28 May May 29, 2019 – Billionaire Secret Rafael Badziag and Sponsorship Connector Shayna Rattler
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Rafael Badziag – Founder & CEO at TheBillionDollarSecret.com and Author of The Billion Dollar Secret: 20 Principles of Billionaire Wealth and Success
How billionaires think is: they become successful not
because of the conditions, but even despite of the conditions.
Rafael Badziag is a German global entrepreneur, top TED speaker, best-selling author and angel investor. He is a valued expert in psychology of entrepreneurship, specializing in self-made billionaires, and was featured on NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX as well as in USA Today, Wall Street Journal and other national newspapers and TV networks in several countries. Rafael pioneered E-Commerce in Europe in 1998 by founding Raddiscount.de out of his dorm. It was the first bike online-shop in Germany, which he developed into an established business in the German-speaking market. He then expanded his business activities both as an entrepreneur and an investor into an array of internet-based services and products in several countries. He also follows his passion as a motivational writer. Rafael founded and writes for NoLimits.co and Indywidualista.pl. His inspirational blog hit the #1 mark on the day it launched. He writes for Billionaire Mentor Magazine and is currently involved in an extraordinary book project involving 20+ self-made billionaires. The book “Ready, Set, Go!” he co-authored with Brian Tracy became an Amazon bestseller in multiple categories and earned Rafael the Quilly Award. Rafael has give some of the most popular TED talks in history, they have been watched over 2 million times.
Shayna Rattler – CEO and Founder of Corporate Attraction – Read interview highlights here
If you’re not asking for at least ten thousand dollars a month,
you’re going to look as though you’re too much of an
amateur to even know how to play this game.
Shayna Rattler is the ultimate connector for monetizable relationships. She recognizes that we live in an attention economy and has mastered what it takes to gain and keep the attention of consumers. As a consultant, speaker and author, Shayna has developed tried and true strategies which have enabled influencers and corporations to connect and prosper together, resulting in hundreds of key partnerships and millions of dollars in profits. Shayna empowers influencers to scale their business by learning how to attract and partner with corporate sponsors and helps corporations break through the noise in the marketplace and reach new audiences. Fresh out of college, Shayna began her journey as an entrepreneur. By the age of 28, as a single mother, she created two successful businesses, making her an obvious go-to for business and life advice. Shayna is also a two time published author. She is an instructor for the Steve Harvey Success Institute and was chosen as the National Association of Professional Women 2012 Woman of the Year for her industry. Shayna has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Enterprising Women, Black Enterprise, and dozens of other major media outlets.
Highlights from Shayna’s Interview
It’s totally possible to get sponsors. Here, I want to talk for a brief second about why it’s possible. Because corporations recognize that we live in an attention economy, meaning it’s getting harder and harder to get the attention of potential consumers, especially in the way that they have always done it like commercials. And I don’t know about you, but unless it’s the Super Bowl, I very rarely see a commercial, if I can help it. So corporations are like, “Well, man, how do we continue to get in front of potential consumers, when no one is paying attention to billboards and commercials and all of those things?”
They’re turning to business owners and influencers and other people who have an audience, because those audiences, not only do we have their attention, but they’re also taking action with us as well. Rather than spend millions of dollars throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping that it sticks, they can just partner with another person or organization that already has access to the audience that they’re looking to get in front of, and make their job a lot easier. So they’ll cut you a check for what you’re already doing with the audience that you serve.
As long as you have an engaged audience, it can be very, very simple. If you’re able to demonstrate like, let’s just take a business coach, for example. If you’re able to say, “Hey, look, I have social media, I have a website, I have a blog that has traffic to it, I do a workshop every now and then, I have people who are in programs,” a company like Dell, who has products and services for business owners, will want to partner with you. Because you’re able to demonstrate the impact and influence that you already have with your audience, you’re able to say, “Hey look, when I do this, this is how many people show up. When I do this, this is how many people buy from me.” “Oh, they’re already doing that with you. Sign me up and let me partner with you. Because my commercials aren’t working.” So it’s not rainbows and daffodils. It’s actually a hell of a lot easier.
Your engagement is always going to be more powerful than your reach. For those of us entrepreneurs who have an email list or a database, we’re told that it’s more important about the quality, because would you rather have 10,000 people in your database that never even open your stuff, let alone buy from you? Or would you rather have 500 people in your database that you can track back and say, “Man, I made half a million dollars last year, I made $100,000 last year, because my list is so engaged.”
When you’re looking at a corporate sponsorship, or a partnership, they’re going to be more interested in the fact that your audience is engaging and taking action with you than they are the sheer numbers, because they’re looking for a return on investment. They don’t care if a million people see their stuff, if only two people are actually going to take action with them. So that’s a heck of a lot more important than the size of your audience.
They’re never going to ask you for a detailed report that shows that you have a 12% open rate and a 65% close rate. But you do want to be able to have some general numbers. You want to be able to say, “Hey, this is the percentage of people on average that are sharing my posts, that are commenting, that are showing up if I do a webinar, that are purchasing if I have a sale, that are clicking through if I have a call to action. As long as you have some general numbers that you can show the impact and the engagement of your audience, that’s going to be enough.
They’re going to do their due diligence, they’re going to look and see, are you present on social media, does your website look like your mom and dad created it? Now your mom and dad might be a great graphic designer, a great web person, but my mom isn’t. They’re going to do their due diligence to see if you look like a brand that is partner-worthy. So the exact same foot that you would want to put forward when you want someone to become your customer, are the exact same things that a corporate partner is going to be looking for. Because the last thing they want to do is water down their brand, by partnering with someone that doesn’t have their issues together. If you have a pretty good online presence, if anyone has ever interviewed you on their podcast, per se, if anyone has ever posted some of your articles, they’re going to go “Hmm, this is a person that actually could get some traction.” Now, if they google your name, and they can’t find you anywhere. Nobody has ever said anything about your business, including you, then you’re probably not going to want to waste time anyway.
The very first thing that you have to have is a clear, defined target market. Now shame on you, if you’re out there saying that your products and services are for anyone and everyone, because you’re making your job too darn hard as an entrepreneur, and your messaging has to be too general and vanilla. But the reason why that’s important for corporate sponsors is because each company has decided for this year or for this product or for this quarter, what audience they want to target. If they’re looking to get in front of Latino women, and you serve millennial males, that’s not going to be in alignment.
The very first thing that you have to do before you can create your target list and decide how you’re going to package what you’re going to offer is, you have to be clear on who you serve, so that you can match your audience with the companies that are looking to reach your audience. Otherwise, you’re going to be wasting everyone’s time.
I have a three part framework that’s position, package and pitch. The very first thing, positioning, is you have to figure out who you serve. And how are you going to position this opportunity to your corporate sponsors to show them that it’s a win-win.
The second thing that you have to do is, you have to package what it is that you’re offering. For example, if you said “Okay, this partnership is going to consist of my private Facebook group, my blog, and my two day workshop that I do every year,” how do you package that in a way that is going to give them maximum exposure to those three things that you’re doing?
Third, you have to figure out how do you get your foot in the door to even be able to have the conversation? Way too many people want to focus on the proposal. And the reality is that if you don’t know how to get your foot in the door and get the attention of the sponsor to start with, your proposal is never going to matter. And if you can get your foot in the door, and you can speak intelligently about why this makes good business sense, they’re never going to care what’s in your proposal anyway.
In business-to-business sales, which is what this is, company to company, it’s all about relationships. And modern day entrepreneurs have been spoiled with being able to sit behind your computer in your underwear, and people opt in and make money. That’s not the way it works with corporations. You’ve got to put on pants; you’ve got to get out from behind your computer. You can begin to be to build relationships, either with the decision maker, or the person who can introduce you to the decision maker.
There’s two different reasons that a corporation would partner with you. Either they want your customers to become their customers, or it’s a cause that they care about. Most business owners fall in the first category. It’s an advertising and marketing expense for these corporations. So you’re looking for someone as high up the food chain as possible in advertising and marketing.
How do you find them? They’re not going to opt in. So don’t go out and run and expect, “Oh, let me get my web guy to create a landing page.” It don’t work like that. You’ve got to figure out where are these corporate people before, during and after work? Are they at chamber events? Are they at Business Journal events? Are they at industry and association events? So that you can go out, and here’s how you get your foot in the door.
You don’t pitch and start talking about your partnership, because everybody likes to buy, nobody likes to be sold to. This is what you say to the person at Dell. “Hey, Stan, I know that you guys are looking to get in front of more business owners. I serve business owners in some pretty unique ways online and offline. It might make sense for us to talk about how we help one another.” Boom, he’s going to give me a meeting. Because I didn’t say sponsor my event. I didn’t say partner with me. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t make it look like I’m the little low measly entrepreneur that’s coming to the big corporate guy, because you have something that I don’t.
I positioned myself as a peer and said, “You’re serving this audience, I serve this audience, let’s set up a time to talk about how we can help one another.” Most of the time, you’re going to get that meeting, if you approach it that way. If you start going in with your pitch, your pre-printed proposal, and you let the word partnership or sponsorship fall out of your mouth in that first conversation, Houston, we’ve got a problem.
I hope when you get to the meeting, you’re going to say something like this–we can’t go through an entire sales script, so let me just hit the high points. I hope when you get in that meeting, you say, “Stan, tell me a little bit about what you guys are already doing to reach business sellers. Okay. Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. Where are you not getting traction?” You know, questions like that. And then say, “Well, let me share a few ways that I serve my audience of business owners. Every year I do this, I do that I do this, I do that. Do you see how partnering with some of those things could help you meet your goals?”
And you’re off to the races from there, because you’ve demonstrated the business case that, “Look, here’s what I’m already doing. And this is how people are engaging with me. If you could partner with something like that, could that help you? Whatever your goals are, spread your message, bring brand awareness, sell more computers, whatever their goals and objectives are?”
Those are the high points of what you’re looking to discuss in that first meeting, to see if it makes sense. Because then and only then do you give them a proposal, then and only then do you give them pricing. Because the reality is, until you know what it is that they’re looking to accomplish, pre-printing something in a proposal or putting things into different levels, you run the risk of offering them something that they really don’t want or need. Let them tell you what they see working in all of the different things that you’re doing, and then put some pricing together based on that model.
There’s multiple different factors that go into pricing, that would take a whole 20 to 30 minutes for me to go into exactly how you price it. We’re going to talk at the end about my free book, and I do go into that. But here’s what I can tell you, if you were asking a medium size to a large sized company for less than $10,000, they’re going to think that you don’t know what you’re doing. It would be like if I came to you and I said, I’m going to put you in this year long mastermind, I’m going to talk to you one on one every single day, you’re going to have access to me around the clock. And it’s $997 you’d be like, “Yeah, right, you apparently don’t know what you’re doing.” So again, if you’re not asking for at least $10,000, you’re going to look as though that you’re too much of an amateur to even know how to play this game.
But there’s things that go into that, like number of impressions, quality of your audience, like if you’re serving people who are on a lower income level, obviously, that’s not going to be worth as much as if you serve affluent clients, so there’s a lot of factors that we wouldn’t be able to discuss in this conversation. But I can tell you that you’re not going to be going for less than $10,000, probably not going to be going for $32 million, because you’re not Mercedes Benz, let’s just be real. So you could probably get about $25 to $50k if you look good in the suit.
I’m going to tell you how to get that book for free. Now you can go to Amazon and pay the $15 or whatever it is, but I’m going to tell you how to get it for free. So that book I go deep, and dive into those three P’s that we just talked about position, package, and pitch and I hope you see from this interview today, I’m not going to just give you the what and why, I’m going to give you how you can take the book and get a check. So the book is free. All you have to do is cover the shipping, and you can get that at corporatesponsorsecrets.com. And if you want to follow me on Instagram, that’s where I’m the most active. My handle on Instagram is GetCorporateSponsors.