I’m not your partner, podnah
Nobody tries to sell me anything anymore. Instead, they offer to be my “partner.” Most emails that I get includes some variation of the…
Nobody tries to sell me anything anymore. Instead, they offer to be my “partner.” Most emails that I get includes some variation of the phrase “we partner with private equity firms to [word salad]…” Partnerships are the end-game status of long and fruitful vendor/customer relationships. When I need a new product or service, I search for it.
That might have been difficult (and it was) before the early 2000s. Sure, the internet was around before then, but much of the content was static web pages. I’m talking mostly about business-to-business content for the context of this conversation. Smaller companies in the business-to-consumer space took much longer to reach maximum density. Today, any company of any size needs a website (or web presence), but twenty years ago, this was not the case.
Most business-to-business companies had web sites by the mid-2000s. So if I needed something after 2005, I search for it. Of course, companies still bombard my inbox with unsolicited sales pitches, and our portfolio companies undoubtedly do the same to other companies. I don’t necessarily opt-out of these sales pitches as there is the occasional gold nugget amongst all of the iron pyrite. However, most of the time, I find the vendors that I need for ParkerGale or our portfolio companies via my proactive searches.
So, when I do get an inbound email from a vendor, it’s a sales pitch. Pure and simple. I’ll bite if it’s useful and solves a problem that I have (even if I did not know that I had the problem in the first place). But let’s be clear — you are selling me something. I am not partnering with you — at least not yet. Working with a vendor is like dating, and there are definite stages.
Meet
Go on some dates
Go “steady” or exclusive
Get Married
No one (other than maybe Ted Mosby) connects with someone on a dating site and proposes marriage. I don’t “partner” with a vendor that I have never worked with before. And before you even say it — I don’t care about any of the other private equity firms that you have as customers. I didn’t get where I am by simply following what everybody else does.
My advice to you is to follow the dating framework. If you want to send me a cold email, then be honest about what you want — you want to sell me something. If your product or service looks useful to ParkerGale or our portfolio companies, we’ll try you out — or introduce you to a portfolio company that could benefit from your offering. When we start to see some good results with this first project, we’ll introduce you to some of our other companies. If we see continued success, then maybe we’ll go “exclusive” and suggest to our companies that they consider you and your product first over competing alternatives. After that, we might be ready to sit down and hammer out a definite, permanent relationship — forsaking all others.
In the meantime, save the weasel words. Cold emails that offer to “partner” with me from the start go right in the circular file and gets your domain blocked from our email server. Harsh? Maybe. But it’s my inbox and my rules.