Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Unlocking Business Potential with Ecosystem-Led Growth: Insights from Bob Moore of Crossbeam

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 371

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Unlock the full potential of your business with ecosystem-led growth strategies, as we explore the transformative power of partnerships and secure data sharing with Bob Moore, the pioneering force behind Crossbeam. Discover how powerful collaborations can elevate both B2B and B2C companies.

In our conversation, Bob Moore takes us on a journey from his early days as a data enthusiast to his groundbreaking work dismantling data silos with Crossbeam. Gain a deeper understanding of how B2B marketing has evolved since the 90s and learn why traditional account mapping methods are no longer sufficient in today's digital age. Bob shares how Crossbeam's platform enables companies to leverage shared data, enhancing decision-making, growth, and collaboration. We'll also examine the rise of ISV partnerships driven by the API economy and the cloud, highlighting how secure, third-party data escrow solutions can offer a competitive edge.

Explore the power of ecosystem-qualified leads (EQLs) and how they can boost customer lifetime value by integrating insights from various partners. Bob and I discuss how shared market intelligence allows smaller businesses to compete with industry giants and the strategic benefits of publishing a book as part of a multi-year marketing plan. Learn how platforms like Crossbeam facilitate data-driven collaborations, showcasing the limitless possibilities for growth in a data-driven world.

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Speaker 1:

Ecosystem-led growth. It is not just a buzzword, it is a game changer, especially for B2B, but it can be as well for B2C companies looking to scale in a data-driven world. What if you could unlock powerful collaborations, ensure secure data sharing and leverage cross-company partnerships to amplify your growth? Today, I sit down with Bob Moore, the visionary behind Crossbeam, to break down the strategies, tools and real-world applications that can transform your business approach, From ecosystem DNA to the innovative concept of ecosystem-qualified leads. We're gonna cover this and a heck of a lot more, so stay tuned to this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schafer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Schafer, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 371 of this podcast. As always, I want to give you my view of the latest news from the blogosphere. I guess one of the interesting points of data that have come out recently is a survey of marketing decision makers. On what areas do they think that they need to improve upon? And some of the answers were, you know, customer acquisition, lead generation, sales conversion, data privacy, et cetera. The number one answer for brands top areas for improvement was actually brand awareness. This, to me, was a shocker because I suppose the type of clients that I work with as a fractional CMO and the clients that I hope to serve in my upcoming book, digital Threads for them, brand awareness is more of a fluff, more of a unmeasurable, easy to just throw a lot of money down the tube and unsure of the potential ROI versus customer acquisition, customer retention, sales conversion, lead generation. So there are many ways to look at marketing. My friends, I do not look at marketing and don't get me wrong, brand awareness is that top of the funnel. It is critical, but there are a lot better ways or objectives. I believe that you can spend marketing budget more efficiently and be able to measure your spend, which for me, being a data-driven, kaizen, pdca marketer, has always been central to what I do and the advice that I give you. Another interesting data point that I'd like to introduce to you that came out over the past week is the annual survey from the podcast host. They interviewed and I know this is gonna be very specific to podcasting, but since this is a podcast and you're listening, I hope that I have your ear they ended up interviewing 511 podcasters or those that planned on launching a podcast soon, and I want to give you this information to not only encourage you if you've been thinking about doing a podcast, but also to give you some specific advice. So, for instance, the number two answer to how long have you been podcasting was 22% have not launched yet, so a quarter of the people interested in podcasting don't have one yet, and then 21%. It's been less than a year, in fact.

Speaker 1:

Me I started this podcast it was originally called Social Business Unplugged. Gone through a few iterations, I'll probably go through a few more. I started this podcast in January of 2013. So I've been podcasting over 10 years. I am only one of the 7% of the people that were surveyed, so it is not too late to get started.

Speaker 1:

Podcasting is the main data point here and, interestingly enough, I always thought podcasting was about interviews. But the most popular format was solo, like every other episode that I do at 29%. Remote interviews, like the one I'm doing today, came in at 26%. So pick your poison. And then I was really happy to see that my current podcast mic, the Shure MV7, costs about $270 on Amazon, but maybe you can steal a Prime Day deal coming up was the number three most popular used mic at 6.3%. The Blue Yeti, which is a $100 mic, actually is the most popular at 16.6%, and the Samsung Q2U was another $100 mic was the second most popular at 8.1%. So it does not have to cost a lot of money to get started as well. In fact, 40% of podcasters say they've owned their mic less than a year, and the most popular, like the one I'm using now, is a USB mic. I literally plug it into my computer, my MacBook Pro, and I use the Apple Free Software GarageBand to record this and then I send it to my editor who edits it. So it does not have to be that complex to begin and record a podcast.

Speaker 1:

And just one more data point here, and if you're interested in the links to any of these, they do appear in my weekly newsletter Make sure you go to neilschafercom slash newsletter and sign up to get the full details and links. But when asked, where do you record your podcast? 58% said record in an ordinary untreated room. Ladies and gentlemen, I am recording this podcast in an ordinary untreated room. I do have carpet right and I do close the doors, which helps, but it is not treated with any special soundproofing. So there you go. I hope that that data gives you the encouragement, the confidence, that if you wanted to start a podcast, you could as well. And if you are podcasting, maybe that gives you some more advice as well. And if you are podcasting, maybe that gives you some more advice as well. Another sort of news for the week is you know, meta in front of our eyes, has sort of launched AI into WhatsApp, instagram, facebook, but there's still a lot of confusion as to actually how to use it within these Meta apps. So there's a great article that came out from readwritecom that actually gave the step by step on how to implement the AI to help improve your user experience in these apps. So once again, go to neilshamfordcom slash newsletter if you're interested in any one of these articles.

Speaker 1:

So for my personal updates. Well, if you are on my list or if you've gone to any of my social profiles or if you've been listening to any one of my podcast episodes recently, you know I'm getting excited for the imminent launch of my Kickstarter for digital threads. I've already received five author proofs from Amazon. I will be unboxing them and live streaming that unboxing and you'll be able to see the archive video. So probably by the time you listen to this, if you go to one of my socials, you should be able to see it there. Excited to well, sort of nervous, because you never know how things are going to look the digital files look when they're printed. But I'm hopeful that there won't be any issues and, if everything goes right, I am literally planning on launching that Kickstarter next week. So if you want to get these early bird specials, where this will be the cheapest that you'll be able to get my book, and you'll get the book before it goes on sale on Amazon, which is tentatively scheduled for October 1st, make sure you sign up for the pre-launch so that you can get informed when I do launch the official Kickstarter and because the early bird specials are going to have an expiration of about 48 hours, so make sure you go to neilschafercom slash Kickstarter to stay up to date.

Speaker 1:

So today I interview Bob Moore. Bob is a pretty incredible data nerd. He has actually founded and scaled three different SaaS companies centered around business intelligence and data nerd. He has actually founded and scaled three different SaaS companies centered around business intelligence and data infrastructure. His first venture maybe some of you have heard of it called RJ Metrics, was actually acquired by Magento, which later became part of Adobe right.

Speaker 1:

Following this, his second company, stitch Data, was acquired by Talend. And now he is on his third iteration of a company called Crossbeam, which is a leader in this new world of ecosystem-led growth, and he's actually the author of a book of the same name which you should check out as well. He has always been about empowering businesses to leverage their own data effectively and in that area I think we aligned a lot, and my background is B2B and obviously this is more applicable to B2B, but I do ask them about the B2C approaches, even within influencer collaborations, if there's a way to leverage data in a third-party protected silo, which is sort of what Crossbeam offers. So I think that this is a conversation that will get you thinking of new ways to partner with other companies, collaborate with other people, but all centered around data, and if it doesn't click yet, I think it will by the end of the episode. So, without any further ado, here is my interview with Bob Moore of Crossbeam.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to your Digital Marketing Coach. This is Neil Schafer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer, and welcome to another live stream edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Partnerships. You have probably thought about them in your marketing there. If you work in a B2B company, you might have this concept of partner marketing. We have affiliate marketing, performance marketing all these terms that we hear of in marketing but if you're in B2B, you might recently have heard of something called ecosystem marketing or ecosystem-led growth.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to turn back the clock before I introduce my guests, because back in the 90s, I sold semiconductors and did biz dev and a little bit of marketing in Japan and in Asia, and this concept of ecosystem was very, very intuitive because we had partners like system integrators that would generate leads for us. Some of them became resellers. We also resold other software vendors. We partnered with non-competitive people in the space, because I was in semiconductors and then, after embedded software and in order to complete a project, there were a lot of other companies that we had to work together with. We could choose to do so directly, with benefit, or indirectly, without benefit. So obviously that was a long time ago, but today that is what we are going to talk about this concept of ecosystem-led growth in marketing.

Speaker 1:

And just a side note, I'm going to introduce you to the co-founder and CEO of a company called Crossbeam, and Bob actually wrote the book literally on ecosystem-led growth, a company that I did not know about until I was actually working as a fractional CMO for a startup that was basically in the same space as Crossbeam, and I realized that they really are the gold standard thought leader in that industry.

Speaker 1:

And just one more note before we proceed forward I'm really excited because Bob wrote a book, a book on ecosystem-led growth, which is what Crossbeam is all about. This is actually a topic that I just last night submitted my speaking topic for for content marketing world to talk about publishing a book as the ultimate content marketing channel. As you know, I am leaning into getting my books published this year for the first time in a while, so I think we have a lot to talk about. Hopefully, I won't take up too much of Bob's time, because I have tons of questions and I think I'm going to be really inspired, as will you. So, without further ado, bob, welcome to the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 3:

Hey, neil, thanks for having me here. Really excited to do it and dig in on this topic.

Speaker 1:

Oh, absolutely, and I think what I talked about hopefully resonated with you, but obviously this is post-COVID 2024. The concept of ecosystem, with all the things we can do digitally, I'm sure, has really changed. So before we get started with that, though, I always like to get the backstory Before Crossbeam how did you get involved in this ecosystem space that you're in today?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, this is actually a great question because a lot of people just assume that maybe I come from the partnerships world, or the personas or the workflows side of what Crossbeam does is the thing that inspired me to start working on this problem. The truth is, I'm actually just a huge data nerd and my background is really deeply rooted in data science, statistics and kind of the applications of data-driven decision-making inside of businesses. So this is my third SaaS company. The first two were both in the business intelligence and data infrastructure spaces. So I had a business called RJ Metrics that was acquired by Magento, which is now part of Adobe, and a company called Stitch Data, which was acquired by Talent.

Speaker 3:

And a consistent theme in those companies was we helped businesses use their own data to make smarter decisions right, get that data in the right places, get it in the hands of the people who can use it the most, and figure out how to invest resources in acquiring more customers or closing the customers better or figuring out the best ways to cultivate better customer relationships over time. But there was one thing thematically in those companies that always bugged me, which was every company, no matter how great their technology was internally, was really just operating inside of a silo of their own data and what their own company could see. And as companies scale and as the market for building technology products and services evolved, it became really clear that any given company's data silo was not the full story and not the full picture. Data silo was not the full story and not the full picture. And even in my own companies, by the time we got to a couple dozen employees, even we started looking for the answers to questions like hey, we've got a technology partner that we very often end up having customers in common with. We'd love to know the answer to how many customers do we have in common and who are they? Or, even better, are my sales reps currently trying to sell into any of the same companies that their sales reps are trying to sell into? Because we knew when that was true, we had higher close rates, the ACVs were higher, the customers were less likely to churn.

Speaker 3:

There were all these reasons pushing us toward a universe where we could sell our product as part of an ecosystem or part of a stack, but there was a missing data layer, because it was very, very difficult to draw the Venn diagram between our data silo and the data silo of a partner company that we work closely with Technology reasons, privacy and security reasons just a whole universe of things working against us. So we ended up doing what just about every other company on the planet does, which is this age old process called account mapping, where we email spreadsheets back and forth between us and the partner company. Those spreadsheets are these very weird quasi redacted sub lists of accounts that we think might be relevant, based on some typically qualitative set of conditions, and you do that maybe once a quarter, more likely every six months or a year, and you get this very kind of makeshift ad hoc swag doing something to use your partner ecosystem to promote growth. And frankly, that process is terrible. Everybody does it but it's terrible. And the real genesis of Crossbeam was after we sold Stitch.

Speaker 3:

I had this moment to take a step back and look at the biggest problems and the biggest opportunities that I encountered in the 15 years before and it felt like if there was a way to solve for this missing data layer, a way to solve the prisoner's dilemma problem of how did two companies answer these questions about where their data intersects without oversharing or without breaking the promises that they've made to their customers.

Speaker 3:

If you could do that, then there could be a really compelling universe of outcomes and new playbooks and new strategies that could be layered on top.

Speaker 3:

So Crosby and Mazar attempt at solving that problem, and we do it basically by offering what amounts to an escrow service for data. We're the secure, independent third-party platform that is trusted by everybody who sits in between companies when they want to collaborate and allows them to connect their systems of record. And then Crossbeam does all the hard stuff it ingests that data, it structures it in a unified, universal data model so it can be compared across companies, no matter what their own internal data looks like. And then it provides this trust and security layer on top that allows every business that's participating to have total, absolute control and auditability over who can see what, when and under what circumstances. And by allowing people to make those controls, you basically unlock a new means by which you can know where and how your ecosystem can help you build pipeline, help you convert deals and contribute to the growth of your business overall, and that set of playbooks is what we call ecosystem-led growth.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha. So let's take a step back. So I'm going to generalize and put things in silo just for the purpose of explaining this in simple terms for the audience that might not be familiar with the terms in the industry. So originally it sounds like the concept you came about from was partner marketing, sales reps, distributors all going after similar customers that we're all trying to gain. How do we map that data together to make it efficient for, obviously, for the partner managers or whoever's in charge of those ecosystem management, to be able to better manage, predict that pipeline, close more business, as well as those individual sales reps or distributors to better understand where they are, what their strengths are, what are the deals that they should go after because maybe their competitors in the same ecosystem are not going after. Does that summarize the general concept, would you say, or am I missing something?

Speaker 3:

Sure, yeah, I would say one of the tricky areas we get into and I talk about this in the book a little bit when it comes to partnerships is that partnerships is such a overloaded term that it has come to include things like you're describing, which is more your classic channel partnership, where you may have distributors, you may have resellers, you may have system integrators, folks that are basically serving as the last mile of sales and service and support when it comes to vendors or product creators bringing their products to market.

Speaker 3:

That's kind of partnerships in like yeah, that's your world, that's partnerships in the classic sense. And then there's also this entire newer wave of partnerships that has emerged since the API economy and kind of the cloud and digital transformation revolution, which is what you would traditionally call ISV partnerships, right, like vendor to vendor or tech provider to tech provider, building these integrations between their products that actually make them kind of a better together solution or something where they can actually co-sell and cross-sell directly via direct sales teams kind of into each other's customer bases. And the reality is that the problem we solve is applicable in both of those worlds. And in the world that you describe, where you've got kind of a distributor model, you're exactly right.

Speaker 3:

Imagine a world where you need to team up with other companies to bring your products to market, to implement those products, to service those products, but you don't have data transparency into who's working with whom until you're so late in the process that you're basically in a completely tactical world. You know. What this does is basically allows people to adjust the aperture of their lens around how and where and at what points they collaborate with outside companies, so that they can be involved earlier on in knowing who to focus on, who to work with, how to position those sales, how to win deals against competitors, et cetera, and basically leveraging that partner ecosystem not just for the implementation details after a sale is made, but actually to be the most prolific source of new leads and differentiation. That exists inside of the way that you sell as a business and that's really at the root of what we try to deliver in that space.

Speaker 1:

Got you. So from an industry perspective, obviously B2B, b2b, saas, but do you have consumer facing brands that also would you consider part of this ecosystem marketing or ecosystem platform that you have?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, there definitely are. I think the thing to keep in mind here is, you know, if you take a step back and just think about the applications of having a secure, independent third party kind of trusted data escrow sitting in between two companies, the B2B use cases are really, really straightforward because you kind of have all this CRM style data right that is universal in its form and function as it relates to how those companies go to market. If you look at it more in the consumer space, there's a whole other universe of applications that show up. But the level of care that tends to get taken around making sure that you're being very, very, very cautious about protecting personally identifiable information and things that kind of exist at the human level rather than existing at the company level. It just kind of changes some of the playbooks. But the cool thing is you know, if you think about what you can do with like Crossbeam in the middle, it's not just sharing data on an individual record basis. There's also a lot from an analytical and statistical perspective. So if you're, for example, a e-commerce company, that's a retailer, and you're trying to figure out if you want to do some kind of cross-promotional list send or you want to have some kind of embedded advertising in the shipments that actually go out to the recipients of partners' products. And you want to figure out, hey, basically, are there ways we can go to market together with folks that sell into our same ideal customer profile but that aren't necessarily competitive with us where we're not competing on wallet share? Historically, a lot of that is kind of for lack of a better phrase like based on vibes, right, like it's a little bit of what's the marketing language, what's the brand language, what's the what we're trying to communicate to what segments in the market, and that stuff works really well. But you get that classic, you know, henry Ford problem, right, it's like half my advertising works and half doesn't. I just don't know which half what.

Speaker 3:

What some of these ELG practices allow you to do is answer questions on an aggregate statistical basis, right, like, look at a set of potential companies where you might embark upon a co-marketing strategy and actually be able to answer the question okay, what percent of our existing customer bases actually do overlap? And when those customers do overlap, are they better customers or worse customers? Are the repeat purchase rates higher? Does it indicate something about, hey, if someone happens to already be using or consuming this other consumer product. It actually increases the likelihood that there'll be a great customer for us and also consume our product. And by and large, you know that the answer tends to be yes. Right, just because it's a bit of a persona identifier in itself that somebody is a consumer, or of multiple, particularly with direct to consumer, like modern kind of digital channel products. So there are that's just one example, right, but being able to do large scale kind of customer studies and customer profiling based on not the individual people but the aggregate groups and cohorts of potential buyers, it can really help you identify where your ideal customer profile is, what buying behaviors out there in the market actually make them better and more loyal to you, and then identify potential partners and other parties that you can do co-marketing strategies with, so that could be done on an individual.

Speaker 1:

So obviously we talk about ecosystem having multiple entities, but just you. Your platform is set for not just data escrow but data analysis. Just uploading your various data to Crossbeam would allow you to perform this type of analytics. Is that a correct assumption?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's right. I mean, you can even in our free tier, right? We offer a pretty generous free tier and you organize your data in these things called populations, and a typical population would be something like a customer list. So you know you can sign up for an account, you can use a CSV or Google Sheets to upload a customer list. You know, use something very straightforward like an email address is a unique identifier, and then you can have trust in the way you set up your data settings that that information actually never makes its way to any of your partners, even if you connect with a bunch of them. You can set your settings to only allow for aggregate statistics, right, and it'll give you kind of at least a baseline.

Speaker 3:

Hey, what's the overlapping portion of this set look like with partner A versus B versus C. So it's a great if you think about kind of a crawl walk run strategy. As you gain different levels of depth and sophistication and kind of rules of engagement with different parties in your partner ecosystem. You can always start out with just the numbers, right, and then drill in with more deep dive use cases from there.

Speaker 1:

I'm thinking because I do a lot of work in influencer marketing. There's a compelling use case of being able to basically source databases that influencers have of their audience, whether it be email address, what have you and then being able to analyze that compared with your own ideal customer profile and use that as a way to analyze who are the right influencers to work with. So it sounds like your platform is very universal in its potential application.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's really true, and while we've kind of done the best in B2B right, we have some 18,000 companies that are largely in B2B that use us today. There's a really enticing universe of applications that exist inside of. I mean, we've seen plenty of B2C applications. We've seen applications in healthcare, applications in gaming, applications in education. The nonprofit world has kind of been increasingly adopting the cross-stream platform, so B2Bs are bread and butter, but you can kind of use your own theater of the mind around how to apply this stuff in any given vertical.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely so. We've sort of tiptoed around this definition of ecosystem-led growth. We've talked a lot about the ecosystems that exist, so how do you define ecosystem-led growth and why is it especially important today?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's really just a set of go-to-market motions that help companies use their partner ecosystems to drive pipeline, convert more deals and grow their existing customer base. We don't think of this as something that's necessarily a function that lives in the partner org and also dies in the partner org. This is a strategy that gets applied at the company level and that has really really big implications primarily in the go-to-market organization. So the idea here is not that ecosystem-led growth is about adding more partners or about growing the ecosystem for the sake of growing the ecosystem. It's this question of if our company's positioned in a way where it's able to participate in or even have its own ecosystem around it, how do we then parlay that presence in the ecosystem into actionable playbooks that we can run as a business, that are going to allow us to grow? And those playbooks, those are ELG playbooks that we can run as a business that are going to allow us to grow. And those playbooks, those are ELG playbooks, and that's really the core.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha and I'm assuming if sort of fast forwarding to where should people go after they listen to this podcast. But I'm assuming that your book Ecosystem-Led Growth actually has information on how companies can build their ELG playbooks. Is that a correct assumption?

Speaker 3:

Totally totally right, you know and this is the funny thing with books, right, because everybody's got 100 books on their shelves that got shipped to them by somebody. I'm looking at it right behind you, right? And I think the thing I love about the way we pulled this book together is that this is not like a marketing brochure, right, you barely see the word crossbeam inside of the first half of the book, and a big part of that the reasoning behind that is because we built this book because of the sheer demand and requests around people getting the specific information in their hands, right, like there is a bit of a revolution going on inside of boardrooms, inside of venture capital firms, inside of CEOs' offices, where the idea of applying and leveraging ecosystem strategies in order to create that next lever of growth for a company is more and more compelling, particularly in the macro environment right now, where cash is king and people are looking for strategies that really stand out and work. So the book was really pulled together to do exactly what you're describing, which is to be this authoritative, extremely actionable, useful source.

Speaker 3:

On what is this ecosystem-led growth stuff? Is it right for my company and when? And then, assuming that the answer is yes, or that we should explore it. What are the actual playbooks and what are some examples of how great companies are applying them? So it's all of the above inside of the book, kind of laid out in that exact order.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha. So I want to hone in a little bit on one thing you just said there, which is how do I know if ecosystem-led growth or ELG is right for my company? We have a lot of people representing a lot of companies, some B2B, some B2C that are listening. So is it something that is universal? But you just got to brainstorm to find the right application. Are there, I suppose, with B2B, if you already have a partner program, it's a no-brainer, but are there certain industries where it may not be the most appropriate? Or are there industries where you might want to avoid it altogether? We'd love to hear your-.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so there are right. I make this joke in the book. My team at Crossbeam is tired of hearing me answer questions in the form of a two by two matrix, but it is kind of like my love language is the two by two matrix, so I answer this one in the book with this two by two right, where there are two dimensions or two inputs to this question of is ELG right? For me right now, inside of my company, one of those dimensions is just overall scale. How large is your business? There is a benefit that comes with scale when it comes to ecosystems, because as you get larger the gravitational pull of your business and any ecosystem activity around it just becomes larger. If you have a larger customer base, if you have more of an ability to execute as a marketer, as a sales operation, et cetera, then the attractiveness of a partnership with you becomes larger and larger and the extent to which prospective partners may bear the brunt of any activation energy that needs to exist for a partnership to happen gets larger and larger. So just the incremental lift to grow and expand gets lower and lower as your scale gets large. So that one dimension is scale, but the other dimension I think is the more interesting one, which is this concept that we describe called ecosystem DNA, right? Like how much is the core value proposition of your business wrapped up in participating in a partner ecosystem of some kind? So a great example of that would be like if you look at my first two companies, right?

Speaker 3:

The first one was called RJ Metrics. We were a software product but we were what you would call a suite solution, like we were a one-stop shop. So if you bought RJ Metrics, it was kind of all you needed. We were an analytics platform but we ingested all the data, we stored it for you, we had the dashboards and the modeling layers for you. We had the interface that you could log into. You didn't really need to integrate it with anything. You just kind of show up and upload your data and it delivers you a value proposition and it's like okay, see you later. It's completely single player mode, completely isolated. It was a very, very low ecosystem DNA company, because our value proposition didn't necessarily get much better or worse when you happened to be using other products as well. Like it was, it was a standalone product.

Speaker 3:

And then there is high ecosystem DNA in my second company, stitch Data, where at Stitch we were basically middleware. So we built these data pipelines that helped you, you know, pull all of your data out of all the SaaS products that you use. We had like 70 or 80 integrations. Out of all the SaaS products that you use, we had like 70 or 80 integrations and then we would deposit that data into a cloud-based data warehouse like Snowflake or Amazon Redshift or Google BigQuery or something like that. It was all partners all day. You literally could not use Stitch unless you were also using at least two other SaaS products, because you needed somewhere to be pulling data from and you needed somewhere to drop the data out into. So there wasn't a single deal that we worked on where there wasn't some kind of better together story, where our value proposition was actually wrapped up in this more complete strategic objective that the customer was trying to achieve through multiple products being stitched together, which is why we call it Stitch.

Speaker 3:

So in that company, our ecosystem DNA was nearly 100% right, and you can think of most modern SaaS companies that build products. Our ecosystem DNA was nearly 100% right, and you can think of most modern SaaS companies that build products. Their ecosystem DNA index is pretty strong because they'll be built on the Salesforce ecosystem or they'll be built on the Shopify ecosystem or particularly in B2B. It's almost a given that if you're in SaaS, in the cloud, in the modern landscape, you've probably got APIs and you're probably hooked into other products and that goes really, really highly. But yeah, if you're in a more traditional kind of legacy business, if you're in you know something that is more classically, you know single point of consumption and value story. It might be a little, a little lower.

Speaker 3:

So then then you bring me to the two by two matrix, right? So you look at the ecosystem DNA on one dimension and you look at scale on the other, and you can kind of do this in like a four box, right? So if you're in that bottom left corner and you have very low ecosystem DNA and you haven't achieved, you know, a material enough scale that people have started to kind of knock on your door and say, hey, how can we figure out how to win together here? This is probably the quadrant where ELG is not right for you right now, and I think we label that as like the weight quadrant. It's, you know, when you then move up to that top left quadrant where your ecosystem DNA is low but you have a large amount of scale.

Speaker 3:

This is a really interesting area for you to go and collect data right At this magnitude. You will have people knocking on your door saying, hey, maybe it's not a product integration, that's a solution here, or maybe there's not a particular avenue for a service to be bolted onto what you do. But there could be some really interesting stuff up funnel right, like we could do some co-marketing or some kind of demand generation or cross-pollinating of our audiences, not necessarily based on this assumption that our products are better together, but based on this assumption that we may be able to reach the same people at a lower incremental cost basis by going out to market together. And you get into all these questions of okay then what partners should I work with and in what ways there and we have a lot of playbooks in the in the book about this and you can use things like Crossbeam to answer those questions in kind of where and how does that Venn diagram overlap in the most promising way with what partners? And there are some really interesting things that start to unlock in that quadrant.

Speaker 3:

Even though your ecosystem DNA might be low, the bottom right quadrant, if you stay with me here, is that your scale would be small, but your ecosystem DNA is very large. There's a lot of companies in here and this is a quadrant where it is invest, invest, invest because you can use ecosystem-led growth techniques. If you are a one-person operation inside of that quadrant, your scale may be very small, but if the value proposition of your product is modified or enhanced by the existence of other offerings whether they are products or services that exist in your market, part of the way you create value for your customers is embedded in how interoperable and the ways your product interoperates with other products and services. Ecosystem-led growth is your way of life, whether you know it or not, and the way that your buyers are buying is probably more impacted by what other technologies and services they have already purchased or procured and consumed than it is by actually the features and functionality of your product itself. How well you click into their technology stack or the way they run their business is going to drive that decision-making process, and ELG is absolutely critical to bring on board. So, even at a small scale, if your ecosystem DNA is high or you aspire for it to be high, this is worth reading and worth looking at.

Speaker 3:

And then the top right quadrant. It's like you know, gas up the jets, pour the rocket fuel on. It's working. You've also achieved scale. This is where you start to see, particularly in later stage, publicly traded companies et cetera, where they have an ecosystem play. If you listen to their earnings calls, if you kind of look at the S1s of IPO companies that have an ecosystem around them. That word ecosystem is very, very prevalent. It's described as a moat, as a differentiator, as an accelerant in growth. It's just absolutely undeniable in modern late stage highly successful technology companies that it's part of their primary playbooks. And ELG is just. You don't have to be told to invest more because it's probably what got you where you are and that's the rocket ship quadrant.

Speaker 1:

So it sounds like in consumer marketing. I guess one thing that CMOs often talk about is the customer experience and that is the ultimate differentiator. But on the other hand, I'm thinking that the ecosystem play is of similar, if not, depending on the company, much greater value, especially in B2B. Do you think that those two work together, compete with each other, very complementary?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of what I just described it's like right down the middle makes perfect sense in B2B, right. So the question is, how does that parlay into the consumer universe? And I would use a really similar paradigm. I would just say that the question of what it means to have ecosystem DNA ends up being kind of a more interesting thought experiment for companies in the consumer space. I used the example earlier of, like direct-to-consumer retailers, like online retailers and particularly ones that are full stack and kind of develop their own products and that universe.

Speaker 3:

I think the question would be if there is not a hard requirement that a consumer uses your product and another product side by side in order for it to get value, the question becomes more of a little bit of a brand question, which is does the use of your product and another product represent something about a certain lifestyle or a certain lifestyle decision that tends to correlate with a customer of a certain profile that makes them more or less attractive? Right, like, if you have a particular demographic or particular profile of buyer that you are going after, you may have a large kind of Gaussian distribution of how well the people that buy your products on any given day actually fall into being right down the middle in that segment, versus people that are just kind of one-off purchasers or that buy it for aspirational reasons but don't really fit in that demographic. And how do you know, right Out of the hundred or thousand people that buy every day, like which ones to invest more, in, which ones to kind of be more aggressive pursuing? How about of the ones that kind of abandoned their shopping carts or never put something in the cart to begin with, like, how do you know what segments to really focus on? This is a really interesting angle to go about narrowing that field and that view of.

Speaker 3:

Okay, this is actually a really promising indicator that if someone has also purchased this other product over here, we know that to be representative of them being very likely to be right down the middle in terms of our you know the lifestyle type that we're going after, and it just provides you with the secondary confirmation within your data set that there's some kind of you know, deeper values level alignment between you and another product that you might potentially co-market with or do some kind of cross promotional product integration with more. Otherwise, try to try to win together, even if it's not a hard physical requirement, like it is in the Stitch example, right that you have to use A in order to use B? Does that make sense?

Speaker 1:

It does, and I'm thinking just to put it in real, simple terms. This is a physical retail store, but Starbucks will sell stuff at the register that aren't necessarily Starbucks branded little snacks. But what snacks should they sell? What is their customer most prefer to buy? What could have the highest profit margin? I think that in an online space, we can think about it the same way. They're in your store. They have an account, they're checking out. What other items can we add to increase that customer lifetime value, whether we produce them or not, is a mindset that probably more and more brands should have, in my honest opinion, and it sounds like your platform can help them make that transition. I think that's really right, right.

Speaker 3:

It's one thing to do a market study and know that you'll sell a certain volume of products or there's a certain appetite or demand that might exist. It's another question to say, okay, well, now there's 20 brands, come to the stores and be upsold and add more things to the cart. Which brand is resonating with that segment? Inside of my universe, that's the kind of question you can answer with the LG.

Speaker 1:

And it's almost like you can become the Costco without having to be the Costco, meaning Costco will often buy third-party brands and then, once they see the sales numbers, they become Kirkland brands and then they OEM them. So but you can do it without having to go through the process, just through that data and a little bit of experimentation, I'm assuming.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it is great. I mean the big box retailers, you know, I think their superpower it's widely known is their data right, like they have so much volume that they have the ability to kind of understand these kind of major trend lines going on inside of markets at large just by the representative sampling of how much economic activity goes on inside their stores. But it's this classic example I gave at the beginning of the call. Right, that's a data silo, and if your data silo happens to be massive, then you may not actually need to run a lot of these ecosystem plays to answer big questions. But what about the other 99.999% of businesses out there? This is a way to basically kind of collaboratively enhance your ability to understand your market in order to be more competitive and more thoughtful about how to go up against some of those bigger players.

Speaker 1:

Right, so you talked about the playbook and without people having read your book, I'm curious if you could provide just a sample for the marketers and everyone else listening that gives them a sense as to what would go into a ELG marketing playbook to generate leads.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'll give you a really straightforward one and this is in the book. We talk about ecosystem led marketing and sales and customer success. We kind of go up and down the go-to-market funnel. But the marketing section I love and I think it's particularly important right now, in this era where post, like you said, post-pandemic, post-interest rates coming back with a vengeance, the ability to generate demand and do it in an economically efficient way is probably more important than ever. So one of the things we introduce in that marketing section is this concept of the ecosystem qualified lead.

Speaker 3:

Right Marketers are very familiar with marketing qualified leads right that typically folks that come through some funnel and have some kind of engagement with your properties. That indicates a likelihood or propensity to buy and if you're in a business with sales reps, they get handed off to sales teams. If you're in a business that is more direct to consumer and has its own funnel, then maybe they have some kind of different experience or prioritization within your product. But at the core, a marketing qualified lead is a really helpful concept because it's basically an indication of intent or likelihood or willingness to buy. That allows you to treat those leads differently. The ecosystem qualified lead is a very, very similar concept. It's an indication of a lead being someone that is more likely or has a higher propensity either to buy or to buy at a higher level or be a higher lifetime value customer. So the difference is, instead of qualifying the lead by doing it lower in the funnel, when they embark on some kind of journey on your website or they engage with some kind of asset of yours, it's actually happening based on the collective knowledge that you can pull in about that lead from everybody else who you've connected with in your ecosystem who's sharing insights about that lead with you. So in the B2B universe, this comes up all the time.

Speaker 3:

Using my Stitch example, right, like if I'm closely partnered with multiple other product companies and I know that when someone uses my product alongside these other products, they tend to be more likely to close, they tend to pay more, they tend to be more loyal. Than being able to kind of cross-reference my leads or my opportunities against the customer sets of those partners of mine allows me to basically run a magnet over the long tail of all the badges I've ever scanned at a trade show or people that have signed up for my email list, and pluck up the ones that are, you know, particularly right now as a result of recent activity, actually more likely to be a hand raiser, more likely to be someone that might potentially buy, and that inherently makes them ecosystem qualified. And that universe is ever changing. Every single day you know new people, make purchases from partners or enter the sales pipelines of partners, and the more partners you can get to provide you with at least kind of high-level insights into how and where that Venn diagram intersects with the people you are trying to sell to or thinking about targeting, then the more you can basically buy these segments.

Speaker 3:

Well, not buy, you can craft through your ecosystem these segments or these lists that are very, very relevant and worth targeting. So in the B2B universe, it's the exact same concept, right? It's this question of if we can identify these partners with whom we know we have an aligned interest and a better together story, or that purchasing or being interested in product A makes you implicitly more interested in product B. The question would then be can we use that to qualify either individual targets or at least segments right, or channels through which you might acquire leads or basically become smarter on the very, very early stage qualification process, to make you more likely to be spending time and energy with those people and accounts that'll convert.

Speaker 1:

Makes a lot of sense. I just wish that we had Crossbeam back in my day, because I could have made a lot more money with my sales bonuses instead of relying on a partner contact with a spreadsheet and their opinion of what I might be interested in rather than based on the data. So great application of data and really kudos on building this great company. So just final question for you what led you to write the book? You mentioned that people were asking about it, but writing a book obviously is a lot of work, and you hooked up with Wiley, which is obviously one of the major publishers. Any backstory to all that?

Speaker 3:

I'll tell you what I have always loved writing. I geek out about it. I've got no shortage of history, writing eBooks and blog posts and other things throughout my entire career. You know, writing eBooks and blog posts and other things throughout my entire career. The difference here is that, frankly, I would have written a book on whatever I was working on at any given time in the last 15 years, right Because of my, like inherent interest in writing. The difference now is that they let me and by they I mean Wiley right, and the publishing industry at large we got a book deal, and you can only get a book deal if you have this independent assessment made by a publisher that there is actually significant material pent up demand for a particular subject matter at a particular point in time.

Speaker 3:

Five years ago, if I had pitched this book, I don't think I would have gotten a book deal.

Speaker 3:

It so happened in my past companies, I think, like we weren't the right company in the right place at the right time to compel an audience to learn from what we had to say about this.

Speaker 3:

But there was a really, really big why now that got Wiley really excited about the prospect of pulling something together here and the validation coming from them in offering us that book deal and that distribution and the ability to actually be printed by a real publishing house. And get real, you can walk into Barnes Noble and pick this thing up on the stores. In May we have airport bookstores. We're going to be in 70 or 80 airports across the United States on shelves there. So like you can't just do that yourself by publishing an ebook, right? So the fact that we were able to kind of tap into this entirely new distribution channel for this message through Wiley made us say, okay, the time and investment in kind of pulling these ideas together and doing a really, really good job of it is justified and we know that it will reach people because Wiley's done the work to know that it will reach people. So that's kind of what pulled it all together.

Speaker 1:

That's fantastic, and I'm just curious and a little bit selfish because, as I mentioned, I'm working on this proposal for content marketing world. But did the concept of content repurposing because it sounds like you are also a content creator like myself that the concept of content repurposing, either in writing the book or once you've written the book, of repurposing those assets and other assets, was that part of the book writing process and did you find some inherent value that you might not have thought of before as you went through the process?

Speaker 3:

Oh, definitely. I mean this book is a small piece in a much broader category creation play that we've been running for multiple years now and we'll continue running for multiple years in the future at Crossbeam. You can almost think of it as like a bow tie type strategy, right when it's content repurposing on the way in and on the way out, because the content of the book itself you know, some of the best stories and anecdotes and quotes and testimonials and things that we source for the book were actually from speakers at our company conferences over the course of the last two or three years who kind of you know some of those talk track themes have been. I'm going to open up my playbooks and share these kind of inside never before seen secrets from within my company from these awesome, awesome people and being able to say to watch those talks and look at the ones that were best reviewed by the crowd and the questions the crowd had in the Q&A as the follow-ups and use that to inform what stories to tell and who to quote. That's where, kind of like the book itself actually is this consolidation of existing content, just kind of repurposed and being able to pull that together and synthesize it in a way that is cohesive and makes sense and add a bunch of new content on top.

Speaker 3:

That's the book process. And then now this thing is the gift that will keep on giving right as a marketer, because we have that core content. We have these stories to tell. There are excerpts that have already shown up on our blog. It gives you this opportunity to frankly have conversations like this the why now on doing a podcast tour and having great conversations like these ones. Having a book that has just come out is a great why now for that and a great motivator. So, yeah, I would view this not as kind of a. The book is not a moment in and of itself. It's kind of a cornerstone of a more comprehensive, multi-year strategy around bringing this stuff out to the market.

Speaker 1:

And you now by default become. You were already the category leader, but having a book out with that name really cements Crossbeam as the category leader, right?

Speaker 3:

So yeah, and I'm inspired by folks like Nick Mehta, who wrote a book literally called Customer Success right. Nick's the CEO of Gainsight, which is the kind of marquee customer success software company, the HubSpot founders who wrote the book Inbound right, which is now it's the name of their conference and it's kind of this iconic thing that's bigger than their own company but where their company is kind of the lion's share owner of the market cap in the inbound space. It's a page right out of those books.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. So, Bob, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything that you want to tell about Crossbeam or about your book that we didn't talk about, and where can people go to learn more about you, your company and your book?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely so. Crossbeamcom is the place to go if you're curious about joining the Crossbeam network. Connectedpartnerscom is the place to go if you're curious about joining the Crossview Network, kind of kicking the tires, seeing how it works, partnering up with other companies to kind of do some of that data analysis I mentioned. I'll mention again we've got a really awesome freemium product right so you can sign up for free, connected Partners for free, upload your data for free. It's really only when you want to add more than a handful of users or operationalize that data in big ways that you enter into our paid tiers. And then on the book itself, you can find it on Amazon, but the comprehensive place to go is robertjmoorecom and there's a big breakdown and some excerpts you can download and other things about the book if you want to learn more.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. We'll put all that in the show notes. Just one final, really, really topical question, and this is not even from a business, but from a content creator perspective. Yeah, content creators often collaborate. I think ecosystem DNA is very high. And if we were all to share our email databases in Crossbeam obviously no one has access to the others, but would we then have the ability to find mutual contacts or be able to generate Facebook pixels of shared audiences? Is that a use case scenario, a potential one, or is it something that companies are already using these days? Just, it came to me at the very end. I thought I'd just ask Totally yeah.

Speaker 3:

So the short answer is anything's possible. We haven't gone deep into the ad tech side of the world with this stuff yet, but the way in which the rule setting works inside of Crossbeam allows, if you had a consortium of people that all wanted to connect with one another, what you could actually do is, on an extremely granular basis, set these rules around who can see what, when and under what circumstances. So for the majority of the other folks out there that you were connected with, you might just say okay, I want to disclose when our lists overlap. At a minimum, you could look out across that universe of content creators and immediately know which other content creators you had the largest overlap in audience with, which could be really interesting and telling in and of itself. And then if from that you identify someone that you potentially want to embark upon a deeper partnership with maybe with that particular party you might turn the dial a little bit and say okay, I am going to see, just in the people that overlap between us, let's share some kind of basic information about in what ways they have engaged.

Speaker 3:

Right, is there a subset of them that is our deepest, most interesting, most engaged customers? For the ones that overlap with that other party. Are they? The more engaged, the higher open rate, the more likely to show up at our events or purchase our downstream products? Or do they look kind of like everybody else that's engaged with us? And that kind of stuff can potentially inform, maybe then going into other platforms and saying, okay, I'm going to use something that's baked into Facebook or LinkedIn or Google to say I actually want to target people that have also visited this domain or search for this set of keywords or things like that. So while we don't directly get involved in the cross-pollination or cross-targeting stuff, it can really help you identify which audiences and behaviors actually correlate to your higher value customer sets and then that can inform your strategies off-platform to target them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's really exciting. I guess only our imagination will limit us. And the era of data escrow love it. So many use cases there. It sounds like ecosystem. It's this classic thing where you develop this technology for one industry or for one concept which is ecosystem that growth, but its applications are potentially really really numerous and it's really just up to your customers to start doing it. So, yeah, yeah, thank you so much. This has been really sort of mind blowing.

Speaker 1:

I hope that everyone listening will go and check out Crossbeam and if you have questions about the platform, reach out to Bob. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. Cool. Thank you, neil. Great to be here. All right, I hope you enjoyed the interview as much as I did.

Speaker 1:

Hey, I mentioned that this podcast has been around for more than 10 years, but I have yet to reach 100 reviews on Apple Podcasts. So I don't mention this all the time, but it is sort of one of my lifelong goals to be able to get to the three digits. It's funny because I heard on another podcast episode of hey when you launch a book, you want to reach out to other podcasters and they either have like below 100 reviews, 100 to 300 or 300 and above, and it's really the 100 to 300, like the nano micro influential podcasters that are the best performing. So for a lot of reasons, I'm trying to get to that 100 review number. So if you have enjoyed this podcast, I'd be honored if you would leave a review and take a screenshot. Let me know. You might just get something free in the mail from me. So that's all I got to say. I'd really appreciate your support.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, if you haven't subscribed yet, I do offer half solo, half interview episodes. Next week will be a solo episode and for the interviews, I have some great ones coming up. I have Dave Kirpin, who is the author of the likable social media books that maybe you've heard of. He's obviously more than just that. I have Nicholas Bruno we're going to be talking about nonprofit social and digital media. Drew Moffitt, john Jantz, the duct tape entrepreneur, andy Lambert from Adobe, dennis Yu, the Facebook ads expert, dan Gingas, the customer experience maker, michelle Garrett. All about PR. Got a lot of very, very special guests coming up. All about PR. Got a lot of very, very special guests coming up. So make sure you hit the subscribe button and I look forward to serving you on the next episode. This is your digital marketing coach, neal Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastnealschaefercom get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and neil shaffercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out neil's digital first group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.