Any business can collaborate with another company, but to see great results you have to develop a mutually beneficial business relationship, with aligned aims and objectives. Discover why you may enter a business partnership and the benefits it can provide, as well as understanding the anatomy of successful business collaborations and how you can build stronger relationships with your partners.
Firstly, you should not just partner up with any company whenever the opportunity arises. Spend some time evaluating the opportunity and establishing whether your businesses are on the same page. It is worth spending your time and effort beforehand because partnering with the right company provides real business benefit.
Why Do Businesses Enter A Partnership?
Generically speaking, companies may decide to form an alliance because they want to increase their capabilities or resources so that they can provide solutions for larger businesses or diversify out of one sector or niche. A business partnership can also provide an edge over competitors, through increased knowledge, ability and offerings.
For Excelpoint other businesses are usually interested in collaborating with us a range of general business reasons, including complementing or extending their offerings, increasing their consultancy footprint, greater penetration within their existing accounts, protecting a vulnerable position within accounts from their competitors, but always with a revenue stream focus. This usually starts by recognising a need for our software platform within their existing client base, and they want to provide a solution for them, or possibly identify a requirement for integration with our software platform.
The Pros And Cons Of Partnerships
One significant advantage to entering a business partnership is the ability to scale your company without a large investment; you can scale through the increased knowledge, resource and capability to take on greater projects. Shared revenue from collaborative projects will increase your business turnover and provide funds to develop and grow your organisation. Access to each other’s customer base provides a ready-made ‘prospect’ list; these clients may be interested in your collaborative service.
The main challenge you will face is choosing the right organisation to form a strategic alliance with; the wrong partner will waste your time and energy and sometimes be damaging for your business. Building a healthy relationship requires a degree of trust and honesty to ensure that your collaboration will be mutually beneficial. It’s also important to know when to reassess a partnership, what is prosperous now may not be in three or five years time, you need to know when something is not working for you anymore and be able to have the honest conversation with your partner.
What Makes A Successful Business Partnership?
Firstly, focus on developing an open and honest communication flow with your partner, it is the only way you will ever actually understand them as people and what their business ethos, objectives and morals are. Effective communication will be the foundation for building your business partnership take the time to understand your partner’s goals and objectives for their organisation, and this will help you identify any conflicts or issues. Once you have established both businesses aims you can start to work collaboratively on achieving goals and eradicating or minimising any potential conflict. Make sure that you focus on the other parties goals and vice versa because success for both sides is crucial to creating a successful partnership.
Your relationship requires ‘give and take’, but you should not just be giving to receive. To develop a successful partnership, you should be genuinely enthusiastic about your partners business and ensure that engagement is in line with their success, striking the right balance is probably the hardest element of developing a great business partnership. Don’t enter a partnership if you are looking for quick wins, to see real results from business relationships takes patience. Always be grateful and treat your partners like customers, show them you appreciate their loyalty we all appreciate it when someone recognises us for our hard work.
Once your collaboration demonstrates the early signs of a successful business partnership, you should consider entering a formal agreement some business situations would not require a formal or legal agreement; it is something you should discuss both internally and with your partners. Always create the appropriate business processes to allow both parties to operate efficiently and seamlessly.
Conclusion
Collaborations will not always develop into successful partnerships if companies jump into them too quickly with unrealistic expectations and don’t spend time developing the relationship. However, if you put effort into identifying suitable complementary business partners, building a relationship, strike the right balance between giving and taking, you will develop a strong business partnership to the benefit of both parties and their respective customers.
