Thinking outside the box in partner enablement w/ Recart & Social Lite

[00:04:18] Nic: My name is Nick Romeo Recart.com is. The number one paid for Shopify app on the app store have about 150 K plus installs, and we primarily deal with message Facebook messenger marketing.

[00:04:33] So just how you facilitate SMS marketing transactions or email marketing transactions. You can also transact and send messages on Facebook messenger. So that's what our product is. We have. A lot of awesome partners. One of them, if not the best one being Brandon on the, on this call. And we're primarily looking for Shopify agencies or e-comm agencies.

[00:04:55] Although I do got to say there are a lot of e-commerce agencies that hide behind Shopify and really a little bit deeper. They may have big commerce or Magento, but Shopify agencies and then their clients small to medium size businesses we're working with there. But we also work with clients that are doing about anywhere from a million to 10 million plus.

[00:05:14] Really depends on the partnership stack side of things. We're currently using partner portal.io to manage our partnerships. And then also partner page that I owe for our listings. And then beyond that, quite a lot of Slack for communication and the spreadsheets and all that good stuff. And then we're also starting to work with Lessonly as well for teaching, I mean, cart and the wonders of messenger 

[00:05:38] Alex: [00:05:38] marketing.

[00:05:39] Awesome. Nick, thank you very much for that. And over to you, Brandon, if I can get your name, what you're doing at the agency name and domain and your current tech partners. For 

[00:05:50] Brandon: [00:05:50] sure. My name's Brandon Clark. I'm an account executive at social. We are a full service e-commerce agency, which is partnered with Shopify since 2016.

[00:05:59] We focus on listen, permission-based marketing, interruptive advertising, and paid search marketing with our clients that we work with between 40 to 50 Shopify stores on a monthly basis on full and marketing retainers. Some of our partners include Klayvio privy. Obviously Recart.com one of our favorites recharge Zipify and ShipStation to name a few, our goal.

[00:06:20] And what we look for in partnerships is obviously similar values and the general outcome to the number one outcome is to better service our clients. And we found that obviously with Nick and Ricard and really excited to chat about it today, 

[00:06:33] Alex: [00:06:33] you're leading me on, I love that we were going to get to that in just a moment.

[00:06:37] I want to get back to Nick. Thank you very much for being on brand. And this is going to be an awesome discussion. So let's do this Nick, and we'd like to ask what. Are a few words to describe the state of your partner program. 

[00:06:48] Nic: [00:06:48] A few words. Okay. It's definitely thriving. I feel like a lot of e-commerce has met stage though.

[00:06:53] Trial and error, I guess that's I guess that's another word. And then I'll pick another good one. Promising I'd say is another one. So a lot of setup for the future and thinking outside the box, what we're going to talk about here today with the specific partnership agreement that. We worked out 

[00:07:09] Alex: [00:07:09] social life.

[00:07:09] Oh, that's perfect. Thinking outside the box, let's make that the theme for the discussion. Thinking outside the box with regards to incentivizing agencies, enabling agencies. So this is going to be a setup for Brandon. Of course. I want to find out yeah. What your current strategy is. For enabling partners, brand new partner of Brandon, never heard of you.

[00:07:31] He comes into the program, he's maybe using Recart.com with one of his sites. What are some of the things that you like to do to get them activated quickly and enable them throughout the program? Great question. 

[00:07:43] Nic: [00:07:43] And this is something that I am figuring out still every single month. And that's one of the cool things about partnerships is that there's a lot of cool ways to, you know, again, think outside the box to figure out.

[00:07:53] How to make this a win. That's the goal here? So anything that can really enable my partners to feel good about this, isn't just a face and a brand. I feel like partnership leaders could be more or less a gatekeeper and it's just like marketing, but I want to make it less of a marketing. It, me just selling essentially, and more of someone, a part of my community, we give to their business.

[00:08:18] They give to us, it's a two way street in lieu of that. Giving clients I think is very important that is done on a manual basis and also an automatic basis still working out some automatic things. But I think client sharing is very important, especially if. I am initially come in with clients sharing, but even before that, I would step away and start with co-marketing.

[00:08:41] If you could show value to one of your partners immediately, and that value is an email going out to say 80,000 people. And those are Shopify stores. I think that's pretty valuable, especially because they can take that content themselves and then replicate it. If they don't want to work with me technologically yet, that's fine.

[00:09:00] At least we've started. We've built something that. Done something together, which is great. It's on the internet. We could share it, we post it. And then from there you can build upon that. Hey, here's an asset that I've made. Do you want me to watermark it? Showing it's coming from your brand and exclusive service?

[00:09:16] Here's some swag, things like that, but it's creating this. Environment that, Hey, this isn't just a one way Sell-a-thon if you will, for lack of a better term, this is something that's a bit more , uh, I'm not going to go away anytime soon. I want to make this something long and fulfilling and, and then eventually even being friends with the person, I think that's important to understanding person down, understanding their goals for the year.

[00:09:40] So asking them questions. I think that's very important. What are your goals for the year? And I think that really helps. Foster a good relationship. 

[00:09:46] Alex: [00:09:46] Awesome. And just curious, what is the cadence of communication for you from entering the partner program? You get your partners involved in Slack, but what is your ideal?

[00:09:56] Yeah, 

[00:09:56] Nic: [00:09:56] it's begin some co-marketing opportunities. There's a slew of. Four options that you can pick from the webinar, a blog co-marketing interview, the partner page is low-hanging fruit. I don't count that, but it's putting them on our partner page, providing us an agency deal, offer, and then sending that offer out to our email list.

[00:10:17] And then of course the guest blog posts. So you can post something starting with one of those. Simultaneously starting a new area of communication. So probably on Slack, just to make things easier, you can tag people. It's a lot, it's a lot more personal than email is. So them ideally joining Slack. Yes. And then on the tech side, starting to think about three cart in this case, how you can start implementing that across your clients.

[00:10:40] Do I need to get you, like I said earlier, Certain assets that are catered directly to your clients, um, where they're coming from you, do I make you a custom landing page? I'm happy to do that, but initiating one of those efforts on the tech side, just like on the marketing side is also my, my, my deals thing.

[00:10:57] So I think about it as like a two-pronged approach. So if we just tick off at least one step on each of those. The co marketing and tech side, and then of course get on a better form of communication. I think that's a big win to start. 

[00:11:09] Alex: [00:11:09] Awesome. Nick and I want to turn back to Brandon for a minute here.

[00:11:14] That was some great insight into Ricard's program, but while I Brandon's here, we want to hear if that's actually working. And what about that? Part of the program. What about the enablement strategy that you just heard? Brandon works for you with Recart.com and other partners? And if you could just reiterate, and I don't think you mentioned it yet, but tell us what your main KPIs are for your role in the organization.

[00:11:39] With regards to partnership. If you have a specific metric or something that you guys are looking at doing with all your partners and what is your relationship to that metric first, and then let's talk about what you like to do with partners, for 

[00:11:51] Brandon: [00:11:51] sure. So on a metric basis, it is considered a vanity metric, but ultimately we're looking for client success.

[00:11:57] Now, what does that look like? Obviously, uplifts in net revenue, Nick was mentioning co-marketing events, email blasts, that type of stuff. And it's all very helpful on our end as an agency, I think mean he's mentioning conversations and touch points and using Slack as a constant form of communication. We really use that even to the point of actually getting on, like you said, a friend basis where we're catching up and chatting about these things now, in terms of what makes our partnerships tick from my position is like I mentioned earlier, client successes from the initial onboarding, we want, obviously our full team's buy-in how the tool works, what kind of results we're going to see and how ultimately this can affect our clients 

[00:12:35] Alex: [00:12:35] and results.

[00:12:36] Client success is the main KPI. So when you're looking at Recart.com, when you're looking at the partnership, right, You have to check the boxes, will this partnership. Really benefit my clients. Now there's a lot that can go into that from support to discounts, to just quality of the product. So let's go through that.

[00:12:56] Nick mentioned a few things that he likes to do with partners, inviting you to co marketing co-marketing with you. We'll get you new clients. It does not benefit client success. So let's talk about the types of things that your partners do for you to ensure. That you're hitting that KPI and your clients are happy.

[00:13:14] Anything come to 

[00:13:14] Brandon: [00:13:14] mind? For sure. So just in terms of support, I guess we can rewind to one of the first times that Nick and I originally met and built this partnership with the social editor. Ricardo Recart.com was actually a part of our Shopify West coast tour. Back in 2020. We toured around Alberta, BC, and actually ventured into the States a little bit where they actually gave us the resources to present to audiences of a couple hundred Shopify merchants.

[00:13:36] At each location. So that obviously involved me having a deep understanding of Recart.com before we actually went ahead and fully implemented it. So they had the buy in on my end from there, we got some original case studies and we has got some successes. I went 

[00:13:49] Alex: [00:13:49] from there. Awesome. So you just hit on something that.

[00:13:52] I didn't even really think about it. It's the co-marketing agenda that you're doing requires you to have a deeper understanding of the product. Your deeper understanding ends up benefiting your clients. So that is hitting on that KPI. It's not a. An endeavor where you would say, Hey, that's a client impact initiative.

[00:14:14] It, no, it's a branding. It's an exposure. It's a traffic, it's a lead generation or doing some co-marketing, but you just hit on a really important thing that I actually haven't thought about. So I'm going to add that to my book of repertoires here and maybe potentially use that in something else, but I'd like to hear a little bit more about.

[00:14:30] The specific agenda that you have under gone since working with Ricar, you guys are pretty close partners. Now you guys are friends. Now, you guys are doing a lot together. Recently, you launched a course. I want to hear a little bit more about what the premise of the course maybe started as, and then what it became with Recart.com involved or was Recart.com involved from the beginning.

[00:14:51] What was the ideation and when, and how has Recart.com 

[00:14:54] Brandon: [00:14:54] involved? So I guess you can backtrack a little bit there. So. We have our agency, which is called socialite, which we focus primarily on businesses doing more than 250 to $300,000 a month, annually businesses, not in the startup phase that can afford to pay for that retainer service.

[00:15:10] Now we identified a big area for the opportunity in the market for startup businesses. Now don't quote me on the staff, but I think it's anywhere from 70 to 80% of Shopify stores, don't earn more than $1,000 a month, a massive opportunity. And we've aligned this course, which is called merchant mastery.

[00:15:26] Similarly to Shopify goals of arming the rebels and giving them what they need to get off the ground and get the success that they earn for w without spinning their tires for years on end. And now we'll touch on, on the Ricard side and the course and how that kind of evolved. We are partnered with some of our key partners, such as pre-vis and Klayvio.

[00:15:44] In the initial stages of our course, right? We're talking about offer strategy, conversion strategy, AOV. How do we increase that? And also indoctrinating and educating customers and consumers with email marketing. Now it calls secondary in our, the eighth week of the course we've mastered and given some advanced trainings on both pre-vis and Klayvio now we're moving into additional tools that we can use to increase customer lifetime value to diverse diversify brands.

[00:16:10] Like omni-channel approach having messenger subscribers, having SMS subscribers, having emails, lists, and scribers, obviously. So there was a great fit. We've obviously partnered very closely with Recart.com and it just seemed to be a natural fit as one of those tools that we've seen success into to teach merchants on a kind of a step up level.

[00:16:28] So the burden of support and training these merchants on Recart.com, it doesn't fall back on them necessarily. We can take that in our own hands to equip them on procedures and tactics that we're doing with Ricard 

[00:16:38] Alex: [00:16:38] ourself. This is great. And forgive me, but I, I love to know specifics about A's the course paid.

[00:16:44] Can you answer that for me? Yep. It's 29 75. 29 75. So $2,975. I saw the list. It's like an eight week course. The generic, sorry, not generic. That's not the right word, but the meat of the course, the main focus of the course is on driving new business through your e-commerce store. So traffic and conversions, right?

[00:17:04] Absolutely. 

[00:17:04] Brandon: [00:17:04] So it's like an eight week program that's designed to help merchants scale your online sales. Using proven offer conversion, email and ad strategies. 

[00:17:12] Alex: [00:17:12] Awesome. Okay, perfect. This teases up. So I want to go back to Nick for a second. And Nick, if you can chime in here on a couple things. So you and I talked about your incentive structure, so we've got this course going on.

[00:17:24] You may know about it, maybe you don't, but there's a course going on that Brandon and team are operating you and I have a conversation about your incentive structure and the conversation was essentially, Hey, we've got. Uh, the ability to be flexible, what should we offer on the commission side of things?

[00:17:39] And we came to a conclusion, at least on the call. We'll see what happens on the, on the operations, but we at least came to the conclusion on the call that your ACV with Recart.com on average is not going to make a 10% to 15%. Maybe not even a 20% commission. That attractive, at least in the beginning for most of your partners.

[00:18:00] So we started to riff on ideas. So talk to me about what that conversation led to. And how that got to this new agenda and what's going on since the crime conversation. 

[00:18:12] Nic: [00:18:12] Yeah. And that was a very awesome conversation, Alex, that more or less led us into this, this awesome integration between Recart.com and merchant mastery, but laid, backtrack how we got there.

[00:18:25] I know we were talking about different incentive structures. Putting the commission upfront and that's definitely something I think we're going to go through with. But the second part of that call, we were talking about immersion. One of the issues at least over at Recart.com was that we have a lot of agency partners, great connections, a lot of people, and it's great.

[00:18:46] But you'll see that maybe there's only one or two clients at their agency of a pool of many dozens. So how can I be to 10% immersion? How can I get to 50% immersion? I think the easiest way to do that is to train and educate on a mass scale and then to provide value to the agencies and S. That's not just that 20%, which is like pretty much the value that we've been giving thus far.

[00:19:12] You're going to get commission. Yeah. Our products will increase your client's LTV, but what does that really mean? You're not going to see anything unless there's been months. It's just take this leap with us. Trust us, because we have all these amazing numbers. That's, that's basically what it's been up until recently, figuring out how to.

[00:19:28] Immerse the platform on a mass scale, because there is a learning curve, something that's a little new, it needs some education. That conversation led to a two way street that, I mean, Brandon worked out obviously with the things that we said as well, Alex, but it's creating this engine that provides clients, which read heart record has a ton of, of these clients that Brandon was talking about where 80.

[00:19:52] 70 to 80%. And I won't quote you on that brand, but Shopify stores, aren't doing more than a thousand bucks a month. There's no, there's a lot of opportunity or Ricard is filled with that because we have 155,000 installs we're getting installed right now. And I'll tell you right now, the majority of those are small clients.

[00:20:11] Cause it's like I have a new iPhone. Let me just download the top five apps effect. Same thing I just started e-commerce let me just download the top five apps. We don't have any agency partners that are quote unquote trained like messenger professionals at agencies you'll have email and SMS professionals at agencies, but there's yet to really be like messenger professionals are trained messenger professionals.

[00:20:32] If we can create this loop where after eight weeks or so after a client has paid and is using Recart.com, they get a welcome flow that says, Hey, it's been eight weeks or six weeks. I hope you've been enjoying Ricard. Thank you have, because you started paying for it, but would you like to set up something a little deeper?

[00:20:49] Here's one of our agency partners that can help you with your setup because you guys said a lot of these times, these entrepreneurs that are just starting off, they're making a lot of e-comm mistakes and that goes down to the app level. They need people to train them. And if we can provide that and give that value to our agency partners who can then train them.

[00:21:06] So thing like social, I will appear saying, Hey, here is one of our agency partners that can help train you, pass that on to socialize. Then socialite can take them, then upsell them. Then on the opposite end and the merchant mastery course they're training and selling our product. It just creates a perfect loop.

[00:21:24] Not only does it hit on the immersion side, but we're creating value for both of our companies creating values value for the merchants. Yeah. And that completely spinned off all from our conversation, Alex. So again, 

[00:21:33] Alex: [00:21:33] thank you. That's awesome. That's good to hear because I didn't have that context until just now I saw something show up on LinkedIn.

[00:21:41] I reached out to Brandon, invited him to be on this episode. So we're all uncovering what's going on from different perspectives. May the consultant Ricard and Brandon. So this is super cool guys. I think we're going to have some awesome context and I'd like to quickly remind all the listeners we have communities to support you in the growth of your partner programs.

[00:22:00] Or finding vetting and going to market with partners. If you're an agency for the tech partner teams, if you head to collective dot partner programs.io, you can find the partner programs, collective, where there are agency led, round tables, trainings, events, everything that you would need in order to learn how to grow with agency partners.

[00:22:22] If your agency had to community dot partner programs.io, that's where you'll find. More agency led round tables, the partner tracks that you need to succeed. And of course the support from everyone here at partner programs. Anyways, I'll let you get back to the episode and Brandon, I do want to get what's going on your end, but let me try to recap what Nick just said for everybody.

[00:22:43] So the timeline sorta went like this with a course. It was. Brandon and the team discovering an opportunity in the Shopify ecosystem, lots and lots. The bulk of Shopify users are under a thousand dollars a month in revenue from their stores. So Brandon and team decided to launch this course to help those.

[00:23:03] SMBs grow to help them get over a thousand to start growing their store and have success in Shopify. It's a win-win for everybody. And it's a win-win for his agency because obviously if they start having success, Brandon and team will sell them some sort of a retainer and get them as clients in the future.

[00:23:20] But then they started working with Recart.com because they were looking for tools that can increase average order value, ACV, all the good numbers in a Shopify store. Meanwhile, Nick and I spoke about incentive structure. And then we started talking about how to create this partner enablement flywheel. Nick is a one man shop on the partnerships team.

[00:23:40] He's got a small team of success. People they've got thousands of installs, I think a week or maybe even a day. There's not enough bandwidth. Figure out who in that install base is a potential partner and then enable them. There's just not. So the idea is. Go to an agency that is already offering a course, ask them to include Recart.com in the course, and then, and enable them to support the Recart.com course, work the curriculum inside their regular course, by including the course link.

[00:24:12] In their new user onboarding. Now what I want to know from Brandon, is there anything I missed in there first, but then also, what do you do if an agency, a potential competitor comes into the course? Do you have any SOP there or is it just business as usual? 

[00:24:29] Brandon: [00:24:29] No, for sure. No, you absolutely nailed it on the head with everything there.

[00:24:32] So nice work on that. Your question is if an agency were to take our course, is that, is that what 

[00:24:37] Alex: [00:24:37] you're wondering? This is the big question. It's if I'm going to go to an agency as Recart.com and say, Hey, please teach our agencies how to use Recart.com because obviously some of the people signing up for your course and signing up for Ricard, our agency users, not necessarily store owners.

[00:24:52] What do you guys do with those students that come to your course? Do you sell them? Spot or no, or 

[00:24:57] Brandon: [00:24:57] what's your absolutely one of the big takeaways from this entire course as well, but it's just when this is all complete, this is going to be, and is already used as a training tool for our entire team, but to go through and to get up to speed on the socialite way.

[00:25:12] As both as there is tons and tons of information out there, whether you're on YouTube or the hustle or wherever it is, there's so much information on e-commerce and what to do and all these tactics. And the main goal here was we've been a Shopify partner agency since 2016, right? We've tested hundreds of campaigns.

[00:25:31] We've spent millions of dollars. We've sent hundreds and thousands of emails. The number one goal here let's make a course for people just starting off. To get quick wins to start getting some success underneath our belt, because like you mentioned, this SMB market, not a lot of these startups can afford to hire an agency full time.

[00:25:50] So we want to give them the tools six succeed. And it's not just a course, so they're not just jumping in there and watching the eight weeks of a video. And they're going away from there. We're not giving, it's just giving high level fluff. So we're giving both training videos with resources, with downloads, so they can actually some flows within Ricard, some flows that they can copy and paste into their Klayvio account recipes to create offer exit intent, upsells in privy.

[00:26:16] We're giving them both the tools and actual tactics to get started. And like you said, 100% from the far we can watch people progress through this course, come to the weekly group coaching calls where they're getting one-on-one help with their current campaign. And ultimately we can watch from afar and look for the winners.

[00:26:31] And if at that point in time, they want to work with socialite, right? We are more than happy to extend that relationship as they have learned the social white wait, sorry. The socialite way from the core. 

[00:26:42] Alex: [00:26:42] I love it, man. This is truly democratic, truly partner ship based in tent. You guys really want to better the ecosystem.

[00:26:50] Sure. You're going to make some money. I'm sure you're going to get some clients out of it. But what's bigger than that I think is establishing your agency as the thought leader in the space, and really getting super close to these merchants by training them over eight weeks, not just selling them a retainer and having them have success in a campaign.

[00:27:11] That's great. But if you can get super close to these merchants, give them some real value, enable them. They're going to be referring you all day. You're going to have all the software and tech partners in the ecosystem knocking on your door, and you're going to get enormous benefit from this. So I'm loving that you guys decided to do this.

[00:27:30] And now I think the next question is what is the expectations from both sides and what are the next steps for let's start with  and then I'll go back to Brandon to hear how this is going to operate on a week to week basis. So Nick, what are the expectations? What are you going to do to get this course to be successful for Recart.com with the KPIs 

[00:27:52] Nic: [00:27:52] that you want out of it?

[00:27:53] Definitely clients and then socialites, I guess like view on, on us as the main things that I want to focus on. So to provide socialite, the tool succeed, I've been working over the past couple of weeks to get some custom videos, uh, made for them so that they could start training. People internally so that when week eight comes around, there is people fully trained internally at socialite with clear videos that could even be copied and pasted and sent to merchants too.

[00:28:20] That's a long version of saying, creating helpful learning materials and resources for socialite, because at the end of the day, we know Recart.com better than anyone else, but we want people to like step inside our minds to, and use our product the way we've been using it for so long. That's one of the main steps.

[00:28:35] Powerful learning materials besides that's not a two week you get on horses and employee two week training. So creating digestible bite-size ways to teach at scale is very important, especially if you're teaching so many people at scale. And then on the other side, it's like enabling those clients. Hey, are they happy?

[00:28:54] Do they need help? Maybe we provide some resources as well. That's. Like the main things that I would say are really that I will be focusing on. And of course I expect that those two things combined will lead to more clients for Recart.com, which then you can 

[00:29:09] Alex: [00:29:09] take anywhere. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And I think the financial components of it are what I'm just assuming the questions in the back of people's minds are, do I pay a socialite?

[00:29:18] For the seats that I'm sending them. So playing that devil's advocate, what are some of the conversations and some of the decisions you guys have made around what happens when Recart.com sends a user to take Brandon's course? Is there a discount in there? Is there a free spot for them? Is there nothing? And they just are met with a 2,900 feet.

[00:29:38] What are some of the conversations you've had and would you 

[00:29:40] Nic: [00:29:40] decide on, yeah, that's a great question. I think that's still a conversation that we're fully flushing out. But as of right now, it's quote unquote, just an automatic referral. Maybe we could do something like 10, 20% off. I think I don't see any reason why.

[00:29:54] Um, that's not possible, but as of right now, we provide them a client and then they ultimately teach the client and then hopefully provide some ones that are entering their accelerator back to us. That's been the main value add here. Although, I think framing it as some sort of discount in either direction can obviously move the needle a lot more.

[00:30:15] Alex: [00:30:15] Yeah. And Brandon, maybe you can chime in on this because this is something we're trying to work this system out because this is something that's gold. I believe this is true. Gold for partner teams to do is to take an agency. That's got thought leadership and subject matter expertise and create this sort of enablement flywheel, where you're loving the relationship because obviously they're sending you users.

[00:30:38] To take your course, you're making money off the course. You're churning out clients from the course. You're converting clients, sorry, from the course. And you're happy and Ricard's happy because in the course you're teaching them how to do something using Riccar it's a perfect relationship, but financially it's got to make sense.

[00:30:55] So what have you guys talked about with regards to partners sending their users to your course? Is there anything. In it for them to do more of the referral. Right. Are you incentivizing partners to send you more referrals? 

[00:31:08] Brandon: [00:31:08] Absolutely. So I'm going to rewind a little bit there and talk about the thought of like the commissions and the kind of old, this whole structure of this podcast.

[00:31:14] What are they relevant? What type of payloads are interesting? It's funny how we're talking about this and next, all that. We're still flushing out that feral fee or the commissions or whatever that is. And then it just goes to show when values and goals align, the commissions come secondary when the clients and the client success comes first.

[00:31:29] It just goes to show like this conversation and what we're talking about today. Obviously we are going to sort that out and we are going to offer that a percentage, whatever that is, we still need to determine, but the Shopify ecosystem being as small as it is. And we built a course here that we really think it's a great piece of content it's going to help people get to that next level.

[00:31:47] So we want to empower both our partners and affiliates of this program up from 10 15 to 25%. Of the course price, we will pay out in referral fees to these partners or even affiliates in this kind of new age, new year. And last probably five years. Affiliate marketing has been such a big part of growing stuff organically, but also with people that have taken the course program.

[00:32:12] Coaching consulting have seen the results and they bring in like-minded people in their community and ecosystem. And I think that's really powerful. 

[00:32:19] Alex: [00:32:19] Thank you for giving us that context and you're right. And it's, it hasn't happened yet because just the relationship and the course itself is so valuable intrinsically that you don't necessarily have to bring up.

[00:32:31] The, Oh, what am I going to get paid? And are my users going to get discounts? But inevitably just like any partnership that you've compensation questions come about. It's a good time to talk towards that real quick. So with the course, you're going to pay an affiliate fee to anyone that refers you, right?

[00:32:47] Recart.com they're not in the business of collecting affiliate fees. They're not going to accept that. Of course. So maybe what you'll do is say, you know what all Recart.com customers, if you have a Ricard account, you get into our course for 30% off for 20% off. That's probably fair. And that may be something you guys decide on later.

[00:33:03] The important thing is the course is valuable enough that Nick and Recart.com are going to send people to the course and recommend the use it because if a free user comes to Recart.com with no agenda on how to use Recart.com. Where to implement it. What campaigns do you use it with? They're probably going to a trip probably, but if they take Brandon's course and socialites course, the chances of them becoming a power user of Recart.com and adding more accounts and doing all the great stuff that makes Recart.com money are going to skyrocket.

[00:33:33] So it's a win-win. So we don't need to talk about money right now in the hypothetical that this course was free. And privy Klayvio and Recart.com all had classes in the course where you show a workflow on how to use all three together, or you show an implementation and you show how to set it up for the campaign and you help your students launch campaign.

[00:33:54] Of course, they're going to have to upgrade the Ricard account in order to launch that campaign in that world. Let's just play hypothetical. Let's just say your course is free. And Recart.com takes what they would have paid in an hourly employee rates to get that customer upgraded. Let's just say it cost him an average of five hours, $500, or that amount of time they're willing to pay you $500 per seat in the course.

[00:34:23] Is that something that you guys have thought about or is that, has that been a discussion at all to say, you know what free for Recart.com users, if they pay us a $500. Fee or just a new course. That's all about Recart.com Klayvio and privy and they pay us 

[00:34:38] Brandon: [00:34:38] for each seat. Yeah. Ultimately there's no kind of horizon with this program and kind of where we can go.

[00:34:43] I think absolutely. In the next three to six months to even a year, we're going to have each kind of major app platform that we're partnered with having their own course that would live on merchant mastery. I think definitely there's compensation on both ends that we can chat about. I think in terms of the agency and where we see value in that.

[00:35:02] Is if we can teach others how to use the platform effectively and get results and do that time and time again, I think one of the biggest takeaways there is just our team's ability, therefore, to go with them and crush it for our clients on the agency side. Now that being said, using some of those specialized courses for the previous, for the Klaviyo.

[00:35:20] So the, um, as an entryway to. Gave that authority as a thought leader in the space and in the e-commerce and Shopify space. 

[00:35:27] Alex: [00:35:27] I love it. So it sounds like everything is coming together, alignments happening on all sides. You guys have a fantastic course. I saw the curriculum. It's awesome. Maybe a pen, some new classes based on partnerships that you really, that are willing to maybe share the course and, or just.

[00:35:46] Or just tools that you really like to use and you really like to include, and you want to make it good for the students first, but obviously you do have bills to pay. You do have growth to objectives to meet. So you got to figure that out too, but I like how this is all happening. I like how it's happening somewhat organically.

[00:36:00] And it's all coming together with this premise of partnerships. So I'll end with Nick. And I think we just want to wrap this episode up with what is the outlook and the strategy for the next. Six months. Hypothetically, you've got a couple things that are in the wind right now, but let's say we come to decisions on those couple of things.

[00:36:22] What would your next six months of a dream partner program structure on the incentive side look like? And then any big plans that you have for productizing your enablement strategy in some way. Anything at all? Yeah. 

[00:36:37] Nic: [00:36:37] So great question. Dream partner. So a couple of things, the dream partner relationship, obviously what we got going on right now is great.

[00:36:46] And this isn't the quote unquote pilot of this, because again, Most of the partner program has been working in the sense that I give you commission, you give us clients and we also do some of the work for you. That's been the other thing, but it's not unknown that doing all the work for an agency at some point becomes a little hard internally.

[00:37:07] If you think of all the man hours, as you were saying, thinking in the future, having seats or people reselling Recart.com. Having messenger being something like a Klayvio or like an attentive where it's very viral and buzzy, and there's people that own these at other agencies and they're champions there and there's experts and they're willing to engage and execute on messenger flows.

[00:37:30] For example, that would be a dream. So having. A trained professional through a Recart.com course. So we're actually working on like a Lessonly course right now as well. So something like that would be phenomenal. Someone championing us that could train potential Recart.com users and then agencies reselling the course.

[00:37:48] So right now a lot of agencies use us as an anchor. To renegotiate and get those renewals for those three month contracts that they have six month contracts. Hey, in the last X months I introduced you to Ricard. They did X, Y, and Z yada. So that's another main thing that agencies are doing, but ideally, it'd be very amazing to, as you were saying earlier in a way that we could just pay people, they teach Ricard implement it, and it's just more immersive, less an affiliate feeling, which is.

[00:38:18] How it's felt a lot of the time. This is definitely an instance where it hasn't felt that way. And more of this is something that is a part of our agency that we want to put on her badge, put on her chest and. Execute and implement. So I think that is one of the main goals there. So more resources on messenger, more tools on training people three cart, because again, that is a space that is very unknown.

[00:38:44] So I think we have a unique challenge there. So that's at least Ricard's Kohl's and in the next six months, creating more of these awesome relationships that we have, like with Brandon. Awesome. 

[00:38:55] Alex: [00:38:55] Yeah. You guys have a really unique partnership. I think. Not many of these tools out there are enabling agencies to teach their users in a better way than they can teach themselves.

[00:39:07] Nick and the  team can teach all day about how to use Recart.com. But they can't and they shouldn't honestly be the ones teaching their users, what to do after the implementation. Where does Recart.com fit into the funnel? How do paid ads versus organic fit into Ricard's ecosystem? It's just, it's something that Brandon and socialites should do and they are doing it.

[00:39:28] So the bigger question for all the partner teams listening is how are you going to work with these agencies that are. Either teaching other agencies now or are open to it. What is the relationship going to be? How are you going to create that partner enablement, flywheel that Ricard's creating with Brandon and socialites?

[00:39:45] So thank you both for being on. It's been a pleasure. We are at the hour we're past time. So I'm going to let you guys go, but you guys have been awesome. I'll chop this up. We'll have an awesome episode. To publish here shortly. Thank you guys. 

[00:39:58] Brandon: [00:39:58] Great time. 

[00:39:59] Nic: [00:39:59] Absolutely. As always. And we'll talk 

[00:40:01] Alex: [00:40:01] in Slack guys.

[00:40:01] Thanks a lot. .