Developing Successful Partnerships
by Matt Zemon
Your business needs electricity- should you build your own power plant?
Look around your business operations. What are you trying to create or maintain that is not part of your true core business? These items are distractions from giving you the time to focus on what you can truly be great at. Once you identify those items it is time to look for a business partnership that can do those pieces better for you.
Whether you call it a vendor relationship, strategic alliance or a partnership, joining forces with other businesses will leverage your strengths as well as open doors to new efficiencies and opportunities. I prefer the term partner because it sets the tone for the relationship and lets everyone in both organizations know that this is a two-way relationship that is integral to our success.
By definition a business partnership is a relationship that adds value to both parties based on the initial business purpose. From that foundation there are often additional ways to gain access to purchasing savings from new sources, facilitate expansion or use the relationship to speed up the time it takes to bring products to markets.
In my experience, leveraging relationships with cloud based sales and service businesses provide even more partnership benefits including the ability to tap into a nationwide talent pool and the ability to scale up or down to meet customer demand without the traditional capital expenses. Good cloud partners are constantly improving their functionality and passing those product enhancements on to you. They can strengthen your business' security by being available 24/7 to watch over your technology and make sure it is working with multiple, geographically dispersed data centers for disaster recovery. Cloud based business support partners allow you to implement new initiatives faster and easier, with a stable monthly operating cost and very little IT staff.
If you have been considering establishing such a partnership, seriously think about your most pressing business needs and what kind of partnerships will fulfill those needs. Acknowledge that such partnerships will require an investment of time just like an internal resource would and make sure that you are comfortable with the time to benefit ratio. Even though they are an outside company, I recommend having regular performance review meetings just like you would with an internal resource to make sure that both parties are aligned in their expectations and the measurement of results.
As you evaluate your potential partners, make sure that prospective partners share most of the same business priorities that you do and that when applicable your sales initiatives and compensation structures are mutually supportive. Take the time to understand and have confidence in the mutual ongoing management of the partnership and to share your management philosophy and vision of the future with them.
The balance of power in business partnerships is just like any relationships, an ebb and flow, but the end-game should be a relationship where both parties are stronger in the end and where results can be achieved far more quickly than going it alone.
No offshore call centers! As President & CEO, Matt Zemon brings over 20 years of operations, billing and customer service experience to American Support. American Support provides contact center support to some of America's largest companies using a 100% U.S.-based workforce. Matt has been named one of Triangle Business Journal's 40 under 40 while American Support is included in CableFax's "Top 10 places in the cable industry to work" and WorldBlu's list of "Most Democratic Organizations."Have a question about your business plan for Matt? Ask here. Your question/answer may be printed in a future issue.