Affiliate Marketing for SMMAs?

[Brett Beckwith]

[Idea needing feedback post, but wanted in INSIDERS]

Hey all,

SMMAs have been quite the talk recently. The ease of entry makes owning a SMMA available for everyone and their mom. For this reason, along with general lack of interest in running a SMMA, I've avoided starting one of my own.

However, earlier this week, SMMAs came up in conversation between myself and a business partner. In short, I thought of an idea:

What if you could be a "sales" business that specializes in finding clients for SMMAs?

Here is what a said business would do:

1. Have a salesperson reach out to businesses.
2. Salesperson would go about the saleperson process of asking said business to sign with a SMMA.
3. If the business is interested, the salesperson would connect the said business with a SMMA that is fit for their needs.

It seems like the basic process of a SMMA signing with a company, and that's because it basically is. You may be asking "why would you go through the hardest part a SMMA goes through just to hand it off to another company for less money? Just do it yourself, idiot."

However, there are some key benefits of doing this:

• Easily scalable: higher more salespeople.
• Detachable: sales team manager and can sell the business
• Don't need to manage a SMMA: just need to connect client to business, get the commission of first contract, and we are no longer needed. Affiliate marketing at its finest.
• Don't need to go through the phase of building credibility: it's really hard for a new SMMA to get a client because they have no way of showing results. For us, it (in theory) will be easier to get clients to sign because we'll set them up with well-established and credible SMMAs.
• "Fit for their needs:" to elaborate more on the theoretical ease of process, clients will be able to tell us (or we tell them) exactly what they need, and we can then point them to the absolute best fit. You need every social media platform in existence managed? We'll show you the agency perfect for that. You just want help with FB ads? Here, the other one isn't as good for that, but we really recommend this company. With this, we can direct companies to get the absolute best results without having to actually build the credibility and experience to do so.
• Don't need to be confined by location: go internet!

Cons:

• Only get commission for the first contract. Depending on how the certain SMMA runs, these contracts could be really big or really small.
• Well-established and credible SMMAs don't struggle with finding an abundance of clients, let alone don't have the manpower to take in more. With this, they are actually picky with who they bring in, and don't need our service to bring them clients. However, we could just bring them the clients they are looking for.
• I'll have to do the selling myself to begin with, and I don't have much sales experience. (hidden pro: I'll learn how to sell)

Am I shooting fire out of my a$$, or is this a viable business model?

Also, personal update: dropped engineering and pre-med. Just need to tell mom... oops. Gotta take that risk.

 

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