How Leaders Think with Kenny Lange

Pete Caputa [00:00:00]:
Like, who waits around for a salesperson to email them about a problem they have? I got hemorrhoids. I'm not waiting for somebody, the hemorrhoids cream salesman, to call me. I'm going to cvs and I'm getting freaking hemorrhoid cream, or I'm googling it. Itchy butt. What the hell do I do? It's like, why are we still doing this in corporate environment?

Kenny Lange [00:00:25]:
Welcome to the how Leaders think podcast, a show that transforms you by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think. I am your host, Kenny Lang, and with me today is the Pete Caputa. He is the CEO of Databox, and he is on a mission to help companies improve performance by making it easy for them to discover insights in their data, which is desperately needed. He was formerly the VP of sales at a little known company called HubSpot, where he built the HubSpot partnership program into 115,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. Welcome to the show, Pete.

Pete Caputa [00:01:00]:
Kenny. Yeah, pleasure to be here. Nice to connect again. Look forward to the conversation. Thanks for the kind intro.

Kenny Lange [00:01:06]:
Yeah, absolutely, man. Well, we've obviously gotten to interact a lot more over the last year or so, but always a huge fan of what you're doing and love the data and the insights. But I'm curious, what is on your mind?

Pete Caputa [00:01:24]:
What's on my mind? Well, what isn't on my mind? New year, right? New ideas, new beginnings, also new challenges, of course. But if I had to narrow it down, you probably would guess. But I'm always obsessing over how to build partnerships. I look at partnerships as like, one of the highest leverage things that a business can have in building partnership programs can really enable a company to scale revenue faster and profitably. And so that's what my mind is always thinking about. How do we grow more quickly and more profitably?

Kenny Lange [00:02:12]:
Which I don't think there's any sane, I'll say, qualify the sane person in the world who would disagree with that notion of let's scale faster, more profitably, all those sort of things. Just for the listeners at home, when you're talking about partnerships, I think a lot of people may go immediately to legal partnership, like maybe running things together, like, hey, don't be a solopreneur or something like that. There are some business leaders out there that would probably discourage you from having a business partner. There's horror stories, of course, when you talk about partnership, how are you defining it and thinking about it today? And maybe was it different when you were kicking things off at HubSpot.

Pete Caputa [00:02:59]:
Yeah. So yeah, I'm not referring to go get yourself a business partner. If you think you're capable of starting a business and building it on your own, I think then that is the ultimate thing to do because it gives you optionality and control and all that. So I'm not advocating like you need to go get yourself a business partner and split your equity 50 50 or whatever. When I say partnerships, you know, but for your listeners, what I'm talking about is when one company decides to partner with another in order to do something together. And when I talk about building partnership programs, I'm talking about one company that builds a program that allows them to sign on lots and lots of partners. And so that's what I've built at HubSpot. We've built that at Databox.

Pete Caputa [00:03:47]:
I have advised other SaaS companies to do the same. Pandadoc Drift Incycle, a bunch of other SaaS companies that were doing similar stuff. So that's what I say, partnerships and specifically with software as a service companies, there's a massive opportunity to go out there and partner with professional service organizations and help each of those professional services organizations, but in a very scalable way that allows both companies to grow more reliably, grow more profitably.

Kenny Lange [00:04:19]:
Got you. So it's about the strategic player, strategic partnership in a way that's mutually beneficial.

Pete Caputa [00:04:28]:
That's right. Yeah. When two companies connect.

Kenny Lange [00:04:33]:
Which could be curious if you think about the fact that some of the companies you mentioned, obviously I think they're benefited by having partner programs and ecosystems. But couldn't you argue like maybe more product based companies, SaaS platforms, they can acquire customers through what you might consider more traditional marketing channels. Right. Like organic content. Obviously HubSpot promoting, evangelizing inbound until they were, I was going to say blue in the face, but probably orange in the face and paid ads and all these other channels, what is so helpful about having partners? And you mentioned the service providers of which formerly I was a HubSpot partner and saw the benefits to my agency, but it always felt like maybe that is more of a help to the agencies because they get to borrow on the brand equity that a larger SaaS platform or any sort of platform has in the community. What's really in it for the SaaS platforms? Like does it really accelerate growth? That.

Pete Caputa [00:05:58]:
I'm glad, first of all, I'm glad you saw partnering with HubSpot at the time as something that helped you and it seems like you still feel that way. I know many HubSpot partners. Do many databox partners feel the same? And so, yes, I think for the professional services firm, marketing agency, consultant, et cetera, et cetera, there's benefit because they can kind of leverage the growth of the SaaS platform and use that to provide services to their clients. But your question is more around what's the benefit to the SaaS company when they can market more directly. And so I'm total advocate of direct marketing for SaaS companies. Not saying to forego that at Databox, like, the majority of our growth comes from search engine optimization and a heavy investment in content marketing starting seven plus years ago. And so we drive a lot of our customer acquisition through that, and we also invest in product led growth. So many of our customers find us through our SEO, sign up for free, try us out, and then upgrade on their own without even talking to anyone, right? So it's a very efficient direct funnel.

Pete Caputa [00:07:25]:
The mistake, however, that I think most SaaS companies make is that they then prioritize their direct sales and scaling up their direct sales when there's actually so much more leverage in scaling up channel sales. Because if you think about it from a SaaS perspective, hiring an account executive, say in the US, you're going to spend more than 100 grand on hiring an account executive to take the leads that marketing generated and turn them into customers. So if you could take one of those AES and you either tell them to go acquire 100 partners, or you hand them 100 partners, and each of those 100 partners brings one deal in a month or a quarter, right? That's 100 deals versus an AE, which is typically going to do ten deals max. And so by having partners involved in the marketing and sales, generating their own leads, which are generally incremental leads, and spending the hours in the sales process necessary to bring that deal on, then that's ultimately a more efficient system. At HubSpot, you can read the 2014 IPO prospectus and in there they talked about three things that really enabled the business to scale and would enable the business to scale going forward. And one of them was the lower customer acquisition cost through the channel. Secondly, the higher retention rate of those customers. Because the secondary benefit for the SaaS company is that when a marketing agency selling martech or an accountant using bookkeeping software, selling reselling zero or quickbooks or whatever, when they implement that software product at the client and then help them learn it and help them use it, they're much more likely to be actually getting value out of the software.

Pete Caputa [00:09:20]:
Because that professional services firm has an incentive to provide another higher level of service than the SaaS company does and charge for that time or that value whenever it makes sense. Whereas with a SaaS company, you generally will get a much better ROI on investing in new product development and marketing with sales and customer support, sales being third and customer support being a distant fourth, because it's hard if you have one account manager with 100 or 200 accounts, they can't have in an SaaS company, they can't really have meaningful relationships. Whereas if a professional services firm is charging for the software plus, say, two grand, three grand, ten grand a month of professional services, they have lots of incentive and lots of capability to spend a lot of time with that client, make sure that client's successful and do the work. Even that makes the client successful. So, long story short, SaaS companies can benefit from partner programs through lower cost of customer acquisition and higher retention rate, which goes to my point earlier, of growing faster and more profitably.

Kenny Lange [00:10:40]:
Got you. And so all of that, when you say it that way, it's like, well, yeah, duh. Okay, well, then, in your experience and your point of view, why aren't more platforms, and even in some cases, going into some of our one to one conversations about companies who are creating and espousing methodologies and those that are adopting and reselling, I mean, you could even say, that's somewhat like what I'm doing with system Soul. I didn't create the IP, but I license it, I'm trained on it, and I help others adopt it and see the benefits from it. Why aren't more people going this way if it's so clear and proven that this is not just acceptable, but a really effective and efficient way to grow and scale a company on both sides of the equation?

Pete Caputa [00:11:45]:
So make sure I understand your question. What you're saying is, why don't more SaaS companies, more software companies, invest in partner programs and build out their partner programs versus what most of them do, which is invest in their own direct selling? That's what you're asking me?

Kenny Lange [00:12:01]:
Yeah, it could be SaaS. I think if there's a part one a to that question, then I think you could extend it even into more, like, methodology.

Pete Caputa [00:12:15]:
Oh, yeah. All right. So you and I have talked about this before, where a methodology business, right, and system and Soul is a great example of a methodology business. I think you probably know story brand is a great example. Donna Miller wrote a book and then has a methodology on how to help companies develop their story and their positioning in the market. John Jans, duct tape marketing has a great one he basically has a methodology that fractional cmos use to go into a client and develop the strategy, marketing strategy for them. And I think HubSpot is another great example of methodology business and software business where we wrote a book on inbound marketing and then had a marketing methodology that we taught these agencies to go and execute for their clients. I don't think a lot of people think through methodology companies, but those are all examples of methodology companies, right? And I think they're very similar to software companies.

Pete Caputa [00:13:11]:
Most pieces of software have some methodology behind it. In some cases they're simply automating.

Kenny Lange [00:13:17]:
At least they should.

Pete Caputa [00:13:18]:
Most of the time they're introducing a new business process, or many times they're introducing a new business process that requires somebody to adopt a new methodology. Your question is, why don't more companies, more SaaS companies or methodology companies go out and say, hey, we're going to sell through channels, we're going to sell through partners, we're going to sign up partners, certify them, et cetera. I think the first reason that they don't do it is control. In fact, there's lots of early stage software advisors who will say don't start a partner program until you have your direct selling motion down, because if you can't sell your product, you shouldn't expect someone else to go sell your product. And I think at a really early stage that makes sense, right. At Databox, however, we chose marketing agencies as our target customer. That became our target customer. We sold directly to them.

Pete Caputa [00:14:18]:
They use our product with their clients and we kind of sell it that way. So I don't think it's necessarily a hard and fast rule. It depends a lot on the context of the business, who you're selling to and why. But a big reason is control and observability and insight. Right? If you go and say we're going to build a partner program first, and I think the feeling is like, well, the partners are going to be selling and we don't know what they're going to say and we don't know what their promise, and we're not going to hear what the prospects or clients say. So how are we going to get feedback to our product team? And so I think that lack of control and that lack of insight into the process is what discourages most software companies from going out and starting with a partner program before they do their direct selling motion.

Kenny Lange [00:15:03]:
Got you. When you say that, it seems in my opinion, a little short sighted. And of course, my job here is I'm supposed to be asking you questions. But I do have opinions. Strong opinions, held loosely.

Pete Caputa [00:15:20]:
All good.

Kenny Lange [00:15:22]:
And we're on a vocal platform, so my opinions may get out there before I have a chance to really process them, which is fun, but it's a bit of a cash grab. And of course, everybody can have their own goals. They're entitled to that. If your goal is like, hey, I have an idea, I think it's good. I think it's viable, but it's maybe not long term. What I want to be doing, I want to build something worthy of being acquired and integrated and have that be my exit. And then maybe in the process I'll find the thing I'm really passionate about. I don't dismiss that, but if you're after absolute control, thinking your partner, like we don't know what they're saying feels a little like when people talk about the quote unquote evils of remote work.

Kenny Lange [00:16:11]:
Well, how do we know they're working?

Pete Caputa [00:16:14]:
How do we know they're working? Yeah, how do we know they're not taking a nap in the afternoon?

Kenny Lange [00:16:18]:
Right? Maybe they are, but they still get a lot of shit done.

Pete Caputa [00:16:22]:
Exactly right. I think a little bit. I do think there's generally good advice that if you got to go sell your product ten, hundred times before, you should ask someone else to sell it. And the first thing that I always tell companies who are building a partner program to do is build a training and certification program. And in that training program, you have to teach your partners how to market, sell and service clients. So if you haven't done that yourself ten hundred times, it's really hard to go and say, here's how you should do it, and with credibility, teach people how to do that. So I do think it's important that you get that business started. I don't know who started system in Seoul, but I'm guessing that they've had plenty of experience building operating models inside businesses and influencing and leading teams.

Pete Caputa [00:17:19]:
And they've done it a bunch of times. And so when they wrote the methodology out, there was credibility there. They probably also still do some amount of consulting themselves to keep themselves active and iterating on the methodology. So I do think there's value in that. I don't think you soul just like, hey, I built this really cool product and I'm pretty sure everybody's going to want to sell it. That's wishful thinking, right?

Kenny Lange [00:17:41]:
You should probably be the first one to sell your product or service or whatever it is.

Pete Caputa [00:17:46]:
But I do think most companies start their partner programs too late. Like later than they should.

Kenny Lange [00:17:53]:
Got you. They waited past 100, but they sold it a few thousand times.

Pete Caputa [00:18:00]:
What's that?

Kenny Lange [00:18:02]:
I was going to say, it's one thing to wait for the first couple of dozen times that you sell it, but if you've waited until several thousand times later, you fell in the other ditch.

Pete Caputa [00:18:15]:
Yeah. Because the benefit that partners bring to the table is acceleration of word of mouth and acceleration of your marketing. This isn't in HubSpot's prospectus, but the reason why HubSpot, one of the reasons why HubSpot was so good at inbound marketing, because every time they did something, they published something, they had hundreds or thousands of people sharing it on social media. They had hundreds of people writing articles about it and linking to it. They still do. Like, it's crazy. It's thousands of know HubSpot acquired Clearbit and LinkedIn was full for a week of why every HubSpot partner in the world thinks know HubSpot's going to put all the ABM tools out of business and game over for Apollo. Right? I think there's that army of advocates that are helping with link building with social media reach, et cetera.

Pete Caputa [00:19:13]:
And I think if you do that, if you build your direct selling motion too much, too late, or too much without having a parallel partnership program, you really miss out on that opportunity to accelerate the marketing and sales results.

Kenny Lange [00:19:30]:
Gotcha. Now I'm curious, in your opinion, from the other side, although you've been on the SaaS company, the methodology side of the partner equation, but you know and have worked with at this point probably hundreds of partners to see what their thinking is, especially the more successful ones. What sort of advice do you give professional services firm, like an agency, like a coach or somebody else who might be leveraging a platform or a methodology or some other type of IP in their practice, how should they be thinking about, well, which ones do I bring in? Because you could bring in too many and then you're a hodgepodge or you're a menu that's way too big for it to make sense. There's no cohesive theming. What advice do you give services firms about engaging in partner programs?

Pete Caputa [00:20:33]:
So I always say to pick a core one first. I think if you're a management consultant like system and Soul would be a core, core methodology, core partnership to develop. Right. If you're a marketing agency, you might want to pick HubSpot or activecampaign or, you know, if you're a CRM, then you're going to go Salesforce or HubSpot, maybe pipedrive. You have to pick that core platform for two reasons. One, I think you want to pick something is going to be around that you can build on. And then also if you're small firm, you don't want to dilute your efforts too much. And you look like, I use a term, I think it's inappropriate.

Pete Caputa [00:21:22]:
But people have entrepreneurial ADHD where it's like, I have this business for six months and I'm like, oh, I'm going to try this new shiny object thing over here. And then you never get anywhere. And so I think it's important that you pick one. Stick with it. You didn't ask this question, but I think once you pick that one thing, you still have to figure out how do you differentiate yourself from the other people who have picked that one thing. So there's like 6000 HubSpot partners. I don't know how many system and soul consultants there are like tens of them maybe, right?

Kenny Lange [00:21:54]:
Tens of partners. Yeah, I think we're somewhere between 40 and 50 as of this recording.

Pete Caputa [00:22:00]:
Yeah. So that's still a lot. Right. Given the market awareness of system and soul, that's a good number of people. I think you have to pick a focus within that. I think you've picked a focus working with nonprofit organizations, right?

Kenny Lange [00:22:16]:
Yes.

Pete Caputa [00:22:17]:
And so that allows you to then target who you're going after. It allows you to maybe customize the methodology a bit, at least within limits of what you're allowed to do, so that it's relevant to that target audience and allows you to say, hey, I'm that guy. I am the one that does system and soul for nonprofit organizations. And so I'm pretty sure that the other 49 aren't doing that, at least not as a sole focus. And therefore you can have a differentiated message and the people that you want to work with can recognize that you work with people like them in your marketing and you can get referrals that way more easily, things like that. So it's really important to pick that one core program and then pick your one core market that you're going to go after and then do that for a while.

Kenny Lange [00:23:09]:
Right?

Pete Caputa [00:23:10]:
Yeah.

Kenny Lange [00:23:10]:
It gives you a nice vertical and horizontal intersection of specialization, but it may even help you pick those ancillary methodologies or frameworks because certain ones are more helpful to your target, whoever it is that you feel like you're supposed to be going out and helping or that resonate with you.

Pete Caputa [00:23:33]:
Yeah. At Databox, as you know, we have integrations with 100 plus different tools. So the beauty of our partner program is that there's almost like no partner that's the same, because we'll have a partner that comes in and says, they're a shopify and Klavio partner, right. And they focus in on a specific segment of e commerce type lifestyle. Or we have somebody that just does a fashion focused marketing agency that uses Klaviyo and shopify. Now, I'm sure there's more than one of them out there, but that agency is very different than the HubSpot partner. We have another partner, Big C, run by a woman named Andy Graham, and she only works with nonprofit cultural institutions, and she's a HubSpot partner and does a lot of ad management for those companies and does fundraising. So I think there's one other tool that she integrates with.

Pete Caputa [00:24:34]:
We have another partner that only works with large law firms, and so he's actually built integrations that we didn't even have with our product. So he can go to those law firms and say, I've built integrations and can offer you a dashboard like no one else can with all of the integrations of the tools a typical law firm offers. So it almost extends every partner we have, almost extends our capabilities as opposed to duplicated. There's a guy named Nick Bennett. I don't know if you know, Nick is a consultant for agencies, and he said it's the first partner program that he's ever seen where the addition of a new partner actually brings value to all the partners because it brings a perspective and a set of experiences that others don't have.

Kenny Lange [00:25:20]:
That's interesting. I'm wondering if you could take what we've been talking about and venture over something you've been posting about quite a bit over the last several months around collaborative growth and how that starts to. The notion of partnerships influences and taps into that. Of course, you and I, we have a mutual friend, Logan, who talks a lot about, has his nearbound podcast, which is floating in the same arena, so to speak, saying some similar things. Talk a little bit about what collaborative growth is and how does that mesh in with your thoughts on partner programs.

Pete Caputa [00:26:15]:
Yeah, so, yeah, collaborative growth is a phrase that I use. I'm not the first person to put those two words together, but I use it in a very specific context.

Kenny Lange [00:26:26]:
You heard it here first, folks. We're going to do it. We're going to change Wikipedia that Pete first said it on the not blaming it otherwise.

Pete Caputa [00:26:33]:
I'm just saying there aren't two words in english language that are put together already somewhere. But it's this idea that marketing is saturated and it's really hard to get through to your buyer. And your buyer already has people that they follow like and trust. And so the best way to go to market is by partnering with those people who are known, liked, and trusted in order to reach, not just reach a larger audience, but to reach a larger audience with a message that they'll trust. And so collaborative growth is all about incorporating other people's thoughts and ideas and experience inside your content so that they feel a part of what you're doing. Not just feel, but are a part of what you're doing, and become your word of mouth accelerant. It also kind of comes from an angle that I don't think any of us have enough knowledge to solve most problems in the world or in our businesses, and we learn a lot more from each other if we go out and ask each other questions and do research and share what we're learning as we are learning it. And so this idea that you could do your marketing by sitting in your room and writing something or recording something and publishing it, and it being the best it could be, is really arrogant, frankly.

Pete Caputa [00:28:21]:
And that really the best marketing, best content, the best educational material will come from talking to other people, running experience with other people, asking for people's perspective, and then publishing something that has a perspective and experience and data, even from multiple people that are in a similar experience, similar situation.

Kenny Lange [00:28:45]:
Gotcha. Yeah. Ever since I've seen but both you and Logan following you all on LinkedIn for a while, the more I consumed it, it was like, this makes sense. And that's something I've used to help guide me in making some of my decisions on, well, what methodologies or approaches, even the marketing stuff that I want to use, if it starts to intuitively make sense. Yeah, it may not be earth shattering. Like you said, you're not the first person to put those two words together until we get that Wikipedia updated.

Pete Caputa [00:29:21]:
If you google collaborative growth, it comes up with a full hour's worth of me explaining the concept. But we're linked to it in the show notes podcast, right? I've listened to several of your podcasts with other guests where you come in and you ask them what they're thinking about and why they do that and why that's different than the other bit ways people think about stuff. So you're learning yourself. I'm sure you're applying some of the things you're learning, but we are also, from a marketing perspective, you're marketing yourself by saying, hey, all these smart people and I have ideas on how you should run your business. And so as the guide, you have insights for your prospects and clients that you're learning from these other people as you go. And you're not just sitting here saying, I learned everything I needed to know in college. You should listen to me. It's like, no, if we're not learning on an ongoing basis, then we're not really learning because things change, especially in marketing, changes so fast.

Kenny Lange [00:30:21]:
That'll preach. You just revealed my big secret on how I'm doing all this. So, man, we'll see if I get any viewers after this episode. I'm sure I will. But the thing that has struck me about it as I've started to try to engage in it, was I felt a tremendous weight lifted off my shoulders from trying to be number one, trying to be like, the smartest person on a particular topic. For instance, on my focus on nonprofits. I don't need to know everything about nonprofits. I mean, I need to be knowledgeable and I need to be competent.

Kenny Lange [00:31:05]:
Sure, that's a given. But I don't need to be an expert on every single facet of nonprofits. I need to be aware of it. But it felt like I could pull in other people to say, like, well, do you know a lot about fundraising? Because I know how to sell stuff, but maybe I don't know as much about fundraising. Let's talk. Let me borrow from your brain and borrow from this person who really understands grants. Like, I just started diving into that, and that is a cluster to end all clusters that I've discovered. I was like, man, I was like, I'm almost done watching all nine seasons of suits, so I might as well have graduated law school.

Kenny Lange [00:31:46]:
But I don't know that I'm ready to wade into the legalese that's in some of these grants. But I loved it because I didn't have to carry that weight. And it also turned a lot of people into allies instead of competitors. Like, I've got to own everything. Which, to be honest, when I was running my marketing agency, I felt like I had to sort of protect my territory. I couldn't let another person, even if they were software or a service, if they did something adjacent to me, it suddenly felt like a threat to.

Pete Caputa [00:32:22]:
The.

Kenny Lange [00:32:23]:
Lifetime relationship that I could have with another client. It took that away, which was really cool. And I think at the end of it, it's to be better service to the end user or client, right? Yeah, it's an others focused sort of mentality. Is that fair to say?

Pete Caputa [00:32:42]:
Yeah. So I learned business networking early in my career. For a while I did quickstar, which was like the digital version of Amway, like in the late 90s, early two thousand s. And so I got introduced to Vern Hardish and all those types of books, how to win friends and influence, influenced by childini. I got introduced to those concepts of be of service to people and it'll come back to you. And then I started my own small business in the early two thousand s and quickly learned that the best way for me to get my business was getting to know other business owners that were in adjacent fields and referring them, because when I referred them, they remembered that. And then when those two people did business together and the person I referred was able to help the person, they both remembered me very kindly, like, hey, you connected us, you changed our business, you helped me accomplish this in my life. I'm so grateful.

Pete Caputa [00:33:47]:
Right. And so that gives them interest in what I do to the point where how can I help you? What do you do? Tell me what you do for people. Right. The more that I did that and the bigger that network got, the easier it was for me to get referrals that closed quickly. And so when I joined HubSpot, they said, here's your leads. They just came in through this ebook and I'd call them up and they're like, who are you? What are you calling me about? I just wanted the ebook and I'm like, this is stupid. And so for the first year, all I did was call my network and say, hey, what are you doing for SEO? Do you know anyone that needs a website? Do you know how to do capture? Would like to learn how to capture leads on your website. And that network that I had closed more than 50% of my business.

Pete Caputa [00:34:36]:
And then that's when I'm like, hey, you know what, the best thing I could probably do is work with marketing agencies, because we sell software and they sell services. And then I realize if I help those marketing agencies, they're going to be more inclined to want to hear how we can help them, how we can help them deliver their services and all that. So all of this comes together for me at least, in that the more you give and the more you think about how do I help some other company grow, the easier it becomes for me to grow my businesses.

Kenny Lange [00:35:11]:
Yeah. Which kind of goes back to my assertion that trying to control everything is short sighted. And what I hear you describe is really sort of taking a lange view on what you're doing. It may not come back to you tomorrow or next month or next quarter or something like that, but there's a positive brand affiliation with your name or your company or what you did that can pay off. And you do enough of that, it gets into what the zig Ziglar quote of if you spend your life helping enough people get what they want, you won't have to worry about getting what you.

Pete Caputa [00:35:57]:
For people, I think it's really hard for people that are either just getting their business started or really early in their career for them to grasp that. But the sooner somebody can grasp that in their career, the impact of that behavior just compounds like crazy in terms of where you're at and how fast your business can grow, how fast your career can go. Yeah, absolutely.

Kenny Lange [00:36:24]:
Well, it's been helpful to me in the second business with the coaching practice. Talked to somebody earlier today that was a referral because I spoke to someone, showed them what I was working on, and they can help me. And I actually just referred a client to them. And so it's already starting to come back around and is accelerating my growth. And it's better fit, there's better alignment, there's a whole host of benefits that come from it. So as someone is listening to this, and maybe they are that person that you just mentioned, they're early in their career. They're still in the early days, which you could be three years in and still in the early days of your business.

Pete Caputa [00:37:13]:
Sure.

Kenny Lange [00:37:15]:
Somebody's listening, as they say, that's great. And that sounds huge. Or maybe Pete must be nice. I never helped a company generate 115,000,000 in ARR, so I don't have people knocking down my door to work with me. What's something that they could do in the next 24 hours to get started towards whether it's sourcing partnerships or just engaging that more collaborative growth. Partner minded growth.

Pete Caputa [00:37:44]:
Yeah, I think I had this conversation with a consultant the other day. The consultant does probably like 400 and 5500 thousand dollars of annual revenue as a one person shop. Very great consultant, but really struggling still on client acquisition. He's been doing it for a while, so he's got great clients, great retention, all that. And I said to him, dude, you're so smart. You ask such good questions. You have a lot of experience in your industry. Why aren't you hosting a podcast? Interview your clients, interview prospective clients and ask them about the stuff that you help them with and tell those stories so you don't have to start a podcast but the one simple thing you could do, call up a client, call up a prospective client and say, hey, can I interview you about your story and why you're successful and the way you think and related to these topics.

Pete Caputa [00:38:37]:
And then I'll either record and publish, or just record that and take notes and share a story before I publish it. But ultimately, just get in that habit of going out to your market, learning something and sharing it back with your market. If you do that as a salesperson, as a small business owner, it will have, again, these compounding effects because everybody's happy. The person you interviewed gets free press, gets someone else out there saying nice things about them, sharing their story, right? The people that maybe compete with them or are collaborators with them get to learn something as well that they maybe apply in their business. And you as the storyteller become the expert because you are the vehicle that delivered that story to them. So it requires care and feeding, right? The more you do it, the better it is. It's not like you can hire someone, outsource your SEO or your paid ads, and just get leaders, but if you go through that process, you'll make friends, you'll get referrals, you'll build up your credibility, and people will see your expertise because you'll share your expertise through that storytelling. And so that's the one thing that I recommend everyone do.

Pete Caputa [00:39:55]:
Frankly, I'm amazed that salespeople still listen to their bosses and send cold prospecting emails every day. It's got to be the stupidest thing, like one of the stupidest things in the world that still happens in the business world, that these companies, they hire 5100 sales reps and they say, here's your list, go email people over and over and over again until they finally relent and take your call, until they give in. Yeah. When in reality, if you email ten of those people, I guarantee, and you said, hey, could I tell your story on LinkedIn or could I tell you your story on my podcast? Four of them will say yes. Three of them are maybe stage side. Three of them will be too busy or whatever and don't value it, but four of them will say yes. And those four stories that you then tell will easily pull in another ten people that want to talk to you because you just interviewed four people in their market and learned something and shared it. So the fact that anything other than that is priority for a salesperson is ridiculous to me.

Kenny Lange [00:41:03]:
I haven't modified my questions since I launched this iteration of the podcast. You just gave me an idea in addition to the first step someone takes, I might need to say, what's something someone needs to stop in the next 24 hours. Like, we'll have a start stop, continue aspect to this.

Pete Caputa [00:41:22]:
I'm not saying cold outreach is bad. What I'm saying is cold outreach, which amounts to, hey, I'm Joe from company X. We help companies like yours with problem z. Do you have that problem? Do you want to talk to me tomorrow at 02:00 p.m. That is the stupidest message ever. Did they not hear the freaking Internet? Who waits around for a salesperson to email them about a problem they have? I got hemorrhoids. I'm not waiting for somebody, the hemorrhoids cream salesman to call me. I'm going to cvs and I'm getting freaking hemorrhoid cream, or I'm googling it.

Pete Caputa [00:41:54]:
Itchy butt. What the hell do I do? It's like, why are we still doing this in corporate America?

Kenny Lange [00:42:02]:
I think we've gotten into the real interview just now. This is what we were trying to get to the whole time. So you got to dig through the layers to get to the gold. I guarantee you. I have a dozen plus messages just like that one sitting in my LinkedIn inbox. It drives me crazy. I've called a few people out on it. I try to do it politely because in some cases I'm like, they're working for somebody.

Kenny Lange [00:42:31]:
They were told to do this. They're just trying to make a living. But I've told people, hey, this is not the way to get my attention, or I'll reply to them. And then they copy and pasted their response. And I said, you just ignored everything I just said. For those reasons, I'm not interested in talking.

Pete Caputa [00:42:50]:
How many salespeople, you'll tell them something and they'll come back like a week later with the same exact message, literally said, hey, no, I'm not interested. And here, go over here, or blah, blah, blah. Or it's like, if you want a half hour of my time, go do this and come back to me. And they just completely ignore it and come back with the same pitch. Someone forgot to teach them how to initiate, how to be human. Yeah, exactly.

Kenny Lange [00:43:19]:
I forgot to human. I feel like there's a mini.

Pete Caputa [00:43:24]:
I know people don't date at bars anymore or pick up people at bars anymore, but I don't know if you're old enough to remember that, but you wouldn't go up to someone and say, your hair is ugly. Do you want me to fix it? For you. I don't like your pants. We should go to the store tomorrow. I'll buy you some new ones. That's not how you pick someone up, right? Why do people continue to do business that way?

Kenny Lange [00:43:45]:
I think there are some people who are still deploying those strategies, and that's why we have dating apps and AI. Now there's another miniseries we'll need to get Paul on and talk about AI, dating apps or something like that. That could be a fun conversation.

Pete Caputa [00:44:07]:
There you go.

Kenny Lange [00:44:08]:
But Pete, I appreciate your time and your wisdom. And if anybody was more interested in you, the thoughts that you're sharing or data box, collaborative growth, those sort of things, where would you send them?

Pete Caputa [00:44:24]:
So, as you pointed out earlier, I'm constantly posting on LinkedIn. I've slowed down a little bit this year, trying to be spending more time on longer form content. We're putting together a free course for our partners. And so I've been working on that instead of posting every day on LinkedIn. But I am very active on LinkedIn. Pay attention to my inbox. I ignore all unsolicited pitches. But if you want to connect that way and have a meaningful conversation, I'm there for databox.

Pete Caputa [00:44:51]:
It's real simple. It's a great domain name, databox.com. Try us out. There's a free product. We also have another free product called Benchmarks. Benchmarks databox.com, which allows a company to go and benchmark their performance against a very large database of companies that have opted in and anonymously allows them to benchmark across like hundred different tools that they might use and thousands of different performance metrics. And then I guess that'll cover it.

Kenny Lange [00:45:22]:
Yes, we will link to all of that. The thing I was thinking about, I was thinking probably about the benchmarks piece, because I know I'm getting rolling on some of that, but I can tell people hooking everything up and some of the power of the databox platform is phenomenal because I remember early days of hooking it up and it was super helpful. You could cross things over. We were early adopters into the partner program. When you started rolling it out, I was mostly in it for the badge. I just wanted the digital badge for the website.

Pete Caputa [00:45:59]:
That's funny. That's why I'm finally launching a training and certification program, because I know people love those badges, especially agency owners, marketing agency owners. They love being able to say to their employees, just go get certified and get the badge. Because the badge tells them that they finished the job and lets them put it on legitimize.

Kenny Lange [00:46:19]:
Yeah, I'll go through it just so I can have another badge out there.

Pete Caputa [00:46:24]:
You're like Boy Scouts.

Kenny Lange [00:46:27]:
It is. I'm collecting instead of I've got my old HubSpot. I probably still have that in my LinkedIn history somewhere. It was never expired, so I'm still inbound certified from 2015. Yeah, I'm in the know. But anyways, thank you so much, Pete, for stopping by, and I hope that we get a chance to do this again. For everybody listening, we appreciate all of the views, the shares, the likes, and all of that. And if you got value from this, I would deeply appreciate you just taking a page out of this episode's playbook.

Kenny Lange [00:47:03]:
Share it, connect with it, you know, relate it to your story. If this has been helpful to you in any way, I would be eternally grateful if you would help more people find it. But until next time, change the way you think. You'll change the way you lead. We'll see you.