Ecosystem-Led Growth with Bob Moore

It's not everyday we get to sit down with someone who quite literally "wrote the book" on a topic. But today, we can say that as we recently sat down with Bob Moore, co-founder and CEO of Crossbeam and author of the bestselling book, Ecosystem-Led Growth.

For all of our sales and marketing professionals, if you have been interested in learning how Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG) can help your business grow — this podcast episode is for you. Tune in to our conversation with Bob as we cover topics such as where the idea of ecosystem-led growth came from, whether it will replace current go-to-market strategies, and how ELG works to create a system of quality AND quantity.

00:00 - Introduction

06:43 - Where did the term ecosystem-led growth come from?

11:57 - Unpacking why ecosystem-led growth efforts are GTM efforts

15:41 - Do you expect ELG to replace a collection of marketing/sales strategies that already exist?

20:16 - Would you have been able to identify the need for ELG had you not founded your two previous businesses?

25:42 - How ecosystem-led growth creates a world of quality AND quantity.

29:21 - Why would people not use ecosystem-led growth methods?

32:43 - Crossbeam Branding Highlights

35:20 - Where to learn more about Ecosystem-Led Growth and Crossbeam

Resources mentioned in this episode:

>> Bob Moore's Personal Website

>> Buy Ecosystem-Led Growth on Amazon

>> Learn more about Crossbeam

Full Transcript

[Bill Kenney]

Hey everyone. This is Bill Kenney, CEO and co founder of Focus Lab and Odi, two global B2B brand agencies. I'm back with another episode of “In Conversation” sitting down with a variety of people in a variety of industries, learning more about what they do and how that can serve certain people. So today, very specifically, we're sitting down with Bob Moore. He's the author of Ecosystem-Led Growth.

He's also the founder of a company called Crossbeam. So ecosystem-led growth. Let me try to do this justice. Bob is a brain. He does a fantastic job breaking it down in the episode, but before we get in there, I want to try to give you the short of what ELG, as it's called, is. In the old world. how would Company A and Company B try to determine their customer overlap?

They might be in adjacent markets, for us, for example, a brand agency is in a very adjacent market from like a web design and development agency. We basically have kind of like the same customer base. Our customers need both offerings. How do we work together to serve both of those people? How do we work together from a business model perspective to say, Hey, a lot of your customers need what we do.

Can you help us? Can we get intros to them? Is there a way to surface that information so that we can actually act on it? In the old world, the answer was no, basically. There was no good way. You would have to talk it out. You'd have to sit down and say, who are you serving? Oh, geez, maybe I could serve them.

How can we make an intro here? Or more technically, you would build a bunch of spreadsheets. It's really complicated. There's privacy issues, etc, etc. All things that Bob's going to talk about. His company, Crossbeam, essentially coining the word ecosystem-led growth does just that. It built a product in today's world where you're able to do that quite easily and you're able to not just bring two companies together.

You're basically able to mesh a variety of companies together to see that overlap and work towards that overlap, um, to build new customer base. Super interesting. It gets really nerdy, really deep on ELG. If you have interest in ELG, I highly recommend you watch this episode. Shout out to Bob, a fantastic human being.

Just a side note. We've had the pleasure of actually working with Bob on multiple rebrands, including the brand for Crossbeam as it launched before ELG was really even a thing. So a very fun conversation about kind of the origin stories of ELG talking about Crossbeam, talking about exactly what they do and how the world is going to benefit from that.

I hope you enjoy.

[intro music]

[Bill Kenney]

Mr. Bob, we're back at it. We're going to talk about your book.

[Bob Moore]

Nice. He's got the hard copy.

[Bill Kenney]

Ecosystem-Led Growth. Of course.

I want to talk about the book.

I want to talk about ELG. This is a new concept to me, although I suspect it's not all that new to the people that we work with. But before we do all of that, I did some digging last night. Cause I was like, man, we’ve known Bob for a minute, all the way, way, way back to, I think what I would call like the Stitch project.

I think that was the catalyst of our relationship. The furthest back I could find through old tools was April of 2016. Somewhere in there, I know we had begun to work with you on Stitch. I couldn't find the, uh, what I was hunting for was like the first inbound email.

[Bob Moore]

Oh, yeah.

[Bill Kenney]

Probably Kevin Jackson. Right?

[Bob Moore]

Yeah.

[Bill Kenney]

I couldn't find that email, but I know it's been about eight years since, uh, our kind of partnerships have been formed. Pretty cool. Long time.

[Bob Moore]

Yeah it is. What's even more wild is that 2016 was eight years ago. Uh, I think that's actually the thing that's blowing my mind more than anything.

[Bill Kenney]

Yeah.

[Bob Moore]

Uh, life is long and it goes by fast. That is a real thing.

[Bill Kenney]

The world has changed a lot since then. Couple of notes that I also captured last night. You went from brand skeptic to brand believer. It's pretty big change. You sold Stitch. You went on to create Crossbeam. That thing's growing like a rocket ship from my perspective.

Uh, you've published a book now, a couple of stats on the book: already USA today, national bestseller. You had Andreessen Horowitz featuring it already got 150 Amazon reviews sitting at number one in your section of Amazon of that category. And publishers already looking to order another massive second printing.

Congrats to you, sir. The book hasn't been out that long. I mean, what was the launch date?

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. March 12th came out. Yeah. Um, so yeah, we've been, uh, we're five weeks in maybe five and a half weeks.

[Bill Kenney]

That must feel like a rollercoaster.

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. It's wild. You know, these things are, it's a lot of hurry up and wait, right. When, when working with a big publisher like Wiley, because. The majority of the work on the book happened last summer. Um, and there was then kind of a manuscript delivery deadline that I had in the September time frame. And then between September and December/January, um, it's kind of out of my hands, right?

It's in like the machinery of the publishing industry.

So there's a lot of that validation, a lot of releases that get signed. Um, but when all that gets done, you finally have this, this version that can go to print, and you know, you kind of wake up one day in March and it's like, Oh yeah, I wrote a book, uh, 10 months ago. And then like a box, it's like, I guess it's go time.

Um, so yeah, it is, uh, it feels like it took forever. And then it also feels like it kind of came out of nowhere it's like, uh, finally having a, like a T bill that you bought with a, you know, didn't pay a dividend for a year, right? It's finally like the dividend check came in the mail.

So it's lovely to get to go do this publicity tour and hear all the great feedback on it. And thankfully, you know, these, these concepts and stories are actually probably more relevant than they were 10 months ago, which is fantastic.

[Bill Kenney]

Oh, interesting point. Yeah. I hadn't considered that. I mean, when I was reading it, I was, and especially knowing our clientele, I am also curious of your perspective. We don't have to get into it in this actual kind of show, if you will. But like how it fits a smaller agency model like ours versus very much kind of the SaaS tech world, which is outlined in the book, but that is the client that we serve.

So I was still able to easily position my brain into that world as I'm reading through the ELG content. So I guess congrats again on the book launch. Um, yeah, I feel your pain on the, like, I'm just waiting now for the book to come. Then you finally get a box and you're like, yes.

[Bob Moore]

It's a real thing. Yeah.

[Bill Kenney]

All right, let's talk about, let's talk about ELG.

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. Mm-Hmm.

[Bill Kenney]

I think you outlined this in the book, but it's worth asking because when I read that book, it kind of felt like, and I think this is a good thing

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. Mm-Hmm.

[Bill Kenney]

In a way that so much so that you and Crossbeam own ELG, if not the fact that you almost coined the term, I don't know that that's fully accurate though, but can you talk about this? Cause it kind of feels like, dude, you're the, you're kind of the owner of the space.

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. You know, there's, there's this very interesting chicken and egg cycle that happens with terminology like this, that in, in a business context, which is, there's some truth to the fact that companies that are the first movers in their space and that are doing a lot of work to kind of redefine the way someone does a certain job or achieve some kind of outcome.

By definition, they always have to go through this category creation playbook, right? There's entire books. You want to get meta, right? There's books about how to write a book about how to create a category, right? Like, Play Bigger is like this very, very well known. Like you can read 250 pages. Yeah, it's got, I've got it right here on my shelf actually.

Um, and it's, you know, it's a few years old at this point, but whenever I get into a conversation with somebody about this topic, I would say, you know, starting point, right? It's like read Play Bigger in the same way you're going to, if you're going to hire an outbound sales rep, you better read Predictable Revenue.

Uh, and you kind of slice and dice it and take the stuff that, that sounds like it's relevant for you. So very true for us going back to the beginning of Crossbeam, right? For those who don't know Crossbeam, we are, you can think of us almost like an escrow service for data. So our product sits in between companies who want to partner with each other and basically lets them draw Venn diagrams between their data sets.

So normally you and I would never be able to figure out what customers we have in common. Unless one of us overshared, I'd have to give you my whole customer list so you could compare or vice versa. Never going to happen. But with Crossbeam in the middle, we can both trust Crossbeam, send that data to that service and then draw the Venn diagram, figure out where it overlaps, but keep all the rest of our data private and secure.

So we do that for 19,000 companies and growing. And because that motion was completely net new when we arrived on the scene. Okay. It did force this question when we talked to companies like what, how do I bucket this? How do I, who's the internal owner? Uh, how do I budget for this and whose budget should it come out of?

Um, you know, if I'm going to go to a conference to find more of these 19,000 people that are doing this, like what conference is it exactly where those, all those people are aggregating. And the answer was that, um, none of that existed. Uh, you know, there was no defining conference for, uh, you know, quote unquote partnership people, uh, or more importantly, like go-to-market people who are enabled by partnerships or, or use partnerships as leverage to, to get what they achieve.

Um, there wasn't really terminology in and around this. And we felt that. And I go into this in the book, the language used in and around like the broader partnership space kind of fell short for us like it was dated in some ways. It was overloaded and kind of weighed down with jargon in some ways, and I know it's an old trope that, like, there's too much jargon.

So let's invent some new jargon, right? Like, solve for

[Bill Kenney]

Which you go into also in the book.

[Bob Moore]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, which is like, you know, there's a little bit of that that goes on. But. Getting back to your point of like, did we invent this or do we intend to? I think that everything that I go into in the book is something that would have existed even if I was never born in this company was never created, right?

Like, there are, there are externalities. There are secular trends within technology. There are macroeconomic trends, um, kind of within how, you know, capital is viewed and deployed. Um, there are, there are big overarching technological trends like AI, all of which are kind of pushing the world into a universe where these kinds of plays and playbooks make the most sense.

And there is an intrinsic market pool for them. So that's all true with or without us. I think the thing that we've been able to do here is figure out how to encompass all of that understanding and those playbooks and that knowledge under an umbrella of a term, and that term is ecosystem-led growth and you know, there's certainly like, you could have called it any number of things, right? Um, but it was a really deliberate choice to not call it like partner-led growth, right?

First of all, PLG was taken. Uh, we weren't going to go fight with the product-led growth guys. Uh, but the more important thing is like, this is not a partnerships strategy. This is a go-to-market strategy that happens to rely upon partnerships as like the fuel that feeds the fire.

And it felt like this was a moment where the legacy history of what people understand to be partner tech, or even what partner teams mean to a company needs to be burned down and kind of rebuilt a little bit.

And I think that the ecosystem is a much more kind of comprehensive framing for, for all that and, and the magnitude of what that could be. So yeah, we might've invented the term, but we sure didn't invent the plays or the playbooks or the need for them. Um, I think those would have been here no matter what.

[Bill Kenney]

Understood, humble and clear. Uh, great answer, which it actually leads me really well into something else that I kind of wanted to sidetrack on. There was one statement you made in the book that I was like, well, I'm going to write that down. That's a good one. I want to bring that to the interview.

You said ELG efforts are go-to-market efforts, period, full stop, period. Very strong opinion. I love that. Do you want to like, maybe unpack that a little bit more too?

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. So, you know, this relates to this thing that we, we discovered really early on in doing our work at Crossbeam, especially when we were working almost exclusively and really closely with partnership teams, which is this thing that we coined the partnership paradox and the partnership paradox was that we would do these giant surveys of the partnerships industry and, um, we asked these questions, uh, around like, you know, how much value you create for your organization?

Uh, you know, how is that value measured? How reliable and repeatable is it? And then also how are you treated within your organization? Do you feel like, you know, you kind of get appropriate credit and celebration and all these things. And two things were always true, which was that partnership professionals were absolutely unequivocally convinced that they created an enormous amount of value for their businesses that they existed in.

And, um, that that value would scale well and was, was kind of undeniable. And they felt like they were underpaid, underappreciated, uh, kind of, you know, under-recognized, they didn't have the resources that they need. The company didn't invest appropriately in them. And that's the paradox, right? Like how can these two things be true at the same time?

So, uh, you know, in digging into a lot of that, and I talk about this a bit in the book, you look at the history of partnerships as a function And you realize that there is a lot of baggage there. And in particular, there's a lot of baggage with go-to-market professionals, with sales leaders, with sales people, where in a world where Crossbeam doesn't exist.

And the data behind Crossbeam doesn't exist. The ability for partner teams to create leverage and outcomes based on the relationships and relationship capital that they create, it really, really comes down to the human beings on those teams. And those human beings need to proactively insert themselves into, uh, the day to day work of sales reps and sellers and in an environment, especially where you have like a large direct sales team and it's not so much a channel environment.

And, the leverage that shows up, shows up through a human being kind of knocking on a sales reps door and saying, Hey, I have something that might help with this account. The natural reaction of a lot of sales reps is actually defensiveness because they might have a deal that they think is going to close no matter what.

And here comes this partnership person. Introducing factors that are not under that sales rep's control, right? And like, even if it would double the value of the deal, it might also slow the closing timeline of the deal down.

And that is the last thing that, that, that rep wants.

And a lot of these ELG playbooks are designed to make these teams significantly more. Tightly integrated and kind of using, uh, data and visibility and technology to do that.

And none of those playbooks are in this book. Um, you know, if your function is to drive something that sits at the core kind of product strategy level or product market fit level. You can do stuff with the data from Crossbeam to be really smart about that. It's not in this book.

What's in this book is who to work with and how to take what data and relationships you get from them and use it to radically transform the way your business grows and drives revenue. Uh, and if it doesn't have a direct, you know, zero degrees of separation link to the metrics that matter to the sales team, then it doesn't appear in the ELG book and it doesn't necessarily fall under the ELG category.

And that's, that's the big difference, right? There are probably entire books written on like partnership strategy that would be mutually exclusive from this from this universe stuff.

[Bill Kenney]

Yeah. Understood. If it's not already clear to everybody that's listening and watching, Bob really understands his market, his customer and what he's building. Thank you for that answer. This might be a little bit of a provocative question, but I'll throw it out there.

Do you expect ELG to replace a collection of strategies that already exist? Maybe just one strategy very specifically. It just kind of pushes it out of the way.

[Bob Moore]

So this is maybe one of the most fun sections in the book to write, which is also the one that I think will be outdated the fastest is this part of the book where I talk about how. Basically, every growth strategy that, you know, occupies some material mind share in the last 10 years is in the process of being burnt down, uh, in, in one way or another.

And, you know, a few 5 second long examples of that. Right? It's like you look at, you look at inbound marketing as we know it, content creation, SEO, you know, anything that lives in kind of the incredible set of strategies that HubSpot Pioneer and so many more have kind of participated in building.

You know, newsletter lists and communities, uh, everything that involves kind of the written word and, you know, speaking with empathy from the perspective of a persona, um, to, to kind of pull people in, uh, as opposed to going after them. What AI is going to do to inbound is just, uh, very, very difficult to see around the corner.

Right. I don't think inbounds going away. Personally, like it's been my favorite marketing strategy throughout the history of all my companies is content marketing, SEO, you know, finding people when they are already looking for something and being the thing that they find, right. And then pulling them in.

That's great. It's incredible, but the bar for creating high quality content or something that's perceived as high quality goes way, way down. The cost of doing that goes way, way down the distribution mechanisms for people finding that stuff, which used to be typing a Google search and you try to get in the top three results is now when people are asking 80 or 90 percent of those questions to like an LLM generative AI chatbot as their first line of defense on search, which I think is the world will be in in less than five years.

Um, what happens to that search inventory and how high volume is actually the ROI on that, right? Like, what does it mean to be where people are looking in a world where Gen AI has kind of, uh, redefined how people look?

So because of that, the predictability and consistency of, uh, you know, pipeline generation and market creation and other things through those channels, it's just kind of like a giant question mark for a lot of people.

So it raises just this natural question of like, what is the phoenix that will rise from the ashes of all of these various strategies? And you asked a question about, will this replace a particular, you know, means of, going to market?

And I think my short answer is that it will actually be the fuel that allows those historical things to remain relevant and remain cost effective. What you're getting out of this ecosystem data is buying signal. You're, you're getting indications of what is going on out in the market among the companies that maybe you should, and maybe you shouldn't care about.

Like inbound outbound, they don't go away. This is just like, the wiring underneath that remains proprietary and interesting and valuable, even in a world where AI has kind of, you know, taken a, taken a swipe at everything else.

[Bill Kenney]

Sure. Yeah. Um, very interesting. I love that take. I hadn't considered it. Being more naive to this type of process, if you will, it felt like, uh, well, something has to move out of the way. Then this replaces another strategy. I found that really insightful, actually, that this becomes kind of an undercurrent to support and propel those things that maybe are struggling or will continue to struggle.

Very interesting.

[Bob Moore]

Yeah, yeah. Um, it really is. It starts. This is where my data nerd background comes into play, right? Like I am not a sales leader by training. I'm not a partnerships person by training. Like I am a, I am an engineer. I am a data nerd. And like, we kind of arrived at this business due to a fundamental understanding that there was a missing data layer.

Like there was information that, um, folks who were running businesses needed in order to make smart decisions that was just completely absent due to some technological limitations and the lack of a network like this one. We brought Crossbeam to life to surface that data. And for me, like, you know, it doesn't have to mean that we are a wholesale replacement to everything everybody has ever known in order for this to be successful.

The important thing is that the data goes where the data is supposed to go to make everybody make smarter decisions. And that may very well be just making smart decisions in the context of the things that your business is already doing. Uh, but it's just like elevating them and making the stuff that kind of stopped working in the last five years really work again.

[Bill Kenney]

Yeah. Do you think you would have known that that problem existed had you not gone through building RJMetrics, then going and building Stitch, feeling some of that pain yourself as you're growing your own companies? Like, what is that actually like necessary to arrive to this?

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. I say this all the time. Like Crossbeam could have never been a founder's first company. Um, cause it is, you know, there's two big reasons for that. One of them is what you're describing, which is like pattern recognition. Uh, it's just, you know, we had this exact problem that Crossbeam solves at RJMetrics.

We had it for years. It was very frustrating. There was no solution for it. And then we got acquired by Magento and we went in house at Magento. And I said, finally, now I'm inside of a big enterprise with large budgets. There must be, you must be able to give Salesforce a million dollars to like flip on some module that magically does this account mapping stuff.

And like, and I get in there and I look around and Magento has got 500 tech partners and 10,000 global agency partners. And every single day, every single one of them is like hopping on a phone call with somebody saying, How many customers do we have in common and who are they? Like, and trying to approximate the answers by doing this archaic method of manual account mapping by emailing spreadsheets back and forth.

And it was like a rip your hair out kind of moment. And it was clear that it transcended personas and use cases and verticals and company sizes. And like the, the bigness of the problem was, was something worth sinking our teeth into.

Um, the other reason that Crossbeam couldn't have been a first time founder's company is the cold start problem. Like this is a network effects business. It's almost like LinkedIn for data. You can only partner with somebody, both sides opt into the partnership. So the very first company that ever signed up for Crossbeam had a really bad time because there's no single player mode.

There's no, there's nothing for you to do in there. So we see this in our own statistics. If someone randomly lands on our website and it hasn't been invited in by a partner or aren't motivated by some specific use case and they sign up, it always becomes a completely dead abandoned account within a couple of days.

Like it only works if you show up with a partner. And because of that, as a, if I had been a first time founder starting this thing, I would have done everything I could to get every individual company to go in and try it and they all would have just like died off. And there have been companies before that have tried to build this stuff and it just hasn't worked.

The thing we figured out early on was we refused. We didn't have an online sign up. We only signed up companies after they had basically spoken to me. And the vetting was who is the partner that you are going to bring to your onboarding call? And we're going to do, we call these things joint jam sessions and two companies show up for the onboarding call at the same time.

And they both onboard and they connect with each other live on the call and they do their first account mapping report and they realize that value. And hopefully if I've done my job well, by the end of that call, I'm not even, I don't even need to be there. Like they've unlocked this data. They're like, holy crap, let's go.

These are the deals we can be working on. This is incredible. So that was the key. But then the tricky thing is, and this gets back to why I couldn't have done this as a first time founder, in order to get that network effect started, it had to be just me calling in favors. And I, you know, talk about exhausting all of my social capital and relationship capital that I had built up in the 15 years before it's like, Uh, Hey, random, you know, person who invested in my last company and run some other business or Hey, random former customer in my last company that we had a great relationship with.

Hear me out. Uh, this is kind of a, there's a bit of a new thing, right? Uh, let me, let me pitch you on what I'm hoping to create here. And will you, will you take a risk with me and go be one of the first hundred companies on this thing? And that took us a year, a year and a half to get to a hundred companies on there.

But there came a day where after it worked with a pair of companies that are connected. And they realized the value. They said, Oh, wow. Sure would be great if the other partners we have are on there. So they would each invite five other partners. And guess what? Those five, they don't need a joint jam call because they were invited in by somebody who's already on there, which means they're going to have a partner on day one built into the registration.

And that partner can run that joint jam call. So like, the propagation of the thing, um, kind of went wild over the course of, uh, uh, over the course of the, particularly during the COVID era when everybody was kind of forced online. Um, and yeah, here we are today where we're, you know, uh, pushing 20,000 companies on, on the network.

[Bill Kenney]

Yeah. That's wild. Um, I think even in the book you had mentioned this idea of like, even ecosystem led kind of thinking and structures spreads like a virus, right? It's like, it's kind of that Metcalfe's law thing where like one more dot is not just a plus one. It's like, well, what is that going to connect to?

And how many other people will that connect as a result? And it's like a super multiplier.

[Bob Moore]

Yeah, it is pretty, uh, pretty, pretty wild, you know, network effects are amazing once they start working. Uh, they're, they're extremely hard when you need them in order to exist, but once they start going, it's actually, it's, it's a beautiful thing. Yeah.

[Bill Kenney]

You're like rolling that little snowball and it's like not picking up any snow yet. And you're like, this is not the right snow. I can't get it to build the stuff. And then eventually you're like, oh shit. It's sticking now. It's growing.

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. It's so true. It's incredibly true.

[Bill Kenney]

Awesome. Uh, there was another note in here. I just wanted to call out, which I, I don't recall seeing really anywhere because it's so counterintuitive to what everybody says.

Um, you, you'd mentioned this idea that this system, this playbook, if you will, creates a world of quality and quantity. That has to be very rare that those two things, it's usually one or the other, which is why we always know the other version of that statement. So that stood out to me.

I'm like, Oh shit. How interesting is that?

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. It really, this kind of boils back down again to the like data versus workflows part of the discussion, right? Because the. Historically, any given, uh, workflow, right? Like a, like a strategy you might deploy, like you're going to hire an outbound SDR who's going to call into companies you've never talked to before.

There's a pretty finite objective there, which is to increase quantity, right? Like it's a volume play. You know, you look at another strategy, like maybe account-based marketing on the marketing side and going hyper, hyper targeted into accounts that you know, are prequalified for various reasons.

You want to move them into your sales pipeline, then it's probably much more about increasing the quality. Like you're getting more stuff in your pipeline that has a higher propensity to close and maybe paying a little bit more for it. Both of those things are there, there are methodologies that you don't necessarily run them because you suddenly have access to some new intelligence or data layer.

It's a playbook that you're running with the stuff you've already got, uh, and you're just going to use the firmographic info that you got to figure out who to ABM target. And, you know, you're going to use, uh, some generic list of, uh, phone numbers that you bought from some other data broker or something to know who your SDR should call or email.

Um, and it's very, very commoditized in terms of the inputs. And then you put your little spin on it to understand your ICP. And through that lens, you execute, you, you, you go for, for quantity or quality. The thing that's going on with ELG, again, the reason it's a new category is because it's new data.

It's data that has not been available before. And because of that, it, it, it is not bound by a specific play from a workflow perspective. It's more about the infusion of the insights and kind of decision making enhancements that happen as a result of this data being there. Now, people don't think in data, they think in workflows and they think of in terms of what to do.

So a lot of the plays most, if not all of the plays that are in the book are framed through the lens of workflows. Like how do you infuse this data into your SDR team to make them more effective and pick the right bets and message better? How do you infuse this into an ABM campaign to, uh, decide who to target and precisely what ads to show them or content to send them on a very individualized basis?

Um, you know, all those, all those strategies can be, like I was saying before, force multiplied or enhanced by the existence of this data. Can you kind of ELG-ify these plays that you're already running and just make them way, way more effective and ROI positive, and in that way, you do end up impacting quality and quantity because you, you make the SDR thing better, which is the quantity play.

And you make the ABN thing better, which is the quality play. And you actually infuse a little bit of those benefits onto each other. Like you get, you add quality to SDRs because they get to their, their target list are more segmented and more intelligently selected and you add quantity to ABM because you crack open this whole new universe of intent data that tells you out, oh, there's a whole world of prequalified like ecosystem qualified leads that we ought to be going after with ABM that we didn't even know about before.

I never could have picked out if not for this data. So yeah, you get, you kind of have your cake and eat it too. And it's, it's, it's this new dat a layer that if your company is not consuming it, you're, you're missing out because it does do all of the above.

[Bill Kenney]

To that point, you said, if your company's not using it, I think closer to the end of the book, if not really, really close to the end, you talked about the fact that this is still really early, something to like 6 percent or something. Maybe it's like the index that you guys built. So I suspect there are a lot of people not using it, given that that chart.

What? Why would people not use it? Like it seems pretty straightforward, right?

[Bob Moore]

Yeah. This is your classic, like crossing the chasm, uh, question, right? Like, adoption and usage of anything like this kind of follows this law of early adopters who are kind of savvy to, what's out there and how to consume it and willing to kind of, uh, you know, disrupt their operations and be agile and kind of infusing new things.

And then you have, like, kind of the, uh, you cross that chasm right into the middle of that normal distribution, which is like the masses kind of like, become aware of these things and then eventually kind of slope down the other end of the curve and all the late adopters and the, the, the Luddites and everybody else.

It kind of just happens to them, uh, and becomes commonplace. And. I think, you know, just about every technological trend kind of follows that. It's a question of how tight that curve is.

I actually think the 6 percent is kind of colossal in some ways, because the, You know, you can think about it in terms of just like the 20,000 companies that are on Crossbeam. Well, you know, there are hundreds of thousands of companies that could and should be applicable to, uh, probably millions globally.

So it's, it's not surprising that that number is down in the low single digit percentages. If only 20,000 companies are on Crossbeam and, you know, there's other, other technologies out there that can kind of indirectly enable this kind of stuff and say, there's another, you know, 10 or 20,000 people in total across all those.

There's a lot to this moment, because it kind of is this crossing the chasm moment. And if we had already crossed the chasm, I probably wouldn't have had to write the book, uh, right? It's, it's, it's almost like this, uh, uh, it's like we wouldn't be here talking because it would be so widely understood and adopted that, uh, it would almost be a foregone conclusion.

Um, so we're just, we're in a moment, right? This is ELG's moment. We're living it. Uh, and that, that, that 6 percent is going to keep climbing.

[Bill Kenney]

Yeah. Which is another reason why I wanted to talk to you, obviously, because of our past relationship and I'm p roud that we worked, uh, with you even on the Crossbeam brand when it was like day one, basically. Uh, but now to see the book come out, to learn more about this and to understand the overlap of the people that we work with.

I'm like, I'm going to get with Bob on this topic. I must learn more. And I want to. I want to hear from him earlier in that journey, like you said, on the front side of trying to cross that chasm. Um, let me lead us out with some fun ending points and I'll let you close, tell people where to go, how to learn more, sign up for Crossbeam, etc.

I noticed that Braze was called out in the book. We love Braze. We worked on them with their big rebrand. Also back in 2016 when I went back and look back, I'm like, why does that

[Bob Moore]

Back from the, like the, the, the App Boy rebrand, the proper. Yeah.

[Bill Kenney]

That was it. Transition series C from App Boy got renamed at Lexicon, and then went through to the new Braze name and we did all the identity.

So to see that in the back section of the book, I'm like, Oh, Braze. I love that overlap. I love that you mentioned this book was not written by AI in like the front of the book. I thought it was both humorous and an indication of the world that we have entered now. I'm like, wow, we have, we literally have to like to say those things.

[Bob Moore]

It's incredible. Yeah.

[Bill Kenney]

The branding word count in your book. I mean, I'm a brand guy, right? I'm like, Is he going to mention brand?

I don't think he's going to talk about brand. Uh, you said it more than three times, but less than 10. I'm taking that as a win in an ELG book that the word brand was mentioned that many times. Uh, so yeah, I just, in closing, I just want to say thank you. Uh, it's been a pleasure to be on kind of different journeys with you through these organizations, through the brand lens specifically, it's always been a pleasure to work with you.

We win when our partners win. In no way am I suggesting that the brand is the catapult. You, you clearly articulated the catapult. And I would say a lot of that is you, sir, super smart, really understand everything that you're doing. I mean, you're your own machine. We can put a little paint on that and help it in the beginning.

Look a little bit more. A little bit more real and feel more real as you're calling people up. Like, hey, I got a thing. I'm just happy to have been a part of that and to watch y'all crush, um, seems to me like you're headed for big, big mountains, um, and I'm excited to watch that and cheer you on.

[Bob Moore]

Thank you, Bill. That means so much. Uh, and I'm extremely humbled by all that. And hopefully we are in such early days that, uh, you know, we get to come back and watch this interview and, and laugh at, uh, how stupid all we said was, uh, in a decade. And I will say, you know, we talked about that, the cold start problem of the network effects in the ecosystem graph.

And I think back to like our work with you on the Crossbeam branding that happened before we had a product before we had, uh, you know, this was like work that went into like the PowerPoint deck that we then use to fundraise. Right. Um, that ends up being in a situation where you have nothing to go on except the vision, the dream that you're selling.

And bringing to life a network craft that really all forces are pushing against it existing. What do you have, but brand? You know, as I'm, as I'm spending those bits of relationship capital to get those people on the phone, you better believe having that professional looking, just right, just sending off the right vibes at the right moment in those right conversations.

The credibility boost that comes with clearly having been deliberate about brand I think is material because it's a, it's a blue M&M, right? Like it shows you if you're deliberate about that, they're going to be deliberate about a lot of stuff in this business.

And it's worth taking a risk on. It probably would be impossible to properly value the influence that's had on our company. So thank you for, for that, that hard work, uh, all those years back and, uh, and since.

[Bill Kenney]

Yes, yes, yes, I appreciate it. Alright, tell people I don't want to leave you. Tell people what the hell they should do, how they should follow you, whatever you want to say.

[Bob Moore]

I mean, uh, if you're not on Crossbeam, get on there. It's free to start. Uh, you can, it's actually free forever to, to be on the network and partner up with folks. You only pay when you start really like operationalizing the data. Crossbeam.com. Make sure your company's on there. It'll tell you right away which of your partners are on.

It's a really easy onboarding process. Uh, the book is called Ecosystem-Led Growth. If you want to learn more about it, my personal website is robertjmoore.com, which allows you to download some excerpts and other things, or just go to Amazon, and buy it. It's 25 bucks and, yeah, we'd love to, help continue to, spread the word on all things ELG.

Um, and final plug, we do have ELG Con, the ELG conference. There's one happening in May in Austin, and we've got one happening in July in London. I'll be there personally at both of them. They should be really amazing events, uh, gathering a bunch of like minded ELG folks, uh, in one place. So we'd love to see you there too.

[Bill Kenney]

Love it, sir. Thank you for spending time with me today. Uh, everybody, please check out the book. Definitely check out Crossbeam and, uh, yeah, we'll see you next time. We'll record again in 10 years. See what the hell we're talking about then.

[Bob Moore]

Love it, Bill.

[Bill Kenney]

All right, man.

[Bob Moore]

Till then, cheers.