A common challenge that very small businesses face is how to grow when the owner is the “chief cook & bottle washer” (for my non-English followers this is when you are the only person in the business so you have to do everything). As you’ve heard me say so many times now, the only way to significantly grow your business is to make growth a priority but when you are carving up your time between delivering to your current clients, doing your business admin plus all the sales activity it is likely that something is going to drop off the radar and quite often it’s the sales activity that gets reduced. You don’t need to be a genius to work out the negative impact that’s going to have!
If only there was a way to generate sales without having to do them yourself. There is! There are several options to achieving this and today I’m going to cover Strategic Alliance Partners and Centres of Influence.
Strategic Alliance Partners are other businesses that have a client base that is attractive to you (ie their ideal clients are also your ideal clients), whose products & services are complementary and not competitive to yours, and, where you can generate a good win:win proposition. If I use my business as an example, accountants are a great strategic alliance partner. My proposition to accountants is that I help their clients to grow their businesses, which then has the potential to trigger greater fees to the accountant. It becomes a great win:win:win scenario. Sometimes I’ll offer my fees to the accountant’s clients at a special reduced rate, or, sometimes I approach only one accountancy firm in the area so it generates a new USP for the accountant. There are numerous ways of positioning it to make it attractive to the accountant to incentivise them to let you access their client base.
Centres of Influence (CoIs) are fab! These are people who are a natural advocate for your business. A great example can be your clients. The aim is that when they are out & about propagating their business they will suggest your products or services if they identify an opportunity for you. Ideally your CoIs are people who are well known in the area with a good reputation so their recommendation carries a lot of weight. These people could also be called Introducers or Referral Partners. To me the main difference is that CoIs don’t usually benefit from the introduction whereas Introducers and Referral partners do tend to receive some type of incentive for each introduction. All three work well.
Who do you know that you could approach about becoming your Strategic Alliance Partner or CoI? Write a list today and start those conversations!