How a Company Went from Zero Resellers to Resellers Driving 40% of Sales

Speaker 1: 1:00

All right, all right, all right. Welcome to the next episode of the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. We are here today with our guest, kurt, who is a Chief Marketing Officer and he excels in scaling businesses, so we're going to talk a little bit about that today how he has helped companies grow and scale their businesses. He has invented some of the marketing channels that we all use today. Welcome to the show, kurt. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So talk a little bit about, before we jump into your story, just talk a little bit about scaling businesses, because that's exciting, that's always remarkable. That's been sort of your focus, your career focus.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Yeah, it's rare for me to be at a company where we only grow at 5% or 10%, 15%, year-over-year. I've been part of two hyper growth companies and so companies are growing by hundreds of percent year-over-year. So you kind of approach things differently when you're like you look at every part of the business marketing, sales, customer success and you go what would happen if you had 2,000 percent more leads come in right now and after people hyperventilate and realize that's not going to necessarily happen, you start having some healthy conversations.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Yeah, absolutely so. Tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've ever done.

Speaker 2: 2:27

Yeah. So the one that comes out to me was a relatively recently company I worked at called Showcase IDX B2B SaaS company marketing technology in real estate. When I came in they were already a decent sized company. They had thousands of real estate agents using them across 100 plus brokers and teams. Now we actually sold the company twice after I joined, but now about a third of the revenue comes from resellers, but that wasn't always so. So it's kind of maybe two stories in one. The first part was as a marketer. I think interesting for your thing is as a marketer. I find so often we're talking to everybody else but we don't do a lot of our own marketing and speaking as well, and so I had not intended to be looking for a job then. I was making just I mean kush money consulting and being fractional CMO. And my friend Pat Romelletti points out look, you may have a corporate gig, you may be wonderful, whatever you're doing, but we all work in a gig economy. That could change tomorrow. And I always stewarded a part of my time just net weaving with other people, taking some time having a conversation to see if you might be able to help somebody, and I had a fraternity brother I connected to on LinkedIn years before and never met in person, that reached out to me and said hey, I heard you talk to your wife and letting you take take 18 months off on a sabbatical after you exited one of your companies. I sold one of my companies. I want to have that conversation. That seems difficult, can we chat? And in that conversation he told me about the second company he'd found in years before which was doing quite well showcase, that had superb technology, had. It was that three large competitors, two of them were significantly larger, owned by private equity groups and I'm talking the company. Their competitors were 20, 20 X to 50 X the size of showcase, and the third one still bigger, but they have really had just a different, different pricing model, which is where they segmented themselves. But this company had way better technology. But he's like we just they can't sell, they just can't find the messaging to go and connect. And I'm like, well, that's the easy part of there. So he's like, well, will you take some time to chat with them? So I meet with their, with their, their CEO? And he's like, no, look, he was like I can give you case study after case study. Our customers get two orders of magnitude better results than our competitors. I'm like, well, I don't understand why I can't sell that. And he's like, well, they all work with partners and resellers. And he was like, look, when I go look at their sales, and he was like they may have, you know, they may have 50% of their sales come directly from a reseller, but another 25, 30% of their sales there's a reseller doing service work, even if the client sold directly. I was like, well, okay, go get more of them. And he's like I don't know how. Which is a good place to be in, I think, from a marketers is when you have a CEO and founder who's like look, our technology is better, but I'm now realizing what I don't know. So I ended up so we, you know talking with him. I'm like, well, this is actually my sweet spot middle market, b2b companies. There's that muscle memory mentioned scaling. There's a muscle memory that happens when you've done that. And I started asking questions and all the things from a B2B marketing perspective that helps with scaling and real growth they had none of. So do you have repeatable processes? Zero. Do you have dashboards? Zero. Do you have OKRs Like does everybody in the company actually understand what the company's trying to get from an outcome perspective and how their roles fall into that. No, do you have playbooks from others that have shared with you about what you should be following? He's like no. Like well, would you like to build those? And he's like well, that sounds helpful. But I want to grow and I was like if we can build those, we will grow, and I have a lot of those we can come with. So in the first 60 days I completely repositioned the company, had conversations with like 100 plus of their clients to ask them what they thought it was not actually what the CEO and the company was selling was much of their success, did case studies, a lot of video recording with them and really focused on helping the company overcome the trust barrier, which could be interesting to talk about, because that was the real thing that was holding back All of these larger resellers was they thought that the company was better, but so often people don't make a decision based on what could be. Forrester had a report that came out last year that said, in the B2B space, 43% of buyers say that at least 70% of the time they make a defensive purchase decision, so they believe that there's a better solution than what they're going to pick. But 70% of the time that 43% says, but I'm going to choose the one that I know is going to at least help me grow. 5%, 10%, 15%.

Speaker 1: 7:33

Right. So what was the barrier? The trust barrier that had to be overcome.

Speaker 2: 7:40

A lot of it. So some of it was size, because the two competitors were so much larger. That was just the default so many of the resellers had. They were like look, we've sold, in this case, the technology. It brought the Zillow listings, the individual listings that it's actually very complicated to do but onto individual brokerage or real estate agents' website, so all the listings in Atlanta, georgia or Orlando onto that agent's website. So these were agencies that were building, that had built 200 or 500 websites for real estate agents and still had on a monthly basis contracts with them over the previous couple of years. And they're like we've never done one with you, like. And so some of it was that. But the company just was it. While they would say the technology was better, they didn't have anybody on camera, kind of walking it through. And so very quickly I found one of their showcases customers, Patrick Higgins. As a marketer I did not know there was a Dot Guru domain name, but he's Nashville home Dot Guru. I mean not where I would build a website, but that website. When I started reaching out to people, patrick was one of the people that shared what he was doing. I said will you give me a testimony with some numbers, cause I know what your numbers are, but I'll never share your numbers. So he gave the review that actually helped unlock so many of these resellers. He was willing to gloat about himself and so I made him one of those Lighthouse customers and his response was look, I've been in marketing, for I've been in real estate for a number of years, me and three other real estate agents, so not even marketers. We started, we changed the showcase, we had a little bit of success, but we've now we went from moderate success to getting more than 50,000 organic visitors from Google on a month over month basis using showcase. Well, you start doing the math and go well, 50,000, and they're Nashville, hence the domain Nashville home Dot Guru. 50,000 organic visitors, even with a 5% conversion rate in Nashville, means that they're by far the top performing website in the state, and that was the number that he gave. And so I was able to go back and start talking one-on-one conversations with resellers and partners and say here's what their response is getting. Do you get anywhere near those results? Cause I knew the answer is always no, the competitors you just couldn't rank on Google for for anything.

Speaker 1: 10:03

So the key was bringing the voice of the customer into the marketing to prove that the technology was better, that solved the barrier issue right.

Speaker 2: 10:15

To prove the technology was better. And then, from a marketing kind of success perspective, once we overcame that part of the trust basis, I was able to bring concerns about trust with the competitors. So I knew the results, the competitors, technology worked in iframes or subdomains. We all know as a market or anytime something there's a click through to something else, even a subdomain you're gonna get a pretty good drop off. So I started asking those resellers now that even where you were selling people, do you know what their drop off in customers are? Even if they spend 10 grand a month on ads and they get all those visitors, how many people are actually using that search site versus going to Zillow? Cause real estate's different than a lot of markets. If you're a real estate agent and your clients are going to send you listings from Zillow, that's the only market you really know that a competitive agent will always be calling your client. There's nowhere else in marketing where I really know it's like, hey, you have leads that you've generated wonderful leads, but you know a competitive lawyer or SaaS product is always gonna be calling them. But if your clients are in Zillow, in real estate that's the case. So I started asking the resellers that and sometimes they knew and so I started to let them know. I said, well, we're starting a consumer campaign to start letting, or an agent campaign to start letting them know that, what happened, what the job rate, the churn rate, the leaky bucket from the funnel is using the competitors. Do you wanna sign up for some of that? You can at least say you're using us and we're a solution, yes or no? So we actually flipped it to kind of cause trust issues on the other side.

Speaker 1: 11:50

So, beyond bringing the voice of the customer in it, you use the voice of the customers to unlock the reseller channel. And what was the impact? When they weren't working with resellers at all? And you unlocked this by bringing the voice of the customer into it and convincing the resellers to sign up with the company. What was the impact of having a reseller channel for the company over time?

Speaker 2: 12:16

So sales ended up going from a fraction of a, maybe even one, maybe 1% of the total company sales coming from resellers to over 40% coming from. So just pure organic growth, 40% of coming revenues coming very quickly just from the reseller channel, which is huge. And then we were able to unlock a large number of additional resellers because the technology was easier to use once we had real resellers that were typically focused on that we went to and did very similar to the HubSop program and we went to other reseller, other website designers that focused on other industries that usually shot away from real estate because it was difficult to work with or they thought agents were difficult to work with because then we had, say, 10 very successful agencies working with us. We could point out, hey, if you're really good in these other areas real estate's been hard we can give you a technology that makes it super simple for you to get set up and unlock a new vertical for you. And so then we were able to grow and more resellers that way.

Speaker 1: 13:20

That's a massive impact that you're able to make resellers 40% of the mix. I've worked for a lot of companies that were all direct, like 100% direct, and they had a very similar dynamic to the CEO that you mentioned, which was just that they didn't know how to go after the reseller channel. So it's pretty remarkable that you were able to figure that out and solve it for them, because that's a huge impact in the business. Let me ask you what was hard about doing that.

Speaker 2: 13:58

The initial, I'd say, the two parts, the two things that were hard was one just getting the first couple major resellers to come on board, because people are a lot of times small industry in terms of people that are just focused on doing marketing for real estate agents. Even though there's a lot of real estate agents and so everybody wanted to see, but is this one, two or three using it? And even though we weren't the line share of their business at first, just being able to actually say, hey, this company is actually working with us now here's some example sites. That was probably the hardest. The next piece was actually because resellers as I said, it was unlocking the resellers that were tightly in real estate. The second part was unlocking resellers from website designers and marketers in other industries and convincing them to come to real estate Like, hey, we can help you print money. That was actually the hardest part there was finding the messaging that worked with them. We failed a number of times going to them with the features, the values, how simple it was to work with our solution and really what worked was direct email campaigns, cold campaigns, but highly personal that said hey, eric, I see you don't work with real estate. You make a ton of money here, here and here. Would you like to make seven figures in the next year in real estate? I can show you how to do that simply, and people take a 15 minute phone conversation for that. Just for the gumption of you to be able to send an email that says you could bring me a million dollars in revenue next year. I'm like I could. Whether or not you'll reach it or not, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 15:34

I'm like interesting, audacious tactic and it works right.

Speaker 2: 15:40

It unlocked the conversations because I helped build some of the marketing channels we all use every day. We're able to talk to marketers in a different way than a lot of people were. But yeah, that first audacious reach out. Some people I mean some people literally just reply back and said I don't believe you, but I'll take the call, just because.

Speaker 1: 15:59

Just because I love it. So you have a resource. If people want to learn more about this that I can link to in the show notes. That's right. Can you share what that resource is?

Speaker 2: 16:12

Yeah, so the resource is a guide on net weaving versus networking. As I mentioned, the stories we talked about happened because I wasn't looking for another job and find so often networking people shy away from it. It feels self-serving and net weaving is basically walks through how to take it from a servant leadership approach and really become a trusted resource to your network so that people will reach out to you and open doors for you in ways that they just want in other ways Free resource and will guide you through that.

Speaker 1: 16:41

Awesome. Well, if you liked Kurt's story here today about a company that had no resellers and no reseller channel and making that into 40% of their mix, share this episode and story with your friends. Please rate, review and subscribe this so we can keep bringing on great guests like Kurt Kurt. Thanks so much for your time today. We appreciate it. Thank you for sharing these insights with everyone.

Speaker 2: 17:08

Thank you.