[00:00:04] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Advocacy Channel, a customer marketing podcast brought to you by impact.com in today's episode, our host, Will Fraser speaks with marketing leader Brian Jamber about the foundations of successful advocacy programs, how to determine organizational readiness, tailor initiatives for different regions, and recognize why advocacy is so important in today's marketing landscape.
Brian has led marketing and partnerships at companies like Synthesia, infusionsoft, Sandoso, and Uberall, where he's seen firsthand how strategic advocacy efforts can drive real growth. From defining product market fit to leveraging emerging AI tools, Brian will share practical insights to help you build or optimize your own advocacy initiatives. Enjoy.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: 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.
[00:01:00] Speaker C: Well, thanks, Will. I appreciate it. I'm equally excited to have a great conversation with you.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, I think this, this is going to be a good one. But before we jump into the topic, I'd love to just get a quick bit of background. You know, let's start with your story. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and. And your journey through marketing to date?
[00:01:19] Speaker C: 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. And really excited about that. And two kids, you know, one in college, one's 13. But in terms of business, I started my career in sales and marketing. I was the GM of so what? You'll see what you won't see on LinkedIn. I was the GM of a marketing agency for five years, and we had at the peak of it, about 17 employees and about 3,000 customers. And we were building custom websites for WordPress, websites for the real estate industry, for brokers and agents, and did that for several years and then got into software 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 with. 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 Yodle 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 with Sendoso, which is known for, you know, marketing and I'll call it creating human to human experiences. Right. Through personalized gifting. Right. So that was a very fun time. I was the first head of partnerships at Sendosa, did that for a while and then I was at Nacelle, 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 Synthesia, which is the leader in AI video. So it's been, it's been quite the journey. For sure.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: That's definitely quite the journey. Definitely a lot of variety there and the ability to see a bunch of different things. I mean, I guess, you know, 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 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 with someone else who's just starting their journey?
[00:03:55] Speaker C: Absolutely. The, the, the first thing that I would say is be hungry, you know, and when I say be hungry, I mean be willing to learn. You know, I, 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 you know, the engineers would go to the engineers and say, hey, we need X feature, X plugin or whatever to sell this to this customer. And what I found was I had a hard time speaking the language with some of our engineers. And so I learned, you know, 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. And so, you know, again, be hungry and be willing to learn new things is probably the number one thing. And then number two it would be stay humble and just realize that it's okay to not know 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.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: Well, I think that was a great podcast. That was some, some great, great to know, but, but a wonderful piece of advice right off the top there. Yeah, that, that's, I think, you know, interesting balance to, to, you know, be hungry and be humble. Right. I think for so many of us, it's so, so hard to keep that balance. But, but I love that advice.
[00:05:28] Speaker C: Well, thanks.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, you know, as we heard in your, your kind of background there, you've had many different roles, right? Whether that's building partnerships at Infus, Doso or Synthesia. Now, you've worked in these companies about various different stages, and I think that's like a really interesting place to dig into. You know, how do you look at a business, you know, looking at their stage, how do you determine if that business is ready to invest in an advocacy program? You know, what kind of milestones are we looking for before we want to get into this kind of thing?
[00:05:59] Speaker C: Yeah, I've, 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, 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. And do they, do they really understand their ideal customer profile? You know, 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. Right. You have some, you know, advocacy, you know, advocacy influencer, or, you know, maybe it be some sort of, you know, publication that you want to be in your program. And you say, okay, here's the resources that we have. Here's the way that you can drive traffic and, you know, called brand awareness to our organization. And if the messaging is off, if the ideal customer profile is off, then when they run those campaigns and they fall flat, then 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 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 organization's 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. Right. And from a revenue standpoint, or maybe not revenue, maybe from a funding standpoint, what 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 a lot of experimentation, it seems like with, you know, ICP and target market and all those things. Right. By series B you're really trying, you really have most of those things kind of honed in for the most part.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's such an interesting way to look at it because I think that a lot of people have looked at this and 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, but I like what kind of what you're talking about is. It almost feels like it's, it's more than just product market fit. It's, it's like even go to market fit. It's, it's understanding that message and who you're going to ask that advocate to go well, advocate to, in that, 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, you know, multi hour debate. But you know, you know, it sounds like, you know, your peers here are kind of consistent messaging, consistent sale motion. Anything else you would look for?
[00:09:08] Speaker C: 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. When we start talking about businesses. Is the problem a big enough problem that you're solving that somebody's willing to pay for you to solve the problem? Right. And a lot of people have great ideas for business, but the way that they 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? Right. And so I would say is the problem big enough and impactful enough and are you solving it in a meaningful enough way that the ROI is very clear and apparent?
[00:09:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. I think one of the things 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, for what you're telling me here, it sounds like you would suggest that's, 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, this idea of word of mouth, of advocacy, of partnerships, but they're, they're either earlier than that kind of Series B stage or they're, they're pre launch. Is there anything they should be looking at or is this kind of like, hey, 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.
[00:10:39] Speaker C: 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 capital stock. But make sure that you build that into your model, your economic model. And so 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 economics then suddenly don't work.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: Right. I love that. I, I would not have necessarily thought about that, but I, that makes so much sense to make sure that we're like, you know, instead of spending the time to build a bunch of integration product partnerships, spend time, just make sure you're building a business that can support this channel. I love that.
[00:11:40] Speaker C: Yeah. Now, 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, you know, and that's, I think that we, we as business people generally, I 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. Right. How we're solving those problems and how much value it's bringing to the customer.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the absolute truth. Right. It's just one of those things where like, you can never, 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, go into like the large and the global kind of programs. Right? So when you were VP of global partnerships at Uberall, you know, you had teams across multiple regions, multiple cultures. You know, how do you kind of tailor these kind of customer marketing and advocacy programs for that diverse range of cultures, languages and needs?
[00:12:46] Speaker C: Yeah, 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, you really have to localize things. You know, your, your partners in, let's say Italy don't want to get, you know, all of your content, all of your enablement, all of your resources in English. They want an Italian. And your partners in Germany, same thing they want in German. And your partner's in, you know, let's say, Japan, Japanese. Right. And. 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 very deep, relationship based. Right. Where other markets are more transactional. And so you and a partner, advocacy partner can maybe have a little bit of a 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 mean, I remember at Uberall we had, you 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 the 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 got to 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 there's just a lot of complexity outside of the make sure all of my Material is in Japanese and you know, it is the, is the documentation in Japanese and is the user interface available for clients in Japanese. Like all, 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 nother ball game completely.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Did you find yourself having to structure programs differently? Like, were there different incentives or different kind of conditions that you found resonated in different markets differently, or were you able to kind of maintain a kind of a global core foundation of a program?
[00:15:37] Speaker C: We, we structure the program differently in apac. So for, for 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 the business gets done in, in the Japanese market, specifically in apac. And so we tailored the program to, to that environment in, I'll say Western Europe and in North America. The programs were near identical. There were small nuances. Right. But generally speaking, they were pretty, pretty identical in terms of the structure of the program.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Did you, I just, 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?
[00:16:27] Speaker C: We, we certainly saw different outcomes based on the region. And a lot of that though, was, 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's, there certainly was a gdp, I'll call it a GDP factor to that depending on where they were located out.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. And 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, any advice on kind of like how you would, you know, step into that, knowing what you know now?
[00:17:11] Speaker C: Yeah, I, 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, 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 hand it off to, you know, somebody in your team to marry, maybe carry it all the way through or maybe they're killing, carrying the full cycle right from, 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 entire, you know, plethora, if you will, of partners in that specific region. But yeah, it goes, it goes back to what I saying earlier. Spend a lot of time with that partner. Spend a lot of time with the customers that they're, you know, 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, we would spend a significant amount of time taking our content and translating it into local languages. Right. And we would use automated tools. You 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. Right. There's other, you know, AI tools that can help you do that at scale. From a video standpoint, I'm a little biased. I work for one. So, you know, shameful plug there. But you know, that's, I think those are some of the things to consider, certainly.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, I think that'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 it'd just be good to just dig in there and see like where are you seeing the state of technology around customer advocacy today and where do you think that's going? And you know, how do we help that? How does that help us deliver on better results?
[00:19:49] Speaker C: Yeah, it's, it's certainly changed dramatically in the last even 12 months. Right. There's, there's so much available now in terms of resources for anybody that wants to spin up an advocacy, you know, channel or ecosystem that there just, there wasn't, you know, even, even 12 months ago. You know, and I think about, you know, 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, 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 to connect with your advocates on, I'll 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 that you can go to market with advocates generally.
[00:20:58] Speaker B: 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 thing that's interesting to me is, you know, where do you see technology trying to work today but not quite making it? Is there anything that you're like, you know, 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?
[00:21:26] Speaker C: I think that, you know, in the space that I'm in, everybody's talking about AI agents, right? And you have, you know, hyperscalers globally. They were talking about AI agents that they've rolled out. You know, of course Chat GPT rolled out their operator agent. And while I haven't played with all of them, I've played with, let's say, chat GPT's operator agent. And I will tell you it's really good. 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 that they do today. So I think, I think we still have probably 12 to 18 months before the technology increases its fidelity enough to where people are going to say, oh wow. Now suddenly, to run my advocacy program, maybe I don't need a team of, you know, 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, right, to, to get to what I need to at scale. And so I, you know, that day is quickly coming. It's not here yet, I don't believe, but I believe that it's probably going to come faster. Than, than we maybe all realize.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Interesting. That's. Yeah, that's wild. I mean, I'm definitely hearing murmurs of groups that are finding ways to, to do a lot more with a lot less.
And I clearly, you know, AI is a, is a journey for us there, you know, back again, you know, someone who's doing this manually, they're living by spreadsheets, phone calls, whatever it is, what do you think is like the piece of tech they need to just jump on right away? Like, what's the tool that they're, you know, and obviously you don't know the details, but like, what are some tools that you're like, hey, 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.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: Oh yeah. I mean, if you're, if you're talking about, you know, an advocacy program, you need some sort of, I'll call it system of record or partner relationship management platform, something to manage, you know, those partners. When you start getting some scale impact, you know, shameless. Do another shameless blog. I've never been back for a long, long time. Impact's a great solution for that. And I'm not just saying that because we're here. I, I genuinely, you know, have seen it and you know, I've seen it be very, very successful,
[email protected], you know, so, you know, 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 right 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 ChatGPT, you know, and, and I will tell you that if you aren't using ChatGPT's pro version, it's, it's like $200 a month, right. And I, 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, and get to real signal really fast in terms of specific markets, who the major players are, you know, where there's overlap in terms of go to market opportunity with advocates in the space. I mean it just the, just the, the quality of output there is significant compared to, I'll call it the, you know, the standard, you know, version or the free version. And you know, I would say in 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, you. As long as it doesn't create a security or compliance risk, and 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. You know, and you know, there are tools like that that can really, really help.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Yeah, it's actually interesting you say that because I've been using that, the, the research tooling for a few things even just in my personal life, and. Wow. Wow. Does that change the game when you're getting, you know, you know, kind of like complex multiple dependency, you know, outputs questions coming back at you so you can like, better refine.
Definitely. Amazing tooling, getting access to amazing data these days there for sure. Oh, yeah, wonderful. Well, you 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?
[00:26:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say find a mentor immediately. There are so many people now that have experience doing partnerships and leaving and leading advocacy programs, and I will tell you, when I started that just wasn't available. There were like a handful of, you know, ecosystem programs out there that everybody knew of that were really, well, you know, and then, you know, I had all these kind of SaaS, companies that were trying to, like, figure it out for, I'll call it general SaaS, not hardware and software, you know, traditional hardware products. And I'll tell you, I, I remember there were like maybe two or three, like, websites out there that spoke to partnerships and ecosystems and, you know, 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, a distant, you know, 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, you know, what are some things that we should avoid?
But there's today, there's so many people that have done it. Right. And you can tap into just incredible networks. I mean there's, you know, Partnership Leaders is a network that I subscribe to that's really, really great in terms of partnership professionals. But there's, there's many out there, right? There's a ton of ecosystem resources for ecosystem leaders. So I would say that's number one and then two, really lean in to the tools that are out there in terms of AI. Right. And I, you know, again, I'm super biased in terms of video. You know, I think that video is really engaging far more than text. And so, you know, I would, I would lean into some sort of really engaging medium to increase your, 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. Right. 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 scale.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Wonderful. Now that's, that's probably a great segue into my last question for today, which is, you know, how can listeners get a hold of you? How can they find you if they want to hear more of your thoughts on the industry?
[00:28:52] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I'm on LinkedIn. You 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 know, you'll see me there. And I, you know, I'm on wonderful shows like this. So I appreciate you having me on, but anybody wants to connect with me, LinkedIn is probably the best way to do that.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: 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.
[00:29:18] Speaker C: Well, thanks Will appreciate you having me on the Advocacy Channel. Thank you so much.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: Thank you for tuning in to another great episode of the Advocacy Channel brought to you by impact.com. join us next time as we bring on more expert guests like Brian.
If you enjoyed the episode, please review rate and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're looking to build powerful referral marketing programs that transform your customers into revenue driving advocates, head over to impact.com to learn more about our platform.
That wraps up another great episode of the Advocacy Channel. We'll see you real soon.
