One of our company’s strategic goals this year was to forge stronger and more meaningful relationships with our strategic business partners. Part of my mandate as the Marketing Director is to facilitate the onboarding of new partners, strengthen our existing partnerships where needed, and develop a marketing plan with all of these companies. Historically, as a company this is an area that we have been admittedly weak at and we had either grown away from some of our existing partners or they had grown away from us. Our strategic relationships needed a reevaluation.
Over the time that I have been at Spira, we have had offers from a variety of companies to enter into strategic partnerships. My task was to determine the benefits of joining together and determine how to weed out the good companies from the bad? The promising thing is that there haven’t been any really bad companies, per se. But there have definitely been a few that make no strategic sense to get involved with because there is no business value to the relationship.
If there is no business value in the relationship, it is like dating a person you have nothing in common with. What is the point? You end up never doing anything together which is the opposite of what a relationship is.
How does one determine a good partner from a bad one? Nothing worse than getting involved with a company and finding out later that they do not run a good business. A bad strategic partner can do a lot of damage to your reputation. Particularly if you are referring your own customers to them and they are not performing to the level expected when you first forged the partnership with them. Thankfully there is a lot of good information on the web about this very subject.
I by no means profess to be a guru of strategic partnerships but here is what I found on the web that was useful for evaluating strategic partnerships.
Don’t settle for the status quo.
If the relationship is not adding any value or increased business then it’s not worth your time to keep it in place.
Investigate their reputation and allow them to investigate yours.
Call their customers and find out what their thoughts and opinions are and expect that they will want to do the same.
Think about the long term.
Partnerships are like choosing a spouse or friends. Unless you are like a Hollywood celebrity, you typically aren’t looking for a short term wife or a temporary friend. Having said this, make sure that you do have a way out if you find out later that your partner has the business equivalent of a drinking problem.
Put it in writing.
NDA’s, partnership agreements and reseller arrangements are crucial. Don’t shack up, get a justice of the peace wedding and a marriage license at a minimum. A pre-nup is a good idea too so you know who gets the kids if the partnership ends.
Put some effort into it, make it work.
Make plans, hold events and cross-promote each other’s businesses. Just don’t sit and do nothing. Strong partnerships like strong relationships are built by both companies making an effort, putting in time and building trust and goodwill.
When you boil it right down, having great partners makes perfect business sense. First off, as a company we can’t do everything ourselves so it makes sense to align ourselves with other businesses that complement our products and services. Secondly, they offer great networking opportunities to get in front of prospects that no amount of cold calling, email marketing or web marketing could accomplish. Third is, great companies are also out there looking for other businesses to strengthen their own product and service offerings and there is strength and legitimacy in numbers.
Why am I writing about this in a blog? Well I have had some excellent meetings and phone calls with a number of companies over the past two and a half months and I am in the final stages of solidifying some exciting new partner relationship for Spira. This blog article is actually just a teaser to these announcements coming in April. Stay tuned to our website for these announcements and for some of the planned events that we will be participating in with these companies.
