[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Referral Marketing With Predictive Technology With Ben Dixon of Naxum

Ben Dixon is the CEO of Naxum, a referral marketing technology company that provides innovative solutions to businesses worldwide. Under his leadership, Naxum has introduced tools like the UNIFY platform and predictive action engines, revolutionizing how companies approach referral marketing. With a background in sales and a passion for empowering entrepreneurs, Ben has been instrumental in developing platforms that enhance user engagement and drive growth. He is passionate about helping companies use referral marketing to build strong, trust-based relationships, ultimately driving success in their respective industries.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:06] Ben Dixon discusses the foundation and mission behind Naxum
• [10:25] The evolution from Chief Sales Officer to CEO at Naxum
• [14:44] Building the UNIFY platform to streamline referral marketing operations
• [17:48] The difference between first-, second-, and third-gen referral systems
• [23:24] How predictive technology tracks sales activities automatically
• [24:45] Ben’s three essential questions to identify the right target audience
• [27:35] Misconceptions around referral marketing models
• [33:42] A client success story involving referral incentives
• [41:47] Using predictive content sharing for insurance agents
• [44:45] Ideal clients for Naxum and scaling referral marketing channels

In this episode…

Growing a business through traditional advertising is more challenging than ever — trust is low, attention spans are shorter, and competition is fierce. The answer may lie not in shouting louder, but in empowering your best customers to become your strongest advocates. So, how can companies create authentic connections, build trust, and turn relationships into revenue without burning out their teams or budgets?

Ben Dixon, an expert in referral marketing and sales systems, shares proven strategies to solve these challenges. He explains the evolution of marketing technology from first-generation tracking to cutting-edge predictive platforms that guide sales reps like a top-performing mentor. He emphasizes identifying the right target audience by focusing on individuals motivated by pain who are already taking action to solve their problems. Ben also discusses how layering multiple referral channels, gamifying engagement, and offering seamless mobile experiences can unlock massive business growth.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Ben Dixon, CEO at Naxum, about building and scaling referral marketing systems. Ben shares insights on predictive sales technology, identifying the right audience, and the power of gamification. He also dives into strategies for supporting a global workforce, lessons from client case studies, and how to create lasting trust through referral programs.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ben Dixon on LinkedIn
• Naxum

Special Mention(s):

• The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M .R. Covey
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
• The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
• The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner, and Nick Toman

Related episode(s):

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “The Impact of Automation and Email Marketing with Tom Kulzer Founder of AWeber” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Trust is the shortcut to relationships and channels growing a lot faster for me has been a gift.”
• “It all changed the second year for me in that business — humbled big time.”
• “Predictive technology allows you to track the activities your salespeople are doing on their devices automatically.”
• “Referral marketing allows you to share products you care about and earn from it.”
• “If you can just remove 20% of the waste, you actually double your revenue.”

Action Steps:

1. Focus on building trust through referral channels: Trust accelerates customer acquisition by leveraging existing relationships and reduces marketing costs.
2. Identify and target motivated audiences: Focusing on people already taking action prevents wasted effort and increases engagement rates.
3. Adopt predictive action technology for sales teams: Tracking real, automatic sales activities offers better decision-making data without relying on manual input.
4. Stack multiple referral marketing programs: Combining customer rewards, affiliate partnerships, and reseller programs amplifies reach and captures different audience segments.
5. Gamify engagement with measurable daily habits: Turning outreach and follow-ups into daily wins creates a motivating feedback loop that drives performance.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of Inspired Insider, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Ben Dixon of naxum.com. Check him out at naxum.com. Ben, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top SaaS series. Some interesting ones. The one of the founders of Zapier on that was a really good one. Wade talks about how they grew the company. One of the founders of Pipedrive. And you know that they I think at that point, at that point, Ben, they had like 10,000 customers. Now they have maybe 100,000. So that was interesting. The founder of AWeber was also an interesting one. Just the journey of building a company in the SaaS world as well. So check those out and many more. And inspiredinsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. One, we help companies launch and run a podcast or an easy button for you to do that. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution and production. The second is we’re an easy button for a company to gift. You know, we make gifting staying top of mind to clients partners, prospects simple and just also been affordable. We even send gifts people want to send to their staff as well from a culture perspective. So all you have to do is give us a list of the people you want to follow up and keep in touch with. We do everything else, and we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for your company to build great relationships through the podcast and gifting. And for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships.

I’m always, and this is ties into what Ben and their company actually does. And Ben smiling here. But I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I admire and also send them sweet treats in the mail. So check out rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. I’m excited to introduce Ben Dixon, CEO at Naxum software. They power over 170 enterprise-level referral marketing companies globally. With the platforms they use, they help these companies grow and scale their businesses. And we’re going to dig in deep. And this is right up my alley because I love referral marketing. I mean, people always say, Ben, like, where do your best customers come from? And the answer is always referrals. Well, how do I track this? How do I do. You know. So we’re going to talk about Naxum. So Ben thanks for joining me. And tell me — tell us — about Naxum and what you do.

Ben Dixon: 03:06

You got it. Well first Jeremy, thank you so much for inviting me to come out to the podcast. And, hey, it’s always a good strategy to ship people sweet stuff in the mail. So that’s fantastic. And agreed. I believe that, you know, Dr. Stephen Covey, with his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is son wrote, The SPEED of Trust and referral marketing is that whole idea of leveraging the trust people already have with one another. If you think about a lot of people try to grow with ads or grow with other traditional marketing methods of a business, you know, impressions are kind of out of this world today. I remember when I first got into sales at 18 years old, I was selling real estate seminars in Downers Grove, and back then they’d say, well, if you have trust with someone, you know, they’re going to respond to you in three touches or four touches, but if they have no idea who you are, it’s going to take seven, eight, maybe nine touches to get their attention.

And today the numbers are wildly worse, right? Even with someone with a trusted relationship, you might have to reach out. Seven, eight, nine times to get their attention. And someone who’s cold. Right. Might be 30 touches. Right? It’s — we’re all bombarded with so many messages on a daily basis that trust is the shortcut to relationships and channels growing a lot faster. For me has been a gift. I was really blessed coming out. I went to NIU outside of the Chicagoland area here in Chicagoland and met my wife down at NIU. We were really blessed, but I watched my sister, my parents, both high school teachers. So yeah. Yeah. Got to go, Huskies. All right. That’s cool. But I fell into referral marketing through my sister. So the story of Nansen comes out of all this. She was selling real estate seminars out of college. She was a school teacher in her high school. School teacher in Aurora and Naperville teaching high school English, and was 23 years old and back in 2004 ended up making six an extra six figures that year in our nights and weekends selling how to make money, flipping houses, real estate seminars, and I was laying stone patios and mowing lawns to pay my way through NIU cash, working hard in Rockford, and said, man, well, if she can do that,

I wonder what I can do. And which is what we always say, right? When you’re meeting some other entrepreneur doing something and joined her on my 18th birthday and made $0 my first ten months thinking I knew it all after watching her for 2 or 3 years and got humbled big time with what it actually takes to reach out to people and to get referrals to a network to go do that. And then it all changed the second year for me in that business. I humbled big time and started doing the real work they taught. It’s amazing when you follow the system, right, Jeremy? You follow a process for somebody and was really blessed. I ended up becoming one of that group’s top earners in the state that next year and it changed our life forever. We were multiple six-figure earners when we were just little kids, 19, 20 years old, selling seminars, and that was what opened my eyes to this idea of referral marketing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was participating as one of those 1099 independent agents who’s out there bringing referrals to a customer. I was in the channel for their businesses, referral marketing. Right. And, and, and I loved the idea of how that business had chosen to create an opportunity for me and my family that didn’t cost us really any money. Right?

It wasn’t like starting a restaurant or another business where there was a lot of investment capital and we were able to earn money as if we had owned 2 or 3 restaurants here in Chicago. So it was a phenomenal experience as a young person, and it was from that that caused me to say, okay, how can I help the industry of referral marketing? And so that’s really the roots of where it all started. And referral marketing as a space is so much broader than some of the traditional categories. And I know we’ll get to that on the show. I think a lot of people think of referral marketing as just affiliate marketing or influencers or maybe MLM. In their world. And they think, oh, that’s what referral marketing is. And it’s so much more from direct sales, certified resellers programs to all kinds of different opportunities to have 1099 joint venture partners who refer clients to you, right? It can be way, way more than that. But I ended up building a piece of software that helped companies compliantly share on social media, because companies who had lots of referral marketers needed to do that. I built it and sold it to a large direct selling company called Usana Health Sciences.

A company called Xango out in Salt Lake City, Utah. And at that time, when I started my small business of this little SaaS company, I didn’t have a CRM or Autoresponders or any of the sales automation stuff you’d expect to have. Jeremy. And like 2009. Right. And so I was looking for a good partner, I was praying, I said, man, God, bring me a good partner. That’d be someone I could do this stuff with. And he brought me Rod Kirby. And Rod is the founder of Maxim. He had been renting Maxim since 1999. He started doing fax on demand in 1999 of all tools. Right. Imagine helping salespeople get their message out in 1999 with, hey guys, here’s a fax-on-demand tool. You just type in someone’s phone number into this website and it sends them a fax with your marketing message. So that’s actually where Maxim started. And that evolved into an email marketing company. When people started using email addresses instead of fax machines.

And then it evolved into generating leads for direct selling companies and insurance companies. And then when I came on board, I was they acquired my technology. We partnered together because I was helping them generate social media interest right, for their offers. And we’ve really evolved over the last, gosh, it’s already been 16 years. I timed their together and we moved from just building marketing systems in the sales tools that power referral marketing infrastructure to building a lot of the traditional back office Commission tracking Commission reports, shopping carts, the other the other parts you need in opening a referral marketing channel and maximize core offer today has evolved even further than that. They build predictive engines today that layer over the things you need and running a referral marketing company that feel like a top salesperson sitting next to you suggesting what to do next.

And the most powerful part that we’ll get into on the show is the types of decisions you’re able to make. You know, there’s a lot of reasons referral marketing companies fail and companies in this channel just struggle. And then there’s a big difference between the ones that last for decades and legacies. And it really comes down to how they make decisions and the type of technology they have so they can make good decisions at the end of the day. So I’m excited for the show. Thank you. So I can see, you know, a hot, hot take on the top notes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:37

No, I appreciate that background. So it sounds like, you know, you had an interesting journey. And I do want to get into A point that you said in a second, which is, you know, something turned around for you with the selling piece, which we’ll get into. But you built a soft you, you kind of were trying to fill a need that you had. Then you found Naxum and the owner and they acquired you and you kind of merged into their software. Talk about your evolution, your role at Naxum, because I know you started and then I know at some point you’re the chief sales officer and then you become CEO. Talk about your role and how that dynamic worked with, you know, with the founder.

Ben Dixon: 10:25

Sure. So the founder is still here. Rod and I work together every day. So we. So in 2010, when acquired our social, the blogging technology they had from the previous company ended up becoming the CSO and Chief Sales Officer doing revenue. We were out selling marketing systems, CRMs, landing pages, sales tools. It was all what people really needed in 2010 1112. And sometimes it’s hard to rewind your brain to what life was like in 2010. But if you if you go back 15 years, you’re like auto responders. Were these life-changing things like email automation was just such a new thing in 2010. I know you mentioned AWeber earlier on the podcast, and I mean, it was pretty darn new in 2010, right? Like a lot of these, all these guys were pretty darn new.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:08

I had like even before AWeber, I had something that ran. I forgot what it was called, like something generic, like auto response that ran on the hosting. That wasn’t even a software. So yeah, I totally remember.

Ben Dixon: 11:23

Yeah. It was, I mean, it was life-changing to people to have even email automation, right? I mean, no one was even thinking about ChatGPT and AI and everything we do today, but it’s a it was a totally different world. But we evolved. So in 2010, you know, there were seven of us. You know, we were serving a bunch of companies, but it was seven staff. Right. And I think a big part of this evolution is the type of company you become In. We had a lot of clients who would use our marketing systems, but we didn’t do commission tracking, we didn’t do traditional back offices, we didn’t do the traditional tracking work at that time. And they would say, well, we love working with you guys on marketing systems. Could you do our back office too?

And so we — one of our engineers said, of course I can in December of 2012. And he literally built one of our clients’ commission engine and a virtual office. And we launched them in 2013. And we ended up evolving and building this platform called unify, where instead of having three, four, sometimes five different providers to open a referral marketing channel, someone could do it all in one. And we built that product in the beginning of 2013, and unify has been a real hit. Like 80% of our clients today are unified clients. They’re on our platform running everything for their businesses referral marketing channel, from back office to LMS to events platform to commission tracking to predictive marketing tools. And in that and in that time, we moved from seven employees to 12. And I moved to the CEO seat. So I’m a business development CEO. I do a lot of the strategy. I lead the sales team, lead the ops, and we evolved. And then in those next few years, it was ten more employees a year and ten more employees a year, and five more employees this year, and ten more this year. And there’s 65 of us here full time, you know, at the company.

So I’m very humbled by the whole journey, Jeremy, because every it seems like every eight, nine employees, it’s a completely different company. Right. When you go through this in life, there’s communication changes, the challenges change what you do to run an organization and serve customers and have happy customers and be there for them evolve. And you have to create some stuff out of that. I’ll share in the journey. If you go to our culture and shoot to Over the North Stars, like one of the things we do that none of my competitors in this space do that even do parts of our system is a 0 to 24 hour brand promise. And when you build enterprise software for large sales organizations, like a lot of groups just say, yeah, anything breaks, you’re gonna. Yeah, just get in line and engineers will fix it. And you pay per hour no matter what. We’re bold. We say, hey, if something breaks in. The system we said was live, we’ll fix it at no cost to you in 0 to 24 hours, right? We’ll take care of anything as Apple makes updates or Google makes updates.

We’ll fix it and we won’t charge you for it. And if it breaks, we’ll fix it. Right. And we’ve had that brand promise for almost a decade now. And it’s something that’s been a been a North Star to how we treat and steward our customers in our world. Yeah. Today I serve still as CEO. Rod, our founder is CFO and he’s our vision officer. So he’s on the upside a lot more. I’m on the sales get this time on the sales side. And then Joe Russell, our COO, is right here in Chicagoland with me too. And he leads a lot of the development and innovation on our side for our teams.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:33

With the hiring. Talk about that for a second. Is a lot of developers that you’re bringing on or is it different types of positions?

Ben Dixon: 14:44

So great question. In the beginning we had all of our staff in the US, right in the beginning was all in the US. And in my previous company before Nexus, I had hired a lot of web designers in the Philippines. My wife’s Filipino and I met when we were at NIU little kids. We were little kids at church when we met at NIU as college students. And so I’ve always had staff in the Philippines. And one of the things that happened when I became CEO at Cgs-cimb was, hey, let’s go double down on staffing in the Philippines. And we expanded from designers to engineers to project managers to customer support. And we actually had two offices in the Philippines fully staffed up through Covid.

And so I would go back and forth from Chicagoland to Philippines, and we served customers all over the world between a mix of US and Filipino staff. And it wasn’t until after Covid, you know, Covid was a very interesting time that I think we could spend a ton of time on, but for our company, it meant everyone working from home. Even though we had these big, beautiful offices in the Philippines. The mayors of these towns said, well, you’re not essential, right? You’re a bunch of engineers, right? You’re a bunch of customer service folks. You’re not essential. Stay home. And so our staff ended up moving to bigger and bigger homes so they could accommodate for a home office, right.

They would all switch their homes during that time. And so when the restrictions lasted a lot longer in the Philippines than they did here in Chicago. And so when we were all back in our offices, back with each other in regular life, they were still stuck in their homes, right? That was not how it worked in the Philippines. So they had almost a full year of extra time of isolation. And so when it was finally time to go back to offices, all of our staff had already, of course, moved to bigger and better houses. And there was there was no need. They had already proven that they could execute well and knock out their work. Where they were. And so that was a change for us that made us truly global. I mean, we have staff in Dubai, we have staff in Scotland, we have staff in Egypt, we have staff in Nigeria. People, a lot of people say Nigeria. There’s more British MBAs in Nigeria than any other country in the world. It’s almost there’s 200 million people in Nigeria, so it’s 300 here in America.

And so a lot of people don’t know that. But we basically have the Jony Ive of Nigeria as our VP of design. So he’s a very talented guy, is on our team. And so through our presence and what we’ve done on LinkedIn, our HR teams just attracted some really talented people who just were not limited by geography anymore. And we all work on the same time zone. We all knock out our stuff together and spend time together on, on zoom and our and in base camp, we’re big 32 singles people. We run everything in base camp, another great Chicago company that we live out of. So all project management we use inside of their platform, and we build enterprise software for customers. And that’s what we do.

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