Golden Rules When Finding Joint Venture Partners

–by Rick Lugash–

Here is my Golden Rule of 5! These are the things you need to keep in mind when identifying potential joint venture partners.

1. Both you and your joint venture partner should share the same ideal client or customer. Meaning, that both of our “ideal” clients have the same wants and needs and hot buttons. The value of the JV partnership goes up significantly when the demographic and psychographic characteristics of our ideal client overlap.

2. These clients must be “willing and able” to buy. This means are they willing to buy what you have AND are they able to do so financially. One of the best places to position yourself as a JV partner is at the back end or as part of an upsell or downsell or bonus after someone has jsut checked out of your partner’s online or offline storefront. These people were willing and able to buy the initial product from your partner, so they are warmed up to buy yours.

3. Your JV partner must understand the value of marketing. Signs of this are: Do they advertise? Do they make offers?  Do they have some kind of a marketing system in place that allows them to attract prospects through lead generation and convert them into clients or customers?  And they should be looking to see if you do as well.

4. Your ideal JV partner should have a target or prospect list to communicate with and to make offers to. Ideally you and your partner should have a list close in size to each other, but that might be challenging, and that’s ok. You can still do things to solve that imbalance.

5. You should have a product or service that solves a need that your JV partners’ existing product or service doesn’t, AND that gets their client closer to where they want to be. It must have a high perceived value. So For example, If my ideal client is a small business owner and I have a product that teaches them how to identify and develop JV partnerships but in my product line I’m missing a series of scripts on how to approach a JV, then an ideal JV partner for me would be someone who could write scripts and offer them to my clients or prospects. So, in a sense, that JV is filling a hole or a gap in my existing product line that gets my small business owner clients closer to where they need to be–which is to get more clients through JV partners.