MBA966 How to Choose The Perfect Launch Partners

Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives you the business insights you need without all the fluff with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, A a complete business training and community online. In today's episode, you will learn how to choose the perfect launch partners. Whatever you're launching, whether it's a new business, a new product, a new book, a new service, a new feature even, you want to get the word out, you want to spread the word as much as possible. And one of the best ways to do that is to partner up with other people, people that have similar audiences or audiences that would be interested in what you have to offer. How do you find these people? How do you choose them and make sure they're perfect so you maximize your efforts? That's what we're going to get into in today's episode, how to find them, what to look for, and how to make sure it's a mutually beneficial agreement. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode is supported by Acer. Looking for a laptop that delivers on both performance and price. The Acer Swift 5 offers a powerful Intel Core processor, super slim design and more. Discover new possibilities with the Acer Swift 5. Go to acer.com, click on store and enter coupon code 100 MBA at checkout to receive 10% off plus free ground shipping on a Swift series laptop, including already discounted models. Offer valid through April 30, 2018 and limit to one per qualified order. Windows hello. The password is you. Windows 10. You only get one opportunity to launch your new product, service, feature, book, whatever it is. So you want to maximize that opportunity. You want to be able to partner up with the right people to help you spread the word and make this launch a success. So I want to give you my top tips. When it comes to choosing the perfect launch partners, my first tip is the people that you already know and have a relationship with are the people you should start with, people that know who you are, that trust you, that know what you offer. They're going to be the best advocates for your products or service. They want to see you win. So that's the first place you should look. Who do you already know? Who are your contacts? Who are the people that are your friends or acquaintances in the marketplace? Who have you helped with a launch in the past before. These are the people that most likely will have your back and will be happy and willing to help you with your launch. So, so that's step one. Step two A better fit is better than a bigger audience. If you find somebody that you can partner with that has a email list of a thousand people, but they're a responsive audience, and that audience is perfect for your product, service, book, whatever it is, that's better than having somebody who has, you know, 100,000 people on their email list, but it's not such a good match. Customer product fit is so important, especially when you're getting somebody to speak about you and your products on your behalf. You need to make sure that when that partner's audience member reads that email or hears about your product launch, they're like, wow, that's exactly what I've been looking for. And you make it easy for your launch partner to say, yes, that's perfect for my audience. Tip Number three Think creatively about your partnerships. You don't have to partner with somebody who's directly in your marketplace to be a perfect fit. Try to step out of your genre or niche to serve a different audience. Here's an example. Let's say, for example, you are a web developer. You create websites for people, and you're doing a special package deal that you're just launching. Now you're doing some website packages. Stepping out of the business world or tech world would be a great idea. Say, for example, you partnered with somebody who has a blog in photography. Reaching out to somebody like that has an audience of people that would love to have a new website. They could be photographers that are trying to go pro and they need a new website to display their portfolio. So think creatively of how you can jump or get outside of your niche in order for you to have a great fit. And a lot of people are very welcome to partnerships like that because, hey, it's something fresh, it's something new, it's something the audience actually needs. Number four different mediums of partnership A launch partnership doesn't have to be, you know, an email blast where you say, hey, can you email your email list about my new launch? Or my new product to do a series of emails. There are different ways to partner different mediums. Here's just a few. Podcasting there's plenty of podcasts that you should be on right before the launch or leading up to your launch. Most podcasts out there are interview podcasts and are looking for guests. So find podcasts in your genre or even outside your genre you can just look at the top 100 or top 200 podcasts and see which ones would be a great fit for you. Remember that when you're on the podcast, you're going to need to make sure that you're adding great value to the episode. And if you do, people will check you out when you give them that call to action about your launch. You can also do the same with webinars. You can partner up with people and do a joint webinar and that's a great medium to talk about and show your product or service. It's also a really easy thing to say yes to for, for the partner. You set it all up, you set up the webinar, you invite them as a co host. All they have to do is show up and share the link to register for that webinar with their email list or their audience. There's not a lot required. Tip number five, the more work you could do, the better for the partner. If you can make sure you draft email copy descriptions of your products or services, images, media. Putting together something like a press kit or a partner assets kit is really, really essential when you're trying to reach many partners. And you can really just do this once. You can compile this on like on a Google Doc and share that with anybody who's interested in being your partner. And it gives them everything they need. Maybe you know, social media snippets or tweets, email copy again, images, photos, testimonials and all the important links they need to see. Now I covered how to find some partners, but how do you choose the right ones? We talked about product, customer fit, that's very important. But also the partners credibility is just as important. You want to make sure that you're partnering with somebody that really partners with the right people. And actually the reputation and their own products and services speak for themselves. They're really, really reputable people, reputable companies and businesses. There's nothing worse than, you know, partnering with somebody that's kind of shady and then you get associated with that kind of behavior. So do your homework. Don't get kind of swooned into the fact that they have a huge list or a huge audience. One bad partnership can really hurt your brand. In my experience, when I reach out to the partner, whether it's by email or Twitter or anything else, if I don't hear a response within a week, I just move on, I do follow up with a very simple email just saying, hey, just wondering if you saw this in your inbox or whatever it Is would love to hear from you and hear what you think. But I kind of demote them and say, okay, this is a partner that's not really enthusiastic about actually getting involved or partnering up with me. I want somebody who's really enthusiastic and really wants to really, you know, be a champion of my product or service. Now, there's exceptions to this, obviously. If they're on vacation, if they have like an autoresponder that says, hey, I'm away right now, but. But that's kind of my rule of thumb. I kind of demote them. If I don't hear back from them in a week, if I hear back from them after that, I kind of move them back up. But I don't really worry too much about it. I do one follow up and that's that. If this is your first time partnering up with people for a launch, you don't have to have, you know, hundreds of partners or even like 10 partners. You can just partner up with three or four just so you can get your feet wet and understand how this whole process works. Don't put so much pressure on yourself to have like 3, 50, 60 partners when you get started. And for anybody, that's a huge amount of partners. I rather have three or four solid people that are really in love with what I do and really want to spread the word to their audience than having like 20 or 30 lukewarm people. Lukewarm partners. So how do you approach these partners? Well, number one, like I said, the first step is make sure you try to look at the people you already know so you already have a relationship, so you know that you're going to get a response and you can have some sort of dialogue. But let's say, for example, you don't know them, you don't know their contact information. Just go to their website, go to their contact link on the bottom or on their contact page and reach out to them by email and just give them a straight up honest email. You don't have to give them a template. Please do not give them a template. Just say, hey, I noticed your podcast, I noticed your website, I noticed your business, and I think it'd be a great fit for a launch that I'm doing. Here's a little bit about the product I'm doing or I'm launching. Give two lines describing the benefits of this product book, launch, whatever it is, and give them a link to that assets document I talked about in the assets document with the pictures and the links and all the email copy. Also mention what's in it for them? Are they getting an affiliate commission? Are you going to reciprocate in some way? What are they going to get in return? And just link to that document and just get them to respond with a yes. Just say, hey, if this sounds interesting, just respond and say, I'm in. I'd love to schedule a call to hash out the details. That's all you're looking for, an easy reply. You don't want them to have to reply with a bunch of questions. You can say yes and then you can schedule a call later on. Obviously, this is really important to do well in advance so you have time to, you know, get everything organized and set up the calls and all that stuff. Now, remember those people I told you about, your contacts, the people that you already know? You need to ask those people, hey, do you know anybody that would be a perfect fit for my product launch? They might know five or six people. That would be perfect. I get introduced all the time by my friends to people that would, you know, be a good fit for the show or a good fit for a partnership. And I get emails saying, hey, you'd love this guy or you'd love this gal. They'd be a perfect fit for your audience so your contacts can do the same for you guys. I got more on today's topic on today's episode, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Today's episode of the $100 NBA show is supported by the Running Remote Conference. When we started our business, we chose to make our team a remote team. We wanted access to the best talent around the world. So if you're thinking about building a team without borders, without walls, then you need to attend the Running Remote Conference. You're going to hear from experts from big companies that run their teams remotely. And I'll be there to speak about how to motivate your remote team beyond compensation. Head on over to runningremote.com to buy a ticket today. It's going to be in beautiful Bali and you can save 15% off by using my coupon code 100 MBA15 guys. To wrap up today's lesson, I want to recap real quick what we covered. Here are five tips to find and choose the perfect launch partners. 1. Start with people you already know, people you already have a relationship with, and don't forget to ask them to give you introductions. Number two, fit always trumps size. It doesn't matter how large a list is. If that part list of those audience members are not really a good fit for your product or service, it's really a waste of time. You want to find people that are a great, great fit, no matter how large that audience size is. Number three, think creatively about your partnerships. Step outside of your niche. Step outside of your marketplace to serve customers that are underserved. Number four, different mediums. It doesn't have to be just an email kind of partnership. It could be webinars, it could be a podcast you can guest on somebody's YouTube channel. Number five, make it easy for your launch partners. Set up that document on Google Docs like I mentioned that has all the information, all the assets that they need to be successful with your launch. All right, that wraps up today's episode. If you love today's episode or love any of our episodes, we'd love to hear it in an itunes rating and review. I read every single review. I love reading them. It gets me all pumped up to read them. It lets me know what you love about the show and it lets other people know what you think of the show too, so they can subscribe and benefit from the lessons as well. So thank you in advance for doing that. Alright, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Any kind of launch in business can be stressful. So the more time you give yourself to plan, the better you can spread out the tasks and therefore you can spread out the stress. So if you have a launch coming up or you're thinking about launching something in the future, start planning as early as possible. One of the things you need in a launch is a sales page and in tomorrow's episode I'm going to share four sales page hacks to increase conversions. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss that one. Until then, keep rocking it with your business. I'll check you then Take care. Of sam.