Customers are the core of your business, so it is vital you keep generating new customers, as well as continue to retain your existing customers. Whether you are a startup or an established business it is essential to identify your customer base, recognize these customers and build a strong relationship with them. After all these are the people who keep your business going.
Harry Brelsford of SMB Nation sits down with Nigel Postings to discuss the importance of building your customer base, and how he is helping businesses find their target audience.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford
Hey nation nation. We are back with Nigel postings. How you doing, Nigel?
Nigel Postings
Very good. Very, very good. luthiery
Harry Brelsford
good. All right. Yeah, here. The weather's getting nicer up there.
Nigel Postings
It was beautiful over the weekend. And then this long weekend is going to be cloudy, I think. And so normal Seattle weather. But yeah, it's nice to see some sun.
Harry Brelsford
Well, it's Bumbershoot just to timestamp us. We're coming up on Memorial Day. It's Bumbershoot. That's, that's why it's called Bumbershoot. Hey, listen, you were you're really proud and rightfully so that you're over the last quarter your company continues to evolve. So let's talk about that third service you're offering and recruit. That's very interesting to me.
Nigel Postings
Yeah. So yeah, just as a reminder to everybody, we do two things really one we help assess. So if you're a large company, with a live search channel partners, and anything from a longtail, we can help assess 1000s of partners in very, very quick time looking at their business, who they're talking about what they're talking about, etc. And so that's one thing. We're now we're getting more and more inquiries about how do we grow our channel, especially as you think in SMB, you know, many of the large partners have aligned to various different vendors. So some of those larger vendors are coming to us say, Look, we need to grow our channel. And they say this is the type of partner we're looking for. So we've evolved the process. And if I can share my screen, which I'll do now, I'll walk you through very quickly, one slide. So this is a typical funnel slide everyone's really aware with. So what we're doing is this, there's a four step process. Number one is defining the target audience. So working with our clients, we want to say what is the type of partner you wanted to find and hire. And very often, the moment is very much focused on SMB, we want to find partners that talk to customers in that in that segment area. So we define the audience and it can be partner type, revenue, number of employees, location, or locations, what type of partner the same they are, and then we'll go ahead, and we'll look at what we call the look alikes in our database. So we score hundreds of 1000s banks globally, across many different signals, anything from what they do, who they're promoting, what they are promoting, and also adding in why customers going to their website, you know, what are they looking for? And then on top of that, one way to differentiate is their web performance, additional performance, how many customers are you attracting to their website on a monthly basis? So that's the identifying look like we then score and segment those look alikes. And we, you know, we think, Okay, how are they performing? And if you remember, here, I've got a typical dashboard, and we look at things such as, how many monthly visitors do they have last month and large apartments in here? We look at, you know, obviously, from their outbound signals, what they're promoting, who they're promoting to. So before we look at where the customers are coming from when they're visiting that website, so the geo splits, you know, are they coming from their home country? Are they coming from other countries. So as you start thinking about you, when you need partners, ie where you have customers, you can look at that. And finally, we can look at things like retrospectively the performance of the partner as that traffic been growing over the last three years. So you know, so very, very quickly, we identify the right partners and score them. But what we're doing now, in addition, we're partnering, and we're taking the concept of what we generate is a data qualified lead, by maps to all your signals is high performing against the data we're looking for. And then for one of the partnerships with a couple of batches we have now we're taking those data qualifying leads through to a marketing qualified lead. So either through phone, email, LinkedIn campaign, there's contact made with the partner, and then from the mighty qualified lead, those are nurtured to the point where we have what's called a sales qualified lead. So there is intent timings, right, by being identified for that partner to engage with the vendor we're working with, to think about generating a practice around that business. So data qualify lead through marketing qualified lead as a new touch base through two sales qualified lead. So this there is great interest at the moment to identify partners that operate in the SMB space. So that's, that's what's happening at the moment.
Harry Brelsford
Wow. Well, what's ahead is we head into the new Microsoft fiscal year. I know you you do business with them? We're headed into before you know it, it'll be q3. Can you believe it? Yep. The summer. So any, any, any thoughts about any forward looking statements? No,
Nigel Postings
I think, you know, everyone's aware in the news. People are evolving their channels, potentially some for good and some, you know, whether it's this particular interest, so we're, we're particularly helping those companies that want to evolve their brand. So that's number one. And then number two, there's competition out there. Always. miners have choices, partners no longer just aligned to maybe one vendor. So how do you look and identify where there's competitive pressures in your ecosystem? And then finally, Harry, you know, this is very applicable to the technology space. But at the end of the day, we have data so that data could be in the interest of you working could be in government, public sector could even be around end customer. So we're always evolving. We're always been asked to do things. So the moment was sticking to channel but who knows where it goes next, where the where the demand is?
Harry Brelsford
I agree. Okay, Nitro. We'll see you next quarter.
Nigel Postings
All right. Thanks. All right. Bye.