It took me WAY too long to realize I could reach out to the brands I wanted to work with. So I’m sharing this with you so you can skip that “waiting for brands to come to me” phase.

Before I worked in marketing, I was an SDR. My whole job was cold outbounding to strangers to try to get them to talk to my team about spending their money on our solution.

Cold outbounding for brand deals is no different. So if you’re in sales today, you likely have 75% of the tools I’m about to walk you through. If you’ve never sold before, this whole process will probably be helpful.

This sequence helped me land two of my dream brand deals in two weeks:

People assume you need a massive following to land brand deals, but in reality, what you need is an ENGAGED following and good content. I’ve landed brand deals at 10k followers and 70k followers. The money is a little different, but the partnerships are the same.

The earlier you start working with brands and proving your value, the more social proof you’ll have as your audience scales, which helps you negotiate bigger contracts.

I know folks with 6k followers getting paid a few hundred $$s to promote brands. Know your audience, keep them engaged, and you’re ready to land a brand partnership.

At any given time, you should be aware of these metrics:

This list should materialize at the intersection of your audience and brands you already know, use, and love.

Example: I’m a content creator. I have a lot of people who follow me for personal brand tips and want to learn how to build their brand. I use Canva ALLLLLL the time. Canva would be an ideal partnership for me because:

Make a list of 15–20 brands, and these become your target accounts.

Every company doing influencer marketing has someone running that program. Whether it’s an overworked head of marketing who outsourced to an agency or a me (internal employee overseeing influencer marketing) – someone at the organization is in charge of bringing on, or at least overseeing, influencers.

Titles worth searching:

^Or any variation of these.

Using LinkedIn or a tool like Apollo, you can get in touch with them via DM or directly through their email. I personally use both, which we’ll jump into in a later step.

Now, hear me out. If these are dream brands and tools you already use, this shouldn’t be that crazy or hard. All I’m saying is: write an unsponsored post about the product, like you would if you were being paid.

You’re going to use this in Step 5.

Repeat this with all your dream brands.

When you land your first brand collab (or if you’ve had a few), you can swap doing free posts for companies (although I still do this because I don’t mind it) with examples of other branded partnerships you’ve done. Use those to show how you could drive similar results for their company.

The first one is the hardest, but you’ll learn so much from it. And once you land one partnership, they have a way of rolling in.

You’ve got this. Try it, and let me know when you land your first brand convo!

The best teams right now are ruthless about removing friction. The pattern? They connect what used to be scattered. Zapier and Clay did this for data. Consensus does it for the buyer journey.

Most of my day looks like sales. Running influencer programs means explaining value on repeat, and demos were the bottleneck. Not because people weren’t interested, but because they didn’t need 30 minutes. They needed 3 to click around and get it.

Consensus fixed that. AI-powered, async demos let people experience the product when interest is highest. No scheduling. No calendar chaos.

Buyers already show up informed. They just need hands-on context. Consensus makes that easy, at scale. It connects the dots for my influencers and our prospects.

They also just launched Consensus for Marketing with mobile-friendly demos. Sharing your product experience is now stupid simple.

If you sell or market anything even slightly complex, this is worth a look. Connect those dots for your prospects and thank me later.