Co-Marketing Partner Sourcing and Term Sheet Drafting

The partnerships worth doing sit inside a narrow band of audience overlap, roughly fifteen to sixty percent. Below that there is no shared buyer and the campaign underperforms on both lists. Above it you are co-marketing with a competitor, and one of you is paying to introduce the other. We measure overlap before anyone is introduced, and most candidates fail on that test rather than on enthusiasm. How candidates are found and screened: Sourcing starts from your buyer, not from a list of companies in adjacent categories. We assemble candidates from wherever your customers already spend attention — newsletters they subscribe to, communities they post in, tools sitting next to yours in the stack, media properties and events in your category — then screen each. Overlap evidence comes from audience research tooling and cross-visitation data, and then from the unglamorous check: we subscribe to the newsletter for six weeks and observe what actually arrives, how often, and whether anyone replies. Claimed list size is the least reliable number in this field, so we ask for send-level metrics instead. What a partnership has to contain before it is worth signing: Lead ownership and how leads are split, written down before an asset is built. Dual opt-in language that satisfies Canadian anti-spam law and GDPR, so neither side ends up holding contacts it cannot lawfully mail. Ownership of jointly produced assets and what happens to them when the term ends. Category exclusivity, if any, with a definition and an expiry date. Who fronts spend and how it is reconciled. A brand approval turnaround, because an unspecified approval loop is how co-marketing dies quietly in month two. And an exit either party can take without a dispute. We draft the term sheet. Your counsel signs it — we do not give legal advice and will not push a template into a signature flow without a lawyer between it and your name. The introduction: We write the approach in your voice, make it warm where a real relationship exists and cold where it does not, and tell you honestly which it is. What goes out is a one-page proposal carrying the overlap evidence and a specific first activity, because a partnership pitch with no first activity is a networking request wearing a business case. What we refuse: No logo swaps, link exchanges or reciprocal directory listings. No affiliate arrangements presented as partnerships. No partner whose audience carries the signature of purchased growth, which we check before an introduction rather than after one embarrasses you. And no partnership whose purpose is a slide for a board meeting: if the first activity cannot be stated in one sentence, there is nothing there to sign. Who this is not for: Companies looking for distribution they have not earned. A partner with an audience is being asked to spend it, and they will ask what you bring in return. Teams with nobody owning the relationship after signature, because partnerships fail in month three rather than at the term sheet. And anyone who wants introductions priced per introduction, which we do not sell because it would pay us to introduce you to the wrong people. Where this work has been done: Mostly sports and fitness, media and publishing, and law, where the partner across the table is often an association, a federation, a title or a bar section rather than a company. Those bodies have approval processes measured in months, boards that must see the proposal before staff can agree to anything, and rules about commercial association that a standard co-marketing agreement breaches on its first page. We write to those rules rather than around them, which is slower and is why the agreements survive a change of executive director. Reporting: Per partnership: what was produced, leads by side, cost split against outcome, and a renewal recommendation including the case against renewing where one exists.