Why are you ignoring joint ventures? Case study inside.

This is something I don't really read much about on the forums, and it really surprises me. Joint ventures is the most leveraged model for getting qualified leads, perhaps moreso than a referral model.

At the present I am managing the JV relationships for a financial counseling service. We manage the customer's weekly cashflow, give financial advice, and ultimately get people's mortgages paid off faster. Before I joined the business they were cold calling residential leads, and the results were very subpar, even with a proven script. B2B didn't work that much better. Cold calling is extremely unleveraged, no one wants to do the calls, and people generally don't like receiving them, and the quality of the appointments usually aren't great either. This is not an issue of qualifying, some people will say ANYTHING to simply nice you away on the phone 'Sure, we're interested. Come on over,' And when you get there, they sit and look at you, nod and smile, and give some vague reason why they can't proceed on that night. This would happen again and again, and the owner was sick of running on this kind of treadmill.

Instead, we looked at setting up joint ventures between the business I worked for and competing but complimentary companies in our city. We went after the big fish, and for us it was the investment property niche. These guys have door knockers, inbound ads, telemarketers generating leads all day long.. and the thing is maybe 80% of people are NOT qualified to purchase a home.. they want to.. but simply do not have borrowing capacity. The thing is, these leads are wood for them.. beyond useless, but for us it's like finding a virgin vein of gold. These people are an ideal fit, all have a mortgage, all want to be financially independent in the next ten to twenty years, all acknowledge they have an issue and are responsive to telemarketers. We set up a deal where we paid the property investment company $500 per settlement, as well as referring the client back to them once they have the required equity/cashflow to make a purchase. What could be a better synergy for both businesses?

We now have a few hundred qualified leads coming in per week from property groups, perfectly qualified and aware of what's going to happen next in the process. The next step is to continuing the leverage by hiring a small room of telemarketers to call these leads and set up appointments, no more cold calling! Using a proven script which has been tweaked for the referral partnership. These leads have already had three touch points before they arrive on the telemarketer's desk..

This post isn't meant to brag, but to open your eyes to the power and leverage of joint partnerships. We have less than 5 big partners that we work with, and we're flush with leads.. so it's not about high volume unlike cold calling.. and this is only in one vertical! There are another 4 big industries we can replicate this process with, and will get a similar result.

How I did it was by cold calling potential partners. But it wasn't exactly that simple. When you approach a business with the idea of discussing a joint venture, you get the same skeptical reaction as any other salesman calling for an appointment. Even in situation like this, where it could be argued that they 'Win', more than we do with the deal. It's like someone saying to you: 'I'm going to let you test drive my Ferrari.' It's weird, and sounds too good to be true. You will be thinking 'What's the catch? What's in it for you?' Yes, you can have the perfect rehearsed answer for this, and hope somehow it makes the right connection in the person's mind.. but like I've been saying for the past few weeks, when they start leaning that way it's dangerous territory.. and you foolishly put the deal at risk.

Anyway, you need to position yourself VERY DIFFERENTLY, in fact you must frame the initial conversation in a way that the other person is qualifying yourself TO YOU as to why they would be a good fit. You need to behave like you would in a game of poker.. sitting on a pair of aces.. and somehow you know the other person has a pair of shitty cards.. you need to slow play your proposal to get the most out of them, to get to invest in the idea of doing business with you. I won't share the exact method or script I use here for free, but if you pay attention to what I've just said it will give you a good baseline. You don't want to come across as selling anything, that's the most important principle.. so you don't want to ever say 'We want to increase your revenue by monetizing your unqualified leads', on the surface that sounds like a good deal right, I mean it makes sense, doesn't it? NO. This opens a whole plethora of objections in the person mind 'What do you get out of it? Are you trying to rip me off? Why did you call me and not someone else? How much work is this going to be?.' So you want the person to be more eager to do business with you than you are with them.. and get them excited and tell you what they thought THEY get out of the deal, you want them to suggest the meeting, set the time, and initially define the expectations. You need to them think it was THEIR idea even if you initially reached out to them.

So you might not have the exact synergies as my business does with others.. but I guarantee if you are creative you will find complimentary firms that want to increase their revenue and get more referrals.

For example, when I was running a web design business from my bedroom, I got a bunch of leads from graphic design businesses, companies that do corporate identity, SEO companies which don't do web design, businesses that do printing like business cards etc. Depending on what you sell there will be stronger and weaker synergies.. but the point is that they are there. You want to take what is JUNK to them and sell your service, give a commission to your partner, then refer back the original lead when they raise their hand to buy the referrer's product. If the prospect decides to buy,

The hard part is actually getting these relationships to begin with, and that involves very precise positioning, and having a proven product which is a fit, it needs to be a no brainer for the other person to see the potential synergy.

So.. think bigger! You only have so much time and energy, and in today's world it no longer makes sense, nor is it really financially responsible to be chasing one sale after another. That's really old school, and it's becoming harder and harder to make it work, even for the most experienced and talented cold callers in the world such as myself, let alone a newbie whose voice shakes when he picks up the phone. Most of the time, there's nothing I can do or say to make it work, it's just.. how it is. There are too many elements of randomness and mechanics at play which are directly out of my influence.. and I'm tired of it after nearly a decade of cold calls.

I'm willing to help people generate ideas and share what I've learned about joint venture channels in this thread.