Scott Manning
When evaluating the methods of marketing, cost, effectiveness, ease, and ability to automate, building business alliances might just be one of the most effective means to abundant qualified lead flow. The concept of alliances is to collaborate with other entities to achieve the result of providing your business something valuable—almost always at a reduced cost and time savings than doing it any other way.
You can build alliances in any area of your business. We will focus on building your profit overnight through marketing alliances with others. The primary purpose is the combination of Referral and Target Marketing—effective business alliances are designed to get you on the “you’re invited” list to the alliance business’s clients.
The WHAT -
Our primary purpose of building business alliances is to capitalize on another company’s business contacts, clients, and prospects. This is done by considering three major things:
1) Target Marketing -
The reason why building alliances is so profitable is because we are basically getting vast amounts of referrals, personal introductions, to people that are potential future clients. In order to achieve this, the most effective alliances are with those businesses that share at least in part your Target Market. Some examples are: carpet businesses build alliance with furniture businesses, hair salons with tanning salons with fitness centers, dentists with doctors, etc. To take best advantage of building alliances, you should strive for a partnership, in which you both are able to “share” business.
2) Ability to have ongoing access -
We certainly could not dedicate enough time to the marketing process as a whole, which rightly deserves an entire book or library. However, one of the most important aspects of any marketing process is the concept of repetitious contact with prospects and clients. You need the ability to access your prospects (in this case, the lead sources provided by an alliance) multiple times.
The major point of business alliances is just like any other marketing concept – this is area 4 of marketing, by the way -to qualify prospects and build our list (see section 5 and 7). Thus the important foundation to building alliances should be to create a strategic campaign with on-going repetitive marketing exposure in order to create qualified leads and future clients. If, in any marketing approach you are unable or just don’t do continuous follow-ups and prospecting, you are wasting your investment. Here are two things you should do with your alliance:
1)- direct response to generate sales
2)- most importantly, direct response to generate prospects
If for some reason you cannot gain ongoing access to your alliance base, wait until you can.
3) Developing the right message, usually by endorsement from the alliance business.
Remember Dan Kennedy’s earth shattering formula; MESSAGE, MARKET, MEDIA – which all must match and be done in harmony. Understand this; a business alliance must be treated as a market within a market. They should be—or at least have—the potential to be your TARGET MARKET, the ability to need or want your service or product, thus you also must consider how you are getting access to them—through your alliance. Because of this, you should microscopically target your marketing message to match not only your typical target market, but that of the alliance as well. Mean-ing, if you are joining forces with a Doctor, you make everything specific to “clients of Dr. ____” etc.
Here’s another point that I thing you should carefully consider when constructing your campaign. The single BEST way of getting great response and being an “in” with your alliances base is to get a Personal Endorsement by or from the alliance, i.e. “As your doctor, I am so fortunate to be able to work with you on a personal level and help you stay healthy. I also often think of other things that are beyond my realm that I know you would find valuable and that I would strongly encourage you to add to your life. That is why I am personally asking you to review this material and give __________ company a call – at the very least, take them up on their one of a kind, for my patients only offer. Believe me, my family started with ________ company _______ years ago and we would never consider not having them part of our life…” You get the idea.
Note: There is no harm in creating this endorsement yourself and getting your alliance to sign/distribute it. This saves valuable time for your alliance and allows you to hone the message to your best advantage.
So all things considered, it makes sense; now WHERE / HOW do you do it.
There are three primary ways that the most profitable businesses use to build revenue maximizing alliances – be creative and think about these:
1)Use current contacts, personal or professional, and sift through your entire client base, current and past.
(This is probably the best and easiest way to get started; quite frankly, just ask your contact for a favor, make them a part of it, and usually, they’ll do all the leg work for you.)
2)Think strategically about other businesses that you know you can help with this same concept and approach them with a plan for a collaborative marketing effort.
(This idea is relatively well-received by anyone who is a serious business owner. Chances are, after studying my book, you will be FAR AHEAD, HEAD and SHOULDERS ABOVE any other business person you would see – so – treat this as another sale, get them excited, show them the potential. In this case, you do the work and both of you benefit. It will be well worth the effort, plus the alliance business will become one of your best sources of referrals and recommendations.)
3)Finally, do your own research—look for target groups of any kind where you could gather leads and see a potential for a target market.
CAUTION:
Although, there are numerous examples where businesses build themselves through alliance marketing exclusively, don’t expect every prospective alliance to work or even to agree to your partnership; however, find one, two, three or five goods ones and dedicate the time to making them effective. This will be a strong source for ongoing qualified prospects and take your business to new levels of profitability and increased revenue – overnight.
Scott Manning
President, Manning Methods, LLC
317-407-3382
sj@manningmethods.com
