Knowing what’s in it for me…

I was recently asked to review a marketing plan that an outside firm had put together for a potential client. While I didn’t agree with everything in it, the folks who put it together were clearly professional who knew a lot about marketing. If I had to grade the plan, I’d give it a B (plus or minus, depending on my mood of the moment). One thing that struck me was the section on setting up some kind of a program to reach those who would be in a position to point my potential client at good sales opportunities.

Without giving too much away - or making things way too vague - here’s the circumstance.

My potential client provides a finite and specific set of business consulting services. These services are most appropriate for companies that share a finite and specific set of attributes. The “problem” is that these attributes aren’t just those that are public knowledge, like vertical, size, and location. No, the list of attributes includes internal, somewhat proprietary, information that an outsider just wouldn’t know. It’s information that a skilled sales person should be able to elicit on a first or second call - but that means spending a lot of time calling into companies that aren’t quite right. And/or spending a lot of time combing through the press and other public sources hunting and pecking for clues from which you can infer certain things.

What my potential client would really like to do is take a short cut, develop a kind of early-warning system that would enable them to learn about the “good stuff” before a whiff of it became public.

So, the marketing company identified several groups of individuals who would, in their line of work, have access to the good stuff. And came up with a plan for informing those individuals about the services offered by my potential client, and how they might be a fit for their real clients.

All well and good, except that there was one pretty big missing piece: why in the world would these folks want to spill any beans about their clients to another party - no matter how worthy that other party is?

Now, there are a couple of angles that I can think of:

• There could be a referral fee. This doesn’t work in a lot of circumstances, as some people find it a bit unsavory and pimpish. But there are circumstances under which a referral fee could make sense. This might not be one of them - I’d have to give it a bit more thought - but it is a potential angle.
• My potential client might be in a position to make referrals back. One aspect of my potential client’s business was a service that could conceivably utilize the services of the guys who know that good stuff. This is definitely conceivable - conceivable enough such that a good place to start might be to look for any instances where it had worked that way in the past, and take it from there. This would be real networking, true tit for tat.
• My potential client’s services were so stunningly, drop-dead wonderful, that they provide such universally recognized and appreciated benefits, that everyone in the world should know about them. Well, stunningly drop-dead wonderful is definitely in the eyes of the beholder, and, while my potential clients services are very good, they don’t fall in the “must know/must have” category.

In any case, the omission of what’s in it for the partner, while glaring, is a pretty common mistake.

When it comes to partnership, we always get what’s in it for us. We just need to keep reminding ourselves that, wonderful as we are, this is seldom enough to get the partner to stop what they’re doing and come partner with us. (If only partnerships were that easy….)

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