Setting Goals for Partnerships & Omnichannel Marketing w/ Robin Dimond

Reading Time: 16 minutes

Harvard Business Review found that omnichannel customers spend 10% more online, and a shocking 73% of customers prefer shopping through multiple channels.

And Google found that omnichannel customers are worth 30% more!

The challenge, of course, is finding ways to create a seamless experience for customers across all of a brand’s channels. Could partnerships play a role?

That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.

Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.

Now, some of you may be wondering how you can use partnerships to successfully tackle omnichannel marketing.

And others, like myself I might add, might not even have a firm grasp of what omnichannel marketing really means today. Let alone how to employ partnerships and set goals we can actually achieve.

That’s exactly what our guest today, Robin Dimond, is going to talk to us about.

Robin Dimond on Partnerships, “If Covid taught us anything, it’s to be agile. If Covid taught us anything, it’s relationships matter.”

Robin has been marketing and innovating for nearly two decades, and strives to bring sensory experiences and the heart back into all her team’s work, thus comes the name – Fifth (five senses) & Cor (Latin for heart). She transforms brands and communities, and she’s going to help you transform how you approach partnerships!

Robin is going to help us with:

1. What Omnichannel Marketing means in 2023
2. The role that partnerships play with her marketing agency
3. The importance of relationships when it comes to business partnerships
4. How to select new partners for a marketing agency
5. How to set goals in business partnerships
6. Tools or tactics to help deliver successful partnership goal completion
7. Potholes to avoid

Learn more about Robin Dimond

• Connect with Robin on LinkedIn

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

• Fifth & Cor
• “Belonging To The Brand, Why Community Is The Last Great Marketing Strategy” by Mark Schaefer
• “Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs” by John Doerr
• Agorapulse
• Agorapulse Calendar

Full Transcript of this episode of Partnership Unpacked

[00:00:00] Mike Allton: Harvard Business Review found that omnichannel customers spend 10% more online. In a shocking 73% of customers prefer shopping through multiple channels, and Google found that omnichannel customers are worth 30% more. The challenge, of course, is finding ways to create a seamless experience for customers across all brands Channel.

Could partnerships play a role? That’s where we’re going to unpack in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.

This is Partnership unpacked your Go-to guide to Growing Your Business through partnerships quickly. I’m your host, Mike Alton, that each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends from influencer market. To brand partnerships and ideas that you can apply your own business to grow exponentially.

And now the rest of today’s episode, welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts as strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing and relationship building. Oh, and you get to learn too. Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid take.

Every episode from partnership experts in the industry. Now, I’m now, some of you may be wondering how you can use partnerships to successfully tackle omnichannel marketing and others like myself, I might add, might not even have a firm grasp of what omnichannel marketing really means today, let alone how to employ partnerships.

And set goals we can actually achieve. That’s what our guest today, Robin Diamond is going to talk to us about. Robin’s been marketing and innovating for nearly two decades and strives to bring sensory experiences and the heart. Back into all her team’s work. Thus comes the name Fifth Five Senses and Core Latin for Heart.

She transforms brands and communities and she’s going to help you transform how you can approach partnerships. Hello, Robin, welcome to the show.

[00:02:30] Robin Dimond: Hello. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:31] Mike Allton: So good to have you here. How are you doing? And, and let everyone know where you’re from.

[00:02:35] Robin Dimond: All right. I am from sunny South Florida, Boca Raton area.

That’s where most of our team is based, so it’s beautiful today here.

[00:02:42] Mike Allton: I’m very jealous. I don’t know if you guys can, I have zero natural light on your right now. It’s just overcast and rainy and gloomy in St. Louis, but that’s okay. Now I can’t wait to dive into this topic, but first, let’s level set everyone.

Could you talk about what exactly omnichannel marketing means in 2023?

What Omnichannel Marketing means in 2023

[00:03:00] Robin Dimond: Yeah, absolutely. In 2023 it looks a little bit different and, and we’re very excited about it. So it is still going through that social media email, your website, making sure there’s a seamless continuity between all the channels, but it’s now tapping in to those in-store experiences.

So you’ve seen a lot of brands start really incorporating different. Activities into their in-store experience, and it’s also moving to a device wearing kind of model. So we’re seeing a lot of augmented reality enter those store locations. So it’s encompassing everything and it’s involving and personalization to each individual.

The role that partnerships play with her marketing agency

[00:03:37] Mike Allton: That is so interesting. Now, what role do partnerships then play for a marketing agency like yours? And also, do you have a dedicated partnership manager or those duties fall to you or someone else?

[00:03:47] Robin Dimond: Definitely doesn’t fall to me. It falls to my wonderful, amazing leader in our partnerships and community.

And that’s Lexi Becker, but she also has a team underneath of her who works on it. partnerships right now needs dedicated resources. Gone are the days that it’s like a side job for somebody else. It’s not. It needs to be focused and those need to be nurtured throughout the whole time. So we have dedicated resources for our partnerships.

[00:04:09] Mike Allton: That’s cool. And talk to me a little bit more specifically about the kinds of partnerships that you guys have at Fifth and Cor.

[00:04:16] Robin Dimond: So we have a lot of different partnerships, whether it is SaaS implementations, whether it is helping, anything that can connect our clients to what their resources that they need.

And partnerships plays an important role. Obviously it’s the glue that holds our company together to be a resource and also help people who maybe are startups and, and can’t hire on a huge team. So that partnership plays a role. They’re great at implementation and, and they’re part of the selling journey through.

The importance of relationships when it comes to business partnerships

[00:04:44] Mike Allton: And one of the things that comes up quite often when I’m talking with clients, when I’m working with with other brands, we want to get right into whatever it is that we’re going to get out of the partnership. Like, you know, what’s the benefit, right? And yet there’s this need, I think for relationships, which seems kind of contrary sometimes, where we’re entering this conversation, we’re getting on a phone call with a company, and we want to know, we wanna be able to take back to our boss.

What are we gonna get out of this? But I want to hear from you. How important do you think relationships are to partnerships?

[00:05:19] Robin Dimond: I’m so happy you asked this question and I think it’s like partnerships or dating, if you really wanna think about it. You don’t go out on the first day and you’re like, what are you gonna give me?

It’s really getting to know that person and it’s really about connecting with them. It’s seeing what, what you match, if you align in your areas, your goals, and then being able to take that back and see how you can help introduce each other. It’s truly, partnerships is like partners in real. . You don’t just go in there asking, and I think there needs to be a mind shift with C-Suite level, it’s not, you know, on that C F O level, it’s not exactly what sales are they gonna get.

Partnerships is a long-term relationship. You don’t expect to wife up right away. Same thing with a partnership. You have to work that relationship and really get to know them on every level.

[00:06:01] Mike Allton: I love that you put it that way. I almost wanna record it and send to my old boss because he was always focused on, you know, weekly metrics, weekly MQLs and that sort of thing.

And I’m trying to think, 12, 18 months. Down the road, who do I need to start a relationship with today that’s going to be in a position to collaborate with me on something and partner with me on something really interesting and beneficial way down, down the road, way down the road. So we definitely want to get into how we’re gonna measure all that, but first, our CMO at a Agorapulse has a message that I wanna share with.

[00:06:32] Darryl Praill: It’s the Arc de Triumph. Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the CMO of marketing Paris, what are your main channels? Wow. There’s the Arc de Triumph, there’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the Louvre. Those are your channels. You’re gonna use them to drive tourism dollars in. Okay, now, but you’re not the CMO of Paris.

In fact, you’re the CMO of your company, product, service. So what are your main channels? So I’m gonna. There things like pay per click, maybe trade shows, events, maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1.8% of you today measure social media and can prove an ROI in that investment.

HubSpot and Gartner say, Social media is the number one channel to invest in this year. Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it, because you don’t have the tools, if you don’t have the mentality. And that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You changed the mentality. We’ll give you the tool.

Agorapulse tracks all the ROI for you. One place to manage all your social media activity, your number one channel, change your success. Treat social media as the channel one CMO to another. My name is Darryl. I’m with Agorapulse. I’ll talk to you later.

How to select new partners for a marketing agency

[00:07:52] Mike Allton: All right, Robin, let’s get back to the work you are doing with Fifth and Cor. The next question, I’m not sure how you’re gonna answer this, so I’m, I’m really curious, how do you go about selecting a new partner for your agency.

[00:08:03] Robin Dimond: Great question. We were just in New York and being able to meet with a bunch of different companies, we look for alignment, that we have the same goals, that we’re servicing customers the same way, and then it’s really gonna bring something that’s unique to our clients and that we’re also able to bring something.

Sometimes we’re not a good match, and I’m gonna go back to that whole dating analogy. Sometimes it’s, it’s just not a match. So when we select a partner, it’s making sure that we’re aligned on our goals, that we can help each other out, that we understand. What they bring to the company and that they understand what we bring to a company and a client, and that we can help make sure that’s a smooth, seamless process.

[00:08:38] Mike Allton: I love that you said that because it, it hearkens back to what you mentioned just a moment ago where when you’re first starting to have a conversation with a potential partner, you need to take the time to understand what their goals are, because if you don’t understand what their goals are, you could never know whether or not your goals are in alignment, which is what you just said.

You know, this is how we know whether or not a partner is a good fit. I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw a curve ball at you for just a second because I, I didn’t tell you I was gonna ask this question, but I’m curious if you’ve had partners in the past that weren’t a good fit, what happened? I mean, can you think of an example maybe of a partner where you might have gone forward with and you shouldn’t have, because they weren’t a good.

[00:09:15] Robin Dimond: Absolutely. I’m not gonna mention names, but yeah.

[00:09:18] Mike Allton: That’s alright. It’s just you and I. You can, you can just throw it out there.

[00:09:21] Robin Dimond: No, we have had partnerships, actually a couple that were not a good fit. One, their business aligned didn’t, it didn’t align with us. They were just focused on sales getting numbers and they weren’t a turnkey solution for our clients and they kind of put it on the back burner and unfortunately we had to break up with them.

We said, Hey look, we don’t think we’re a good partner, nor do we want to implement you. There was another partner who actually went through, they got bought. and their new L rules did not align with what we were doing. And unfortunately we loved our relationships and we were able to get our partnership person into a new role, but it wasn’t aligned and it wasn’t a good fit.

They had different metrics, different goals, and it was very C F O measured, you know? It was, Hey, what are you doing? What’s sales? What’s return? It’s been week one, where’s a new lead? And it was just almost like a cattle call. And I was like, Hey, this is not really working. You’re not a good implementer. And so I think those are the relationships that we’ve had to break up.

The other one is it’s personal and, and no matter what, I know it’s personal and it’s business, but it is personal and getting to know our birthdays of our partners, getting to know their kids’ birthdays, understanding what means and value to them so that we’re tracking along it and aligning them with different people on our team who can help that.

I think that’s really important and setting them up for success. I hate getting on a partnership call and you have no idea. So we love to give notes to our partners. Here’s who’s gonna be on the call, what they’re gonna talk about. Here’s who the decision makers are, here’s the questions that they’re gonna throw.

So we give them like a brief before they go on because nobody wants to get ambushed.

[00:10:47] Mike Allton: Oh, I love that idea. I’m, yeah, I’m taking notes. I’m writing that down. And you mentioned CFO cause that’s very similar to the experience I was having previously. My old boss, he was a CRO. So like I said, he was always concerned about MQLs.

Now my new boss is the guy we just saw in that mid-roll video. Darryl Praill is Awesome. Shout out to my new boss, Darryl Darryl is great because he understands long-term vision and, and brand awareness and he understands partnerships and social media. What he also understands is goal setting. So one of the things I wanna talk to you about, because this is.

Can sometimes be, I think, a little murky and hard to pin down with partnerships. How do you go about setting goals? I know you’ve had some fantastic partnerships with Help Scout and Particle. Tell me about those. Tell me about how you came up with goals for those partnerships.

How to set goals in business partnerships

[00:11:29] Robin Dimond: First of all, I love those people in our partnerships and they truly care.

They truly invest in us as people. Ben is fantastic. So sitting down and looking at a 30 day goal, what’s our goal from this? And the first one is onboarding. Learning about your. . That’s our first 30 day goal. Can we speak as good of a thought leader as you can in the space to introduce it to clients? This next is 60 days, you know, who are we gonna introduce?

What can we do to help them out? If there’s any hiccups on the buying in process, and then 90 days, what do the first 30, 60, and 90 days look like? And then how do we move our partnership goals? Are we tracking to what your growth metrics are? If your growth metric is to expand your business three x, well, are we helping you track to that or are we holding you back?

Sometimes it’s reeducating or, or allowing the team to reeducate or sharing in marketing, like, Hey, it’s collaboration. We need to do a podcast together or a blog together. Let’s put that out there. So it’s really realigning and looking at it in 90 day segments.

Tools or tactics to help deliver successful partnership goal completion

[00:12:26] Mike Allton: So I love all that and it makes me wonder, are there any specific tools or tactics that you’ve used to actually measure those specific goals and the successes of.

[00:12:37] Robin Dimond: Yeah, so we do OKRs and KPIs with companies, so you know, what is our okr? How are we aligning to your company’s okr? We do a lot of tracking. We do regular touch bases, and then we use platforms like Slack just to communicate, Hey, we’re gonna touch base all of this amount of times we’re gonna introduce it.

We do a lot of retraining on whatever platform they are, and then we share with them like different newsletters or features that we’ve been in so that they can send that. Other than that, not really a lot of tools yet. If someone has them send ’em to me. I’d love to keep measuring, but it’s really handholding right now.

I say hashtag, you’ll see me on LinkedIn hashtag year of the partnership. 2023 is year of partnerships and nobody wants to be cold sold too anymore. So it’s something that we all need to figure out and, and measure towards that.

[00:13:23] Mike Allton: Yeah, I’m, I’m nodding my head in agreement cuz Yeah, I, I’m seeing you talk about it and I’ve seen so many more people talking about partnerships and I keep asking myself, is it because I’m connected with more partnership leaders or it’s that just the nature of the thing.

And I think you’re right. I think it’s really more of a thing this year because we’ve got these concepts of community, of relationships. That are being rolled in. Mark Schaffer, a good friend of mine, he just came out with a whole new book about community and it was so interesting because he and I in, uh, Doreen Morin Van Dam, we were all speaking at event down in South America.

All three of us and all three of us, unbeknownst to each other, ended up going on stage talking about community and the importance of building community and building relationships and building partnerships. Other brands, influencers, and your clients, so thank you for sharing that. I was gonna ask, you mentioned OKRs.

Do you find that the people you’re working with, they already understand the O K R framework, or do you have to do even more education on, on the front end? ,

[00:14:19] Robin Dimond: Great book, Measure what matters. We have to do a lot of the teaching, coaching, and training in that, and that’s great because we’re all learning. I had a fantastic c e o from my old company who taught me, so shout out to Manish, who taught me a lot about OKRs and how to set them and, and how to be agile in those.

If Covid’S taught us anything, it’s to be agile. If Covid taught us anything. It’s relationships matter. We’ve all spent time with our families, our friends closer, and that’s why partnerships is changing it. We just accelerated. We kind of skipped over the fakeness. And that’s why we want that real relationship now.

And I think that’s where partnerships is really excelling businesses and, and unfortunately a lot of businesses are like, well, how do we measure? And that’s all I hear. How do we measure? How do we measure? And it’s, it’s a long-term game, and that’s something that’s important. You have to understand each other.

I don’t say in your first three weeks of dating. , how are you measuring it? How’s it going? You know, it’s good. We have to get to know each other. We have to get to know what we offer each other, and so, ok. Ours are something that we really do coach people through to make sure that they align and who on their team doesn’t matter.

You know, it’s great if you’re a partnership leader, but if your implementation team doesn’t understand what we do either there could be a hiccup. So it’s, it’s getting everyone to be bought in and on the same team.

[00:15:28] Mike Allton: I love the analogy of dating that, that you’ve used a couple times cuz I’ve mentioned.

When I’m teaching brands how to use influencers when they want to build like an entire ambassador program for themselves, I said, you need to work with a lot of different influencers. Don’t just pick one and just jump into trying to build a relationship with them because it’s, it’s not only like dating, it’s like blind dating cuz you don’t know which influencers are going to be the most amazing ambassadors for you tomorrow.

Could be anyone that you work reach out to today, so definitely work on those relationships. I was curious, are there any potholes that you think we should be looking to avoid?

Potholes to avoid

[00:16:03] Robin Dimond: Yeah, I think we’ve mentioned it a few times and the pothole is, what are you doing for me now? And I think this comes from that.

Like being forced to get a sale, and that is a huge pothole right now. I think choosing poor partners is also one, and then leaning down your teams and not really putting someone, like if you’re adding this to your sales slash customer success slash marketing slash partnership person, and that’s their role.

It’s like social media. You can’t have a graphic designer lawyer all to do social media. Social media is a team job now. It’s not one person job, so partnerships is not a one person. Side hustle thing. And I think when brands really see the value of it, or agencies see the value of it, that’s when they’re gonna see success.

So that’s the pothole to stay away from.

[00:16:47] Mike Allton: Yeah, and you really hit it, I think because today with this economic climate, there is so much pressure now on brands to succeed today, to jump up the numbers today and hit their goals tomorrow. And that’s just not something that’s going to. Through partnerships.

Partnerships, like we’ve been saying this entire show. I love this show already. We’ve been saying this entire show, it takes time. Now, if you allow that time, you’re gonna see five, 10 x growth in whatever it is that you’re doing. That’s, you’re gonna see that exponential growth, but you, you have to allow that time.

[00:17:19] Robin Dimond: I would love to share personally what IT partnerships did for fifth and Core. We, this past year, we’re able to 10 x are leads because of partnerships, because of our community involvement from any other. Prior, not just as with the company we are now, but our, my prior company. And it’s really due to partnerships.

It’s that referral people feeling comfortable with us and being able to do that. It’s not the cold outreach and we saw a huge shift in market. And so if I, as a C E O, also my own cfo, myself, it’s to sit there and say, Hey, it’s time to. It’s time to invest in the community. It also drives a better culture.

Uh, you’re getting to know somebody. Your challenge is to get to know them, to invest in them personally, and that’s something that you want to spread through your company immediately. So, Personally, professionally that we’ve seen a shift in that whole relationship this past year.

[00:18:10] Mike Allton: I love hearing that.

That’s fantastic. Robin, this has been amazing. This is 20 minutes. We’ve gone already. This has gone so fast. Thank you so much. Let everyone know where they can find you, get ahold of you where they, you know, can learn more about you and the work you’re doing at Fifth and Cor.

[00:18:23] Robin Dimond: Sure. So I’m on LinkedIn.

Please connect with me. I’d love to connect with. You can follow our journeys. I try to post every day, even if it’s a video, and also connect with us on our website. We’d love to talk to you if you have questions about it or you need somebody in your corner to back you. If you’re a partnership leader person right now and you need someone to back you, I’d love to come in.

I’d love to give you quotes. I’d love to share with, you know, what our experience has been personally so that it can help strengthen this. For the next relationship.

[00:18:47] Mike Allton: Fantastic. Thank you so, so much. And that’s all we’ve got today, everybody. I hope you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Google, wherever it is that you listen to podcasts, and we’ll be back in a few weeks with another interview.

Thank you all so much. So next time.

Thank you for listening to another episode of Partnership Unpacked, hosted by Mike Allton and powered by a Agorapulse, the number one rated social media management solution, which you can learn more about agorapulse.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcast player. Be sure to leave us a review.

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