CMOs, What's Not Driving 28% of Your Revenue?

CMOs, What’s Not Driving 28% of Your Revenue?

Introducing Cristy Garcia, the CMO of impact.com and a Chief and Forbes Communication Council member. With almost 20 years of experience in B2B tech marketing, she leads a team of 60 marketers at Impact.com and is a strong advocate for the power of partnerships and influencer marketing.

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In this episode, Cristy talks about the rising importance of influencer and partner marketing. She discusses how mature partnership programs drive up to 28% of revenue (23% on average), as found in a joint study between Impact.com and Forrester. This is the main reason why this channel is becoming increasingly critical for B2B marketers and one that you only pay for when revenue is realized. Cristy shares examples of successful B2B influencer and partner marketing campaigns, including HubSpot and Zenefits. She emphasizes the importance of content in educating and engaging B2B buyers and reaching them at all stages of the buyer’s journey.

Cristy Garcia, CMO at Impact.com – Follow Cristy on LinkedIn

“Partnerships can be both focused on brand and demand. But what’s great about partnerships and influencer marketing is that you’re only paying for the desired revenue outcome.” – Cristy Garcia

Cristy provides a different perspective on assessing acquisition costs as categorized primarily into brand and demand, with partnerships and influencer marketing falling into both categories. What separates partnerships and influencer marketing is that payment is based solely on achieving the desired outcomes. This contrasts with the uncertainty of allocating a large budget to ads without guaranteed performance. Instead, funds can be channeled towards commissions for partners who generate sales or website traffic, facilitate lead generation, or provide exposure through panels and conferences. These partnership models are gaining in popularity due to their direct ROI.

Topics Covered:

Referral-based vs. transactional partnerships
How HubSpot got a 50% lift from partnerships
Befriend your CFO with low-risk revenue generation
Growing lead volume through partnerships
The role of partnerships through the entire sales funnel
Content to educate the 97% TAM not currently in-market
Why you need more B2C in your B2B
Why you must have a third channel: traditional sales and marketing alone is not enough

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube. To watch the 4-Minute summary video, CLICK HERE.

Introduction to Cristy Garcia

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the B2B Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. And we have a very surprising conversation that we’re going to have today in a very wonderful, wonderful way. And what we have here today is an expert, Cristy Garcia. Cristy is the CMO of Impact.com.

You’re a member of Chief, you’re on the Forbes Communication Council. So you’ve got a lot of expertise in your background, but we’re going to talk about influencer and partner marketing in a way that we really haven’t been talking about lately, right? Although it’s been in the marketing playbook for decades.

Why should we be talking about it now? Why is it rising in importance? And Cristy’s got some really good insights on that. But maybe Cristy, start us off with just a bit more about your background and what you’re doing, and then we’ll dig into things.

Cristy Garcia: Sure. Hi, thank you so much for having me on the show, Steve.

This is such an honor. And it’s been really fun chatting with you. So, my name’s Cristy. I am a B2B marketer. I’ve been doing B2B tech for almost 20 years now. And so, I feel like I fully understand the B2B technology ecosystem and landscape at this point in my career at Impact.com. I lead a team of about 60 marketers, an exceptional team that has been with us for three-plus years.

We grew the team from 6 to 60, and I’m really proud of that. And, of course, I’m a huge advocate of Impact.com.

Steve MacDonald: That’s quite a bit of growth. 6 to 60 globally. That could be a podcast in itself, right?

Cristy Garcia: Yes. Yes. It took a couple of years, but it seemed like very fast growth for the company in general.

Referral-based vs. transactional partnerships

Steve MacDonald: Well, that probably underscores the reason why we’re talking about influencer marketing here today. Your growth is an example of the opportunity that is available to all of us. Maybe kind of take us back a little bit to influencer partner marketing 101 and just give us your point of view on it, what it is.

Cristy Garcia: Sure. And I think it’s a good thing to clarify because partnerships can mean a lot of different things. So when we’re talking about partnerships, we’re referring to referral-based partnerships, not transactional partnerships. Like a Dell computer could be sold in a computer specialty store.

That would be an example of a transactional referral partnership, or what everyone sees every day when they go online. Anytime an influencer is talking about what they just bought, and they’re showing it off. Anytime you’re reading a list of the top 10 gifts to buy a new mom. Anytime you’re looking for discounts and coupons.

Those are all partners of the brand who you’re searching for. And so partnerships and the reason that this model is super attractive, especially right now, because you did ask the question, why now, right? Partnerships have been around forever. In fact, I’d say it’s probably the first marketing channel ever created was recommendations and referrals from word of mouth.

So the reason partnerships are so important and interesting right now is because every marketer or head of marketing that I know of is trying to do more with less.

And when you are looking at your acquisition costs, you’re bucketing it into primarily brand and demand. Partnerships can be both, and influencer marketing can be both. But what’s great about partnerships and influencer marketing my company does is that you’re only paying for the desired outcome.

So instead of spending a million dollars on Google this month or Google ads, not knowing the performance, you could be spending that only on commissions out to partners who have sold for you or who have sent traffic to your website to fill out a lead form, or basically introduced you at a panel or on at a conference.

So these are the types of partnerships that we’re referring to. And that’s one of the reasons they’re becoming so increasingly important right now in every marketer’s playbook. It’s because of the cost structure of it and the fact that the modern consumer has tuned ads out. We know that they are looking for recommendations.

Nine out of 10 consumers search for reviews before buying things, including B2B. So you need to be where they are researching. They are going to their favorite publications. They’re talking to their favorite influencers or seeing what their influencers are saying. They are talking to their community and their networks. And so you want to be all of those places where they are looking. Otherwise, there’s no chance they will find your brand, and advertising will not get you there anymore. So it’s partnerships all the way.

Steve MacDonald: So, a couple of things that are interesting out of that is in today’s B2B CMO world, all focused on revenue, right?

It’s not about I just generate MQLs and then sales they take over. It’s all about deep pipeline penetration and attributing marketing activities directly to revenue and growth of the business. And so what you just said there was that this is a very different model. It’s similar in one way, very different in another, very different in that kind of a pay-as-you-go, right?

You pay for performance similar to that. We all want to build brands where we are our own experts and influencers, and we tried to do that, but it’s always important to have others that are validating what we do as a business, what we’re saying, our point of view, and we get rub off on that. Our brand and their expertise gets shared onto ours.

And that’s very similar to what you’re talking about right here, right?

Cristy Garcia: And it’s a win-win. When one party wins, the other party wins. And so you can really multiply the value that your company brings by partnering with other companies or with some of these influencers’ worlds.

How HubSpot got a 50% lift from partnerships

Steve MacDonald: Well, maybe give us some examples because we can all understand that if I’m selling purses and Kim Kardashian is photographed with my purse, that’s going to be pretty beneficial to my company, right? But if you could give us maybe kind of more of a core B2B client that you have in maybe kind of a case study on what they did with the influencer partner marketing.

Cristy Garcia: Sure. So a good example of that would be HubSpot. Everyone knows who HubSpot is. They are definitely the leader in inbound marketing, but they were looking to us to grow their paid subscriber base. So they joined as a customer, and they went into our marketplace, and they were able to see all the different types of partners that would be relevant for them.

We also have an AI component that gives recommendations based on who they are, what we think their partner mix would look like, and who those recommended partners are. But HubSpot already knew. They already had an idea in their mind. They knew that they needed to reach their influencers.

Those people were the SaaS reviewers who provide in-depth reviews of business solutions. So you find a lot of that on YouTube and LinkedIn, just content creators who share business knowledge through blogs, videos, and podcasts. So, Steve, you would be one of their partners.

So these are people who provide online courses or other informative material for business professionals. And then, they were looking for other businesses that would potentially have a product integration with their business. So they found these partners. And as a result of this, these partners started driving traffic to HubSpot’s whatever the call to action was, which was paid subscribers.

So they got a 50% lift just from working with these types of partners. And what we see on average is companies that work on our platform that have a mature partnership program, they’re seeing up to 28% of their company revenue, not marketing-sourced revenue, total company revenue coming from this channel, which is more than paid search.

It’s more than display and paid search together. This is the best-performing channel for those businesses.

Befriend your CFO with low-risk revenue generation

Steve MacDonald: And you actually did a study with Forrester, right?

Cristy Garcia: That’s right.

Steve MacDonald: And what were the results of that study?

Cristy Garcia: It was the 28%, and companies were growing. It’s a growing channel.

It was growing 50% year over year for a lot of companies. The good thing about working in partnerships that we haven’t talked about is that you can find partners at all different stages of the funnel. So it can be a full-funnel strategy. It’s not just the bottom of the funnel.

A coupon or discount, it introduces new partnerships, introduces new products. They take the audience from awareness all the way down to conversion in a lot of cases. So you want different types of partners who can reach different parts of the funnel. And you do that through trial and error and working with a platform that has done it several times.

Steve MacDonald: So a quarter of your revenue could come from these partner relationships. Where there’s very low risk, tell me a little bit as a CMO, and how does that affect the relationship with your CFO?

Cristy Garcia: Oh, they love it. So this will make you best friends with your CFO. You can tell him, oh, you don’t have to worry. I know for a fact I will provide a return on investment on this investment because I’m only paying once an action has been completed. And so those commission rates could be anything from a percent of the product cost, or it could be a flat rate of 10%, 20%, or maybe you’re looking for partners that can send in new customers only, and so you’re paying them only on new customers, not returning customers. So there are a lot of different ways to structure it to meet your business objectives.

Steve MacDonald: So, I’d love to have one more example if you have it. The HubSpot one was great, but give us a little bit more flavor. Maybe you have another B2B example that you could kind of pull out to give us a little bit more of a granular look of like in application. What does this look like?

Growing lead volume through partnerships

Cristy Garcia: Sure. Yeah. Another company that comes to mind is Zenefits. So Zenefits is HR and payroll software. So the biz dev team at Zenefits was taking a super good approach on how to reach out to partners. So we kind of consider it to be its own channel, the same way that you have a dedicated team around sales and marketing. Our recommendation is to have this team around partnerships, which they did.

So they were reaching out and building strong relationships with other businesses. People like me talked about consultants, agencies, and publishers. So because of those types of relationships that they were able to find and nurture on our platform, their lead volume grew 96%. So people are using this channel to drive leads, not just actions in some cases.

Steve MacDonald: And how does this compare when you’ve done, I don’t know if there’s an example there or not, but comparisons of ROI to, say, paid search or things like that? Do you have any numbers on that?

Cristy Garcia: Yeah, so for Zenefits, their return on ad spend was three times higher than what they typically spend on paid search. So, that was one example. But yeah, paid searches are roughly between, I think, usually 10 or 15% of the total. And it’s a two-to-one return on ad spend on average. So it’s not hard for partnerships to beat those numbers, especially when you’re working with a big set of diverse partnerships.

Steve MacDonald: So I can understand your clients, they’re coming to you, and they’re loving the lead gen, the revenue benefits of this. But you and I were talking before, and we’re both big believers in brand, equity in the brand, expertise, and being that leader in the marketplace, taking on that trusted advisory role.

What do you hear from your clients or from the studies that you’ve done? You can think very much of bottom-line impact, but you mentioned before that this can hit all levels of the buyer’s journey, right? Tell us a little bit more about that.

The role of partnerships through the entire sales funnel

Cristy Garcia: Sure. So, I think influencers are great examples. I think you mentioned it that when people think of influencers, they think of top-of-funnel awareness, right? Like, I’m learning about a new fashion brand or buying a new blow dryer because there’s been this review on the best blow dryers, right?

In the influencer example, people typically work with influencers and don’t expect sales. And influencers, in a lot of cases, don’t want to be salespeople. They want to be introducing products and content to their audience, not selling it, which I respect. That’s how they built their audience. And so they have to be very careful walking that line.

But a lot of creators are using links to say here, check out these software products that I just reviewed in my bio. Or click here to buy what I’m showing you. So those are how partnerships can become very bottom of the funnel, and it could be a direct line of direct path acquisition. And that’s how the majority of our clients are using our business.

Steve MacDonald: It’s intriguing because not all marketing tactics play so well across the funnel, right?

Real bottom line impact while you’re also impacting your brand awareness. You’re being introduced, you’re getting a rub-off effect from the expertise and the influence of the partners that you’re with. And you can, it sounds like you’ve got a very, very robust community, right? Where HubSpot can go in there and say, this is very, very specifically who I want. And sometimes these people have their community, the influencers can be very, very niche, right? And that can be a very big benefit.

Now I want to take it kind of and pull it out just a little bit. Because influencers and partners are known for their content, right? Their connection, their relationship with their communities. As a B2B CMO yourself, what is your perspective on content overall? And I’m going to start it out by having you actually give me a rating.

Content to educate the 97% TAM not currently in-market

Steve MacDonald: When you think about Impact.com, and you’re a B2B company, in terms of the overall importance of content to the growth and the success of the company, if you had to rate that on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 is not important at all, 10 it’s vital. How would you rate it and why?

Cristy Garcia: I would rate it an 11. It’s so critical to everything we do. Our content team we have a machine, but it’s not just pumping out sales content. It’s real thought leadership, helpful content. And so every demand gen campaign that we run is circled around a piece of content.

We’ve found that most people are just interested in learning about partnerships. They’re not in the market, and that’s great because we want to educate people about the channel. That’s why we’re here. It doesn’t have to be necessarily with us, but this is a channel that most can lean into.

Content is critical and partnerships. There are so many partners that just want UGC, user-generated content, and they use the generated content as their own, right? So they don’t have a content team. Let’s say they can take this content and sort of promote it as their own. And so that’s another benefit of partnerships, but it just speaks to the importance of content.

There are so many businesses out there that are lacking a strong content marketing engine. And you have to start somewhere and build it up over time, but content cannot be more critical to our business and to my marketing team.

Steve MacDonald: So give me some kind of an understanding, if you could, on if the content is that important, what percentage of your team is dedicated to content, or how much content are you producing on a regular basis?

That’s kind of when you put your own money behind the words that you’re saying. Give us an idea in terms of in actuality and application, how much resources are you putting towards and creating in terms of content?

Cristy Garcia: Yeah, we have a team of 10 people and an outsourced network of over 20. So we have a lot of writers. Everyone on the team is a writer. Also, we have a writer specifically for performance. We have writers for research reports. Writers and content are critical. We put our money where our mouth is. In fact, just last quarter, the team pushed out 80 pieces of content. That could be an infographic, ebook, or a blog post that’s a thousand words long.

But that’s the amount of content that we’re pushing out, and I think that’s helped us introduce our brand to new audiences because we’re trying to put out content that is helpful and educational primarily instead of contact us right now, which the modern consumer does not want.

Steve MacDonald: No. And to your point, most of the people aren’t in the market right now. They just want to learn. It’s usually around 97% of the market. Your TAM isn’t there. They’re not in the market to buy at the moment, but they’re open to being helped. They’re open to learn, to be educated, so that they’re not missing out.

We all know that the moment that we stop learning is the moment that we’re going to be behind in our careers, right? That we’re going to be in trouble, right? So, that’s one of the biggest things that in all the studies have said is that as a B2B company, you need to be that trusted advisor. That B2B buyers don’t want to be sold to. They want to be educated, they want to be advised.

And that gets you in earlier in the conversation. If you’re only talking about that bottom of the funnel, by the time they do their research, they figured out their consideration set and who they’re going to talk to. So I wanted your opinion on this.

I’ve said that in the B2B world, upwards of 60, 70% of the research happens before they want to talk to somebody. And so, in my mind, that means marketing is taking on a much greater role in the sales process than ever before. What do you think about that? What’s your opinion on that?

Cristy Garcia: We see research that says 9 out of 10 consumers, including consumers buying B2B products, are doing research before they buy them. And they’re not just going to one site. They’re going to four or five different sites to learn. They’re going to YouTube, like I said, to see it in action. They’re going to their favorite software review site to see what people have said about it, or G2 crowd, let’s say, to see what the reviews are.

But they’re not wanting a salesperson. They know what a salesperson is going to say, right? Just like they would know what marketing is going to say, that they want to make their own decisions. And that’s why I think right now we’re working in a very hard space with the most informed consumers of all time. Any information you need, you can find it in any place that you want.

And so I think it’s very important to be where they’re looking and part of the information, like you said, because you don’t want to be at the bottom of the funnel when making their decisions. You want to be throughout the funnel, showing them and teaching them how to use partnerships, for example.

Why you need more B2C in your B2B

Steve MacDonald: So you have such an interesting introspective into the world of B2C and B2B. If so many of your clients live in the B2C world, you’re a B2B marketer. You have huge B2B marketers as clients. And there’s this overall trend, right?

Gartner talks about it. Everybody’s talking about how there needs to be more B2C focus in the B2B world. And I think that the notion behind that is that the B2B buyers are consumers of ours, right? And just like any consumer, they want to be entertained, right? They don’t want to spend their entire days reading through white papers, right?

And I’m not knocking white papers because they absolutely have their roles. But what’s your point of view? Because you have this unique perspective on there needs to be some more B2C in the B2B world.

Cristy Garcia: Yeah. So I love creativity. I studied it actually in graduate school. It’s what I wanted to do is be a creative writer, but being creative and B2B, you can really stand out. So because we target marketers, one of the things we did was we, an example of this was we wrote an ebook called Advertising is Dead. Then we created a microsite and told people to find out who killed advertising, and it had all the culprits, right?

Like blaming Gen Z, or maybe it was all of the spam or all these different reasons. But in order to get them to the site, we sent them something in the mail. And so all of these are tactics that you wouldn’t typically expect a B2B company to do or come out to say something so controversial like advertising is dead.

But it’s our best-performing campaign to date because it was enough to raise a couple of eyebrows of the marketers, and the way that we were marketing to them throughout the campaign was more of a B2C style with more B2C almost designed to a certain extent too. You sort of get used to seeing the typical B2B design, and it’s flat.

So we’ve tried to inject a lot of color and different gradients. And we love creativity and see creative partnerships taking place all the time on the platform. So it challenges us to be even more creative. But that’s an example of using some channels and some different tactics in your B2B marketing handbook to try to shake things up and see how it goes.

Steve MacDonald: I don’t know if this qualifies as creative as you were describing it there because that’s pretty stunning. But I like this kind of dialogue, right? I like it when we get to create content that our buyers get to listen into and a dialogue and different perspectives and interesting people that are talking, right?

You know, that’s a form of creativity. And I think the idea is that we have to actually be more creative in garnering the interest of our buyers and their limited attention. We’ve lost some sight of that in the world of B2B. So thank you for bringing that back a little bit.

My last question I have for you, though, is you had mentioned a type of content that those 80 pieces of content that you’re creating and everything you call thought leadership. Why are you calling it thought leadership, and why are you creating so much thought leadership content versus more what we would call product marketing feature benefit? What’s your perspective on that?

Cristy Garcia: Good question. We’re in a unique situation because not everyone knows what partnerships are. And, as I said at the beginning, they’re defined very differently based on where you come from, what business you’re in, or what vertical you’re in. And so because we have to introduce the category, and we do consider it a category of partnerships, there needs to be a lot of thought leadership and education.

If we were just telling people like, Sign up now or talk to sales now, that wouldn’t be relevant because they don’t understand partnerships or even what we mean by them. So we felt like we needed to plant the seed and create this educational thought leadership.

We launched a free academy called PXA so people can take free courses, no matter who they are, even people who work with different companies. It’s an industry-level certification and academy because we know how important it is for people to understand the value. And when you are trying to demonstrate the value, you are not doing it via ads, you are doing it via thought leadership.

And so those are the things that we leverage. We ran a creator campaign recently and are starting to use some of that user-generated content ourselves this quarter. We haven’t used it in the past, but we’re really looking forward to starting to leverage the content that’s been created, which explains what we do in a very educational, non-salesy way.

Steve MacDonald: I think there are so many lessons in there for all of us, right? Because the majority of the B2B world, CMOs do not represent household names, right? We’re challenger brands, right? We’re trying to carve out who we are, and what our expertise is, right? On top of what we do. There’s a quote that I got from Forbes, and you’re on the council there that I love, which is content marketing solves problems, thought leadership sparks conversations in a world where so much research is being done before they decide who they even want to.

I want to spark conversations earlier in their process. And I’m not going to do that by talking about my babies, my products, right? There’s a time, there’s a place for that. I’m going to do it because I’m doing what you’re talking about. I’m educating them. So I think that’s very profound for all of us to take away here.

Why you must have a third channel: traditional sales and marketing alone is not enough

Steve MacDonald: And I want to ask the last question: we’ve talked about a lot, right? But if there was one thing you wanted us to take away, the most important thing out of this conversation that we should remember, what would that be?

Cristy Garcia: And I’m passionate on this point. Your sales and marketing will not get you there by itself.

You need a third channel. You need partnerships now because consumers have changed. Time has changed. Technology has changed. My attention span has changed. This is something I need everyone to understand. Every CMO out there should be leaning into this channel because it’s an extension of your team.

It’s cost-effective. As we talked about how the CFO will love it, it’s a way to drive brand awareness and conversions. So I think that’s a very important point that I want everyone to understand. It’s not a nice to have. It’s critical to growth.

Steve MacDonald: And it’s one of the most direct links to bottom-line growth at the same time.

Well, Cristy, if somebody wanted to get ahold of you and they had questions or something like that, would we maybe link to your LinkedIn? Would that be a good place to start?

Yes. I’m very active on LinkedIn. So that would be great.

Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic. Well, thank you for coming and sharing and expanding our minds on what’s been in the playbook for decades, right?

And new ways to think about it and why we should be thinking about it. I really appreciate your help.

Cristy Garcia: Thanks, Steve. From one marketer to another, I really appreciated the time and you having me on your show. Thank you.

Next Steps

Cristy Garcia has 60 people on her marketing team and published over 80 pieces of content in the last quarter alone. To efficiently produce high-quality content, elevate your ROI and revenue impact, don’t miss the opportunity to CLICK HERE and schedule a 20-minute strategy session with Steve MacDonald, founder of ConstentStrategies.io.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies. Follow Steve on LinkedIn.