Sean D'Souza: Secret to playing with the big guys

It doesn't matter how big or small your business is, you're always going to need to work with strategic alliances.

Of course, there's just one problem with alliances. In many cases, the allies are much bigger than you. They have more customers, bigger revenues and technically speaking they should not be dealing with you at all, right? Wrong. You can indeed punch above your weight and get big allies to listen.

And here's how you go about it.

Let's first examine the core basis of a non-financial relationship.

Every relationship is unequal. Take a husband and wife, for instance. That is an alliance of sorts. They don't get together for financial gain. And yet most couples (read alliances) work together.

One takes over the cooking. The other takes over the fixing. One takes over the accounts. The other takes care of the decor.

They're two individuals who, by themselves, may be completely lost (in a way). But they work out a deal between themselves and away they go.

So how do you align yourself with someone who's not quite the equal?

How do you align yourself with a Tiger Woods? Tiger Woods has no need for your money. Or fame. But a 5-year-old kid could get Tiger's attention. But how?

Here's how.

The kid gets Tiger's respect. He does so through his tenacity, through his ability, through whatever. The key is respect. When a person has respect for your abilities and perseverance, they don't behave like they're bigger and you're smaller. They treat you like someone they respect. And hence recommend you to others.

Like Red Bull for instance.

When Red Bull launched their product, they didn't advertise. They sought out strategic alliances. They sought out the most influential groups in universities and gave them cases of free Red Bull for university parties.

And the less influential saw the more influential drinking Red Bull (because you don't just drink it at a party), and so everyone started catching on.

But Red Bull wasn't a big brand. No one knew of Red Bull. One student in one university group had more influence than Red Bull.

And that's how Red Bull found a way in, thus creating the big brand that you know it to be today.

We've applied similar tactics at Psychotactics.

The way we've gotten to others is through creating top-class information. Not just information, but really good stuff people would pay for. And then we've approached individuals (just like Red Bull approached the university groups).

And then we've played the dating game. One date, second date, third date, fourth date. And in this way, we've dealt with companies that include Techsmith, Mindjet, Quickbooks and companies that are way bigger than we ever hope to be.

The methodology for dealing with strategic alliances is simple.

First approach the ally.

If the person keeps responding, if they keep asking for more, you're building up a relationship. You're building respect.

And when you build respect, you're no longer unequal. You're treated as an equal.

And that's the short story of how you build strategic alliances that are way above your weight.

But how do you prevent the project/alliance from getting stalled?

A strategic alliance project can easily get stalled. And it's not always your fault. Hah, of course it could be your fault. It's because you haven't done your homework.

And there are two important assignments you need to do, before you even start working with an alliance.

The two most important things you need to know are: 1) Know who to speak to in the organisation. 2) Know which vehicle to jump on.

Who to speak to

In smaller companies, the owner or someone higher than two steps removed from the owner is easy enough to find. You simply email them, call them, and yes, tweet them. (I've found Twitter and Facebook to work better than any other system).

And sure enough, they'll respond. They may say "no", but in many cases they're reasonably keen to speak.

Of course, this assumes you have a plan of some sort. If you simply go in without a plan, then you're wasting the time of the person (and yes, we're getting to the plan in the next point, but let's stick to this point).

If you want to go directly to a big company - and we're talking Microsoft or any big brand name you can dream of - then you have to find the PR Team. Not the marketing director, but the PR Team. Find out who heads the PR Team, then go after that person and start a conversation.

By doing so, we've linked up to some pretty big names over the years, if only for a short while. Big companies can be very um, big. And changing too. So while they may be of great use to begin with, it's always a changing situation.

I'll give you an example. John McWade is a designer (and a good friend) who lives in Sacramento, California. And he got in touch with Adobe. And Adobe featured him in their early magazines. From that nondescript start, John went to tens of thousands of paid subscribers, and since then has been running the very successful site www.bamagazine.com.

The same concept applies to Gary Vaynerchuk, who did an "alliance" of sorts with big TV shows, and got a chunk of his fame from TV. Knowing which vehicle to jump on

I've tried and failed. I've tried again and failed. And tried yet again and failed. So what have I been trying so hard to do? Trying to get into a stationary alliance project. Often we get this idea, we talk it over with an ally, and everyone gets super excited. And then nothing happens.

There's a reason why nothing happens. A project is too hard to handle from the ground up. Everyone gets busy. And suddenly everything stalls.

Which is why I'm very careful to pick a moving project.

For example, if the company already has a blog, it's easy to submit for the blog. If they already have some kind of customer experience spotlight on their site, well it's easy to slot you in. If they already have a newsletter going out, or a newspaper going out, or make a video, then it's easy to slot you in.

But if you suggest that they start up a video, blog, daa, dee, dah, then you're dreaming. Because while you'll get all excitement and rah-rahs, nothing will ever happen (well, there are exceptions, but that's why they're called exceptions).

If you're going to punch above your weight; if you're going to get to the big guys, jump on a moving "vehicle". Find out what they're already doing. Find out what they're doing on a consistent basis, and then slot yourself in.

Joining forces
To form a strategic alliance:
* Find the right person to talk to. In big companies, this is usually the PR person. In small companies, it's the owner.

* Get yourself in a slot that already exists, rather than trying to start a new project.

Sean D'Souza is chief executive of Psychotactics and an international author and trainer.

www.psychotactics.com