Demystifying B2B Partnerships with Adam Glazer, President of Partner Commerce

[00:00:01] Canned Intro

Welcome to The Partnership Economy. This podcast explores the power of partnerships through candid conversations with industry leaders. Join our hosts Dave Yovanno, CEO, and Todd Crawford, co-founder of Impact.com, as they unpack the future of partnership as a lever for scale and an opportunity to put the consumer first.

[00:00:23] Todd Crawford Welcome back to The Partnership Economy podcast. I’m your host, Todd Crawford, and today we’ll be exploring B2B partnerships with Adam Glazer, president of Partner Commerce, a leading partner marketing agency that specializes in expanding the digital footprint of B2B, SaaS and service brands. Adam started his career at an agency building innovative channels before social media existed. He moved on to manage affiliate programs for B2C and eventually transitioned to B2B offers. Here is when he realized that there were little tools or support for B2B brands interested in performance based partner marketing. And so partner commerce was born. As the founder and president of Partner Commerce, Adam has led high performing programs for global brands such as Microsoft, TikTok, Dropbox and Google. In this episode, Adam and I dive into B2B partnerships and how they differ from traditional affiliate partners, what type of partners exist in B2B and how to incentivize them. We also explore what B2B brands need to consider when using this channel. The importance of education and feedback among different teams and how to get buy in from your c-suite. I hope you enjoy. Hey Adam, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you on.

[00:01:40] Adam Glazer Thanks for having me here. I’m excited.

[00:01:42] Todd Crawford Yeah. Yeah. So I guess as I always want to do at the beginning of each episode is get a little bit background on you, how you got started in the industry, what else you’ve done with your career, and then a little bit about your company.

[00:01:56] Adam Glazer So I’m the president of Partner Commerce. I started out my career at an agency called WPP. It’s a big Madison Avenue global ad conglomerate. And in the late 90s, early 2000s building a group for them called at the time called the Alternative Channels. We’re innovating on channels like affiliate marketing. And there was no social media back then. It was guerilla, you know, online speeding of news groups, something like that. And then I had the opportunity to kind of spin out my own company out of that called Converseon, which we were managing Hilton hotels, affiliate program and [00:02:39]Mikasa [0.0s] and some some pretty large B2C brands. And after all, I was I was able to exit that. I went on to actually become an affiliate and focused on a lot of B2B offers. And out of that experience, I discovered that there really weren’t agency services or technology platforms set up to support B2B brands in doing performance based partner marketing. And so that was the genesis of Partner Commerce. I swore I would never have another agency again, but it’s I guess it’s just in my DNA.

[00:03:16] Todd Crawford Yeah. I mean, what I like about it is that you kind of went after an area of affiliate marketing that is obviously underserved. I think, you know, historically, people think of affiliate marketing as B2C, and I think of all the B2C brands, Amazon being kind of the flagship or pioneer in the space many years ago. And obviously there’s thousands and thousands of B2C brands and B2B are in there. But I think it’s a bit more of a mystery for a lot of people either because they’ve never worked for a B2B company or they don’t think about B2B. But once you start thinking about it, it’s huge. I think a third I think it’s really great that you went after that that segment of the of the industry, because even the agencies in the space for the most part are B2C type services that they’re offering those types of clients. So the one thing I guess just to help people understand is, you know, what is I guess B2B versus, you know, we know what B2C is, right? It’s typical somebody selling to a a consumer just going out, buying for themselves. But, you know, how would you describe B2B brands?

[00:04:29] Adam Glazer You know, simply put, it’s just where the their end customer is another businesses, they’re selling to another business. And business buyers behave differently. They shop differently than than end consumers. And so the way you market to them, especially to partners is very different. Businesses, for the most part are using coupons sites and cashback sites necessarily to discover and influence their purchase decisions, may be very, very small micro-businesses like solopreneurs may lean on some of those types of things, but there are other types of partners that are touching that business consumer on their journey to investigate products and services. And so our approach is helping them uncover who those partners are and how to meaningfully engage, enable, incentivize and reward those partners to market our clients offers.

[00:05:27] Todd Crawford It’s interesting because, you know, when you think about B2B, like you said, even besides partnerships, just the way you you market yourself online is different than B2C. So obviously partnerships would be different. It’s certainly the case that if I’m a B2B buyer, I’m also a consumer. So you could catch my eye under my consumer hat when I’m shopping. But for the most part, you’re trying to cover the bases where as a business buyer, I might look or be surfing to get exposure to the service or product.

[00:06:02] Adam Glazer And oftentimes there’s maybe a committee of people involved in a business decision, in a purchase decision. And there are just, you know, along that journey, you’re probably engaging with other, you know, consultants and service providers, influencers who are or touching that business and various people on that buying committee on that journey. And so there’s a lot of opportunities to use partnerships to help steer those decisions. But, you know, these these are longer sales cycles and oftentimes involve multiple people and oftentimes involve offline events that need to be tracked. And so that creates some challenges and challenges and how you do performance based marketing and how you determine who should deserve the credit for originating that sale and and just the whole track ability of it.

[00:06:57] Todd Crawford So it’s not the typical add to cart checkout done. It could even be an RFP or request for proposal where they maybe are evaluating more than one provider of the service or product, right, the vendor and then having to go through with all the stakeholders and procurement and everything just to make a buying decision. Or maybe at the end they do just add the card and check out, but it’s just not as the velocity is much more considered and methodical.

[00:07:25] Adam Glazer Right. And maybe you’re, you know, using partners at different points of that journey. So maybe there are partners who are just sort of generating awareness and generating new demand by distributing content and generating leads, right. That that then those brands can nurture and develop into. Because I think, you know, for B2C affiliate, you’re looking to reward a partner for driving someone right at the point of purchase. But for a business buyer, it’s very hard to ice, you know, reach. There are partners you can reach them right at the point of purchase, but we can generate a lot more reach and build awareness and drive a lot of demand into your funnel by having partners disseminate content and rewarding them on on generating qualified leads. And you can even use partnerships post-purchase to expand, you know, renew customers.

[00:08:23] Todd Crawford So I guess one one question I have these partners are not resellers, right? So maybe just unpack that a little. Like do you ever help with that or is that really not what you’re trying to do? You’re really trying to create more the affiliate program for businesses. Yeah.

[00:08:40] Adam Glazer Yeah. So we have multiple capabilities, but our core competencies in the affiliate marketing area of that spectrum of partnerships, right. And so working with partners to refer new, new acquisition.

[00:08:57] Todd Crawford What type of brands do you see either you know, by business model or vertical are best suited to leverage affiliate type partnership programs?

[00:09:08] Adam Glazer I think it lends itself really well to businesses that have a SMB audience and really micro SMB. So one to ten employees, right, that and where you have a very large TAM. And so if you can, you know, being the type of product that all businesses need, like a CRM or office type software and where you have you’re able to sell globally, right? That opens up the opportunity to scale. If it’s a very niche product that has a very unique buyer in one region, that obviously makes them on order. So we’re looking for and the brands we work with are global, primarily SaaS brands that tends to lend itself also really well. Not that we don’t work in other types of B2B businesses like services or hardware or products like SaaS, just the types of lending software. Also the SaaS brand with a micro SMD audience with a very large TAM. Those are good indicators of success. I’ll add one more actually. I think that what we’ve done is we work with a lot of a lot of those brands and I’ll call this one thing I’ve noticed is brands that are what I’ll call platform products tend to do better than brands that are what I call add on product. So what is a platform product? Platform products would be something like a CRM that a company is going to make, it’s an important decision for them and they’re going to build processes and workstreams around that platform. Impact would be a platform product. And so then there are other products that are sort of add ons to that, like if there’s some sort of way to put it into context and affiliate world, maybe like some sort of trademark beard monitoring software, third party software. That’s more of an add on. It’s not something that we’re building their core business around. Right. And so I think we have platform product that SaaS large TAM, SMB audience, but we can do this also for brands that are, you know, going after mid-market or enterprise customers and, you know, they’re selling industrial machinery.

[00:11:21] Todd Crawford Right. Always in my mind when I think of B2B, which is also a B2C product, are like antivirus, right, like, obviously as a consumer, you might buy antivirus for your computer or your family’s computer. But as a company, you want to protect your investment in that hardware and your assets behind it. And so as a company decision, a business decision, which antivirus software we’re going to put on our computer, or are we going to invest in, you know, Google Suite or Microsoft Office. And so all those business decisions that, you know, are we going to need to facts? Do we need facts? You know, there’s all these kinds of products out there that may help a business run at the worker level, much less systems and and building out your own company. That’s always kind of my Uber example when I think of B2B, because you can you can run a B2C program for antivirus and you can also run a B2B program.

[00:12:19] Adam Glazer Sometimes like a company like Microsoft, which, you know, we ran on Impact, you have office for personal use in your office for business use. And so, you know, there’s some complexity there and trying to make sure that the way partners are marketing the offers is there not creating confusion for customers and that, you know, you don’t want to drive a business customer to buy a consumer skew. And then there’s some sort of customer dissatisfaction with the purchase. And so it’s how do you then enable your partners to market the offers and control the way they’re messaging and and making sure that customers are getting a good experience.

[00:12:58] Todd Crawford Yeah. When I when I think of a B2C affiliate program, you know, launching for the first time, one thing that makes affiliate easy is there’s this, I call it low hanging fruit. There’s a sub, there’s a set of publishers that, that’s their business model, their affiliates. They’re ready to work with you. If you have a great product or service, they want to work with you. Then you have the high hanging fruit, which for a lot of brands might be unique partners or, you know, bit more Biz Dev or custom partnerships that they might do beyond the traditional affiliates. But when you alluded to this earlier, when you launch a B2B program, a lot of that low hanging fruit is kind of off the table that’s not going to work. And almost all the partnerships are bespoke based on the business vertical. There’s not always I think it’s growing, but there’s not a lot of what I call ready made partnerships, right? Just waiting to get an email or a phone call.

[00:13:59] Adam Glazer Right. I think you’ve got, you know, traditional sort of consumer familiar coupon sites and incentive networks and toolbars and sort of black box sub networks that they’re professional tools. That is their business model. They’re set up to scale. Like you can create a data feed of offers and they’ll pick it up. And like you said, it’s the low friction. You probably don’t even need a very senior person to manage those relationships or like it scales quickly and easily. Whereas here exactly, you’re right that B2B is more like business development in a sense. So it’s affiliate marketing in the sense that it’s referral based, performance based, and we’re using an affiliate tracking platform to, to enable it, right? But the types of partners and the way we engage with those partners is very different. And, you know, I almost prefer the word partnership development to affiliate marketing, because I think affiliate marketing has that sort of connotation to it, right? The types of partners we would work with would certainly include those traditional clients. So there are definitely endemic publishers like small businesses and those types business.com and that’s similar to consumer based publishers, right? And then you’ve got comparison and review sites as well. Then you’ve got these other segments that are really very different. So agencies, service providers, consultants, they are not professional goods. They have a whole business selling their services and this is not need to require more training. It’s a longer tail. And then you also have strategic brand to brand deals, which is also the super successful successful strategy for B2B as well.

[00:15:51] Todd Crawford Yeah. And you kind of touched on this idea of like you like partnership development better than affiliate marketing or affiliate program, because in a B2B telling somebody we have an affiliate program and you can sign up is is almost working against you or it’s not helping you. Or if you say, Hey, I’m calling for our business development partnership program and I’m here to reach out to you. I think there’s a good fit. If you have 15 minutes, I can explain how we can work together to grow our businesses mutually. You know, that kind of conversation, which, again, the type of people that you need making those calls is in the is more of a Biz Dev role or even like a sales role in a way is same, almost the same thing where they’re not like we talked about this low hanging fruit. I mean, hey, we have an affiliate program, this is what we sell or this is our service. Here’s a link to sign up. That’s the whole conversation, right?

[00:16:46] Adam Glazer Rigth. And it’s more education and even just educating them how to use the platform. Like a lot of the B2C affiliates, they’re used to working in Impact or, you know, and they understand what a tracking link is and how to distribute that. And they know how to, you know, we end up dealing with a larger influx of inquiries like where do I log in again? And I thought they forgot to put their check because they just aren’t used to working in that way. You know, it’s a little more, little more scope to manage and scale that.

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[00:18:04] Todd Crawford What does a B2B brand even need to be considering to actually go down this path and have success at it?

[00:18:10] Adam Glazer For one, it requires a little bit more alignment within the organization because there are often other groups managing partners. And so understanding the swimlanes of what is an affiliate and what types of partners you prioritize the affiliate program. What types of partners should be prioritized for referral or reseller or channel sales program? So also a lot of times it’s it’s engaging with other teams across an organization where I’ll go back to Microsoft as an example. But, you know, they obviously we’re we have a network and a deep network of relationships and partners that we can bring leverage. A lot of times you find that the brand, especially big companies like like a Microsoft where they have, you know, field marketing teams and different product marketing teams, those groups have relationships with partners. They just don’t have a way to incentivize or reward them or provide them with, you know, marketing support to go out and create create demand. What affiliate becomes is a resource to the rest of the company to go out and leverage the relationships that they already have and get those partners to incentivize them and reward them for creating demand and support them in active in campaigns to do so.

[00:19:41] Todd Crawford Yes. So B2B is a an interesting opportunity, I think. And I know, like I said, a lot of brands have business development going on in their company and, you know, resellers. So they might think they’re doing all the types of partnerships that they should be. And of course we don’t believe that because we know they’re not doing, you know, a partnership program like we’ve been describing here today. And I think if you think you’ve got everything covered and it can’t hurt to talk to to your team, to to to just see if there is more to uncover. Because I like I said, I think a lot of companies don’t know what they don’t know and they might think they’re doing something. And then when they have a conversation about it, they’re like, we’re totally missing a whole thing here that we didn’t know about, right, we thought we were doing it.

[00:20:30] Adam Glazer Right. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, now we’ve got some real case studies to show how we’ve been able to demonstrate, you know, proven success. And so I think, you know, there were some procedures and we were sort of launching in, and it was we had to convince advertisers that affiliate could be successful for B2B, and I think we can now show definitively how and what actual trajectory looks like and what the factors are for success. And and yes, I think, you know, the last exchange definitely can B2B we’re seeing customers are a bit more educated about it. And but I think, you know, you’ve got to work with an agency that our only goal the thing you do is B2B. We don’t manage any of B2C programs. I bet you that’s why we were successful is that we’ve gone so deep on on B2B that we have, you know, subject matter expertise and we and that playbook and knowing the mistakes, you know, and knowing the opportunities and where to prioritize and, and just having the relationships. We’ve got, I think 30,000 partnerships.

[00:21:43] Todd Crawford And we touched on this about the education internally, but a lot of times it changes how the company operates and approaches partnerships that they wouldn’t have done without that kind of consulting from from a company like yours, where, okay, we need to maybe realign some things here and then and now we can, now we’re a lean, mean fighting machine when it comes to this new partnership thing. Like, where’s it going to sit? Okay, we’ve got this team over there kind of doing some of that. What do we change with them? Do they become this new team? Do they become a slightly different team? You know what, what, what do we what do we got to do here? I mean, it’s not the problem where it goes. It’s just that it has a place and that there’s this swimlanes so that these guys to the left that are doing Biz Dev, they don’t get in our swimlane. We don’t get in there but we know about our lanes and the guys on our right are the same way. And so we’re all working, you know, for the good of the company and not our own individual ambitions. And, you know, if I if I take your partner, I don’t care. Right.

[00:22:47] Adam Glazer Right. Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, it’s the same sort of, you know, as with any affiliate program like attribution and determining like. When should the affiliate be credit a versus, you know, sales channel or, you know, marketing or something else. And so that that’s even, I think, more relevant when you have a longer sales cycle and committee of buyers and there’s even more complexity there.

[00:23:24] Todd Crawford Yeah. And I think, you know, it all has to bake up, cook out to the CAC that they’re targeting and all the other metrics that they measure so you introduce another channel. Does it add costs and not revenue? Right. Probably not. But I’m just saying, you know, those are the kind of considerations. And how much will it increase our CAC versus and our LTV. You know, as you mentioned earlier, I mean, if I’m bringing in partners that bring in new customers that are in line with our LTV or exceeding our LTV or exceeding our AOV’s right, like all those things matter to kind of demonstrate the value that this new channels now introduced.

[00:24:10] Adam Glazer And, you know, and also what we found, too, is that in a with the agencies that where we’re bringing in customers through a partner that is managing so not a partner like a publisher that’s selling sort of one too many in broadcasting, but a partner that’s selling one to one, right, or one to few. Usually there’s those customers tend to be higher deal sizes thrown at lower rates because the partner is assisting and providing some sort of a service layer there. So those customers are more successful at adopting the service. And so we’re finding that one affiliate is becoming a huge generator of acquisition on par with partner channels and channel sales and on par with paid search and paid social. But the average deal size, the average LTV, much higher churn, much lower. And the efficiency, the CAC efficiency is there too, because it’s it’s it’s not a it’s performance based. You’re only paying out the most part when it performs. And if we’re on paid search and paid social where CPC and CPMs are going up double or triple digit every year. We can control that efficiency a bit more with affiliates. So it’s super efficient. You’re getting higher ticket, higher LTV customers that are happier or more successful. Yeah, I think now what we’re trying to do is get our class to think about how partners can do more than just bring in demand. But I think we can help them, you know, expand, renew customers. Right. That’s an exciting sort of opportunity.

[00:26:06] Todd Crawford Yeah. I mean, you know, all of these B2B companies, they’re they’re in a it’s still a very tough business. Right? So not only acquiring customers, but retaining them is huge. Getting those renewals and also expansion, cross-selling, upselling, all that partnerships can play a role. So I think you know again it’s it’s really about, I think even more so than B2C, because this is obviously important to B2C, but it’s being coordinated across the organization and informed. And who’s responsible for what, you know, we’re seeing, you know, this new creation of chief partnerships of officers or sometimes it’s under a CRO or CMO because there’s so many ways to create partnerships. We want a core someone conducting that orchestra. Yeah.

[00:26:56] Adam Glazer Yeah, it’s funny. And I think, you know, sometimes brands will look at the financial resources. We need to go out and get a resource and it should sit here and it’s centralized. But, you know, maybe, you know, we’re recruiting and engaging influencers who are generating demand. Maybe they should sort of sit with demand teams, right? And but maybe when we’re engaging with partners who are helping customers expand and renew, maybe they should be sort of have a dotted line into customer support teams. And so because their metrics and mandates are more aligned to those groups and so they’re thinking of an affiliate as more of a distributed capability, right? That you could still have that chief partnerships or chief of ecosystem officer that’s overseeing and orchestrating. But different parts of your team could be more embedded with other organizational groups within your broader organization and kind of distributing that knowledge. So not looking at as a centralized resource, but as a capability.

[00:28:04] Todd Crawford And again, I keep thinking it’s constant education across these teams because they can kind of forget. It’s almost forget to come back to it. But also, once this channel stood up and performing, coming back and showing the teams, here’s how this channel’s doing, here’s the types of partnerships that are doing well. This is what’s working. Right. So it kind of reinforces, okay, this is something that matters to the business and we’re going to support it even more, right? So that education is not just kind of upfront to get this launched, but it’s kind of a constant education. I mean, even, you know, in most companies that are B2B, I mean, Impact.com included, I mean, we we celebrate wins and we have, you know, subject matter experts internally or owners of certain pieces of the business present to the whole company or segments of the company like what they’re doing, the successes, what’s working, what’s not, so that we’re all educated. So if somebody reaches out to me and I’m like, we have 1100 employees around the world, I don’t know what everybody does. But I know, I know somebody. I can find somebody who can help. You know, I’m not always the person who can help anymore when we were like 100 person company. So it’s it’s it’s really key, I think, to scaling and really taking advantage of everything available, right, to grow your business. And I think that that’s really the key here. The c-suite, their sole purpose is growing the business and increasing shareholder value. But that’s the big reason that they exist. So this is this is another tool that they should be exploring, which as we wrap up, Adam Glazer, if people want to learn more about Partner Commerce and how you might be able to help them grow their business, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you?

[00:29:52] Adam Glazer Yeah, you can go to our website www.PartnerCommerce.com. Find me on LinkedIn as well. And I think we’re listed in the agency marketplace on Impact.com. So you just Google our name or my name and you’ll find us. But yeah, we’d love to love to chat.

[00:30:12] Todd Crawford Well, I greatly appreciate you coming on and unpacking B2B. It’s sometimes a mysterious thing for a lot of people and there’s always something to learn. So again, I greatly appreciate you sharing everything.

[00:30:24] Adam Glazer Thanks for having me. There’s been a great opportunity and always fun to talk to you.

[00:30:33] Todd Crawford When it comes to B2B partnerships, brands can benefit from being more strategic and focused on adding value at various stages of the consumer’s journey. Measurement is critical to the success of B2B partnerships, though It’s not just about tracking that final sale, lead or trial, but about understanding metrics like long term customer value. This makes it crucial to have well aligned strategy across multiple teams within an organization. Clear communication and consistent education are key to ensuring everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. B2B partnerships require thoughtful planning, strong relationships, and a long term vision. Like Adam mentioned, going slow and focusing on creating value allows brands to unlock the full potential of partnerships leading to more meaningful and sustained growth. Thanks for listening and I look forward to next year.

[00:31:25] Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to the partnership economy brought to you by Impact.com. If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the show and rate and review it on Apple Podcasts.