Learn how to sell more online courses via indirect sales and referral partners with Doris Nagel of Globalocity in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett of the LifterLMS team. Doris and Chris dive into the essentials for creating effective partnerships by establishing trust and providing mutual benefit.
The purpose of Globalocity is to help companies grow their sales by focusing primarily on indirect channels to market. Indirect sales means using partners to promote and sell your products, rather than or in addition to you selling them yourself. Indirect sales may mean different things depending on your market. If you are a distributor of a product, an indirect sales channel might be a licensee or franchisee.
Creating effective partnerships is more complicated than it may seem on the surface. A lot of times course creators are experts in a particular field, and they lack the sales ability needed to make money on their courses. If you struggle with the sales skill, you can build partnerships and take advantage of indirect sales.
One of the keys to creating strong partnerships is having a clear value proposition. This will help you figure out very early on weather it is a good partnership for your business or not. You will often find the people you can offer the most value to are your competitors. Chris and Doris talk about the opportunities you have to work with your competitors and mutually benefit.
One of the reasons it is hard for accountants and online course creators to guarantee results is because they don’t have a great way of holding clients accountable. You could have the best weight loss program in the world, but at the end of the day success for the client comes down to whether they put in the time and do the work.
To learn more about Doris Nagel head to GlobalocityServices.com. You can find her on Twitter at @DorisNagel. You can also reach out to Doris personally by email. The Globalocity YouTube channel is Globalocity LLC, and their podcast is on there as well. If you head to Learning.GlobalocityServices.com you can check out the Globalocity online courses on topics like management and international distribution.
Find out more about how you can use LifterLMS to build your own online courses and membership sites at LifterLMS.com. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris Badgett, and we’re joined by a special guest, Doris Nagel of Globalocity Services at GlobalocityServices.com. Doris, welcome to the show.
Doris Nagel: Hey, Chris, thanks so much for having me.
Chris Badgett: Can you explain to the listeners what you do? What is Globalocity Services all about?
Doris Nagel: We’re all about helping companies grow their sales, but focusing primarily on what we call indirect channels to market. So there are … If you look at Amazon, there’s thousands of books on sales enablement and customer experience, and on how to develop your sales skills, but most companies in some form or another use indirect sales channels, and there’s very little written about that.
So, the way I like to describe direct sales is selling to the customer, whereas using partners is selling through your partners to reach more customers. Indirect partners can be a lot of different things. Depending on your industry, it might be a classic stocking distributor. It might be an OEM, or licensee. It could be a franchisee. It could be a wholesaler. In the hardware and software world, they call them VARs, or value added reseller, and systems integrators. When it comes to service businesses, it can even be referral partners.
So, we’re pretty passionate about helping companies do a better job of selling through partners to reach markets, and it’s not as easy as it sounds because you’re dealing with a completely independent company, and you need to partner effectively, quite frankly, in order for your sales to really grow. It is not the same as selling direct.
Chris Badgett: That is awesome. For this episode, if we focus this power of indirect sales onto the course creator, sales … There’s a saying that sales heals all wounds, which is a problem for course creators, especially if they’re more of the expert than the entrepreneur.
Doris Nagel: Right.
Chris Badgett: Maybe they’re not used to sales and marketing. It can be a lot more relaxing to basically build a sales force through indirect partners instead of doing a bunch of direct sales. Let’s talk a little bit about the landscape of the different kinds of indirect partners. What comes to mind to me are affiliates, joint venture partners.
Doris Nagel: Right.
Chris Badgett: And even using your own customers or students as a sales force.
Doris Nagel: Absolutely.
Chris Badgett: You also mentioned value added resellers, and then there’s licensing.
Doris Nagel: Right.
Chris Badgett: Which is really interesting. So, let’s get into those. Can you talk about-
Doris Nagel: Sure.
Chris Badgett: … those? Yeah.
Doris Nagel: Well, where do you think it would make sense to start?
Chris Badgett: I think in the online business world. People are really … as they get into selling and having online business, they’re aware of affiliate marketing and affiliates, but they’re not really thinking about all these other possibilities out there, but let’s start with affiliates. With [inaudible 00:03:36], you can plug in affiliate WP, people can sign up on the website to sell your course for you, get their own unique affiliate link that gets tracked and so on, and they can earn a commission for selling your course or membership, but how do you help people find success for affiliate marketing with courses?
Doris Nagel: Well, I think one of the first thing is that we stress it’s important that you have a very clear value proposition. Your value proposition may not really resonate with lots of partners that are out there. In our experience, there’s all too often companies who are looking for affiliate marketing or referral partners, have quite a number of them, and they either sign them up just because they happen to run across them, and they have coffee and they say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if we referred stuff to each other?” You end up a lot of times with this collection of referral partners, but the same thing happens with referral partners as happens with distributors, is that you find that most of the business that actually has any money coming from it is limited to maybe 10% of those or less even.
So, you’ve got all these partners that sound great and you’re all excited and you get some initial excitement going and you talk about a couple things, but they don’t actually end up going anywhere. So, you waste a lot of time. It’s just the same as in the distributor world. That’s exactly what happens with classic stocking distributors for manufacturers as well, is you sign up a distributor, it sounds great, but then there’s a flurry of stuff, and then before long, it’s, “Wow, haven’t heard from them in a long time. What are we going to do? Should they still be a partner?”
I think part of it is twofold. One is, is that there’s not necessarily a clear value proposition. So, what I mean by that is that we’re all really focused on selling our own thing, and so your referral partners are focused on selling their thing too. Unless you can truly find a situation where one plus one equals three or five, you’re probably not going to get a lot of traction, because there’s not enough mutual benefit. Unless you happen to find somebody who’s interested and you think of it, you’re not going to end up referring business or you may try a few but they don’t really stick.
So, they may not have been a great fit to begin with, and the value prop, I think a lot of us think, oh, you’re going to get these great referral fees, you ought to be really super motivated, but the reality is, is that it’s hard usually selling somebody else’s stuff besides your own. It’s hard enough to sell your own stuff, your own offering, much less trying to sell somebody else’s as well. Unless you really have a value proposition where there’s a space you can carve out where both of you are really going to create something new and different, it’s really tough to get much traction.
Chris Badgett: Could you give us an example of carving out that space and getting that alignment on the value proposition? Whether it’s in the course world or manufacturing or whatever. What’s a really good example of that?
Doris Nagel: Well, I think we’ve got a really good example in our own business. We’ve partnered with a company called [Brindas 00:07:45] in the UK, and they focus mostly on Europe. They do what we do, so technically they’re a competitor. It’s interesting how competitors can actually be sometimes really interesting and some of the most productive partners out there, but you have to be pretty brave-
Chris Badgett: How do you do that without getting into … How do you partner with your competitor?
Doris Nagel: It’s not always easy. Usually, though, you have to have some complimentary thing that you’re good at. Maybe you have different geographies. In our case with Brindas, they focus mostly on Europe, we focus mostly on Europe and Latin America, and North America. And the rest of the world we kind of share. They have a very similar mindset to ours, very similar approach. They, like us, wanted to create an online course, and we pooled our resources and said, “Let’s put aside our differences. Let’s just figure out … because it’s going to be a lot easier for both of us to work together to create this offering.” Through the process, it’s just been a phenomenal partnership. Very rewarding, I think. I think Brindas would say the same. It’s been very rewarding for both of us, and what we’re creating is no question about it much better, different, more unique, more captivating, I hope, than either of us could create separately.
Chris Badgett: Then you both promote it, right?
Doris Nagel: And we both promote it, exactly. Go ahead, sorry.
Chris Badgett: Because you’re getting into course world, we have a little bit of rabbit hole to go down here.
Doris Nagel: Yeah, of course. Go ahead.
Chris Badgett: Which is, is this like a free course for lead generation, or is it a paid course?
Doris Nagel: We’ll see where it goes. Obviously like all course creators, and by the way, we basically don’t call it a course. In ours, it’s a learning journey or a program, because it is blended consulting and online training and exercises in coaching and mentoring. So-
Chris Badgett: So, hold on one second.
Doris Nagel: It’s not just a course. Oh, no, no, another rabbit hole.
Chris Badgett: We talk about a lot on this podcast the value of a stack. So, it’s course plus.
Doris Nagel: Yes.
Chris Badgett: So, you said course plus coaching plus mentoring?
Doris Nagel: Mentoring, accountability to the extent we can provide it. I think the accountability piece is one of the toughest ones. It’s why so many people never finish online courses. It’s why it’s so hard for consultants to guarantee results, is because you can’t really hold … it’s so difficult to hold your B2B client accountable for … Even if you’re trying to reach individuals, it’s a weight loss program. At the end of the day, you got to do the work to really get the benefit out of it.
Chris Badgett: What is your course? What is the elevator pitch for that course?
Doris Nagel: Well, the elevator pitch is it’s international distribution unplugged, so our value prop is that a lot of folks in our experience manage distributors internationally. They find them, they train them, and they manage them internationally. There are tons of free resources out there that government agencies provide that offer courses on how to characterize your product, to be able to export it physically, how to do market research in the local market, even programs that are you go on a three day trip and go meet some potential distributors, but not really anything on how to effectively partner with these people, how to have a process that’s repeatable and scalable, and how to apply the basic concepts of building partnerships so that you end up with an ecosystem of distributors that actually generate results instead of just your top 10% and the rest you’re frankly wasting time with.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, and I love that unique insight of looking for potential partnerships with our competitors in terms of online education. That’s really fascinating.
Doris Nagel: By the way, I just want to say, online education I think is a great way to potentially take partners that you have and bring them into the fold. So, you partner with an affiliate or various affiliates for a reason. They have expertise that you don’t have. So, think about using your online course or training or program or however you want to call it, your stack, and draw them in. Have them do a video cameo for your online offering, so that they get some free promotion, you look smart because you have all these people at your fingertips who can speak articulately about related areas, and now all of a sudden you’re truly partnering and creating something together.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In the online world, I often think about what you’re talking about there in terms of what’s known as JV or joint venture. It’s one thing to sign up for an affiliate account to promote somebody’s course or product and drop links in social media and send a newsletter. It’s something completely different to do a joint venture partnership and figure out how to make it really a win-win, and like you say, one plus one isn’t just two. It’s even something better than two. It’s more valuable than that.
Doris Nagel: We’re big advocates of what we call a partnering mindset. In fact, last year, we merged with a company called Partnering Intelligence that actually has a whole framework on partnering, because we realized that selling through to customers is really about effective partnering. The first thing you need to have to really have an effective partnership … you need two things, always, and if you don’t have these, you probably are not going to have an effective affiliate partnership, or a partnership of any kind. There needs to be mutual benefit, and there needs to be trust. If you don’t have true mutual benefit, if it’s mostly one way, you’re referring stuff but nothing comes back, you’re not going to see mutual benefit, and also, you’re probably not going to have much trust because you’re going to think, I’m doing all the work here. What are you doing? What are you bringing to the partnership?
So, having a partnering mindset, basically being open to share ideas. We talk a lot too about what we call the partnering paradox. So, you partner with someone else because they bring something you don’t have. They have customers you don’t have. They have expertise you don’t have. They have talent you don’t have, and skillset. So, unless you take the time to really explore what those are, why partner? Because they’re going to do things differently than you are, so you need to take time to understand that about each other, and it should be a mutual thing. They’re partnering with you because you have something they don’t have, and what is that? So, how do you go about really taking the time to understand that, to understand how you go about things differently, and that’s where the creative juices really start to flow.
Chris Badgett: You mentioned a word, I just wanted to see if I could unpack, or an acronym I should say: VAR, value added reseller. How do we think about … What is that? Can you unpack that? I’m just trying to see how that would apply to online business.
Doris Nagel: Well, a value added reseller is essentially someone who takes product, physical product … So, if you think about the electronics, the hardware/software world, it’s a company that may take different hardware components, so a mouse from Lenovo and a keyboard from Hewlett-Packard and a monitor from somewhere else, they bundle them together not just as products, but then they also offer services. They help people configure the various hardware pieces that need to be put together. So, in that sense, they offer something that, yes, it incorporates their suppliers’ products, but it becomes a new offering, essentially, so that they’ve bundled services with it, and they have a local customer base, so in that sense, they’re a partner that resells your product but they also create a unique offering for their customers.
Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. That reminds me of like in the online course space, we have this expression called the technology Frankenstein, or software Frankenstein, that people end up with, or failure to launch because of the software.
Doris Nagel: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: But, there are people out there who build services around reducing that friction, like …
Doris Nagel: Right.
Chris Badgett: All the way down to actually shooting the video.
Doris Nagel: Absolutely.
Chris Badgett: Editing it. Getting the tools. Setting up the website. Getting the hosting. So, they’re basically adding value through training and done for you services with the stack of hardware and software. So, that’s a really interesting professional way of integrating what can be complex into something really more approachable for the market.
Doris Nagel: Well, I think customers more and more are looking for solutions, and this is where I think a lot of the various software apps maybe go a little wrong. I don’t know about wrong is the right way, but-
Chris Badgett: I’m guilty. I say-
Doris Nagel: Okay, but it’s-
Chris Badgett: I’ve said that marketing, it’s easy, but it’s not necessarily.
Doris Nagel: Well, the problem for the user, think about your VAR as a kind of a simplified example. You’re a business, and yeah, you need to buy a keyboard and you need to buy Windows 10, and you need to buy some software, and you need to buy a bunch of this and that, and you know what? You don’t really want to deal with somebody who says, “Hey, you really should buy my keyboard, because these are the coolest keyboards on the face of the planet.” What you want as a business, you want somebody who’s going to fix your problem, somebody who’s going to come in and give you the solution, the answer, “Here’s the package you need of everything to make your life easy.”
I just think about myself. I look out there and I think, oh, maybe I need an app for this, or maybe I need a little something that does this, and wow, you start … Before you know it, you’ve got yourself a flipping Christmas tree of stuff that you’re trying to make stuck together. You’ve got your auto-responder, you’ve got your CRM, and you’ve got your LMS, and you’ve got your website hosting, and oh my goodness, and none of it talks to each other. What you want is just somebody that’s going to make it easy for you, somebody who’s going to give you a solution that’s going to help you launch whatever … to help you facilitate to do what is your core offering. I think there’s a lot of neat techy ideas out there, very cool stuff, but at the end of the day, wow, it starts to get really overwhelming for the average user.
Chris Badgett: That reminds me of the construction industry, where we could go out and we could buy a really nice drill, but what we actually want is a hole in the wall, but what we actually want is a house, and we want somebody to put it together, but what we actually want is a place to raise a family or come home at night or whatever. That’s what we actually want.
Doris Nagel: Right, exactly.
Chris Badgett: Not a drill. Right.
Doris Nagel: Exactly right. People don’t buy stuff. They buy to a need, and whatever that need is, and different people frame it differently, but that I think is one of the biggest challenges today, and maybe circling back to affiliate marketing and finding good affiliates, is, what are the problems your customers are really trying to solve, and what bits do you bring, and are there others out there who have other pieces to the puzzle that you … and are willing to consider truly partnering, that can allow you to bring together an offering that’s completely unique?
Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. I want to dig into something else you said, which was licensing, and I want to give an example out there in the online course space. I sell software at LifterLMS.com, and we have demo courses that are real courses about how to use LifterLMS, but we also have one on how to just work with WordPress. Sometimes LifterLMS people or who are interested in building these courses and membership sites, we’re actually their very first introduction to WordPress.
Doris Nagel: Absolutely.
Chris Badgett: So, we have a WordPress training course. I can make that, but I don’t. I license it from the best in the business, which is Shawn Kesketh from WP101. I pay an annual license fee to be able to use his videos, I structure the course, and I provide them to my audience. So, that’s how I do licensing, or that’s how I’m a customer who is licensing for courses. Can you tell us more about how it works?
Doris Nagel: Well, that’s it in a nutshell, is either taking something you’ve created and extending your reach by licensing it to somebody else, so in Shawn’s case, he’s increased his market research by licensing his offering to you. You promote it to your customers, and so lots of new eyeballs get to see it, which is great for him. That’s a double win for him. He gets the licensing fee and he gets all the exposure. You might license something to someone else, so maybe you have a plug-in that has multiple uses, and you could license it to somebody else who needs it and get a recurring stream of revenue of license fees, and maybe even keep your brand on some of it so that you get some residual marketing benefit.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You also said something I wanted to understand what it was. I believe it was OEM, is that right?
Doris Nagel: Oh, yeah, original equipment manufacturer.
Chris Badgett: Okay.
Doris Nagel: So, that’s people who make something that can be incorporated into something else. So, it’s interesting you and I were talking about using learning management systems. So, you could, for example, offer … I’m not suggesting you should, but just one idea of a way your business could be wrapped into something else is that you might be able to offer an entire corporate learning offering. You partner with people to create content. You’re the platform, and you bundle it together to create this learning solution for companies. The OEM world, the classic OEM world, is in the manufacturing world, so think of the auto parts manufacturers. They then would product parts for, say, Ford or General Motors or BMW, and so they are OEM suppliers to those car manufacturers. So, essentially, they’ve increased their sales. Yes, they sell directly to Ford and General Motors, but at the end of the day, they’re selling their parts through those manufacturers to reach lots and lots of customers who buy the vehicle who has their parts in it.
Chris Badgett: Let’s shift gears and talk about indirect sales through customers. What do you recommend if somebody wants to explore the idea of developing their actual own customers as an indirect sales team? If they’re not necessarily classically trained sales people, but they love the product, got results of the product, how does that work?
Doris Nagel: Well, it’s interesting. People use the word partnership in a lot of different ways. So, you can have a business partnership, and you and your partner are business partners, or you have a marriage partnership, or a joint venture partnership. People in the sales world often talk about their customers being partners. I always like to stop them and say, “Well, so, just what do you mean by that?” To understand it. It is possible, I think, the best customer relationships, the deepest, longest, most productive are ones that do start to resemble a classic business partnership, where you’re exploring ways, again, that you can take one plus one and make it be three, or five even.
You need to obviously, just like any kind of partnership, you need to walk before you run. You need to make sure you’re really aligned, because the last thing you want to do is trash a relationship with a great customer. Wow, you really don’t want to do that. That’s a lose-lose proposition. That’s where one plus one equals minus five. So, you really want to think about that, take it slow, really think about ways to work together. One of the things we really advocate is using a framework. Most people, honestly, we’re all pretty bad at partnering, to be honest with you. If you ask people, are you good at partnering, they’ll say, “Sure, I’m a team player, of course. I’m for the team.” But the reality is, and I liken it to driving, so if you ask people are you an above average driver, everybody will go, “Of course I am.” Surveys basically say consistently 80% of us say we’re above average. I don’t know how much math most of us remember, but that is not possible. Half of us are worse than average drivers, and half of us are worst than average at partnering too.
If you can use a framework, it can be really, really helpful, a structured framework. It may seem a little awkward at first, but it’s like a framework for giving effective feedback or for resolving feedback. It provides a safe and structured environment to really say a lot of the things that really need to be said, the fears that you might have and concerns, and be able to lay them out on the table, because you need to do that if you’re going to have … especially with a customer, to form a partnership.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned part of this above average problem of partnerships is a lack of onboarding for referral partners.
Doris Nagel: Right.
Chris Badgett: Can you talk about the onboarding problem?
Doris Nagel: Well, it’s interesting. Again, I go back to all of us are really focused and struggling on doing our own thing, and trying to sell our own thing, and to really have an effective referral partner, you need to truly understand and be effective salespeople, really, for each other’s product, and that required an investment of time. It requires an investment to understand … So, if I were going to be a LifterLMS referral partner for example, I really want to understand not only the features and the benefits, ’cause that’s the thing everybody thinks about, I’d really want to understand, though, who are your effective customers, how do you effectively sell this to people, how would I repackage that to sell it effectively to my customers.
So, onboarding is a series of things. It’s not just, here’s my service and here’s what I do. It’s, here’s the customers that really work for me, here’s the process that’s really effective for converting customers, here’s the kinds of marketing collateral that we ought to jointly produce or have review and editorial process over. It takes a long time to really learn how to sell a product the way you would do it, and to understand all of your expectations about how you would want to do business with a customer.
Chris Badgett: That’s great. Really, that’s grounds for potential training courses for-
Doris Nagel: It is.
Chris Badgett: … referral partners.
Doris Nagel: It is definitely that. It is definitely that. Like I said, most of us are in the referral world. I’ve been there. I know. You sign up partners. You’re like, oh, this would be great; sure, oh, yeah, this is complimentary space, and wouldn’t it be great. But you really find that unless you sit down and really spend a lot of time and invest that time in understanding what is it you’re trying to sell, how do you go about selling it, are there better ways to sell it, are there better ways to sell it to your client base, that’s where the real synergies and the real magic happen.
Chris Badgett: One of the things I do personally is I go to … There’s a few master minds that I go to that are … Some of them are bigger than others, but it’s just a breeding ground for partnerships, and just open conversation around especially when we’re sharing a same or overlapping customer, it’s just been very beneficial for me to explore partnership by getting out of the building, getting out of my home office, leaving the computer away, and going meeting people in my industry or overlapping industries. That’s been the key for me for partnerships.
Doris Nagel: Well, and not only that, but one of the keys is that by going to that venue, you have already got a pool of potential partners who have something you share in common. You’ve already taken the step to get out of your office and to go meet like minded people who are interested in partnering, and I’m guessing that’s why a lot of people will go for those, is they really are looking for partners, and that’s really the first step. It is tough to make what I call the missionary sale, which is, you just happen to run into something, you have coffee, and you go, shouldn’t we work together? They may say, “Well, sure. Hey, if you can … I’ll put a little effort in if you can sell some of my stuff. Great. That’s super.” But, I think we will call that a tactical relationship as opposed to a strategic partnership. I would call like the one you have with Shawn, for example, with WordPress, that sounds like much more like a strategic partnership, not just flinging some stuff out there and hoping it sticks.
Chris Badgett: And we’ve met many times in person or on a call like this. He’s been on the podcast. There’s a lot of layers to working together, and I’m honored to work with great people like him.
Doris Nagel: Yep, absolutely.
Chris Badgett: This may feel a little left field, the question, but this comes up from time to time on the podcast, and just in general I have this question, and I don’t have the answer to it, and it involves partnership, so I think you might have some insight.
Doris Nagel: I don’t know. We’ll see.
Chris Badgett: One of the things I’ve noticed is LifterLMS is a software product, but in the software world in general, what I find is that the best training on how to use a software is never made by the company that makes it, and the person that does the course about how to use the software, if they’re good … like there’s an episode on this podcast with Joseph Michael. He does a training on how to use the Scrivener software, which is a software for people use to stay organized and write books. He talks about that. There’s all kinds of … Just like Shawn. Shawn doesn’t work at WordPress, but he has the best training course on how to get going with WordPress and e-commerce and other things. The number one selling course on Udemy is an Excel course. It’s made by some guy. It’s not made by Microsoft.
Doris Nagel: Yuck.
Chris Badgett: Do you have any ideas why these software companies just are not … They can never produce the best training. Any thoughts?
Doris Nagel: You’re too close to it. We all are too close to it. It’s why a partner can really help you create a better process. Like I said, when we partnered with Brindas to create our offering, wow, we just pushed each other all the time. We’re like, that’s irrelevant, that’s stupid, that’s too far into the weeds, that’s not entertaining. Whatever it was, we just kept pushing each other. I think the problem is, is that most of us are too close to our offering. We talk about this even with partners. The problem is, is that it’s the old iceberg analogy. There’s the stuff that you talk about, which is on top of the water, and then there’s all of the stuff that’s underneath about how to use it and how to really make it effective, and what the expectations are, and the other little things that are related to it.
We are all so immersed in our own company culture and our own idea flow that it is really difficult sometimes to step back and say, “Okay, now, I get all this cool stuff, but how would I explain this to my mother?” That’s why somebody coming from the outside, doesn’t really understand it and has to come to grips with it, says, “I get there’s all this stuff and it’s all very interesting,” but you got to explain it the way you would tell your mother or your neighbor next door or your teenage kid or whatever, and that’s really hard to do when you’re so close to it.
Chris Badgett: Well said. So, if you’re listening to this and you’re at the beginning and you’re still trying to figure out which course you should make and how do you increase the odds of success, maybe explore this type of partnership, so that you don’t have to do it all alone and you don’t have to create it from scratch. There may be somebody out there who needs a clear thinking instructional design type person who’s not as close to whatever the thing is, that has a huge database of customers that are already paying money looking for some kind of solution.
Doris, I want to really thank you for coming on the show and sharing all this indirect sales wisdom with us.
Doris Nagel: Thank so much for having me, Chris. This was a delight.
Chris Badgett: Absolutely, and just sharing from experience, I was more focused on just kind of content marketing and doing my thing, but once I started getting into the world of partnerships at various levels, that’s when things really started taking off. I have a business partner. I have affiliate partners. I engage with my customers at a deep level. I’m always looking for ways to cross-pollinate with others. That was really the key, and I’d encourage you, the listener, to explore partnerships and relationships as what might be a more powerful mechanism of sales than just doing all the direct sales yourself and just focusing on content marketing.
Doris, where can people find out more about you and connect with you?
Doris Nagel: So, they should feel free to email me anytime about anything. Love talking about partnerships of any kind, at Doris, D-O-R-I-S, dot Nagel, N-A-G-E-L, at globalocityservices, so it’s like Global and O-C-I-T-Y, dot com. You can call me, 847-984-2816. I’m in the Chicago area, at least for now, and you can find us on our own podcast on YouTube, and also watch for our new learning journey, our international distribution unplugged, at learning.globalocityservices.com, our new learning café website.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Doris just can’t help teaching as she’s signing off. Notice how she gave out her … Made it easy for people to get in touch. I think there’s a tendency for people to hide behind the website or not have the phone number or whatever, but if you’re open to … Make it easy for people to partner with you, is what I’m saying, so thanks for that tip and your sign off there.
Doris Nagel: Thank you. Again, thanks so much, Chris. It was an honor.
Chris Badgett: You bet.
