Knock on the door with value

“What is important is:

• Meeting people who are interesting and I can learn from

• Meeting people who are doing amazing things and have great companies

• Meeting people who are nice, who are funny, who have interesting challenges

Use this to best pitch me.

This sounds really d*ckish, but try to think about what’s in it for me.”

• Tom Goodwin, How to best contact me (& sell to me) and other people in the modern age

From reading the last section, you should have gathered a list of channels, whether they’re a fit for your business, an idea of their size, and who you can contact.

With each item on the list, you’re going to be pitching two things:

1. You’re offering to collaborate with the channel partner so they can give a valuable experience to their list of customers (or audience) in order to serve them better; and
2. You’re offering something valuable to the customer list (or audience)

It’s a two-step convincing process. But we can’t get to the more exciting second step (pitching to potential customers) without winning over the channel partner first.

Imagine this conversation:

You: Excuse me sir.

Channel partner: Yes, how may I help?

You: I’ve noticed you have a large list of people that you can contact.

Channel partner: Yes that’s true I’m busy, what’s this about?

You: Well I’d like to contact those people via yourself, offer them something that’s really valuable, and will help you look helpful to that list.

Channel partner: I don’t know about that.

You: It won’t require any other effort on your side, and because you’ve let me offer them this valuable thing, I’ll pay you a nice sum of money for any new customers I receive.

Channel partner: Well, ah…

You: We haven’t worked together before, so how about we do this small test with a valuable offer I’ve already prepared, and then you can see if it helps your customers or not?

Channel partner: Okay then! Let’s see where this goes.

Neat conversations like this rarely happen.

But this conversation illustrates the sequence we want to follow.

Your potential partner knows their audience better than you do, has worked long and hard at building up a list of people they serve, and is someone you really want to help and get on side.

The benefit of getting them on side means:

• With some extra effort upfront, you get access to large pools of potential customers that you ordinarily wouldn’t have access to. Other people’s audiences are high-value and more open to hearing what you (an unknown) has to say. The channel partner has worked hard to earn their audience’s trust by allowing you to pitch to them, some of that trust passes on to you.
• If you can negotiate a way to make it a shared success that helps the channel partner, there’s no reason why you can’t help them again in the future. An initial collaboration might be small and produce excellent results. By proving a collaboration works, you open up further opportunities to do things much bigger, and with more scale and impact.
• You become better at pitching to other channel partners and getting access to more audiences. Every partner is going to be different, but as you start landing successful collaborations, you’re going to notice what about your pitch lands, and what needs to stop. This information helps you pitch better to the next partner, and compounds with value by the 100th time you execute this.

The rest of this section equips you with principles for engaging partners and working with them well. You’ll need to be respectful of their time, patient, willing to educate them on why and how you can help them, and do all of the work for them to make it effortless.

The reward is simple you won’t have to fluff around with ads, you won’t be reliant on one platform or technology, and you’re building a customer-gathering engine that you can continue to tweak and improve for years to come.