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

Misogynist Sentences

1


Summary

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

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!
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.