A quick recap of the NbD this week:

• Get the Most Outta Nearbound Startup Day
• Double-Trouble at the Nearbound Summit
• A Never-Before-Seen Lineup of Top Marketers
• Your Golden Ticket to President’s Club
• Must-Watch Summit Recordings

How to run partnerships effectively without a software budget

Times are tough for SaaS teams. And even more difficult for partnership teams.

That means more pressure from the salespeople at the SaaS companies you use to run your partner program. 

It’s a vicious circle no one wants to be a part of. 

Thankfully, we are entering a period of democracy within our tech stacks as partnership people. Much like what HubSpot did for sales with their free CRM, you do not have to spend a lot of money to effectively manage and automate a partner program. 

In his latest article, Alex Glenn shows you how to do it for $0 a month...

Check it out here. 

"Isn’t that just good outbound?"

This has happened a few times. I’ll post about running a nearbound sales process— tapping into those buyers trust for intel, intros, or influence—and someone will posit that I’m being too cute calling it ’nearbound’.

It’s what the best salespeople have always done. Does it really need a new name?

I think it does.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, good language must exist if for no other reason than that bad language does.

I don’t mean four-letter words. Language goes bad when it stops producing the desired result.

Maybe the best practitioners of outbound are already layering in trusted voices who surround the buyer, but most aren’t. When you say ’outbound’, what comes to mind for most is what most salespeople do—mass quantities of cold, impersonal (or worse yet, badly "personalized") emails.

They treat it like a numbers game when, in reality, it’s a network game.

Whether we like it or not, the word ’outbound’ doesn’t convey the need to surround the buyer, live in their market, and partner with those they trust.

That’s why nearbound resonates. It takes a little something from its predecessors outbound and inbound and brings a little something new. Nearness is a concept we understand. Combining that with "bound" isn’t just a cutesie move. It opens up a new way of seeing and thinking.

Nearbound is, in many ways, just a way to give voice to what the very best revenue pros have already been doing. But that voice is desperately needed because the majority haven’t figured it out.

If you’ve been running these plays already, you are ahead of the rest. Now you have a word to explain what you do and how you do it.

If you haven’t been running these plays, there’s no better time to start. (And no better place to do it than at the Nearbound Summit. Get the best sessions, on-demand.) 

– Isaac