To truly launch a great product, you need partners. Channel and marketing partners share in your success and share in the costs of reaching your target audience.
— Jay Samit
NOTE: This is the first in a comprehensive series on Launches.
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One of the main things that many marketers get wrong is that they don’t allow enough time to their partners. As a rule of thumb, at the higher levels of affiliate partners, you have to give people six months to expect to get onto their calendars. We actually give our partners twelve months and we schedule as much as a year and a half ahead of time.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, in the upper echelons, everyone has a busy mailing schedule. You are competing with many other offers and launches. If you want someone to mail for you, it only makes sense that you would want to get on their calendar before everyone else.
Secondly, you want to become a regular partner on people’s schedules. If you do all of the other things that we will discuss in this series and get results for your partners, they will include you regularly on their schedule. You want them to expect to mail for you every year or perhaps more than once each year. If you have a specific, well-defined yearly schedule, you make it easier for them to include you.
In addition, when you plan way ahead, you have much more time to invest in your relationships, reach out to your top partners, ask for referrals and more. We’ll discuss strategies for how to best do that in upcoming posts.
Consider a test case scenario. Suppose I have a new Mind Movies product that is set to launch in about six months. That means that we have plenty of time to let people know about the launch. You can send invitations to your top partners. You can test everything to your internal list with ample time to do so. You never feel rushed. It’s the difference between working smartly with low stress levels and feeling pressure and angst when you are rushing things because you didn’t start early enough.
When you start early, your JV page is up and ready way ahead of time. I then make a plan for communication to my allies. I will send out 50 or even 100 personalized emails to affiliates asking for their support. Even if I don’t get an immediate response, I have started the process and began a slight buzz. And with those who do reply, I have locked in promotion dates with them.
On every level, it will serve you well to begin your launch early. Set the dates, start communicating and watch the confirmations come your way.
