114 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
Not having a plan
I’ve encountered many businesses which proudly tell me how great they
are doing online. When pressed for examples they tell me they have sent
out a couple of e-mails to their customer base, joined a LinkedIn group and
have a website. These are the ‘techno dabblers’ mentioned earlier.
The bottom line is this. If you are going to be successful online, you need
a coherent and coordinated plan, so that your efforts are sustained and t
into other aspects of your business development. If you haven’t got such a
plan, then get one.
Not being selective
You don’t have to use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as if these activities
were an online triathlon Olympic event. Choose your media and be selec-
tive. If you were going to buy paid advertising you wouldn’t necessarily
advertise with the same message in every single newspaper. Spread your
time and energies. Make sure you match your business targets to the prole
of your chosen media. If you are a business consultant selling to other busi-
nesses, then LinkedIn is likely to be more appropriate than Facebook, for
example.
14 ways to develop your business through joint
ventures and collaboration
Many businesses permanently beat themselves up with the question: what
shall we do to generate more protable customers and clients? I want to
urge you to consider a different question, which has the potential to help
you achieve your business development objectives much quicker, at a frac-
tion of the cost and sometimes with little or no risk. The question you
should therefore be asking is: Who can we collaborate with to mutual
benet?
Regardless of your size, joint venturing and commercial collaborations
are without question one of the most underestimated yet most inuential
and effective ways of generating more leads and enquiries. In fact, for the
smaller and even new business, these methods are absolutely appropriate
and denitely not something to be ignored.
Let’s begin with a great example of joint venturing and collaboration in
action to show you what I mean.
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Priority 3 – Externalise business development efforts 115
Craig Holt advises the following key things to strive for:
‘Collaborations that reect the brand values of both parties.’
‘Collaborations that give both parties demonstrable collective benets and
that would be difcult to achieve individually.’
‘Not to be afraid of making approaches to organisations that are perceived
as having a stronger brand than yours.’
Most information about joint ventures perpetuates the common image that
it is all about detailed legal agreements, pages of small print and lawyers and
accountants thrashing out a very formal and complex deal. While I don’t
Despite many changes in recent years and the ongoing shake up in the way legal ser-
vices are provided, it is still a justiable fact that to many the legal profession conjures
up an image of stufness, inaccessibility, mystique, poor communications and value.
All this is changing, however, with the emergence of a number of new legal ‘brands’,
setting out to get a signicant market share of legal business, by creating a fresh and
more accessible legal world driven by modern and dynamic concepts of ‘customer
service’.
At the time of writing the clear leader in the eld is an organisation called
QualitySolicitors, which has set out to become the Specsavers of the legal services
sector . . . and it is already well on its way.
What is of most interest, however, from a business development perspective, is the
way much of what the company has already achieved is through the clever use of
joint venturing and commercial collaborations.
Chief executive, Craig Holt, has brilliantly orchestrated several joint ventures, which
include among other things:
getting law rms in different locations to collaborate as part of a national brand;
persuading high street retailer WH Smith to collaborate with QualitySolicitors,
thus giving the legal brand what it calls ‘Legal Access Points’ in approximately
150 WH Smith stores around the country;
the establishment of deals with many other well-known consumer brands that
provide discounts to the holders of QualitySolicitors’ ‘Legal Privilege Cards’ that
people can sign up to in WH Smith stores.
No doubt other such collaborations are on the way but this is a masterclass in joint-
venture business development collaboration.
As a direct result of these arrangements, QualitySolicitors has in a very short space
of time established a highly visible nationwide presence on our high streets; obtained
massive promotional coverage; associated itself with an existing trusted name and
brand; and, of course, created for itself a fantastic lead-generation system.
All very impressive, but what is the strategy behind Craig Holt’s thinking in terms
of business joint venturing? Does he have any golden rules for putting successful
collaborations in place?
116 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
want to minimise the need to have a proper commercial understanding
with those you might joint venture with, the truth is, many collaborations
can be done relatively informally, quickly and are limited only by your
commercial creativity and your willingness to make approaches and ask.
In essence a joint-venture collaboration is no more than two or more
parties joining forces in some way to bring something different and of
mutual benet to the parties. I absolutely encourage all businesses, at the
very least, to explore this possibility. If you are not joint venturing or con-
sidering collaborations then you are potentially missing out.
The tangible benets of joint venturing include the following:
getting into different customer and client bases;
potentially massive cost savings;
the endorsement factor . . . working with a bigger brand than yours
operates as an explicit endorsement of you;
limitation and sharing of risks;
information, experience and intelligence sharing.
All of these add up to one massive major benet . . . enhanced business
development resulting in more customers, clients and prots.
So with this concept and these benets in mind, let me give you 14 exam-
ples of various types of joint-venture collaboration. Of course this list is
not exhaustive and some of them may be totally inappropriate to your
business.
This list is simply meant to illustrate the range of possibilities and the con-
trast in scale and level of them, in order to act as a catalyst for your own
business collaborative creativity. As you look through it, note how collabo-
rations can take many forms, some of which you will have seen before but
perhaps not really thought of as a business development collaborative tool:
1 Web links. The process of arranging reciprocal links between websites
is a very simple form of joint venturing.
2 Getting newspapers and magazines to offer your products or services
as special reader offers. For example, check out your weekend papers
and you will see The Times travel offers or wine deals. Approach your
local papers with similar arrangements.
3 Getting newspapers and magazines to offer publication-branded
information guides. For example, I have in the past negotiated and
7
Priority 3 – Externalise business development efforts 117
set up a ‘Yorkshire Post Guide to Beating the Recession’, between the
Yorkshire Post and an accountancy rm.
4 The sharing of e-mails and databases. Subject to data protection
legislation and privacy regulations, many businesses simply swap, buy
and sell their respective databases.
5 Sponsorships. These can range from the huge mega brands sponsoring
various events and causes, right down to a small business which
invests £75 to sponsor a trophy given as an annual award at a
prestigious regional drama festival.
6 Competitions. When the TV or newspapers run a competition and
give away a prize, this has often been donated as part of a joint-
venture collaboration.
7 Commission or royalty-based arrangements. These are extremely
common and easy to set up. You simply nd others in related areas
who have a customer base of their own, who will market your goods
or services to them. You pay commission to them on sales. You can
also do this online through ‘afliate marketing’. Using this method
you can potentially generate a huge number of additional leads.
8 Joint-venture seminars and events. I regularly get invited to seminars and
events hosted and organised by two parties as part of a joint venture.
9 Speaking engagements. If you are offering a service and are able to
talk knowledgeably about your various products then you could
offer your speaking services at appropriate events. When an audience
perceives you as the expert you are effectively showcasing your goods
and services and driving business in your direction. The joint venture
is with the organisers of the event, who are effectively endorsing and
promoting you.
10 Joint branding deals. The AA now sells wills. Does this mean its car
mechanics are out in their yellow vans providing legal services as well
as xing cars? No, of course not. It simply markets the service under
its brand name, leveraging its client and customer base to harvest the
business, which it then outsources to an appropriate legal practice.
The two parties have a commercial arrangement.
11 Premises sharing. Visit a large department store and take a walk
around the fashion departments. You will nd a whole variety of
fashion brands almost operating as a store within a store. If you have
premises where you trade from, and space available, consider bringing
in others as part of a joint venture.
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