← Always Be Testing
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:07]
A
Thank you guys for having me. Excited to talk to you today and hopefully we can roll through so we can have a nice break for for lunch. Appreciate everything and this is going to be a good one. So today we're talking about the cowboy code. What B2B can learn from some consumer experience and how do you think about writing for the brand in a trust deficit world. Little bit about me. We've got some kiddos here on the left. Hayward and Gray superheroing it up in Austin, Texas. My wife and I are at the Austin Rodeo which we will attend frequently. We did a awesome friends and family event at the long time which highly recommend. It's like a sandlot in Austin, Texas. Like you walk into a 50s baseball or right out of the movie sandlot. Bob is a inspiration and a friend and a mentor. He's like an uncle. He worked for my grandfather. He was inducted into the Cowboy hall of Fame. He's there with Hayward visiting the museum and my wife and I are in Austin doing the turkey trot with the kiddos. So what is the cowboy code? It's actually a real thing. You kind of think about it, it's like, what is this bs but. But it's actually real. I grew up on a ranch in Northern California, working ranch. My dad was a horse trainer and it was just passionate with horses. My mom was a teacher and an educator, but she had a passion for being a part of the horse, for connecting with the horse, for teaching others how to make it work and do it the right way. And so it always had a big impact on my entire life and how I've just operated and something I've enjoyed, not to the extent that they have. Here I am working in tech and in marketing. A little bit different than riding horses and handling cattle and things like that. But the principles are really interesting and I wanted to share them with you today. Right. So live with courage. That means you're kind of facing things with adversity. You're facing things bravely. Challenges that you meet. Take pride in your work. It's something that we're all trying for. We're trying to work towards, we're trying to believe and find ways to make it work. Finish what you start, complete your commitments, do what has to be done. There's times when things are tough, you get punched in the face. You have challenges. These matter and they do resonate and they mean something. Be tough, foot fair. You're going to see these themes come up through the conversation. You need to show strength and be just and be compassionate. And show empathy for people when it's tough. Keep your promises. Something that's very important in our world in business. We're going to talk about this and why it matters. Honoring your word in anything, particularly in marketing in a world where there isn't as much trust as we used to have. It's an important piece writing for the brand. This is an important thing we've talked about. Amy came up on the panel and talked a little about the importance of brand brand building. You're going to see that here today. Being loyal and thoughtful and thinking through how you're interacting with your group and your employer. Being brief and concise and thoughtful about your messaging. Your communication may talk less, but maybe say more. That can be effective, that can allow you to resonate with an audience and allow you to get your point across. And some things aren't for sale. Nowhere to draw the line. These are all things that I think stand up in an age where there's a lot of noise, there's fraud, there's challenges, there's gray and black hat tactics like we talked about earlier on the panel. These are all things that seem a little hokey at first, maybe initially, but when you dig deeper, they matter and they can help you build a brand and help you improve. How you're thinking about your marketing and your partner marketing a little bit about myself and the business. So the CEO of Round Barn Labs. I've been in this industry for 20 years. I started essentially from the bottom at Adbrite, one of the early ad networks. They had their share of challenges. They as part of the ad network growth, double click kind of competitor and then Commission Junction was early on there building that grew the StubHub program significantly and then went to ebay where I was able to grow that global program but have had the pleasure to work with some amazing brands in technology, B2B SaaS certainly and interjecting some of those great consumer learnings to an industry now that's growing massively, which we're thrilled about. RBL has been around for 11 years. We're seeing insane positive growth. Some of that's due to the client we're really pulling folks. We're saying, hey, what is happening? What is working? Well, we're getting those scores right now in Q1 and Q2. We're at about a 9.5 out of 10 just in terms of their happiness level, something we take very seriously, which is leading us to on Average retained for 42 months. Learning, educating, teaching, educating my team, educating our clients, doing that through the Podcast is something that I really, I love doing. I enjoy it. Some of you out there may have been on the podcast. Some of you might be able to join in the future. It's been an absolute pleasure to build it and grow it over time. We're approaching our 100th episode. We broke into the top 10 in marketing. We broke through the top 50 in business. We surpassed Simon Sinek and Morning Brew in business, which is pretty cool because Simon Sinek knows what he's doing and some of his stuff. So the team's obviously a major importance for us in terms of looking out for each other, enjoying spending time together, having a great time with our client in San Francisco, getting the In N Out burger in Las Vegas with the team, meeting with a friend, an industry friend at a conference, doing Butler pitch and putt with the team, investing those relationships is obviously as talked about earlier. We have data, we have AI, we have tech. All of that's flooding into our industry. But these partnerships, these relationships, connecting with each and every one of you, having that networking event we just did is critical, and it's part of this ecosystem very much still. And I think it's going to continue to be so. What can B2B learn from some of these consumer brands that have been doing this a little bit longer? B2B has exploded recently. It's still exploding. It's an exciting opportunity for everyone in this room. What do we draw from that? And the big thing, we've took a look at data for years. We thought through, we've seen examples. And one of the biggest things we're coming back to, shocker. Mike's not going to find this surprising. Trust and authenticity. We came up with this ourselves, independently. It wasn't just taking straight from Mike's deck, but we just came back to this, looked at outside individuals, we looked at publishers, we're talking to our brands, we're talking to our teammates. And. And this continues to come up as the need that we need to tap into. And fortunately, we're in a space that can answer the call. The problem is widely known. You guys understand that we live in an era where there isn't a lot of trust. We're going to talk about that, but we definitely live in a trust gap. This is a slide that you've probably seen some example of through the news, through the headlines. There's reasons why consumers are not as trusting as business as they used to be. It's no shock to anyone here in this room. And guess what? Affiliate, as Amy alluded to in her Conversation unfortunately, has its checkered past as well. There's a lot of things that have gone on that don't necessarily elicit trust. We're not going to necessarily want to tell this to everyone and make this a huge deal, but it's real. We recognize these things have impacted the industry negatively. Historically. The trust gap is real across a number of things. CEO credibility, trust in businesses to do the right thing is extremely low. Trust in media, brands directly speaking to consumers is not what it used to be. It's not as effective as it used to be. It doesn't perform as well. Just as Mike said, that trend line of cost going up and performance going down, that's all part of that. And in B2B, it's a real thing. And these, I mean, literally, we're kind of overlapping in some of these themes. We came to these things independently. Right? There's a lot of distrust in business. A lot of B2B buyers do not believe vendor claims. Only 41% of Americans trust businesses to do the right thing. Sounds like the cowboy code a little bit. So how do we bridge this gap? You know, competence, doing right, getting it right is a big piece in actions is your word matching. Your action sounds like the cowboy coat. But even more importantly, a lot of it is in just the sincerity of the actions. Do you intend, do you mean to do the right thing? Are you showing honesty? Do you really genuinely care about the person on the other side of the table, on the other side of the zoom call person you're meeting with to try to make things better for your partners, for your team, for your clients, for the industry here are you being fair? Cowboy code. So how do we can bridge this gap, is the thought. We can take a little page from this old hokey list and kind of turn it into something that can be meaningful and valuable. Living with courage, taking pride, finishing what you start being tough but fair. A lot of those scandals wouldn't have happened if these things were being followed. And you'll see them interjected into other, other pieces of this as well. And guess who's the buyers right now for B2B SaaS? Gen Z, not as much. They're growing. But millennials, significantly, 71% are buying. So how are we reaching them? They're actually trusting the least out of this group, these cohort, they're the least trusting and they're the ones making the decisions to buy the SaaS, to buy partner stack, to team up with folks in this room. There's some Gen Zs and millennials in this room. I know, I know. So how are we bridging this gap? Fortunately, we're all kind of in this sort of together. We're, we're wanting to tap into trusted third party content. That's why we came here. That's what we're doing. It's what partner Stack enables. That's what we work on. That's exciting. That's, that's part of the opportunity with AI. It's part of the opportunity that many of us, many of the folks here talked about earlier today. A lot of the motions, Mike talked about ads, cold calls, outbound, they're not exactly sparking joy in people. You're not like thrilled to download the latest white paper necessarily. Not exactly cowboy code material. Ads, cold calls, these are not things that are eliciting that genuine trust and authenticity. So again, B2C's had their opportunity. They've shown their ability to connect, to create great content, to show authenticity. And they still have their way to go. Right. I think it's certainly B2B's turn now to really do it in an authentic way. It's not easy. We've talked about this a lot. It takes time, it takes effort, takes creativity. But it's B2B's turn in a lot of ways. You all have probably seen this one before, the importance of brand investment, right? Your 95% of your buyers who are out of market, you still need to invest in that total addressable market so that when they are ready to buy, they're considering you. And guess what? Partner marketing, what we're all doing here, can help do that. That's super exciting to everyone in this room that's writing for the. That's the cowboy code. We've seen this one. We've got to invest in brand in some capacity for B2B. Why? Because trust, you need to establish that trust without the brand recognition, without that brand understanding, that relationship with the brand community, like this, communities that others spoke about, that gets you on that rfp. If you're not in the rfp, you're not going to, you're not going to make, you're not going to win the business. So that's that simple. The brand lowers that risk. So it is an investment that can be material and ROI positive. And then it's not an easy one to replicate. If you're building a brand, a community, a knowledge base, it's hard to replicate that. Some future friends of the podcast, I'm sure you know these characters. Some, some good B2B voices, they're echoing this point, right. They're. They're only validating what all of us are saying here today, that trust is critical and this is how we're going to unlock things for consumers. In an era when people are just not very trusting, not as trusting. Another familiar one. People are making their decision before they even speak with you. They're really relying on the third party reviews, content, everything that you guys are working on. And again, they're doing it digitally. We have to find a way to get in front of them ahead of time and do this in a way that's meaningful and educational in a way that is thoughtful. It's not just trying to force it on individuals. So speaking of writing for the brand, Udi certainly did that. Taking gone from 1 million ARR to 300 million ARR. Pretty impressive. Obviously part of the team effort. But how did he do it? Cowboy coat, he's riding for the brand. They really owned that they invested in that. And he certainly lived with courage. It's the title of this book. They were bold. They weren't shying away. And it shows you that that partner marketing piece can certainly be a big lever. Now what does this have to do with consumer. Well, many, many years ago when I was at ebay, a little old is a really great example of how to integrate brand and partner marketing. We sat down, we collaborated with bring a trailer, one of the better enthusiast blogs on the Internet for ebay motors for their affiliate program. Multi staged, multi month, multi. Lot of time conversation. Right. Was it Becky or someone up here was explaining how long it takes. We wanted to work with them as a win win. We weren't just saying here's $10,000, good luck. Weren't just saying here's a CPC, see you later. You know, we sat down with them. There was, there was budgeting, there was branding, there was. The story was essentially let's take a 60s Corvette. Let me back up. Ebay Motors had a problem. They were basically like we're known for cars, not auto parts. Parts had a lot better margin. So it was a great opportunity to kind of utilize and lean into partner marketing, to kind of elevate that from revenue from a branding perspective. We did that. They basically said we're taking a stripped down Corvette from nothing. This is the finished product, by the way. Should have switched those slides, stripped it down from nothing. And we're gonna enlist the support of the bring a trailer community to build the car from nothing with using ebay motors parts. This is the original or close to the original. So it drove over seven figures, GMV20 original, thoughtful, well branded content posts. The first post alone got 279 comments. So talk about, you know, rewind. You think influencer and content was maybe a new thing, but you know, back in 2010 or whenever this was, it was a big part of the strategy and it was a big branded play and it told a story and it drove revenue and results. Zooming out ebay, motors, the parts and accessories category, they went from about 2 billion in GMV in 2009 to about 3.8 billion in 2012. This was a big contributor to that, about a 72% increase. So definitely some results and excitement in leaning into the brand, writing for the brand. And B2B, we're doing that now, engaging with Alvin the PM. He's got engaged, genuine followers. We're setting up videos on how Confluence can accelerate the team's project management work. Ideal for this type of audience. This is what we're working on at scale, this is what we're working on for a number of our partners. And it's taking a page from that story, it's taking a page from consumer. It's now obviously what's on the tip of everyone's tongue here in terms of content, leveraging answer engines, AI and working with good creators in the right way. So we take that collaborative approach, we take that thoughtful approach to ensure that it's well set up and it's an investment in the brand and the performance. So performance, 81% increase in traffic, 46% increase in their North Star metric. And it's working. We're building on that, we're building that with lookalikes, building from this community and other creators like Alvin the pm. So this is the main piece. We need to tap into these authentic voices. Doing that with the audience and creators is an important piece to kind of get your consumers excited, get the audience excited, get buyers excited. The pillars of this I think are really exciting for us in B2B. This is not an easy playbook, but this is a playbook that I think is directionally where we wanting to go. Authentic communities of trust. Actually looking at deep, detailed customer Personas with the brands you're working with, how do we unlock what those users are looking for, those buyers are considering, what are their pain points, what are their ages, what are their communities, what are their GEOs, what type of competitor set we're looking at? This is an important piece because these communities can, as Mike said, they can live on Slack, they can live in, in person, live events like this. We need to be thoughtful and creative about that and not just go into the platform and pluck out the top 50 and hope for the best. YouTube, I, I always like to smile this one because we, we do our fun little predictions every year in December we do our, our little newsletter, our BL Flywheel newsletter for those who subscribe. Thank you. In, in December I said YouTube's going to be the channel of 2025. And I think it was accurate. The growth rate, the engagement, YouTube TV dominating streaming, the Alvin example, right? How many of you are tapping into that for your partners now? How many of you are seeing that, needing to tap into that for LLMs and answer engines now, which is exploding. The growth of newsletters, right? This is not a surprise to anyone, but getting in touch with those influencers, getting in touch with those writers that are writing about what you're doing, your specific need, your buyer Personas, the 10x growth is not a joke. And then on the podcast side, obviously near and dear to my heart, but you know, being able to have unscripted conversation, intimate, something that's educating people and not just saying, hey, here you go, a little bit more cowboy code attitude there. And then influencers, it's just dominating. It's an important piece of the mix that we have to tap into. So as part of that, we've been building out for the last about six months our own proprietary algorithm to tap into our database to tap into follower engagement, contact info, revenue. Yes. Using some AI to really do content matching based on a lot of data points, a lot of demographics and a lot of Personas. So looking at the brand, we don't want to just say here's a potential partner, they're a nine out of 10. We want to give a score that's based on the match of a good brand. Sage is matching with a content site. We want to say that's now a 9.5 out of 10 because that's an accounting based integration. That's a Persona driven way to think of things. And based on our early data, we are seeing it increase and improve answer engine. Getting citations, getting value, showing that time over time. I know, profound was mentioned. I think you guys are working with some teams here about improving that citation and that visibility now more than ever. It's critical and it's exciting to be able to be part of that like Mike was talking about. And the goal here is around that trust and authenticity. We've spent literally years looking at this market where we've seen the most value for our clients, that trust and authenticity is really a huge part of why we're. Why we want to do this, why we want to be a part of it. So a lot of that. This is where the but came in. Sorry I dropped that earlier. A lot of that is about how do we connect with the audiences, your buyers. Right. But who. Who's really driving a lot of the legwork? A lot of the partners and publishers and affiliates in the audience, the creators. So our job in a lot of ways is to get them excited, give them the tools, make sure you take care of them and do right by them. They're the currency of the ecosystem. Keep your promises, right? That's cowboy code tracking. Get your API tracking set up and your CRM integrated through partner stack fraud protection. Something that gets neglected a lot. Cut a lot of bad guys at ebay. It was no joke, as you saw from the timeline. Gotta be tough but fair with them. Cowboy code communication, maybe say less, but say more, talk less, say more. I like to limit surprises and coach the team around that. Get them ahead of time, give them the schedule of goals, calendar of events, what's coming up, what is needed, what's happening comp. Right. Keep your promises there. Talk about the importance of cowboy code when it comes to compensation for your partners and authenticity. Right. That match, it's all about that matchmaking and making sure. Like was said on the stage earlier, the panel, you've got to have a good connection. They have to have some kind of a reason to believe in why they're promoting the brand. Again, tracking, there's a lot of pieces individually this, so I'm going to roll through, but got to have that API for connected tv. IP address is critical. We want to have that to where we can see if there's any anomalies, if there's fraud issues, especially around lead referring URL, we want to know how they're promoting. We want to see that visibility and that transparency. How many times this UTM parameter has been needed as a backup when maybe tracking doesn't work or we have an issue. We want to triangulate all that and do it the right way around. Fraud protection. We've got to look at the quality, we've got to look at ip, we've got to look at lead scrubbing on communication that time matters. Time can kill a deal. We all know this. Talk less, say more. Cowboy code, be proactive, get ahead of it. And then going back to the relationship piece, we're all here, we're all spending time, we all, all this stuff matters on a human level. So how do we show them what we know them? How do we show them that we genuinely care? Just like we talked about at the very beginning, being competent is critical, but that genuine just empathy and thoughtfulness around how you're approaching it does actually matter. In terms of growing and building that trust gap that we all unfortunately live in, compensation, we've got to do it right, we got to think long term, we got to keep our promises. So my dad, he was the inspiration for the Cowboy Code. Lost him in 2020. But we're keeping the excitement and the dream alive. That's me cowboyed up and playing the guitar. So I just challenge you guys today. Define what the Cowboy Code means to you. Define your code, look at some of the principles of it. If you like them, use them. We're going to build trust one action at a time. Choose the people you associate wisely, your team, your partners, the brands you work with, Partner stack group here and speak up and stand tall. I would challenge you. Pick a principle you like, think of your own, use it to your advantage, bring it back to your team, agree on one, share it with those results and let's start building. So wrapping it all up. The gap is real. We know that. It's not a huge shock, we see it everywhere. But I think together, building this the right way, we can build that gap, we can draw a bridge there and improve it. And the cool thing is we're all doing the thing that's going to bridge the gap. We're all doing the thing. It's third party trusted partners. Each and every one of us can do that if we do it the right way. It's not easy, but we can. B2C's had their time. They're still doing their thing, they're still doing it. But B2B, it's time. The time is now for B2B. Time is now for everybody in this room. And if you're building trust with the partners, the ones that are doing the work, the publishers, the affiliates, the creators, that's going to really make the magic happen, they're the ones that are promoting the brands, they're the ones that are ultimately the currency of the ecosystem. And I hope that the Cowboy Code can help you out a little bit with that. Thank you.