Q&A: How to approach someone about a partnership opportunity?

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Today's listener has an interesting challenge. He is a customer of a company. He bought a product, they shipped it to him. He actually wants to reach out to this company and offer to partner with them. He'll tell you the story, but basically he's worried about the right process for doing so.

Now, if you spot an opportunity, if you see something where you might be able to help somebody out or help a company out and also do well for yourself, which is what Side Hustle School is all about, help others, help yourself, how can you reach out to that person or company in the right way? Now, some good news here right off the bat, it's actually not that hard. Or at least it's not hard to avoid making some simple mistakes just by putting a small amount of effort and care into it. With that said, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host.

I'm excited to bring you this daily series, this conversation, dialogue, case studies, tips, questions and answers all designed to help you create more economic empowerment. That also means extra money. Also, by the way, I love that this guy's day job is selling on eBay and his side hustle is in fulfillment. So again, he'll tell you more about that. His question, my detailed answer is coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor.

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Hi, this is Andrew Heim from Denton, Texas. And I've been listening to the show since early in the first year. My day job is reselling on eBay and Amazon and my side hustle is offering 3PL fulfillment services for smaller e-commerce and local businesses as value cube industries. So I have a few fulfillment customers currently and I'm always looking for more. I recently discovered a company selling a product that aligns with some of my passions about ecology, you know, saving the earth and all that.

I went to purchase it and try it out. The product works great and I plan to order more when I run out. But here's the thing, it ships from Canada and I'm in the US. I paid 10 US dollars for the product and I learned from Canadian reseller friends that the company probably paid 10 Canadian dollars just to ship it to. This means they basically made no money on the transaction.

So of course I wanna help this company sell more and get their shipments out quicker and cheaper. The problem is I'm not a natural sales person. I contacted the company through their Facebook page and they have a customer service rep who says she passed my information on. I've done research on the company and it's key employees and found their pages on LinkedIn. Two of them only allow followers but one employee is wide open.

So here's my question. What's my line here? I don't wanna piss off a potential client but I really want their business and we would be perfect for them for so many reasons. How can I approach this company in a way that I can actually get the business without coming off rude, unprofessional or like some sort of stalker? - Andrew, thank you for the question.

Thanks for saving the earth and all that as you put it. Listen man, you are on the right track with tracking them down on LinkedIn first of all. It's great to identify a real person behind a Facebook page which can be run by an anonymous account or you just don't know who's running it or a generic customer service address, same kind of thing. They probably get a lot of mail of various quality but beyond that, like you've already identified a real person, that's great. Beyond that, it's not that complicated.

The fact that you're worried about being rude or unprofessional means that you won't be. Do you know what I mean? Because people who are rude salespeople and not every salesperson is rude, let's be clear but people who are in that category, they don't think a lot about it. They're like, oh, how can I make sure that I'm approaching people the right way? They just approach people all the ways over and over through a very untargeted process.

And so the fact that Andrew actually already has a relationship here, he is a customer. I mean, that's very important. I would say his line, Andrew's like, what's my line? Your line is to introduce yourself. You are a customer, you work in fulfillment, you understand their business or at least you understand a challenge that they have in their business and you have a potential solution.

That's the most important thing. I would just add, you know, one point, don't include too much info in the initial contact. Like when you don't actually have that relationship, don't send a long email, send a short email. Like your goal is to get to have a conversation. And I would just reassure Andrew and anybody else out there who feels like they're not a natural salesperson, you know, I don't feel like I am either.

There's a big difference between this kind of outreach and what is basically spam or mass pitching. You know, I hear from people every day in both categories and the difference is almost immediately obvious. So the spam pitches, they send me the same message that they send to lots of other people. It's really obvious they don't know anything about me. If they're pitching something for the show, that's really obvious they don't know the show.

And it's often completely off topic. The other kind, which is exactly what Andrew's gonna do, is a gentle outreach with an idea, built on a real relationship with the goal of establishing more of a relationship. And it doesn't always work out of course, but that's okay. Because this relationship hopefully can endure, it might end up helping with something else later. And that's really the ultimate goal, you know, to add value over time and, you know, also sell your products and your services, right?

So I don't think you have to choose between one or the other. And I also think don't hold back. Andrew, good luck, let us know how it goes. Listeners, if you've got a question or something you're trying to work out, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Let me know what's going on.

We will continue to feature them throughout this ongoing conversation. I hope you'll take the time to do something for yourself today. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.