Building win-win situations is key in a number of scenarios.

Check out this clip from the What Sales Can Learn From A Race Car Driver to learn what the most important element in building win-win situations is according to Michael Hurczyn, Brand & Partnership Director for FCP Euro.

Why is forming a win-win situation with branding partners so important?

Carole Mahoney:

You said there's the financial preparation and getting partners, and things like that. And I think in other racing circuits they're looking for sponsors. But you're working with them together kind of trying to get them excited. What are some of the ways that you get your partners and branding partners excited about the particular race? And why is that important?

Michael Hurczyn:

Everything that we do ties back to, at FCP Euro we sell European car parts. And so we have European cars specifically Volkswagens because we're trying to grow our Volkswagen market share. We reach out to our partners that are making parts for European cars and Volkswagens and saying, "Hey, you can put your name on our car, we'll go do all of this cool stuff. And we film everything. We have a documentary series, we throw up stuff on social media." And they partner with us so they can be part of what we're doing. And so it's not just, "Hey, give us some money and we'll go do these things and maybe you'll get something." We're actually leaning in and increasing their market share with our customers and we're selling products because of the activation activities that we're doing.

Carole Mahoney:

Yeah. It actually reminds me a little bit of what happens when salespeople are trying to work a large enterprise-size deal where you have multiple stakeholders. And it sounds a little bit like not only are you trying to organize and build consensus among your partners, but then also there's all of the work that you need to do on your side of the camp internally.

What do you think is the one thing that's most important in being able to build that kind of a win-win situation both with your partners and with your team?

Michael Hurczyn:

On our side of it, having the organization and the processes put in place and we've kind of figured out a formula that there is no one silver bullet that does this. We have constant communication. We give them sales reports, we give them marketing reports on what we're doing. We update our catalog to be, whether we prioritize their products or have better photos, and then we have the content.

We go in person to do all these cool things and then we film everything, take photos, and put it up online and share that. And none of those things individually would do much. You can't just go to races and then not put anything up on social media and then you can't just put stuff on social media and hope that people are going to pay attention to you. All of these things collectively is where we've seen the growth.

So internally for us that's a big component to be organized and have the process. But externally as well, we invite all of our partner sponsors to the events, to come activate with us, talk to customers, enjoy our hospitality. We build closer relationships with them and then in turn they go back to their companies and go to bat for us and say, "Hey, these guys have their act together. We want to do more with them and lean in." And that's how we've kind of built up our relationships.

Carole Mahoney:

Yeah. It sounds more like you're partnering and collaborating together versus trying to get them to do something for you, which, a lot of time in sales and in enterprise sales, I hear from coaching clients, how do I get them to do this? How do I build the urgency? But it sounds in racing anyway, and probably in a lot of other ways, that it's really more about collaborating together with them, figuring out how this going to benefit them as well.

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