Marketing agreements for small to mid-sized business owners

Marketing agreements can provide tremendous leverage for small and medium sized businesses to get the word out, particularly if they are done on a cost effective basis.  Many of these types of marketing agreements are available in the public record for review, and I’ve provided a link to a helpful resource at www.realdealdocs.com above.  Despite my role as a founder and early employee of several early stage businesses, I am by nature pretty conservative when it comes to evaluating business opportunities.  In my experience, marketing agreements are entered into far too easily, with a “shoot the moon” type of mentality.  I believe that there are several seemingly obvious but important considerations to review prior to entering into a marketing agreement:

1. What are your real business objectives?  Is it to spread the word, or to actually deliver tangible, short term sales increases?  Too often, the ideas about getting the message out are good, but the actual mechanics are too far removed from getting customers to buy.
2. Is the marketing partner appropriate to your target audience?  There are times when your partner is in “your space”, but their target market isn’t in your sweet spot.  For example, if your company targets law firms (as ours does, among other markets), the purchasing dynamics are very different for small law firms as opposed to larger law firms.  A marketing partner for one of our particular product offerings needs to really fit the right market segment.
3. How are you compensating the marketing partner?  Of course, you want to link compensation to performance, but many times payment schemes arent’t tied closely enough with results.  There are any number of ways to reward performance for marketing agreements and partnerships, and a great way to see how performance is compensated in marketing agreements is to review other similar agreements.  You can review hundreds of marketing agreementsdrafted by top law firms, and there are millions of searchable legal agreements and agreement clauses available at www.RealDealDocs.com.