- Hi my name is Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur,
investor and creator of SaaS Academy and in this video
I'm gonna teach you how to recruit incredible partners that
want to promote your product.
Be sure to stay to the end where I share with you my partner
pipeline process that includes email scripts and
a tracking grid to make it simple.
(upbeat music)
So getting partners is probably the most efficient way
to grow your business and the reason why is you can
essentially outsource your costs to acquire a customer
through those partners.
For many partners you only pay them once they bring you
customers with credit cards on file.
When I was starting my company Flowtown.com
that was our initial strategy.
We signed up 13 partners, companies like MailChimp, WooFu,
Constant Contact, iContact, essentially our question was who
had email addresses out in the market 'cause Flowtown was a
social email marketing tool and how could we create win-win
scenarios with those partners to get them to promote it
to their existing customers?
I recently had one of my coaching clients do the exact
same thing for accountants.
Their software is in payroll which it makes an obvious
correlation that they would approach accountants and they
recruited 2,000 accountants out there continually
send them new customers for trials that are converting
at 90% of their trial.
So, the partnership model is the most powerful way from a cost
point of view and speed to get your business scaling but you
need to know these five steps to make it work for you.
Step number one, find shared customers.
It's very important when you're thinking
of companies to approach.
Typically founders do this wrong is because
they are reactive to inbound interest.
Companies out of the blue reaching out to them and saying,
"Hey, I really love your product.
"We'd love to partner."
What you want to do instead is be proactive and strategic
outbound and say what are the big pockets or industries or
types of tools or companies that would have
a shared ideal customer profile?
What I mean by that is if you look at your customers,
you've got ones that you don't like to work with at all.
You have those that are okay but I wish they would spend more and
then you have your ideal customers.
The ones that not only love your product,
they get your product and they want to expand.
Take those, think about the five top ones you have today and go
find partners that have shared customers around those perfect
customers because if you don't do that you can do a lot of work
building the partnership structure the agreements etc.
only to find out that their audience
was not perfect for you.
Step number two, profile partners for growth.
This is a simple concept that if you're gonna spend the time to
reach out to people to partner with to promote your product you
need to make sure they're a rising star.
The way I think about it is high tides rise all boats if you can
hook yourself into a partner that is growing 20,
30, 40% per year, some of them 100, 300% if you can find a
dozen of those kind of partners that are investing in their
business their lead gen, their marketing so that they grow and
they promote your product just by the high-rise concept
you're going to grow your business.
So make sure they're in growth mode
not in survival mode in their business.
Step number three, create a hit list.
It's very important.
I believe that everything in life comes down to a funnel from
recruiting to marketing to reaching out to partners and the
only way to make this work is to build a hit list of customers or
potential partners because you don't want to feel like that one
Microsoft partner, that one Salesforce partner,
that one Facebook partner is going to make
or break your business.
There's no silver bullets in a partnership.
You want to find a model that works,
a framework, you want to identify a cluster of potential
industries of companies that would work best and build that
hit list of at least 20 companies and work through
it just like any other pipeline in your business.
Step number four, connect to fit.
Make sure that when you approach these partners the nuance in the
language is not that, "Hey, we want to talk about
"a partnership," is, "Hey, we're due it's really cool stuff.
"We think it might be a fit for your customers.
"Do you have 15 minutes to jump on a quick call to see if that
"might be interesting to you?"
It's not saying that you're asking for anything.
You're saying I don't even know if this would
make sense for us, for you.
Why don't we just have a quick exploratory call to see if our
technology would make a lot of sense for your customers?
And you can hint to the potential reciprocation of what
they offer and you can add it to your customers but really in
the early days, especially if you have a unique workflow,
unique innovation, a unique approach to what you do,
some kind of technology
they're probably more in need of you
to do that deal than you need of them.
If you have something innovative and unique in the market and you
can make them look different than their competitors then
that's what they need from you.
So make sure that you connect to fit,
not connect to sell.
They'll feel that, they'll say no whereas an expiratory call
usually gets a warm reception.
Step number five, invest in the channel.
This is the most important thing.
I was recently talking to one of my clients and they had a
partnership, a structure they created in the past,
three years prior.
And they had I think they said a couple dozen partners but it was
really just like kind of like get a referral link.
It was more of our referral system versus a partnership
model and what I suggested is that they invest in that channel
and what that means is that if you can get a partner to add,
I mean just think about this,
add an email to an onboarding sequence.
After a customer achieves some level of success in their
solution of the product of they hit some success milestone
offering your solution as a way to enhance their business or
experience if you can add that as a reoccurring activity in
that partner's kind of customer lifecycle then
the more they grow, the more you grow.
So that requires somebody on your team to actively work with
those partners to make sure that happens.
Giving them the assets that they need to create maybe marketing
materials, banners, landing pages.
Maybe do a joint webinar with that partner to really make sure
that you support them in promoting
your product and get commitments.
To me if you don't have somebody at scale,
this is at scale, flying around meeting with your partners to
make sure that you get commitments from them from a
promotional schedule in the next 12 months and asking them how
you can support them better to promote your product then
you're missing the huge opportunity.
I know some of the top companies in space Leadpages,
ConvertKit that 20 to 30% of their growth came specifically
from partnerships and it's in you to go get that
if you invest in the channel.
So quick recap, step number one, find shared customers.
Step number two, profile partners for growth.
Step number three, create a hit list.
Four, connect to fit for sale and step number five,
invest in the channel.
As I mentioned earlier I want to share with you an exclusive
download, my partner pipeline framework which comes with email
scripts for reaching out and a tracking grid so that you can
make sure that you monitor and move those partnership
conversations forward.
You can click the link below in the description
to download that.
If you liked this video be sure to click the like button,
subscribe to my channel and share this video with a friend.
Thanks for watching I'll see in the next week.
Oh that gets them to say yes.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [Jared] Did you change your shirt though?
- [Dan] That's always a good thing.