Nearbound Podcast #166: Pete Caputa’s Return: The Partner Led Startup Story
Peter Caputa explains the unique value partners bring through differentiation, customization, network effects, unique data access, and turnkey marketing campaigns.
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Here's what our other successful partners did. You should do exactly that. And
every time you do that, you create a new competitor.
And then really, like you said, they're gaming. What was that? Gaming the gains
Then you're basically putting them in your directory where they have to compete
with each other either on price or on the number of reviews that they get or
something like that.
[MUSIC]
All right, we're back at last. Welcome to the Nearbound podcast. I love saying
that. I love being with you all every week. And I couldn't be more excited to
have the gadfly of partnerships, at least for me.
The one who's told me I am wrong more than anyone on the show today. We have
Peter Capuda, everybody. Welcome back, Pete.
Thanks, Jared. I've told you you're right plenty of times, too, right? Just so
I can't be balanced. Keep you eager.
I'm stoked to have you here because it's been so interesting to get to see. I
've had this thesis on the podcast from the beginning that some of my favorite
and the best partnerships folks and the becoming entrepreneurs.
And the data box story that I've followed from you kind of taking the helm
there. I remember when you told me in Boston in person, I was like, "Yes, this
is so cool.
I can't wait to see what comes out of this in terms of SaaS go-to-market
innovation from you kind of leading the helm there." And about a month ago, we
saw this LinkedIn post where you had -- you'd launch something that I'm like, "
This seems pretty unique.
I have to talk to Pete about this." So maybe let's set the stage on the -- I
want to see what you -- what did you call this? It was data box, like a white
label.
Should we read the bit of the whole thing? Yes, we have -- we've actually
always had a white label add-on because our partners use us to report the
results that they drive for their clients. They use us to report those results.
And so a lot of them say, "Oh, I want this to look like it's mine. I don't want
it to look like it's data box." And so we've always had -- not always, but for
a while, we've had the ability for our partners to white label our software.
But that's not the main thing that I would say is special about our program or
unique about our program. There's lots of white label software tools out there.
It's some of the other things that we do that allow our partners to create a
unique offering that is their own.
And it's not just like changing their logo. It's actually -- they're able to
customize our software in a way that our other partners are unlikely to
customize it or maybe even couldn't figure it out.
I love just the starting point, the mindset of, "Okay, the agencies want this.
So let's figure out a way to get them what they want in a way that also
benefits us." Just like starting from that standpoint.
I know that sounds really simple, but even the white label thing, as a marketer
, you can feel like, "Well, no, that's my thing. I don't want it.
The agency taking credit as if it's something that they're pretending -- this
is my software that's presenting this data and this report. I want the end
customer to see that it's data box." And to be able to say, "Look, the agencies
want to be able to package this in a way that shows their value that has their
branding on it." And being able to say yes to that, but then do more than just
that, like, figure out a way to make that a win.
It sounds very simple, but I'm telling you, a lot of people come from the --
yeah, but what's that going to do for us? Let's make sure our brand is on there
, right? Like starting from that standpoint.
Ryan from vendor Pete, what's that going to do for us? I remember that call
that's right the other day.
Yeah, I don't want to go too far down.
Yeah, we will go there today.
And I like Ryan a lot.
I was ready for a thought to break out.
This is going to get spicy.
[ Laughter ]
Yeah, Ryan wrote a post -- we'll cover it since you.
Ryan wrote a post saying, "What do partners do for direct sales teams?" And it
kind of the question by itself kind of pissed me off because like --
I don't think the direct sales team is the party that should be getting
optimized for.
When it comes to sales, it should be the customer, of course.
First, then I would argue maybe the partner because generally the partner is
investing in the relationship,
whereas the sales person is getting a nice, usually comfortable, base salary
and leads delivered to them.
But yeah, I don't think we need to go too far down that path.
But I do think it's important to optimize for your partner's success first, or
at least programmatically.
And we've talked about it before.
And I think the most partner programs have in that they're -- when they say, "
Let's launch a partner program," all they think about is,
"How can I get incremental sales out of partners?
How do I grow my revenue from my partners?"
And to really make a partner program work, you have to think about, "How am I
going to help my partners generate incremental revenue or higher margins or
some benefit to them?"
So I think that's the first thing to think about.
Yeah, one of the -- yeah, that's one of my first things.
Go ahead, go ahead.
One of the ways to do that -- so the second mistake I think a lot of partner
programs make is that they build a program and they want everyone of their
partners to do and say the same thing.
They want every partner to go out and say, "We use -- we sell ABM services and
this is our stack.
We sell CRM and this is our stack, right?
We sell in the old days of HubSpot.
We sell inbound marketing and this is our stack.
We're marketing automation and this is our stack.
And so in a way, the vendor is kind of labeling the movement or the market and
then they expect their partners to kind of parrot or mimic those things.
And so the one thing -- way beyond white labeling that we've been able to
design partners to really customize our software in a way that they're unique.
And so our offering is unique.
And just to give a simple example, we have a partner who provides marketing
services to large law firms.
And what they did is they went and created a benchmark using with permission
data from their clients.
And that allows them to go to their clients and say, "Compared to hundreds of
other large law firms, this is how your sales and marketing is performing and
it's anonymized."
And nobody's learning about their actual competitors or peers.
They're just seeing where their performance falls against the median or the top
quartile, bottom quartile of the group.
So that is a unique offering that a partner can create.
Now, there are other maybe marketing agencies that focus on law firms who could
try to duplicate that, but their data would be different by nature because they
're going to have a different set of clients that opt into that.
And so that's one way that we allow our partners to kind of lean into their
differentiation and build something unique that they can go to market so that
they don't sound like our other partners.
So that's -- I think the thing that caught your attention, Jared, and Gurnevie,
you wanted to talk about?
I love that approach of like, just given that we're in a world where ever since
the SAS revolution, where you can sell your product direct to customers,
everyone's so focused on that, doing the thing that scales and selling the one
version or the tiers directly to your customers and thinking of partners as
just like,
"Hey, you should also be selling this exact same thing to customers," not
thinking of them as like, if your partner can get access to something that
other people cannot get, and if they can get something, if people can get
through them something that they cannot get elsewhere, that is so, so big.
I was just talking to somebody in an education space and they were saying they
had a partnership with one of these universities that has like nationwide
online degree programs, and they were like, "No, we have this partnership that
's exclusive to us." We get to offer a version of their program that you cannot get anywhere else
except for us.
And they were like, "That's why we promote it to our people because it's an
actual value ad that gets to be our program paired with their program, gets you
something different."
And I thought, "How brilliant that is that they go and do this with partners,"
and they're like, "We're going to tailor it and customize it a little bit so
that it's otherwise what's the point?
If I'm an agency, everybody can just go buy the software, why would they buy it
through me?" And then I'm just trying to tax services on, but to plug into them
and say, "Hey, we're going to give you a slightly different version of the
product that's customizable to you so you can go and offer something truly
unique."
Again, it sounds simple when I'm saying it, but it's rare. Nobody's doing this
in SAS.
No, no, it's a less like I learned the hard way in building the HubSpot program
in that, you know, inbound marketing was this new thing in the late 2000s.
And so we were teaching people how to do that and we're like, "Oh, well, if for
teaching agencies how to do that, we'll just teach them to offer these four
services."
And then a few years into that, there were hundreds and then thousands of
agencies basically all saying the same thing and just not, they weren't
differentiated.
And I think the hidden truth in most of these partner programs, I won't share
HubSpot's data per se, but the hidden truth in these partner programs is that a
small fraction of those resellers end up being successful.
And it's because I think one of the reasons is that they're just not
differentiated enough. And so they end up competing on price or, you know,
other being the first ones, having more money behind them, right, as opposed to
really trying to carve out something where they can be the best.
Right, like game the games, right? So like game the review boards or the sites
or like they're trying to win it something that is not unique to them, that
does not solve a problem for them as a business or the end customer.
And I think what I've learned by, you know, following alongside some of your
collaborative growth journey that you've been building out at Databox Pete is
like so many partner people will say the phrase like joint value proposition,
right?
And it's like they lose the concept of a unique value proposition. It's like
the joint value proposition is, hey, can we package this the same for all 200
of our partners? And it's like, no, no, no, it has to be unique.
What about the verticalization or the segmentation is something that's
important. And if you're not hoping your partners define their market and their
customers and how they best serve them, you're not really doing partnership.
You're doing marketing and sales alignment by another name where the economics
of that model doesn't really help the end partner. It's about you, not about
them. It's about you, not about their customer.
I want to take it a step further and say that you're actually commoditizing
your commoditizing or commodifying your partners as you bring them on, right?
Yes.
And then you're basically, oh, yeah, here's what our other successful partners
did. You should do exactly that. And every time you do that, you create a new
competitor. And then really, like you said, they're gaming at what was that
gaming the games.
Then you're basically putting them in their directory where they have to
compete with each other either on price or on the number of reviews that they
get or something like that.
So, yeah, I think it's a race to the bottom when you build a partner program.
And it's funny. I know with all of them, right?
Sorry, sorry for the overlap there, Pete, must be lag on my side. But I've made
this analogy a handful of times on this podcast here, but, you know, because
before partner hacker and reveal, I was working in the career space and people
on the job hunt and technology related to hiring and applying to jobs.
And that idea of like, when you're going to apply for a job, if you basically
just say, hey, I'll do all the things in the job description, there's nothing
unique about working with you over somebody else.
Whereas if you can say, hey, here's something, I'm so a value that the two of
us together are going to create value that no other two parties can create,
right? Yes.
There's something unique and with partners. If you're like, hey, how about you
do the same thing every other partner does? There's nothing about that that's
additive.
And if you say, let's find something that only the two of us can do together
that has a value that couldn't be gotten anywhere else. Like, that's where it
gets really magical. Those are the partnerships you want to go in on.
Yeah.
What this unlocks, if you approach partnerships by allowing your partners to
create something and what that does is that unlocks the ability to actually go
to market together in a very scalable way.
Right. So most partner programs are all about reselling. It's like, you go
generate your lead and bring it to me or maybe I'll generate a lead and bring
it to you.
But the real value in partners partnerships with given that the internet exists
is unlimited reach. And so if you can go to market through marketing with your
partners, then you can reach a significantly larger audience and generate
significantly more demand.
One of the things that I love about the program we've been building is that all
of our partners are unique. So I have that partner who is only working with law
firms, large law firms.
I have a partner. All he does is help B2B brands launch and get to a certain
level with their YouTube channels.
I have another partner. All they do is work with international house schools.
Those are schools that teach English language as a English language to students
in foreign countries. Right. So, and those are just three.
We have like a hundred partners and they're all somewhat unique, whether it's
the market they serve or the services that they offer.
But we're able to allow them to build something unique using our platform that
only they have and that allows them to market sell and serve their clients more
efficiently.
And here's where I've been like, I've had like no remorse conversations where I
've just been showing up to CMOs and being like, I'm going to throw something in
your face here.
Like, who on your team, who on your team has ever been like, who do you sell to
? And they're like, oh, we have these, you know, verticalization strategies,
right?
And well, okay, you sell the CIOs and you're branching into like this part of
security or you're branching into this part of info sec. And there's these
growth opportunities where they're looking at more market expansion.
And I always hit them with this. So tell me who on your marketing team has ever
been a CIO. Right? Like, you don't, these are content marketing managers. These
are product marketing managers. These are, these are all folks that lack any
empathy or understanding of where the customer is tacitly
and much less where they're trying to go. And in that world where that is true,
why would you ever market alone?
If you're expanding into like, there's, Pete, you would have to hire someone
that's like an expert in like legal services, right? And probably pay them 2x,
3x your media and salary in order to effectively reach that new market.
Right. Exactly. Not yet. Even just to write content for that market, let alone
reach it. Right. Meanwhile, he has a partnership with a company that has 90,000
law firms opted into their unique directory. Right? And so he has access to a
list of 90,000
contacts. I would never even pursue that in our business. Right? Right. Which
is, would never make the list. But with a few conversations with him and a
quick campaign, we're running together. Like, he's going to basically promote
our offering, our joint offering to 90,000 people.
And he can market it better, can sell it better and service it better because
you'd have to have that expertise across all three buckets. Yeah, we're talking
about that. He does all that. Right. And we're in the governmental game. Yeah. When I'm
talking near bound, that's my point is like, how are you going to do that? It's
who? It's who is the end recipient of the value and who is best, you know,
position to serve them to help them to reach them to help them grow.
And so, there's going to be someone that's closest to the customer. And by the
very nature of your business, or our business or any of our businesses that are
listening, where we're trying to serve ourselves. And like, it's, there's any
deviation from ICP. And I'd argue that even with your ICP and your defined, very narrow list of
like, here's the thousand accounts that we want. Like, even then, you're
probably selling to someone that you're not an expert of and around.
There are some exceptions of that. Like, you know, for example, like, I think G
ONG does a decent job selling GONG. Right. Like, there's a sales tool selling to
salespeople. Right. Yeah, exactly.
Well, I loved about Husband early on as we were selling to marketers, right?
And we were marketers ourselves, at least some of us were.
And then later on selling sales tools to salespeople. Yeah. I think that's rare
, right? Most salespeople and marketers are not marketing to their own profile
to people like them. They're marketing to some other market.
So for them to really understand it, they have to spend a lot of cycles. And
then if their market is broader, like in our case, data box, we sell a business
analytics tool.
So our market is horizontal. There's no way that I can be able to have a sales
team or even a marketing team or whatever that can go deep on the data that a
law firm needs to capture.
Let alone even know the tools that they use to where they capture data and need
to integrate with our system. But he can, right? He can not only know that
stuff, but in our platform, he's able to actually build custom integrations
that he can reuse across clients, build custom reports, custom dashboards,
templates that he can reuse across clients.
And so by having all those customization capabilities in our product and then
having a partner like him, we can go after that market with very little
incremental investment on our part.
Yeah. It's interesting, Pete, as I was looking at your comment on that LinkedIn
thread as well, you were kind of listing like, Hey, here are some of the ways
that we help the agencies differentiate.
And I'm looking through that. And I'm also just thinking of how I have watched
you do things at data box over the last couple years.
It's almost like, it's like a full stack partnership or like a multi surface,
right? So instead of just saying, here's what partnering with us gets you, it
gets you one thing.
You have things that, okay, they get a customized version of your product. So
there's a product component about being a partner that's unique.
They get the branding ability, the ability to do the white label. So there's
branding. But then also, they get to benefit from your branding and your work
because you will often share and highlight a lot of things about these partners
to kind of draw attention to them.
So it's a, it's a, you know, heightening awareness of them in their market. But
then here's where it gets really interesting.
They get access to unique data. So it's not just your product. It's the fact
that you have all these other customers and all this benchmark stuff.
They get to give data to their customers that their customers wouldn't be able
to get elsewhere.
And it's like this flywheel, you start to compound things like a customized
version of the product access to data. You can't get anywhere else.
The brand component, the ability to reach, and then that lets you break into
markets to your point. You would never have time to do all that and put it
together and package it for all those different markets.
But the fact that you have this core network and some of the data and the
customizable product that you can give to them.
Now they can take that and do something. And it's like, I mean, I just love it,
the number of layers. And then you get to tell the story of doing that, which
attracts other agencies to want to come and do that with you.
It's what Jerry calls the zone of genius where you just start stacking things
on top of each other.
Yes, you said it also. What to add there? There's one other thing you didn't
mention, which is my favorite part of it is that we have these turnkey
marketing and prospecting campaigns that we've built.
And we have like 60 of them. And so when we bring on a partner, we can say,
tell us what your areas of expertise are. And then we say, okay, we have these
turnkey surveys that we run.
And so you can use these surveys in your marketing and your prospecting will co
-brand the survey with you.
And that allows them to go out and share data that we've already gathered
around business processes and business practices.
And then in order to establish their credibility, but also use that survey as a
way to connect with someone and say, hey, I have access to anonymized data.
Well, how companies do XYZ? Would you like access to it? Oh, by the way, I'm
writing a report with the box about this where we're looking for experts that
we can quote in their reports.
So if you're interested in that, you're going to either talk to or have you
fill out this form with some open answers to some open-ended questions that we
have.
And so by going out to our partners and saying, here's a turnkey marketing data
and data that you can market with and use in your prospecting.
And then benchmark data where you can show your prospects and clients how their
actual performance compares and then follow it up with your services plus an
analytics tool to help them keep track of how they're performing over time, set
goals, forecast, etc.
So yes, full stack, full stack.
I'm such a fan girl. I'm such a fan girl. Isaac and I are going back and forth
and chat about how much we're fan-girling over here.
And it just reminds me of this quote in the nearbound book, "Great product
never beats great go to market, but great go to market never beats great
network effects."
I think what you've demonstrated in the model, Pete, is that there are network
effects from these things.
The funnel versus flywheel analogy is people get, but it's played out in as
much from a design perspective.
People aren't designing their go-to market with that in mind.
They think, "Oh, that's the destination." We're going to get to a flywheel at
some of the few real features.
It's between half customers.
I think most people think of the flywheel as happy customers, then I get
referrals and that's a really slow flywheel.
If you have that in your business, you're not going to scale. If you don't have
happy customers referring you, you're not going to scale.
I guess the first thing to get right in any business and keep right.
But once you have that, then it's about how do you leverage your customers and
partners in order to market more effectively and build flywheels within your
marketing and your sales processes.
We probably have four or five flywheels. One of the ones that Isaac pointed out
of the fact that we tell our partner stories, where we include our partners in
our marketing.
They love it because they get highlighted, quoted, linked to their website,
mentioned on social media, etc.
But it also shows other partners and other perspective partners how we do
things that we actually put them front and center of our audience.
Then other people are like, "Oh, I want to get involved in that."
We literally have partners that reach out to us and say, "I saw what you did
with this agency over there or this bookkeeping firm over there. Can we do that
too? How does that work?"
And then they're really surprised when we say, "Oh, it's all free."
Because it benefits us. It helps us drive our audience and drive for our free
product.
I feel like when you've described everything that you just have and the way
that you have, Pete, that obviously we're the near-boundy folks over here in
that lexicon of language.
But it really struck me that I think your framing of collaborative growth was
as crystallized and as clear as it's been to me.
I'm like, "Hey, are we saying the same thing?"
But I'm like, "No, collaborative growth, that just made the most sense to me
that it ever has."
I'd love to talk about that topic for a little bit and maybe tease out it.
How much are you continuing to document or maybe write about this? Because
whenever you told me, "Hey, I'm doing something with the phrase collaborative
growth."
I'm like, "I'm interested. I love this topic and I love how you think about it
."
I'm impressed that you're able to get a book out and it's awesome and I
appreciate the free press as well.
Where you talked about my accomplishments, gave a copy to my parents and they
're very proud.
But I'm amazed that you're actually able to do your job and actually put a book
out at the same time I know in your role, like marketing is more of your role
so you can get to focus there.
But in my role, I have not been able to focus and get the book out.
I also rationalized in my head that I want the DataBox Partner Program to be
close to as successful as the HubSpot Partner Program.
So that I can basically cover both in my book.
I want to tell both stories and the journey that I took to get there.
And I also wanted to be, like you said, I wanted to be kind of a methodology
that any company can follow.
And I think the Partner Program at HubSpot that I built is not something that
you would ever try to duplicate, I think, outside of a SaaS program.
Outside of a SaaS company.
But I think the stuff that we do at DataBox couldn't really be applied at many
other companies, whether it's SaaS or not.
I think so. So I'm eager to kind of scale up the DataBox Partner Program and
there's like two or three things that we want to still do.
I want to still do before I write that book.
But yeah, I have a good portion of the book written out.
I'm sure it'll edit it a lot.
But the second half of the book just isn't written yet because I haven't done
the work that I want to do.
So that's where we're at.
Well, let me ask you a quick question on that. You mentioned the HubSpot
Partner approach is something that you couldn't really do outside of SaaS.
But that what you're doing at DataBox is maybe more generally applicable.
What are the key differences? What makes that true?
Let me hop in here real quick. I want to interject something that Pete and I
discussed back in 2016.
I remember discussing this with Pete.
I said, I think one of the reasons or something that's really hard about
building agency or solutions partner programs is that there's these big macro
shifts where industries change.
And one of the things that I learned from Pete was that Pete helped these
agencies launch a new type of revenue model from one time project based billing
to recurring revenue models.
And today, most of these agencies now live in that world. So if you're
launching a partner program and you're like a French fry with the Happy Meal,
you're not really helping them transform their business.
And I think you have to really understand these macro shifts to truly build an
ecosystem of agency or solution partners and help them launch the nectar
iteration of their business.
And I think that would be my quick take, Pete. I'm like, why it's hard to
replicate or it would be hard for any company to wrestle with.
There's windows. There's times and windows. Right. So I think, I think actually
, Huddspott's done it twice. This is well beyond when I left it.
We planted the seed, of course, when I was there, but Huddspott's done it twice
with the second iteration is with RevOps and sales, sales kind of CRM
implementation.
And they've kind of created a new category there. And it seems like it's very
successful. There's lots of Huddspott partners who call themselves RevOps firms
or product technical consulting firms.
And it's really that connecting the sales marketing and service functions to
operate as one go to market function.
And so they timed that right and kind of drove it to a degree. I don't think it
was like any vision that anyone had, but it kind of just worked out when they
launched a few of the sales, the more sophisticated CRM and then the operations
hub.
And so I'd say Huddspott's done it twice now or is he in the middle of doing it
a second time.
But for as many of those that are successful, there are so many more failures.
There are not many marketing automation firms anymore, but if you go back to
2012, there were hundreds of these new brand new marketing automation agencies.
Now, pretty much every agency does marketing automation. There was also a huge
craze with account-based marketing. Everybody thought that was going to be the
new thing.
And so all these professional service firms jumped on that and said, we're
going to do ABM. And now really, everybody kind of dismisses that as like a
sole focus.
It's really a methodology that you use when you go after big companies and
everybody should be able to do it.
So I think you have to time those right. But if you go one level deeper with
the value that you're providing to the partners, then you have more staying power. And what I mean by that is like, although we taught Huddspott partners early on
how to do in-mom marketing, what we really taught them is how to sell consult
atively based on the ROI that they're able to deliver.
And so that, regardless of whether they're selling blogging services or ABM or
marketing automation or SEO or whatever, as long as they're selling that based
on the potential ROI that they can deliver and then following through and
delivering that ROI, that is what's always valuable.
It's timeless. And so it's less about selling a specific set of services. It's
more about how you sell them. And of course, prioritizing the success of your
customers.
And so I think that, if I had to say there's one thing that I accomplished is
like, yeah, teaching them out of sell based on ROI to be able to go from
project, what was heavy project to more of an ongoing relationship.
But that's really just because they were offering a higher level of service and
helping their clients kind of navigate how to market online, not just writing
blog posts and building landing pages.
And I think the big shift I see now is that there are literally hundreds of
different things any company could do, thousands probably, in order to market,
sell and service their customers better, whether it's applying technology or
anything else. And so I think the challenge for professional services firms now is like, you
can't do all of those things well.
And the real value that they can provide to their clients is helping them
navigate that and prioritize the things that will have the biggest impact.
And so again, I think if we go back to the basics, it's really about helping in
our case, our partners, leverage data so that they can sell more sell better,
right? So they can sell based on the ROI that they can deliver and so that they can
show their clients that they use data to actually make decisions.
They're not just using data to like say, hey, we did a good job, here's our
report.
They're using data to make the right decisions in order to optimize performance
or improve performance as efficiently and as effectively as they can.
So that's where I see the next stage is just like, there's going to be more
demand for consultants as opposed to professional services firms and the
professional services firms that can learn how to sell and deliver on
consulting services.
They'll be much further along.
And that's what we're trying to help them do.
So it opens up a line of thinking for me, Pete, that I've felt I've become
closer to this philosophy over the past several years is the difference between
, you know, let's say a service provider and a SaaS company is what they're
selling, or what they should be selling
at a high level is like outcomes versus access.
Why do I believe that? Why do I believe that? Because, well, we pay for
outcomes almost everywhere else as consumers. We're paying for the end result.
We're not paying for access.
Right. And when you say that we're going to need more consultants, I think this
is why your program's working well right now is that your value proposition is
you're helping your partners deliver outcomes.
That are measurable, that are repeatable, right? And you're going, hey, there's
so many solutions out there. There's so much software. There's so many service
providers. We're going to help you deliver outcomes. And that's the only way
you're going to have a retained relationship is if you can demonstrate that you
're repeatedly driving outcomes.
And in the podcast that we did with Jaco Vanderkweis from Winning by Design,
and Jaco's crazy. I love him to death. But it was probably the most terrifying
podcast in SaaS I've ever been a part of, because he was basically like, I mean
, without saying it, I think he pretty much said it's like the end of SaaS.
I mean, he was broadcasting from a van down by the river. I think he was like,
already, you know what, I'm out of here guys. I'm off the grid.
It was terrifying because he was like, look, here's my advice. My advice is if
you grew up on a family that loved farming, like you better go find a job in
farming. Just like do something you love because like you're not going, you
need some expertise on like an industry and like if you're not doing something
you love, your job is going to get disrupted.
And I think what makes your story so cool is that, and he was talking about B2C
, like, why do we trust Amazon? Because every single time we use it, we're
getting that package in 48 hours. Why do we trust Uber? Because when we hail a
car and it says six minutes, we get a car in six minutes.
Now, in SaaS, what repeated outcomes are we getting? It's laughable. It's
laughable. It's not acceptable. And back then I have to like have 16
conversations to do a renewal at the right place.
Exactly. It's laughable when we compare our consumer experience. Like, what did
I get when I bought my Tesla or got my new Tesla versus what do I get in SaaS?
I never even talked to a human for a $50,000 purchase. Never even talked to a
human.
Jared, I had this thought the other day because of all the years I've moved a
lot of times and had involved many, many trips to various states, departments
of DMV and all these things.
And I'm always joking with my wife. There's nothing makes me more grumpy than
dealing with these bureaucracies. And I'll be like, what do they not understand
I am trying to pay them money to come try and they don't want it. That's what I
feel like with some B2B products. I'm like, I am trying to use your product and
pay you for it.
And you won't just let me. You want me to do all these things and book demos
and just let me use the product and let me pay you for it, please.
Oh, it's more like a bureaucracy than a B2C experience sometimes.
Outcomes versus access. And I think that's the unlock that we're all going to
have to deal with. I think in the wider SaaS industry is that is your company
increasingly better at helping deliver client outcomes?
That's why in the book Nearbound, like, who's at the center of the Nearbound
narrative? It's the customer.
It's not the, you know, are you better at delivering that outcome more
repeatedly? And that means you better be helping your partners deliver that
outcome more repeatedly and their outcome more repeatedly.
And that's where the unlock is. And that's why I'm so like geeked out on your
programs is that it's very outcome oriented. It's data back and helps people
make better decisions, sell better market better together.
Totally. Yeah, no, that's what it's hard. It's hard to sell deliver outcomes.
It's really hard to like predict outcomes, but that's the challenge.
Right. As a CEO, right, I have to every day pretty much make decisions on what
to do and what not to do. And I'm always doing that on imperfect information,
even though we're very data driven.
And the reason the, but I still have to make those decisions to say like, I
think investing this time or these resources or this money into this thing is
the best thing, best next thing for us to do.
And that's really hard. And so the more data I have about how other companies
might be performing or what they're doing, the more data I have about my
historical performance experiments that we've run, right, easier those things
become.
And so that's if you're a consultant or professional services firm, that's what
you got to be focused on is how do you make it easier for your clients to make
those prioritization decisions.
And the better you are at that, the better their ROI is going to be and the
more they're going to be willing to pay not just for your hours, but for your
expertise.
And that's really, I think what's needed out in the market these days with
given this the plethora of options that we all have.
I love how you put that because Jared, Jared says this all the time that
strategy is choice and what's the hardest thing for any leader. It's just
decisions. You have to make decisions and framing it like your job is not to
just deliver a bunch of services because there's a lot of competitors that can
deliver those services better other other
agencies or software tools or whatever is to help that customer make better
decisions, make them feel better about the decisions they're making, feel more
informed like helping people make decisions.
I mean, it's exactly what you tell somebody when it comes to being a good
employee like, Hey, you can make your manager's job easier by helping them make
decisions.
And just that shift in framing from like, Okay, I got to deliver a bullet point
list of services here's stuff that I did. I don't know. Does that help me make
a decision? No, I'm not sure. But if you come to me and you give me things that
make my job easier those decisions and that's not going away.
Whatever gets replaced by AI and whatever else you need for humans to make
decisions is not going away. And we just have more and more information to sift
through and second guess ourselves to death on these decisions.
So anyone who can make that easier, you're still going to have, you're still
going to have plenty of work to do.
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, you've heard the phrase I'm sure like if you're you're
talking to your manager, right? You, a lot of people will bring their manager a
problem. And the better thing is to bring your manager a problem and solution.
Now, the ideal thing is to bring your manager the problem, multiple solutions,
pros and cons for each solution and a recommendation.
And that's what any good sales person should be able to do, right? Any good
consultant should be able to do is follow that process.
And those decisions are easy. Like if my employees or consultant brings me
something and says, here's the problem. Here's what's costing us.
Here's what I think here's what I think we can do. If we fix it. Here's option
A, here's option B, here's the pros of option B, here's the pros and cons of
option A, I recommend this one.
It's like those are like five minute conversations for me. I can say, well, I
like a little bit better. I'm a little concerned with this risk.
Go with go with me, right? But that's that's makes my life a main time.
Well, that and the trust that you build, I know this is like sort of a tangent,
but when you do more to your point, when you do more than just say, Hey, here's
what you should do.
And then I'm like, is that really what I should do? But when you say, Hey, here
's your problem. Here are three potential solutions. And here are the pros and
cons. Here's the cost on the upside.
The trust you build, like, I had a, yeah, totally. I had a head of engineering.
They used to come to me like that. And he'd be like, instead of doing the
typical thing, I need to hire five devs and I need to ever, you know, we need
to just tell me all this list of demands or else the whole world's going to be
on fire. He would be like, okay, we can do nothing. Here's the cost of doing nothing. We
can do a mid road, which is going to cost this and do this and here will be the
outcome, or we can do the best case, which is going to cost a ton and whatever.
And he would very dispassionately just present me with that. And usually I
would pick the mid or the, I almost rarely pick the right, the one that he didn
't want. Like, every engineer wants to build the world class, everything.
But like, he just presented it very factually. And the amount of trust I had in
him, where I could just say, well, you tell me which one would you do?
And then I would start to turn it over to him. But he built that by not just
coming to me and a lot of consultants do this and say, Oh my gosh, everything
is screwed. Your whole thing is terrible.
You need to replace everything. It's going to cost you this much.
Exactly. Yeah, that's one of the reasons why we really double down on
benchmarks, both performance benchmarks and business process benchmarks.
Because you can dispassionately tell people where they're missing the boat,
where they're underperforming, what they're not doing, that their competitors
or peers are doing.
And then you're just sharing that information. It's not opinionated. You're not
coming in and saying, here's what I recommend you do.
You're basically saying, here's the problem. If you see it as a problem, then
question is, do you want to address it amongst your priorities?
And so by starting with benchmarks, you can dive into those issues and, as you
're saying, come in without an agenda. You could basically say, Hey, here's what
I see. If you want to fix this, then I've done this a few times.
Otherwise, good luck. Right? And as opposed to what most professional services
firms do now, it's like, we do website design. We do SEO.
We do, we're Hubsport experts. We're active campaign experts. We're SEO experts
, right? Like, and then, but they're one of a million. And I don't know if I
need that stuff.
So I think, yeah, trying to flip the switch.
I absolutely love it, Pete. It was a gem of an episode. We got to live in the
future in the present.
You've done a lot of things that are very first principle oriented that I think
are timeless moving forward. And this is how entrepreneurs and great businesses
are going to be built.
We're going to continue to follow along the data box story and your journey.
And every time that we are fortunate enough to see you document some of the
collaborative growth strategy out loud.
I'm going to be right there on the front lines reading, consuming, and paying
attention to it because it's very instructive for the entire industry and all
these folks that are listening to this podcast.
So my mentor, my guy.
It's all part of our flywheel as we talked about.
Yeah.
Well, you know, hey, that's great. Like, we'll continue to cover it geek out on
it. And I just wanted to say thank you, Pete, for aligning us and joining us
for this wonderful combo. I had a blast.
To Pete's parents, your son did a great job. I mean, if you read the book, you
make me a book.
I do.
So, I said, I think I missed that.
What's that?
I said to Pete's parents, if they read the nearby book, maybe they'll see this.
I just want to say you raised a great son.
We sat in the snippet. I don't think they're going to want to listen to the
little podcast.
No, no, our parents have no idea what we do. But Pete, thank you so much. All
right, nearbound. We'll see you around until next time on the nearbound podcast
[Music]