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Business and Marketing Podcast with Debbie DeChambeau
Welcome to episode 15 of the Select Business Team podcast. In most of our episodes, we interview our members about their business and their business experiences, but it’s just your host talking about different ways to meet new strategic partners, when they won’t otherwise respond to your inquiries. How can you help the people you have identified as your strategic partners get visibility and more clients before you really know them. Basically, how can you add more value to the relationship?
Do you reach out to people that you think might be good strategic partners and suggest you get together because you think there is synergy and want to explore ways that you can work together? If you are reaching out to someone who is just starting out in business or in sales, this can be very flattering, but if they are busy, this can be very time consuming.
When I refer to strategic partners, I’m talking about people in other professions who are going after the same customer base as you. For example, strategic partners for a realtor might be divorce or estate planning attorneys, mortgage lenders and apartment leasing agents. For a banker, a strategic partner might be a business attorney, a CPA and a business coach. If you are developing a list of strategic partners, you might want to listen to episode 7 of the Select Business Team podcast where we talk about creating a referral marketing plan for strategic partners.
In this episode:
We are assuming you already have that list of strategic partners developed, but if you don’t, keep listening because you will get some great ideas and maybe even get some inspiration for getting started!
If reaching out to people you don’t know for the purpose of developing potential relationships is part of your marketing strategy, one of the questions you need to ask is how do you set yourself apart from everyone else and get their attention? How do you stand out and get them to say yes to meeting with you?
What if you could provide an attractive offer as a way to get to know them. Something that would make it difficult for them to say no to because it’s exposure for them, either by way of you promoting them or by an introduction you want to make.
5 Ideas
- Invite them to be a guest author for your company blog
- Ask them to be a guest on your podcast and interview or have a conversation with them.
- Follow them on social media and share some of the content they promote – when doing this, put your own comment in to personalize it some.
- Promote them in one of your email newsletters – Remember that not everyone will land on your blog or podcast so when you push your content out via email, you have a greater chance for more people to see it.
- Offer to provide a product or service that you offer free of charge to them
In this episode we provide several examples and elaborate on these 5 ideas, so take a few minutes to listen and grab something for taking notes. If you would like more information, give us a call or send us an email.
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Select Business Team – A lot of business today is created from what you do for others….the more you help them, the more they will help you. At Select Business Team, it is the core foundation of what we do. While we might talk about how to most effectively run a business, we also talk a lot about how we can create opportunities for each other on the Team. A lot of being able to create opportunities for others comes from really understanding what they do in business, what types of clients they work with and what the outcome of their services means to their clients. Send us an email if you would like to learn more about how we can help you build your business through referrals.
ABOUT THE HOST – DEBBIE DECHAMBEAU
Debbie DeChambeau is the founder of Select Business Team and has been training on referral marketing for over 20 years. If you aren’t getting the amount of referrals you think you should be getting, give Debbie a call at 301-924-3662 or send her an email debbie@selectbizteam.com.