In a recent article I told you how to target and approach your hottest prospects for JV deals. Of course, this still leaves millions of prospects who aren’t hot – but who could still be great partners for a JV deal.
You should never neglect approaching WARM prospects as potential JV partners. A warm prospect is an individual or company you know of, and where you already know that their customers could be buyers of your product. However, you have no established relationship with them …. yet.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you sell a self-help/motivational course. You know that Fred Bloggs or whoever is one of the biggest names in the business. You also know he has a newsletter that goes out to hundreds of thousands of loyal subscribers – you being one of them. However, you don’t know him personally and you have no Naturally Existing Economic Relationship or NEER with him. Therefore, he is a WARM JV prospect.
Most JVers who chase up warm JV prospects do so for one of three reasons:
1. They know that the customers of warm prospects are in the target market for their product/service.
2. They know that the warm prospect has a great relationship with their customers.
3. They know that an endorsement from them could trigger £££’s of sales.
Whilst these warm JV prospects are easy to find (because you already know of them!) they are also a fair bit harder to approach. You see, many of them are protected from JV offers and other contacts by a ‘gatekeeper’. A gatekeeper can be anyone, such as a secretary or personal assistant, who just doesn’t understand or value JV proposals.
To succeed, you need to get past the gatekeeper!
One of the best ways I’ve found for getting past the gatekeeper is to prepare a professional JV proposal and have it delivered by Fed Ex, Royal Mail Special Delivery or some local courier service as opposed to simply using e-mail. Make sure the envelope is addressed to your JV prospect by name and mark it ‘URGENT Please Hand Deliver’ or similar.
Nine-and-a-half times out of ten, when you use this technique, you can be sure that your proposal will reach the hands of your intended recipient!
Whether or not they respond to your proposal is another matter of course. So you need to appreciate some of these warm prospects may not ‘warm’ to your offer for a reason that is nothing to do with the quality of it. For example, they may be ill, on holiday, or you may have caught them on an especially busy day. The point being that if you don’t hear from them after a week or so you should follow up using e-mail or phone.
And here’s how you can use an existing Naturally Existing Economic Relationship to find more warm prospects: If you have a working relationship with someone who knows the warm prospect already ask them to introduce you. This means you benefit from incredible leverage. It immediately changes your status from ‘warm’ to ‘almost hot’ …. and puts you in a much stronger position to get the deal.