Interview with Jay McBain

Hi this is Bob Samuels founder of TechConnectr, TechConnectr is a
marketplace and campaign management platform of best of breed account based
marketing lead gen solutions we help marketers deliver highly targeted
quality leads to the sales teams we’ve partnered with the b2b market exchange
to bring you wisdom from leading account based marketing thought leaders to that
end i’m proud to introduce one of the world’s leading experts Jay McBain
principal analysts of global channels for Forrester how are you today Jay I’m
doing well thank you for having me it’s it’s wonderful to speak with you so I
know that you’ve been around and the channel business for what 20 25 years
now about that I’m starting to get aged it’s a lot of fun yeah absolutely
and by definition that you know I think of channel yeah channel marketing and I
know ABM is a new term it’s it really means targeted marketing or named
accounts but that I imagine that’s a big part of channel marketing today it
absolutely is so if you look across the world and if you look across the 27
industries 75% of world trade today goes indirectly through some type of third
party companies and you know even though companies have invested so much in terms
of direct marketing and direct sales and everything else it’s usually less than
half and globally you know a quarter of the business and you know we think it’s
the biggest opportunity to really drive revenue and enhance your ABM strategies
via third parties and I assume that’s that’s not not a not it’s a growing
business it’s it’s continuing to grow as far as a percentage share yeah
absolutely and the biggest change that we’re seeing by the way is around
influencers and advocates and you know b2b buyers for example
starting to look more like b2c buyers with how much research they do before
they talk to somebody and even some of their behaviors you know during the
buying cycle and you know these non transacting partners these people who
help you know customers along their journey are really interesting to brands
as they try to figure out how to you know corral them and motivate them
Cosell and Co market with them so a really growing area so it sounds is
there’s a lot more influencers involved in just in than just the direct client
yeah absolutely and so do you have any interesting
account based marketing success stories offhand that you could share otherwise
I’ll want to talk to you about your you know your presentation that’s coming up
at the B2B MX yeah as you can imagine Forrester spends a lot of time on ABM
we’ve got dedicated ABM analysts and I look at ABM actually in two ways and I
end up talking about it almost every day because many companies that are out
there you know for example in the technology space one of their big
potential partners today around digital transformation and business
transformation what customers are thinking system integrators are you know
a big influence so these are companies like Accenture and Deloitte and PwC and
you know you’d know the top 10 by name and these companies are massive
you know Accenture has 450,000 people so you don’t just go and recruit them at a
trade show and you don’t just send them an email and sign them up it takes an
ABM approach to go win or recruit a new partner of that size and magnitude and
we’re starting to see ABM come into channel recruitment as a key way of you
know getting some of these larger resellers and alliances signed up so
it’s kind of an interesting way to think of it not just at the end client level
but in terms of building your channel as well make sense
make sense so your your presentation at the B2B MX through channel marketing how new
new tools and services will accelerate partner programs tell us a little bit
about through channel marketing automation but what exactly is that
well it’s interesting so when you look at 75% of trade world trade that goes in
directly you’ve got local businesses you’ve got a whole myriad of local or
distributed businesses that impact your customer you know they might buy
directly from a local franchise or a local insurance agent or pharmaceutical
rep or technology bar what you know whatever industry it’s in but again if
you look backwards 20 years ago companies invested heavily into CRM and
you know we know Salesforce and Dynamics and the other winners there 10 years
ago they invested heavily in marketing automation so we know Marketo and Parr
Dodd and Eloqua and and the winners there but for 20 years now a lot of the
focus has been on direct direct selling direct marketing building out that
process you know making it a science as opposed to an art what’s missing in this
equation is that third stage which is how do you market and cosell with all of
these different agents or or franchises or retailers or others that are
basically the last mile between you and your customer and how do you market to
them through them and with them you know to make them better because in most
cases they could be smaller mom-and-pop shops that don’t have the marketing
expertise are driving around in a rusted white van that you know has a pixelated
logo on the side and you know they don’t have the same level of expertise or
skills or capabilities that you’ve built over the 20 years and now this third
stage I think is this shift in terms of how do we raise all those boats make
sense so what kind of technology have you seen
that’s been effective as far as helping work with the channel partners for
success yeah there’s actually a category which which I write about I wrote a wave
earlier this year called TCMA through channel marketing automation and when we
look at it there’s about 35 companies who build TCMA software that really is
dedicated towards the 27 industries it is quite industry specific and these
pieces of software really automate a lot of this type of work and like
traditional marketing automation it includes email and it includes social
and search and syndication it also involves some physical you know there is
still brochures and signage and TV and radio ads and everything else but you
take that whole bucket of marketing assets and and tactics and you need to
govern that and you need to have a different layer when you’re doing it
one-to-many especially you know outside of your firewall you know you’ve got to
protect your branding guidelines you’ve got to you know make sure that the
security and the compliance and everything is built at scale and then
what’s interesting is you know we find that two-thirds of these local
businesses don’t have the capabilities so we call it you know do it for me or
do it on behalf of me type of users which is I understand you know the
marketing is important I don’t really know how to do it or I don’t have the
time to do it or I don’t even have the resource or capabilities to do it
so we’ve introduced this third another third party called a concierge or White
Glove service it could be a digital agency that acts on behalf of that local
business to be able to take the brand and and to be able to execute at a local
level so the software is different than traditional marketing automation just in
terms of how you run it at at a global level and be able to transact with all
of these you know third parties and enable the mid scale so that category by
the way is the fastest growing marketing software category that
Forrester tracks because are you talking about TCMA are you talking about the the
white glove service the TCMA which is through channel marketing is the fastest
growing marketing category from a software perspective just pioneers and do
you have any favorite vendors of the of those few dozen players out there yeah i
do not like the may i talk about specific vendors no I I definitely talk
about vendors all the time I publish a channel software stack so if you google
channel software stack it’ll come up number one and number two on google you
can see a big infographic of all channel software companies there’s about a
hundred and six of them and the thirty or so that I talked about here are
definitely on that list and you know there are big players like and Sierra aprimo there are some very specific so if you look in the technology industry
there is companies like ZIFT, Inpartner ZINFI there is you know global
companies that handle multiple industries like a brand muscle brand
maker but all of these companies you know many of them also have digital
agency backgrounds or creative type of backgrounds but they also have a SAAS
platform that that they sell that automates this and you know enables you
to scale your third-party marketing excellent so so what are the what’s the
critic what are the critical skill sets necessary to optimize these TCMA
programs yeah well first of all it’s it’s the data that you collect because
you know what ends up happening most companies partnerships and
alliances channels are are pretty large you may have thousands you could have
tens of thousands of partners when you look around the world and each location
you know looks somewhat customized in terms of what works the ability to pull
that back and and learn from you know kind of what works
and apply it to other situations so if something’s working for example a
campaign with certain tactics is working in Wichita Kansas you know would you be
able to pick that up and move it over to you know a town in Florida and as you
look across your partners and look at you know all the marketing that’s going
on and how they mix it and you know that the day-by-day measurements and
management of it you know are you able to gather those best practices almost in
in real time and push it you know across a larger audience you know that ROI the
return on investment of these types of marketing campaigns you know it’s pretty
easy to track at a local level and as you go to you know maybe sub optimized
places you know maybe partners of yours that are not participating you can
definitely lay it out in terms of the mechanics and the tactics and and if
they don’t have the capability of doing it introducing a third party that can do
it on their behalf excellent so it’s a combination of data
or more to the point intelligence the the tools for marketing outreach and
then I guess the white glove or the the marketing advice yeah absolutely so you
know in total we think you know we’re seeing this today is about a 300 million
dollar software business that’s growing to be over a billion dollars in the next
five years probably 1.2 billion there’s another billion or so dollars of
services that those same 35 companies deliver with their software and then the
opportunity for digital agencies and other firms is about 2 billion so the
overall market is about four and a half billion dollars you know by the year you
know 2023 around these technologies so it’s pretty lucrative and the margins
are you know relatively high and you know for many digital agencies
for example that you know are seen compression and seeing consolidation and
things and in their core businesses you know this presents a pretty big
opportunity for them excellent it sounds like it’s a great
market it’s growing it’s very much ABM best practices and it’s nice – it’s nice
– nice to hear you’re on top of everything and you sound like a great
resource for anybody who’s going to be doing some research of where they head
next the insight yeah and I’m excited about ABM you know expanding to include
channels again there’s a lot of influence that happens through the
buying journey that isn’t directly inside the organization so you’ve done
the work and you understand the who the buying group is and who the internal
influencers are but on average you know there could be five 10 20 different
companies externally that are influencing the buying decision as well
making recommendations adding expertise whatever it may be
and you know as you’re looking at your own ABM approach you know you have to
understand who these third parties are and perhaps you know recruit them as
partners not only to win that account but you might find and be surprised that
they’re working on five other accounts and influencing them as well and these
future partnerships for you as an organization as a salesperson are
critical in terms of you know expanding your territory and you know getting a
army of feet on the street to help you that’s great stuff so I look forward to
seeing you at the b2b MX for everybody who’s interested Jays presentations on
Wednesday February 27th in Scottsdale on Through channel marketing and I think it’s
going to be a great topic and that I encourage everybody to attend all right
thank you so much thank you and look forward to seeing you there.