The playbook you’re reading was built from over seven years of in-depth experience in influencer marketing. While the landscape has significantly evolved since I began my journey at Discord in 2016, the essential principles remain the same. And it's these principles that are at the heart of this playbook.

This playbook is more than just a static guide; it's designed to be a dynamic, evolving source of knowledge aimed at empowering businesses of any scale to effectively collaborate with content creators. Whether you're on the cusp of your first venture into influencer marketing or looking to optimize an established program, this playbook offers insights to validate your approach or improve your strategy.

Success with influencers isn't always straightforward, but it's certainly achievable. It requires the right mindset, the appropriate tools, and a commitment to navigate the learning curve. It's not about quick fixes or instant profits; it's about building a robust, impactful program that drives real business results over time. By leveraging the insights shared in this playbook, I hope you'll accelerate your journey and reach your goals faster.

But remember, the learning process is reciprocal; I'm as keen to learn from your experiences as I hope you are to learn from mine. I encourage you to reach out with any questions, suggestions, or ideas you'd like to share. You'll find links to my social profiles and a contact form at the top of this page. I also invite you to complete a brief survey at the bottom of the page. The information you share will not only help me fine-tune this playbook but also enhance its value for everyone else in this community.

Now, without further ado, let's dive into the world of influencer marketing together.

The Influencers at Scale playbook is structured as follows:

I'll be sharing a plethora of stories, anecdotes, and evidence from my experience working with creators, both at Discord and beyond. My hope is that they'll help you grasp the core concepts and gain insight into the reasoning behind its structure.

Almost all of my experience working with creators is with software but I also have experience working with influencers in consumer electronics, fashion, and CPG. I believe this has no impact on how the program functions. However, you should expect to have to contextualize or adjust certain details based on the product, market, and industry your business operates in.

You may not be able to reach the same level of scale. You may have more significant challenges with discovery, agency representation (much more common since I started in 2016), competitive pressure, and so on. That’s okay. Take what works and leave what doesn’t. (I don’t recommend abandoning the P-Process!)

I will be adding additional information to this playbook as I learn more about how it functions across industries and business models.

The playbook as it is today is heavily based on my experience Twitch and YouTube. I have had some experience testing influencers on Instagram and Twitter with mixed results. I’ve not yet touched TikTok.

However, although some of the details differ across platforms, I believe the structure of the program remains fundamentally unchanged. This is a strategy, not a set of bespoke tactics.

I will add specific support and detail for other platforms over time as I continue to grow and improve the playbook.

In contrast to the spokesperson model of influencer marketing, where brands integrate deeply with a narrow set of select partners, our goal is to build a large-scale influencer program involving light-touch relationships with dozens or even hundreds of creators.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have meaningful relationships. Nor does it mean you can’t pick some top performers and build them into brand spokespeople. I just want to be clear about what we’re going for here so there are no surprises.

I don’t go heavily into tools in this playbook, except to mention when and how to work with tools as well as the tools I have used and how I used them. I will do my best to include free (or freemium) tools in the playbook to help everyone get what they need.

For anyone starting out, manual research and outreach is what I recommend anyways. Rushing for tools is putting the cart before the horse.

That said, I do have a tool database on the roadmap, so I will be adding more tool related content over time.

Let’s start with a miniature existential crisis:

Every company should have a mission (the “why”); every mission should have a metric (the “how”).

If you’re not clear on either of these, stop now and don’t go any further. No amount of marketing will help you if you don’t know your why and your how.

Since marketing should always be aligned with what the business needs the most, any confusion about business goals translates directly to chaos in marketing.

So start by answering these questions:

At Discord, our mission was to become the best text and voice chat app for gamers. Our metric was retention, or Monthly Active Users (MAU). The whole company reviewed our mission and our metric at every weekly all-hands. Everyone knew exactly what we were doing.

With those two answers in hand, you’re ready to ask yourself the final question:

The marketing team must also have a good answer to this question. There are myriad ways to market businesses, so get clear on why influencers are the right choice versus all other available choices.

Funnily enough, Discord didn’t choose influencers; influencers chose Discord. After a shoutout from Lirik at TwitchCon 2015, the company noticed a huge corresponding spike in users. Curious about the possibility of pursuing partnerships with Twitch streamers, the early Discord marketing team picked up a handful of additional streamers and ran an experiment. The experiment worked, which is when they hired me to bring scale to the program.

Influencers provide businesses with a multitude of benefits such as authenticity, credibility, and access to niche audiences. They can offer innovative ideas for brand promotion, fill creative pipelines for social and advertising programs, and provide valuable audience insights that can be leveraged for business growth and product development.

TODO: EXPAND ON WHAT INFLUENCERS ARE GOOD AND BAD FOR

Take an hour to write down all the ways influencers could meaningfully impact your business. Split your time between brainstorming opportunities and then stack ranking them in order of most to least effective.

For more on that, check out my guide on building an ICE List.

If you can come up with a list like this for your own business and you’re still convinced influencers are the best path forward, then it’s time to dive into the nuts and bolts.

Let’s start building your new influencer program.

Before we hunt for our first creator, send our first email, or sling our first contract, there are three mission-critical pieces that must be in place:

Every company, no matter the level of maturity, should be capable of coming up with all three of these—even if they’re built on little more than assumptions to begin with. Making the attempt at a guess and proving yourself wrong with data is still something worth doing—done is better than perfect!

The trouble with influencers is they are capable of impacting a large variety of metrics. With such versatility, it’s critical that you decide for yourself what success looks like for your company. With that in mind, assign a number, what I call the One Big Number (OBN), to your program to measure performance.

Don’t just default to sales or brand impressions! Your opportunities to work with creators are limited mostly by your imagination. Don’t be afraid to get creative about your business challenges and how influencer marketing can contribute to a solution.

Now it’s your turn. What will your OBN be? Make a decision and write it down, including a definition of the metric and how it will be measured. You’ll need it for what comes next.

It’s spreadsheet time–my favorite! (No, I’m not being sarcastic.)

Pop open a spreadsheet on Excel or Drive and prepare to build your performance model. The model you’re about to build will be the foundation for your budget and your quarterly/annual goals as well as the seed of your pricing strategy, which we’ll get to next.

There are two ways to attack this model:

There is no right or wrong between either method. Regardless, you will be adjusting the performance expectations or the budget inputs according to your company goals, performance expectations, and what you can afford.

After this exercise you should have the following numbers:

If you’re missing data, make your best guess. Don’t rely solely on industry benchmarks. As a rule, I always draft my assumptions based on my current best or estimated business performance. You’ll find out your true numbers soon enough once you start running small-scale tests.

In this section, I’ll first talk briefly about setting aspiration and walk-away points in your pricing. Then, I’ll go through each of the three types of deal structures: flat fee, tiered performance, and product only/product plus cash (generally only applies to ecommerce).

HOW MUCH TO PAY

Everyone wants to know what to pay for influencers. It’s fine to ask around for market rate, or even just pay what creators ask for when you’re just getting started, but nobody else can define what your pricing should be in the long run. Only you can decide what’s best for your business.

Once you’ve picked your price benchmark, that will become your walk-away point. As long as performance is your concern, you will not, without an extremely good reason, pay more than this price to work with an influencer. (Spoiler alert: this should almost never happen.)

Based on that number, set an aspiration point. This could be 30-50% of your walk-away point (eg. $1,000 walk-away, $300-500 aspiration) so as to give yourself plenty of breathing room for negotiations.

Stick this in a table in a spreadsheet. You’ll use it as a template to play with numbers and build offers in real time during the P2 phase. You’ll also want to have it as you get into different pricing structures, such as tiered-performance and revenue share.

ASPIRATION AND WALK-AWAY POINTS

Once you’ve picked your price benchmark, that will become your walk-away point. As long as performance is your concern, you will not, without an extremely good reason, pay more than this price to work with an influencer. (Spoiler alert: this should almost never happen.)

Based on that number, set an aspiration point. This could be 30-50% of your walk-away point (eg. $1,000 walk-away, $300-500 aspiration) so as to give yourself plenty of breathing room for negotiations.

Stick this in a table in a spreadsheet. You’ll use it as a template to play with numbers and build offers in real time during the P2 phase. You’ll also want to have it as you get into different pricing structures, such as tiered-performance and revenue share.

When you talk to a creator, you should have your metrics filled out in your pricing table and an idea of what kind of offer you are prepared to make between your aspiration and walk-away points.

It might look something like this:

Your aspiration point shows you what the best-case scenario is for your pricing. If the creator agrees to your aspiration price, you should be happy that you made a good deal.

Your walk-away point is your worst-case scenario. If you’re paying this number, it’s because you believe in the partner and want to make a deal. Do not exceed this number without an exceptional reason (almost never happens). You have put this number in place to protect yourself against over-paying creators. Save yourself the headache and the angry meeting with the finance department or CEO and be militant about maintaining this barrier.

As you go through P2, adjust the pricing numbers in your table. Copy/paste the same table two or three times to play with different numbers. If you find out you were willing to pay $500 but the creator is happy with $300, adjust your pricing down accordingly.

You’re a business, not a charity. Do not overpay.

More on this in the P2/P3 sections below.

FLAT FEE

The Flat Fee model is simple: I pay you X in return for Y deliverables.

To build your flat fee, simply use the benchmark range you set in your model to build your aspiration and walk-away points.

I mainly use flat fee deal structures when I want a set of agreed-upon deliverables on a monthly basis.

I believe this structure works best for always-on/evergreen style brand activations that produce a steady drumbeat of content and consistent messaging in the market. That said, don’t be afraid to start here if you’re just getting up and running.

Keeping deal terms easy will allow you to move faster an learn, even if you’re sacrificing some price efficiency or revenue performance.

TIERED PERFORMANCE

This deal structure primarily exists to incentivize creators to work hard and over-perform. However, it is more complicated and creates more friction in the P2/P3 parts of the process. If you want to keep it simple, start with the Flat Fee structure before moving up to Tiered Performance.

Here’s how it works:

You will pay a base fee that is paying the creator for their labor. Then, set a sliding scale of benchmarks for them to hit that trigger additional payments. The additional payments should help them achieve as much as 2-3x their original asking price.

It’s important you make each benchmark harder to hit. Don’t pay for linear performance; make the target more difficult to achieve at each level.

Use a three-tiered bonus structure and prepare the partner for the idea that they may not hit all three bonuses.

Here’s an example of what that might look like:

Generally speaking, the first target should be relatively achievable. Earning out even a little extra is a big incentive to work harder and earn more.

Using this structure, the creator has a chance to earn big—potentially multiples higher than they asked for. However, they also have to significantly over-perform. Don’t ever get mad about paying out your bonuses! If you’re paying, then you’re winning.

PRODUCT ONLY/PRODUCT + CASH

First, a quick thought on product only deals: I think they’re increasingly difficult to pull off.

Brands are monetizing creators much earlier and the overall trend amongst creators is to value your work with brands much sooner. Furthermore, if you expect to get custom content and specific deliverables, that will generally come with a cost.

The result is, while many micro influencers will still take product-only deals, even they may ask for cash. They also have an extra consideration: shifting to audience monetization too early can harm growth rates. They may prefer to stay in growth mode until they’re more comfortable and better prepared to open the door to brand collaborations.

The product plus cash model works best for exclusive product or premium software, luxury goods, and high-ticket ecommerce, such as the custom gaming PCs I sold at NZXT. The PCs we built for our top partners were usually valued at $3000-5000 MSRP, which made it a valuable part of the bargaining equation.

Your company doesn’t have to sell a $3000 product to take advantage of this. Maybe you sell a $150 high-end electric kettle or a $200 backpack. Build that cost into your model. The right partner should understand that your product has value in the market and cost for you to produce. If they don’t respect that then they might not be a good fit for you.

REVENUE SHARE

If you’re making money off the influencer’s activation, you should expect a question about revenue sharing. Answer this question internally beforehand: will you offer revenue sharing and how much?

There is no right or wrong answer for this question. It’s up to you. Discord didn’t do this because we didn’t have Discord Nitro when we began and didn’t prioritize selling Nitro once it launched. NZXT did use revenue share to offset cash risk with our six-figure deals and help our creators feel like they had a stake in their success. Do what’s best for you.

Here are a few questions to guide this conversation internally:

If these questions confuse or intimidate you, or you don’t have easy answers, don’t offer revenue sharing yet. This may increase your cast cost up front or reduce your close rate on creators. So be it.

Wait until your business or program matures before you begin adding complexity.

With your why, your how, and your metrics, model, and money all firmly in place. It’s time to get into the nitty gritty of building and launching your first influencer partnerships.

That means it’s time to get into the P-Process.

The P-Process is a light-weight business development framework former Discord CMO Eros Resmini came up with. As I understand it, he built the framework to help Jason Citron better understand BD efforts while they were working together on their first company—Open Feint.

It is almost too simple by design. You will be tempted to mess with it and overcomplicate it by adding extra stages or hair-splitting existing ones (eg. P2.2 or P5.1). Don’t do it!

I’ve personally run millions of dollars through this system without ever needing to change a thing. Trust me—it works.

Here’s how the P-Process maps to the stages of our influencer marketing playbook:

If you follow this process step by step, you will succeed at finding, contacting, and closing influencers. It’s a lot of hard work but the results are there for anyone willing to put in the time and effort.

Influencer discovery is a time-consuming, meticulous process. In the early stages, this process will be manual and you will rely on public tools for research. However, as your strategy matures and the value of influencer marketing for your organization becomes evident, I recommend you invest in more sophisticated tools to streamline this process.

In my own experience, I went from taking multiple days to find a few dozen P0 creators to processing lists of a thousand or more in one single day.

Tools like Grin and the TikTok Creator Marketplace are a big help for discovery. They’re also a great way to try before you buy by running small-scale campaigns at budgets you can afford to lose before investing more heavily. However, if you’re going to get serious about investing in influencers, you will want to have personal relationships with your creators.

Marketplace tools make this hard because they get in-between you and your prospective partner. It’s against their interest for you to go direct so they will fight to stop this from happening.

However, marketplace tools also make scale much easier in certain situations. When what you want is to round up a large quantity of influencers rapidly to activate around a campaign, not only marketplaces but also agencies can help quickly pull together a roster for you.

That said, it makes a big difference whether your creator partners actually know, like, and care about you and your product or service. You can’t know whether that’s the case if you don’t talk to them. We will cover this in depth in the P2 section down below.

For YouTube, I started using the basic YouTube search function, public tools like SocialBlade, and a python script I wrote myself to aggregate data and perform calculations. This was incredibly slow. To speed up this process, I signed up for a trial run with an enterprise tool called Tubular, which we eventually signed a contract with (not cheap–cost was $50k/yr to start) due to how powerful it was.

Note on Tubular: I recently learned they launched SMB pricing, which is two seats for $25k instead of $50k.

The Twitch tool I used was Noscope, which I used mainly to dump data into my own set of spreadsheets. We had a personal relationship with the founders that allowed me to set up some custom data exports with them.

Unfortunately, Noscope was acquired and ceased to be as useful (the acquirers turned it into their own client dashboard tool). As of 2021, the tool I use for Twitch streamers is Sullygnome.

Your goal in P0 is to cast a wide net. We will use limited criteria to ensure we get the broadest list possible. We will further filter and refine that list in P1.

To build your P0 prospect list, there are three primary metrics to consider:

These criteria form the crux of your influencer discovery process. Let's delve into each of them.

Creator size is a crucial consideration for two reasons. Firstly, the effort required to negotiate and finalize a deal is largely the same, irrespective of the influencer's audience size. Thus, if you have to choose, go for the influencer with the larger audience, assuming you're prepared to pay their cost.

However, it's important to aim for diversity in your partners. Think of your whole program like a portfolio of investments, with a mix of large, mid, and small-size creators. This way, you spread your risk, learn more about how different-sized creators perform in your market, and wind up with a more balanced program overall.

A good product solves a specific problem or set of problems. That means not all content related to all problems is a good fit for your brand. However, we’ll save the in-depth brand pass for P1, so far now it’s enough to ensure a creator is generally active in your overall space (eg. gaming, coffee, fashion, beauty) in the beginning. We are casting a wide net

The final piece of the puzzle is the target audience. Use standard demographic information such as age, gender, and location to ensure you’re reaching the right people. For example, f you can’t sell your product outside the country your business is in, don’t speak to audiences who can’t buy.

Many tools track creator audience demographic. If you don’t have that, ask the creator for it in P2.

If you end this step with hundreds or even thousands of creators on your P0 list, don’t worry. We’re going to cut that list down dramatically in P1. In fact, that’s why I want you making a big list in P0—you can easily find yourself going from 1,000 down to just 100 creators after you complete your P1 review.

With your finished P0 list in hand, let’s keep rolling!

P1 is all about refining your P0 list and ensuring a high level of brand compatibility with each potential influencer. This step involves additional quant-based filtering and a qualitative review of each creator's content to verify its relevance and fit with your brand before we even think of emailing or DMing anyone.

This is important for two reasons:

If you filter your list and still have a large (>100) number of P1-qualified prospects, then break your list into batches. If you get 20 done today, then email 20 today. No point in holding up your entire outreach program until you’ve run through every creator.

Since we want to narrow our list to include only the best prospects first, I recommend using a metric I call the Quality Score. This is a simple score from 1 to 3 (3 is best; 1 is worst) that will allow you to separate your prospects into the appropriate buckets.

You’ll need a couple metrics:

To get your engagement metric, there are a number of different metrics you can use. I recommend using the “hardest” interaction behavior (eg. comments or viewing a livestream) as your benchmark for a creator’s audience engagement.

For example:

Note: You may need to get some data directly from some of your partners to fill this out completely (eg. Twitch doesn’t expose streamer subscriber counts so the streamer will have you tell you personally). Use an average percentage as an estimated calculation as a backfill until you get real data to replace it.

Then break out your Quality Score targets for your view and engagement metrics into something like this:

Important: To be a QS3, a creator must pass on both view and engagement metrics. If they pass one but not the other, they are an automatic QS2.

Filter out anyone who has a Quality Score of 1. If they fail to meet either or both of the views or engagement targets, now is not the right time to work with them.

Sort your spreadsheet based on Quality Score from High > Low (Descending) and prepare to go through each one of them in your qualitative brand fit review.

A quick look at a YouTube video's thumbnail, title, and perhaps a minute or two of the content is generally enough to gauge its suitability. Things to look out for:

Here are examples of what I looked for on YouTube:

I might spend three to five minutes on each creator, but with a list of fewer than a hundred creators and a clear schedule, I could navigate through this task in one or two workdays at most.

Seriously, don’t skip the brand fit check.

If you do, one or two things could wind up happening.

Firstly, you will end up initiating partnerships with creators who are not a good fit for your brand. That’s a waste of time and money on top of potential negative brand impact if the partnership launches. You will increase your risk of getting canceled on social media if this happens.

Secondly, if you approach a creator without having familiarized yourself with their content, you risk appearing unprepared and disrespectful when you talk to them. It's crucial to make an effort to understand and appreciate the creator's work and be able to articulate why it aligns with your brand.

Almost no one does this. My friend Paul got a $200,000 book contract offered to him by people who hadn’t even read his book.

Don’t be like them. Put in the work.

Once you've completed both quant and qual checks, you are now ready for outreach!

For this step, consider using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool integrated with your email. (I mainly use Streak.) This will help you track your conversations, automate your emails, and report on pipeline progress.

In addition to tracking current conversations, a CRM tool will also allow you to keep a list of influencers who might not be a good fit now, but could potentially align with your brand in the future. As you trim down your list during the P2 stage, don't delete the influencers who fail the quantitative pass. Instead, move them to a separate tab or spreadsheet. This will ensure you don't lose track of potential future partners as they grow over time.

With your CRM in place and your emails prepared, it's time to reach out to your potential influencers.

Once you've sent out the outreach emails, the waiting game begins. To increase your chances of receiving a response, consider sending up to two or three follow-up emails. Creators, like all of us, receive a lot of emails, and your message might get lost in the mix.

In the early days, I also had creators telling me they thought my email was spam. Discord hadn’t been active in offering sponsorships so it took some time for some creators to realize the emails I sent were legit.

Once you receive a response from a creator, congratulations! You've officially entered the P2 phase.

P2, also known as the Interview Stage, is a pivotal phase in the process of building relationships with content creators and their management teams. Its primary purpose is to cultivate a thorough understanding of the prospective partner’s business, aspirations, past brand activation experiences, and their expectations for your future partnership.

Begin by scheduling 45 minutes to an hour for each interview. As time goes on, you’ll get faster and you should be able to get entirely through P2 and P3 in one session of 30-45 minutes.

Far too many folks working in influencer marketing are just trying to sling briefs and close deals without pausing to get to know the people they would be working with.

Yes, this is time consuming and laborious but do not skip it. You’ll see why it matters so much in a moment.

Before we go further, I want to make a critical point:

You’re going to be talking to a lot of people in P2. The conversations you’ll have are incredible opportunities to learn about how your ideal customers (your P2 creators are your ideal customers, right?) react to your product or service. Don’t waste them!

Use your conversations to learn more about the following things:

Here are a few pitfalls to look out for:

For more on this subject, go read the very excellent book Talking to Humans by Giff Constable and/or Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

Our first step after opening an email conversation is to insist on having a live conversation. Some people will resist this—that’s a bad sign. Anyone who’s willing to do a deal sight unseen is likely not the right partner for you.

Think of the willingness to meet and talk live as a small test of their excitement and interest in you. Don’t compromise.

I recommend taking no more than an hour to write down some thoughts on what’s important to you as you begin talking to creators. The earlier you can filter out creators who don’t fit in, the more time and money you’ll save.

Avoiding unnecessary conversations is a critical part of keeping your influencer program lean and effective.

Schedule another hour to brainstorm questions for your creator conversation. Write them down in a Google Doc that you keep as a template. You will trim or add to the list as you learn more about what information was most important in your P2 conversations.

When you speak to a person, make a copy of the template questions document and fill it out in real-time. As time goes on, you will build a repository of information about each creator—whether you work with them or not—collected from each conversation.

This proactive approach allows you to create a comprehensive profile of each prospective partner, giving you a significant edge in structuring your offers and successfully negotiating. It’s also a wonderful relationship tool, as you can and should be asking personal questions about your partner to get to know them as a person.

The more you know about your partners as people, the easier it is to connect with them and do your best work together.

While building rapport is a big part of P2, you are also trying to get information you need to learn whether you think a deal can be done. Here are some of the most important things to learn about your prospective partners:

By exploring these areas, you will be learning whether what you would like to propose to them is something they’d be interested in. You should be either adjusting your offering in real time or preparing yourself to hear a “no thanks” once you’ve told the person what you have in mind.

I believe almost nobody takes the time to go to this level of detail and depth and really put the effort into getting to know the person they're planning on working with. By putting in this level of effort, you will be well ahead of the race.

Once you’ve gotten all your important questions answered, it’s time to talk about money. Mastering the money part of the conversation will save you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s the hardest but most important thing to get right.

In P2, you are not selling. I repeat, you are not selling.

However, some creators will refuse to either open a conversation or progress a conversation until they know what kind of numbers they can expect. If a creator refuses to even get on the call with you without talking about hard numbers, pass immediately.

But what if they start asking questions about payment in the middle of the conversation? There are two things you can do:

If they bite on the first tactic, then you’re golden. Keep moving forward with the questions. If they insist on a number and you’re prepared to give them a morsel to chew on, try saying something like this:

For a channel like yours, we normally pay a range of $X-Y. However, these numbers can change depending on a variety of factors.

The only reason to give them a range is that you haven’t heard from them what kind of money they’re accustomed to making for brand sponsorships. Once you’ve given them this tidbit, ask them directly whether it meets their expectations.

Your goal is to hold back as much pricing information as possible while gathering as much information from them as you can. You will use this information, along with the pricing model we built way back in the beginning of this process, to craft your pitch.

Any time I lost a deal that wasn’t flat out because of money, it was because I didn’t gather—or share—enough information in the P2 interview.

The reason why we budget a big chunk of time for this call is so we also have the time to explain how we like to work with creators. Make sure you cover the following at minimum:

Use some of your Interview SOP thinking time to go through your contract T&Cs in your mind. Think about what could be a sticking point for your partners and make sure you address it up front live with the creator.

I promise you that by doing this you’re saving yourself huge headaches down the line.

In 2016, almost no one had representation except a handful of top creators. I used to stroll into the inbox or the DMs, rarely having to worry about getting routed to someone’s agent or manager.

Nowadays creator talent management is commonplace. Even “small” creators get snapped up by talent management agencies if they see potential. As a result, don’t be surprised if an email or a DM results in something like this:

When this happens to you, don’t panic. However, do be prepared to pay an added premium to cover their management fees. You will also have a harder time getting the full scoop on that creator’s business, goals, and interest/experience with your product. After all, it’s the job of creator management to find the best opportunities for the most money for their client.

Here are a few things you can do to get the information you want:

Whether you’re talking to talent or talent management, the next few steps are the same so let’s dive in.

It’s time to talk turkey! Once you’re in P3, it’s all about making the sale and closing the deal. There are four short sections to cover here:

This shouldn’t be overly complicated. You’ve done most of the work and laid the foundation you need to successfully work through sales and negotiations. If the deal doesn’t close at this point it’s because you can’t agree on price, plain and simple.

At this point, we’ve done everything we could to gather information and craft an acceptable offer. Now it’s time to listen and learn.

The thing to keep in mind is that our pricing may work for us, but it isn’t real unless it works in the market. There were a few times we had to adjust our pricing and CPRU targets at Discord because the market wouldn’t bear what we wanted to pay.

For example: in Germany, almost all influencers of meaningful size are locked up in agencies. This made costs similar to the United States, despite being a much smaller market.

When you get information that you’re coming in too low (i.e. you struggle to close deals consistently), adjust accordingly. If you learn in P2 that market rate is consistently below where you set your targets, pull in your benchmarks to match. Remember, it’s not cool to overpay.

That said, don’t break your walk-away. If you can’t afford to pay market rate, don’t pay at all until things change.

I am no sales master. I have messed up many times and made mistakes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last five to seven years.

Here are a few hard-earned lessons you can use in your P3 negotiations:

There are no emotions in sales; the deal makes sense or it doesn’t. This was my greatest weak point as a closer. If you’re new to this, like I was, I promise you will likely struggle with it too. This is why we build large P0 and P1 lists–if one deal doesn’t close, there are always more fish in the sea.

If you don’t trust yourself to be 100% impartial about a deal, fall back on the benchmarks as a default or use a colleague or your boss to check your thinking before you make an offer.

Contracts should be a breeze if you did P2 properly. Simply take what you discussed and put it in the contract. That’s it.

The only time you should get pushback is if you’re working with a large partner or an agency with a legal team who needs to redline things to justify their expensive hourly rate.

If you’re getting big questions or complaints about specific terms, deliverables, or details, that’s on you. As we discussed in the P2 section, it’s your job to explain how the contract works up front so there are no unpleasant surprises.

Getting contracts signed can be a slog. Here are a few ways to make the process easier:

Your contract should be written to favor you within reason (no worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable rights to likeness and content, please). That being the case, you should expect any creator with a legal team to make a fuss about things.

Here are the most common areas I’ve seen redlines occur:

You must know your contract well enough to recognize when a change puts you in a compromising position. Contracts bore the hell out of me but I always make sure to know what my legal stance is.

Discuss with your legal representative ahead of time where you can easily make concessions and what constitutes a deal-breaker. When redlines occur, if you’re not confident you understand the language—ask.

Lawyers are expensive, but so are lawsuits.

You did it! You closed an influencer deal. Take a second to do a fist pump or maybe spin around in your chair a couple times. Once the dizziness subsides, it’s time to face reality: you’re half done.

Here are the next steps you’ll have to complete:

I’ll go into more detail on each step below.

Once the ink is dry on the contract, it’s time to begin the work of account management. You will need to make sure your new partner has all the assets and information required to complete their deliverables, such as logos, messaging points, and so on. I recommend preparing an onboarding process for your new partner to get them going, including the following:

At Discord, since we had our partners making servers for their community, we did a live server build together. I would hold their hand through server and channel creation, roles, bot integrations, and so on. Your product may not require such hand-holding.

When I ran an influencer trial for the coffee company Fellow, we were promoting an insulated travel tumbler. Tumblers are not rocket science–pour hot or cold liquid in to keep it hot or cold. No further explanation needed. However, I made sure the creators at least read the product page on Fellow’s website, had access to internal product documentation that covers all features and functions of the product, and were given enough time to trial the product before making content with it.

You’re paying your partner to do work for you. Make sure you have a central location to track exactly what that work is and when you expect it to be delivered. Fill it in as the work completes to feed your dashboards, identify late partners, and make payment processing easier.

At Discord we used a simple spreadsheet that our account management, data, and finance stakeholders all had access to. Everyone knew how it worked and how to use it. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

As I’ve said numerous times in this guide, relationships are important. Your partner will work hard for you if they feel incentivized and supported. In other words, partnerships work better when you like each other.

Reporting performance and progress towards bonuses (if using tiered incentives) is a key part of this. So in ensuring your partner is holding up their end of the bargain. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case.

Prepare yourself to spend a lot of time chasing down deliverables. Some partners are very professional and deliver everything on time with a high level of quality. Some require consistent reminders and some help bringing the deliverables across the finish line.

In gaming, many of our partners were literal kids in their parents’ basement. You can imagine for yourself how that impacted my work, I’m sure.

Regardless, be patient and professional. Your contract should describe what happens if deliverables aren’t complete by the promised deadline in no uncertain terms. In Discord’s case, our partners would receive prorated payments and were ineligible for bonuses–even if they were on track to earn one–if deliverables were incomplete.

That’s usually enough of a threat to put the pressure on a person. Let the contract do the work.

Don’t over complicate your dashboard. You don’t need powerful business intelligence or interactive charting tools—I’ve run almost everything out of spreadsheets throughout my career.

At first I was embarrassed how much our million-dollar marketing program relied on basic spreadsheets. Then I realized that’s how it should be. Build just enough tools to do the work and then go back to doing the work.

Some more tips:

It took us at least a year to finally move our program from a spreadsheet to Chartio. The only reason we made the decision to do so was to more easily facilitate data refreshes and have access to more powerful charting/visualization tools.

Learn to love spreadsheets. They’re more than enough for most of the job.

Rather than relying on invoices, we had an agreement with finance to manually approve payments ourselves when deliverables were complete. We would update finance on a weekly basis with who needed to be paid and what amounts via email. They could verify things in our deliverables tracker and had access to all contracts if they wanted to review the details.

Since I had already collected tax and payment information up front, finance was usually able to quickly and easily process payments without hassle. I highly recommend doing this–you will save everyone a lot of time and they’ll love you for it.

Every marketer knows a happy finance team is a happy life.

We’ve reached the end of the playbook! Time for a recap on what we’ve learned.

First, we began with identifying the “why” for our business and for our influencer program. Clarity on this point is crucial and any attempt to build a marketing program without good answers will likely be doomed to fail.

Second, we talked about establishing our One Big Number (OBN). This is the North Star metric the whole influencer program is organized around. It can be the same number as the whole business uses, or one that is similar to it. Either way, it should be connected to what the business values most to ensure the influencer program is delivering a meaningful impact resulting in real growth. From there, we set up our performance and pricing models. These two tools are the foundation for crafting our P3 offers and also tracking performance in P5. Work cannot begin without both tools in place.

Next, we began the real work by launching the P-Process, our light-weight business development framework.

In P0, we built a large list of “P0 qualified” influencers. The goal in this stage is to end with a large list of influencers who are vetted just enough to ensure it’s not a complete waste of time to pursue them. To do this, we qualify our list by applying filters on core quantitative metrics such as average view count and target audience fit.

From there we move to P1, which is where we’ll whittle our large P0 list down to a fully qualified list of influencers ready for outreach. We do this by applying a “quality score” that ranks each influencer based on the strength of their engagement from 1 to 3. We cut off the bottom and keep only 2s and 3s to make sure we’re reaching out to influencers who have real relationships with their followers. We end P1 by sending emails to each influencer.

Once the prospective partner responds, we are in P2–the Influencer Interview. In this most important stage, we get to know the person and attempt to gather the information we will need to craft a meaningful offer. We also want to share information about how we like to work, how we structure our deals, and what expectations we have. While information gathering is important, it’s just as important to start the relationship off on the right foot. Part of enjoying working with influencers is the real relationships we build while working together. That process begins here.

And remember: no selling in P2.

Selling begins in P3. We have filled out our pricing template with our best offer. It’s time to close the deal or walk away. That is all. If the partner is shocked (in a bad way) by your offer, then you missed a detail in P2. Be prepared to make adjustments and listen to feedback from each partner. Start as close to your aspiration point as possible to give yourself room to come up. That said, never break your walk-away point without a very good reason, which almost never happens. If you’re unsure about your offer, make sure to get eyes on it before you send it.

When the partner accepts the offer, it’s time for P4–contracts, terms, and conditions. This should be an easy stage, as you should have shared everything your partner needs to know in P2. The only time you should see redlines is if the partner has an agency or a legal team, who will quibble over things to justify their salaries. If the partner is upset by any unfamiliar or surprising details at this stage, you messed up in P2. Lastly, send tax and payment info collection forms along with your contract. It will save you tons of time on the back end.

Finally, it’s time to execute the deal in P5. Now you will onboard your partner, provide them with resources and support, and ensure they’re ready to complete their deliverables. You should have your tracking and reporting setup for both deliverable completion and performance. Use spreadsheets to start and keep them lean. Ensure stakeholders know how to access and use your dashboard tools to inform themselves and answer questions they may have. Be prepared to chase down deliverables, but be professional. Let the contract do the enforcement by spelling out what happens when deadlines aren’t met in clear and concise terms.

Most importantly, have fun and enjoy getting to know your new partners!

Influencer marketing is a game of relationships. The best partnerships are built on a real foundation of trust and respect. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to cultivate that kind of partnership. Go above and beyond for your partners to help them in ways that aren’t just tied to money–introduce them to other sponsors, send them gifts on important occasions, and shout them out on company socials for doing great work.

I will not lie to you—it’s hard work, but it adds up. I personally struggle with some areas more than others, and so will you. Stick to your guns and see it through until you know for sure whether influencers will work for your business.

I didn’t do any of this alone. The partnership, mentorship, and leadership of my bosses Will Boyer and Eros Resmini, and later the support of my coworkers Andy Lunique, Julian Huynh, Andrew Kim, and Christine Peng was absolutely crucial to making this happen. Shoutout to Mallory Loar for taking the affiliate side of things and crushing it.

Also thanks to my dear friends Jon Heeter, George Sylvain, and Will Boyer for reading this and providing feedback.

I couldn’t have done it without you.

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