Finding Strategic and Joint Venture Partners to Get More Clients

I am always looking for new Joint Venture (JV) and Strategic Partners. A JV or Strategic Partner is business that you partner or create an alliance with to increase both your businesses and theirs. They are targeting the same ideal client as you, but offering different yet complementary products and services.

A big topic with my clients lately and which inspired me to write this article is how to actively find JV Partners. One of my favorite tools for finding JV Partners is LinkedIn. They offer a fantastic advanced search option that will allow you to easily narrow down your search. Once you create your "Perfect Search", you can save that search and have LinkedIn email you when any new contacts match your criteria. How is that for a system (AKA "a consistent, repeatable marketing action")?

If you and I are not connected on LinkedIn yet, please send me an invitation so that you have access to my ever-growing network that you can use when you search for your JV partners.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferdavey

So let’s get in to the meat of it! To find potential JV partners, log into your LinkedIn account, click the down arrow next to the word "People" at the top of the page and select "Advanced People Search"

On the advanced search screen you can search a lot of cool stuff, like location, company, industry, groups, schools, what they are interested in, when they joined and what language they speak. You can also use a variety of variables in the Keyword search field that aren’t listed. Below are examples of all the ways you can search for your JV Partners that aren’t listed on the advanced search page.

You can search for an EXACT PHRASE by using quotes. For example, if you were a Wellness Coach looking for JV partners that are Personal Trainers, you would search "Personal Trainer" in the keyword field. This would give you a listing of all the personal trainers you have access to on LinkedIn. Of course, the size of your network will affect the amount of results you get.

Using this same example, when you look through your search results for "Personal Trainer" you might find there are a lot of wellness coaches in the results. Of course, other wellness coaches would not be a JV match so you would weed them out, but adding the variable NOT. You could use the variable NOT to exclude people that had the word Coach in their profile. So your new search would look like this.

"Personal Trainer" NOT Coach

Let’s keep going with this same example. Say you wanted JV partners who were personals trainers OR nutritionists. LinkedIn allows you to use the handy variable OR. You could search for profiles that contain the words personal trainer or nutritionist, but not the word coach. You would build on your search like this and put it in the keyword field.

"Personal Trainer" OR Nutritionist NOT Coach

After looking through the results of your search, you might find many of the nutritionists or personal trainers you’re finding don’t actually own their own businesses. So, you can use the variable AND to require a word such as owner. The following search string, used in the keyword field of the advanced search page, would give you profiles of personal trainers or nutritionists who are owners but not coaches

"Personal Trainer" OR Nutritionist AND Owner NOT Coach

Sometimes all the variables we discussed are just not enough, so you may want to create a big complex search to seek out all your potential JV partners in one fell swoop. So, let’s say you wanted to find all the personal trainers, nutritionists, yoga instructors and massage therapists who own their own businesses but are not coaches. You can do this by using parentheses to group each portion of the search. Here is an example:

("Personal Trainer" OR Nutritionist OR "Yoga Instructor" OR "Massage Therapist) AND (Owner OR President OR CEO OR "Self Employed") NOT Coach

Of course, you can add any of the regular advanced search options to the mix, like what they are interested in or where they are located.

Once you have your perfect search click the words "Save this search" (at the top of your search results). You can then either save the search so you can rerun it again or set up LinkedIn to email you every week or every month with new results.

To build, get clients and a successful business, your marketing needs to be consistent and repeatable. In other words, you need systems in place so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.