In this Ask Evan episode, Evan Carmichael answers a Facebook reader’s question about how to market a hot‑wings brand through partnerships. He explains that the most efficient way to reach new customers is to partner with businesses or organizations that already serve the target audience before they decide to buy wings. He gives concrete examples—partnering with Little League teams, office buildings, or companies that can distribute flyers—to capture customers at the pre‑purchase stage. Carmichael then outlines three primary partnership structures: (1) cross‑promotion with no money changing hands, (2) commission‑based deals, emphasizing the concept of a “margin to motivate” and the use of front‑loaded commissions for repeat‑purchase models, and (3) discount or coupon incentives for the partner’s audience. He illustrates the commission model with a case study from his first software company, which expanded internationally by giving local sellers commissions for leads. Throughout, he stresses tailoring the commission rate to the business’s margins and the importance of aligning incentives. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to like, comment, and suggest future partnership questions.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my Facebook readers, Terry, who wrote in asking about partnerships. And he wrote in saying, "Can you explain, I want to sell my brand and my hot wings, who should I partner with to market our product?" This is a great question, and partnerships are a fantastic way to be able to reach a new audience, especially for when you're starting the business. It's a low-cost way to be able to go out and get customers. So the idea here is find somebody who's already selling to your ideal target audience and strike up a partnership with them so you can reach that target audience a lot faster than if you were going to go out and do advertising or some of the more costly or expensive ways to promote your business. So if you're selling wings or, I mean, it doesn't matter what type of product you're selling, but in case of wings, you want to think about where are people going and what are they buying before they buy wings and after they buy wings. So if you think about before, as an example, what are people doing? Where are your customers coming from before they buy your wings? Uh, if you don't have any customers yet, if you're just starting up, think about where your ideal customers are coming from before they want to come and buy your wings. So example might be, uh, Little League Baseball. Maybe after Little League Baseball games, everybody goes out and wants to go have some wings. So here you want to make a partnership with either the teams or other people selling to Little League Baseball or the association, or strike up deals with the coaches so you can get them coming to your establishment after every game they have. Maybe it's going to office workers. Maybe people after their day at work, they want to go home and buy your wings because they want to have dinner. So it could be striking up partnerships with the buildings where these people are working. Or with the individual companies to post flyers in their, in their lunchroom or their photocopy room. So you're thinking about where people are going before they come to you and letting them know about you before they have to make that decision and partnering up with the companies who also target those types of people. In terms of how to make a partnership arrangement, there's a whole whack of different ways to do it. There's a million different ways to be able to strike up partnership agreements. But the most common ones is either just cross-promotion, so here it's, you know, you're going to promote their product if they promote your product and there's no money changing hands. So that can work sometimes. The second is you offer commissions, you're actually paying, you know, 10%, 20%, 30%, whatever it is, depends on your business and your margins, if they're going to go out and, you know, promote your product. A quick example of this, in my first software company, this is what we did to expand ourselves internationally. And we had a, a pretty good presence in North America, but also had people who could use our software in Europe and Australia and all around the world. So we partnered up with people who were already selling to those companies, and we gave them a commission to help us sell it for us. So we gave them even a few leads, but their job was to go and promote us to their audience. And so it was great because we didn't really have a foothold in England or the rest of Europe or Australia or or everywhere else around the world, and we just found people who are already selling to those guys and made an agreement with them to get them to sell for us. If you are giving them a commission, you wanna think about what's called the margin to motivate, and that's when you're thinking about how much money do I have to give them to really motivate them to sell for me. So if you're selling something and you're giving them a 1% commission, they might say, "Yeah, okay, let's make a deal," but they may not ever actually sell anything for you because It's not enough money to really make a difference for them. So think about for your own business what you can afford and how much is going to really make them want to go out and sell. So is it 10%? Is it 30%? Is it 50%? Is it 75%? Just depends on the type of business you have and what your margins are. A lot of times people will front-load a lot of these agreements, so you get 50% commission in the first year and then that's it. So if it's the type of business where you get repeat customers, then you can afford to give up a bigger percentage for the first transaction or the first year than ongoing, then that's all your money afterwards. So that's the type of relationship sometimes people can work out really effectively as well. And then the last way to do it, if you're not just going to do a trade or if you're not going to give a commission, is you give a discount. So if you're going to companies or if you're going to the Little League teams as an example, then they may not be interested in taking a commission off any sale that's made, but you can give give people who they bring a discount. So instead of paying the commission that you'd normally pay, you give them a discount. So you say, "Anybody who comes from this company or from this Little League team, you give 10% off." And you give them a little coupon that they can come in and redeem at your place. So that could be an incentive for the company or the Little League team or whoever partner to promote it to their people because they're gonna get a discount for coming to your place. So hopefully that helps and gets you thinking. Really think about those people who are buying, you know, or what are they doing before they come and buy from you, and how can you target the companies who are, you know, working around those people. So hopefully that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I love seeing them come in, and it makes me want to do more of these videos for you. So thank you, I always appreciate it. And if you have a comment or a thought about partnership, I'd love to hear it. Or if you have a question that you want to ask, I'll definitely check out the comments below, so feel free to leave it in the comments. And we'll see you on the next episode.
