Creativity is essential for successful partnerships, especially when you need to negotiate win-win solutions, overcome challenges, and generate new value. But how can you spark creativity in your partnerships and avoid falling into routine or stalemate? Here are some tips to help you foster a creative mindset and culture in your partnerships.
Partnerships can be beneficial since they enable you to leverage the diverse perspectives, skills, and experiences of your partners. This diversity can spark creativity by introducing you to different ideas, approaches, and feedback. To gain this advantage, you should invite partners from different backgrounds, sectors, or markets to join your brainstorming sessions or workshops. Additionally, you should encourage partners to share their insights, stories, or best practices from their own contexts or industries. Furthermore, challenge partners to question their assumptions, biases, or habits and explore alternative scenarios or solutions.
To spark creativity in your partnerships, you can co-create value with your partners. This means collaborating to design, develop, or deliver something that benefits both parties and meets the needs of your customers or stakeholders. To do this, you should define a clear and shared vision that aligns with your partners' interests and values. Utilizing tools such as design thinking, prototyping, or testing can help generate and validate ideas with your partners and customers. Additionally, regular communication and feedback loops should be established to monitor progress, learn from failures, and celebrate successes.
Seek to employ a Use-Tell-Sell approach. Its much more convincing when speaking with contacts to say "we use it ourselves, and that's why we recommend you also take a look at it".
I always use a combination of two approaches here - top-down research and bottom-up view. Top-down: follow the economic developments in the region of your partners' operations and interpret data to find new opportunities. Bottom-up: apply design thinking methods and stay open-minded- even 'the most crazy ideas' have potential to help you to find very unusual and effective collaborations.
A third tip to spark creativity in your partnerships is to experiment and learn from your actions and outcomes. This means adopting a growth mindset and embracing uncertainty, risk, and failure as opportunities to learn and improve. You can set up small-scale pilots, trials, or demos with your partners to test your ideas and assumptions in real situations. Additionally, data and feedback from your partners, customers, or stakeholders should be collected and analyzed to evaluate your performance and impact. Experimentation and learning will help you reflect on experiences, identify what works and what doesn't, and adapt accordingly.
A fourth tip to spark creativity in your partnerships is to share inspiration with your partners. This means exposing yourself to new sources of information, knowledge, or creativity and exchanging these sources with your partners to motivate and stimulate each other. To share inspiration in your partnerships, you can curate and share relevant content, such as articles, podcasts, videos, or books. Additionally, you can invite partners to attend or host events that showcase new trends, innovations, or best practices. Finally, recognize and appreciate the creative contributions of your partners and celebrate their achievements and milestones.
Give them a sellable, credible and deliverable story to interest their top clients; this always helps to open the doors to their contacts.
A final tip to spark creativity in your partnerships is to have fun with your partners. This means that you enjoy working together, build rapport and trust, and inject humor and positivity into your interactions. Having fun can reduce stress, increase energy, and improve your mood, all of which can boost creativity. To have fun in your partnerships, you can use icebreakers, games, or challenges to break the ice or energize meetings. Additionally, you can incorporate elements of play such as storytelling, drawing, or role-playing into your activities or projects. Finally, show your partners gratitude and appreciation to show that you value them.
Without doubt humour, and an element of personal style, plus not taking yourself too seriously, a degree of humility almost always help to build bridges and do more deals.
Help the overworked salespeople at the partner to achieve more, by only expecting them to setup the initial meeting, then only revert to clarify a point of commercial interest during the sales cycle, or to tell them the deal has been done.