As
far as being first approached in a JV solicitation, let me start by saying that
many people do it the wrong way.
I’m
online a lot, so I would say that about 90% of the time people are approaching
me through email. Before we say
what the right way is to approach someone is, we have to really notice what
people do a lot, which is approaching others the completely wrong way.
The
absolute, most horrible way to approach someone is to send an autoresponder,
such as “Dear Mitch Myerson…” You know it’s an autoresponder and then
they have some canned pitch. It
probably takes me all of seven seconds to see that it’s a canned pitch.
I
delete it. Period.
So,
that leads to the basic point that if they have any real chance of engaging
someone by email, you’ve got to have a personal touch.
If you’re just approaching it from the standpoint of pitching
something, know that most people who are fairly successful first of all are
extremely busy. They go through
their emails at a pretty good speed and they have a radar for things they want
to delete.
So
the question of how can your capture someone’s attention … again, the wrong
thing to do is have any canned approach. It
is also wrong to pitch how great you are. What you really want to do in engaging a JV partner is to do
your research first, which means you know something about what this person is up
to, which you reference in the email or the call.
Be
very specific about their business so they get a sense that you’ve taken some
time to know what they’re doing. The
more personal you can make it is very important. There is a saying we talk about in marketing, “Build the
human bond before you build the business bond.”
If
you can remember something they did well, or remember a personal touch about
their website, such as, “When I was at your site, gmarketingcoach.com I
noticed that you had that free flash movie, and I just want to tell you that I
viewed that thing for about ten minutes because I was just amazed at how cool it
was.”
If
someone said that to me, I would be flattered because they took the time to do
that. That would be a way of
getting in to me on other levels, because they’ve taken the time to
acknowledge something I am proud of.
It’s important to add ...
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