A common challenge that micro 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). Does that resonate with you? 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 your radar and quite often it’s the sales activity that gets reduced. Do you fall into that trap? 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.
Strategic Alliance Partners are other businesses that have a client base that is attractive to you (i.e. 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.
If you get this right you can start to build yourself a little army of foot soldiers who are looking out for new clients for you. What I really love about this is that this works when you don’t. What I mean is you can be taking time off, or working on an existing piece of work, or doing other marketing and all the time you have your Strategic Alliance Partners on the lookout for new leads for you. How cool is that?!
The first step to cultivating Strategic Alliances is to think about what other products/services your ideal clients use and go from there.
Who do you know that you could approach about becoming your Strategic Alliance Partner? Write a list today and start those conversations!