:56
And then on the book itself, you can find it on Amazon, but
00:50:04
the comprehensive place to go is robertjmoorecom and there's a
00:50:05
big breakdown and some excerpts you can download and other
00:50:08
things about the book if you want to learn more.
00:50:10
Speaker 1: Awesome.
00:50:10
We'll put all that in the show notes.
00:50:12
Just one final, really, really topical question, and this is
00:50:14
not even from a business, but from a content creator
00:50:16
perspective.
00:50:17
Yeah, content creators often collaborate.
00:50:19
I think ecosystem DNA is very high.
00:50:22
And if we were all to share our email databases in Crossbeam
00:50:25
obviously no one has access to the others, but would we then
00:50:29
have the ability to find mutual contacts or be able to generate
00:50:34
Facebook pixels of shared audiences?
00:50:36
Is that a use case scenario, a potential one, or is it
00:50:39
something that companies are already using these days?
00:50:41
Just, it came to me at the very end.
00:50:43
I thought I'd just ask Totally yeah.
00:50:45
Speaker 3: So the short answer is anything's possible.
00:50:47
We haven't gone deep into the ad tech side of the world with
00:50:52
this stuff yet, but the way in which the rule setting works
00:50:57
inside of Crossbeam allows, if you had a consortium of people
00:51:01
that all wanted to connect with one another, what you could
00:51:03
actually do is, on an extremely granular basis, set these rules
00:51:07
around who can see what, when and under what circumstances.
00:51:09
So for the majority of the other folks out there that you
00:51:12
were connected with, you might just say okay, I want to
00:51:15
disclose when our lists overlap.
00:51:17
At a minimum, you could look out across that universe of
00:51:20
content creators and immediately know which other content
00:51:23
creators you had the largest overlap in audience with, which
00:51:26
could be really interesting and telling in and of itself.
00:51:28
And then if from that you identify someone that you
00:51:32
potentially want to embark upon a deeper partnership with maybe
00:51:35
with that particular party you might turn the dial a little bit
00:51:37
and say okay, I am going to see , just in the people that
00:51:42
overlap between us, let's share some kind of basic information
00:51:47
about in what ways they have engaged.
00:51:49
Right, is there a subset of them that is our deepest, most
00:51:52
interesting, most engaged customers?
00:51:53
For the ones that overlap with that other party.
00:51:55
Are they?
00:51:56
The more engaged, the higher open rate, the more likely to
00:51:59
show up at our events or purchase our downstream products
00:52:02
?
00:52:02
Or do they look kind of like everybody else that's engaged
00:52:04
with us?
00:52:05
And that kind of stuff can potentially inform, maybe then
00:52:08
going into other platforms and saying, okay, I'm going to use
00:52:11
something that's baked into Facebook or LinkedIn or Google
00:52:14
to say I actually want to target people that have also visited
00:52:18
this domain or search for this set of keywords or things like
00:52:20
that.
00:52:20
So while we don't directly get involved in the
00:52:24
cross-pollination or cross-targeting stuff, it can
00:52:26
really help you identify which audiences and behaviors actually
00:52:30
correlate to your higher value customer sets and then that can
00:52:33
inform your strategies off-platform to target them.
00:52:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really exciting.
00:52:37
I guess only our imagination will limit us.
00:52:39
And the era of data escrow love it.
00:52:42
So many use cases there.
00:52:44
It sounds like ecosystem.
00:52:45
It's this classic thing where you develop this technology for
00:52:48
one industry or for one concept which is ecosystem that growth,
00:52:52
but its applications are potentially really really
00:52:55
numerous and it's really just up to your customers to start
00:52:57
doing it.
00:52:57
So, yeah, yeah, thank you so much.
00:52:59
This has been really sort of mind blowing.
00:53:01
I hope that everyone listening will go and check out Crossbeam
00:53:04
and if you have questions about the platform, reach out to Bob.
00:53:06
Thank you so much for your time today.
00:53:07
Really appreciate it.
00:53:08
Cool.
00:53:08
Thank you, neil.
00:53:09
Great to be here.
00:53:09
All right, I hope you enjoyed the interview as much as I did.
00:53:14
Hey, I mentioned that this podcast has been around for more
00:53:16
than 10 years, but I have yet to reach 100 reviews on Apple
00:53:25
Podcasts.
00:53:25
So I don't mention this all the time, but it is sort of one of
00:53:26
my lifelong goals to be able to get to the three digits.
00:53:27
It's funny because I heard on another podcast episode of hey
00:53:32
when you launch a book, you want to reach out to other
00:53:34
podcasters and they either have like below 100 reviews, 100 to
00:53:38
300 or 300 and above, and it's really the 100 to 300, like the
00:53:41
nano micro influential podcasters that are the best
00:53:45
performing.
00:53:45
So for a lot of reasons, I'm trying to get to that 100 review
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number.
00:53:48
So if you have enjoyed this podcast, I'd be honored if you
00:53:51
would leave a review and take a screenshot.
00:53:53
Let me know.
00:53:54
You might just get something free in the mail from me.
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So that's all I got to say.
00:53:59
I'd really appreciate your support.
00:54:00
Obviously, if you haven't subscribed yet, I do offer half
00:54:03
solo, half interview episodes.
00:54:05
Next week will be a solo episode and for the interviews,
00:54:09
I have some great ones coming up .
00:54:10
I have Dave Kirpin, who is the author of the likable social
00:54:14
media books that maybe you've heard of.
00:54:15
He's obviously more than just that.
00:54:17
I have Nicholas Bruno we're going to be talking about
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nonprofit social and digital media.
00:54:21
Drew Moffitt, john Jantz, the duct tape entrepreneur, andy
00:54:25
Lambert from Adobe, dennis Yu, the Facebook ads expert, dan
00:54:28
Gingas, the customer experience maker, michelle Garrett.
00:54:31
All about PR.
00:54:32
Got a lot of very, very special guests coming up.
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All about PR.
00:54:36
Got a lot of very, very special guests coming up.
00:54:37
So make sure you hit the subscribe button and I look
00:54:38
forward to serving you on the next episode.
00:54:39
This is your digital marketing coach, neal Schaefer, signing
00:54:42
off.
00:54:43
Speaker 2: You've been listening to your digital marketing coach
00:54:46
.
00:54:46
Questions, comments, requests, links.
00:54:50
Go to podcastnealschaefercom get the show notes to this and
00:54:55
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00:55:00
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00:55:04
business.
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While you're there, check out neil's digital first group
00:55:08
coaching membership community if you or your business needs a
00:55:12
little helping hand.
00:55:13
See you next time on your digital marketing coach.
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