Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances:
Introduction:
The heading for this section tells it all. A joint venture or strategic alliance in its simplest form means joining forces with a business that is like yours but not a direct competitor but to sell to a similar group of prospects. If you don’t compete head to head for the same product or service, joining with another company that can offer a valuable service or product to your customer base is a good marketing idea.
Finding companies that can add on to your product or service is a great idea. If both firms can market to the same group of customers it only makes sense to do a joint venture to offer your products to each others list. Work on a plan to market a small test group from both your customer lists. Design a complete test that you can run on both customer lists. You can create a new website for this test or use one that is already created.
Find a business that can sell to the same customers as your customer list
This is not a difficult thing to do. Sit down and make a list of all the businesses that can sell to your clients that would benefit from your business products or services.
For example: my main business is the mortgage business. I arrange mortgages for clients in Canada and have done it for over 18 years. Companies that also sell to these same clients are:
- General insurance firms selling home and property insurance
- Life insurance companies selling policies to protect their investment
- Financial planners helping my clients to set up a future program to help in their retirement.
- Home cleaning and furnace cleaning firms
- Painting and renovation companies
- Furniture and landscaping companies
These are only a few companies that like or need to sell their business to my clients. Every one of them would love to be able to market to my client list.
Your job is to find out a couple companies that you can work with
You need to write your list and choose a few that you think would complement your business. You don’t want to be pushy in this process but making suggestions to your clients or customers on adding value to their purchase or investment with you is a great idea.
Building a relationship with a business that is not a direct competitor to you is a smart marketing move. You can benefit in the following ways.
- You have a market of warm prospects. They are familiar with the business they already bought from and are willing to look at your offer.
- You can save on advertising costs by sharing those costs with your new business partner.
- You can make a variety of arrangements to profit. You can pay them a referral fee for buying from you. You can offer them access to your client list so they can promote to your clients. You can share in the sale profits with them.
JVs and SAs are easy to set up
These types of arrangements are easy to set up. All you need to do is write out your list of businesses that can benefit from selling to your clients.
Then write out a compensation agreement on how you will pay them for access to their clients. You can do a straight swap of client lists and no other compensation. You can give them a referral fee for every sale that takes place. You can split the profits on sales that take place.
The good news is you can sit down and work these details out once you have a business partner willing to look at this opportunity.
The trick is to sell your new partner on how they will make more money.
It doesn’t take a business person long to figure out a new way to make a profit. Approaching them shows initiative and willingness. Business people love to see this in other businesses.
Once you have their attention you will see that they can contribute to the overall brainstorming of how to approach your new clients. Brainstorming with other people and businesses is a launching platform that can build large profits.
A simple letter of introduction and some sample ideas as to the advertising can be enough to build a great long term partnership with your new partner