Building Strong Successful Partnerships is Necessary, But Not Easy

by Barb Mosher Zinck | September 8, 2014 11:57 am

Partnerships. They are essential for any business to be successful. You can’t do it all, you can’t know it all, even if you want to. That’s why we need partners.

But as the CMO Council found, finding the right partner and ensuring the relationship stays strong and beneficial is not easy. The CMO Council and Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network recently completed a study of 330 senior management executives focused on what they develop partnerships for and how they work. The study showed the 85% believe partnerships are important to the businesses overall growth strategy, but many have not been able to develop successful relationships (44% have a high failure rate).

There are many different reasons for developing strategic partnerships. They range from bringing in new customers (57%), to strategic (55%), bringing in new technology (42%) and marketing promotion (39%). In addition, partnerships often bring in new ideas, insights and expertise.

There are many different types of partnerships each with its own set of strategies and management techniques. According to the study, 42% aren’t satisfied with how they leverage their alliance potential.

This is even more noticeable for small to mid-sized businesses. The challenges for SMBs often start with a lack of strategy (only one third have a partnership strategy), but also include a lack of internal resources to identify good partnerships, set them up and manage them.

“It is essential to lay out a formalized structure that outlines each stage of partnership development: planning, formation, operations and review. If any of these areas is underdeveloped, it could lead to the degradation of the partnership,” notes Larraine Segil, Partner Emeritus at Vantage Partners, a company that specializes in building executive management teams for market leaders and venture-backed start-ups.

While partnerships are important, they are not without their challenges:

45% have trouble keeping partnerships active and mutually rewarding
42% have issues maintaining an ongoing win-win relationship
32% have issues allocating sufficient resources and mind share

A few other challenges: negotiating/structuring an optimal deal, researching and finding the right partner and understanding where/how partners can benefit the business.

7 Steps to Identifying and Sustaining Valued Partners

The report “Grow from the Right Intro” offers seven straightforward to steps to ensure you are identifying where partnerships can benefit your business best, how to find them and manage them appropriately:

Do your Homework – Have a strategy and plan in place before you start.
Network like crazy – you’d be surprised where the right partner might be.
Be synergistic – your partner ecosystem is greater than the sum of its parts.
Score – keep the end goal in mind.
Trust, but verify – don’t set the partnership and walk away assuming everyone will do their part, keep an eye on what’s happening to ensure things are staying on track
Communicate, communicate, communicate.
Exit Stage Left – nothing is forever, so know when it’s time to walk away.

The report also contains some great insights from organizations who rely on successful partnerships to drive the overall growth of their businesses. Partnerships can be customers as well as with technology providers, agencies and strategic consultants. The point is you need to consider where a partnership can benefit your business and then find the right partner.

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