It’s all about passion

I spent a half hour on the phone today to a new potential partner – they sell a great on line business simulation game for schools. The Director of the company had looked at our website, seen some potential synergy and we exchanged emails and arranged the conversation.

He told me about his product, and he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable. It sounds really good – an interesting and useful business game that would be great for our teachers, education contacts and even for training companies who work with young employees.

He transmitted his passion and I understood the product offering and target market quickly. Sounds like the sort of person I like doing business with. In return I told him about our site, about our markets and about how we contact prospects and send out newsletters and write articles etc.

At the end of the conversation he confessed that he was ‘more excited’ about our potential partnership than originally envisaged. There are opportunities to be far more than just ‘one more product on someone else’s site’ and he obviously picked up my passion for the business. We are now meeting face to face next week in London at the IoD to explore more widely the potential for doing business together.

It really is about passion. Anyone can set up a website and ‘sell stuff’* but a sustainable business, even when it is ecommerce based – is still about people.

And I firmly believe that people with passion do better business.

* half the affiliate programme promotions on the web seem to be based around this and making yourself an ‘internet millionaire overnight’. But are they people businesses, or just playing a numbers game? The most successful of these businesses are those that engage with their audience and sell ‘to’ them instead of ‘at’ them. But that’s a whole other article....