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How To Track Joint Venture Activities Through Online Tools

By Christian Fea

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 15Oct2011 Word count: 954 Viewed: 63 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

How to track joint venture marketing activities is the most important element of executing a successful joint venture marketing relationship. Without being able to understand what successes are achieved and where failures may be occurring it will be difficult to improve your joint venture marketing activities and it will also be next to impossible to hold your partners accountable to the agreed upon terms of the relationship. There are several online tools that allow anyone to quickly set up and execute a joint venture relationship as well as manage the relationship over the long haul. It's important to clearly identify all of the ways that the joint venture marketing will happen and sales will occur to ensure everything is accounted for and easily track able. It is vital that through the tracking solution deployed metric based reports can be crafted to analyze activities to know what to focus on in the future and what can be avoided.

Affiliate Marketing Sites

If the majority of the joint venture sales activities will be delivered through online referrals than it is extremely important that that an affiliate network program has been established for the JV partners to utilize. This can be achieved through several different methods. One model is to simply sign up with one of the large affiliate marketing sites like Commission Junction, this not only provides access to the tools necessary to create a tracking system for referrals and sales, but also will help market JV opportunities to website owners that are seeking additional partners that fit well with their customer demographics.

Choosing to not create a presence in one of the large affiliate marketing databases is more than acceptable as there are several solutions available to develop the same capabilities in house, that provide tools for tracking marketing activities of joint venture partners, whenever they are promoting your brand online whether on a website or in an email. A few of the more popular affiliate marketing tools available are LinkTrust, HitPath, and DirectTrack. Each of these services allows a business to create unique ads that will track the clicks and actions that a user makes when clicking on one of these ads. This is vital for a joint venture and will ensure all actions can be tracked back to who is achieving the goal of successfully selling products and services and how much they have earned from their activities. Failing to track leads and sales successfully will quickly harm joint venture marketing relationships and potentially loose a business a valuable partner.

CRM

While online sales may be an important element to a joint venture it also may not be nearly as important as personal introductions and more traditional marketing efforts that may occur from a joint venture marketing relationship. If a business specializes in larger priced items, it is much less likely that a sale will occur from a website click, therefore having a Customer Relationship Management "CRM" system in place to track the lead from the initial referral all the way to closing the sale will be able to provide the data necessary to track, evaluate, and reward marketing partners. A few of the popular CRM solutions are Salesforce, ZohoCRM, and SugarCRM each has the customization capabilities to fit the requirements of almost any business and sales process. These systems can be set up quickly. Joint venture partners can be invited into the system to enter potential sales prospects and follow the sales cycle, all the way to closing of the lead as well as seeing the final closing amount for the client. This will help track and calculate the monthly or quarterly referral checks that need to be issued to each joint venture partner as well as keep them in the loop about the progress of any deals that may be closing.

Promo Codes

Setting up a promo code and assigning it to an individual person or to a specific company or marketing campaign will help track joint venture activities. If a business wants to be able to measure the success of a specific marketing activity just including a simple promo code will ensure that customers will actively assist in gaining the knowledge required to know if they came in through the marketing brochure, radio ad, or were just flipping through the yellow pages and decided to call. By utilizing promo codes it's easy to put together raw reports of how many people are responding to a specific message, to refine your marketing pitch, or to identify which sales people in a company that you have a JV relationship are really pushing the products and services and who is not. Being able to reward those that are selling products is vital to make them feel appreciated and this data point is easy to set up. Make sure you create a field in your CRM system called promo code and instruct everyone processing sales leads to always ask the customer if they have a promo code and include the details in the field. Since it will be a field in the CRM then you can run a report just for that individual code or look at the results of several codes.

Use online tools to track joint venture marketing activities and ensure that energy and resources are dedicated to the right partners and channels. Make sure that when structuring a new joint venture each party clearly understands the expectations of the agreement concerning reporting and tracking all activities and that everyone is fully capable and trained to meet the requirements. Failure to track a joint venture properly can lead to many problems in the future and create more hassles then overall benefits.

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