Eric Siu discusses two partnership models for agencies: reciprocal lead-sharing versus commission-based deals. He covers informal referral tracking and when to drop partners who don't pull their weight.
Oftentimes people ask us about how do you structure the partnership? So the way I think about the partnerships, let's say you're the web design agency and I'm the performance agency. I'll say, okay, we're going to send you a couple leads, right? You know, our expectation, our hope is that you would send us leads back. And usually if we send you like 3, 4 and we get nothing back, maybe we'll even send you like 6 of them, get nothing back, we're probably going to move to somebody else. And that's the same thing for you guys, right?
Yeah, we try not to do partnerships where it's commission-based. We try to just do partnerships where it's just like, I help you, you help me. We don't really keep a tally, but we do keep a tally in a sense that if someone's driving us zero and we keep driving them business, then we look for a different partner, but we won't look at it as I drove you 2 customers, you owe me 2. You're not going to go tit for tat. Exactly. There's a general feeling like, yes, you know, like, hey, I drove you 10 customers. You don't even try to drive us one. You haven't given us one lead. This is not working out. You're just using us and we're getting nothing in return. Yeah, exactly.
