Derek Morgan: Businesses are not looking internally at their existing client base. The networks, the associations, the other vendors outside of the technology industry, the other suppliers, the other trusted advisors to your best clients, they actually have a network of your next best clients.

James Davis: If you act like a supplier, that’s how you’re gonna be treated.

If you act like an advisor you bring, bring value that isn’t just directly what you deliver, you become more and more and more valuable to.

Jeremy Balius: Welcome to Go-to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to-market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode we sit down with B2B Tech and SaaS founders, executives and industry Playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market. Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to-market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program or partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work.

I’m your host, Jeremy Bayless, and today’s theme is Growth Strategy Through Referrals. I’m joined by two guests today in, today’s episode, it’s a first for this series,, Derek Morgan from Referral Marketing Ideas, and James Davis from the TSP Advisory. This is a fantastic conversation going deep into what referral marketing is, how to grow businesses through referrals.

I think it’s a real missed opportunity in the market. I think we can all agree that referrals are a fantastic opportunity to grow your business, but how do you systemize and build process around it? How do we think about referrals in the context of a strategy and how can we build out our networks in order to elicit referrals?

That all gets covered today. Let’s get straight into it.

guys. Derek James, it’s so awesome to have, have you guys on the call. I’m pretty excited. This is a first for the podcast. We’re having a, a group conversation for this episode. Thanks for joining me today, guys.

Derek Morgan: My

pleasure.

James Davis: Thanks. Thanks for having me back. I haven’t been booted off yet, so that’s a good start.

Jeremy Balius: I think, showing that you’re, you’re gonna be a regular on this thing. Hey, let’s jump straight into it. I’ve got, a starting point for us. Derek, this, this is gonna, kick off with you In your view, what’s not working with traditional go to market in this day and age?

Where do we go from here?

Derek Morgan: Yeah, look, I, I think it’s, it’s noise and overwhelm. It’s been noisy and overwhelming from a, a, a content perspective. And, you know, outbound and acquisition of cold net new leads has been a real sort of marketing push for a long time. And I guess ai, which is fantastic. As far as, um, piece of technology’s concerned, it’s actually.

Increase the ability and speed to market for a lot of businesses so they can produce better content, easier. They can get that content out into the marketplace easier. They can repurpose that content easier, and there’s lots more people doing it. So I think the noise in the marketplace is one of the big things that, you know, where people started to mentally filter ads, are they now starting to mentally filter content because it’s overwhelming.

So I think. That’s a bit of a, a, a go-to market challenge that I’m seeing. I’d be keen to see what you guys are seeing in the marketplace around that.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. What do you think, James?

James Davis: I think, uh, back what Derek’s saying that noise, noise is a key contributor to a lot of fos and I think, uh, especially in the technology space.

Um. There’s a, there’s a rush towards getting stuff to market as soon as possible. That whole flip, if you look from a SaaS perspective, the whole, um, a whole sort of thought process now is create something and get it out to market. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Mm-hmm. So there’s actually a lot of rubbish in the market too, so that ev ever increases the noise as well, because all of a sudden everything’s coming at us plus.

Like you said, Derek, ai, that’s, that’s, um, speeding up noise and rubbish. And so what I’m finding in general is a lot of people are shutting off to things completely. They don’t, they don’t want to hear about stuff ’cause they can’t trust the stuff that they’re hearing. They’re hearing a lot, even if they’re interested in it, they’re getting bombarded from all sides and.

If they do dive in, often the, what they’ve been told, what the expectations are set are completely misaligned to what problem they’re trying to solve as a business. And I think there’s a lot to be said around the go to market strategy, around actually understanding the client, the problem’s being solved, then you reduce noise.

I think everyone’s just rushing to just be, be seen and that’s not helping anyone.

Derek Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. How about Jeremy? I mean, from your perspective, I mean, you’re at the coalface and the cutting edge of this. What are, what are you seeing? Yeah,

Jeremy Balius: there’s, I I, I think that the topic of noise, I think is a really interesting one because it, I think it’s really important to be abundantly clear that a lot of it service providers, um.

Uh, solutions partners, as James calls them, as well as, um, SaaS, they’re all targeting the same decision maker or, or a suite of decision makers. A n Z’s not that big. I. You know, there is a very limited supply of opportunity and uh, you have a fierce competition for a limited client base. And I don’t know if that’s well thought out when it comes to go to market strategies.

Um, it’s considered when attaching budget to Google ad campaigns maybe. Uh, but the reality is, is most of these guys aren’t searching for solutions in the first place. And so I think, you know, when you talk about noise, yes, there’s a lot of noise in general. Um, but getting cut through to reach the people that you’re trying to reach.

Is harder than ever. And unlocking that is a, is is a real, uh, game changer I think. How do you get access? How do you get attention?

Derek Morgan: I think that’s a really good question, right. I’ve had a couple of conversations in the IT industry this week in and around that, and one of the conversations that I had with a cyber cybersecurity specialist.

Who consults into other, um, managed service providers as a, a bit of an example, and he does, he’s very active in the networking space. But I said to him like, who is your ideal customer that you are actually going out to? And who is your ideal referral partner that you’re actually looking for when you’re doing this networking?

And typical of most businesses, it’s, well, I can service everybody type. Mentality, and that may be correct, but you can’t market to everybody and you can’t speak to everybody clearly. So when we got down to it, I just said to him, how many, with the capacity that you had this week, how many actual, um, net new clients could you bring on in the next 12 months?

And he went 12. So, well, if you’re only looking for 12 clients, do you need this mass market mass content strategy? Or do you just need to be really focused on one industry and one sector, or one, one vertical? But, and I went, well, they’re easy to find because you need to just look at your top three best clients.

They’re already networked into your next best client and your next best referral partner. So sometimes narrowing your focus and being really hyper-focused is actually your fastest way to growth and scale and speed to market. Um, interested to get your guys’ thoughts on that.

James Davis: I would, uh, I completely agree with that.

Um, what you, what you said before, Jeremy, around especially a NZ, were. We are a limited pool of, um, uh, potential clients in general. It’s, it’s a, there’s only like 1.2 million employing businesses in a NZ and it’s only like two to 3% or above 20 employees. So we’re, we’re talking like 200 odd, um, 20, um, person businesses or more so.

Put that brings things into sort of a stark reality very, very quickly. Um, and I think to lead off what you were just saying, Derek, is that that clarity of who we actually work with, um, who is our ideal, ideal client or ideal partner profile is critical to success. Um, not just from, uh, um. Marketing perspective and a sales perspective, but also from our operational side, how, how are we engaging with clients?

There’s a very big difference between that small and micro business size to that medium sized business, to the mid-market and enterprise and government. Um, and this is where I see a lot of those sort of conflicts happening because people just assume, well, I can do everything for everyone. I’ll just blanket, um, go after it, but all of a sudden, very quickly use, um.

Actually cut off more market than what you think you’re, um, targeting because you, you are using the wrong language. You know what you might do in the mid-market and the language and who you’re targeting in that space. It’s very different to A SMB, um, compared to enterprise. And that’s where I see most people go wrong with.

Just not thinking about who, who they’re targeting and your point around, um, how many can you bring on actually breaking it down to how much revenue do you actually need? How much margin is that? How, how many clients and what your average, um, deal size is really starts to frame up. Actually we don’t need as much as we need.

Uh, think we need to, to really move the needle and hit our targets, especially in the partner land. Most of us aren’t trying to grow to a hundred million dollar companies in a year or two. And the ones that are trying to do it fast, we’ll do it through, um, business acquisition, not client acquisition. Yeah.

It’s a different strategy. Yeah. It’s, it’s, I see where most of the problems are is when the, the vendors start coming into the space is they don’t actually understand the dynamics. They’re the ones that, um, end up kicking a hornet’s nest and causing the problems because they don’t understand the. The market size in our region, um, they, they’ll hear there’s like 3.3 million businesses in a NZ, but then they don’t cut it back like I just did.

There’s only 1.2 million that’s got employees. There’s only X amount, um, above a certain size. They, they sort of muddy the waters very quick because of that lack of understanding as well. And then the noise that, that, that creates, um. And misalignment in, in the space, um, because of it.

Derek Morgan: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Balius: Uh, and Derek, you segued into this, um, a little bit before James, just then, and I just wanted to, uh, push us into the space of Dr.

Thinking about partner driven growth and in what ways is that unlocking an opportunity for tech businesses to cut through all that noise?

Derek Morgan: Really good question. I think sometimes the perception, and it might just be my perception, um, sometimes the perception is that, you know, building those partner relationships takes longer and the process is more difficult and et cetera.

And we need specialized teams. I’ve gone from SaaS startup sales to enterprise. Tech sales back to, um, SaaS, scale up businesses. And basically what I’ve found across the board is our fastest speed to market and speed to new customer acquisition has been through network relationships as opposed to the cold outreach.

Um, so I think that potentially the misconception in the technology space is that partnership programs. Are too complex, they’re too difficult to run. You’ve gotta have dedicated staff. It’s expensive. And, and I think that comes from the big end of town where you’ve, you’ve got these big data strategies and you’ve got dedicated staff and and et cetera.

And I think what the mid-market misses and the small business market misses is that they have really tight relationships with their clients and they can leverage out into referral. Partner networks that are not industry based, right? They, they need to look left and they need to look right rather than the traditional technology referral relationships and done right.

Your, your existing SDRs or business development executives or founders can actually set up referral. Partnership models relatively quickly as a small part of what they’re already doing anyway. So it doesn’t need to be this big complex strategy with this big complex, um, change management process from a sales and marketing perspective.

It’s like I. Hang on. How do we, how do we just have a focus and shine a bit of a light on a partner strategy and then do it as a byproduct or part of what we’re already doing anyway? And I think that’s a big, big missed opportunity. You know, everyone’s, the, the market trains us to be focused on the next trend, Thad scale marketing process, and in focusing predominantly on that.

Businesses then are not looking internally at their existing client base. The networks, the associations, the other vendors outside of the technology industry, the other suppliers, the other trusted advisors to your best clients. They actually have a network of your next best clients. So then it’s a matter of how do you put in place an engagement strategy that adds value to that partner and through that partner too.

Your target client rather than looking at, um, referral lead generation as exactly that, just purely an inbound process that happens because you’re a good business. How do you put a strategy around that so that you can actually drive that process in a way that’s actually predictable, duplicatable, and scalable?

And I think that’s probably the biggest missed opportunity. There’s a huge amount of, of revenue sitting within your existing network and client base. That’s being walked past, chasing, chasing all these scale opportunities. And I often talk about in my past life when I was, um, doing some fractional BDM work, I introduced a technology company to a consulting company.

We sat them around the boardroom. Everyone agreed it was a match made in heaven. But because there wasn’t a clear process and nobody owned. That relationship when I walked away from the table and left those two potential people to partner for two years, nothing happened. When I came back into that technology business as an employee saw in the database, the consultant was there and nothing had happened with ’em.

I went and had two coffees and that business wrote $11.2 million in the next six months. So if you do the math, the previous 24 months where nobody followed up because they didn’t have a focus structure and framework. There’s a $42 million opportunity cost. And I think that opportunity cost, nobody’s looking for it, nobody’s measuring for it.

Therefore, it is invisible. Um, and again, it just comes back to trying to cut down some of the noise and having a focus around some of the strategy that you can put in place with what you’re already doing now to just pull a bigger lever.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s really fascinating in the way that you’re talking about that.

Uh, and, and it gives me a question for James based on what Derek was just talking about. You know, we’re in this space, we’re. We’re so accustomed to talking about partners in channel programs. We’re accustomed to talking about, um, SaaS partner ecosystems where the API might be the connectivity, but listening to what Derek was just talking about, I’d be really interested to hear James, what, in what way are you thinking about partnerships in the context of referrals?

James Davis: There’s a, there’s a few different areas and, um, if I start with the, the partner as the center of the world in the technology industry, uh, it’s ironic because we’re all small business owners and how we built our businesses was based on our friends and family’s referral network. It’s, no one started it by going out there doing a marketing campaign, driving from BDM activity and all of that.

It’s actually just. We jumped out, we started our own business and we already knew some contacts and we got some business and we kept building that way. And then there’s a certain point where we stopped doing that. We stop extent. We basically use up all our, of our friends and family circle, and we don’t continue to be deliberate about building our ecosystem and our network any larger.

We get sucked into the day-to-day operations and then we find any excuse not to do that. Stuff, even though clearly we’ve been good at it, and clearly there’s value in, in doing that. Um, and I think that is sort of the starting piece for a bit of awareness for partners out there. What’s our true success in the past was driven by those, those key relationships and, and talking to people, why, why do we stop?

Um, we are, and to Derek’s point, it’s we default to this. How do we make it scalable? How do we, how do we automate all of this process? You can’t, that’s, that’s not how small business owners purchase and buy. We all know we do it through referrals and asking someone and talking to someone. So why do we go against that?

Um, in the. In, in the, um, sort of the vendor dis side. Um, uh, again, to Terry’s point, um, everyone tries to overcomplicate it. It goes down to trying to be really big data science. And I get, I get why you, you need to do that. You need to control money, but everyone’s too quick to rush towards that. Um, it’s very clear.

Proven track records of people just building a community, getting people involved, meeting the partners where they’re at, and the growth happens. It, uh, I don’t know why, um, people rush so quickly towards needing to get it to an exact science to, to prove whether it’s working or not. I, I think most of the time it shows the overall growth shows by doing that.

Um, we need to be comfortable in the intangible. Yeah. And, and I think the last sort of component, the end client. Because they’re all SMBs. The majority of the market, especially in our part of the world, they’re all SMBs. They’re the same as the partners. They’re just making different decisions. Technology is just one component to their business.

Mm-hmm. And the more that we just realize that, and it’s not their whole world, the more that we can fit in to how they need to make decisions. And that’s where the partners come into play. The end clients are relying on the partners to help them make decisions in their business. Because they’re the expert in that.

Um, in that field, it means that the end clients can make a less, um, uh, have less mental load because they’ve got that sort of advisor, advisor partner there. And I think the more that we just realize how simple that stream is, yeah. So much easier to then just. Whatever part we play in it. How do we go to market?

Well, let’s just, it actually becomes quite, quite straightforward and streamlined. It, it doesn’t need to be as big of a thing, um, as complex as a thing that we procrastinate. Um, and the final thing that, you know, sort of what you are alluding to Jeremy, is the, what it, what’s really evolving is that partner to partner network in the te um, technology space.

You know, in, in the past it’s been MSPs. Have owned their clients and they control that, um, completely and don’t let other people into that environment. The SIS and VARs have played in the mid-market space on their own. As, as technology’s changing, as it’s becoming more broader, as technology is democratized down to the SMB space, there’s a lot more people that need to play a part in delivering solutions to the end clients.

And there’s a lot of friction that’s starting to come because of that, because most of the specialists are used to. Mid-market and enterprise, they don’t understand the SMB space well enough. They don’t understand that a client actually needs only one advisor. They don’t want to have multiple vendors that they have to interact with.

They want to have that one throat to choke. But the positive side, they want that trusted advisor that will bring in the delivery solutions. Um, and the MSPs need to realize. And evolve to becoming those advisors and understand they actually can’t control everything. They don’t need to try and deliver everything, and they can, they can all make more money together by actually working together.

And most importantly, we’re gonna deliver better overall outcomes for our clients. And I think that’s the, that’s the friction that’s really starting. And there’s a really a lack of awareness from all the parties because of their worldviews and they, to start understanding. What this new world looks like by understanding what people bring to the table and what, um, Derek was outlining, everyone actually needs to become better at structuring their part of the process.

In the partnership, the, the advisors need to understand and di and sort of set the terms of how they want their specialist partners to engage so they can deliver to their clients. And the specialists need to really clarify their channel model and their monetization side. So they can more easily go to the other partners and go, this is how we operate.

Does it fit your methodology or not? At the moment, it’s a lot of blind leading the blind, and that’s why nothing happens. That’s exactly what happened with Derek’s partners.

Derek Morgan: Yeah, and I think one of the, one of the key takeaways from that James as well, is you, you’ve gotta have a, you’ve gotta have a partner process and a system and engagement because that then just makes everything smooth and, and the.

The, the partner coming into your world and network has some train tracks to run on, right? So that you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to create, it’s like, this is how we engage, but more importantly, the conversation starts with, this is how we add value to you. And, and value doesn’t necessarily need to be a share of revenue.

It may be, maybe it’s not, maybe value and, and I would suggest the value exchange. Is better and more scalable when it’s not tied to revenue and sharing of leads, right? Because when you’ve got a finite, finite amount of leads coming into your business, you can only divvy them up between partners to a certain extent before you start getting your partners to compete against each other.

So when your value proposition is around IP system, process, or product that you deliver, as opposed to. Leads, cross referral of leads that you generate. Now you’ve got a very scalable partner program. So, and, and thinking about when you’re going into a partner conversation, ’cause this will, this will increase your speed to market of engagement and conversation, whether it’s client or partner level, it’s like leading with value as opposed to looking for the transaction and, and trying to sell something straight up.

So with, with partners. If, if you are leading with value, the conversation happens faster and they actually expose their clients to you quicker, so that speed of that speed of lead picks up. But more importantly, the referrals to the right person needs. Your speed of conversation picks up, and typically they’re in a problem aware situation when you’re getting that referral.

So your sales cycle speeds up, your conversion rate, speed up, and price sensitivity. Because coming back to your point, James, you are introduced as the trusted advisor into a trusted network of suppliers. There’s, there’s less rigor in the negotiation process because the perception of values there and for other psychological reasons that we won’t go into, there’s less margin pressure in, in delivering.

So that I, I think one of the biggest mistakes that. Owners and BDMs make when they’re going out to networking events is they’re looking for their next client when they could actually be looking for their next referral partner and having a chat with the right client, looking for a referral partner takes the pressure off that engagement, that you’re not trying to sell them something and you’re getting exposed into an into that person’s network and you’re starting to build a relationship and a conversation.

The other thing about leading with value in your partner conversations is you’re not going in there with a give me your list mentality, which changes the con conversation, changes the feel of the engagement from partner to partner because you’re leading with value first and the speed of engagement through network is is really quite, quite crazy when you’ve got the right trusted advisors.

To your point, James. The borrowed trust in that first conversation is off the charts. Um, and I got a, just, just as an example, I got a referral to somebody I knew through LinkedIn, um, last Friday. I had the first meeting, that first meeting because I was leading with value into how can I help them in their network.

The result of that first meeting led to an introduction to a CEO of a very large company. By Monday that CEO had booked a meeting in my calendar. By Tuesday, I was having a meeting with that CEO. You can’t get that. You just can’t get that through cold outreach. Now, I’m not saying don’t do cold outreach.

I’m not saying don’t do inbound. Absolutely, it needs to be part of the process, but don’t do it to the exclusion of understanding the value in your network and the people that trust you the most, and that you’ve got the deepest relationships with. It really speeds things up. Um, so yeah, I dunno if I’ve got, yeah.

Jeremy Balius: we all agree that referral introductions are the strongest, right? The trust, uh, has already been built because it’s at. Trusted referral. We know that they make the best clients. We know that they more than likely deliver the best client lifetime value. So we know, I think everyone, including the listeners, understands that referrals are fantastic for business growth.

And we’ve been talking about, you know, removing the transactional nature of, if I. If I control this process by investing X I’m going to get y and we’re kind of blowing that up a little bit. Um, can we drill down into the point of adding value first in order to elicit trust and build your referral network?

What does that mean from a practical standpoint? How should I as a BDM. Think about adding value to a partner without an expectation of return. What does that mean?

Derek Morgan: I think there’s, there’s a number of different ways I, that you can think about this and I don’t wanna sort of run down a deep rabbit warrant, so I’ll try and answer your question without, from my perspective, without getting too carried away.

You know, when you’re talking enterprise sales with 36 month contracts, if you are coming into a relationship, you know, one month into a 36 month contract, you’ve gotta find ways of actually being relevant to that prospect for the next 24 months before they start to go into, you know, their next budgeting and buying cycle.

And then you’ve got to come in over the top of an incumbent. So there’s, there’s a couple of things to think about. It’s like I. Buyers are. Buyers are buyers. So rather than going for the million dollar contract where they’ve already got a contract in place that’s going, you can’t unseat that mid-contract.

What’s the value added products and services that you can bring into that client? That might be a small deal now, but it actually gives you, gives you a better stance because you’re on their books as a. Um, as a provider, right? So what’s that? What’s that complimentary product that you can, um, put into the conversation?

If you don’t have that, it’s then that client has problems or things they’re looking goals or challenge, uh, goals or opportunities They’re looking to unlock in five different areas, being marketing, sales, delivery, operations, and finance. So how do you build a network of trusted advisors around you? So when you are doing that business development conversation, relationship building, you can add value by introducing them to people that can solve a problem that they have right now.

That bang, you become back to James’s point. You become the trusted advisor, not because you sold them anything, but because you solved a problem for them through your network. And I think one of the biggest missed opportunities for a lot of. SMBs, SMEs and particularly, um, managed service providers is they have this really high level of trust as a trusted advisor.

They have this network of clients. They’re out there networking together, but are they actually connecting other suppliers to their clients to solve problems? And are they actually connecting clients up with each other to do business? Then that then takes you far beyond just your average supplier. Your worth to that client goes up significantly.

So, um, one of the things that I’ve always done in that whole business development process is what other problems do these people have right now? And how can I help them through my network, solve that problem and make sure that network is well outside the IT space. Because your clients have far back to your point, the technology’s a fractional piece of their overall operations and their business and it’s may have absolutely nothing to do with their product and go to market.

That’s the bigger piece of their business. That’s where they’ve got more challenges. There’s more opportunities to refer into their and build your partner network with people outside of the technology industry. Then when those partners are referring. You’re not playing in a space where you’re trying to go back to the vendor or the disty to get referrals, right?

It’s coming from a completely different source where there’s less technology noise in the conversation. Um, so I dunno if I answered your question there, but that’s one way of, you know, particularly for example, where in the past where I’ve come up against. Um, technology purchases being pushed back because it wasn’t a budget priority because they had other problems that they needed to solve.

Where they’re focused on how do you bring a trusted partner in that can solve that problem for them so they get that off their plate so then they can focus on, you know, what’s the next thing they need to do in their technology space to move their business forward and get it moved up. The buying timeline, um.

Just some things to think about.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Yeah. A lot to consider there. James, in what way are you thinking about adding value to, uh, your relationships and potential referral partners?

James Davis: The, um, what Derek just said, a lot of pragmatic, um, good ways of, um, engaging with clients and partners to. To unlock value and, and become more valuable as a person.

Like this is a big thing that talking to partners about, uh, elevating up to being actually an advisor. If you act like a supplier, that’s how you’re gonna be treated. If you act like an advisor, you. Bring, bring value that isn’t just directly what you deliver. You become more and more and more valuable to, to, to who you’re engaged with.

Um, and that’s the, that’s the mindset and an approach that I’ve taken for many years. It’s the, um, it is what can I do to help help people, um, before anything else that you actually, pragmatically do you need to change the mindset from that transactional approach into. Basically a curiosity driven approach.

You need to be curious about the person on the other side. If you are just coming in to go, how am I gonna generate revenue? You’re gonna fail every time. You might get some wins, but there’s no, there’s no relationship there. It’s a transaction. Um, and, and so if you are, if you are first sort of interaction with people, is to understand who they, who they are, what they do, what their challenges and opportunities are, then you can actually start to help them.

And you might find that there’s nothing that you can help them with. And you can, you can say, be that up and upfront. Um, and you might not have the answers, but that might trigger something to go find out. Um, but without that curiosity. And that go give a approach in the first place. All of this is a bit, a bit of a moot point.

Um, and I find in, in what I do, uh, like my whole mission is just to elevate the industry. I’ve been trying to build a cohesive ecosystem down in the a NZ region for. Many, many years now. Um, and it’s just been based on trying to put, uh, find the pieces that are out there and then connect the dots between each other.

Um, and what I’ve found over the years, I’m getting better at, um, filtering out who, who I have in my ecosystem. ’cause I’ve built a lot of trust with people. Um, one of the first things I’ve tried and find out is, are they just trying to make money? Is it just a transaction to them? And is that something that I can help change and shift, or is that just how they operate and if they’re transactional, they’re, they’re written off very quickly from how I engage because it means if I put them in front of someone else, that’s how they’re gonna act with them.

And it’s just gonna continue and my reputation will be burnt. Where if I know. I can help someone, I can give something. I don’t expect anything in return because it doesn’t matter to me. It’s what matters is, is it gonna help the partners? Is it gonna help the subject matter experts to grow together? If they have that approach as well, then everyone’s gonna thrive and, and so I think no matter what, you cut it down to whatever structure you put it into, it really comes down to mind the actual mindset and an approach of individuals.

Derek Morgan: Yeah. It’s a really good observation, James, because your mindset changes when you, when you talk there about approach, your mindset changes, your approach, your language, and how people perceive you. Even if you, even if you are using the right language, if you intent is not right, your coming back to your mindset.

People talk about the spidey heads on the back of your neck. You, you have a sense of it. Yeah. I’m hearing the words, but the authenticity doesn’t seem to be there. So back to your point of mindset, particularly in partnerships, I’m gonna sort of pivot this back to partnerships. If you’re going out to a potential partner and all you see is client list written on their forehead when you, when you’re talking to them, and how can I get their clients?

That comes across, right? It comes across and their defenses go up and the conversation doesn’t, um, doesn’t go smoothly. But back to your point, when you’re thinking about value and you’ve got a really collaborative mindset and you’ve got a value driven mindset, your engagement changes. It just changes because your mindset changes.

So, yeah, without getting too woo woo, I can’t sort of. Emphasize that enough. Attitudes, everything.

Jeremy Balius: That’s a, that’s a really good point, and I think that’s a really great opportunity to think about, uh, uh, as we pursue trusted relationships and, uh, our, our adding value in our are providing referrals and introductions and, and receiving them in return.

How does a technology business systemize this? Or how do we think about operationalizing this? And I guess where, where I’m really going for here, Derek, specifically to you, is the bones of why refer It exists in the first place. But could you talk to me about how you’ve developed the means of operationalizing referral networks?

Derek Morgan: Yeah, so I mean, I. We’ve been, we’ve been doing business development through networks and building, um, collaborative relationships for 30 plus years, and it’s something that was never trained into us. It’s something that develops organically. Um, you know, there’s lots of stuff out there about business networking and how to do it properly, but there’s not a lot of information around how to actually use referral marketing as a growth strategy.

So everyone, everyone agrees referred leads are the best leads. Everyone wants more referred leads, but what most business owners don’t do. And this is from top to bottom, right? ’cause I’ve seen this in, in enterprise mid-market and SMB, they don’t take the time to be sit down and be thoughtful about designing a framework, a structure, and a process that is duplicatable and therefore scalable.

Right? It’s most businesses. And the really good businesses get referrals and, and I had a conversation earlier in the week where 70, 70% of our growth, this I’m quoting here, 70% of our growth, new business growth came from referrals. Great. Do you have a system or a process for that or are they happening organically?

They’re happening organically. Okay? So you’ve got no control over that. You’re a good business and therefore your clients are referring to you, which is awesome, right? You’ve gotta be a good business to start with. But then how do you go? What’s happening in this relationship process that’s getting the referrals?

And then how do we reverse engineer that? With a framework, a formula, or a process that we can put our finger on. That’s how we do it. And then once you do that, you can then take, you can train the rest of your team to do it and new mem, new employees to do it. And then you can go, okay, if we do more of X, we’re going to get Y.

Therefore, it’s predictable, therefore it’s scalable. That’s hard to do when you’re only dealing with. Customers and customer referrals. Customers are not typically great referrers and it’s hard to systemize for customers. Partners, on the other hand, you can completely systemize and therefore you can for one of a better description, um, cookie cut and duplicate the process.

So now you can have multiple partner networks and grow those partner networks. When your value’s not tied back to giving them leads, your value, some other form of value that you’re giving to those partners, now you can scale at will subject to the limitations of the market. But now you’ve systemized your business to the point where, well, you wanna level up from SMB to SME.

Will you actually have the business development capability to do that? Now what you’ve gotta do is operationalize it so that you can then level up into that. Um, from SMB to S-M-E-S-M-E to enterprise is a completely different conversation. Wouldn’t even consider speaking to that. But, um, you know, in the S-M-B-S-M-E market, the ability to scale through partnerships is in your control.

Whereas when you’re doing. Fad marketing in the mass market. And again, I’m not saying not to do it. Absolutely you should be looking at it. It’s ’cause it’s another way of scaling if you get that right. But your partnerships is a no, no ad spend way of doing that. So when you’ve got a model that you know works, you bring on another BDM, you give them that model and now you’re growing another partnership base and servicing an an extended partnership base.

Partners give you one to many referrals. When you can systemize it for them and they know why. They have their own reasons for doing it because of the value that you are delivering, you then become part of the referral partners go to market process. Whether it’s their mar part of their marketing process, part of their sales process, or part of their customer success, customer support process, you all of a sudden start to get embedded.

That’s where you get that consistency of engagement, consistency of referrals and scalability.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s really cool. It’s so effective. I’ve been experiencing this final question, James, at your advice and recommendations, what should tech businesses be considering, uh, from your point of view?

James Davis: I need to understand their clients and who their ideal clients are. That’s, that’s, uh, what most technology businesses with their service-based businesses or their SaaS. Don’t actually, they don’t actually know. Um, and can’t articulate that very well apart from some rough app attributes. From, from there, you can start to understand what sort of ecosystem you actually need to build.

Um, who I’m working with medical, what experts around that field, what are the solutions are there. We can actually talk their language, we can get involved. Same with construction. Like you think about the segmentation, the types of clients that we’re working with, types of partners. And then going and talking to our clients and understanding and ask them who, like what other experts do they use, who are, who else are their trusted advisors?

All of a sudden you can start joining the dots and building connections. Um, it’s just being more deliberate, um, rather than floating about and either doing nothing or, or floating about and just sort of chucking money at. Random stuff. It, it really is just getting back to some basic fundamentals and start with the client first.

Or if I’m a SaaS vendor or dity, start with a partner in mind first and understand who they are, how they operate, and then who do they work with with their client base. It’s, it’s. It’s really not rocket science, but we just all keep over complicating this time and time again because we’re trying to chase everything we are.

We’re stuck in the survival, um, instinct mode. We’re making decisions based on survival, growth, not abundance mentality, where even though we might have a smaller market. There’s way more money to be made than what we even think is possible. And so the more that we just focus on we, we are going to do it.

If we’re active and present and we’re working with the right people, we we’re gonna grow. And good businesses prove that time and time again. So I think it’s as simple as that. Jeremy?

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Any final thoughts, Derek, on that?

Derek Morgan: Yeah, just re reinforce what James said, and I know it’s what your business does.

You don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Your ideal customer profile. Pick your top three, to three to five of your best customers. Profile those, and then look at their network, their suppliers, vendors outside of the technology industry because they’re you, potentially your next best partners.

Think about how do you add value? Go and test market with a couple of conversations. Go and ask your potential partner what is valuable to them? What challenges do they have and how can you help solve those? And when you answer that question. The conversation flows, the relationship builds.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, it’s amazing.

It’s a lot, a lot to consider. Uh, we’re gonna have a whole bunch of links in the show notes. Um, I recommend listeners check out, refer It app, uh, download the guides and the checklists available on the website. Um, links will be in the show notes. Um, there’s a lot to consider here. Uh, first Go to Market Playmakers episode as a collaborative group.

Conversation in the can. Thanks guys for, for coming on. This is fantastic.

Derek Morgan: Thanks for creating the space mate. It was, uh, fun.