Foundation Marketing: Revenue Share Programs

I believe that developing strategic partnerships is one of the fastest and most cost effective ways of building your business. It should be one of the foundation elements that receive continual focus with direct goals in every quarter.

Now one of the big problems with strategic partnerships is that local businesses are constantly approached or solicited by others to do things, display things or post things that help other people grow their business. For the business being approached this generally just takes up valuable space and is a waste of time with little to no reciprocal benefit which is why so many businesses won’t talk to you or have a standard practice of saying no.

Here are my five steps to overcoming this. Go with a giving hand and deliver real value that leads to mutually beneficial relationships.

1. Interview the Expert
2. Sponsor Your Community
3. The Charity Lunch & Learn
4. Cross Promotion
5. Revenue Share Programs

In this post we’re going to cover the final step, which is Revenue Share Programs.

Well this is it the end of our journey, the easy part.

At this stage you now have a great mutually beneficial, lasting relationship with likely some of the best of the best practitioners in your community. You’ve established yourself with them by showing them real value. If your community is like mine you’ve likely taught them all kinds of new concepts towards the whole approach of attracting customers, these are all good things.

With your strong relationship in place it now makes perfect sense to directly ask them to promote you, but we’re still going to do it in a fashion that’s win-win.

Create an exclusive service package for them. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel to do this just simply re-package and re-name a trial service or group of services you’ve used in the past for client attraction.

I recommend developing some sales materials to go with, perhaps a nice sales letter, a plastic card that can be sold or a combination of both.

Create a program that appeals to their customer, validates the practitioner and ties your relationship to them as the greater good of a mutual passion to help people. The goal is to make a product they are proud to promote and one that will surely yield easy sales.

The offer that comes to mind is the one I mentioned in a previous segment of this process. We created a (name) Chiropractic & Wellness Fitness Assessment. This included two appointments where we completed a variety of assessments, compiled the results and demonstrated individualization through a one-on-one workout. In addition we offered Infrared Therapy sessions as bonus value and the best part was the programming was always developed based on recommendations from the practitioner to ensure there was a high degree of overlap and reinforcement.

In this situation rather than sharing the revenue we just gave it all too them, this allowed them to sell more than $1000 in 24 hours and generated more than 20 leads for us.

Once in place these programs take no effort on your part the business can keep selling the product you keep validating them and supplying the service. Imagine if 10 different businesses we’re doing this for you? If they only produced 1-2 leads a month even that would be an average of 3-5 new prospects for you every single week.

It shouldn’t take much to see why Strategic Partnerships should be a foundation element of your business. Start every quarter with a list of 15 and work through all the steps with all those that will respond, if by step 5 you’re developing just 1 new revenue share program each quarter it will still be easily worth the investment.

Best part, after completing this process train a member of your team to do it and pass it off.