Question
How do you approach a company you want to create a partnership with, if you have no contact person at the company?Do you just contact them through the contact form? Do you try to sell the benefits of the partnership in the initial email?
Answer
You do NOT want to sell in the first email. Your first few contact attempts are likely going to be about finding the right person to even talk to. This is a bit of a naive question. There are always a dozen lines of attack of varying levels of coldness. The question is, how much time and money do you want to spend on your effort? Some prospects are even worth relocating for.
Contact form versus rousing endorsement from the CEO's best pal in a way is irrelevant. You get a meaningful conversation when you match message to medium to trust level and correlate difficulty and clarity of ask to those variables. A success allows you to slowly escalate along any variable direction.
And manage expectations. About 90% of these things go nowhere fast. Another 9% go nowhere slowly and expensively. The last 1% is worth something. So try to make the path pay off, rather than the end point only. The ideal biz-dev reach out generates SOME value no matter where it fails. And remember, you build your network partly through a history of failed contacts. As your career matures, your hit rate goes up simply because you know a lot more people and vice versa. That's why you see so many career biz-dev types in their prime during their 50s.
Unless of course you have money or people assume you have money. If they believe this, I always correct the mistaken impression, but not always immediately :)
Contact form versus rousing endorsement from the CEO's best pal in a way is irrelevant. You get a meaningful conversation when you match message to medium to trust level and correlate difficulty and clarity of ask to those variables. A success allows you to slowly escalate along any variable direction.
And manage expectations. About 90% of these things go nowhere fast. Another 9% go nowhere slowly and expensively. The last 1% is worth something. So try to make the path pay off, rather than the end point only. The ideal biz-dev reach out generates SOME value no matter where it fails. And remember, you build your network partly through a history of failed contacts. As your career matures, your hit rate goes up simply because you know a lot more people and vice versa. That's why you see so many career biz-dev types in their prime during their 50s.
Unless of course you have money or people assume you have money. If they believe this, I always correct the mistaken impression, but not always immediately :)