Have you ever wanted someone with a large email list to introduce you to their people?
If so, you’re not alone (and you’ll get a TON of value from this article).
We’ve had hundreds of well-meaning people ask us to promote them.
And we can understand why. Because we’ve grown our email list to over 20,000 people and we get around 1,000 people coming to our Client Attraction Summit each year, we are in a position to double, triple, or even quadruple someone’s business, practically overnight.
But you may have noticed that we only promote 10-12 of our friends and colleagues to you each year via email.
We are extremely careful and highly selective about who we introduce to you.
We thought you would like a window into our thought process around…
How do we decide who to promote?
What are the 3 biggest mistakes we see people making when they ask big influencers to promote them?
And how can you avoid these mistakes to get big influencers to promote you?
We look for three things in the people we promote:
- Value
- Generosity
- Integrity
Let’s start with Value…
Are your free giveaways and programs high-value and high-quality?
The mistake that some people make is that they ask big influencers to promote a program they don’t yet feel fully confident about.
Honestly, we are fans of launching “imperfect” programs that you improve over time (as one of our mentors once said, “Every master was once a disaster.)”
But if you ask a big influencer to share your work with the world, make sure you first feel very proud of what you’re asking them to promote…both the free giveaway AND any programs their people would purchase from you.
Quality really matters in this day and age of people being bombarded with so many offers. The last thing you want is someone coming back to the person who promoted you and saying they weren’t happy with what they signed up for.
As an example of high-value and high-quality, our friend, Callan Rush, wrote an ebook called “Wealth through Workshops.” I (Sharla) read it and even though we’ve had over 10,000 people sign up for our live events, I still got a TON of value from it.
So when they told us that they would let anyone on our email list have a free copy of their ebook, we got really excited and jumped on the opportunity to share it.
Your first step is to make sure you feel rock-solid about the value and quality of what you’re offering.
Next, let’s talk about Generosity…
Do you lead with what you can give or what you can get?
The second biggest mistake is to make the short term gain more important than the long term relationship.
Many people have emailed Thrive, asking us to promote them. They think that offering us commissions would be enough of an incentive for us to promote them. Honestly, that’s the last thing we think about when promoting someone.
Commissions are nice, but there is no amount of money we would take to promote someone we don’t know very well.
We only promote people who we have a relationship with. Our Joint Venture Partners are friends before they are partners. They are people we call when we are having a challenge in our business. They share their best advice, business systems, and resources with us. And we do the same for them.
Our best partners don’t do tit-for-tat. They lead with generosity. So much so, that they inspire us to be generous with them.
As an example, Callan and her business partner, Justin Livingston, have been friends for years. Callan served as a trainer for our company when our son Jacob was about to be born. And Justin was a big part of our marketing team during this same period. After working with us here at Thrive, they moved on to start their own company and we’ve stayed in touch all this time.
They know we offer high-value and high-quality work, so they have been endorsing us every other month at their “Magnetize Your Audience” live event. They share stories about how we recognized Callan’s talent and believed in her when she was getting started.
And she shares about who we are and the results our clients get. And then they offer our Client Attraction Summit to the people at their event. After the event, they have been sending us 50-70 registration forms, filled out by their participants who want to attend our live event.
How generous is that?
We don’t even have to travel to their event to speak. They make the offer for us. We love how easy they make it for us.
We recommend you lead with generosity and make the long term relationship important when trying to get other people to promote you.
Lastly, let’s talk about Integrity.
Do you follow through with your promises?
And if you break your word, do you find a way to get back into integrity?
If we introduce a joint venture partner who makes a promise they don’t keep, it damages trust.
And while we can’t control what our partners do, we can get to know the character of our partners so that we can make the best decision as to whether or not they’ll deliver on their promises to our clients.
This is why it’s important to get to know your partners before doing business with them. You get to witness whether they keep their promises or not.
Miscommunication happensand everyone breaks their word at some point. But not everyone takes the time to clean it up and make it right again.
We’ll use Callan and Justin as an example again:
Several months ago, they promised to promote us at one of their events and there was a misunderstanding and it didn’t happen as we expected.
Instead of just apologizing, Justin offered to send an email out to their entire email list of over 70,000 people, introducing us to them. This restoration of integrity actually had us trust them more, because we got how much they value our relationship and the keeping of their promises.
You know how relationships just get deeper and more solid as you deal with the tough stuff? It’s HOW people deal with the tough stuff that shows you how much they value the relationship.
You will certainly have misunderstandings with your joint venture partners. And how you deal with these places where it feels that the integrity is out of balance will determine whether or not you will continue to stay in partnership with them.
A bonus tip: Most joint venture partners care more about reciprocation than they do commissions.
Your ability to reciprocate is a key factor. So you’ll find that most of the people you “play with” in the realm of joint venture partners will have promotion power that matches what you have to offer.
But reciprocation can come in lots of different forms. So don’t overlook other ways to reciprocate.
What resources can you support them with (can also be personal resources)?
Who can you introduce them to?
The bottom line is this: It’s all about the relationship.
And most relationships start by meeting someone in person and leading with generosity.
We recommend you start attending more live events to get to know people you want to connect with. And lead with generosity whenever you can.
We want to model this for you now…Because we know Justin and Callan provide SO much value, they lead with SO much generosity, and because they are such high integrity people, we decided to surprise them by writing this entire article that showcases why they are one of the best partners we’ve ever had.
If you’re inspired by Justin and Callan and would like a free copy of their ebook, “Wealth through Workshops,”
Enjoy! And please let us know what you got from this article in the comments below.
