Fun fact about me, I keep a micro journal. You probably haven’t heard of one but google it if you’d like to know more. It takes me about 30 seconds to complete each night before bed. I track simple life stats; steps, sleep, resting heart rate, minutes of exercise and any specific goal I’m working on (money spent on impulse purchases 😬). It’s incredible how much impact this small act has on my overall health and wellbeing. Similarly, small daily habits can significantly improve your professional success. As James Clear says “you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems”.
One of my partnership habits is reading. This morning, like every morning I opened my browser and searched Mumbrella. It took me 4 minutes and 28 seconds to scan the website from top to bottom. It was an additional 7.38 to read the articles that were relevant and of interest to me. Can you find less than 5 minutes each day to scan for industry news? Here’s a few reasons why you should implement this habit:
Partnerships are won with consultative selling
What is consultative selling? It’s where you act as a trusted advisor to a business, focusing on their needs and how your solution adds value to their business. If you want to be a trusted advisor, you need to talk the talk and walk the walk about their business, not just your non-profit. Understanding a business’s issues helps you ask relevant questions, identify their needs and offer tailored solutions. Omnichannel selling, loss of cookies, death of the press release –these are all recent articles. One of these might be a current issue for your prospect/ partner but if you don’t know about them, how can you ask about them? A reminder that if you’re helping to solve a key organisational issue the value of your partnership will increase dramatically too.
You’ll be on top of market changes
Why would you want to be? If a brand is launching a new TV ad, appointing a new agency or is axing jobs these are all huge signposts. They want new customers, or they want to retain their existing customers and what they’ve previously been doing hasn’t been working – hence change. They are at the action point in the stages of change. They have already decided on a new direction, have taken action and secured budget to get things moving. This is the best time to approach a brand.
Key people and potential partners
Have you ever spent hours trying to search for the right person within a company to approach? Looking for the right job title and the actual name of a person? Many articles will profile who was the driving force for this new ad and will often get commentary from that person. This gives you a compelling reason to contact them: “Hi, saw your article in Mumbrella which mentioned x. I’d love to chat about how I could help support that ambition”. It makes an approach personable and shows you’ve done your research and why specifically you want to talk to that person. Your approach will be more successful.
Enhance your strategic thinking
Thought leadership and opinion pieces often provide new perspectives and strategic insights. They will help you develop more effective partnership strategies. You’ll stay ahead of the curve and spot trends as they emerge, understand market dynamics and get ideas from case studies to inform your activations.
It’s really hard to binge your way to good habits. Yes, you can do some deep-dive research into a prospect but I’m guessing you don’t always have time to do that. It’s far better to implement a daily habit of bite-size reading and build your knowledge over time. If you’re hungry for more there are additional publications to read such as B&T, AdNews, and there will be specific publications for industries that you align with most.
By staying informed you’ll position yourself as knowledgeable and be ready to respond to potential corporate partners in their language. Let’s make those 4 minutes count.