Inside the Partnership Marketing System That’s Helped Rajiv Nathan Nearly 2x His Business in 2021

What if you could not make a single additional sale for the rest of 2021…

And STILL outperform your 2020 sales by 30%?

That’s the kind of growth our client Rajiv Nathan reported all the way back in August.

Specifically, here’s what he had to say:

“I don’t have to make another sale the rest of the year and I’ll still eclipse 2020 by 30%! I can confidently say half (potentially more) of this year’s revenue growth is directly attributable to the Growth Tools system.”

The “Growth Tools system” he’s referencing isn’t rocket science. For Raj’s business, it’s built on a repeatable partnership strategy that we’ve helped him systematize over the past year.

If you sell coaching, consulting services, or courses, you can use the exact same approach to build out a 100% ad-free lead-gen channel for your business.

Recently, I invited Raj onto my weekly live show Shop Talk to break it down step by step. Check out the interview below, plus a full breakdown of the strategy he walked me through during our conversation.

By the way, as Raj points out in the video, he’s still been hauling in new sales since he crossed the 30% growth mark in August. In fact, he even has a shot at doubling his 2020 revenue. Watch to find out how…

Check out Raj’s company, Startup Hypeman, here

Let’s Break Down the System Behind Raj’s Massive 2021 Growth

To understand the system, first we need to look at how Raj’s business works.

His Business: Startup Hypeman — They help startups not suck at pitching themselves.

What He Sells: Raj offers a variety of coaching and consulting services to startups, including:

• Creating pitching materials like their elevator pitch and pitch deck
• Helping sales teams level up their actual sales pitch
• Ongoing sales coaching

His ideal customers are early stage companies seeking investor capital (for the pitching materials services) and B2B SaaS companies that are scaling (for the sales coaching services).

The best way for him to get in front of those customers?

A simple type of partnership called the guest workshop.

Guest Workshops: The Simple Partnership That’s Helped Raj Add 6 Figures in Revenue to His Business in 2021

Raj’s guest workshop partnerships worked like this:

1. He identified companies or organizations that already had his ideal customers in their audience
2. He narrowed them down to the ones that are non-competitive with his business (in other words, they serve his customers at least slightly differently)
3. He asked the best fit partners if he could deliver a guest workshop for their audience that would help them get better at pitching/sales (his area of expertise)

The wins for Raj: 

• He gets to showcase his expertise in front of an online audience of his ideal customers.
• Since they already know, like, and trust the partner company, they are primed to trust Raj.
• He is able to add all attendees to his email list.
• He can then follow up with every attendee automatically about working together.

The wins for the partners:

• They get quality content for their audience that they don’t have to create themselves. (It might not sound like it, but this is a HUGE win and relief for many companies—more on that in a second.)
• As Raj put it, “For them, the value is, even though it’s me doing the workshop, they’re hosting it. So their name keeps getting in front of their audience around sales topics. So they continue to establish their credibility with their market.”

To show you exactly how Raj secures and executes these partnerships, let’s break down a recent one he did with wildly successful results.

Guest Workshop Partnership: Predictable Revenue

Predictable Revenue is an organization that helps companies build their outbound sales team.

So yeah…pretty easy to see how their audience would overlap with the types of customers Raj wants to attract.

From mid-summer to early fall they did one guest workshop together per month. In each workshop, Raj covered a different part of the sales funnel for startups.

• Workshop 1 (June): Elevator Pitch
• Workshop 2 (July): Personalized Cold Emails
• Workshop 3 (August): Demo Calls for SaaS Companies
• Workshop 4 (September): Sales Presentations

None of this was content Raj had to create from scratch. Each one was a workshop he had already done with other partners. This time, however, he was packaging them all up with a new partner as a unique series.

The results?

• Around 150 people signed up for each workshop, and approximately 50% showed up live each time.

• So far, Raj has generated 5 new customers from those workshops alone.

When you factor in how much a customer is worth to Raj, that’s a big deal.

“One of them signed last week and we’re doing a $6k starter project, but there’s a clear path toward a $70k deal,” he said.

How Raj Landed This Partnership (Including His Exact Email Script)

You might think it took a lot of magic to land an entire series of guest workshops with a prominent company in his space.

Surely Raj had an existing connection, a warm introduction, or a massive audience to offer them in return…right?

Wrong. 🙂

All it took was a simple email.

Raj had been a subscriber to Predictable Revenue’s email newsletter for a few months, which allowed him to get a feel for their content and style.

Once he had an idea for a partnership that would be a good fit, he wrote an email (using the pitching framework we show our clients) to the person who manages PR’s newsletter, Veronica.

Check it out:

As you can see, Raj didn’t start by pitching an entire series of workshops. It was actually the partner who came back and suggested expanding the partnership to multiple workshops!

That’s why you should never doubt the power of providing a potential partner with quality content. Like I said earlier, this can be a HUGE win for other businesses.

Here’s how Raj put it:

“As an outsider, I look at Predictable Revenue and I’m like, ‘They have all their [stuff] figured out already.’ And then it turns out they’re starved for content, and they’re like, ‘Hey, we can [feature you] every month for four months.’”

The cool part is that, even months later, Raj continues to get leads from these workshops because the recordings are on Predictable Revenue’s YouTube channel. It’s become an evergreen source of free high-quality leads for his business. You can even find links to all of the recordings on Predictable Revenue’s website:

Startup Accelerator Workshops: The Other Type of Guest Workshop That’s Killed It for Raj’s Business

One of the most valuable things you can find for your business is a certain type of group that attracts your best-fit clients.

For example, for some businesses, it’s mastermind groups.

For others, it’s Facebook groups.

Raj’s industry has a unique type of group that is like a magnet for his best-fit clients—startup accelerators.

These are organizations that bring in a cohort of startups that they typically invest in or just enroll in a curriculum. There are typically 10-30 companies in a cohort. The accelerator will often bring in guests to lead workshops for all of the companies in a cohort.

Guest workshops for accelerators have been another major source of growth for Raj this year—even though they’re typically pretty small audiences.

“The conversion rate on that is kind of at a point now where, as long as the room is qualified, if there are 20 people in that startup pitch workshop, three to eight of them will become a customer,” he said.

How to Build a Guest Workshop System to Scale Your Business

The reality is that anyone can put together a one-off guest workshop. It was something Raj had done successfully in the past. But the reason why they went from a one-off tactic to a reliable growth engine for his business this year is because we helped him create a system for lining them up month after month (and optimizing each opportunity for sales).

Here’s how he described the difference:

“It’s a matter of investing in the process. If you do things as one-offs, you might get one-off success. But then what do you do the next time? So if you can systematize this stuff, it really does change how you perceive yourself as a business owner, and how you perceive your own business.”

Want me to personally help you build a partnership system that takes care of lead generation for your business?

Let’s talk.

Schedule a Strategy Call on our calendar and we will personally show you the types of partnership opportunities your business has (and how we can help you unlock them).

On the call, we’ll study your business and show you:

• Ideal opportunities in your niche
• The step-by-step process you can use to take advantage of those opportunities
• What it would look like to have my team coaching you through the entire process and automating the system for you

Here’s the link to grab your spot while they’re still available.

Talk soon!