S02 | E05 –Launching and Scaling Global Advocacy Programs with Brian Jambor

Will (00:02)

Welcome to the show, Brian. I’m so happy to have you here today and I just can’t wait to get into this with you.

 

Brian Jambor (00:09)

Well, thanks, Will. I appreciate it. I’m equally excited to have a great conversation with you.

 

Will (00:14)

Thank you. I think this is gonna be a good one. But before we jump into the topic, I’d love to just get a quick bit of background here. Let’s start with your story. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey through marketing to date?

 

Brian Jambor (00:28)

Yeah, happy to. Maybe I’ll start a little personal. My wife always gives me a hard time. She’s like, you just jump into your business background and you never talk about your family. My wife and I have been together for 20 years. We’re celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary this June, which is a huge milestone and really excited about that. Two kids, know, one in college, one’s 13. But in terms of business, I started my career in sales and marketing.

 

Will (00:36)

Yeah Congrats.

 

Brian Jambor (00:55)

I was the GM of marketing agency for five years. And we had the peak of it about 17 employees and about 3000 customers. And we were building custom websites for WordPress websites for real estate industry for brokers and agents. And did that for several years and then got into software.

 

Will (01:02)

Hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (01:18)

and landed at a company called Infusionsoft at the time, which then changed their name to Keep and recently got acquired. And so, you know, I was there for a while and then got into partnerships, which is really exciting. Did partnerships there for several years, kind of built the ecosystem with a handful of people from the ground up. And then went to a great company out of New York called Yodel. That was a local marketing company and did partnerships there.

 

And then that got acquired by Web.com, which was a really fun and exciting experience. And then Web.com went from a publicly traded $2 billion company to a private company. They got acquired by a private equity firm called Cirrus Capital. So it did that for a couple of years and then started partnerships at Sendoso, which is known for marketing and I’ll call it creating human to human experiences, right?

 

Will (02:06)

Mm-hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (02:11)

personalized gifting, right? So that was a very fun time. was the first head of partnerships at Cendosa, did that for a while. And then I was at Nassau, which is an e-commerce startup. And then most recently I was at Uberall for a couple of years, focused on global partnerships. And then now Cendasia, which is the leader in AI video. So it’s been quite the journey for sure.

 

Will (02:32)

That’s definitely quite the journey. Definitely a lot of variety there and the ability to see a bunch of different things. mean, I can see you starting in that, that agency life. usually it’s kind of the, the, the off book, history, the little bit of secret there, but you know, throughout that journey, you know, I know we’ll talk a little bit about the partnerships piece, but like, help us understand if there’s like a junior or young marketer here who’s listening, you know, was there, was there a lesson in that journey that you think you’d love to kind of just share?

 

Brian Jambor (02:45)

Right.

 

Will (03:01)

with someone else who’s just starting their journey.

 

Brian Jambor (03:04)

Absolutely. The first thing that I would say is be hungry. When I say be hungry, mean, be willing to learn. When I was at that marketing agency, when I first started, I was doing field sales and I led a field sales team. And we were doing all these WordPress websites and the engineers would go to the engineers and say, hey, we need X feature, X plugin or whatever to sell this to this customer.

 

Will (03:13)

Hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (03:30)

And what I found was I had a hard time speaking the language with some of our engineers. And so I learned how to code in PHP and I learned how to build WordPress plugins and WordPress themes. And I got really deep into it. And that allowed me to communicate more effectively to the engineers. so, you know, again, be hungry and be willing to learn new things is probably the number one thing. And then number two, would be stay humble and just realize that it’s okay to not know.

 

Will (03:36)

Hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (04:00)

everything. Nobody knows everything and be willing to ask for help, seek counsel and guidance from those that have been there before you and have have figured out what not to do in certain situations and in certain ecosystems and growth stages of companies. And that’s where you can accelerate your learning as well.

 

Will (04:17)

Well, I think that was a great podcast. That was some great to know, but a wonderful piece of advice right off the top there. that’s, think, interesting balance to be hungry and be humble. I think for so many of us, it’s so hard to keep that balance, but I love that advice.

 

Brian Jambor (04:37)

thanks.

 

Will (04:38)

Now, as we heard in your kind of background there, you’ve had many different roles, right? Whether that’s building partnerships at Infusionsoft or Sendoso or Synthesia. Now, you’ve worked with these companies about various different stages, and I think that’s like a really interesting place to dig into. How do you look at a business, looking at their stage, how do you determine if that business is ready to invest in an advocacy program? What kind of milestones are we looking for before we want to get into this kind of thing?

 

Brian Jambor (05:07)

Yeah, I’ve seen companies do that really well and I’ve joined companies that tried to do it and were way too early. Right? And I can tell you the biggest common denominator that I’ve seen is how well there’s product market fit. Right? And how consistent is the organization in their ability to sell their solution themselves.

 

Will (05:18)

Mm.

 

Brian Jambor (05:34)

And do they really understand their ideal customer profile? When you have an advocacy program, you’re asking third parties to advocate for your brand, typically you don’t get very many chances if you don’t get it right the first time. You have some advocacy influencer, or maybe it be some sort of publication that you want to be in your program.

 

Will (05:34)

Hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (05:59)

And you say, okay, here’s the resources that we have. Here’s the way that you can drive traffic and, you know, call brand awareness to our organization. And if the messaging is off, if the, you know, ideal customer profile was off, then when they run those campaigns and they fall flat. Then the, the, you the partner realizes, yeah, maybe this isn’t quite the best avenue for me. And they go and try one of hundreds of other programs that are soliciting them for you know, their, their advocacy, right? And so it’s really important early on to ensure that there’s really solid product market fit, a really dialed in ICP and that there’s serious consistency in terms of the sales and marketing organizations ability to convert prospects into customers. And once those things are really dialed in, then it’s, it’s a pretty, you know, I’ll call it stable environment where you can launch an advocacy program and be quite successful. And from a funding standpoint, I find is companies that are somewhere between Series B and Series C tend to be right around at that place. Series A is still lot of experimentation, it seems like, with ICP and Target Market and all those things. Series B, you really have most of those things kind of homed in for the most part.

 

Will (07:10)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah, I think that’s such an interesting way to look at it. Cause I think that a lot of people have looked at this and you talked to me in the past with this from maybe a number of customers or a revenue perspective. And even though I think you could probably draw conclusions to those, you’re kind of stepping back one and saying it’s really product market fit. But I like what you’re talking about. It almost feels like it’s more than just product market fit. It’s like even go to market fit. It’s understanding that message and who you’re going to ask that advocate to go advocate to in that kind of message. So I love the way that you’re thinking about that. Is there any other way that you would define product market fit in this environment? Because I know product market fit in its own right can be a whole multi-hour debate, but it sounds like your peers here are kind of consistent messaging, consistent sale motion, anything else you would look for?

 

Brian Jambor (08:17)

Yeah, I would say have you defined the problem that you’re solving and do you solve it very well? So much so that your target prospect is willing to pay significantly to solve the problem because the way that you solve it provides a very clear return on investment. Right. And sometimes that’s the biggest challenge. Right. We start talking about businesses is the is the problem a big enough problem that you’re solving that somebody is willing to pay for you to solve the problem?

 

And a lot of people have great ideas for business, either the problem’s not big enough or important enough, or the way that they solve it isn’t impactful enough for the prospect to really care. And so I would say, is the problem big enough and impactful enough, and are you solving it in a meaningful enough way? The ROI is very clear and apparent.

 

Will (09:06)

Yeah, I love that. I think one of the that I see, one of the challenges I see is I’ll see startups that have not yet launched, wanting to make sure that they build in some kind of advocacy motion. Now, from what you’re telling me here, it sounds like you would suggest that’s kind of too late, or too early part of me, not too late, too early. What would you suggest to those groups where they’re really excited about this idea of word of mouth, of advocacy, of partnerships, but they’re either… earlier than that kind of series B stage or their pre-launch? Is there anything they should be looking at or is this kind of like, just double down and make sure you’ve got those core things we’ve already talked about here together before you come around to this?

 

Brian Jambor (09:48)

Yeah, the one thing that they could look at is making sure that their economics support an advocacy program. Right? So make sure that whatever your margin needs to be, that you set aside some margin for your partners that are going to want some sort of part of the pie. Right? And whether that’s incorporating your customer acquisition costs or whether that’s incorporated in other aspects of the business, typically it’s incorporating your CAAC, but make sure that you build that into your model, your economic model.

 

Will (09:55)

Hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (10:17)

That way, when the timing is right, you don’t have to then reconfigure your pricing strategy to accommodate a partnership or advocacy strategy because it would dilute your margins too much and the economics then suddenly don’t work.

 

Will (10:25)

Hmm.

 

I love that, I would not have necessarily thought about that, but that makes so much sense to make sure that we’re like, instead of just spending the time to build a bunch of integration product partnerships, spend time just making sure you’re building a business that can support this channel. I love that. Now going…

 

Brian Jambor (10:49)

Yeah, the number one thing you could do is just get really clear with your customers on the problem that you’re solving for them and make sure that’s providing enough value. know, and that’s I think that we, we as business people generally, think, I think everybody actually that’s ever been in business could probably be doing more of that. Admittedly having more customer conversations, really understanding the problems we’re solving. how we’re solving those problems and how much value it’s bringing to the customer.

 

Will (11:21)

Yeah, I mean that’s absolute truth, right? It’s one of those things where you can never talk to the customer enough, you can never understand the problem enough.

 

I think kind of going to the opposite side of that spectrum though, going to the large and the global kind of programs, right? So when you were VP of global partnerships at Uberall, you had teams across multiple regions, multiple cultures. How do you kind of tailor these kind customer marketing and advocacy programs for that diverse range of cultures, languages, and needs?

 

Brian Jambor (11:55)

I’ll tell you Will, it’s not easy. If it was easy, probably everybody would be doing it, right? It’s not easy. You really have to localize things. Your partners in, let’s say, Italy…

 

Will (11:58)

Right.

 

Brian Jambor (12:09)

don’t want to get all of your content, all of your enablement, all of your resources in English, they want in Italian. And your partners in Germany, same thing, they want in German. And your partners in, let’s say, Japan, Japanese, right? And it goes even farther than that, right? It’s not just the enablement, it’s the conversations. And a lot of it is even cultural nuances too, right? So there are certain markets that you may want to get into where they are

 

Will (12:16)

Mm-hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (12:38)

very deep relationship based, right, where other markets are more transactional. And so you and a partner, an advocacy partner, can maybe have a little bit of different strategy going into that market than you could with a different one. And so you really have to tailor your program on a market by market basis. And you really need to have, I’ll say, leaders in that market that understand the market, that speak the language, that understand the cultural nuances. I I remember at UberOil, had

 

Will (12:45)

Hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (13:08)

know, nearly every country in Western Europe that we had partners in, we had partners in a couple of partners in Japan, we had several partners in North America, both United States and Canada. And I will say that one of the best partners we had was in Japan, but it was also one of the most challenging partnerships just from a language and cultural nuance standpoint. We didn’t have partner managers that spoke Japanese, and so we had to rely on third-party translators whenever we’d have a call with one of these partners, right? And you think about being intentional with every word and phrase that comes out of your mouth, multiply that by 10 because now that’s gotta be repeated by a translator and the message has to be abundantly clear and concise. And so what would normally take, you know, maybe a 30 minute call, now suddenly takes an hour because you have a translator translating both ways and.

 

Will (13:41)

wow. Yeah. Right.

 

Brian Jambor (14:05)

There’s just a lot of complexity outside of the make sure all of my material is in Japanese and you know, is the documentation in Japanese and is the user interface available for clients in Japanese? Like all of those things are pretty, I think, top of mind for a lot of people. But when you start getting into advocates, right, and partners, it’s a whole other ballgame completely.

 

Will (14:22)

Mm-hmm.

 

Did you find yourself having to structure programs differently? Were there different incentives or different conditions that you found resonated in different markets differently? Or were you able to maintain a global core foundation of a program?

 

Brian Jambor (14:46)

We structured the program differently in APAC. So specifically for the Japanese market, we structured it differently, very, very different in terms of the way that that market is run, very different culturally in the way that business gets done in the Japanese market, specifically in APAC. And so we tailored the program to that environment. I’ll say Western Europe and in North America, the programs were… near identical. There are small nuances, right, but generally speaking they were pretty identical in terms of the structure of the program.

 

Will (15:23)

Did you, I’m I’m most curious on this one. Did you find like different efficacies and different like, results by region or, was it really more by partner and the region wasn’t as, as relevant for that?

 

Brian Jambor (15:36)

We certainly saw different outcomes based on the region. And a lot of that though was likely tied more to the GDP of the region than it was necessarily any other factor. And then of course, certainly we had partners in regions that would perform better or worse than others. But again, there certainly was a, I’ll call it a GDP factor to that depending on where they were located at.

 

Will (15:47)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess, you know, kind of similar to the first question I asked here, but you know, if someone was about to launch a global program, maybe they’re live in kind of one generally, you know, homogeneous market. Any advice on kind of like how you would, you know, step into that knowing what you know now?

 

Brian Jambor (16:20)

Yeah, I am a big advocate of finding a partner to partner with you and go into that market so that you can learn a lot of lessons from them specifically before you expand it to a bunch of other partners. So start with one, right? And offer that partner greater concessions than maybe you normally would because there’s a lot of challenges that they’re going to face that your other partners aren’t going to face, right? Whether it be localization of content, localization of support, maybe they have to carry more of the responsibility in terms of the sales cycle as far as how far along that prospect is informed in terms of your solution before it’s then handed off to somebody on your team to maybe carry it all the way through, or maybe they’re carrying the full cycle from front end to back end. And so I would really lean in with a partner, learn what you need to learn in that market before you double down and opening it up to an entire you know, plethora, if you will, of partners in that specific region. But yeah, it goes back to what saying earlier. Spend a lot of time with that partner, spend a lot of time with the customers that they’re, you know, that they’re introducing to your organization and learn how business is done in that market and what that partner needs in that market to be successful. You know, we would spend a significant amount of time taking our content and translating it into local languages. Right. And we would use automated tools, know, there’s great tools out there like DeepL is a world-class tool for text translation, right? And it’ll get you the vast majority of the way there. And then we would have typically local translators that would take it from call it 90, 95 % to 100 % with some maybe some nuances on custom taxonomies based on, you know, some specific things that we had in our industry.

 

There’s other AI tools that can help you do that at scale from a video standpoint, a little bias, they work for one. plug there, but I think those are some of the things to consider,

 

Will (18:19)

Hehehehe

 

Yeah, I mean, I it’s a good kind of segue to talking about technology and innovation in this space, right? I mean, you’ve had a good chance to see a wide variety of different companies. And like you said, you’re now at an AI video company. But you know, I mean, it’d just be good to just dig in there and see where are you seeing the state of technology around customer advocacy today and where do you think that’s going and how does that help us deliver on better results?

 

Brian Jambor (18:57)

Yeah, it’s certainly changed dramatically in the last even 12 months, right? There’s so much available now in terms of resources for anybody that wants to spin up an advocacy channel or ecosystem that there just wasn’t even 12 months ago. And I think about, again, the ability to take content and instantly convert it into the local language.

 

right, of choice. The ability to take that content and convert it into engaging video, right, rather than static text that is far more engaging. The ability to take, you know, your voice and translate it into, you know, 140 different languages, right, and then suddenly you’re on a call and now it feels like you’re actually speaking the language when maybe you can’t. And so there’s just so many ways to increase the ability

 

Will (19:45)

Yeah

 

Brian Jambor (19:52)

ability to connect with your advocates on a call it a human to human level that there weren’t before that really allows you to accelerate you know your one lessons learned but to the way you can go to market with advocates generally.

 

Will (19:57)

Mm-hmm.

 

You know, I mean, I’m fascinated by by this ability to connect as humans and you know, basically the Babel fishes of technology here that we’re in today. But you know, one of the things that’s interesting to me is, know, where do you see technology trying to work today, but not quite making it? Is there anything that you’re like, you you’re you’re excited about, but you’re like, it’s still 12 months out? Or where do you kind of see that that future take us?

 

Brian Jambor (20:35)

I think that in the space that I’m in, everybody’s talking about AI agents, right? And you have hyperscalers globally, they’re talking about AI agents that they’ve rolled out. Of course, ChatGPT rolled out their operator agent. And while I haven’t played with all of them, I’ve played with, let’s say, ChatGPT’s operator agent. And I will tell you, it’s really good.

 

Will (20:41)

Yeah. Right.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (21:02)

But there’s still a ways to go in terms of maybe the ways that people would want to use it to create maybe creative content or the ways that they want to use it to engage with their partners or increase partner advocacy by automating some of the processes they do today. So I think we still have probably 12 to 18 months before the technology increases its fidelity enough to where people are going to say, wow, now I’m suddenly going run my advocacy program.

 

Will (21:10)

Hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (21:31)

maybe I don’t need a team of 50 people, maybe I need a team of 20 people, and I can do it with a team of 20 and use a bunch of agents at a lower cost to get to what I need to at scale. so that day is quickly coming. It’s not here yet, I don’t believe, but I believe that it’s probably gonna come faster than we maybe all realize.

 

Will (21:35)

Right. Right.

 

Interesting. That’s wild. I’m definitely hearing murmurs of groups that are finding ways to do a lot more with a lot less. clearly, AI is a journey for us there. Back again, someone who’s doing this manually, they’re living by spreadsheets, phone calls, whatever it is. What do you think is the piece of tech they need to just jump on right away? What’s the tool that they’re, and obviously you don’t know the details, but like, what are some tools that you’re like, if I was just starting again at a new company, I’d want to make sure that I’ve got this, this, you know, sorted right away.

 

Brian Jambor (22:27)

yeah, I mean if you’re talking about an advocacy program, you need some sort of, I’ll call it system of record or partner relationship management platform, something to manage those partners when you start getting to some scale. Impact, another shameless plug, I’ve known Impact for a long, time. Impact’s a great solution for that. And I’m not just saying that because we’re here, I genuinely have seen it and I’ve seen it be very, very successful, especially at web.com.

 

Will (22:43)

No.

 

Brian Jambor (22:55)

So again, some sort of system of record for partners is certainly critical. Then you start getting into some sort of automation, right? And companies like Zapier or Make are great at that automation, I’ll call it layer, so to speak, and then certainly the AI layer itself, right? And that’s where you can generate a lot of your content. And I mean, I’m biased towards OpenAI’s chat GPT. And I will tell you that…

 

Will (23:07)

Mm-hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (23:26)

If you aren’t using ChatGPT’s Pro version, it’s like $200 a month, right? And I get it, right? I totally get it. Sometimes budgets are tight. But let me tell you, their deep research function in that allows you to just cut through the noise and get to real signal really fast in terms of specific markets, who the major players are.

 

Will (23:31)

It’s.

 

Brian Jambor (23:50)

You know, where there’s overlap in terms of go to market opportunity with advocates in the space. I mean, it’s just the just the quality of output there is significant compared to I’ll call it the, you know, the standard version or the free version. And I would say at some point it’s probably good to invest in those tools. And if you can’t get budget for it, then.

 

Maybe that’s something you, as long as it doesn’t create a security or compliance risk, I’ll highlight that real quick, as long as it doesn’t create a security compliance risk, then maybe that’s something you put on your personal card, right? And there are tools like that that can really, really help.

 

Will (24:22)

Right? Yeah, yeah.

 

I actually just to say that because I’ve been using the research tooling for a few things, even just in my personal life. wow, wow, does that change the game when you’re getting kind of like complex, multiple dependency, outputs, questions coming back at you so you can better refine. Definitely amazing tooling, getting access to amazing data these days there for sure.

 

Brian Jambor (25:01)

yeah.

 

Will (25:03)

Wonderful. Well, know, huge insights here today talking about product market fit, talking about, you know, making sure that we’ve got the correct tools and think about how to go global. You know, if you had to boil it down, you know, here we are almost 20 years of industry experience and, you know, someone’s listening to this thinking, wow, I’m really excited to get going today. What are kind of your key takeaways that you’d want someone to make sure that they’re thinking about whether they’re starting a new program or taking over an existing one today?

 

Brian Jambor (25:33)

Yeah, I would say find a mentor immediately. There are so many people now that have experience doing partnerships and leading advocacy programs. And I will tell you, when I started, that just wasn’t available. There were like a handful of ecosystem programs out there that everybody knew of that were really well. And then you had all these kind of SaaS companies that were trying to figure it out for, they’ll call it general SaaS, not hardware and traditional hardware products. And I’ll tell you, I remember there were like maybe two or three websites out there that spoke to partnerships and ecosystems and how to set up advocacy programs. And that was it. And so you were left to like trying to find that one or two people that were like a distant… Kevin Bacon connection, so to speak, like seventh degree of separation that maybe you could get on the phone and talk to to say, hey, we have like this challenge and have you seen this before? And if so, know, are some things that we should avoid? But there today, there’s so many people that have done it, right? And you can tap into just incredible networks. mean, there’s, know, partnership leaders is a network that I subscribe to that’s really, really great in terms of partnership professionals, but there’s many out there.

 

Will (26:29)

Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

 

Brian Jambor (26:55)

There’s a ton of ecosystem resources for ecosystem leaders. So would say that’s number one. And then two, really lean in to the tools that are out there in terms of AI. And again, I’m super biased in terms of video. I think that video is really engaging, far more than text. And so I would lean into some sort of really engaging medium to increase your ability to connect and engage with your advocates.

 

Same thing with automation, right? You start talking about those automation layers like Zapier, Make, things along those lines. But yeah, I would connect with some sort of advisor or coach that’s in the partnership space that’s maybe been there, done that, connect with a network, and then really lean into AI and start to use AI tools, best-in-class AI tools to accelerate, one, your learnings and two, your ability to execute at scale.

 

Will (27:50)

Wonderful, now that’s probably a great segue into my last question for today, which is how can listeners get ahold of you? How can they find you if they wanna hear more of your thoughts on the industry?

 

Brian Jambor (28:01)

Yeah, absolutely. I’m on LinkedIn. can look me up. Brian Jammer on LinkedIn. Currently at Synthesia. So I’m there. I’m a member of Partnership Leaders. So if you’re in that group, you’ll see me there. And I am on wonderful shows like this. So appreciate you having me on. if anybody wants to connect with me, LinkedIn’s probably the best way to do that.

 

Will (28:20)

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time and your thoughts here today, Brian. I know I learned a bunch. I’m sure our listeners did too. So just thank you very much again.

 

Brian Jambor (28:27)

Well, thanks Will. Appreciate you having me on the advocacy channel. Thank you so much.

 

Will (28:33)

There we go. Wonderful. Thank you. That was great, man.

 

Brian Jambor (28:37)

Well, thank you for that. I appreciate it.

 

Will (28:39)

Yeah.