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How does nearbound differ from a partner strategy? Nearbound is broader than partnerships, but partnerships are the foundation.
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Nearbound or Partnerships?
How does nearbound differ from a partner strategy?
Nearbound is broader than partnerships, but partnerships are the foundation.
Reaching buyers directly is not nearbound. Reaching them with and through others that surround them is. It applies to every stage of the buyer journey—from lead to prospect to customer. To the extent that you are working with other companies and individuals at any of these stages, you are doing nearbound.
Mostly, it’s done ad hoc today. But when you deliberately and systematically commit to a nearbound strategy and set a target for a percentage of revenue you want to drive with and through those who surround buyers, just like you do for inbound and outbound, you dramatically increase your success.
So who surrounds buyers?
It’s a lot of different people and companies. Not all of them are possible to partner with in a formal sense. You can still involve many of these informally, by doing things as small as mentioning them in your content, but that’s a smaller play marketing teams can run pretty easily. The real meat and potatoes comes when you formally partner with these entities.
It might be an integration, a joint event, a co-sell motion, a referral or affiliate program, or a marketplace. There are almost too many ways to partner, and more partner types every day. The main thing is, to effectively run nearbound, you need some strong partners.
Who chooses which partners to work with and which plays to run with them, and builds and maintains these relationships?
Partner pros.
A company should have a POV and strategy for outbound, inbound, and nearbound.
Every department is impacted by each to some degree. But each has a main orchestrator. Outbound is probably Sales, inbound is Marketing, and nearbound...
Partnerships.
You’ve got to have a foundation of real and valuable partnerships. Then you can begin to layer them into the appropriate GTM motions across the org.
A nearbound strategy requires a partner strategy because it answers the "who are we going to market with" question.
Partnerships doesn’t own nearbound, they orchestrate it.
—Isaac
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