Growth Hack: XYPN’s Playbook to Partnerships that Work

Maybe you’re building your business and you feel a bit scattered when pulling all of the disparate parts together. You seem to have a lot of challenges to overcome, and it’s up to you to solve them all. Challenges like:

• How should I become an expert on my target market? 
• How do I establish credibility? 
• Where can I find my audience? 
• What will spur them to contact me? 
• How can I make my process more streamlined? 
• Who can address the needs of my niche that aren’t in my wheelhouse? 
• I need thought partners to bounce ideas off of. 
• Where is my network?
• I just need more ideal clients. 

These might all seem like different problems, but an often-overlooked key to unlocking solutions to many or all of them, usually without spending a dollar, is to foster and nurture a few very strong partnerships. These are relationships that go beyond choosing a solution for a business need. A financial planning software is a tool that solves a business problem. A partnership is a relationship with another company or organization that is personal, dynamic, mutually beneficial, and always involves collaborative coordination to optimize your and your partner's mutual goals. Cultivating partnerships is advanced practice management. 

Why Invest Time In Partnerships

A+ partnerships can serve up numerous growth accelerators to your practice, as well as support your personal fulfillment as an entrepreneur. The most obvious and immediate benefit of a partnership is growing your audience through joint marketing. You share content or an opportunity with your audience, and they share with theirs. Both companies drive engagement, capture contacts, and grow their reach. However, there are many benefits to strong partnerships. Some other reasons they’re so impactful  include:

• Solving a Business Need—The most natural partnerships form when your clients or prospects have a need in common, but it’s not in your wheelhouse to provide a solution. Rather than explaining that you don’t do that kind of work, refer them to a partner organization that solves your client’s problem and forges a professional relationship.  It's a win, win, win. As the relationship grows and strengthens, you can also start to provide feedback to the partner about what would make their service even better for you and your clients, fine-tuning their organization to exactly what your business needs. 
  
  
• A Shared Audience—A good partnership is one in which both companies share the same audience. You know that when your partner puts on an event, they’ve done the legwork to fill the room with only your ideal clients.
  
  
• A Complimentary Service—Not only does your partner’s audience need your services. Ideally, your services dovetail nicely with, and even enhance, the value of your partner’s services. A classic example might be one where your partner creates 401(k) plans for dentists, while you help dentists align their business and personal finances. This leads us to the next benefit…
  
  
• A Cohesive Story—Partnering with complementary companies puts your service in context and provides a natural progression for prospective clients. Now that your partner’s client is saving for their new 401(k), you can help them optimize contributions, choose Roth vs. traditional, and select an investment allocation. 
  
  
• Lent Credibility—This is incredibly powerful when you’re building a brand. Hosting your own webinars is great, but when a partner invites you to their webinar as a respected expert, they lend their credibility with their audience to your firm, and people trust you more quickly. Remember, that audience is a room full of your ideal clients. Not only do you seem more credible, but both companies now represent an alliance of established professionals in your audience’s area of need. 
  
  
• Preferred Referral Source—With the above in place, and regular communication with your partner, you now have a referral source that does a lot of the early trust-building for you. They know your service, when to recommend it, why it’s a great fit, and what the next step should be. They’re making one-to-many or one-to-one introductions. Potential clients come to you ready to get started and with the appropriate expectations of basically what you do, what it costs, and how it works. 
  
  
• A Source of Feedback—If you have overlap in your client base with your partner, chances are your name comes up when they meet. Sometimes it’s easier for a client to tell someone else how they’re experiencing your service than it is to tell you directly, especially if it’s constructive feedback. Your partner can sometimes tip you off when you need to make an adjustment or boost you up when you’re doing things well that your clients are excited to share. Even before you share clients, your partner might be able to critique your ideas, challenge or confirm your assumptions, or connect you with resources.
  
  
• Brand Affinity—Related to lent credibility, brand affinity is an even deeper association between your brand and your partners. As you continue to coordinate publicly, more people in your target market think of your two brands as being related. When one of you has success, like the good press, both organizations benefit. And that brings us to the last benefit we’ll mention for now…
  
  
• Alignment—We’ll mention two kinds. The first is both a requirement and a benefit of partnerships. Values alignment with your partner means you share fundamental values and want to see the same change in the world. To be comfortable building brand affinity, you want to trust that you have aligned values. You want to know your association with your partner reflects positively on you and doesn’t violate your core values. 

If everything we’ve discussed so far is clicking, then you probably also have incentive alignment. With incentive alignment, you naturally want to share ideas and get better together. What helps your business helps theirs. When you need someone to bounce ideas off of, they’re always ready to brainstorm. And when you just need someone to talk to who understands your challenges, they can empathize. 

What would you pay for all of these benefits? This is one reason why investing in partnerships provides such outsized leverage—they usually don’t really cost you anything except your time and attention. Let that sink in. There is a time and a place for paid leads and paid ads, content-management software, marketing agencies, and ghostwriting support. But whether you’re running a lean startup or an established growth enterprise, if you’re not leveraging strategic partnerships, you’re probably missing out on one of the highest ROI activities available to you and your firm. 

How To Select The Right Potential Partners

Go for quality over quantity. It’s now understood that old-growth forests are disproportionately effective at sequestering carbon. A 300-year-old tree absorbs more carbon dioxide than ten 30-year-old trees with the same total biomass. The same idea applies to ideal partnerships. These foundational business relationships take time and care to grow to their full potential, but their cost-benefit rewards are strong from the get-go and grow at an increasing rate over time. Choose wisely, and invest generously. 

So how should you assess potential partners? Investing in the wrong partnerships is an energy drain. If you make this mistake, try to identify it quickly. Here are a few characteristics to look for, which we think pay major dividends and help you avoid mismatches:

• Complementary Business Models—Some of the benefits we’ve talked about are also clues to finding great partners. Find teams that meet your clients' needs and complement your service, preferably with a fee structure that looks something like your own, so you already know your partner’s audience is receptive to paying a certain way for a general kind of service. 
  
  
• Price Point—Related to the above, you ideally want partners who operate in the same value tier as you, relative to their industry. That means they have a price point that appeals to a similar demographic. You don’t have to charge the same amount, but if you offer a premium service, avoid partners with discount offerings.  
  
  
• Business size and phase—This one is negotiable, but the key is your partner's incentives and engagement. How engaged and motivated are they in investing in the partnership? Usually, companies of a similar size and phase have a similar amount to gain, which keeps both parties equitably engaged. Of course, it’s tempting to seek out larger partners with giant audiences, and this can be great if you solve a critical need they can’t fulfill without you. Just beware of sinking your time into relationships where your partner may decide they don’t have the time (or interest) to make it work.
  
  
• Chemistry and Communication—Related to the above, but more apparent as the relationship progresses, this is hard to measure but just as hard to live without. Simply put, you know when your partner is excited by talking with you and follows through on what they say they will do. It’s the X factor that gets them to work on your joint event at 6:00 on a Friday when they’ve had a long week. Without this, you risk burning a lot of energy forcing a relationship that just won’t work.
  
  
• Goals—While you don’t need to have the same goal as your partner, you should both be very clear at the outset about what you hope to get out of aligning your brands. Again, the most common initial goal alignment is growing your respective audiences. In some cases, you might want to grow while they simply want to fulfill a need for existing clients. That’s great too! Just make sure everyone knows what’s motivating the other, and then hold up your end of the bargain. 
  
  
• Values. Values. Values.—We’ve touched on this already, but can’t emphasize it enough. Many of the characteristics above are helpful but not absolutely required. This one, in our opinion, is different. When you decide to align your brand and effort with another company, you have to be confident they have a belief system and core values similar to yours. Values are your “why,” and what you fall back on when things get tough. Values alignment will see your partnership through stormy weather. It’s also an insurance policy that your partner won’t start operating in a way that violates your core principles or reflects poorly on you. If you want to be a marketing machine, seek out others who value this. If you want to be most knowledgeable in your field, find a complementary partner that values excellence. Chances are, your audiences will share these values as well. If your partner is acquired or takes on investors who influence operations, it’s time to check in and make sure your values are still aligned. 

One of the superpowers of choosing a niche is building partnerships with COIs that no other advisor would think to align with. Niche advisory firms thrive on partnerships, and many share one story we hear over and over: they start by spending time where their target clients hang out. 

If you work with therapists, attend a few therapy conferences and read the relevant professional publications. If you're serving parents sending kids to college, schedule some campus visits and walk the isles of your local college fairs. When you expose yourself to the lives of your ideal clients by doing what they do, you will better understand them and speak their language, and you’ll also very quickly learn what other services and professionals are serving those same folks. 

Once you find that professional education group for therapists, or that SAT-prep company for college-bound kids, that all of your ideal clients know and love, you’ve got a strong signal for where to spend your energy exploring a potential partnership.  

Our Playbook For Making It Work

Once you’ve explored the world of your ideal client and identified a few potential partners you resonate with and would love to be associated with, here’s a playbook that’s worked in the past for getting things off the ground and growing toward maturity. 

• Get curious—Your reason for scheduling a first meeting is to learn everything about your prospective partner. You’re serving the same people, you like their brand, and you want to know exactly when, why, and how you would refer clients to this company. What makes them different from their competitors? What are the challenges they’re facing? What do they know about your audience that you don’t? What do you have in common? Do they have any advice about the market you both serve? Don’t present your services yet unless it’s truly awkward not to. Be curious and look for ways to help. 
  
  
• Stay in touch—What is another way to learn more about them? Are they hosting content you can join and share with clients? Are they attending any events that might be mutually relevant? Join their newsletter and follow their socials (if that’s your thing). Build a relationship by keeping communication open, becoming a fan of their work, and supporting their efforts. You don’t need to fake it. Be yourself and stay engaged.  
  
  
• Collaborate—In time, you’ll naturally begin to explore ways to collaborate. In most cases, a joint webinar is the easiest way to launch and test a partnership. Offer to manage all of the logistics and invite your whole audience, but secure a verbal commitment from them that they will market it too. Provide them with a unique registration link and keep an eye on their newsletter and socials to make sure they follow through and that you can track their success in bringing an audience. They should be inviting their whole audience, not just their clients. If they are cagey about this, that’s a red flag, especially if they’ve seen your content before. Seek those with an abundance mindset. 
  
  
• Follow the signal and expand—This is a good time to assess how things are going. The goal at this phase is to grow your respective audiences. You should see your email list, CRM contacts, and/or social media engagement ticking up after you collaborate with your partner in some way. Your partner should be seeing the same or otherwise expressing enthusiasm. If your partner is psyched, webinars are working, and you get good audience feedback, you’re on to something. Some easy next steps include:

• Exchange logos and “partnership placement” on each others’ websites with backlinks. Nothing too fancy. “Partners include…” and scrolling logos, or if you have just one, be loud and proud: “Proud to partner with”... big logo.
• Share each other’s content, or better yet, co-author blogs and other resources or host joint office hours. Post these on both websites with backlinks. Put them in your newsletter. This is your marketing trump card - potentially your best CTA. You’re not just sharing your thoughts. You’re part of a professional partnership that puts out real thought leadership. 
• Consider submitting joint speaking proposals for key conferences.  
   

• Give it time and keep it up—Let the joint clients come naturally at first. Don’t force it. In sales and marketing, client acquisition is generally considered a numbers game. A percentage of your partner’s audience who’s exposed to you will follow you somehow, a percentage of those will contact you, and a subset of those will engage with you. 
  
  The rule of thumb, or benchmark, is 10-3-1. For every 10 folks in your audience, 3 reach out, and one becomes a good client. Establish these stages in a basic CRM sales pipeline and see where you might be losing folks. Get some targeted consulting to set this up if needed. Grow your audience and track where each new contact is coming from using tags in your CRM. 
  
  It’s worth noting that it’s important to give folks time to raise their hands when they’re ready. If audience growth isn’t immediately resulting in new conversations or clients, be patient. In fact, be very patient. If you focus on growing your audience and providing real, gradual value that speaks to them through a free newsletter and webinar cadence, when they decide it’s time to act, they will come to you first. 

• Integrate—Once your joint marketing is clicking, you’ve established a great relationship, and your joint clients are singing your partner’s praises, it’s time to consider a deeper partner integration. 
  • Collaborate on a joint user journey—Schedule one or more strategic meetings with your partner. It’s time to put fuel on the fire. Explore exactly when and why your ideal clients need which of your respective services. What is the right moment for an introduction? What resources do you each need for a great handoff? Consider building mutual co-branded landing pages. 
  • Consider a referral discount—It may seem unwise to discount your services, and we wouldn’t recommend long-term discounts necessarily, but if you have one-time services designed to lead to ongoing engagements, the efficiency you gain from a fine-tuned partnership can sometimes be worth a 10-15% one-time discount to generate more interest. Trust your gut on this one.
  • Joint Go-to-Market—How can you truly have a joint go-to-market strategy? This is a feature of a deep, mature partnership—don’t rush in. Does it make sense to share a booth at a conference? Is there a way to package your introductory services into one offering? Could you build a course together—a paid, higher-value, extension of your existing free webinar cadence? Check with your compliance expert, but there may be ways to bundle certain one-time services at a discounted rate or create joint products, often under a separate DBA or LLC. That may sound exciting, but very few partnerships ever reach this phase. You can have a flourishing partnership program without ever considering this. 
  • Track, report, and refine—All mutual marketing efforts should have a mechanism to track activity and success. Your joint webinars, white paper, and conference presence are funnels. Again, seek marketing consulting to set up the automation and reporting if needed. Set aside recurring times to review the fruits of your efforts with your partner and refine them. 

• To Formalize?—If you’re a fee-only financial advisor,  in the vast majority of cases, you won’t have any actual revenue sharing with this partner. Assuming there’s no financial arrangement (bundled offerings described above can still be split into two payments and two client agreements), a partnership contract is probably overkill in most cases. Any serious joint investment in marketing might be an exception where you want some contractual protection. Talk to your attorney, but don’t get bogged down in lengthy negotiations and redlining if you can help. Find abundance-minded folks who excel at what you care about and focus on low-investment, high-return activities where everyone benefits. Keep it fun. 

I’ve been fortunate to be on the founding teams of a few small but successful companies. In every case, for at least the first 3-5 years, those teams relied almost exclusively on close, collaborative partnerships to find our audience, stay in the know, refine our message, and improve our delivery of value. There are 101 ways to succeed and reach your goals, but I’ve always found partnering with like-minded teams the most effective way to progress. 

Those partnerships have also been incredibly personally rewarding. The relationships you make will last a long time, and they can help you connect with your community in a way that is sometimes difficult to do as one organization providing one service. If you choose your partners wisely and give to them generously, I think you’ll find they give back in a way that enriches your professional and personal life. Your clients can feel it. That’s worth the squeeze.