Affiliate Rockstar: Jason Lilien

Introducing Jason Lilien

Jason has spent two decades working in global marketing, with a focus on affiliate and partnerships over the past 10 years. Having worked with nearly 100 brands and clients throughout his career, Jason has found his home in B2B, leading campaigns for top SaaS companies such as Google, Zendesk, and Notion. When not helping to grow leading B2B affiliate agency Partner Commerce, Jason also helps out as an advisor for B2B SaaS affiliate platform Reditus.

Rockstar Q&A with Jason

What are your day-to-day duties?
Building the team and leading client services at Partner Commerce, a full-service affiliate and partnership agency exclusively focused on B2B. We help to manage and scale partner programs targeting SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise audiences.

How did you get into the affiliate industry?
My first affiliate responsibility was helping to launch the program for TravelSmith in 2008. Back then we were expanding our digital footprint across many channels and launched an affiliate program on Google Affiliate Network.

What’s the best thing you learned at the last conference you attended? What conference was it?
The last conference I attended was actually an event that we put together in London for our client TikTok for Business. It was an event for TikTok’s top partners in Europe, and what was evident from meeting them all in person was that most of the affiliates were power users of TikTok’s ad platform. It highlighted to me how important it is in B2B to focus your partner recruitment efforts around the businesses, agencies, and consultants that are actually using the software, platform, or service every day.

What are your most important KPIs?
In B2B affiliate, most KPIs come down to the overall return on investment of the entire program, which is supported by several efficiency and quality metrics such as cost per lead/new subscription, or even conversion rates that reflect the quality of leads through the funnel. Every client’s partnership program aligns back to the business objectives that they are held to, and we work closely with them to ensure that each program has two to three main KPIs that drive most decisions, and several supporting KPIs that may be specific to support different recruitment, activation, and optimization strategies, for example.

How do you interact with other marketers outside of the affiliate/partnerships team at your clients’ companies?
We actually work very closely with many different teams at each of our client’s companies. Depending on the scope of our work, and how our affiliate strategy is able to fill gaps in their organization, we may in any one day have conversations with the creative team, influencer team, demand gen team, or even the PR team. Affiliate touches so many different channels, and marketing teams that we work with are always engaged in conversations across teams to ensure that we are complementing and supporting each other’s work, as opposed to competing with it.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve come across in affiliate marketing?
The biggest challenge I see currently in B2B affiliate marketing is that there is still a lot of education that needs to happen with potential publishers to get comfortable working on a performance basis. B2B media and content sites, for example, do not come from a performance model necessarily, and I think advertisers need to approach them with opportunities of mutual benefit, where the work that publishers put into something will be rewarded. When it’s the right two-sided partnership, a performance model is ideal, and we need to facilitate these win-win relationships, as opposed to some that are more based on whoever has the biggest budgets to throw at publishers.

How does seasonality play into your strategy or your advertisers’ strategies (if at all)?
In B2B, seasonality tends to be different for different verticals. However, it often aligns with business budget approvals and times when businesses are looking to invest. Early in the year always tends to be a strong period in B2B as budgets are released and those businesses working on a calendar year are inspired to hit the ground running, adding to their tech stack as needed.

What is your biggest challenge today?
The biggest challenge today is trying to make the recruitment, activation, and optimization campaigns as streamlined and efficient as possible. Building and managing partnerships is time-consuming, so the goal is always to figure out how we can do more, do better, but also be quicker with what we’re doing. When you’re an agency, there is not always a lot of patience for a slow ramp, so we’re always looking to find ways that we can grow our clients quickly but in a way that ensures that they are sustainable.

How important is following the journey of a user after you (or your advertisers) first acquire them or after the first purchase?
In B2B, which is often a subscription model, this is is critical, as publishers are typically paid out on recurring commissions for a period of time. If users cancel soon after their initial purchase, the brands lose customers and the publishers lose their rewards. Recurring commission is one of the key differentiators and biggest value-adds with SaaS programs, and therefore it’s important that customer retention is seen as part of the affiliate strategy.