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#63 The Tech Stack for B2B Affiliate Marketing, Tyler Calder, CMO of PartnerStack
00:41:50
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- [00:00]
Ty Degrange
Foreign. Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your host, Ty degrange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance, marketing, customer acquisition, paid media and affiliate marketing. We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings and growth markets, marketing and life. Time to nerd out. Check your biases at the door and have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
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Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty degrange. I'm really excited to have Tyler Calder today. Tyler, how you doing, man?
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Tyler Calder
I am good. How are you?
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Ty Degrange
I'm doing well, Survived the weekend. Another good week. Starting to cool off here in Austin. My 49ers and my UT Longhorns fared terribly this weekend, but we're surviving and make it through.
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Tyler Calder
Good. I'm crossing my fingers for you.
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Ty Degrange
How are you in your neck of the woods?
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Tyler Calder
Good, good. I'm just hanging outside of Toronto, so we're in the thick of fall. I'm trying to squeeze in potentially a few more rounds of golf as I continue my journey to trying to figure out that game. But we're probably only a couple weeks before we got to shut it down.
- [01:20]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, I commend you for that journey. It's a challenging and humbling one, but one that I enjoy as well.
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Tyler Calder
Awesome. I love it.
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Ty Degrange
Yeah. For those who don't know, Tyler, he's the CMO of Partner Stack. Very great experience within partner stack, within B2B SaaS and marketing and performance marketing. Really excited to delve into some good learnings today. Tyler, maybe to kick us off, maybe just tell folks in the audience about PartnerStack.
- [01:47]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, for sure. So, you know, the way I like to describe Partner Stack is, you know, a little bit of a journey. So the highest level, what I suggest is we're the leading platform for scaling partnerships and driving revenue for B2B companies. Right. So that's your pretty typical tagline, but really when you unpack that, what that means is the platform we've built has quite a bit of breadth to it. And so our whole value prop from day one was companies really should be thinking about how do you bring all of your indirect revenue opportunities under a single strategy, a single owner? Like, it's so powerful, but that power is kind of diminished when it's so fragmented across a company. So what I mean by fragmented is you might have somebody own, you know, marketing partners like influencers and affiliates, content creators, and then you might have sales owners, agencies and co sell partners and resell Partners. And so what that leads to is this fragmentation. It leads to teams using four or five different pieces of tech, depending on what they're trying to do. And so we said, no, no, like this really should be a single strategy and you need a single platform. So that's sort of the breadth that we've built. No matter what type of indirect revenue motion you have running, you can manage it and run it through Partner Stack. And so we like to say it really is about managing and orchestrating your entire kind of indirect revenue ecosystem. So tracking, attribution, partner onboarding, partner education, certification, tiering your programs, managing payouts, all that fun stuff. And then we have this network which is really interesting. So we have a network of about 80,000 active partners all focused on B2B and we're regularly trying to match those partners with customers and find a really good pairing where there can be kind of mutual benefit between the two. So you have the platform to sort of manage everything and then you have the network to help you continue to scale the impact of your program. So, you know, my big bold vision when I talk about PartnerStack is B2B companies. When you look at where they spend cash, it's Google, LinkedIn and events. My big bold vision is Partner Stack should be on that list. It is one of the default kind of sources of distribution that you look for when you're rolling. So that's us.
- [04:04]
Ty Degrange
I love that. Tyler.
- [04:06]
The Always Be Testing podcast is sponsored by Round Barn Labs. RBL is the growth agency. They are a leader in efficient customer acquisition and pound for pound, the most experienced team in affiliate marketing. For the last nine years they've worked with brands like Oculus, Amazon, Grammarly, ebay, Atlassian, Scotch, Quarter, Live Nation, Hatch, Puma, Hoppin, Stubbub, Recess, PacSun, SunBasket and more. They've generated over 100 million in media, spend over 250 million in traffic generated, 500 million in revenue generated. They go beyond the data to give you the why and the revenue generating recommendations to grow and create a paid marketing flywheel for your brand. So if you're a consumer E Com brand looking to go from 8 to 9 figure revenue per year, or an enterprise brand looking for a higher quality of data, rigor and growth, Check them out@roundbarn labs.com.
- [05:12]
We share a lot in terms of vision and vision for ourselves and where we're seeing success and placed a very significant bet on, you know, B2B and seeing a lot of success with SaaS and just believers in the model and also Believers in what partner marketing and affiliate and influencer marketing can do for said model. So I couldn't agree more that it needs to be part of that stack beyond events, Beyond Google, beyond LinkedIn. And I love hearing about it. I love the progress and wins that I've seen and the great work that your team and you have been putting out and sharing and educating the community about what wasn't really a thing a few years ago, gang. Like now it's really exploded into something quite powerful. And so I love that.
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Tyler Calder
Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that. That's great.
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Ty Degrange
As chief marketing officer, as performance marketer, someone knowing kind of, hey, these are the, kind of, these are the channels that you can tap into as you think about marketing partner stack. What are some of the growth loops that you've tapped into? What are some of the levers that your thesis is kind of centered around? What do you, what is kind of the. Your stack, if you will, if you, if you kind of flip it on your. Put your marketer hat on for partner stack.
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Tyler Calder
Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, the growth loop question is always a good one. And so there's a few things I would point to. I think the first is just the business itself is an entire growth loop. We got a pretty good flywheel going. And so what I mean by that is our platform, as I mentioned, like it's pretty powerful on its own. Like I mentioned, sort of the breadth of what you can do with it, the depth, you can go with key partner types, but when you pair that with our network, to me it becomes this really interesting, almost unbeatable thing in the B2B space because the two feed each other so well. So really what I'm saying is as we sign more customers, those customers attract more partners into our network as partners out there. See all of the kind of B2B behemoths that we're working with, all of the up and coming startups that we're working with, it's a really attractive place for partners to come and drive their own business forward. So as we sign customers, it attracts partners and then as we attract more partners, that in turn makes the network more valuable and attracts more vendors. So I would say that, you know, as much of a cop out answer as that might be, I would start there. Like the whole business is sort of built on that loop, which I think is a really interesting thing. And then if I were to get a little bit more zeroed in and tactical, I think we have this data loop that I think is pretty important for our business. So the more vendor and partner connections that we have in our network, the more data we're able to capture and aggregate that data informs product development. It gives incredible insight into what the best of the best are doing to drive success in their programs. It shows us what maybe some of the lower performing companies are doing. And you know, we can interject and help and we can learn perhaps what not to do. But really what that loop is doing is driving incredible insight into our marketing team to build content with. It helps drive our approach to coaching during the sales cycle. How do you provide as much value as possible during the sales cycle and then once they're, you know, a customer. Same with the CS team. Right. So all of this data around kind of what the, like I said, the best of the best and then being able to slice it in a thousand different ways depending on who we're coaching and supporting, I would say that's become one of our biggest growth loops, at least in my opinion. I think that data play is really critical and it's one of the things I always encourage people to look at is what's the data that you have access to that nobody else does. You can really start to anchor a lot of what you do, not just in marketing, but your whole organization to that. And then I'd be amiss to not suggest that our own partner program of a partner ecosystem is a pretty significant growth loop itself. You know, I think the more that you can lean into partners and attach them to your marketing, your sales, your customers, the stronger just about every single metric across your business will become. You know, the marketing side, co marketing with partners, you're going to drive more traffic, you're going to see higher conversion rates, more engaged traffic. Your cost of acquirer is going to be lower sales side, shorter sales cycles, higher acv, stronger win rates, cs, you know, stronger net revenue retention. So for us, just focusing on our own partner ecosystem is right up there with one of the most important levers that we're pulling.
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Ty Degrange
I love that there's a lot in there to kind of understand and digest. And it's a good thing to have multiple growth loops. And the fact that there is a network effect there is powerful for anyone that has a remote understanding of growth and to be able to attract world class brands on the B2B side, it's certainly going to enable improved outcomes on the partner side and that just continues to feed upon itself. So I love that.
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Tyler Calder
Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, again to your point, there's so much that we could unpack Something as simple as having our own refer a friend type of program writing our product like simple things like that are so oftentimes ignored but so impactful and relatively easy to implement. So things like that we see some pretty good traction with as well.
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Ty Degrange
Amazing. Maybe tell us what you're most excited.
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Tyler Calder
About right now besides the upcoming basketball season and seeing what the Raptors can do. I'm going to give again an answer that probably isn't the most exciting, but it's genuinely just the continued growth and trajectory of PartnerStack. You know, we've been somewhat quietly growing over the past four to five years to the point where based on every data point I can see, we've become the most commercially successful partner tech startup of the decade. And so, you know, with what we've built, I do think we're primed to become a de facto mission critical piece of tooling for go to market teams, you know, especially teams that are looking to get into that next phase of their growth, looking to scale revenue, you know, in a really predictable and efficient way. I think that's what I'm most excited about, which is bringing the power of partnerships, ecosystems, indirect revenue, whatever you want to call it, just bringing that to the entire go to market, you know, not having it just sit siloed within a single partner team. But I think again like just really evangelizing how big of an impact it can be to a business I think is probably what I'm most excited about.
- [12:03]
Ty Degrange
That's awesome. I love that. I think that's fantastic. Obviously all businesses have challenges. You guys have seen immense growth, you've seen immense traction. The focus on B2B has clearly been phenomenal and paid dividends. What are some of the challenge areas? What are some of the areas of improvement? I talk about this a lot in the pod. I'm just curious to get a sense of what are some of the things you're looking to tackle in those areas.
- [12:28]
Tyler Calder
I think the biggest one for any venture backed company, any company that's in scale mode is just the challenge of focus. Like I said, I think that's true for everybody. I don't think that's unique to us. But when I look at PartnerStack and we have conversations internally, you know, genuinely there's, there's a dozen paths that we could take as we, you know, strive to get to that $100 million mark and, and beyond. And so, you know, within our executive team and then obviously trickling down through the rest of the organization. I think it's, it's Just how do you continually and pretty ruthlessly prioritize on our focus areas while still giving yourselves the latitude to wander to. To explore? You know, I think I see some companies, they have no focus, and I think that's a recipe for disaster. And then you see some that are hyper, hyper, hyper focused to the point of having blinders on, and they don't give themselves the room to wander. So I think that balance of focus, plus, you know, still being open to where we could take this thing, I think, I think that's probably the biggest challenge. If I were to zero in a little bit more tactically and give a bit more of a concrete answer. I think one of the things I'm really interested in is just this idea of education in the space. We feel like there's a huge opportunity to educate just on B2B SaaS and partnerships. I think there's a deficit of knowledge there. I think I see a lot of folks trying to implement either a B2C playbook, or they're trying to implement kind of an antiquated channel type of playbook. And there's a lot of folks just trying to seek out, what is that modern playbook? What does that look like? And going back to our data, going back to some of the incredible work that our customers are doing, I think we're in such a position to help educate the market, help improve the iq. And so for me, the challenge is just how do you go about doing that? How do you do that in the most impactful way, in a way that truly is scalable? So that's one of the things we're talking through quite a bit at Partner Stack. Right. The easiest thing is, oh, it's, you know, it's just you orient your content to education. It's like, okay, but like, you're, you're educating busy people, executives, you're trying to drive behavior change. Like, there's a lot that needs to go into it and thought through. So that's, that's one of the big things we're, we're toiling with right now.
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Ty Degrange
Love that there's, There's a lot, a lot of opportunity. And I definitely share that passion for education, as you could probably gather. And there's certainly a gap and there's certainly a lot to discuss and help and educate and kind of find folks where they are because they are busy and overwhelmed and have long to do lists and, you know, a lot of us listening. And you and I probably have challenges keeping up with our long education list that we're going through of like staying on top of trends and testing and learning about new tools and just doing the blocking and tackling required to maintain and improve. It's a challenge, but those are some great challenges and opportunities to tackle. I like the way you've laid those out.
- [15:42]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, they're all exciting things, for sure. Nothing more exciting than having an abundance of ideas that you could chase down and trying to decide which ones you don't.
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Ty Degrange
Yeah. And I think it's always a magical challenge of, I feel it myself quite heavily of that pull of new and fresh and exciting and shiny object. And there's so many ways you can apply and improve and grow and add in particular when you're thinking about product and product roadmap, that it comes up a lot on the conversations we've had on this pod around how do you kind of strike that balance of you're focusing enough, you've got a lot of arrows in the quiver going towards one thing, if you will, you know, but you're not necessarily have blinders on to your point. I think that's a very good call out. It's like, like curious to know if there's things that are top of mind around kind of finding that balance. I'm sure it's an ongoing conversation internally, but I think you highlighted a great challenge there.
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Tyler Calder
Yeah, I mean, I love your, you know, what you just said. Focused enough. I think I probably just want to get that printed on a hat. Like we're focused enough and that's good enough.
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Ty Degrange
Yeah.
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Tyler Calder
But no, I really think that that's it. Right. I think it is giving yourself permission to deviate from the plan a little bit. Right. So now I'm kind of contrary to the importance of focus, but I really do think it's important to give yourself the permission to say, like, okay, I know the 80%, 90% of what I got to go deliver on. You know, we've done our due diligence to be confident that that's where we're placing our bets. But, you know, we're still an early stage company. We can't be closed off to what the, the other opportunities are out there. So how do you pilot them? How do you run experiments with them? How do you, how do you. There's so many frameworks for just, you know, trying to prioritize work as well. So whether it's you know, something like a nice framework where you're looking at like impact and, you know, effort and all that fun stuff, you know, whether it's just, you know, a really well structured Brainstorm with the leadership team, whatever it might be. My thing is just very simply having clarity on like, what are you saying no to and what are you saying yes to and how did you come to those decisions to make sure the rest of the org is clear. And then like I said, you keep giving yourself room to explore.
- [17:52]
Ty Degrange
I like it that no reminder is really important. What are some client outcomes that you kind of have seen jump out at you? Partner Stack and some of the brands in B2B that have really, really nailed it. I'm curious to learn more about some of those examples that you want to.
- [18:08]
Tyler Calder
Share with the audience. Yeah, I mean, I would suggest that most of the outcomes that we support and what we hold up in case studies and kind of customer anecdotes, it's all a revenue outcome, as simple as that sounds. I think when we look at our customers, step one is if you don't have a partner program, then the outcome is just you now have the ability to do partnerships. It is a transformation type of story where you couldn't do the thing before and now you can do the thing. So that's step one, the ability to have the infrastructure to run a meaningful program. And then it becomes a revenue story of how do you go from 0% of your revenue coming through the channel or partnerships to 10%, 20%, 40%, 60%. So that's a lot of what we kind of focus on with our customers. I'd love to share a few specific names if that's cool.
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Ty Degrange
Yeah, please. That's kind of what I was hoping for.
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Tyler Calder
I love that, you know, for anybody in partnerships. I think folks know Corey Snyder quite well over at Teamwork. If folks don't, it's definitely worth checking out his LinkedIn and how active he is. But teamwork.com they've seen about a 10x increase in pipeline sourced through their partner program this past year. They don't have a super high ACV average contract value. So there's, there's just some astronomical numbers and volume that they're. They're pumping through their partner program. And I share that as an example because what they're doing and how they're operating the program is how a lot of partner orgs run. The difference is Corey and the team there just get at it. You know, when I see so many people in similar positions say, oh, it's going to take time to stand up. This program impact is 18 to 24 months out. It's like, well, you know, the team over@ teamwork.com, they're not sitting by and waiting for that two year marker to show any traction. They're really just moving very quickly. And one of the things that they do, I think that's really interesting, and this is true with Corey in particular. He very much thinks like a marketer in the sense of speed testing and experimentation. He talked to a lot of partner leaders around the importance of their ideal partner profile, which it's absolutely important. But I see so many partner leaders try to get it perfect before they've even stood up their program. Whereas, you know, some you don't know. Like you can do as much whiteboarding and guesswork as you want, but really you should formulate a hypothesis, get out, ship it, just ship it. Like, see, see what's happening, who's responding? Like you're going to get the data that really helps you zone in on who your ideal partner type is. You can figure out all of the signals, the characteristics and you can just move fast. That's just one very specific example. So I think they're just a great example of using the platform to scale, to communicate with their partners, to onboard them, to activate them, and just do it really, really quickly, you know. Another org worth checking out and looking at is Glide. We just published a case study and a video with them. And the person over there, Brett. Brett has the coolest title ever. It is Head of Experts at Glide. And so, you know, when I mentioned education earlier, I think he's a really, really, really cool example of somebody doing this at scale, pulling together a group of experts that are then going back out and educating the market on their behalf. He's done it using Partner Stack and a bunch of our APIs in a way that nobody else ever has before. So it's worth checking that out to go into a little bit more details. But just the way he's approaching this idea of education and leveraging experts as partners I think is just really, really incredible. And then Apollo is always just a really cool example given how quickly they're growing. Jennifer Rima over there, she's been a great customer of ours And I estimate 15 to 20% of our customers are using the full power of PartnerStack, right? So it's a fairly low percentage. But Jennifer and her team have kind of wrapped their arms around just about everything you can do with partnerstack. And so going back to the original vision of all of your partner types, one platform, one strategy, their team is really, really seeing that through, which is, which is awesome to observe and use as a good example, some of those.
- [22:38]
Ty Degrange
Certainly resonate and those are like, I love the different use cases there and especially the creativity around using tools and properly tapping into those APIs that many others aren't. And it's such a not talked about enough tool API. And those connections, I think that's such an exciting part of making it more automated, scalable, powerful, data rich. All those fun buzzwords, but they're real. And to see the 10x growth type numbers is really certainly like jaw dropping speaks for itself. It's part of the success that you're seeing. So I love, I love and appreciate those specific people examples. It means that I think people get a lot of value and understand that intrinsically. So it's huge.
- [23:24]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, yeah, they're great leaders in the space. They're worth following. I say, you know, what they all have in common is they just, they allow their creativity to push how far they can use the platform. And that's always what I encourage people to do. Like think about like, hey, I really wish I could do this thing or wouldn't it be cool if we could do this thing? Yeah, like have those sessions where it's just kind of this divergent type of fun brainstorm and then there's a really good chance you could do it. Whether it's with partner stack or another piece of technology. Like you're going to be able to do that thing that you wish you could do. You just got to again give yourself the permission to kind of wander a little bit and brainstorm those things.
- [24:02]
Ty Degrange
I think in growth and in product and in performance marketing and the data heavy emphasis that we have, which is very powerful and positive and it's helped us in so many ways. I think oftentimes performance marketers don't always appreciate the need to take those big swings and to be creative and to think about, okay, what can I dream up with this program? What can I envision is possible with this program to make it easier for partners, more scalable, more agile, feedback loop. I think you're hitting on something that's, you know, easy to say, harder to do, but is really important.
- [24:35]
Tyler Calder
Yeah. And I think, you know, growing up in the performance marketing world, I think one of the things that I regret early in my career is getting so hung up on just incrementalism. Right. So you know, I'm managing a Google Ads campaign and our click through rates went from you know, 7% to 8 and a half percent. It's like nobody cares. You know, the conversion rate of our page went from, you know, whatever 12% to 12 and a half. And I'm, you know, I'm sitting here celebrating those things as wins and they are wins. But realistically what the business is interested in is like, no, no, what's the next level jump in our growth? Like what's that thing like? Move away from the incremental and start to think about the exponential. And I think partnership leaders are in such a good space to be able to do that and not get sucked into incrementalism, just how big of an impact partners can have. So again that, that's just the other reason why I encourage people to again, just be creative, think big. You can always reign stuff in and figure out what realistic looks like today, but have your eye on something bigger than just incremental.
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Ty Degrange
I love that, the zooming out beyond all the goodness and focus on Partner Stack and kind of what you're working on now, thinking about your other revenue opportunity, you know, marketing experiences, especially in how, you know marketing SaaS is certainly unique. Is there anything maybe you have that or lessons or things that you've observed that are just going gangbusters or have you encourage folks to look at if they're in marketing for software, particularly in SaaS. I'm just curious to think through like some of your other learnings, not just at Partner Stack, but beyond. And it kind of alludes to some of the great things that some of these brands are doing on platform, but specifically in marketing SaaS in its unique way. Right. You've talked about events and Google and kind of getting creative, going beyond that. Obviously you know, partner marketing is the focus, but is there anything that you, you kind of have that you want to share with the audience around just the learnings or things that were notable even beyond PartnerStack with your other experiences in marketing SaaS?
- [26:40]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, there's, there's quite a bit to pull from, you know, one, one of the things that I've always been really, really focused on is regularly testing new channels as they pop up. I think it was, well, shoot, what's his name? Anyways, years, years, years ago he wrote about the law of shitty click through rates.
- [27:03]
Ty Degrange
Andrew Chen.
- [27:04]
Tyler Calder
Yes, Andrew Chen, exactly. I don't think people think about that enough, which is like you're going to get to a point where you're in a channel that is completely saturated and you're going to start to see diminishing returns. It just happens. And so if you're not constantly looking out and testing, you know, what the new thing is, you're missing out, right? Because by the time you get to it, it's probably going to be saturated, the impact is going to be diminished. And so for me, way back in the day, that was something as simple as aggressively testing Facebook ads because of how cheap the traffic was. But I would look at that as an opportunity, not just to test Facebook as a channel, it was how do I drive targeted but cost effective traffic, to test messaging, to test landing pages, to figure out what's working, what's not working before I go full tilt into a larger investment. So back in the day, I used to use Facebook ads to test billboard messaging, app store icon images. I would use it to test everything. And so where I'm going with that is there's equivalents we see now, like Reddit ads, incredibly cost effective. We're seeing some pretty decent traction there with the cost to acquire the traffic. I would still say TBD on how it plays out through the whole funnel. Earlier a couple of years ago when LinkedIn introduced conversation ads, very simple tactic on LinkedIn. But we tried to be one of the first to get in there and test it. And we saw probably about a six to eight month spike in the traction we were driving before it got really saturated. And so again, what I would just encourage people to do is just try to stay abreast of what's new in the space. You know, carve out some budget to go test it, experiment it, before, you know, the thing starts to diminish and the returns it can drive for you, you know, for us more recently, it's just testing our own B2B influencer type of program. What are all of the different ways you can incentivize creators through the entire buyer journey, not just a moment in time. That's one thing that I find most people do is they're simply incentivizing a partner, an influencer, an affiliate for just a single action when they can drive impact through the whole journey, right top to bottom, right. So how do you kind of, how do you tier out those types of incentives? So we're doing a lot of testing and experimentation there. And then, you know, I encourage people to stick with the unsexy stuff. Like going back to some of it is definitely incremental in nature, but something as simple as just reminding ourselves at Partner Stack as an example, like we should be testing, you know, we should be testing our landing pages. We should be focused on conversion rate optimization. You know, if I can improve our traffic to demo requests by 10% without spending an additional dollar to drive the traffic like that, That's a pretty big win for a company that is, you know, trying to get to profitability, you know, trying to be as efficient as possible. So things like that, again, not super sexy, but I encourage people like, don't forget that those things can drive huge impact. And then I also encourage people like you don't necessarily need a bunch of tech to try to test some of this stuff. Right. So, you know, we've run full on ABM programs without an ABM platform and the results have been fantastic. Right. We saved ourselves, you know, a couple hundred grand in tech by just kind of brunt force doing it, you know, direct mail. You know, some of our most successful campaigns have been a direct mail push. It's just us and the team mailing stuff out. Right. We don't necessarily need a platform to do it. Right. So we'll, we'll test a lot of these things and then that helps us figure out, okay, where do we really want to double down and invest in the infrastructure to, to keep scaling.
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Ty Degrange
Tyler, I love that it's obviously central to the thesis of the pod. We've had guests like Preach, you know, very similar just, just talking to someone on Friday in a very different vertical, but one steeped in performance marketing. It was, you gotta have a percentage of that budget outline that is purely testing. And you know, it's call it an insurance policy, call it investment, call it research and development that there's obviously a lot of ways to think about that. But even, especially right now where there's some constraints, certainly higher than they were over the course of the last five years, at times we have to be scrappy and thoughtful and it's a challenge kind of getting that finance buying at times. But ultimately you're, you're spot on. There needs to be a, that macro view of law of shitty clickthroughs is really a great reminder because those what, what worked six months ago isn't all is does definitely not always working now. And sometimes even what worked three weeks ago isn't what's working now. And I think it also kind of goes back to the highlighting the value of partner marketing or affiliate marketing for everything that, you know, you and I are focused on. It's that, you know, platform can, you can make or break you. And there's a point where some of those platforms start to become either not sustainable from a pricing perspective or from a competitor perspective. And so I think to having some forcing function to always have a, an investigative new channel development, research and assessment and estimate and forecasting mechanism within an org is just so critical. And so I love that you called that out.
- [32:25]
Tyler Calder
Yeah. And I think you're bang on. Right. I would encourage everybody to think about in your particular org, what percentage, percentage of budget are you comfortable setting aside without any expectations tied to it? Because that's the other thing I think I see companies say like, oh yeah, we put 20, 30% of our budget to testing and experimentation, but it better work. And it's like, well, if that's not really testing and experimentation at that point. Right. You're going to get people playing it safe. You're going to get back, you know, into incrementalism.
- [32:56]
Ty Degrange
Yeah.
- [32:56]
Tyler Calder
Like you need to have no expectation that it's going to do anything. It might actually send you backwards and you have to be okay with that.
- [33:02]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, no, and it's easier said than done. But I think you hit the nail on the head. It's like people often say it and they don't necessarily mean it. And you know, if you zoom into a partner program or affiliate program, I would say the same logic probably applies. There should probably be about 10% that's kind of in that experimentation end of the spectrum or the, there's a Bartville approach of like a mixed portfolio thoughtfulness around that. And I think you're in the. Why, why wouldn't you apply it to your partner program as well?
- [33:30]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, you're right, it is easier said than done. But it is incredibly hard to do if you're not hitting your numbers with the 80, 90% of your budget. Right. So you got to hit your numbers, you got to build confidence in the org that they can trust. You're going to keep pushing, you're going to do what's right. So that's the other thing. Right. Like if you're not hitting your baseline numbers, like, I probably wouldn't be going suggesting that, guess what, I'm going to take 30% of my budget and it might just disappear. We might not get anything out of it.
- [33:57]
Ty Degrange
100%. Let's coming down the home stretch. Moving into some more personal fun questions. Tyler, what's the sliding door moment in your career? What was that pivotal point that you want to share with the audience?
- [34:09]
Tyler Calder
I think for me, and again, I think this is true for everybody. Right. You have a number of them that stack up on each other. But for me, I think it was very quickly out of school. I worked at what was a 300 person startup, Eloqua at the time, ended up being Canada's largest exit. And I Would say that that's moment number one where I just saw the pace of a startup, how innovative they were, how just incredibly ambitious everybody was. I used to work in a bank through my summers at university, and it was like the complete opposite of pace. So that was the first exposure of like, oh, shit, this is what I want to do. Like this, Whatever this is, that pace. I want to do that. That was one and then I think the other, once I left Eloqua, was making a decision between two roles. One was at a very small agency. I think I, when I was interviewing them with them, they were nine people, nine or 10 people. So that was option one. They had, you know, maybe a handful of customers, but they were doing really interesting things in digital marketing, like all of the things that I was quite interested in myself. The other was a sales job, which the fairly large ad tech company and I, you know, we're going back to almost 20 years. So they're like, you get a BlackBerry. I was like, you're going to give me a BlackBerry? Like, this sounds amazing. Every summer they had a party at the Playboy Mansion, which I was like, you do what? I was like, all right, all right. There's something interesting there. Like, wouldn't mind, you know, checking out the grotto.
- [35:40]
Ty Degrange
That's hilarious.
- [35:41]
Tyler Calder
And so I think the moment was making the decision, like, those are all dumb reasons to take a job. And taking the job with a small agency where I would get exposed to so much, I'd be on kind of the ground floor of learning. They were one of the only digital marketing agencies in Canada at the time. I think the moment of taking that job was really the defining moment of my career because I was there for eight years and that's where I just saw everything. I was hands on. Like, I managed. At one point in time, I was managing 400 SMB accounts myself. So, like just seeing all of those different verticals, trying to figure out, how do you make SMB work in the digital age? Then I had about 50 enterprise accounts I was managing like it was just absolute chaos. But I had my hands on all things digital and the founders were great and they just let me do it. All right. A lot of agencies kind of say, no, no, you do this, that is your job. You don't talk to the customer. Right. You're not client facing. And they didn't care. They just let me talk to anybody, do anything. And so I would say, being lucky enough to work with founders like that in an agency that was growing the way we did. So we ended up growing to about 110 people or so. One of the biggest independent agencies in Canada. That's probably the big thing that I would point to. It's where I got comfortable with sales. It's where I got comfortable managing people. All. All of that fun stuff. So just that. That decision, I would say, was. Was the big one.
- [37:07]
Ty Degrange
It's awesome. It's like the. The pathless travel that's maybe not as. As quote, unquote sexy or has the bells and whistle whistles or the. The quote, unquote perks, but is going to get you the exposures and challenges and learnings and more breadth and depth. And that led to so many more. So much more knowledge, it sounds like, and so much more gains long term.
- [37:30]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, it was. It was half the pay. I remember my parents being like, what are you doing? You're deciding to take half of what the pay is. But, yeah, to your point, like, the learning was just so accelerated. And now almost every job I've had since the agency, I can connect back to the agency some way. They were a client, they were a friend of a client. Like, it all goes back to there. So very thankful of my time there.
- [37:54]
Ty Degrange
Well, smart. Smart on you to make the right call there and do the hard work to lead to those better outcomes.
- [37:59]
Tyler Calder
Little bit of luck, too, right? Let's be honest.
- [38:01]
Ty Degrange
Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I couldn't agree more. And I appreciate you calling that out. All right. Getting into some fun ones. An item that you've purchased recently that you just rave about and want to share.
- [38:12]
Tyler Calder
Yeah. So this, I don't know if it's been on camera, but I bought this probably about eight or nine months ago. This is a weighted leather ball. Nord Sports and Style is what they're called. But, like, I'm such a fidgeter that, you know, this thing just keeps me sane all day, every day. I like that it's weighted. So, like, it feels good. If I'm, you know, pretending to throw it, I can, you know, use it to rub out, you know, a knot that I oftentimes get on my neck or even my foot.
- [38:45]
Ty Degrange
Yeah.
- [38:46]
Tyler Calder
So it's truly multipurpose. But surprisingly this. Surprisingly that. And then the other thing I have on my desk, which I'll share, is I use a company that. So I lose a lot of golf balls. I am not good at golf, so I lose a tremendous amount of them. So these are all used balls, but they offer free printing on them. So now I just get my daughter's drawings printed on all of my Golf balls. And this is just one of them that I keep here to remind myself that, hey, you know, what's probably a little bit better than taking off for five hours to play golf is just, you know, hanging out with your kid. So you should probably do that.
- [39:24]
Ty Degrange
I love it. That's amazing. We'll have to get the link on that one in the show notes. I think a lot of people and golfers would love to, you know, get the used balls and not pay as much and throw out. Throw a cool design on there. And yeah, for a number of use cases, gifts. Funny just is also general use. So I love that.
- [39:44]
Tyler Calder
I used to have my name on it. I stopped that once I went golfing with a friend, and he came out of the woods. He's like, hey, I got. I think I got like 12 of your balls here. Your name's on all of them. He's going to stop putting my name on them.
- [39:57]
Ty Degrange
That's amazing. I love it. What's something that folks maybe don't know about you?
- [40:02]
Tyler Calder
This actually just came up in a conversation over the weekend where someone, somebody that I know fairly well, was shocked to learn that I was, and I would say still am, a huge Glee fan. That comes as a surprise to a lot of people.
- [40:17]
Ty Degrange
That's amazing.
- [40:19]
Tyler Calder
Luke, one of our co founders, calls me Musical Chaos, because if you look at my playlist, they're just like all over the place. So to me, Glee was like this mix of humor that sometimes kind of push the boundaries to inappropriate, which I'm a fan of, but also had such a good mix of music. So, anyways, that's probably the thing people are typically pretty surprised about.
- [40:42]
Ty Degrange
I love it. I wouldn't have guessed myself. Tyler, this has been awesome. We've dropped some awesome knowledge and I think the shared vision and opportunity around partner marketing and kind of expanding the B2B marketing stack for performance is really shared with me as it is with you. You've had a great experience and CMO and leader, and I think really got some good insights out for folks today. So just want to thank you and appreciate that.
- [41:09]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. This was. This was fun.
- [41:12]
Ty Degrange
Awesome. Well, where can folks best connect with you to follow up and learn more about you and what you're doing at PartnerStack?
- [41:19]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, LinkedIn is always quickest. You can find me there. Tyler Calder. I'll throw this out there, see how it goes. You can always reach me@tylertnerstack.com open email. But those are probably the two, two best for sure.
- [41:32]
Ty Degrange
Awesome. Tyler, you, man. It was an awesome conversation. And have an amazing rest of your week.
- [41:37]
Tyler Calder
Yeah, you too. Thank you so much.
- [41:38]
Ty Degrange
You bet.