Developing a strategic partnership plan can help you align your goals, expectations, and resources with your potential or existing partners. However, not all partners are equal in terms of value, fit, and commitment. How can you prioritize partners when developing a strategic partnership plan? Here are some tips to help you identify and rank your best partners.
Before you reach out to any partners, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your partnerships. What are your objectives, challenges, and opportunities? What are the gaps or pain points that you need to address? How can partnerships help you solve them? By defining your needs, you can narrow down your partner criteria and focus on the ones that can offer the most relevant solutions.
There is a famous saying that states “If you don’t know where you are going, you cannot get anywhere”. This same thought can be translated to business collaboration opportunities as: “If you don’t know what you want, how do you expect your partner will be able to deliver it for you?”. This illustrates the importance of setting proper expectations between your company and your potential partner. You are only able to do this, though, if you have performed an assessment of the issues you are looking to solve and clearly defining which solutions fall under the scope of what external partners might be able to deliver. Understanding your needs, your capabilities, and your leverage (money, data, etc) should be the first step before you engage.
When evaluating potential or existing partners, you must consider various factors such as their alignment with your vision, mission, and values, their reputation and trustworthiness, their expertise and resources, their network and influence, their willingness and responsiveness, and their compatibility and communication. To compare them objectively, you can use a scoring system or a matrix to rate your partners on each factor.
The best way to create this scoring matrix is to understand your own company culture and try to replicate the values of the company in how you assign the scoring grades. For example: if you work for a company where being environmentally friendly is very important, a cheaper solution offered by a partner that is publicly known to disregard the environment - even though it might seem to be the most cost effective option-, might actually cause a severe loss of trust for your company’s customers and internal teams who would not expect such deal to go through. This would end up costing the company lots of money. Therefore, not always the most “obvious” answer on how to score partners might be the correct one.
After you have evaluated your partners, you can prioritize them according to their scores or ratings. Utilizing a simple framework like the Eisenhower matrix can help to classify your partners into four categories - Urgent and important, Important but not urgent, Urgent but not important, and Not urgent and not important. Your top priority should be the Urgent and Important partners who contribute most to your most critical and valuable goals. The Important but not Urgent partners can help you with long-term and strategic goals, while the Urgent but not Important are useful for some immediate and operational tasks. Lastly, the Not urgent and not important partners should be minimized or ended as they do not contribute much to your goals or needs. By prioritizing your partners, you can effectively allocate your resources and optimize your partnership outcomes.
If you work in large organizations, make sure your prioritization matrix is properly socialized and aligned internally. Your team might consider a partner as “not important” while another team you never interacted with considers them a “VIP” partner. A good solution for this is to socialize your matrix upwards and confirm with upper management if they are aware of any other team working with that organization. If upper management doesn’t know, it might be an opportunity for you to create a process and organize that information across the company. This would highlight your efforts in being collaborative and prevent others from disrupting existing relationships.
Prioritizing your partners is not a one-time activity. You need to review your partners periodically and update your rankings based on their performance, feedback, and changes in your needs or goals. You should also communicate your expectations and appreciation to your partners and seek their input on how to improve the partnership. By reviewing your partners, you can ensure that your partnerships remain relevant, mutually beneficial, and aligned with your strategic partnership plan.
Your goals for engaging in a partnership might also change with time. Therefore, establishing a periodic review process with upper leadership ensures that the organization is still aligned that there is a strong benefit in engaging with the list of partners. During the review, stakeholders can also evaluate the partnership delivery and decided if the company should maintain the relationship, terminate it, or maintain it while a better one is sought. If the partnership is underdelivering on what was agreed, and feedback was provided, it might be time to look for a different one. Ensure this is also aligned with leadership, as there might be a cost in making this change, as well as the impact on other business units who might depend on it.
One of the benefits of partnering with others is that you can learn from their expertise, insights, and best practices. You should not only prioritize your partners based on what they can offer you, but also on what you can learn from them. You should ask questions, listen actively, and seek feedback from your partners. You should also share your knowledge, challenges, and successes with your partners and create a culture of learning and collaboration. By learning from your partners, you can enhance your skills, improve your performance, and foster innovation.
Understanding in more detail your partners concerns, challenges and strengths can only help you identify more collaboration opportunities to enhance the existing relationship. Imagine a partner that is great in doing A and needs help in doing C. Your company’s strength is doing B but a client of your company is focused in C. You could connect your client to your partner and provide value to both of them. You would earn lots of trust from your partner and this client, which would later translate to potentially better deals on both ends. It all starts by listening and paying attention. You should always be trying to seek more information and building trust vs just focusing on checking the box if the deal is being executed as it should.
Prioritizing your partners is not only about ranking them, but also about developing them. You should not settle for the status quo, but look for ways to grow with your partners. You should explore new opportunities, challenges, and markets with your partners. You should also celebrate your achievements, recognize your contributions, and reward your efforts with your partners. You should also seek referrals, testimonials, and endorsements from your partners and expand your network. By growing with your partners, you can increase your impact, reach, and reputation.