COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT
This is Christian Mickelsen and this call is How to Do Joint Ventures with Potential Strategic Alliance Partners. And actually I would call this How to Do Strategic Alliance Calls but for some reason everybody's calling them joint ventures. I'm going to just say what I think is the difference between the two but they're practically interchangeable now. So just based on how people are using them.
Strategic alliance is usually where you align yourself or form an alliance with somebody who has a similar target market to you and you help each other and support each other maybe by passing leads or business to each other. And a joint venture typically is where you actually create a project together. And I had a business years ago where my business legally formed a joint venture with another business and we kind of formed a new business together, a new project together. So a lot of people will talk about doing JVs and it just has progressed that JV means really strategic alliance partner but I thought it would be useful to share the differences, the actual differences between the two. But most people when they say JV it really means the strategic alliance partner these days.
So I wanted to share with you how to get these setup and how to get the ball rolling, what to do, what to say kind of questions to ask someone and things like that. So with me here today to start us off anyway is Rob Goyette. Rob is on my team and he's in charge, he's my Director of Business Development and he sets up strategic alliance calls for me or potential JV calls, we call them strategic alliance calls mostly internally. So I wanted to just sort of interview Rob to start off with to figure out what is Rob doing because Rob actually goes out and reaches out. We do pow-wows every now and again we talk about who should we be doing strategic alliances with, who should we be doing JVs with. Or people are reaching out to us saying that they'd want to JV with us and so we talk about whether they are a good fit for us or not. But if we're reaching out to them Rob how do you get people to agree to talk to us? What do you do?
Rob: Yeah so I guess the first thing Christian is you and I identify them first. It's not really where I'm just hunting out on the web for people. I guess I've tried that but usually the people that are on your radar is someone who's successful in your target market already and those names usually you can rattle them off right off the top of your head. So sometimes these people have heard of you and sometimes they haven't, but what I generally do is just reach out to them with an email.
Christian: Okay. So what do you put in the email?
Rob: Yeah I thought you might ask me that question and every email is different. I don't have a template for this it's really just kind of what I'm feeling at the time. And so I don't know if you want to say some things out loud or Skype them over to me but I can pull up some emails that I've sent on some of our most successful calls and that might lead some clues as to what to put in an email.
Christian: Well let's just pretend you were going to write one right now. I mean I'm guessing it's probably some similar things you can put in there. If you want you could do just look back to the calendar with some of the people that we've – I don't necessarily want to put any names on this call just for the sake of, I don't know I'd just think it'll be a little cleaner to not mention that main name. So yeah I don't know if you want to just quickly go through or if you want to just come - let's say you were going to contact somebody whatyou might come up with. What would you say?
Rob: Okay. So yeah so first what I'd do is I'd do about five minutes of stretching. Now what I do is first I try to figure out who's the bigger celebrity is it you or is it them? I hope that's not too blunt for this call but…
Christian: No that's okay.
Rob: Yeah if it's somebody that's never heard of you Christian then my approach is going to be a lot different than if it's somebody who's reached out to you and said "Hey I really want to work with you." So it's kind of like yeah…
Christian: I'm assuming someone who hasn't reached out to us. Let's say that we're reaching out to them and let's say they haven't heard of me then what might you say?
Rob: Yes if they haven't heard of you I'll try to introduce myself but I keep it really brief because it's not about me it's really more about you and them. So I'll say my role is your Director of Business Development and I'll ask if they would like to work together to promote each other, basically if they'd like to work with us to promote each other. If they have no idea who you are I'll mention that you work primarily with coaches and that you have there's actually two things that I mention.
Well one of them I know is that I mention that you have a very effective and ethical way to help coaches get more clients very quickly. I've been using that phraseology recently. So I'll tell them what you have to offer. The other part is that I'll mention the size of your list. I'll say you got a list of x thousand current coaches who want to grow their coaching business even more and you've got a list of y thousand people who are just getting into coaching or exploring coaching. So I'll let them know that you're for real you're not just some business startup.
Christian: Okay. So a lot of people that are listening to this might be startup people and so they might be thinking well how can I get people to joint venture with me? It's hard to get people to do JVs with you or strategic alliance partners without a list at all, with no list. But even if you have a list let's say 500 people I approached a really big name person about doing a promo to a list I had of just 500 people. I think I might have said 600 but I think it was a little under it's like around 550 or something like that so I just upped a little bit and said 600. And he was totally opened to it.
I didn't actually follow-up with him because I didn't really want to do a lot of promoting to my list at that time but I remember just talking to the guy and he was like, ah yeah we could sell this or we could promote. And he was thinking immediately what he could to sell to the group because that's how monetization focused he is and there's nothing wrong with that that's actually probably a really good thing. I think a lot of our strategic clients partner sometimes don't think about the money side of it and while that's okay oftentimes we need to like teach people how to become good strategic alliance partners for us because they don't have a really great pathway.
Like let's say we're going to promote them and we want to send them a lot of traffic and we want to get them a lot of subscribers and we want to help them a lot they're not even setup to really take a lot of the help. Sometimes they don't have a good web page to send people to where we can just lead traffic to, they don't have a good freebie offer to send people to or they don't have a solid teleclass with a great opt-in page or something like. So those are the kinds of things that sometimes we even have to end up educating people on to be like, hey we want to do this for you but you've got to get yourself setup for it first.So that's one thing that I've noticed. If they're bigger name people than and whatever you're doing Rob has been really good. So what I'd love if you could get me a couple of different emails that you've written to people that we've talked about that have been on the list. If you can get those to me I'll post those on this page below where this audio's going to be recording's going to be. So just so people can sort of see those things what you say.
One of the things that I want to point out here is that Rob mentions that what I do but also is mentioning what we have to offer which really is how we can help. And so we get contacted a lot by people who want to have us promote them or that just want to work with us that want to do teleclasses with us and stuff like that, that want to have us be a guest speaker. So if somebody wants me to be a guest, hey you want me to be a guest speaker for a teleclass or something like that it's very easy for me to evaluate and then just say yes. And most of the time someone wants to promote me that's like a no brainer. So if we reach out saying "Hey we'd like to promote you" that's very easy for people say "Oh that sounds really good let's talk about it."
And so what Rob usually does is move to get people on the phone with us and setup a conference call and then from there we basically take over from there and that's where the magic happens. So I wanted to actually make that magic happen and introduce another guest that's on the call here Howie Jacobson, hey Howie.
Howie: Hey, Christian. Hey, Rob.
Rob: Hi, Howie.
Christian: And Howie is someone that I think would be a really good strategic alliance partner. I think we'd be good strategic alliance partners. I think I'd be a better partner for you than you would be for me, although I think there's some value probably that I could get out of having you promote me a bit, but I think you'll get greater value just because of the match like. And I'm just going to set the context here for everybody is that Howie is a Google Adwords expert an internet marketing expert and he wrote the book "Google Adwords for Dummies", which Google Adwords is a form of pay-per-click advertising.
So Howie's a superstar. So I asked Howie if not only we could have one of these JV calls but if we could record it just because I've been teaching this for awhile but a lot of people just don't know what to say, they don't know what questions to ask. And I've taught some of it but I just thought it would be best if we could record it. And I go back to my idea before about why it might be better, this might be more of a win for Howie because everybody on my list probably could benefit from what Howie has to teach while not everybody on Howie's list necessarily might benefit from what I have to teach. My list is primarily coaches and coaches are all business owners and they really ought to learn more internet marketing stuff. While internet marketers aren't all coaches, although some of them could really benefit by adding coaching to their business model. But we'll hash all that out and figure things out on this call.
So basically we're going to just move over here as if this was the beginning of the call because this is the way we would normally start up with being like, okay book here we are on this call. And I usually bring Rob on the calls with me because Rob has some insights, he might asks some important questions and also Rob will usually make sure that whatever gets discussed actually comes to fruition because sometimes if I was just left to my devices things could fall through the cracks and whatnot.
Rob: Could I interject a couple of comments there?
Christian: Yeah please.
Rob: One is that Christian you normally show up two or three minutes late to the call, which first of all gives the impression that you're very, very busy, but second of all kind of lets me warm up the partner we start talking casually. And sometimes we get right into it like yeah in this call we're hoping to promote each other and figure out ways we can work together. So then Christian when you come on the person's already kind of in the right mindset and feeling comfortable and relaxed, so that's one thing.
Christian: Yeah.
Rob: Yeah. So then the other things is that you and I generally have Skype open so that while we're on the call if I'm not thinking of something that you want me to bring something up you can shoot me a little text message and then I can bring it up without making you look like the one pulling all the strings. And maybe that's a little tricky or something but I know it's helped us a couple of times.
Christian: Yeah not everybody listening to this is going to have somebody else on their team on the call but I think it makes you look better having somebody else on the call with you just because it's like oh hey we've got our whole team. I mean the last time we did one of these calls we had you and John on the call. So we had three of us on the call and one strategic alliance partner. And sometimes the potential strategic alliance partner sometimes they'll have someone on the call with us too so you never know. And sometimes people are business partners and they work together that way, and sometimes it's just somebody else's Director or Business Development or somebody else's just virtual assistant or something like that.
So these are just some background sorts of things that happen on these calls. And we do a lot of them I mean we do; I don't know I'd say we average what two or three a week?
Rob: Yeah when we're cranking when you're not doing a live event somewhere or something yeah.
Christian: Yeah. So yeah we do a lot. So even if we're conservatively just said two a week we do a lot of these calls. So we kind of got our rhythm down. All right so let's just jump in as if this was the start of the call and the three of us got on the call and whatnot. Yeah like Rob said he probably should have chatted a little bit with Howie and then I might come on the call a minute or two late. It's not by conscious decision to show up two minutes late.
Rob: Oh okay.
Christian: It might make me look good like hey I'm so busy, but the truth is that I sometimes have a hard time getting off a call, as Howie knows. Sometimes Howie's the reason that I get off a call late and get onto the call a few minutes late. All right so let's take a look. I guess we have time for us to jump into JV mode. So now Howie and I know each other already. We haven't done a lot of cross promoting. I did have him do a teleclass for a segment of my list probably six months ago or something like that, but not to my entire list yet. So yeah the kinds of questions I'd ask I'm just going to jump right in here, is I would just start asking – and I guess let's just move into the mode of where we're actually having this conversation. Does that work for you Howie?
Howie: Sure. So I'll be finishing up with Rob sautéing onions for about 20 minutes and then make sure the fan is on.
Christian: Hey, hey who's up here? Oh hey this is Christian sorry to interrupt you guys. Yeah sorry for being a couple of minutes I had one of my clients went a few minutes long there I apologize.
Howie: Yeah needy fellow I'm sure.
Christian: So yeah. Well I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to get together with us. I've heard a lot about you and I've been on your email list for awhile and I really respect your work. And I thought it might be a good idea for us to see if there was some ways that we could promote you. And so I wanted to see if you had any big projects that you've got coming up over the next year that are really important for you to promote?
Howie: Two things I'm working on right now. One of them is a box it's called the Checkmate and it's specifically for adwords and it's about how to look at your competitors and write better ads than them they just by quickly looking and scanning what the competitive landscape is. And it kind of is a beginner course because it's not one of these home study courses that you have to spend months and months going through with 43 CDs and 21 DVDs you could get through the whole course in two hours and then implement it in another hour and a half.
Rob: Wow that's great.
Howie: So that's something that we're getting the final touches on the sales letter and the product is all done and working out the bonuses. And I'm really proud of it and of the results that some of my clients have gotten by using this method. So I'm eager to find people to help me push this out because I think it will make a big difference in a lot of lives.
Christian: Awesome. I love it. Not only do I love what it sounds like the program promises but your conviction and excitement about it enthusiasm's contagious.
Howie: All right.
Christian: That actually makes me want to help. All right so you said you have two projects what's the other one?