Gary Sabin, VP of Product Management at Impartner talks about the benefits of referral marketing within the B2B segment in this quick chat with MarTech Series:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Gary, tell us about yourself and your role at Impartner.

I am the VP of Product at Impartner, where my team develops industry-leading solutions that enable partner and channel teams to collaboratively sell products, market to their audiences and service their customers together.

I’ve been with Impartner since 2015 and I am supported by a fantastic and talented team of product managers and product UI/UX designers. Prior to my tenure at Impartner, I was at Workfront, the project management solution that is now owned by Adobe.

We’d love to hear from you about Impartner’s new referral marketing tool and how it is set to benefit end users?

An increasing number of brands are waking up to the reality that the $21 Billion influencer market is not just a B2C phenomenon. B2B buyers go through the same journey and have several points of influence that occur well before they get to a final selection phase – which is where traditional transacting partners operate. Smart partnership teams recognize the power of developing a relationship with those influential targets to cultivate a strategic partnership instead of just leaving them within a single marketing campaign.

Social influencers help promote and sell products from brands and then are compensated for their influence. While B2C influencers are massively understood, the B2B influencer market is the untapped opportunity. Companies that sell B2B leverage influencers in many of the same ways. Partners, analysts, and customer referrals are quickly becoming the largest go-to-market path for the B2B industry, and referral marketing enables these channels to perform in a trackable, revenue-generating way.

Additionally, many of the traditional transacting partners (i.e. resellers and VARs) frequently come across a deal or account that may not be in their wheelhouse, but they still have an ability to influence – so we’re giving brands a mechanism to incentivize and reward them for attributing to the lead.

It’s about giving existing partners an alternate way to generate revenue and create additional demand more passively to further harness their market reach and professional networks. This includes:

• Personalized Links: Each influencing partner gets a unique link assigned to them which will lead to an automatically co-branded landing page, whose contents are controlled centrally by the vendor.
• Deep Tracking: Any end user arriving to the customized landing page and completing the lead-generating form will be tracked based on the source link, giving credit to the influencing partner.
• Progress Visibility: The lead data submitted from the custom landing page is synched into the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) system, generating a lead for the vendor to follow up on, while also automatically tracking the referral for the partner. This gives both partners and vendors visibility into the progress of the deal, further driving partner co-selling and marketing at scale.

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How are you seeing referral marketing evolve in today’s marketplace? Can you talk about some of the prominent referral business models that have stood out for you in the recent past (and why)?

We are witnessing a significant shift in B2B partnerships, with players engaging in linkbacks, co-branding initiatives and joint paid media campaigns. Recognizing the sustained momentum behind these co-selling motions, we anticipated the need for a more effective way to propel B2B companies into the referral and affiliate economy (and enable them to thrive and prosper from it). With these latest enhancements, B2B businesses have the tools to capitalize on this growing trend and unlock the full potential of the influencer economy.

Before, B2B businesses were tied to the traditional method of submitting referrals as a partner. Now, Impartner gives B2B influencers like affiliate partners, referral partners or hybrid partners the capability to utilize personalized URL links across any online platform. The door to growth is now wider than ever with Impartner enabling B2B companies a way to bring any partner type into their ecosystem and incentivize them to deliver new business in a way that meets modern marketing and existing business workflows.

In what ways do you feel brands today can build more impact from their referral marketing strategies?

From a B2B brand perspective, I see ample opportunity for businesses to leverage influence across buyers. This also comes at a time when it’s moved beyond opportunity to necessity as digital marketing will be unable to rely as heavily on cookies for personalized prospect experiences. “Word of mouth” marketing is back and will become bigger than ever for those companies that know how to leverage it in an automated way that drives repeatable and scalable profitability. Technology is a critical component of scaling referral marketing efforts. As a network expands, the cost of management through human capital increases unless technology is leveraged.

Before the tech, of course, comes strategy. I would encourage brands to look first from the eye of their customer and ask, “where does my customer want to find us?” That question will lead to the best possible referral strategies to test and verify.

When it comes to the martech ecosystem: what type of martech features will become more prominent in this space in your view in the near future?

As referral marketing becomes even more critical and widely used between B2C and B2B, I foresee that more payment technology solutions will be developed or created jointly with partner management solutions in order to streamline the process between influence and incentives.

If you had to share five thoughts about the state of martech in the next decade, what would it be?

The technology stack for marketing will expand to include influencer management automation software as well as influencer marketing software. The separation from the direct business technologies will be important for teams to successfully leverage the referral word-of-mouth economy at scale.

Companies will spend less and less on advertising distribution platforms that leverage cookie tracking as the data becomes less reliable with privacy protection.

Social influencer technology is here to stay and will become a bigger need for teams as they race to reach the right person, on the right platform, with the right connection. The follow-up here will be tying the management to the payment portion of this workflow.

Martech solutions that can find interest and behavioral correlations for businesses will be preferred over solutions that can’t as marketers will be looking to find ways to ensure their investment hits the right people with the end of third-party cookies.

Collaborative content creation technologies will become an area of innovation as businesses work more heavily with influencer and referral partners as an extension of their core marketing efforts.

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