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More signs the Who Economy is here

Here’s my favorite chart, from the HubSpot, Partnership Leaders, and Canalys report on the State of Partner Led Growth:

This is an amazing visualization of the Who Economy.

Only ~25% of marketing leaders thought one of the first five items on the list have the biggest impact on buyers. ~75% picked one of the last two.

What do the first five items have in common?

They are usually either made by or paid by your company.

It’s YOU telling the market stuff and hoping they’ll trust you and buy your product. It works sometimes if done well, but it’s not nearly enough and getting harder all the time. (Yes, you could argue analysts and review sites are third parties, but at this point, most B2B buyers are savvy enough to suspect it’s been gamed and/or is pay-to-play, whether fair or not).

Contrast with the last two items on the list, where it’s WHO buyers trust recommending you.

It’s a clear YOU vs WHO showdown, and ’you’ (stuff made by or paid by your company) is losing to ’who’ (the opinion of people not in your company).

Buyers want to know what real people they have real relationships and trust with think of you. That’s how they’ll make their decisions.

That means that you, too, have to care what the people who surround your buyer think of you.

It’s not enough to think about your buyer. You must think about who surrounds them as well.

I was talking to a friend who owns an agency that serves realtors. They love him. He recently launched a mortgage company.

He assumed that his realtor clients would love the mortgage company and send them referrals, but they don’t seem to care. He made the company attractive to the customer (homebuyers) with low fees, but it doesn’t do anything for the person with the most trust and influence over that buyer’s decision on which mortgage company to go with (the realtor).

His whole distribution plan is stuck, unless and until he figures out how to make the realtors who surround his customers love him as much as the customer themselves.

He’s run into the realities displayed on the chart above. He’s run into the Who Economy.

You can’t rely on paid-by and made-by marketing efforts alone unless you want to close only 25% of deals. You’ve got to go from you to who buyers trust.

You’ve got to partner. You’ve got to run nearbound. 

—Isaac

T-minus 3 days

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