Jill Rowley: Building Ecosystems That Customers Actually Want

Chip Rodgers  0:01  
Yeah, okay. Here we are. We are in San Diego. You know, it was supposed to be sunny San Diego, and it's a little overcast right now, but it's still a light mood, and really excited to be here at crossbeam supernode. So welcome everybody. I could not be more excited to be talking with Jill Rowley. Jill is, gosh, we were talking about this. What

Jill Rowley  0:23  
is Jill Rowley? I don't even know anymore. No. I mean, I've had a great history, a career in SAS, 22 plus years in B to B SAS, early at Salesforce, early at Eloqua, helped build the whole martech industry.

Chip Rodgers  0:39  
Social selling. Social Selling, definitely the queen of social selling. Absolutely, yeah,

Jill Rowley  0:45  
absolutely. That did professional speaking, traveling around, really, more on the why? Like, why do we need to actually leverage the power of social networks and really? Okay, so let's define social selling as using social networks to do research on your buyers, the smarty pants people who influence your buyers. So we do research, so we can be relevant, so we can build relationships right that ultimately drive revenue. So like social selling, evangelizing the why of that, and then building an ecosystem of partners who can actually teach the what and the how. I wasn't the what and the how person, when it came to like curriculum and instruction, I was more of the give people their aha, their oh shit moment, that digital and social is where sales people need to be. And then I was at Marketo. Yep, Marketo, that was awesome, acquired by Adobe. And really in a role in HubSpot as well. I was an advisor to HubSpot, yep. So I've sort of been with pretty much the hot spots, all the hot spots in marketing automation and martech, and then do advisory and some investing in B to B startups, all B to B, SAS and all related to go to market. I really believe in nailing your niche and being the best at something. And I feel like, for me, it's it's a combination of sales, marketing, understanding, subscription, right? That you don't get a customer, you you build an ongoing relationship with customers, and so how do you continuously deliver value. And put

Chip Rodgers  2:22  
me thinking about that renewal coming out fast, absolutely and

Jill Rowley  2:27  
and the renewal, and actually the reference ability. So it's one thing to get their money, it's another to get their endorsement, get their advocacy. And so I think sure about the money, but, and I don't even like a lot of times, companies tier their customers based on how much the customer spends, rather than how much influence that customer has over other companies that spend money with you. Oftentimes, we look at it through the sheer things that we can measure easily, which that's another really hot button for me, because we're, we've, we've over indexed on attribution right, and it's easy to spend money on ads and search and see the click and conversion rates, and it's easy to spend money on emails and to measure click and conversion rates Direct Mail and all these things that we now can easily measure, but those aren't the things that are actually driving, sometimes even awareness of your company, your service, your product or evaluation. It's always it's really about people and people who are talking about what it is you do, and advocating,

Chip Rodgers  4:08  
advocacy. And we were just talking about, we were talking just now about, you know, community, right? Community. And then, but, but, let's get to the to the big topic, why we're here at supernode ecosystems as well, right?

Jill Rowley  4:23  
Absolutely. Yeah, I am. I've been defining ecosystem as partnerships. So certainly companies that partner with each other and partners that partner with each other, so you've got, like, the super node HubSpot, and then you have HubSpot partners, and you have HubSpot partners that partner with each other. That's really where the multiplier effect comes in. And when you look at how many pieces of the puzzle can we put together. For our joint customer, making it okay. Here in partnerships, we talk about one plus one equals three. You've heard that, right? The customer doesn't want three. So the customer wants one plus one equals one. I'm the customer. I want one. I want you partners to put the pieces of the puzzle together and come back to me with what a solution, a solution so ecosystem for me, partnerships that can be tech, that can be services, that can be agency, community, right? Community like pavilion, communities like partnership leaders, so, communities like cmo coffee, talk so, communities and then also marketplaces. And it's really about where are buyers, customers living? Where are they communicating, connecting conversations, consuming content, where are they discovering and purchasing? And that's where we need to be. We need to be where our buyers and our customers are. We need to live in their ecosystem rather than thinking about it from our point of view of what is our ecosystem? First, we have to understand what our customers ecosystem is.

Chip Rodgers  6:30  
And I think you know, you, you, we were talking earlier, you had this great example of your landscaper, which I think is, is really true. I think as you, as you have an ecosystem of a lot of partners working together that the influence that you grow your influence, because they're influential as well and in different ways.

Jill Rowley  6:52  
Yeah. So I was talking about, I live in Charleston, South Carolina, and we have landscapers who come into our yard every Monday, and they we have oak trees in our yard, and our landscapers aren't tree experts. They're not arborists. So I need help with some of my trees, and so I go to my landscape guys, and I say, Who do you recommend? What arborist and tree service people do you recommend? Those are the people I'm gonna call. I'm not gonna go to Google and search tree specialists and pick one out of the however many that are listed. I'm going to go to next door, and I'm going to post in nextdoor Looking for Tree Service Company. I'm going to go to we have a neighborhood Facebook group. I'll go to our neighborhood Facebook group. But I'm not going just to Google. And so I go to my landscape guys, and then my fence. I'm either going to replace my fence or repair my fence. My landscape people don't do fence, but they have customers who have fences, and they get asked all the time, I'm sure about fence work. And so I go to them for recommendations on who I can get to repair or replace my fence. And

Chip Rodgers  8:02  
so what you just talked about our partners and community and this extended concept of extended which is an ecosystem, right?

Jill Rowley  8:10  
An ecosystem? Yeah, now I'm obsessed with the word ecosystem, and I like to, I like to relate it to things that we already understand, the ecosystems in which we live and that we get value from. I love

Chip Rodgers  8:23  
it. So Jill, this is fantastic. What are you what are your thoughts for the rest of for this Super Note we just got here, what's, what's on your mind?

Jill Rowley  8:34  
Yeah. So for events like this, I come to to be part of the conversation. Really a lot of listening. I've not been in a partnership role myself, so I've never been in the job that many of the people here are in. And I need to better understand the job that they're doing, so that then I can help them have the conversations with the rest of the C suite, in particular, the revenue leaders have them have like I need to understand the work they're doing, the challenges that they're facing, and help them understand how to actually have that conversation with their C suite and and revenue peers, so that they can speak the language that a CMO speaks, that a Chief Revenue Officer speaks that a rev ops person speaks and be able to relate their world to the world in which their peers live. So important today, yeah,

Chip Rodgers  9:34  
so for credibility, for relevance within the leadership conversations, right? You know, right?

Jill Rowley  9:43  
It. When I think about like ecosystem and partnerships, I think about how, how do we thread partnerships throughout the entire go to market organization? So when we're thinking about product, what partners do we want to work with? From a product perspective. Of when we think about marketing, what partners do we want to market together with selling partners, threading partners into our sales success and services and education? What partners can we thread in there? So I really want partnerships to think about how they thread through the rest of the organization. It's

Chip Rodgers  10:21  
so true. And, you know, I've been, have had the ecosystem aces podcast for a long time, for five years, I think, now, and and it's, it's, it's so that that really resonates with how so many partner people, you know, what, how they think about their job is, it's really their general manager across all parts of the business. They have to understand and be connected to all parts of the business. So it really is

Jill Rowley  10:44  
true, they're very much more entrepreneurial, because they they do need to understand how the pieces of the puzzle fit together, which is what an ecosystem is, right? It's how do you how do you put the pieces of the puzzle together in the context of the customer? Because you're trying to simplify things for the customer.

Chip Rodgers  11:02  
Awesome. Jill, this has been fantastic. I hear the music for the welcome reception to starting. This

Jill Rowley  11:10  
is kind of a groovy hotel too. Have you read all the quotes on the wall? Oh man, you got to go buy that.

Chip Rodgers  11:16  
It's really cool. It's got a nice vibe to it, sort of mid century,

Jill Rowley  11:21  
kind of 70s Ishmael, yeah, right.

Chip Rodgers  11:24  
It's cool. Jill, thank you for joining, and we'll see you all at the you know, the next couple sessions and today and tomorrow. Yeah. So Thanks, Joe. Appreciate it.

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