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Discover how solo entrepreneur Brooks Lockett used an Ecosystem-Led Growth strategy to drive results by partnering up in the crowded B2B SaaS landscape.
This is the story of how Brooks Lockett, a conversion copywriter for B2B SaaS, got partner pilled.
But don’t worry, this is not a scary story — in fact, it might help encourage and open the eyes of those who aren’t interested in leveraging partners within their inbound and outbound strategies.
Let us introduce you to Brooks.
He started his career a decade ago, and has been a freelance copywriter for B2B SaaS since 2019. To give something back to the community, he created a newsletter originally called SaaS Storytelling (now Living in Market).
In this article, Brooks shares:
- Why he shifted to an ecosystem-led approach
- How his workflow functioned before and after partners
- The results of implementing an Ecosystem-Led Growth strategy
The key factor in going ecosystem-led
At the beginning of this year, Brooks read The Nearbound and The Rise of The Who Economy (twice). The phrase that resonated the most was living in market.
“Living in market sums up what you need as inputs to essentially everything you do in marketing and business-building. I already understood talking to customers, doing market research, etc. But connecting the dots of pulling in partners to my content strategy was what compelled me to adopt the Nearbound mindset.” says Brooks.
Brooks relies heavily on content for his business. And partnering up with other content creators for distribution was a strategy he hadn’t made a full go at yet.
“The problem in the market right now is that everyone is trying to move the needle on outbound and inbound, but what happens when the whole internet reaches an exponential point of saturation?,” he says. “You have to try something new.”
“I think we’re arriving at that point, and now, people are only going to trust people who they have either talked to or met in person. There are too many unknown people trying to sell to you (even if the solution is good, people don’t have any easy way to verify other than their peer networks).”
If you really want to break through the noise, partner with those who your audience already trusts. Then leverage the joint distribution to reach a larger audience.
This learning led Brooks to change the name of his newsletter, from “SaaS Storytelling” to “Living in Market”. The change made sense, since every edition of his newsletter was conversation based — he would try to reach out to GTM experts just to share their experiences.
“When those conversations go great, you end up making more content together, and that content reaches more people, and that represents more partnership opportunities,” says Brooks “This becomes a subtle flywheel effect.”
“I’m a solo consultant so I work with clients full time, it’s all on me, I do everything,” says Brooks.
The before and after partners
“Now I feel kind of excited because when I interview our market, I get free insights all the time, which later are going to lead to more ideas, which leads to more content, which then leads to more opportunities, and at the same time, leads to more referrals. It’s a great base for your content strategy.”
Even though he has successfully been doing social selling, social media, and conversion copywriting, it was starting to feel harder to get the same results.
The only logical way forward was to leverage partners.
No matter how much you plan, you can’t control how people respond to your message or campaign, recommendations, impressions or open rates, but what you can control is who you partner with.
You can make sure you work with partners who are relevant to your audience.
Brooks reaches out to people who are relevant for his interviews, as well as have a good and solid positioning and audience.
Here’s a summary of his content creation process:
- Reach out to people for interviews — people who already had the trust of his audience
- Ask those who have already participated for introductions to other respected colleagues
“Recommendations are a lovely way to expand out,” says Brooks. “It helps you create this content machine that doesn’t involve spamming anyone, or feeling super salesy. Having a partner-led motion is having the right framing, putting the partner mindset into your context. It’s mainly about leveraging word of mouth through partner lenses.”
- Do the interviews
- Build up the content and send out the published draft
- Leverage partners and distribute with them through channels like email, LinkedIn, etc
- Mutually engage with the content
- Make the other person famous
This last point might seem a bit too obvious to explain, but we think it’s worth it.
Making someone famous isn’t inherently “promoting” them, but rather joining forces with them to move your space’s conversation forward. And using them as a reference point to encourage further conversations. It implies setting that person up as an expert that people can follow, trust, and ask for advice.”— Brooks Lockett
If you wonder what’s in for you while you make your customers famous, just think about this for a minute:
Traditional customer research is hard to do. At best you get the learnings and rough data of maximum 10 surveys. After, you have to do the rest by yourself based on your own interpretation of that data.
Instead of spending all this money and energy doing these studies and surveys (that hardly get answered), it’s better to just create ongoing content with your market. If you stick to it long enough, you’ll get the best insights by default, interviewees who are excited about the joint distribution opportunities,and relationship-building that leads to more referrals and intros.
“Now you have multiple new team members in the form of partners who are willing to work with you, and yes, it’s going to be a lot of work on your part, but you’ll be able to multiply the effects and results. Partnering is a great way to scale your results.”
He also emphasizes that the process is every bit as valuable as the content it produces.
“It’s in doing the work, it’s in partnering and going through that process that you learn. It’s not about asking questions, recording it, and putting it in some folder and never using them again,” says Brooks. “It’s an active asset. That’s why my newsletter is now called Living in Market, because that is the only way to get all the leverage, content, relationships, and introductions out of it.”
The impact of an Ecosystem-Led strategy
“Partnerships is a business-building activity and goes way beyond marketing, says Brooks. “If you're not a service provider and you have a SaaS product that does 10M in a year, and you take partnerships to heart, this will help you to scale your efforts. It’s not magic, it can get hard, and can be frustrating, but it won’t stop being a good growth model.
I really do think that, and I wouldn’t say it, if I didn’t get the results myself.”
Brooks has been implementing an ecosystem-led strategy for the past six months, and he knows that he needs more time to unlock its full potential for his business. But he has already seen a notable increase in referrals and engagement.
A final advice: The “aha” moment
So what can an enterprise SaaS company learn about partnerships from a solo entrepreneur?
“Everyone can leverage partnerships, but that doesn’t mean that you have to copy and paste what others are doing, you have to do the version of it that makes sense for you and overlay partners into every element of your strategy.”
According to Brooks, the C-suite needs to reflect on the idea of:
- Is outbound getting easier?
- Is inbound getting easier?
If the answer to both questions is no, the only thing they need to do is be open minded and listen to a podcast or read an article that talks about the power of partnerships and ecosystems.
“It’s worth an hour of your time to understand and adopt a different mindset on SaaS go-to-market right now,” says Brooks. “Maybe it would have made less sense 10 years ago, but right now the complexity of the market, the boom in AI technology, layoffs, just ask yourself one thing ‘why not try something new?’ And partnerships is the best option out there.”
If you want to share your GTM story with Brooks, feel free to send him a DM on LinkedIn.
