 Thank you. You really made my life sound more exciting than it really is. Thank you so much for sharing your Saturday afternoon with me. I'm supposed to stay here. I see familiar faces in the audience. I'm thrilled to see you here. Still, for those of you whom I don't have the pleasure to know yet, my name is Radost and I work on some of the partnerships of Siteground. Siteground is an international hosting company. Up to date, our team is almost 500 people and we're very happy to be the home of about 1,800,000 domains. So we're large, right? But large is also a matter of perspective. I recently read that Walmart had N2E's 2,300,000 in 2017. Imagine that, entire Sofia city works for Walmart. So because we know that large is a matter of perspective, at Siteground we're constantly in pursuit of new partnerships because establishing partnerships is a great way for a company of any size to grow bigger than where it is right now. Maybe except Walmart, but we're not here to talk about it today. From all partnerships that you could establish, those with larger than yours organizations are the most beneficial ones because they allow you to expand your customer reach at once, to sort of speak jump out of yourself, to increase your sales significantly and respectively to win more. In my job at Siteground, this is exactly what I do. I develop relationships with big companies for which I want something and subsequently I work with smaller companies that also want something from me. And it sounds great and it's very beneficial and we're going to win big except it's kind of a problem because this often is very tricky. The process of establishing partnerships with larger organizations has a difficult start. It is slow, it is lengthy, honestly it is frequently very annoying and the worst of all is that you don't even uncertain its outcome until the very end, meaning until you sign the contract. But practice shows that there are some steps that you can undertake in order to make this process successful. So I'll spend the next minutes sharing those with you. Okay. As frequently in life and always in business, in order to be successful, you got to prepare. The first and most important thing you need to do when you are about to establish a partnership with larger organizations is to define the business purpose of that partnership. Luckily that's easy because that business purpose always needs to lead to achieving the business goal of your organization, which I'm sure you know from the very beginning. It doesn't mean necessarily that the business goal of your partnership needs to directly lead to the business goal of your organization, meaning all companies wants to sell. I'm not going to establish a partnership that will create sales. No, that's not the rule. You could have a partnership that takes strategic curves to get into the business goal of your organization. For example, partner with someone who will create brand awareness for you, which will eventually lead to more sales. But ultimately, when you start working on a partnership, you need to have a clear vision of how its business goal will lead to achieving the business goal of your organization. Once you have your business goal validated, you need to identify a business partner who will help you get there. One of our joint sign-grounds, one of the projects I started working on, was to develop a partnership with WeWork. I don't know if you're familiar with this organization, but it's one of the largest and certainly the fastest growing co-working space companies in the world. Their customers are startups and entrepreneurs, and these are my customers, sign-grounds customers, because these are people that are at the level of development of their business, now is the time when they think about their website, so now is the time when they need hosting, and I want them to buy hosting from me. So, I started working on developing the relationship with WeWork exactly, not any other co-working space, because this is also where people go, because there are other co-working spaces, but my research showed that they attract mature companies, remote workers, in other words, people who don't really care about hosting right now, and I can't sell them. This is how I got my business purpose, and I identified the exact partner who will get me there to achieve it. When you know what you want, and when you know who can help you get it, you're ready to develop your partnership concept. A partnership concept needs to be specific. A partnership concept is not, wow, such cool company, let's do something with them. No, your partnership concept needs to answer these two questions. What will I do for my partner, and what I want my partner to do for me? And in order to answer these questions, you need to do a lot of research work on your partner. To go back to my work experience, when I identified that we have opened up a customer base with them, I visited all of their 12 websites, or so, and I was looking for the exact space where I want to see SiteRound's product placed within their community, within their network, within their websites. So when I was about to approach them, I was absolutely ready with what exactly I want from them. So careful research will lead you to creating a successful partnership concept. How to approach the partner? Okay, obviously, when you're talking about a large company, you can't talk to the entire company at once. You need to identify who's the right person that you can talk to. I know WordPress pros are on Twitter, but in fact, the platform that you need in this case is LinkedIn. And of course, the company website. LinkedIn provides valuable information about companies, employees, their relationships between them and their relationships, their relations with other companies. Do not shoo for the CEO. Never. In fact, I would say do not shoo for any on-sea level position. Unlike smaller companies, when sometimes the CEO is the one involved in all decisions in large organizations, there are layers, there are filters, and very often important decisions are taken by mid-level management or even regular employees. The scenario under which the CEO of a large organization will receive an email from someone unknown, for example, will read it and rush to their partnerships manager with the other duets now is absolutely unrealistic. So it will only create more work for you and you'll have to wait longer. The people who are looking for it usually have the words, partnerships, business development account, regional account in their titles. But as you know, nowadays we have very funky business titles for our jobs. So I'd recommend that you not only just know the title, but you also read through the resume that's published on LinkedIn so that you're sure that this person is the right one for you. You have found your person. You're gonna like to call that. It's wonderful that I'm talking about this here at WordCamp, because WordCamp is one of the events that really present great opportunities for creating partnerships if you prepare for that. Meaning that before you come to WordCamp, hoping to find a partner who will help you grow your business, you need to research who else is coming. WordCamp organizers are such cool people and they do have the work for you. You have publicly available information on sponsors. Is my kid here after all? You have publicly available information on sponsors, on speakers, on regular employees. So before you go to WordCamp, check who is coming, check their websites, mark your targets, and then come and simply go talk to them. I'll share again about my work experience. I started talking to them at a certain moment, the things honestly got stuck. I wasn't getting the answers that I was expecting, but luckily there was an event right here in Sofia with one of their mid-level managers speaking at that event. So I bought a ticket for Digital K and I went there for the sole purpose of getting this person, of meeting this person in the hallway and asked him to help me with my problem with his colleagues from WeWork. He wasn't even part of the team working with me, nothing like that. But I went over there, I just talked to him, it turned out that we had friends in common, so after that he came back to London, he called his colleagues and they started cooperating with me and my problems were solved. So that's an excellent, excellent way to not only start a partnership, but also to maintain it, just use it wisely. Obviously, it's super cool if you can get a referral. Online stalking is definitely an underestimated process according to me, online being the focus here, right? So when you identify someone via LinkedIn, just Google them or Facebook them and see if they have hobbies maybe like yours, if they have a side business that you know. If they, obviously if you have common acquaintances and all that, anything would help for you to get to that person easier. Email would be the most professional way to approach someone. Unfortunately, we don't always have it. LinkedIn message is another option. Just keep in mind that you have to wait usually even longer for a person to respond because people don't necessarily go check their LinkedIn every day. Finally, general contact form. Larger organizations usually, not usually, always have someone minding taking care of the general contact form. And now usually this person will be responsible enough to get your message to the right person in the organization. Whether it's going to be answered or not, it's a totally different story. Don't expect that you will receive a response from the first time. This is okay, you should not get discouraged by this. In reality people, for example, would call emails, people then respond to them after two or three attempts. So just create an algorithm for yourself that you need to follow in order to make initial contact, do it again, remind you of yourself again, and so forth. Just be careful because the same goes that a common definition of insanity, and that's how that stupidity to do, is repeating the same action again and again and again and every time expecting to achieve a different result. It doesn't work that way. My personal borderline for stupidity is three. Three times I attend to contact someone, view one on the same channel, and I stop and I change my strategy. So I'd say define your personal borderline for stupidity and follow your algorithm, and when you hit it, you just change your approach. Try something else. One approach, the truth is that you have to do the work. No one will come to you, no one waits around for their door opens. You just need to act proactively. We mentioned several ways to make a contact with someone. Usually you will be making your partnership proposal be a right thing. This is, I think, a very sensitive moment of establishing a partnership with larger organizations. So I gave several tips from you from my personal practice on how to make this proposal more successful. Keep it short. I will take the time to get to this slide in my notes until you read the slide. You don't need more than three paragraphs. This includes hello's and goodbyes. Keep it short. The length of your message is an important indicator for your level of preparation for this partnership. If you're incapable of telling me what you want in a couple of sentences, all I'm thinking is that you're not really capable of, you don't really know what you want at all. In which case, and this is bad for you too, in which case I suggest you go back, define your business goal, define your business purpose, and then start the game. Do not use professional challenge. There are two problems that you could create with that. First of all, people may not really understand you, or even worse, they may understand something totally different than what you're trying to tell them. Here, if I say SMBs, all you will understand is small, medium businesses, right? But if you check Wikipedia, Wikipedia offers 13 different meanings for that acronym. So you don't know that the person across of you is not necessarily well acquainted with your field of work. They might be in a totally different industry. You don't know what they will understand, so just make sure that you don't use any jar to confuse them. In general, just mind the tone of your message. Do not make extreme comparisons. The best, the only, the first, the most sellable, the most useful, this does not really work well, especially when you approach someone for the first time. What is good to do, however, if there is to compare yourself to a more established competitor of yours? This serves two purposes. First one, if the partner is not well aware of your field of work, which is pretty regular situation, you give them clarity of what you do and you give them easy clarity of what you do. How many of you know what send-in blue is? Put your hands down please. Okay, three people. How many of you know what mail-chimp is? There you go. Send-in blue, according to their own words, is the same as mail-chimp but cheaper. I'm not going to discuss send-in blue now. I haven't checked this for myself, but I'm just saying that when they approach me, this is what they told me. I don't know what send-in blue is. They just said, we're mail-chimp but cheaper. And then I was like, okay, so let's see what this, you know, cheaper tool goes and don't. I don't have to go on their website to research them, to check them and all that. So that's easy. Second thing, it's super helpful if your partner already works with your more established competitor. Because this means that your partner is open for the proposal you're about to make. And they're open for this type of relationship. And in this case, this makes your life easier. Avoid fancy language. I'm not going to explain you why to avoid a fancy language. I'll just show you this. This is an actual partnership proposal that I received, I think, a couple months ago. So let's read it together. My name is Yvonne, and I'm the co-founder of XYZ Company. So far so good. We provide multifunctional solutions, servicing enterprise-level customers and bigger installations. I'm sorry, I didn't get it. Maybe some of you did, but honestly, I didn't. But keep on reading. Maybe it will get clear. Is the technology continue to mature? And as we were able to recognize the value from the larger businesses, I need to take a break here. And how that could apply to S&V and their content marketing, whatever, whatever, whatever. It just turned on. I still don't get it. I read it three times. I don't understand it. You gotta understand how the larger partner takes here. Nobody has time for yet another email. You yourself, you don't have time for yet another email. That's perfectly normal. What you need to offer in the beginning when you approach them is clear vision and clear statement how your larger partner is about to gain quick returns from working with you. So you don't need to write all these fancy-spancy words. What you can do is simply this. Introduce yourself. And then attract their attention. A number of my clients already use online services and I think this can be extended. You attract my attention because people pay attention when you talk about them. Always. No one will see themselves. No one see themselves in the first sentence of your email, your writing proposals, and look away. Never. Everybody will keep attention. This simple sentence, the second one, achieves two other goals, too. First of all, you already told me that we have overlapping clients, which for me is great. You know, for me this means also for me this means more sales. And the second thing you told me with this sentence is that you have a plan how we can make even more sales together, even more clients. I love people with a plan. If I work with someone with a plan, it means that I don't have to do the plan myself. So I definitely read forward. Get to the point. Exactly. Just say exactly what you expect the big apartment to do and what you're going to offer to them. That's really bad. I'm sorry that you showed me I have five minutes. Okay, so I'll have to run forward. So get to the point. Tell them what you expect. Tell them what you offer. Tell them what you expect. Keep it specific. Here all you need to do is numbers and successful examples. Successful examples. Successful examples with their competitors. That is even bad feeling. All you have to do with your first partnership proposal to someone is to demonstrate what the partner has to win out of that relationship. I wish I could tell you that once you have written your email, you have a thread and answered and it's all done, but it's not. And there will be negotiations and once again you could easily come out alive and win and win if you prepare for that. Stay flexible. Most of the cases, a larger partner will always try to squeeze you and they will not take your initial proposal. They shouldn't discourage you. You just get prepared for that. For example, if on your website it says that you're giving 30% discount for resellers, but in reality you're prepared to give 50% discount for a bulk reseller, you don't have to approach your larger partner just offering the 50% at once. If it's important for them, they will ask for it for sure. And after that you're given to them but then you have the opportunity to ask for something else for you and return and to gain more of that negotiation power. It is not personal. We all love what we do and this is especially valid in the WordPress community. It is only human nature to get upset and to have our reasonable thinking blur when we get mad at someone if we feel that they don't appreciate our product, they don't value our service kind of. Don't do that. Keep emotions out. If you don't get the answers that you want to get at a certain level for developing the partnership, just ignore that try a different approach. Keep yourself focused and just move forward. It's not personal. I know that I just told you that it's not personal but still you have to work with personalities there because you have a contact person. That contact person is the gatekeeper to your partnering with that large organization. Because it's a large organization usually that contact person does not have the power to make your deal happen individually but trust me most of the cases they have the power to kill your deal individually. So be nice to people. Never act condescending. If somebody again doesn't give you the answers that you want don't go on telling them I want to talk to your manager. It doesn't work like that. Keep in mind that you're working with a personality across of you and you always need to mind their ego. Plus after that when you actually start working when you actually start working with this company if you have been nice to this person you will have an ambassador within this large organization and it's also it's super helpful for you. The successful process of developing partnerships with large organizations depends on the persistence the positive attitude and the flexibility of the smaller party. This is the fact and that's okay. It does not mean however that if now you're in the position of the smaller party you need to give anything that the larger organization wants. You should never do that. Starting a partnership getting into the negotiations thinking about signing the contract you always have to know where to draw the line and this line stands right before you lose perspective or you're on your business goal. If something in a partnership does not satisfy you if it makes you compromise your values if it makes you sacrifice your business goal while you started in the first place you just say no. Often it's really cliche the world is big and salvation lurks around the corner. There are no irreplaceable people in business and certainly there are no irreplaceable partners. As you know I'm not on Twitter but please feel free to send me an email and if it's short and clear I'll be happy to respond. Thank you. It was an awesome presentation. Thank you. It was an awesome time. You guys again this is my work too. She was full time and how she did this very awesome presentation. I think we've got to appreciate it. Thank you. Okay now do you guys have any questions? We could also do questions in Bulgarian if I'd like to be more comfortable. Can I ask you a question? I would like to ask you a question. In Bulgarian do you have any partners who are excluded and who are excluded from your work? Do you have a small number or do you have any other reasons? Well... Yes I have a partner but for example I have a partner who works with me who is excluded from my work with him he is not an individual but an individual in my work. He was partially excluded from my work when I was in the second year of the year. But I think this is something wonderful that I think about. I have a partner who works with me who is excluded from my work with him who is excluded from my work with him who is excluded from my work with him who is excluded from our workingending and with him who is excluded from my work with him whom I accessed from the same place when I was at work and when I was at work the whole process paid attention that is continuously parts of the work and also what I'm doing with him is like a business They will be published next month and it was very exciting to fall in love with them and to thank them. In a way, it is not easy to participate. In fact, it is too easy. I think that everything will become possible. What is the moment when you start to write a book? The moment when you do this is the moment when you start to write something. This is when you write a book and if you try to start with something to make more progress and make no progress, and if you don't have the strength and the pressure to make more and more things, then you will be divided. There is a situation where you can make more progress. If you have other benefits, which can be other financial benefits, that is, you spend money from something that you spend with this partner, and this is okay, or you spend the money of the partner, that is, the partner does not keep the way you expect. Because of something that he does, you spend a lot of money of the partner, after you wear a shirt, but all this is dangerous for your business. The moment when you start to write something, because you don't know what is going on, because you don't know what is going on, you continue to write a book, you continue to write a long, long time newsletter about such things, then you will see how it depends. You don't have a good one. You write a good one. If a good one helps you to continue automatically, without anything else, then you have to stop it. When you have a good one, the next time you have a good one, you buy a book, the next time you buy a book. I believe that when you start to talk, it is okay to start directly with a good one, because you don't know what is going on, and normally, you don't know what is going on. As I said, even if you want to, I don't think this is a good way to speak in English, but I think it is a good way to do it. Yes, even not only if it is for a long time, but also for a long time. The whole long-term message is to stop the contact. If you are a Bulgarian and your future partner is a Bulgarian, you can write to me in English, maybe it will be the only difference between me and my emotions. Everything that is approaching you is okay for a long time. I am interested in your experience that will continue around the world. In the case of getting a new client or being created on a partner. And sometimes you say first for a client, then for a partner. I see that you are a Bulgarian. Because you are creating a partner that you are going to bring new clients after that. That is, if you mail an individual product to a specific client or to a new store that is a different thing. In the case of you, you are dealing with a person who is going to bring a lot of new clients on a partner. And from these methods that I have used on the path, I would say all of them on a partner if possible. That is the best way to say what kind of person you are looking for. If you have a business or a person you know they will help you and they will tell you what kind of person you are looking for. In addition, you can talk to colleagues if you can. In any way, it is okay to use a certain person who has a border and not to mix a lot of things. Yes, thank you. The question that we are asking at the beginning has no way to express a small percentage that you see and that you don't want to get involved. We have a lot of emails to say 2% I'm not sure how to explain it. I think this is the moment when we have a lot of clients and they work as a partner. In the case of a partner with whom you would deal with this and that. They don't work as a partner. They work to assess if this partnership is good for the company or not. But they don't work automatically and they don't think anything bad for the person who uses it. I'll show you a little what this particular business has. I want to get into it. Until I get into the company I'm ready. Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you