Finding Big-Name Partners

If you own a small business, a good thing to do is to become a strategic partner with larger organizations. Your first step should be tracking down potential e-mail contacts and wiriting to them. Here are some tips on how to do that.

• Read press releases on prospective partners' Web sites or in the press and record the names of anyone quoted about any projects that parallel your interests.
• Create a "contact profile" and note whether the would-be contact has written white papers or contributed to industry newsgroups. If they have, that shows they're involved in their work and passionate enough about it to take their own time to make contributions.
• Try to get a sense of their personality. The more you know about that, the easier it is to structure the tone and content of initial E-mail to that person. Note that they should differ from person to person - people will sense if you send a bulk text with the same content out to everyone.
• Send copies of your E-mail messages to people on the administrative level in each organization. They're the ones most likely to field follow-up calls.
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