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How to manage it effectively
If you decide to make the leap into partnership marketing programs, my advice is to take good advice from experts. Meanwhile here are some tips:
1. Brainstorm what you can jointly sell and who can sell it for you. Are you finding people to partner with formally—on a legal footing—or informally? What other businesses around you have the same target market? What are your expectations of return on investment (ROI)?
2. Locate partners that have already built a database and would benefit from your amalgamated offer. Your offer should be a win-win for both of you.
3. Develop compelling sales material and provide your partners with the sales pitch and relative promotional material. You want to make their job of marketing your products or services as easy as possible. The less work they have to do, the more likely they are to promote your products or services.
4. Continually be on the lookout for new partners. Don’t rest on your laurels. Protect yourself by actively recruiting new partners. You can find them by advertising your program on your website, listing or advertising in relevant directories, or by contacting potential partners directly.
5. Take care of your partners. Communicate with them regularly and send out updates on product additions or changes. Give them tips and advice on how to be successful in marketing your products. It also helps to pay them on time!
How do you know it’s working?
Keep a track of where you get business from in a simple Excel spreadsheet or in your CRM software and track where each piece of business comes from. It is so important to measure this. Then you can be sure where your marketing spend is best focused in future.
-Sharon Williams is CEO of Taurus Marketing and a member of the Dynamic Business expert panel.
Associations and Mentor groups
A definition: A supportive system of sharing information and services among individuals and groups having a common interest.
Here are some of the mentor groups and associations that may help:
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Great to know we’re all on the same page and that we find networking beneficial. Thanks also for the extra tips!
Perfect, I could not have said it better..I tell people my skill is talking ! That’s all it takes to get to know another person and how you can help each other. Im from smarteronline.com.au and the focus there is ” how can we help small business”. It’s not about selling it’s about talking and education.. Offten people will gather info from us and go run an online PR program them self.. GREAT.. I say power and freedomis all we can ask for in business. x Bianca, Smarteronline.com.au
Great article. I do this day in day out for AVG and Carbonite and what I have learnt is that finding partnerships is one thing, making sales from leveraging someone else’s client base is another. What works best is developing a partnership that incentivises the partner to promote and sell your service, not just offer it as a value add.
Other ideas I can think of are:
1) Work with related companies to share advertising – helps both sides cut cost… and can be seen as a unique offering if no one else is offering such bundled services.
2) Hold joint talks or seminars together
3) Provide each other with a great service that they can shout out to their own contacts. Eg, a web developer sends out to his clients new namecards printed by a printer along with a strong recommendation; the printer in turn announces his company’s new website developed by the web developer.
4) Share expert tips from other areas of experts in their own newsletter to increase the value to their subscribers (but keep within the theme of the newsletter!)
Partnership marketing is not about networking only. While networking allows you to meet the right people, it is when we develop deep relationships with the people we meet that we can bring it one step further and explore partnership marketing – collaborating and helping each other on an intimate level.
I must add that it does not have to stop at people who are a natural complement to our business. Be creative and explore how you can promote each others’ services. When you have the trust and relationship, anything is possible with some creative thinking.
What I have found very successful is a site called ECRM Australia. I subscribed last year and since have connected with a number of prospective clients/partners from around the world. In particular finding relevant buyers and distributors in the USA. It had email addresses and phone numbers to the relevant people and the search engine was very easy to use. The minimal outlay for the subscripton was well worth it, i have since done over 500k in sales using this site- A GREAT WAY TO CONNECT FOR BUSINESS.
http://www.ecrmaustralia.com
Networking has always been a large part of my business. I do more than 80% of our business on referral. That is my livelihood. 1 thing I do recommend is consistency. It never fails to surprise me when I am talking to a Franchise owner and they haven’t networked in over a month and they say business is slow. If it is slow then why aren’t you networking? Because that is probably why it is slow, because you were not networking consistently before. What you do today doesn’t always affect you today, but rather 1, 2 or 3 months down the road.
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