You may have felt it more than ever over the past months. The pandemic makes it harder to grow your revenues, as customers are more concerned about their personal health and well-being than ever before.

Your cost to acquire new customers only knows one path, and that is up. 

Sigh. 

There’s gotta be another and better way to boost your growth, no? Indeed there is. 

Consider this. Lendico (yeah, I made that name up) is a newbie in the consumer credit business. It has built a solid platform, top notch scorecard, fluid digital onboarding of customers, and an attractive offer for people looking for a personal loan. 

The problem though, is that the startup is bootstrapped, and needs to get access to a much larger captive audience at a way more affordable cost that the google channel in order to break even. 

At the same time, BigTalk (yeah, I made up that name too!), a leading telco in the same market, is struggling not only to increase its ARPU (the Average Revenue Per User), but even keeping the ARPU at its current levels, full stop. Revenues from talk time drops rapidly as customers enjoy free calls using Whatsapp, Signal and more. 

And unfortunately for BigTalk, the revenues from increased data usage is not making up for the revenue shortfall.

To make things worse, a lot of BigTalk customers cannot afford the more sophisticated smartphones, and remain with their traditional feature phones, which certainly cannot be used to benefit from the newest data intensive digital services. 

At a conference, the commercial directors of Lendico and BigTalk bumped into each other over a coffee in the coffee shop, and started discussing their respective challenges. 

As seasoned professionals in their trade, they quickly realized that teaming up might be the solution to their challenges. 

Lendico had a suitable offering to finance those BigTalk customers who craved for a smartphone but simply could not afford it. 

BigTalk had the massive, captive audience that Lendico needed to scale fast, and ready made digital channels to give BigTalk’s customers an offer they could not refuse. (Yeah, I stole that from the Godfather. Rest in peace, Marlon Brando!)

Fast forward a couple of months.

BigTalk launched an offer for handset financing to its existing feature phone customers, a nice bundled package with an attractive smartphone, together with some really cool streaming services that customers longed for. All of it accompanied by an offer from Lendico that made the bundle affordable to the large majority of BigTalk’s customer base. 

In exchange for gaining access to BigTalk’s channels and captive audience, Lendico shared a part of its revenue with BigTalk, a small price to pay to accelerate its growth and secure its future as a startup. 

BigTalk solved a couple of problems of its own too.

The revenue share from Lendico helped it open a new revenue stream. It also unlocked revenue from increased data usage as customers upgraded their old phones to smartphones and started using more data, while benefiting from streaming music and films on their handsets.

A fairy tale? 

Not at all. 

Smart business development? 

For sure.

In my next article I will give you some tips about what you need to consider to build a successful partnership for your company.