Dan Martell - April 23, 2018


How To Recruit a Network of Partners Promoting Your SaaS Product


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

186.71053

Word count

1,419

Sentence count

63

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The partnership model is the most efficient way to grow your business, from a cost point of view, and the most powerful way to get your business scaling. In this episode, Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy, talks about how to find partners that want to promote your product.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Hi, my name's Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor,
00:00:02.460 and creator of SaaS Academy and in this video I'm gonna teach you
00:00:05.260 how to recruit incredible partners that want to promote your product.
00:00:10.060 Be sure to stay to the end where I share with you my partner pipeline
00:00:13.180 process that includes email scripts and a tracking grid to make it simple.
00:00:30.000 So getting partners is probably the most efficient way
00:00:33.300 to grow your business and the reason why is you can
00:00:35.580 essentially outsource your cost-acquire customer
00:00:38.100 through those partners.
00:00:39.100 For many partners, you only pay them once they bring you
00:00:42.520 customers with credit cards on file.
00:00:44.240 When I was starting my company, Flowtown.com,
00:00:46.780 that was our initial strategy.
00:00:48.960 We signed up 13 partners, companies like MailChimp,
00:00:52.720 WooFoo, Constant Contact, iContact.
00:00:55.020 Essentially our question was who had email addresses
00:00:58.460 out in the market because Flowtown was a social email
00:01:00.520 marketing tool and how could we create win-win scenarios
00:01:04.840 with those partners to get them to promote it
00:01:06.700 to their existing customers.
00:01:08.540 I recently had one of my coaching clients do the exact
00:01:11.000 same thing for accountants.
00:01:13.140 Their software is in payroll which it makes an obvious
00:01:16.720 correlation that they would approach accountants
00:01:18.440 and they recruited 2,000 accountants out there,
00:01:22.020 continually send them new customers for trials
00:01:25.180 that are converting at 90% of their trials.
00:01:28.520 So the partnership model is the most powerful way
00:01:32.180 from a cost point of view and speed
00:01:34.180 to get your business scaling,
00:01:36.020 but you need to know these five steps
00:01:37.460 to make it work for you.
00:01:38.500 Step number one, find shared customers.
00:01:41.860 It's very important when you're thinking
00:01:43.800 of companies to approach.
00:01:44.900 Typically founders do this wrong
00:01:46.240 is because they are reactive to inbound interest.
00:01:49.800 Companies out of the blue reaching out to them
00:01:51.680 and saying, hey, I really love your product,
00:01:53.140 we'd love to partner.
00:01:54.300 What you want to do instead is be proactive
00:01:56.560 and strategic outbound and say what are the big pockets
00:02:00.200 or industries or types of tools or companies
00:02:03.840 that would have a shared ideal customer profile?
00:02:07.320 What I mean by that is if you look at your customers,
00:02:09.880 you've got ones that you don't like to work with at all,
00:02:12.520 you have those that are okay but I wish they would spend more
00:02:15.160 and then you have your ideal customers,
00:02:16.980 the ones that not only love your product,
00:02:19.060 they get your product and they want to expand.
00:02:21.320 Take those, think about the five top ones you have today,
00:02:24.360 and go find partners that have shared customers
00:02:27.300 around those perfect customers because if you don't do that,
00:02:30.600 you can do a lot of work building the partnership structure,
00:02:32.900 the agreements, et cetera, only to find out
00:02:35.060 that their audience was not perfect for you.
00:02:37.360 Step number two, profile partners for growth.
00:02:40.240 This is a simple concept that if you're gonna spend the time
00:02:43.240 to reach out to people to partner with,
00:02:45.380 to promote your product, you need to make sure
00:02:47.480 they're a rising star.
00:02:48.880 The way I think about it is high tides rise all boats.
00:02:51.720 If you can hook yourself into a partner
00:02:54.840 that's growing 20, 30, 40% per year,
00:02:58.160 some of them 100, 300%,
00:03:00.060 if you can find a dozen of those kind of partners
00:03:02.860 that are investing in their business,
00:03:04.520 their lead gen, their marketing,
00:03:05.600 so that they grow and they promote your product
00:03:08.600 just by the high rise concept,
00:03:11.480 you're going to grow your business.
00:03:13.300 So make sure they're in growth mode,
00:03:15.120 not in survival mode in their business.
00:03:17.680 Step number three, create a hit list.
00:03:20.920 It's very important.
00:03:21.760 I believe that everything in life comes down to a funnel
00:03:24.080 from recruiting to marketing to reaching out to partners
00:03:28.060 and the only way to make this work is to build a hit list
00:03:31.860 of customers or potential partners because you don't want
00:03:34.900 to feel like that one Microsoft partner,
00:03:37.860 that one Salesforce partner, that one Facebook partner
00:03:40.780 is gonna make or break your business.
00:03:42.640 There's no silver bullets in partnerships.
00:03:45.600 You want to find a model that works, a framework.
00:03:48.140 You want to identify a cluster of potential industries of
00:03:52.180 companies that would work best and build that hit list of at
00:03:55.880 least 20 companies and work through it just like any other
00:03:59.720 pipeline in your business.
00:04:01.040 Step number four, connect to fit.
00:04:03.820 Make sure that when you approach these partners,
00:04:06.280 the nuance in the language is not that,
00:04:09.100 hey, we want to talk about a partnership.
00:04:10.820 It's, hey, we're doing some really cool stuff.
00:04:12.660 We think it might be a fit for your customers.
00:04:14.300 do you have 15 minutes to jump on a quick call
00:04:16.240 to see if that might be interesting to you?
00:04:18.340 It's not saying that you're asking for anything.
00:04:20.480 You're saying, I don't even know
00:04:22.380 if this would make sense for us, for you.
00:04:25.040 Why don't we just have a quick exploratory call
00:04:27.020 to see if our technology would make a lot of sense
00:04:30.140 for your customers?
00:04:31.180 And you can hint to the potential reciprocation
00:04:34.380 of what they offer and you could add it to your customers.
00:04:38.260 But really in the early days,
00:04:39.360 especially if you have a unique workflow,
00:04:40.920 a unique innovation, a unique approach to what you do,
00:04:43.860 some kind of technology, they're probably more in need
00:04:48.460 of you to do that deal than you need of them.
00:04:51.940 If you have something innovative and unique in the market
00:04:54.540 and you can make them look different than their competitors,
00:04:57.500 then that's what they need from you.
00:04:59.040 So make sure that you connect to fit, not connect to sell.
00:05:02.820 They'll feel that, they'll say no,
00:05:04.540 whereas an exploratory call usually gets a warm reception.
00:05:07.880 Step number five, invest in the channel.
00:05:10.720 This is the most important thing.
00:05:12.120 I was recently talking to one of my clients
00:05:14.260 and they had a partnership structure
00:05:17.400 they created in the past, three years prior.
00:05:19.720 And they had, I think they said a couple dozen partners.
00:05:22.400 But it was really just like,
00:05:25.160 kind of like get a referral link.
00:05:27.300 It was more of a referral system versus a partnership model.
00:05:30.740 And what I suggested is that they invest in that channel.
00:05:33.700 And what that means is that if you can get a partner
00:05:35.980 to add, I mean just think about this,
00:05:37.780 add an email to an onboarding sequence.
00:05:40.480 after a customer achieves some level of success
00:05:42.880 in their solution or their product that they hit,
00:05:44.900 some success milestone, offering your solution
00:05:47.520 as a way to enhance their business or experience,
00:05:50.640 if you can add that as a reoccurring activity
00:05:53.960 in that partner's kind of customer life cycle,
00:05:57.000 then the more they grow, the more you grow.
00:05:59.100 So that requires somebody on your team
00:06:01.120 to actively work with those partners
00:06:03.120 to make sure that happens.
00:06:04.280 Giving them the assets that they need
00:06:06.480 to create maybe marketing materials, banners,
00:06:08.960 landing pages, maybe do a joint webinar with that partner
00:06:12.300 to really make sure that you support them
00:06:14.360 in promoting your product and get commitments.
00:06:17.460 You know, like to me, if you don't have somebody at scale,
00:06:20.460 this is at scale, flying around, meeting with your partners
00:06:23.360 to make sure that you can get commitments from them
00:06:25.360 from a promotional schedule in the next 12 months
00:06:28.200 and asking them how you can support them better
00:06:30.560 to promote your product, then you're missing
00:06:32.560 the huge opportunity.
00:06:33.760 I know some of the top companies in the space,
00:06:35.760 Leadpages, ConvertKit, that 20 to 30% of their growth
00:06:39.540 came specifically from partnerships
00:06:41.400 and it's in you to go get that
00:06:44.000 if you invest in the channel.
00:06:45.900 So quick recap, step number one, find shared customers.
00:06:49.760 Step number two, profile partners for growth.
00:06:52.820 Step number three, create a hit list.
00:06:55.220 Four, connect to fit for sale.
00:06:57.220 And step number five, invest in the channel.
00:07:00.720 As I mentioned earlier, I wanna share with you
00:07:02.380 an exclusive download, My Partner Pipeline Framework,
00:07:06.180 which comes with email scripts for reaching out
00:07:08.780 and a tracking grid so that you can make sure
00:07:11.180 that you monitor and move those partnership conversations
00:07:14.620 forward, you can click the link below in the description
00:07:16.720 to download that.
00:07:17.860 If you like this video, be sure to click the like button,
00:07:19.900 subscribe to my channel, and share this video with a friend.
00:07:24.260 Thanks for watchin', I'll see you in the next week.
00:07:26.480 Boo! 0.83
00:07:28.900 Oh, that gets them to say yes.
00:07:31.840 Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:07:33.420 Did you change your shirt, though?
00:07:35.000 That's always a good thing.