Jill Rowley is a legend in SaaS, with early tenures at Salesforce and Eloqua. As one of Eloqua's first salespeople, she helped shape the category of marketing automation and was also an early pioneer of social selling.

Today she is helping evangelize a new perspective on partner-led growth, which she calls "nearbound."

Jill and I talk about what it was like selling cloud-based software in the early oughts, helping the first customers to use marketing automation, and what it means to go to market with partners.

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About Today's Guest

23 years in SaaS. Early employee at Salesforce (first 100), Eloqua (#13), HubSpot Advisor (2014-2016), Marketo (2018).

Loves startups, especially category creators - - in the trenches building Nearbound.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillrowley/

Key Topics

[00:00] - Introduction
[01:23] - Start of Jill's career at Salesforce.
[03:08] - How Jill pitched SaaS in the early days of cloud software. Salesforce's guerilla marketing tactics.
[04:47] - Moving to Eloqua as employee thirteen. Creating the category of marketing automation. Evangelizing for the importance of marketers on revenue.
[10:05] - Early days of service partnerships at Eloqua. Co-selling with David Lewis.
[11:54] - Types of service partner relationships. How there can be power-disparities and bad dynamics between smaller service partners and larger vendors. How many companies still view service partners as a source of leads rather than a way to build credibility and influence with prospects. There are bad fit partners. Need to have organized partner ecosystem data.
[15:26] - Definition of nearbound. Living in market with your partners. Differences from inbound and outbound. Looking at a practical, hypothetical example: Clari and Hubspot.
[20:41] - Addressing potential criticism of the partner-led approach: that it's too slow. Why you can't go to market with 1,500 partners.
[24:01] - Why the value of partnerships is far more than leads. Top-down vs. bottom-up partnerships. Why both are important.
[29:50] - Partner ops. Reference to Scott Brinker's article (see resource links).

Resource Links

nearbound.com | The future of GTM is here - Official Nearbound website.
Partner Ops: The forgotten ops that’s suddenly thriving in the ecosystem era - Scott Brinker's article on partner ops.

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Legends of GTM - Jill Rowley and the Nearbound Movement

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Legends of GTM - Jill Rowley and the Nearbound Movement