Agreement on Strategic Partnership and Mutual Support

Transcription

Pete Bennett: Okay, we need get some more business. What should we do? I know! We'll go to one of those networking meetings where we get up really early in the morning and we travel to a grotty pub and we have breakfast with someone who gives us an el cheapo Vista Print business card and talks about what we do when what they really mean, what "me" do. Now, that's okay, nothing wrong with people starting out, in fact, I support them. The thing is though, if you've been in a business for a while, you're very unlikely to get a lot of business from people who are just starting out because they're there to build their business and get referrals for their company or, actually, a lot of them are self employed but that's another video. What you want to do if you already have a business is leverage the contacts and the reputation, I call it, "The Social Capital", of someone who is already established. That kind of marketing is called, "Strategic Relationship Marketing", and that's where you work together for your mutual benefit. What you don't do is go and buy an email list of 100,000 people for, I don't know, let's say five dollars or something stupid and then spam them because you won't get any business, you'll get a lot of complaints, but there's no warm relationship there, it's not a warm referrals. It's just basically spam and it won't work, you'll just spend a lot of time dealing with the fall out. You'll probably get your account banned, your email account and get in all sorts of trouble. I know because I've tried it. I was young, I was young too, it doesn't work. Don't do it. Strategic partnerships and forming good relationships in business is what it's all about and a little while ago I interviewed a lady called Carmen MacDougall who's an expert in this stuff and she shared a number of very useful tips and also her contact details. So if having watched the interview that follows you would like to get in touch with Carmen, I'm sure she'd love to hear from you. But I learned a lot and I'm sure that you will too. [Pete's Interview with Carmen Begins] Hi, this is Pete from Bose, and I'm here today with Carmen MacDougall who has built her business, Carmen Inspires, by building strategic partnerships with others and Carmen's going to share in the next few minutes some tips how you can, perhaps, do the same to build your business. So, with that, Carmen, are you there? Carmen MacDougall: I am, hi, Pete. Pete: Hi. So if you can just share with the listeners some tips as to how you built your business that they could perhaps apply in theirs, I'd be grateful. Carmen: Absolutely, be my pleasure. Well, first of all, I would just like to explain the benefits of having a strategic alliance and actually what a strategic alliance actually is, or partnership. It's all of the same thing. So, first of all the benefit is that it enables you to get a wider audience because these days, in my mind, buying a mailing list doesn't always work for every business. It obviously works for some but not for every business. It also means that there's an element of relationship building that has already taken place. So if you think about, let's say, with your service, Pete, yes, they'll be a need and people might, obviously realize they need a conferencing service but quite often if there is an introduction or referral, it means that I trust the person who's made the referral and, therefore, my relationship with you has gone up quite a number of notches, especially if I value that person's opinion, my expectations will be higher. So the strategic partnership, what that actually means is that that you can either have an agreement with somebody, that they'll promote you and obviously they'll only promote you if they think your service of a high standard and one that by them recommending, anything is not going to go wrong because it's their reputation, obviously, on the line. So you can have an agreement that they'll promote your business exclusively. So they won't promote any other conferencing company and wherever they can, when they're doing their social media or any marketing activity, they'll have something based on your business within that material. So it might be a blog post, some tweets, something on Linked In. And sometimes it's part of a strategic partnership, it means that someone might turn an affiliate fee, which means like it's a commission. So you would provide a particular software link, which means that when I'm promoting your business, your software recognizes it's coming from me and when someone becomes a client, I'll earn a small commission but that's not always the case with everybody. The reason why it works so well is because these days there is a lot of competition out there and people are very nervous about just picking a name out of the yellow pages or just doing a search on the internet. And, of course, it takes an awful lot of time to build up your business, build up a reputation that will then attract the number of clients and the type of clients that you want. So by collaborating with someone else it means then you're not doubling workload, you're actually halving it in a sense. So the assets - you would still carry out the same activity for your business but someone else is doing the same for your business. Now you're not allowed to swap databases because of confidentiality so, therefore, let's say that we both have a strategic partnership. I would make sure that where's there an opportunity I'm promoting your business and vice versa. So, there may be also someone else who has a business that also serves the same market as yourself. So if I take, for instance, one of the businesses I'm involved in, I actually train people to set up as a P.A. or office manager but self employed. Now there are other people out there who want to tap into that market. So I may have a strategic partnership with an online directory which will promote the virtual assistants. There might be someone else who has a piece of software, let's say an online accounting tool that specifically wants to target the virtual assistant. So we will create, like a collaboration together so that on each other's websites, we're promoting one another where we might have events or we're going in to pitch to a client or we'll bring in information about the other person as well. So, basically, the long and the short of it is, Pete, is that a) by collaborating who have the same target market as yourself, it means then you're getting double exposure and you've got other people who are also marketing your business. But, for me, the most important reason for having a strategic partnership is that it enables your reputation to double or triple and as well as the exposure. It takes an awful lot of time and effort to market your business, to get the leads that you want and then convert those leads into clients and, obviously, we know that you could have a thousand leads but it might be ten percent of those that actually converge, sometimes even less. And these days, there's a lot of networking that takes place. There are a lot of people out there that say they do what they do but they don't do a very good job at it and I'm not sure about yourself, Pete, but I've wasted an lawful of money on the wrong people. So now I look at other people and think, "Well, if you were using that service and you're recommending them and I'm trusting your judgment, I'm going to use that person. I know I'm not going to waste my money". Pete: Yeah, I think that I tend to look at this as transference or share of social capitol. Carmen: Yes. Pete: So, I have a reputation such as it is within certain niches and I will not recommend products which don't meet the standards that people know that I set for myself and, therefore, it's a much warmer lead if I recommend a product and vice versa. I mean people can say anything they like on their website and, of course, they're going to say it's great - Carmen: Yes, of course they are. Pete: But I will take a personal recommendation over any kind of marketing collateral. Carmen: Absolutely. So that's why being - you're not literally in partnership with someone but you've got this agreement, maybe even the financial agreement that you will promote one another on an exclusive basis. Some people listening to this might be aware of something called, "joint ventures", where you're then actually collaborating further and creating a joint product together because you've both got an element of expertise, actually bringing it together can create some new products or service, so then you sell that on, but this is more about strategic alliances. And, of course, for anyone that is looking creative marketing ideas that is going to bring in faster results, I have to say that this one of those systems. When I started really looking at strategic alliances for own business, I can honestly say that things moved much further forward in a shorter space of time than if I was going to do it all on my own and buy a marketing list and try and attend every single networking meeting around the U.K. and being online all the time. And, of course, as we all know, by focusing solely on your marketing, that then takes your time away from doing the work that your clients are paying you to do. Now a lot of corporate organizations will have a separate marketing department, of course, but ultimately having a strategic alliance really does promote business far further forward and accelerates far quicker and it's all based on that recommendation. But what people have to be very, very careful of, that they're not stepping into any strategic alliances unless they've done their homework on that business because, ultimately, it's their reputation on the line. Pete: Yeah, you can blow a reputation by making a recommendation, sometimes with your heart in the right place, that you want to help someone but then they could let you down. You've blown it and they don't benefit anyway. Carmen: Absolutely. Pete: So, I agree. Well, this is a huge topic and we could talk, literally, for hours on this. Carmen: We could. Pete: But we don't have hours. We like to try to keep it as snappy as we can on these calls but if people want to find out more, is there a way that they can contact you, Carmen? They can call us and we'll put people in touch but is there an email address or a website they can visit? Carmen: Yes, although it's not directly related to the topic but I'm happy to speak to anybody about this if they want to understand more. My website is www.carmeninspires.com, that's plural and "Carmen", like the opera and so I'm more than happy to speak to people, my email is [email protected]. Pete: Okay, that's perfect. I will put this below the video in the newsletter text so people will be able to see the domain name. Carmen: Lovely, thank you. Pete: With that, Carmen, I think before I do get tempted to talk for hours on this, we perhaps draw the call to a close. I'd like to thank you very much for sharing those insights and I whole heartedly endorse what you say. It's the way that we've built several businesses in the past and more and more we're relying on this kind of mechanism ourselves. So, thank you very much for your time. Carmen: Well, thank you, Pete. Thank you. Captions by GetTranscribed.com