Guide to Attracting as Many Customers as You Want with Strategic Alliances

Strategic Alliances will supercharge your referral campaign.

There are many ways to market & grow your buisness.

Using well designed & printed sales documents, flyers & brochures is but one excellent strategy that you can use in your marketing mix, however I wish to talk about another great option.

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The Strategic Alliance

Setting up a successful strategic alliance with a suitable company is really one of the greatest ways to increase your customer base. 

Two companies should consider an alliance if they sell similar products to similar customers, but do not compete with each other.

The details? 

If you agree with another company to provide them with gifts or services for them to give to their customers, this then is a strategic alliance.

These gifts must be seen by all parties, particularly the customer, as valuable and worthwhile.

Here are some examples of businesses in closely related industry sectors that will work well together in a strategic alliance situation. 

Example 1  
 
A retail carpet outlet that provides a discount voucher from a carpet cleaning company for each new carpet sold.  

Example 2 

An computer shop that supplies their customers with a 1 hour free PC tune up from an IT guy.  

Example 3 

A BYO restaurant that provides customers with a discount voucher for the bottle shop next door.   

The opportunities are limited only by your imagination and the power of a good strategic alliance is truly amazing.
 
Think about it.

You have respectable businesses endorsing your company and handing out opportunities for their own customers to call you and save money. 

The offer? 

A credit, discount, over-supply of goods, buy one get one free are all good offers that work well in an alliance situation however all these gifts must apply to your products or services.

You know your own costs & profit margins so you can engineer it so you don’t make any profit on the first sale.

To my mind acquiring a new customer at no cost is good business. 

There are two ways that a partnership can work.  

One Way Alliance   A one way alliance is exactly that. It’s based on one partner supplying the gifts for the other partner to hand out to his customers.  

Two Way Alliance    A two way alliance is when both partners supply each other with gifts/benefits of about equal value to give out to their respective customers.

How does it work? 

There are four basic options for running an alliance.  

Option 1 - The King Hit

The king hit is where you send a letter with the offer to every customer on your partne’rs customer base.  

Option 2 - Slow Feed  

Slow feeding is where you send the letter to a small quantity say on a weekly basis. This option is a more practical approach as smaller numbers of incoming calls can be handled by current staff.  

Option 3 - Point of Sale 

The special offer is presented to a customer as they purchase something as a reward for “shopping at Joes”    

Option 4 – Manual Distribution 

Manually distributing the offer via a flyer to passers by a letterbox drop. 

The options and benefits of alliance partnerships are many and well worth the effort it takes to initiate and nurture them.      

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