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#121 Zero Platform: 10 Great Partners Beat 100 — The Future of Local Marketing | Adam Dewer, Soci.ai
00:28:48
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty degrange and I'm really excited to talk to Adam Dewar today. Adam, how you doing, man?
- [00:16]
B
Hey, Ty. I'm feeling fan freaking tastic. I have to make a fun joke to kind of start it off. It's hump day. I always love hump day. Made me feel really old recently. We're just talking about having three kids. My oldest, she's nine, she came home and she's like, mommy, daddy. The boys were talking about hump day all day at school today and they thought it was so funny. And so I had to explain to her where that even came from. The camel walking through the office. Hump day. It's a GEICO commercial. I think if I bring it back. Remember that one? That made me feel old trying to explain that commercial and what a commercial was even, you know, the kids don't even watch TV like that anymore. But anyways, good to see you, Todd.
- [00:55]
A
Good to see you too. It's, it's. Yes, it's. You're. You're a man after my own heart. Referencing old pop culture references. So maybe we'll, we'll weave some into the conversation today. But I think leading partnerships at Sochi, having some great conversations tackling the concepts of AI. There's a lot in the episode today. So I think the audience is going to have fun and appreciate to get to know you and learn about some of the great things you've experienced in partner led growth.
- [01:24]
B
Right?
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A
Hope so. I think so. Just jumping into it, Adam, give me a little bit of a sense like when I think about socio, like what problem were you hired to own and how are you kind of measuring your progress on that?
- [01:37]
B
I love jumping into that one. So I've been in our industry for about six years and I've been really focused on kind of building out partner program, working with strategic partners. I don't know, have a very entrepreneurial spirit over the years. So I spent a lot of time building projects and ideas. And so when I was in another organization that was really partner led, I really enjoyed getting in my hands dirty and understanding from an operational standpoint and how all the pieces fit together to make a partner program work really well. And I started to see some shifts happening in the industry and for myself made a shift as well and came into Sochi, which was kind of mirroring this time in there. Their, their professional life instead of the business, talking like a human, where they really wanted to take that step in Building out a true partner program. They had been working with agencies, they had been working with resellers. They've been really successful enterprise deals and servicing and closing and maintaining enterprise brands. So they had a really strong product then they also had a, a very strong like AI heavy direction in their product. But they didn't quite have all the tools in kind of building out this partner program.
- [02:48]
A
Just as a quick sense. Adam, how do you, how would you describe Sochi for like for your kids or something like just for audience members out there that are not familiar with Sochi.
- [02:57]
B
My family always struggles to explain what I do. Right. So. So she makes sure that local businesses can be found when you look on Google, when you look on AI, right. If you want to find a local restaurant, a local dental office, whatever that is like doing that near me search. So she makes sure that they're showing up on local listings, local pages, that they're showing up through review searches, that responding to reviews, managing and maintaining and posting your social media. All of those pieces that kind of come around the local marketing experience for brands and then for resellers. Awesome. Yeah, thanks. But I was brought in to grow out the partner program. Right. And very clearly measuring that by revenue.
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A
Right.
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B
There's kind of two areas. How much revenue do we bring in? Net new.
- [03:48]
A
Let's go, let's bring in some revenue. What's where we live and breathe ourselves? When you think about the Sochi mission, right. You've got kind of the multi location marketing you referenced and being able to help local businesses with AI. What's some of the like big misconceptions marketer have about. Marketers have about the AI powered local marketing. What does that look like in practice?
- [04:12]
B
I love that question and I think like the obvious one here, right. Beyond the idea that a lot of marketers think you can just turn on any AI feature and it's automatically working for you in all of the best ways automagically. Learned that from one of my clients the other days and now I told him I'm trying to plug this in anywhere, it's becoming a thing. But yeah, the idea that you can just turn it on and it's automatically working for you is I think that's a pretty common misconception. The one that I see a lot and I talk a lot about is this idea of AI slop, right. Especially when it comes to content and social media. And I think that it really misses the mark to think that because of AI content generation we're going to have this incredible amount of Slop. I don't know if you spend a lot of time on social. I personally don't anymore, but when I do, I feel like that's mostly what I'm seeing is slop, but not AI. It's just poor content. And I think the challenge always has been, especially focusing on SMBs is how do you deliver good content at scale. Right. And this is a challenge that I've seen with SMB resellers for years. You just can't at the same price point create content that's as engaging as an enterprise brand at scale for a thousand SMBs. So what you typically have seen is localized variations of the same content for a vertical. That's kind of been the solution over the years. But what we're seeing now is this fundamental shift because of AI and because of the intelligence that creates engaging content, real content, relevant. Right. So rather than just thinking like how do I, what, what, what is relevant? Today with current events, AI is looking at signals. So like our review agent as an example is probably giving the most signals because customers, it's consumer generated content. Right. They're in there giving reviews about their experience. So our AI is seeing that. And if you're a dentist office and you don't have dental or teeth whitening as a service, our review is going to pick up that customers are giving you good reviews about white teeth whitening, but you're not actually promoting that yet. So now we're going to create a campaign that's really focused on your business and teeth whitening and pulling in like your actual customer reviews to promote a campaign that is highly relevant, highly localized and not slop at all. It's not a variation of the same content. It is for that business.
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A
Yeah, I love it. It's such a problem right now with you see this expansion of content out there and I think rising above the noise is such a great use case and I think that's exciting piece. And we see that noise in partner marketing too. When you think about like an ideal partner. Right. I'd love to hear if you could describe your best partner of the last year. Like what, what made them different?
- [06:56]
B
I've worked with a lot of different types of partners and I'm, I'm lucky enough when I came into my role here, we kind of sat down and said like, who's our icp? And, and who do we want to be in partners? And we wanted to be the SMB reseller of choice. So that means that we had to be really specific and keen on what kind of partners that we want to work with here and that focus is their large SMB tech platforms and resellers and sometimes we have some like verticalized value added resellers too. But primarily we're looking at SMB. What we find to be the best type of partner to work with is the type of partner that is open to setting up sessions with all of their departmental leaders. Right. So we find the real success comes when you can go wide and you can go deep. Right. So it's not just understanding what the company goals are, it's understanding that when you're talking to the director of support, they have some really key KPIs that they need to hit so that they're hitting their goals every, every quarter and they look good to their bosses. Right, their managers.
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A
Yeah.
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B
If you can identify those and you can see where you rate with them as it relates to your business and improve on it quarter over quarter. When you go into that business review at the end of the year and you're talking to the executive leadership team and you're showing them how you have worked with each of their teams at KPIs across the entire org. Now when you come in with an initiative to drive real revenue, you're showing that you're reducing OPEX and you're, you're, you're reducing time to market. Now let's talk about initiatives really drive revenue like all the other noise goes away when you're having that type of strategic partnership with, with the partners that you work with.
- [08:38]
A
That's great. When you think about partner types, you know, referral, reseller, tech integration, is there, is there kind of a, something that rises above that maybe exceeded expectations from
- [08:48]
B
your view, I'd be hard pressed to pick between a product led tech partner where like your partnership with leadership across that product is really strong and, and a reseller with a really engaged agency audience, those are right next to there for me. And I think like I've been lucky enough to kind of work with both, I've worked with all of them. Right. But if I, if I get to pick and line them up like I'm going with those. But I'm right now Ty, I'm probably putting my money on, on agencies. A couple of my favorite party partners are both tech platforms that enable agencies and a reseller that's enabling agencies. And I, I love it. I mean look, we know AI is moving faster than you can even actually explain. Like what we talked about yesterday has changed the week before then. Right. So I think the movers that can enable an agency, whatever your product is, if you can enable an agency to help an SMB onboard into AI, like that is where the wins are going to happen throughout the rest of this year and for next year.
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A
I love that. Are there signals you get when like partner early on where partners are like, okay, this is, this is showing signs of scale versus this is showing signs of maybe not being as lucrative or beneficial?
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B
Hmm. Gosh. A lot of my early signs really are coming from the teams I'm working with. Like, I can't really think of an example where having the buy in across an org hasn't led to the success of an initiative. Like, it's the early signal of those that know the customer best who are going to tell you if it's going to work or not. Of course, knowing where their incentive is, you got to, you got to, you got to take that part into consideration of it. There's just, it's, it's a very quick line for us. Like every initiative is a quick, is a quick buy in where, where it's kind of low cost for our partners to sell. So it's, it's a very quick signal on if it's, if it's working or not. I know that's not really answering your question.
- [10:51]
A
No, no, it's all good. We, I mean it's all, it's all helpful context. I mean, and I'm kind of throwing a number of things out. We've talked a lot of, we've also talked a lot about experimentation. Obviously it's big, big part of the theme of the pod. Is there something that you've, you've run that, that has some like, experimentation elements that you're like, man, we just got to keep running that again. Or is there like a learning that you kind of think has been valuable or interesting to share? It doesn't necessarily have the most super uber scientific structure, but I'm just curious about some of the test and learn things that you've observed and what maybe you can share with the audience.
- [11:31]
B
This one's interesting. And leave it in, leave it out. However we feel about it. Yeah. The one thing you get to know about me, you realize I always have a project happening. I have to my adhd, it keeps me kind of excited about something even though I'm running over here. In my past world, one of the things that we saw from the data is if you were serving in SMBs and an SMB did not have a connection to Google or Facebook for 12 months, there were 70, 70% of those churned within 12 months. Okay. And we also knew that 30% of those connections are breaking every year. So connection became a really big challenge and there wasn't anything in place to kind of go after the idea and get a connection once a token broke tokens, that's how you keep that connection in with Facebook and Google and some of the other platforms. So I had went out and found a tool, this was about three years ago, that kind of solved for this connection challenge. And I tried to partner throughout the organization and say this is one of the solutions that we need. And couldn't quite get it, get them to buy into it. So I went out and built it, found some folks that had a dev agency and said I want to try and build an MVP for this and for relatively low collection we could. Very cool. And I did that because my revenue, my income was tied to growth for a partner in retention. And I knew that if I hit those numbers that I was going to pay back what I did. So we built the mvp, we started to put it into market. We found that for some of our agencies they went from a 30% to a 90% connect rate. 30 days and their churn went away. So found it, hypothesized, proved it, built it. And then our company said, okay, we're going to go ahead and build it, which is fine. Took my product, I sold off the MVP to somebody and kind of rinse and repeat.
- [13:22]
A
I love that. Very cool, very cool that. And I feel like we're kind of, you know, such an exciting time. You're doing that years ago, it sounds like before. A lot of the tooling has been so democratized. I feel like a lot of the build now is becoming more common and more, you know, good end around that. But like overall pretty exciting opportunity. So is that, are you chomping at the bit to do more building or is it more a one off thing?
- [13:51]
B
Oh man. I mean is it even building anymore? Like three years ago I had to go find somebody that had a dev team so that we could build that. Right. Like I built all the, the wireframes and the. And. And now I can vi code it like yeah, I am working on a, on a project and by the way, I don't know if I can plug them. Leadsy is the name of that company. Any agency that has a connection issue highly suggest checking them out. It's a really great product. I've known them for about four or five years now and actually we partner with them now at soci because it's so impactful.
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A
That's great.
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B
I'm sorry, the question that you had.
- [14:26]
A
Yeah, I mean with the, with the explosion of Vibe coding and AI and like products and SaaS, it's making it so much easier to build. Not to go down a rabbit hole. But now that you don't need to go out and hand select that dev team as much or as likely not to say you're not going to utilize devs, which isn't the case. But is it more exciting? Are there more things that you and Soshi want to build? Either you yourself or. So she as well, like how are you thinking about how does that change your build buy mentality at all? Just curious.
- [14:59]
B
I think it kind of changes everything. The speed to make those decisions has just been completely replaced. A couple weeks ago we had an all hands meeting and our CEO and CTO got on and said, hey, you guys aren't using AI enough. We see your usage on GPT, we see your usage on Gemini, we have enterprise plans and we're now launching Claude. We're just not using it enough. On our product level, we're now shipping four to 10 times faster than we were in 2025. Four times, like that's insane. As individuals, you can do more with less. Anyone listening who's been in partnerships knows that, man, that's our world. Right? So for me it's been, it's been a savior because I can now more easily do the work of two or three people while still only being myself. So I can use those AI to turn an idea into a project initiative that's very clear, very fast, which allows me to get those approvals or that doesn't work and then I can either say, do I need to go and find one person to build this whole tool versus going and buying a PRM or some other product that might capture 10% of the, the use case that we have. And we're actively exploring that. Our partner marketing team is, is working on a, on our own product that, that we would use to enable our partners versus potentially to going out and buying it. So I think that as an organization we're adopting and moving faster, but we still need to, we still do need to find the buys where, where it does that are.
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A
I love it. Yeah. And it's kind of interesting because it sort of connects to something else we were talking about around, you know, all the things you can provide for a partner. You know, there's compensation, incentive, content, landing page direction, relationship, a host of things.
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B
Right.
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A
How do you think about those, that spectrum of things that you can tee up a partner for success. How do you tee up a partner for success?
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B
It's a good one. And I think a lot of people might not like my answer here because it's not as scalable. And this kind of comes back to the part that I've said and kind of drilled in a few times is we're really particular about the type of partner we take on because we want to put the kind of strategic work into strategic accounts that they need. And what works for one strategic account likely isn't going to like really work for the other ones. Like there's some components that you can plug and play, but by and large, when you drill down to know what Those really unique KPIs are or specific requirements are from a team, you have to go and find what fits that. And sometimes you can't get that off of a shelf. Which is why I'm such a big fan of your speed to build things right now with AI is we can go out and build that little project. We have a couple of those in the works right now. Right. We want to make it really easy to pre promote new features before they're coming out kind of pre sell. And we're using a guided tour platform that allows us to white label for our strategic partners and create these, these short workflows that they can leverage and then plug them into the existing kind of sales processes that they have right now. But they're a little bit different for each person, each, each partner. The concept is still the same.
- [18:10]
A
I love it when you, when you think about, you know, teeing up or things around, experimentation around co marketing, co selling, strategic partners. Are there things that have come up that are interesting learnings for you around that? Obviously you mentioned, you know, co selling, you mentioned agencies. When you think about co selling and strategic partners and co marketing, we, what, what stuff has worked there? What stuff has hasn't worked from your perspective?
- [18:37]
B
Yeah, we don't do as much co marketing as I'd like just because we stay behind in the shadows a lot with our strategic partners, they want to operate as the only brand forward. I think we'll see some shifting to that, more co branding because of AI. And you want to be able to move a little bit faster with, with a logo in front that represents that, that speed to market. So we might see some shifting there. But the, what I've found to be the most successful is to help those partners meet the right partner. Right. The right complimentary partner that has the same ICP and can complement the offering and Helping them to find that path to market together. I found more success in enabling that to happen than I have and trying to drill down into co marketing initiative.
- [19:29]
A
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
- [19:31]
B
The karma comes back.
- [19:33]
A
Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think, you know, talked about AI, obviously it's, it's a topic du jour, it's exploding. How is that sort of reframing, rethinking like types of partners that you're landing on that you're trying to aim to recruit, activate, court. How is that explosion sort of shifted your, your partner strategy a little bit in terms of who you want to work with, who you want to go after and optimize.
- [19:58]
B
I think that this position some specific partners to excel a little bit faster than others. Those that are enabling through agencies and selling through agencies I think are really, really poised to crush it in this new world. And kind of right alongside them is offering the professional services. Right. I think that a lot of folks might argue that professional service companies are going to take a massive hit because SMBs are able to go out and find their own AI products to run, manage, you know, manage all of those services for them. But there's still a gap in knowledge and rather than learning that gap of knowledge, they need to go find other operational AI products that are going to improve their business. So I think you're just going to see a shift in those companies that are offering professional services to be far more efficient.
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A
Right.
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B
We're going to see a change to price. I mean kind of across the board pricing's got to adjust or value. One of the two is going to, going to give, which can be really interesting for a lot of really big companies to see. But yeah, I think that those that are offering professional services and are adopting AI in a way that allows them to do 10 times more with the same. That's my preference because I hate the conversation of how do I do the same with less. I don't, I don't want, want to remove people. I'd rather try and reframe that conversation into doing much more and charging same. I think, I think that, I think that's where you're going to see, yeah, some success coming out of AI.
- [21:27]
A
That's awesome. When you think about your partner pipeline and you kind of scan the opportunities like what do you think is the biggest untapped opportunity? Is there a part of it that feels under invested or experimented that you'd want to maybe tap into further?
- [21:45]
B
I mean honestly, it's those two, those two types of partners are the ones that we're going after. Those are the ones that are keeping our pipeline nice and heavy. The types of strategic partners that we have are a 24 to 36 month plus sales cycle. Right. Chances are they're probably in a long term contract somewhere. They're constantly evaluating where their current partners are going.
- [22:10]
A
Agencies and tech platforms really being the focus.
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B
Exactly. Yeah. And, and, and by agencies, more specifically a reseller that targets agencies. Right. Like we have some direct agency clients. But I'd rather have somebody, I want a partner that plays the middle, that adds more value on top of what we have to those agencies and can enable them. Right. Like that's, that's, that's a business in itself is enabling that scale.
- [22:35]
A
Yeah. That's awesome. If you're thinking of the always be testing playbook of experiments and you're building out partner led motion moving forward, were there a few experiments that you're like, this is kind of what has to be involved. You sort of talked a little bit about like which ones you'd want to have really prioritized. Is there one in particular that jumps out for this year in particular?
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B
Oh man. For experiment this year that I'm working.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So I actually had a really interesting one this morning. I am very bullish on the idea that we're going to move to a zero platform faster. Faster than I think most software companies would like.
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A
Zero platform.
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B
Zero platform meaning you're not logging into a platform. You're not using a single sign on. You're not downloading an app. You're. You're responding to a text. Right. You're, you're getting a text that says the last hour you got these four reviews. Here's the replies for them. Just thumbs up this message and we're going to send them.
- [23:37]
A
Or customer using Sochi would only use a text message kind of.
- [23:43]
B
Yeah. Whether it's. Or whether it's another platform, agents are going to be more autonomous as folks are build trust with it. And so they want to move at the speed that they're comfortable with, but then they want to move at the speed that they're moving and that doesn't happen behind a computer. For small business owners.
- [24:03]
A
Well, it's also perfect for your icp. Right. The small business owner mindset. They're not necessarily always behind a desk.
- [24:11]
B
Exactly. And so I'm working a project right now. We'll see. Right. It's got some really good legs. There's one component that builds kind of like the foundational layer for, to build your agent on. They're Partnered with the SMS layer that, that provides the pipes. They only work with channel partners. We have us who has the agent working at the like listing review and social layer and then we have our reseller that's enabling the agencies and we want to run a webinar series that basically allows these agencies to show up over five sessions and build their own, their own app, their own agents.
- [24:47]
A
Yeah.
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B
Plug and play all of these different agents into their own, their own design app that they're, that they're using with their customers.
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A
I love it. Very cool. Coming down the home stretch. This has been awesome, Adam. Just good, good learnings. Good, good test and learn thinking in the partner led growth world. It's, it's super exciting. What's something just kind of fun stuff at the end like here. What's something that you've bought recently that you just can't live without?
- [25:11]
B
Yeah, actually I made sure I had it in, in the video today and I didn't buy it but I had asked for something like it for Christmas and I got it a few years ago and it's one of my most used products. It's. They're, they're like a sound bath. It's called now and W. I call it my tones. It's literally you just press each of them. It's three to three and a half minutes. It's always different. If you've ever heard like the sound bath with the big bowls, I love it because in today's world like constant context switching gets really challenging and that is a three minute way for me to just kind of pause and, and shut down what I was doing and prepare for the next thing.
- [25:54]
A
Love that. I, I definitely like that call out. Super cool. You talked about being a parent, being a dad, multiple kids like myself. Like any, any dad learnings or, or wisdom or things that you share that might be interesting or notable or things that you found helpful for folks.
- [26:12]
B
I love using AI for my children to help them feel special. So I've gotten really into creating music and that's just music for myself. Like I put it on Spotify so it's easier to get to but it's like, it's like a therapy outlet for me. Like I'll make one for my wife and I for anniversary. I'll make one about the kids so it talks about what they're doing and stuff. They love listening to music on the TV when it's mentions their name. Other thing I started to do is build stories for them. So I would use like 11 labs and just whatever AI tool you want to use to create the scripts and then create these stories and put them on Spotify. So there's like lessons for them to learn that they had an experience that was hard. It like talks them through it kind of thing. I like doing that kind of stuff for the kids.
- [26:58]
A
That's so cool, man. It's so cool. Just crapping it up. What's something that folks don't know about you?
- [27:04]
B
If you've met me for more than five seconds, you've probably heard that I am a girl dad times three. And I put something in here that like popped in my, my brain. Something in here when we were kind of going through the, the prep for it. And I'll just, I'll just go ahead with it. I've always considered myself a really good problem solver. And I was recently reminded by a family member that when I was in middle school, I got some like, state award for being the best problem solve for solver in the state where you like, did this word problem every week. And I was a class clown. Adhd, right? Like, it didn't. I had a hard time paying attention. You would not think that I was
- [27:38]
A
a smart kid in school.
- [27:39]
B
And so at the end of the year at this assembly when they called me up, I was like, what is happening? And yeah, I got this award for being the problem solver. And that was an important moment in my life because from that point forward, I knew I was a good problem solver. And now it is one of my best. So I guess.
- [27:57]
A
Very cool. No, I love it, man. That's actually very impressive. Very commendable. So tip of the cap and I'm sure those things are helping you now to this day, Adam, it's been awesome to get to know you more. Awesome for you to take your time and share some really great wins and learnings and thoughts about partner led growth with the audience. And thank you so much for coming on, man.
- [28:21]
B
Of course, Ty. Really appreciate it. And as we close out so that I can make sure it's in there, I want to make sure that my wife knows that I love her because I know she's going to watch this, this, this podcast.
- [28:31]
A
Good man.
- [28:32]
B
Now she's laughing. Thanks, Ty. Thanks for having me on.
- [28:35]
A
You're welcome, man. Take care.
- [28:36]
B
Bye. Bye.