PSA: Our agency wasted $5,000 on a 'partnership accelerator' program

We signed up for this online course last spring that promised to teach us the 'secret formula' for landing big agency partners. It cost us five grand and six weeks of our team's time. The whole thing was just recycled, basic advice about networking and making cold calls, stuff we were already doing. The promised 'exclusive' partner introductions were just a list of generic agency emails you could find anywhere. The worst part was the weekly group coaching calls, where the host spent most of the time pitching his even more expensive mastermind. We saw zero actual partnership leads come from it. I feel like we got sold a dream with no real roadmap. Has anyone else been burned by these kinds of high-ticket partnership programs? What actually works for finding good agency collaborators?

3 comments

3 Comments

grace_knight704d ago

Feel your pain, we dropped three grand on a webinar series that swore they had a direct line to brand managers. Turned out their "proven framework" was just a fancy PDF telling us to join industry Facebook groups, which we were already in. The whole thing made me feel like a chump.

matthew_hart254d ago

Was it the same one where the "secret" was just cold emailing people? (I fell for that one too, honestly.)

the_max3d ago

Sometimes you gotta pay to learn what doesn't work.