Insightful, detailed, relevant—but especially, actionable.
Many a strategy book only talk about high-level strategy but fail to provide a proper framework or playbook to implement it. Jared Fuller’s new book, Nearbound and the Rise of the Who Economy, goes above and beyond that. Jared provides an incredibly detailed and actionable blueprint that any organization that wants to be successful in what he’s calling the era of the Who Economy can follow.
Jared’s whole thesis revolves around a very simple, but often hard to implement, premise:
Partner up or perish.
The book starts with a great foreword by Jay McBain, who (in customary Jay fashion) sets the stage with incredible insights backed up by very powerful stats and data. Jared then proceeds to impart a masterclass and drop knowledge bombs of what organizations must do in this day and age to stay relevant, keep growing, and be successful.
The best part is that Jared follows his own advice and leverages the help of many incredibly successful people and organizations to provide real-life examples. He uses examples of people like Jill Rowley, Peter Caputa, and Mark Kilens, as well as companies such as HubSpot, Tesla, Microsoft, Databox, Drift, PandaDoc, and more, that have used network-effect, partnering, social selling, and nearbound strategies to be successful.
This is exactly what separates the bad from the good from the great. Not only going from theory to action, but also taking all the proper steps for those actions to become a success.
It doesn’t stop there. The best part starts about 100 or so pages in, when Jared provides very detailed and actionable blueprints on how to implement all this from marketing, sales, customer success, and operational standpoints, and with an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily cadence. And he continually talks about how all of these rhythms need to be in place and how to work holistically throughout the organization, never in a silo, never alone.
This is a book that every person who works in a partnership role must read. However, this is especially powerful for folks who don’t understand the value of partnerships (or don’t want to) and are stuck in the old ways of channel, inbound, and outbound that are not working as they once did.
Throughout my career, I’ve seen many of the mistakes that Jared points out throughout the book. I have made some of them myself as well. I’ve seen brands or teams fail because of their unwillingness to change and challenge the “status quo.” But I’ve also seen many succeed by taking risks and changing a stagnant culture.
Learning to help first and to take your partners and customers to, as Jared puts it, their “promised land,” is easier said than done. In many organizations, this will be a massive cultural shift. However, it’s the only way forward to gain the trust required to win more customers.
I am lucky to have personally experienced the result of implementing some of these playbooks and frameworks with strategies in my role at Megaport. Actions that create true partnerships and are not transactional or zero-sum game relationships.
Organizations that keep repeating mistakes of the past and refuse to see the value of having a nearbound strategy embedded holistically throughout every department will have a very hard time growing and succeeding.
In a world where outbound and inbound are not working, nearbound is a must.
