18 - Partner Ecosystems: Trends, Predictions & 2023 Forecast with Jay McBain

is brought to you by Magentrix. Magentrix is a pioneer in platforms for partner ecosystem management and partner relationship management. This is Partner Relationship Management, the ultimate channel sales podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Ultimate Channel Sales Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Bird. Our guest today is the man that needs no introduction. We're going to give him one anyway for people new to channel relationships and the partnership space. He's an inspirational leader and thought provoker who's committed to helping others succeed and is passionate about driving change in the technology industry. He has a unique blend of business acumen, technical aptitude, and he's an exceptional communicator who is able to articulate complex ideas in a simple and effective way. Today, he's the chief analyst of Channels, Partnerships, and Ecosystem at Kanellis, a leading global technology market analyst firm with a distinct channel focus. Today, he's here to discuss partner ecosystems, trends, predictions, and a forecast for 2023. Please welcome Jay McBain, welcome to the show, Jay. It's a pleasure to have you here. Well, thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to this. Well, let's start with the basics. Can you essentially define what a partnership ecosystem means in the context of today's discussion? Yeah. I mean, we've been talking for close to 40 years about channels. And we know that today in every industry, 75% of world trade goes through channels. It goes through retailers or resellers or distributors. It goes through brokers or agents. Every industry has their own dealerships or own type of channels of distribution. And that's what channels is short for, is how your product gets to market. And basically, people who collect the customer's money on your behalf. And all of the programs and the people and everything wrapped around that go-to-market action is the broader channel. And there's about 10 million people today in that channel around the world, if you look on LinkedIn. The ecosystem is very simply just to disconnect that point of sale. We need to be able to connect that point of sale. We need to be able to connect We know that partners help customers through the first 28 moments on average in a considered purchase before they make vendor selection. We know that partners assist the point of transaction, even if they don't collect the money. Today in marketplaces, for example, direct marketplaces, partners click the buy button 24% of the time. So they didn't collect the money, but they literally had their finger on the mouse making the purchase. And then obviously in today's economy, a subscription consumption economy, that purchase is only the first 30 days with the customer. Now you need to renew and retain that customer. You need to upsell and cross sell and enrich them every 30 days forever in a customer journey now that never ends. And we know that partners are involved every 30 days forever. The average customer today has seven partners that they trust. One or less of those partners might ever collect their money. We're talking about points of value that partners bring more so and maybe adjacent to that. So we need to be able to connect that point of sale. We need to be able to connect that point of sale to the point of sale. And those two things added together become the broader ecosystem. Interesting. And what do you think some of the misconceptions are about partner ecosystems? One of the misconceptions is just this idea, well, they've been around forever and this is just the way the world works. And it's synonymous with channel, but it's really not. If you're an ecosystem executive, which 20 of the biggest companies now in the last 12 months have added what's called a chief partner officer. And this is different because the channel chief of the past in more times than not, almost two thirds of the cases reports into sales, the CRO or into marketing or some other line of business as a go to market or routes to market strategy. The chief partner officer sits in the boardroom reporting to the CEO and they're responsible. And if you look at their KPIs, it looks very different than revenue and profit and customer market strategy. And it's not what you'd expect it to. It's things like co-innovation and value creation, things like network effects. These are kind of the new stories driving technology alliances as every company in every industry becomes a tech company. You saw that at CES last week and cars and bulldozers and basically every industry showing off their wares as technology companies living with others. You see that at a company like IBM, which yesterday announced, that for the first time in 30 years, they didn't win the patent race. And they did that on purpose. For 29 years, they've been the most innovative company in the world in patents, but most of us would never think of IBM as the most innovative, at least for the last 10 or 20 years. But in the patent race, they were missing that conception, what they call open innovation today. Then it's not about the patent race. It's about working together and sharing IP and sharing some of that data where you can bring all the best, best, best, best, best data that you can bring all the best, best minds to the table and innovate based on particular customers and things. So they're not interested anymore in that novelty metric. They're interested now in investing into the kind of this open innovation space. So that's an example of where you're seeing changes in people. You're seeing changes in business strategy. You're seeing surveys done by big companies like McKinsey and Accenture and others that show 70% plus of CEOs think that ecosystems are their future It's not about product strategy. It's not about the market fit and segmentation and all the other hundreds of things that they're worried about. It's literally working with others and becoming those tech companies, changing their models and everything else. So, and that concept of co-innovation, in people that I've spoken to, some of them embrace it and others have noticed that they're having challenges with it in order to kind of establish those relationships within their ecosystem. Do you have any insight or predictions on the types of things people can do to kind of bridge that gap and better collaborate, better innovate together? Yeah. I mean, there's a number of things. The first thing is culture. Many companies, almost every company starts direct. They grow up in a very, we can build it, we can market it, we can sell it, and we can support the customer. And by the way, you get no help as a startup. So that's what you have to do. You have to go get market fit for your product. You have to go and build a sales and marketing engine that's repeatable and scalable. And at that point, at some point in the history of the channel, we'd always talk about franchising. Once you've built the perfect hamburger, the perfect cup of coffee or donut, now the idea is how do I get a restaurant on every street corner in the world to distribute those things with the biggest scale? And then that startup, once they get product fit, once they get customers renewing, once they get something that's working, it's how and when should we start to acquire resources? And then you have to go and build a franchise around the world to get us on every street corner. But in channels today, ecosystems, it's not about that point of franchising, which is still there. It's at that point of partnering, which actually starts day one. If you're one of the 200,000 SaaS companies today, you're literally a partnering company from day one because you're living on rented land. You've built your product with it. You've built your product with AWS or Google or Microsoft. You've built your product with a Salesforce, HubSpot, ServiceNow, Workday, Marketo, NetSuite. You're building in a community and you're building on using tools that put you in an ecosystem from day one. Your ability to be successful building with AWS or building with a big SaaS company is your community work and your ability to go and work with partners from the very beginning to be part of a seven-layer solution, which is now the AWS. The average buy for anybody purchasing AWS or anybody purchasing Salesforce or HubSpot or anything, it's seven layers of the stack. So you're competing not to displace the platform, but to become one of these six other things that the customer buys. So now your sales, your marketing, your entire strategy, go-to-market strategy involves partners from the day you incorporate your company. Interesting. Now, earlier you had also mentioned as part of the kind of relationship and now the adoption and embracing of marketplaces. Do you think that we will see a higher level of importance placed on marketplaces in the future? And what do you think that has on the overall effect of the channel ecosystem or the partner ecosystem? Yeah. So marketplaces are growing phenomenally. And there's a bunch of reasons that we could get into, but companies like McKinsey has forecasted B2B marketplaces, cross-industry B2B will be $17 trillion by the end of the year. So that's something that I'm really excited about. Right. And if you think of 17 trillion, that's a lot of trillions. But today's global GDP, in other words, the total global economy today is 94 trillion. And that involves a lot of B2C and a lot of other interchange of capital. When you just think B2B, that is a massive, massive number. And so we at Canalys, we're thinking cloud marketplaces, to take an element of that, will be 45 billion in a couple of years. of years, and that's a pretty good chunk. It's a growth of 85% every year compounded, at least for the next few years, and then probably for the next decade. You could be facing a technology industry today, which is 73.3% resold through others for the hardware, software, and services attached to maybe an industry that's a third, a third, a third. One-third resold, one-third through marketplaces, which for everyone else on the marketplace that doesn't own the marketplace is an indirect sale as well, and then one-third direct. So that's a difference, and it doesn't mean that resale is going down. It just means it's not going to grow. If you look at the technology industry, for example, it's $4 trillion industry in terms of what businesses and governments spend on technology. That's 73%. You know, the… The trillions of dollars that go through resale today will stay put. The growth as this industry doubles in size over the next decade will mostly be attributed to marketplace growth, and direct will stay actually pretty close to the same as well. So while nobody's selling books here or magazines or trying to get clickbait saying anything's dying, it's just we want to see where the fastest growing is, and that's this focus on marketplaces. If you're acquiring seven different things… Instead of chasing a partner that has to go make seven relationships, get seven special pricing scenarios done, and you wait three months to get a quote, it's better to go do that in one place. You can cash in enterprise credits, which float above all seven of those companies or the tens or hundreds of thousands that sit on those marketplaces, and you can get to extra discounts. You can implement and integrate. You can monitor and measure and manage, and you can pull partners in. So the… The partner value may not be at the point of sale, collecting the customer's money, because the marketplace does that. But again, the partner working before and after that point of sale, the partner working, innovating with you, you can move your gross to nets, your margins in a different way through multi-partner offers and private offers through a marketplace so that everyone is whole. And in this case, you're running a go-to-market strategy with just the marketplace collecting the customer's money instead of… …some type of reseller-distributor relationship. Interesting. So as we start to look at kind of trends that you're seeing or that you think we'll see in 2023, where do you think we'll see the kind of key area or major area focus on partner ecosystems this year? Do you think there'll be any one specific area that we'll start seeing organizations put cycles into? Yeah, we're seeing it actually in four areas. We're seeing a lot of changes in people. If you've grown up for… …decades in your career and all you've done is run a transactional channel, that's a key element of an ecosystem and that's a career path and a job linear path there that has great riches at the end if you reach the highest levels. But we're now seeing 20 new chief partner officers and they're hiring new executives. Now, that executive of channel marketing is not just to go and run through channel marketing, gain leads and close deals. That person probably is deploying their team into the direct marketing and that embedded team is going to work on those first 28 moments, 24 or more of those moments owned by partners. And that team is going to work as an indirect direct marketing house trying to win all 28 moments before vendor selection. You're going to deploy a secondary executive as a sales leader, not closing deals with distributors and resellers, but embedding them into your direct and marketplace departments. So that… …they're recognizing partners, those seven trusted partners in every deal. They're recognizing them, working with them, so they're not providing friction. They're actually providing support to close that direct or marketplace deal. They don't see it as channel conflict because they're not interested or they never have been interested in collecting the customer's money. You deploy them in customer success, which is your third executive. A partner customer success executive that works with managed service providers, works with system integrators, works with… …everyone that's out there that's with your customer every 30 days forever and making sure that your customer success metrics, the implementations, the integration, the adoption of your product, the stickiness of your product, the enrichment that you're getting from each client and all these different metrics are quantified and your customer success team is working both as a partner and direct organization. So partnering is no longer a department. It's now deployed across the organization. You've got partners. You're partnering executives in your product team because you're building out a tech company. You've got to be API first. You've got to think about it. It doesn't matter if you're in finance, insurance, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing. It doesn't matter where you are. Your product has to interoperate. Seventy-nine percent of people will not buy a new car unless it has Apple CarPlay. So if you're starting out designing a new electric car, I've got to have somebody focused on that Apple relationship or it doesn't matter how good the range or how good the looks of the car are. How safe it is, literally, I'm going to lose four-fifths of my audience if it doesn't have a feature. Absolutely. These are the types of things that are now driving product innovation. And when I talk about co-innovation, it's wouldn't that car be better if you integrated with transportation as a service? If you've linked all the self-driving and all these new models of getting from point A to point B that may, for our grandkids, may not involve ever buying a car. But having one readily available within a few minutes. And it knows when you're going to Home Depot to send you a F-150 Lightning. It knows if you're going on a date to send you a little convertible, maybe even a stick shift. Know if you're going to the airport, it's going to send you a little cube van with a Lazy Boy recliner and all the technology and big screen TV and everything. Depending on what you need to be the best experience to get from point A to point B, that's what's going to show up five minutes before you need it. And you're going to subscribe to transportation. You're not going to buy transportation. If I'm building my product with that in mind, that's different. And that doesn't come after the fact, after I built a widget and try to get it to market. It comes from the very early days of design and architecture. So those are the things that are people reporting into new ecosystem leaders, these chief partner officers that would never have worked in a transactional channel before. And that really goes to talk. You're talking about culture, right? The change in culture to support ecosystems. That's very much what it would take to get this level of evolution. Yeah. And if your boss is sitting in the boardroom and the CEO is one of those 76% of CEOs think that ecosystems are their future. For the first time in partnerships, we're getting top down support. We've always kind of been the Rodney Dangerfield. We've been the people that don't give respect. And, you know, it's been that thing that no one understands. And now it's becoming core to the business, which is great. You know, we can talk about a raft of program changes. You know, Microsoft went to a big point system last year. IBM on Friday changed their system and Octa's changed their system and Smartsheets changed their system and VMware changing their system. You're going to see 35,000 vendors go through this change instead of paying at the point of sale or recognizing partner value by the point of sale. They're going to recognize partner value at that point of value before, during or after the transaction. In those points of technology, strategic or business alliances, in those points of co-innovation and network effects and value creation. So all these point systems are doing is lifting the gross to nets, the money, the margins, and spreading it more equally across all of those seven partners that are trusted at every one of your customer prospects and paying them for the value they're providing back to your organization. And so those program changes are going to be huge. And you're going to see weekly. Announcements through 2023 of companies. And I know the next dozen that are going to come out with these announcements very shortly. They're going to drive new ways to be educated and develop partners and build out competencies. All of the incentive structures that have been built for 40 years around that point of sale are changing how marketing and marketing dollars and all that's going to work to partners that would never even sell a nickel might be some of your best partners. And then down the road to, you know, obviously. How you co-sell and how you co-market and do all these other things is pretty radically shifting and you've got new people driving these new methods and that leads to the technology we're seeing an explosion of innovation. We're seeing Wall Street start to get interested with over $3 billion of equity investments last year and you're seeing new islands of innovation pop up and the channel stack almost looks like the sales or marketing or other stacks today. Where hundreds of companies now are there and maybe it's a seven-layer stack to solve for all of these executives and all their KPIs and all the measurements and monitoring and managing they need to do, you know, may not get solved with one end-to-end platform. For sure. And that's interesting because do you think that 2023 will be kind of a breakthrough year for some of these emerging technologies like machine learning and AI that have been around for a long time? Do you think that it's going to happen? Do you think that it's going to have an impact on the partner ecosystem this year? Yeah, you're obviously it's the headlines in magazines and in newspapers. today is obviously about chat, AI, and we're questioning the future of journalism and our kids who are writing book reports at school and things like that. And I'm going to say it's going to spend most of 2023 in the consumer space. AI and machine learning is critical within the tool set of the channel stack. There's a ton of data. That data, there's no humans that could possibly correlate and pull that data out of the data lake to make it actionable. So it's a critical layer. If you're saying though, is that a headline? Is it going to take over the world? I don't think so. I think that there's something that's more important than that, which is automation. The average ecosystem. So if you take a mature channel inside a mature company, and this could be in any industry, but it could be a mature channel is a thousand partners or 10,000 partners, or in some cases up in tech, you know, a hundred thousand, or more partners. The ecosystem is almost 10 times the size. So AWS, which has 120,000 partners today has about a million people out there that have some level of influence. They're one of those seven partners that are in and trusted at that customer. So the AWS channel is about 120,000, but the broader ecosystem, if they touched and, you know, eliminated that friction completely to a million. And it actually, you know, at every company in every industry, it's almost the same 10 time multiple. You know, you've got a 500 dealerships today selling your lawn tractors. Well, if you look in those first 28 moments before I buy a John Deere and look at everything I read, everything I listened to every place I go, all the super connectors I listened to and trust. If you dissect those 28 moments before my lawn tractor purchase, you know, you start to recognize there are 5,000, not 500 dealers, but 5,000 additional points of influence. So my ecosystem in lawn tractors involves every magazine, every association, every podcast, every event, every home and garden, every, as you go around the analysts like me, it involves other distributors and vendors and adjacent type of industries. There's a map of 14 spheres of influence. It's not just about the dealership organization who trains dealers, pays dealers and incents them and does all the work in that transactional channel. The marketing, the sales, the customer success and product groups have to start looking expansively across the 5,000. Many of them now are ISVs that connect with internet of things and connect with AI and machine learning. And, you know, maybe you don't actually have to sit on that tractor anymore. It mows the lawn once a week for you and you can set it and forget. And John Deere is an example of that. And it's not just building self-driving technology, but there's hundreds of companies that are. And so that's the thing. John Deere might acquire one of these companies. John Deere is better off today at partnering. Because when I sit on my tractor, if I choose to do that, I actually want an Apple dashboard, kind of like buying a car. I want an Apple car. I don't want to stare at their speedometer. I want to stare at Apple's speedometer. I want to get on and I want to have access to all of my life on that tractor. You know, if I'm going to be sitting on it for a couple of hours, I mean, I got to make that time useful. And I could be listening to this podcast. I could be getting educated. I could be getting entertained. I could be working out a little ab machine or something on it, whatever it is. It's John Deere to go find the 5,000 adjacent companies, you know, many of them at CES last week that are rethinking mowing the grass. What about challenges? Do you foresee any challenges that organizations could face in building and managing the their ecosystems in this coming year? There's a ton of them. If I go back to technology, you know, you're talking about something 10 times larger and most people can't manage what they have. They can't measure it. They can't monitor it. They can't manage the moments that, you know, they're having trouble executing against their current KPIs. And if you ask them to do 10 times more, and obviously we're going through a recessionary period and layoffs and all that stuff, and their teams are probably going to be less. And investments, their company are making into their department is going to be less. It seems to be divergent in terms of, you know, having to grow 10 X with less resource and less people. And so back to automation, it behooves many of the companies on the tech stack, as well as, you know, the consultants and thought leaders in this industry is to put forward a vision of software, hardware services, and other things that can help with that, that challenge. And I don't think that's going away anytime in the next 18 months. Okay. You know, the most successful partnership leaders are going to be the ones that look at these people and program and process automation and technology challenges and have the best approach to balance all four. Interesting. And what about kind of the relevant metrics that people should be looking at? Is there kind of success tracking metrics that you've seen people use in technology? Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think today's current climate. Yeah. The interesting thing is the best way to break down metrics is go down line of business. You know, if you go talk about marketing ops, there's 9,932 companies on the MarTech stack. They're all driving out data. There's a whole list of thousands of marketing ops. You just need to put the word partner in front of every single metric, because up until now, we're measuring a lot of very direct things, which is a very minor part of those 28 moments. And if you add in all of the different moving parts, you add in technologies like attribution, you add in technologies like data sharing, and account mapping type of services. If you add in other technologies, you know, you can start to measure and monitor many of these early moments, which add to those marketing type metrics that get reported up through the organization. They shouldn't be a separate set of metrics. Same thing for sales, same thing for customer success, same for every line of business. Operations, finance need to be augmented with partner KPIs. And for every one of those sales ops, marketing ops, thin ops, op ops, and HR ops, you know, they should be augmented with embedded teams that are enriching those KPIs with partner data. And we're very much on the early stages of that. You know, we're maybe in the first or second inning of where marketing ops might be in the eighth inning and sales ops might be, you know, early in the ninth inning. You know, we're still early in the decade of really furnishing the complete story. And that can only be done from within. Do you have any kind of examples of people that have gotten it right? They've been extraordinarily successful in kicking off their ecosystem. Maybe somebody that is specifically in the B2B space. Yeah. I mean, I can talk about several companies, like at the very top, the biggest company in the world in the channel is Microsoft. And they had a daunting challenge to rework their business kind of out of the windows and office and kind of legacy client server business that they're in. Get into cloud. And they had a formidable AWS, which had a multi-year head start. And they used the channel to their advantage. They had 470,000 partners. And over the course of, you know, five or more years, they were able to convince about 30% of them to become cloud aware. And cloud friendly, but they also went on a massive recruiting campaign where today they're up to 400 new partners joining every single day. They leveraged that enterprise army of partnerships and they've outgrown AWS now 12 straight quarters during a pandemic. Most would argue that in that space that Microsoft doesn't have the product portfolio as wide and deep. They don't have the legacy as deep and long, maybe even the brand, but when they have more of those seven trusted people at every customer providing less friction and maybe steering the customer during those moments, they found a way to success using an ecosystem and be able to transfer part of their transactional ecosystem or channel that they've had in the past, which has been very robust, but take on hundreds of thousands of new partners that are wired into the cloud and wired into this new way of doing business and created success there. So that's an example in the cloud world, we've had successful as like a HubSpot came out of almost nowhere and became a $47 billion company. And you wonder, they were a great inbound marketing company at the beginning and they kind of broke new ground and how to do marketing. But about midway through the marketing decade, they were behind Marketo and Eloqua and Pardot, all companies that got acquired by Oracle and Salesforce and Adobe. And they were kind of the last remaining non-acquired company, but they invested heavily. The owner of that Martech stack, the 9,932, they brought him in as an ecosystem chief, Scott Brinker. They've hired successfully in the last couple of years, really ecosystem friendly people. Out of the 200,000 digital agencies that serve a CMO, 78% of them now report that they're tech services companies. And many of them, the majority would report HubSpot as what was the ticket to get over to that really rich service. And so they've looked at partners and they've looked at a CMO that spends more money on technology. And they've looked at a CMO that spends more money on technology. They've looked at a CMO that spends more money on technology than the head, than the CIO at many companies, the channel that's already trusted. They've looked at a CMO that spends more money on and built out that partnerships, they built out the tech alliances, they built out all the layers of the stack that have now made HubSpot a leader and obviously a market winner in this space by using ecosystem as opposed to creating new feature function by doing inbound marketing better, by hiring better salespeople. I mean, it hasn't been a traditional strategy. It's been a, you know, we're going to be a platform and we're going to be the most friendly company in this space, most integrated company in this space. Do you think that there are any kind of, you talk about HubSpot and yes, I mean, they came out of nowhere, it seems, but is there any kind of underrated or maybe underused technologies that people can better make use of to manage their ecosystems? Yeah. I mean, the main one is when you start to think of a point system and go back to that point of value that we talked about, you know, it could be an early stage partner that wrote a blog or recorded a podcast. It could be a later stage partner that, or prospective partner that built a CPQ, configure price quote tool. It could be some sort of analysis website. I mean, whatever it is across those 28 moments, it gets to the point where how do we monitor and measure that stuff? So making a partnership is one thing that's non-transactional, but the other thing is their funding available for if, you know, they wrote an ebook that happens to cash in twice as many customers if they read that ebook in our favor. And so, you know, I think that's a big part of it. And I think that's a big part of it. Could we get them to write five more ebooks? Is there an automated way that I can recognize their value, quantify their value, and then go back and know that the next dollar I'm going to spend ought to go there for the best projected return on investment? That's a little bit of AI, but that's a little bit of human capability to program that AI to recognize that. And it's also a lot of partnerships to be able to go and get access to that data and be able to share that data. So I think that's a big part of it. And there's companies that do through channel marketing really, really well. I can think of one here and building out those capabilities. And it could be using the tool itself, or it could be using adjacent marketing tools. But the most information is going to win the future. The bigger the data lake and the better processing of that data lake to be predictive and prescriptive. And so your next best dollar just doesn't go to distribution. It just doesn't go to the old places, hiring a new sales rep. There's new competition for that next dollar. And it's up to partner professionals to go and work every single angle at every single moment before, during, and after the transaction, work every moment in co-innovation to figure out where that next dollar should go. So as we start to wrap things up, do you have any advice that you could share with organizations that want to get the most out of their partner ecosystem this year, knowing that it may be a little bit more difficult for them to get the most out of that initiative? Yeah. I mean, the one thing that I almost see a hundred percent failure rate as is organizations taking an ecosystem or channel approach. That's only top down. All of us learned in college that, you know, let's take the top three things and hit a home run. I have to remind people every day that winning in the channel, winning an ecosystem, which is 10 times larger is a game of money ball. We have to get people on base. We have to get hit singles. And rather than going to that biggest channel, we have to get people on base. And rather than going to that biggest event and spending the most money and putting 50 people around a 50 by 50 booth, dissecting that and going to 20 or 30 events instead, showing up, coming into the grassroots, the bottom-up strategy in parallel, you're going to hit the biggest sellers. You're going to hit the biggest distributors. And the top-down strategy is an enterprise strategy. It's based on account-based marketing and everything else. Almost everyone is a black belt in this, especially at larger companies. The thing that they're all missing is the amount of money that they're going to get. And that's the thing that they're missing is this idea that I can go one to many. Most partners, the average partner, by the way, size is eight people. And the average partner, 50% of them don't make money consistently. This is cross-industry. 25% of them lose money. 25% of them don't make the numbers each and every month consistently. You're dealing with a different demographic and you're dealing with people that you have to handle through community. And whether they listen to a podcast like this, they go to a show, they subscribe to an association, they're in a peer group, they hang around analyst communities, they read magazines. There's 14 spheres of influence in every single industry, every single opportunity, whether you sell security, whether you sell lawn tractors, there's a lot of a few. Almost every industry I've ever looked at across the board comes down to about a thousand watering holes and comes down to about a hundred super connectors. These are the people that are on stage, that sit on the board of the association, that are on this podcast as a guest of yours, are just out there that are omnipresent on social media. So these are the hundred most important people to the future of the organization. And here's the thousand places where they're trusted and they've earned the platform, they've earned the milk box to stand on. Every company, 99.9% of the companies I talk to don't know the thousand watering holes. They don't know who the hundred people are and they just go back to spending more money at their biggest partner, which doesn't have the same return. Very, very insightful. All right. Well, thank you so much for being a guest on the show today, Jay. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and having you here. All right. You too. Thank you. All right, guys. Thank you for