Hey,
Affiliate recruitment is a sales job.
Most affiliate managers don't treat it that way. They write a solid outreach email, get a reply, and then freeze the moment a potential partner pushes back.
"Your commission rate is too low." "We're not taking on new programs right now." "We had a bad experience with a similar brand."
These are objections. And if you don't have a clear response ready, you're going to lose affiliates you should have signed.
Build a communication folder
Every time a potential affiliate pushes back, log it. What they said, what you replied, whether it worked.
Patterns emerge fast. Once you know that 60% of your pushback is about commission rates, you can address it before it even comes up. You can adjust your pitch per segment. You can brief a new team member in 20 minutes.
Turn your biggest objection into a role-play
When I was running an 8-figure affiliate program, we would pick one objection from the folder and act it out. One person plays the skeptical affiliate, the other has to handle it live without a script.
Fifteen minutes of that tells you more about where your pitch breaks down than any training ever will.
Bonus: let AI build the folder for you
Use an AI note-taker on your recruitment calls (Otter, Fathom, Fireflies). Then drop the transcripts into Claude and ask it to group every objection by theme and frequency.
You get a ranked list in seconds, and you can follow up: "For the most common objection, give me three ways to respond depending on the affiliate type."
Your communication folder, built in an afternoon.
Quick poll: what's the most common objection you hear?
That's it for this week.
If you want to share your biggest objection and how you handled it, just hit reply. I read every one of them.
And if you're looking for more like this, find the full archive here.
More next week.
- Jani