A strategy for winning top-tier agency partnerships.

I learned some actionable strategy for winning top-tier agency partnerships so I’d like to share the strategy with you:

I recorded a podcast yesterday with Christopher Antonopoulos on this topic. Chris is the CEO of Measured Results Marketing agency, one of the instructors in our accelerator, and top Eloqua / Marketo / Hubspot / Salesforce partner.

Chris receives a new partnership request almost daily between email and LinkedIn.

What Chris looks for in this outreach, and he reads them all, are keywords that align with his needs from partnerships in their early stage:

• Joint pipeline relationships – co-selling.
• Events – co-marketing with your partners.
• Caring – showing you care about that agency, not how they can help you hit your numbers that day/month by only talking about their lead.

Because Chris is an implementation partner (important to know), and sells to enterprise clients, the time/effort/marketing to become a full ‘partner’ with new tools costs him between $15-$20K (Onboarding time, Training the team, Content to promote, Sales processes…).

Further, Chris is the first line of support for his clients on over 40 tools.
He has to answer these questions for any new software partnership inquiry:

• Does this solution solve a pain point for our clients?
• Is it better than most of the other options?
• How can we be a part of the implementation of that solution given our team/branding?
• If so, can we actually share a sales pipeline and co-sell by way of referrals, shared data, shared calls etc…?

We discuss how he answers these questions in the episode, but here is the tactic we lay out in the episode around converting partners who have been ignoring your outreach:

*You probably have an email list of partner prospects which have gone stale – they have not replied in a while to your discovery emails.
*This is great for anyone who is handed a cold list of partners to reach out to, or anyone looking to clean out there list. It simply requires:

1. That you have a list of agencies you have emailed, but did not respond.
2. Have a pipeline stage that is for stale leads (prospects who are non-responsive).

Here’s what to do:

1. Export the prospective agencies into a sheet
2. Open each of their websites and see if you can find what vertical/industry they are targeting for services, add a new column with “Target Clients” then fill that out per agency.
3. Then, try to deduce (based on case studies and testimonials) what the size of their average client is – smb, mid-market, enterprise. Add a new column for “Target size”
4. Finally, and this is the important part, add the main tools the agency uses or is partnered with – check builtwith and their footer. Add final columns for “uses these tools:” and “partners with:”
5. Then, go to sales and ask them to give you a list of leads that seem to be non-responsive with permission to try and warm them back up.
6. Look at each of the verticals of the companies on the list, plus their size, and try to play matchmaker – which companies should which agencies want to work with. Add the company URL to a new column “Vertical-based Prospect 1”.
7. Then, check out that prospects tools using their domain and builtwith (or Wappalyzer), and add a new column for “Tools used prospect 1:”
8. Do this until each company is matched with at least a few of your partner prospects – the goal is to have at least 3 user prospects matched with each agency prospect.

Now that you have your list, we need to reach back out to the agencies who were non-responsive:

1. Compose an email to each agency one at a time with the subject “Pipeline Referrals”
2. The body will be something like:

“Hello first_name,

As you are probably aware, we are big fans of your agency and have been for some time. Our previous offers have fallen flat, but I may have something we both can benefit from today:
Based on you using ___ tools, targeting ___ vertical with ____ services, I believe the list below of prospects in our pipeline would be a great fit for your services given their recent need for a tool like ours.

We have not closed them so please let us introduce you and hopefully after you win the deal they will look closer into the relationship.

If you are open to it, please find a time in my calendar so we can form a proper intro and reason/offer (other than your agency being one we admire) for the intro right now.”

(paste the list of company names/urls below along with your calendar link)

Sincerely,

Partner manager Joe

3. Send that out and I assure you agencies will reply with gratitude for thinking of them.

This tactic not-only works on Chris, but it forces your team to really look at your agencies and align with their sales goals – not just blasting nonsense to everyone on your list.

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