How to Build an Agency Partner Program; Add Some Video

Dee Dee de Kenessey, Agency Partner Program Manager at Wistia, joins Jen Spencer on The Allbound Podcast to discuss the why behind creating a partner agency program, owning the customer relationship, and divvying up valuable time between partners.

I'm so happy to have you. For anyone who's not familiar with Wistia, Wistia provides professional video hosting for businesses, they help businesses add their videos to the web, track performance, and really find new ways to build and engage with their audiences using online video. Dee Dee, is there anything I missed there? Anything you want to add about Wistia? And then tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure. I think you hit the nail on Wistia. That's sort of it in a nutshell. I've been at Wistia for the past year, and I run our agency program over here. We work with a lot of agencies who are doing video for clients in all capacities; some of them are production shops, some of them are marketing agencies, some of them are large ad agencies, but we've got actually a lot of our customers do exactly that. So it's been really fun to come to Wistia in the last year and to launch and be running this program.

So you joined Wistia and the Partner Program a year ago. How long has the program itself been in place? Did it start when you arrived or was it something that you sort of adopted when you joined the company?

It started when I arrived. So Wistia brought me on to develop and run this. I came to Wistia just a year ago, January 2016, and we launched the program three weeks after I started.

Unbelievable.

It was pretty unbelievable. It was one of those things where I said, "I think the best way to do it is just to dive right in and build it as I go." And really what that allowed me to do was to really listen to our first round of agencies that signed up. So instead of building anything in a vacuum and crossing my fingers and hoping that it worked, it was great to be able to listen to that first cohort, ask them questions, and build what they needed. So it was a hectic beginning, but I'm glad we dove right in.

Why did it make sense for Wistia to begin an agency-based program? What was your executive team hoping to achieve by developing this kind of program and hiring you to come build this?

Well, most businesses, when they set out to make a video, hire someone to do that video for them. It's not unusual that you'll find businesses that have internal video teams, but most of the time it's an external hire to actually contract out or to get an agency or production shop to do that. So, again, that can be anyone from an independent videographer or a video-production studio, or a marketing agency that just offers video services. So, really, agencies are a natural fit for Wistia. In fact, many of Wistia's customers are, and have historically been, agencies. It really made sense for Wistia to dig deep into that cohort of its customers and to figure out if we could find a way to really partner with them and help them be more successful.

And what I've found and what I saw coming in is that there were sort of two huge opportunities within video for both the production shops and the broader marketing agencies. So, regardless of what type of an agency you are, agencies that are doing video have an opportunity to upsell their clients or just increase the size of the deals they're closing by adding video services to their existing portfolio. So either agencies are adding video on for the first time, maybe they offer services and now have an opportunity to increase that by adding video on top of the SEO or the social work or the e-mail marketing they might be doing, or, for those that already offer video, adding additional video services.

The real success comes when agencies go from just doing video production to running full video marketing campaigns. So instead of just making the video, the agency can own the strategy, and the planning, they can do the marketing around that video, and if they're using a platform like Wistia, they can measure and prove the success of that video. What we've found - what agencies found, partnering with us and starting to do this - is that their clients are willing to pay more for those services because they ensure the success of the video.

So part of our goal with starting this agency partner program is to educate the agencies that were already using Wistia about how to run these types of campaigns, and how do you you use Wistia to prove out the success of their videos, and then how to upsell, or sell larger deals.

The other opportunity lies in going from doing sort of one off video projects, to having a retainer model of work. Most people just sort of say, "Hey, we want one video for our home page, and that's it." That's sort of the equivalent of asking an agency to just write one blog post, and hope that it goes viral, or one tweet and hope it goes viral. And video can do so much more than just go on YouTube, or go on a home page. Video boosts results across the board for both marketing and sales initiatives, if it's lead nurturing, or closing deals, or whatever it is.

So, again, we saw another opportunity to help educate agencies about what the opportunities are that come with using video in different parts of the marketing and sales process for clients. Videos are also getting cheaper and cheaper. Wistia has a ton of great resources for our agencies about how to record on an iPhone, or make a lighting kit for under a hundred bucks. We wanted to help agencies also do more and better video, and then help them make the case to move to that retainer model, which is just a more sustainable source of income for them.

So really, our goal in creating a partner program is to help agencies do those two things. And of course it's a win-win, right? If video becomes an agency's core strength, if they're closing larger deals, if they're getting onto a retainer model and doing more and more video, then the more clients they'll introduce to Wistia and the longer those clients stick around. Being able to help agencies be successful in two ways was really the main driver.

Well I can definitely see how using a platform like Wistia can help an agency add value to that client for sure. From a very nitty-gritty partner program detail sort of perspective, who owns the customer? Are the agencies reselling Wistia, or are the agencies referring the business to Wistia? So who owns that customer relationship?

So the agencies are reselling Wistia. We decided to go the route of having an agency partner reseller program, as opposed to sort of having an affiliate program where people just get credit for links in to Wistia or referring leads because we wanted to own the end relationship with the client.

I actually came from HubSpot before Wistia and a lot of our inspiration for a successful model of a great agency program comes from Hotspot's agency program. I think they do great things with their agencies. One thing that is core of their model, which we've taken up and has been really valuable, is owning that end relationship with the client. Because at the end of the day, agencies and their clients, it's a temporary relationship. They might work together for a couple years, or a couple months, but at the end of the day, they usually part ways. You want to make sure that your company owns that end relationship so that when an agency disappears, they don't also take all their clients with them.

Right. So let's say - well, here I'm Allbound, right? So I'm Allbound and let's say I hire an agency to create all of my marketing content, which includes videos, and my agency then recommends that I host those videos in Wistia. Is that all wrapped into that one contract I sign with my agency? How do you handle it from a document perspective? So you stay in connection with that customer but the agency also still plays a supportive role in that customer relationship?

Absolutely. That's a great question. So the way that we have it structured is we ask our agencies to separate out the cost of Wistia from sort of the general charge, or to at least make it very clear within the contract that they're signing with their clients, that Wistia is a separate account, a separate charge. We ask that every agency signs their clients up with unique Wistia accounts, and we want the end client to own that account, basically to be the account holder, and own the billing. It's as simple as that. Every agency is made a manager on any client account, so that's how they have full access to the account, they can do all the work in the account, they have access to basically everything but billing. And that's also our way of tracking which agency is associated with which accounts, is whether or not they're manager on there.

We ask that either that the agency sign their clients up for Wistia, or just tell the client to sign up for Wistia, and as long as the agency makes themselves a manager in that account, then all that credit for that account, for the sign up, the resale, and sort of the future work goes to the agency.

Well, I mean, it's great to also hear that this is built into your product, right? It sounds to me like the Wistia platform was built with the intention, the plan, of going to market at least partially through partners. To be able to support that kind of a relationship which is great. I mean, it would be much more challenging for you to determine your success and to track that kind of engagement without that feature within the product.

Absolutely. I think it wasn't actually the initial intent. I don't think this was the plan all along. I'm not sure Wistia knew exactly what it was going to do, but they certainly knew that they had agencies in their ecosystems and that they wanted to have a specific type of user in the account that was a manager and that was different from just a normal user, was different from the account owner, and just had different sort of privileges and permissions mandated. That feature has really made the difference.

That makes a ton of sense. Now you brought these partners on, you just get started, you bring on that initial cohort like you said. I'm sure you've expanded since the initial recruitment that you've done. How do you determine which of your partners are going to earn that lion's share of your attention? Is it based on revenue that they generate? Is it based on their own potential for growth? A combination? How do you decide where you're going to spend your very valuable time?

That's actually the question that occupied me the most and probably still occupies me the most today, but especially when I was starting out the program. Wistia, the company is about 80 people right now, it was about 60 when I joined a year ago. Our agency team is fairly small. So, as I was building, not only was I thinking how can I make this a sustainable, scalable program within this business, but I was also thinking how can I build something that doesn't require a giant team to run it right off the bat? That could still scale up if it's just me or just a couple of us working on it.

So the way that we broke it down and sort of framed it out is every agency that signs up in our program has access to a really nice robust source of resources and training. I made sure that every single one of those things were built scalably and were fairly self sustaining. By scalable I mean that we have a resource center that we continually add new resources too. We stay top-of-mind not by having a weekly call with every agency, but by sending out a weekly newsletter. We've got a self-sustaining community in Slack that's attended to by the most active agencies in there. We use marketing automation to take care of our on-boarding process, the things like that.

Frankly, and most importantly, we eat our own dog food - we use a ton of video. So instead of having webinars or calls or just emails, video has actually been an incredible way, a really engaging way, to stay in touch with agencies and to have them get familiar with us, put a face to the name, and be able to communicate with them in a way that doesn't just feel like yet another email.

And then on top of that, we determine which agencies in particular we pay most attention to from our tiered program, which basically just rewards the top agencies by looking at a combo of the revenue they're bringing in every month and the account activity. We wanted to sort of reward them and pay attention not just to the ones that were reselling the most Wistia accounts, but that were actually actively getting in there and doing good work for their clients. And those agencies get sort of additional benefits, and part of that is some more one-on-one attention.

So they get a sales manager to help look at their client portfolios and help them close deals, and they get a customer success manager to help them use Wistia. When agencies reach a certain level, that's when we can justify and scalably and sustainably pay more attention to them.

So when you launched the program initially, did you launch with a tiered program, or was that something that came later?

That came later, maybe about six months in. I didn't want to build it initially, though it was in the plan all along, because I wanted to make sure that we were setting the tiers in a place that was reasonable, but also aspirational, right? So, I didn't want to set the tiers to some number of accounts or MRR or activity that no one would be able to get to, or that everyone would be able to get to, and then have to course correct from there. I wanted to see sort of who are our strongest agencies, and what are they doing on their own, before we set it up.

Makes sense. Engagement is going to be really important. You touched on so many different ways that you're transferring knowledge to your partners; leveraging video, obviously using marketing automation, creating this sort of cadence of communications. What's the biggest challenge that you have actually engaging your partners after they come onboard?

When I was doing my research as we were launching and as I was talking to people at other agency programs and doing some homework there, I kept hearing two things over and over again. The two biggest challenges for any - not only a new agency program but just for agencies that are in partner programs in general, the two biggest challenges are staying top-of-mind and helping those agencies make that first sale.

And I have found that is absolutely right. It is hard to stay top-of-mind because agencies do so much, right? Not only are they running every part of a business for themselves, but they're taking care of their clients or really it's switched. Oftentimes they take care of their clients first and have a tough time making time to run their business and do their own marketing and they're partnering with different people, they might also be a Marketo partner, might also be a Salesforce partner so staying top-of-mind is a tough one.

And also making that first sale. I have definitely seen that if they figure out how to sell Wistia once, then they got it. They understand, not only do they sort of understand what it takes to make that first sale and they got their spiel down, their pitch deck, whatever it is, but they also are then seeing actual dollar-value coming in for it and are incentivised to make that second sale, if see it helping them. So those two things are really tough and we try a bunch of different things to get at both of these things, and I think we do a fairly good job. Those are the two tough things and they're always tough.

Yeah. I think it's consistent. When we talk to other partner program leaders who are building agency-based programs. It is hard because, like you said, they are very focused on their customers as an agency. We say it's like the Cobbler's kids have no shoes, right?

That's right.

They put everything that they have all into their customers and then they kind of think about themselves last, so you're always going to be challenged with that. I also find that there are a lot of SaaS companies today that are vying for the attention of agencies and looking to agencies as a way to expand that customer reach. So if you've got one agency that you're partnering with they're probably partnering with other companies as well.

I'm just curious, have you noticed any sort of complementary technologies or complementary organizations where you have a lot of crossover? Maybe one of your agency partners is doing a lot of business with you and maybe another entity, or maybe a bridge that you hadn't previously identified.

Yeah. Absolutely. That's actually really been helpful for us because one of the easiest ways to stay top-of-mind with agencies is for them to really see value in the partnership with you. That sounds obvious, but say you've got a group of agencies and they are only Salesforce partners, then when that program grows, to a certain extent, it's hard to differentiate themselves. So they're then looking for that next opportunity so that they can be both a Salesforce and Wistia partner and then they can say to their clients, "Hey, I don't just offer Salesforce help, I also do this other thing. I'm different." It's a way for them to stand out. So if they can find the value in that, that really helps.

The partners, the other SaaS companies that we've found to be really great partners for us in that respect and we just share a lot of agencies, are the marketing automation ones. HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot are sort of in the big three partners for us and love working with all three of them. There's no competition there. The things that we offer are mutually beneficial and in fact partner really well on top of each other. We use other marketing automation platforms as well, it's not just those three. There are a lot of ones that just offer email, right? So sort of your MailChimps, etc., and that's also great for an agency to be able to say, "Hey, not only are we a MailChimp agency and can offer email services but we also offer video services - we're a Wistia agency." So again, for us it's all about sort of complimentary marketing services.

That makes perfect sense. Wistia is a very scalable product, so I can see how you have the opportunity to partner with organizations both on kind of the lower SMB part of the market and then go all the way up, up enterprise. So that makes perfect sense to me. It gives you a lot of opportunity, from a partnership perspective, to find organizations out there where you can nicely complement each other.

So, as you said, when we kind of first kicked this off, you've literally just wrapped up your first year building and overseeing Wistia's agency partner program. So if you could go back in time one year what advice would you give yourself?

What a great question this is. I love this one. In the last year we went from zero partners to over 500, and it's been a pretty incredible year. We set some pretty aggressive goals for sign up and revenue and hit them all, which was incredible. This past year, I couldn't help but worry or want to move faster. It's tough when you build something new and you're not sure exactly how it's going to go.

If I could give myself advice, it would have been to have a little bit more patience and to trust my intuitions. I knew, I really knew, that it was going to be successful from the homework I had done before coming to Wistia, to the sort of intuition I had about how things were going, and then the initial results the first few months in. It's hard to relax when you're building something new at a company, when you're still proving it out, both internally and externally. So my advice is to relax a little bit, which, of course, hindsight is 20/20. It's tough when something is your baby and you really want it to work, but at the end of the day, hard work goes a long way and pushing things forward goes a long way. I do believe that if something is the right fit, it's going to work. I knew from the get-go that this was the right fit, that this kind of a program was going to work for Wistia, it was going to work for the people at the agencies using Wistia. So I wish I had trusted myself just a little bit more.

That's great. That's really great advice to calm that self doubt.

Oh, it's so hard.

I know. Luckily, there are organizations like you mentioned HubSpot, and they built an amazing agency-based partner program where it's generating, I think, 40% of their revenue now. So it's been done. You had the building blocks. You got the head on your shoulders. You've got a great product. But patience, man. It all just takes time.

So before I let you go, I like to ask people just a couple of more personal questions - I have five - in a quick little speed round. Are you ready for this?

Sure.

Okay. Just so we can get to know you a little better. All right. So first question is what is your favorite city?

New York City. That is where I was born and raised. It's the best.

Question number two, are you an animal lover? Yes or no.

Oh, yes. I have two cats and I think they're great. I also love dogs, I don't discriminate. Dogs and cats, hopefully someday I'll have lots of both.

Good stuff. Question number three, Mac or PC?

Mac all the way. I wish it weren't true. I feel a little bad about it, but they're so sleek.

Okay wait. Why do you feel bad about it?

I don't know. I know that I am really, at the end of day, paying more just because it's prettier. That makes me a little sad, but they're so beautifully designed. Now that I'm on a Mac, I can't imagine ever not being on a Mac.

I know. I'm right there with you. Okay, question number four, Uber or Lyft?

Uber, but I--

You sound pained.

I do feel a little bad because I've used Lyft and Lyft is just as, I don't know - there's really no distinguishing difference. I think it's probably because the Uber app comes first in my phone before the Lyft app, even though they're side by side, but I guess it's Uber.

Alright. Last question, let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses paid trip, where would it be to?

Oh, it would be to Morocco. Hopefully someday I'll be able to go to, that's where I would love to go.

Wonderful. Well, I would love to be able to send you.

That'd be great.

Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, Dee Dee. It was such a pleasure. If any of our listeners would like to reach out to you personally and ask some additional questions, get to know you a little bit better, what's the best way for them to do so?

Easy way to do it is on LinkedIn. I'm on there, Dee Dee de Kenessey. Also, Twitter is easy, it's just @deedeedkc. If people want to get in touch with me in a sort of more direct way - although I do look at both of those, they can also email agency@wistia.com. I'm usually on the other end of that, certainly it would get to me if someone went through that way.

I'm absolutely welcome to people reaching out regardless of whether or not you're starting a new program, or are an agency, or are just running an agency partner program, want to do a little commiserating or brainstorming. I love that. Some of the most inspiring moments I've had this past year have been talking to other people who run other agency partner programs or who are starting out, and being able to brainstorm together has been great.

Wonderful. That's so great to hear. Again, thank you for your time. Thanks everyone else for tuning in and join us next week for a brand new episode of The Allbound Podcast.