Hi everyone,
Sorry for not posting more often. I've been busy taking a lot of time off - as well as setting up a new business.
The following two strategies will help you get the attention of potential JV partners.
Appeal to Their Desire to Sell Their Products
The vast majority of entrepreneurs tend to prefer selling their own products
as opposed to endorsing other people’s products and services to their lists.
I have rarely had someone ask me if they could endorse me to their list. It
was very often the other way around.
I once worked with a marketer who accepted to endorse my client’s course
to his list. We worked the details out, I answered his questions and everything was going well. Then he dropped a bombshell. He asked me: "Your client will also endorse me, won’t he?"
I found that his request was somewhat ridiculous, because the product he
wanted us to endorse was VERY cheap compared to my client’s course, his
endorsing us was all of a sudden conditional on us reciprocating, and I just knew that it wouldn’t fly with my client’s list.
He held on to his desire and eventually dropped the deal (which would
have been very lucrative for him) because we didn’t want to endorse his book.
Now don’t get me wrong. This person was a worthy partner. He had
worked with some very prominent experts in his industry, and had gotten very lucrative windfalls doing so.
He simply wanted to sell his new product – his "baby."
When people develop a new product, they often spend a considerable
amount of time and energy working on their project. When everything is finished, they want to sell it. And they want to sell their product a heck of a lot more than selling someone else’s product.
So how can you capitalize on what we’ve covered? It’s simple.
Try endorsing someone else before asking them to endorse you. The key
is to appeal to their ego and to build a relationship with them in the meantime…
If they have an easy-to-find affiliate program, don’t just sign up and
broadcast to your list. Contact them beforehand and ask them if they have a sample endorsement letter, for example.
You want to start the relationship as soon as possible.
Following are a few JV proposals I received from two marketers who were bright enough to use this strategy before asking me to promote them. Imagine you were to receive the following two proposals. How would you react, knowing it could take you as little as a few minutes to do everything on your end?
--- Proposal no. 1 ---
Hi Gabriel,
I looked through your site, UltimateJV.com, with great interest.
We have access to a database of over 10,000 British/UK entrepreneurs
and business owners, many of whom would be interested in your eBook, Ultimate Joint Ventures.
We would be happy to endorse and promote this product to our database,
but please let me know if you're keen to attract new business and customers.
By the way, we're only interested in a revenue-share type of deal, so no
up-front fees are necessary.
Please let me know how we may be able to structure a potential joint
venture...
[…]
--- End ---
For the second proposal, I am paraphrasing as best as I can.
--- Proposal no. 2 ---
[…]
Our list is just over 25,000. It is extremely responsive. We recently did a
promotion with a marketer who had a course on Joint Ventures, and it was in the same price range as your book, and we made over 2,000 sales.
Would you be interested in partnering with us?
[…]
--- End ---
I researched these two people, and was impressed with what I saw.
Note that I was especially sold on the second one, for the following
reasons:
- The subscribers recently bought something (recency is very important.)
- The product that was sold was related to Joint Ventures (the subject of
my book)…
- The price point was similar to mine. In fact, I think it was identical.
So their offer appealed to my desire to sell my book, and I knew it would
take very little time to carry everything out. I worked with both people, built a relationship with them, and quickly saw that they walked their talk and were very professional.
Could I have known that they were professional and pleasant to work with
from a typical, "do you want to endorse me to your list" proposal? Sure, there would have been good clues, but nothing beats actually working with and getting to know a partner to really get a feel for the person.
The aforementioned things are very important to me, so you could say in a
way that I was pre-sold to working with them on other projects.
Another twist to this is to offer, in your proposal, to reciprocate by later
endorsing them to your list. If you plan to do this tell them when you will do it.
This will help solidify your offer and make it more real in the mind of your
prospect. Not some type of "I’m going to recommend your course eventually. Someday."
Perhaps you could say something along the lines of, "I have four people in
line to endorse. So, I can fit you in around the [day and month]."
Why do you let them know you have others to endorse? Because they will
know that those partners probably seeked you out, and the fact that you regularly send out recommendations means that your list must be responsive. In other words, it will be worth their time.
Also, if your list is responsive, show them the results you have gotten with
past promos.
If you have recently endorsed a similar product to theirs, and it did very
well, point it out to them.
If you promise to endorse them, you had better do it. (Unless their product
or service does not live up to your expectations.) I’ve had people promise me, and then turn me down for whatever ridiculous reason. Then after some time, they contact me again with the same pitch. "I’ll endorse you to my list if you work with me."
Yeah right.
Offer to Help Them for Free
The following is a letter I got from someone I didn’t know from Adam.
-- Start--
Hi Gabriel,
I just came across your site at http://UltimateJV.com and I wanted to
quickly send you an email and congratulate you on all the success that you
have had online! It looks to me like you have provided and put together a
fantastic resource for Joint Ventures...
I wish you well on your continued success as you experience further
business growth...
I'm also looking for the opportunity to speak with fellow entrepreneurs &
Internet Marketers such as yourself to find out how we can be of assistance to each other in our various Internet Marketing business endeavours. I wish you the best in all your current & future business interests!
I hope to hear from you soon and look forward to finding out how I can
help YOU!
Thanks,
Name
E-mail
Website URL
--End--
His focus was on me, not on himself. He focused on building a
relationship with me before anything else.
I wrote back and said: "Congratulations on approaching me the right
way. It’s refreshing to see someone who really gets it."
Need I say more?
I will.
You should list the things you are very good at (and that you are
willing to do for your potential partner).
For example:
-I can find JV partners with responsive lists to sell your product to.
-I can critique your sales letter so it can convert better.
-I can do some programming also. Let me know what you need, and I can
do it for you.
If you don’t list what you can do for them, and they need a hand with
something, they may not ask you if you can do XYZ. Simply put, you immediately lose out on what could have been.
Give these two ideas a try, and I am sure you will adopt them.
Hope this post will help you.
I wish you the best,
Gabriel Howes
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