Partnerships, Commercial and Strategic Benefits

Three Things to Consider When Partnering Here are a number of principles to adhere to when looking to leverage partnerships to build business and improve the probability of meaningful successful dialogues: 1. Partnerships are meant to accelerate growth and improve the prospects of your business. Spend time understanding where the best partnerships might lie from the perspective of the customer first. Focusing on serving the customer is the best way to find partners and align interests, raising the probability of success. 2. Avoid exclusive partner relationships that make you overly dependent on any one party. Some partners can come to have a disproportionate influence on sales and operations. Although large, exclusive partnerships are a means to further accelerate growth in your business, those larger entities may come to be more demanding of the partnership both from an operational and financial perspective, making it more challenging to grow the business outside of them and potentially diminishing future value potential. Multiple partner relationships across the same or different dimensions can in the end have a greater impact to the business over the long term and create more of a market for the company. 3. Structure and operate partnerships to truly demonstrate capabilities. To succeed commercially and engender strategic interest, a partnership needs to be meaningful and go beyond a simple press release. Meaningful partnerships are those that have an alignment of objectives, periodic measurements and a commitment for continuous improvement of results. While many large companies have very specific and rigid guidelines for participation in partnership programs, there’s nothing that precludes any one company to stand out simply by being more proactive with communication, feedback and with the overall management of ones side of the relationship. These are the companies that can come to stand out amongst others. Related articles: How To Be An Outstanding Business Partner     Hispanic Business and New Rochelle’s Success Creating Real Strategies for Small and Medium Sized Businesses