Blueprint for Building B2B Relationships To Grow Your Business
Phil Risher walks through a cold email system for B2B referral partners: segment prospects by vertical, send a three-email sequence, call the ones who open it, and nurture non-responders quarterly to build long-term relationships instead of chasing paid leads.
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If you're looking for strategies to grow your business to business relationships to get more referrals in your business, in this video, I'm going to give you the blueprint that we utilize with companies that we partner with to help them build relationships and partnerships in the community so that they can get referrals in and not be so transactional by paying for leads. This is a way to get referrals in. If you like content about growing local services businesses, be sure to hit like and subscribe because we post content about growing businesses and we are here to help you grow your business. All right, so let's hop right into this. We partner with local service businesses to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And one part of that is using this flash customer journey. And on this visibility side here, there's three parts to it. But really on the visibility side, you can do a bunch of stuff. You can do search engine optimization, you can run ads, you can post on social media, you can do direct mail, you can do prospecting calls, or you can do B2B outreach and build more visibility for your business. Now, inside of doing business to business, you could join networking groups, you could go out and sponsor events. You could go and do like lunch and learns, breakfast, lunch, dinner, hosting these things. There's a million different ways that you can do business to business relationships. In this strategy, I'm going to show you how to do a cold outreach to build relationships and I'm actually going to show you our template that we utilize and I'm going to show you how it actually works. All right, so the first thing you need to do is think about your business. Let's say that you do carpet cleaning and you're looking for referral partners that are going to help you create visibility. So you want to make a list of those partners. So I'll just rattle off a few. Obviously, we know that realtors could refer you into business. So you can go to Realtor near me and then you can either make a list with their email addresses and phone numbers, or there are tons of ways that you can get lists out there. We have several different companies that we utilize. But basically you want to get a list of all these people. You could do it by just going to their website and getting that. You could pay someone to find the email addresses. There's other tools out there. Like on LinkedIn, they might have their email addresses listed. But let's say also if you're a carpet cleaning, there's also companies that are like cleaners near Me cleaning companies, whether that's an actual cleaners of clothes or an in home cleaning company, on their website, typically on the contact page they're going to have some type of an email so you can build a list of cleaners that way more. One really good one for carpet cleaners is new flooring companies. So if they're installing carpet, we know that they need carpets cleaned and a lot of times they need it within the first year to maintain your manufacturer's warranty. So they should be referring you and if they don't do carpet clean they should definitely be referring you and then you can come up with some agreement or something like that. H Vac, maybe there's an electrician, mold remediation, maybe there's plumbers or property managers, right? Whatever it is, there's always some people out there. Property managers, realtors are always the low hanging fruit where you can build relationships and hopefully get referrals into your business. So once you get a list of people, typically we would recommend, recommend breaking it down by like plumbers, property managers, H Vac, pest control, you know, whatever the list is and having those verticals. And so here's a script that we use, we do typically three emails that we see is most effective. The first one is just a very generic email. The subject line says partnership question mark and then it says good morning. I came across your website looking for a local whatever company to work with. Are you free for a quick call to learn more about your company and see how we could possibly work together in the signature. Now this is important. You want to make sure that you put your name or the owner's name, a link to the website and you want to make sure that you have a pretty professional looking website and then a link to your phone number. Right. So this is going to give them an opportunity to either email you back and say yes, click on your website to check it out, or just click and call you and just start a conversation. So when you have these things it's going to be important and I'm going to show you how this all works. But you can do this in some type of a CRM tool. We obviously have a CRM tool of our own, but you can use like a tool like HubSpot, Mailchimp. There's a bunch of different ones that you can send email. Even in your own CRM you can send that email. And the beauty of this is that let's say we send out this first email, then if they don't respond or open it, then you can send you can wait three days and you can send another one that says looking for a reputable cleaning company. Hello, came across your website looking for a reputable local blah blah company work with. I'm looking to partner with other local companies. Are you free for a quick call? Blah blah. If they don't answer again, maybe they're not the right person and they're just keep getting your emails and they're annoyed. So then you say, are you the right person? Right. I came across your stuff. Should I be talking with you? Is there someone else I should reach out to? Sometimes they'll just respond and say like, hey, can you reach out to my salesperson over here? Could you reach out to my sales director? Could you reach out to the owner or whatever and then they'll put you in touch with the right person. Now what we found is that by having these more generic, it doesn't come off as salesy, it's just like, hey, I came across your website. I'm looking for a local business to partner with and I want to learn more about your company. Maybe there's ways that we can work together. It comes off very soft, it's not as cold as like this is what we do and this is what we're looking for and this is this and this and this. It's like, no, let's just see if it makes sense to work together. So how does this work? One thing that we recommend is that if you have a vertical that is like for example with Realtors, then maybe you can change up the subject line or some of the content in here about ways that you could refer them business or you could help them and not taking, only giving. So a perfect example of this that we work with a company that does like tree pruning and they, they do tree removal. And so the subject line for them was tree maintenance help because they were sending this to like property managers and HOAs. And it's just a very simple subject line. And you can see that the open rates was almost 50% on this and the click rates was here. And if you use a tool like HubSpot, Mailchimp or some other CRM, if you click on these view details for opens and clicks, you're able to see who opened it, who clicked on it and who replied. And when you see this information, you know that if they opened it, they got your email. So then you can just call them and say like, hey, I sent you an email, not sure if you got it or not, but I'm looking to partner with you for Da da da da da da da. And it gives you an easy opportunity to get in because you know that they're clearly interested in this. Same thing with this is like fallen tree, which is like if you have this exact situation that we service, what's your game plan for this? And we want to be your go to person. So like what's a fallen tree? Same thing. Good open rates, good clicks, good replies. And again you can see that you can contact these people and you can see the responses. So inside of this funnel here from a visibility perspective, even if these people never reach out to you, they know that you do this service because you're creating visibility for your business. That is just natural. So hopefully even if they don't respond next time they have a fallen tree or next time they need tree maintenance and they see your comp, they see this service and they say wait. Then I get an email from this person about fallen trees and they do this stuff, they may reach out to you. And so I'm going to give you one other pro tip to this is that inside of this visibility, yes, you can do this. Let's say that they do reply and say like hey, not right now. Or they don't reply, but they don't unsubscribe from your emails. You can take all those prospects and you can put them into your retargeting funnel over here into I wouldn't say a monthly newsletter, maybe a quarterly email. So in that example that I just gave with the, with the tree pruning and the property managers, the quarterly email is going to be more informational based which is like, hey, it's spring, here's what you should be doing on your property. Here's what you need to look for in your property for pests that could spread to other trees, for example, or if you're carpet cleaning and it's for the new carpet installation companies, then it's in spring. Hey, if you're installing carpet right now, humidity is really high, you're padding, blah blah blah blah. Here's what you really need to look for because after six month piece, here's what they're going to do. And it's just more educational about the carpet cleaning process, right? Like if they select this type of carpet, then here's what we would recommend for carpet cleaning, whatever it is something to help them. You're the subject matter expert, you're educating them so that they can educate their customers and be the go to person when they need carpet cleaning. And so that's really how you Build this relationship. That's how you create the visibility. That's how you create some retargeting and nurturing. And then ultimately, the goal of this is to build a solid relationship with a referral partner so that you can start to get conversions in your business through this funnel. Most importantly is that you're not transactional in this funnel. A lot of times people get stuck at running ads all the time, which is like, I'm just running thumbtack, I'm running Yelp, I'm running Google local service ads. And that is their main driver of business. And what happens is that they keep spending and spending and the price is going up and up and up, and they can't get out of the 1, 2, 3, 4 people phase because they haven't done this other stuff. And they definitely haven't done the retargeting side of things. They're just literally transactional, paying for leads, and they're stuck. And so if you feel like you're stuck and you don't really know where to start or you're looking for someone to do this type of strategy for you, that's what we do at Flash Consulting. We'd be happy to do a strategy session with you and see if it might be a right fit to work together. And if not, go ahead and try to implement this yourself. It's pretty straightforward on how you can do this, but again, we're happy to help you. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post videos about growing local service businesses, and our goal is to help you grow your business. That's why we do this. So, sounds great. We'll see you in the next video.
