Partnering for growth is all about ensuring you can continue to meet the needs of your customers’, by potentially finding the talent you need with another partner.
If you have excess capacity, you can increase your reach and profitability by finding partners that can help you drive the utilisation of your staff. If you lack capacity, you can connect with other partners that have the expertise to enable and expand your own solutions.
IDC predicts that cloud spending will exceed $500B by 2020*. In “Partner of the Future: 10 Transformations IT solutions providers must make” they outline ten specific areas that partners should consider when looking forward with their business – and aiming to ensure they remain successful both now, and looking towards 2020.*
Move over the generalist; step forward the specialist
Customers are looking for tailored solutions to meet their needs! How can you extend your portfolio to accommodate this? Added value is key (Services, managed services and IP replace “just” reselling technology) – it’s not just the IT contact within customers that needs attention – think about approaching business decision makers too. Customers look to you to create a holistic solution for your customer, to fulfil all of their needs.
Growing the portfolio of skills you provide could be one route – either training your existing team or recruiting fresh faces and effectively buying those skills / IP in. But there’s an alternative, offered by connecting with other, like minded, partners that have the skills (IP / services / business insights) you’re looking for. And in turn they may also be looking for qualities that you have. The ‘do it yourself’ days fade into the past as you turn to a new world of collaboration.
Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be exploring the world of Partnering for Growth as we introduce quick and easy to digest materials and resources to help as you partner with others.
Whether you’re new to this, or a seasoned professional we hope there’ll be something of interest for everyone. These hints, tips and guidance are here to help you, but the ultimate path you take is your decision and your destiny.
Checklist for starting out
You may choose to do some or all of these, or approach partnering in your own way:
Planning
- Start with the end in mind; set a clear goal/outcome for what your partnering relationship should achieve
- Define “what’s in this for my business”! That way when you’re meeting with prospective partners you know what you’re looking for
- The negotiable and non-negotiable! Ensure you’re clear on what you’re prepared to negotiate on and what elements are non-negotiable
Search & Select
- Define your criteria for the kind of organisation you want to work with:
- Technical skills
- Other skills (selling, change management etc.)
- Knowledge pools (contacts, specialisms)
- Organisational size
- Attitude to partnering
- Customer references
- Audience access (customer reach) and insights
- Culture and approach to business
Agreeing the basics
- Define and agree the gives and gets for both parties
- Ensure you’re comfortable that both parties have an offering that customers want
- Confirm for yourselves that, commercially, the relationship can work
Setting up the relationship
- Should there be a formal or informal contractual arrangement between you?
- Don’t be afraid to agree up front the circumstances under which you may both (or separately) decide the relationship is not for you (better to have this discussion up front than further down the line!)
- Write a simple plan together to ensure you’ve a common view of success and the outcomes
- Think about the customer:
- Who takes responsibility for the customer engagement side? (Define who does this and on what basis)
- Who supports the customer at and post-sale?
- Who engages with them through the course of their lifecycle to ensure they stay with you?
- What are the checkpoints to ensure the customer is – and remains – happy?
- Define the commercials (if you agree any) and how these will be governed
- Agree how you will review and adjust these commercials
- Agree the requirements that each organisation has in terms of levelling their understanding and ability to represent each other’s offerings. What training? What support?
- Agree a process for arbitration just in case of any problems
- Are there additional resources needed on either side?
- Determine how you will keep track to ensure you both have capacity to resource the customer?
Keeping connected
- Define a regular set of meetings and reviews:
- Reviewing customer progress / deals / outcomes
- Reviewing the performance of the relationship and longer term sustainability
*IDC November 2015