Using a JV for Leadgen - the Intelligent Alternative to Cold Calling.

What is a JV?
A Joint Venture is simply where two or more parties get together to leverage each others assets for mutual benefit. An example is a service provider, such as a web developer, makes an offer to their own accountant's customers for website design. The web developer gets access to a large number of prospects and the accountant gets perhaps a share in the profits or whatever other benefit that can be negotiated.

There are many reasons to use a JV over cold calling. The two I'll highlight here are credibility and leverage.

Credibility:
If you have a choice between someone selling you something and a recommendation from a friend or business associate, which would you tend to favour? The salesman is clearly there to sell you something, he wants something from you. The friend or business associate isn't obviously out to gain. The credibility of the recommendation is dependant on your trust in the friend or business associate, but there's almost always going to be more trust in a friend or business associate than a stranger trying to sell you something.

Leverage:
Cold calling is always a one to one activity. You can't conference call with a sales pitch (or maybe you can...? :-)). With a JV you're putting your sales message in front of a lot more people in one go. An example, the printer we did a JV with when we started our SEM business gave us 25 paying clients within a few weeks. With one offer. And that doesn't include those prospects we turned down. Using Nathan's figures, from his WSO, we'd have to make 25,000 calls to get that many clients. And that would take 25 weeks - 6 months of cold calling.

Types of JV.
There are many ways to do a JV, only limited by your imagination. Here are three common ones:

Profit Share.
In this you agree to share the profit from any sale. You'll want to be generous with your partner and a 50/50 split is common. But it can be anything you can negotiate. Sometimes you can barter your services instead. We bartered our SEO services for access to the Printer's customer list (and later, printing credits).

Educational Offer.
This is where you send something out that is educational and of perceived value to your JV partner's customers. Rather than money, the JV partner gains prestige and trust by doing something for their clients that is perceived as valuable.

Cross Promotion.
Each partner promotes each others services to their own customers, usually with a special offer. Really only suitable if you have roughly equal sized customer lists.

Finding Partners.
Best starting point is to start with people you already have a relationship with. This might be friends, family or businesses you already have some form of relationship with. e.g. your accountant. Like all marketing, you need to look at the arrangement from their point of view - what's in it for them?

You will want to look at what sort of customers they typically have. Your plumber might only deal with householders, so an offer of web design to their customer list won't go very far! :-) Think about the type of business that will have the type of customers you want.

You'll also want to think about how the prospective JV partner is viewed in the community. Do they have a good reputation? Are they visible, high profile? The more people who recognise them, the better the results.

Approaching Partners.
Here's an example, posted by Ewan, you could use to approach JV partners.

You'll notice on the second page there is a reference to a previous successful JV partnership. In order to get a case study to include you just need to approach someone you already know, as already mentioned.


The Offer.
The offer should be special and specific to your JV partner's customers. It might consist of a discount or added value. It should have limits - a time limit or a limited quantity or both.

The other thing it should have is broad appeal. If you were to offer web design for instance, then your response will likely be low. This is because at any given time, there's only a small percentage of the market ready to buy at any given time. So you need to grab their attention and persuade them that they want to buy now. There's an example of what I mean in this post

Instead of saying "Hey we're locksmiths, these are the services we provide...", they raised an issue that they felt would get the attention of those who weren't even thinking about locksmiths. And the result was a lot of calls. If they simply offered locksmiths services, the response would have been far more limited.

So your offer must be broad enough to get the attention of people who are not necessarily looking for your services right now.

That'll have to do for now as I'm needed elsewhere...