08.25.08
Are You a Salesman or a Joint Venture Broker?
Most people confuse brokering deals with selling things, and it’s good to know the difference, so that you can decide what you want to do when you grow up. Brokers respond to needs and solve problems, and get paid a portion of all the ensuing business. Salespeople run around trying to sell stuff. Their service / product is unsolicited, usually unnecessary, and singularly unimpressive to people who broker JV’s – it’s too much like a combination of hard work, selling time, and limited thinking. It’s like running a V8 engine on one cylinder.
I talked with someone who told me they had a great new “Joint Venture” – they were asked to be the distributors for equipment that cleans computers, and they didn’t even have to pay for the right to become a distributor! Whoopee do! Now, if you create a conventional distributorship, pay rent, employ people, start advertising the cleaning equipment, bring salespeople on board, etc., you’re not doing a JV – you just built yourself a job. A real JV Broker would find a distributor, set the deal up, and take a piece of the action on an on-going basis; he would simply triangulate the deal - little time, and no cost or risk to him. It’s called leverage. We BUILD tollgates – we don’t work in them.
A JV Broker is a problem solver, and we’re not limited to any product or service or demographic or geographical area. When we find a need, we simply find a business to solve the need, and we get paid. Within DollarMakers, we have hundreds of Members in 14 countries, and by understanding the principle of “Six Degrees of Separation”, it’s easy to find solutions and help people. Knocking on doors, cold calling, or advertising to sell one product or service automatically limits what you can make.
A JV Broker has people calling him or her with requests – we kindly respond and make money. Salespeople are the ones calling and harassing other people to buy stuff. I know, I’ve been a salesman all my life, and there is a big difference between selling and solving. Also, smart JV Brokers look for natural synergy and flow between their JV partners and the demographics they target; they’re not all over the map. They build growth and strength when their JV partners, products, and services overlap. They understand how important integrity, consistency, and relationship is in business. They see the big picture.
Salespeople who learn what a JV is and how it works seldom remain salespeople; they change their approach and start making much more money from many more sources.
Only 1% of entrepreneurs understand and use JV’s, and that’s why DollarMakers operates the way it does; we create and educate our own JV partners and we make our money doing JV’s, not selling memberships and training. DollarMakers is unique in that we have the track record and the branding that nobody else has in the area of JV’s for small and medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs.
Robin J. Elliott www.DollarMakers.com
