How to choose and commit to strategic partnerships in business

Why we chose Beamery as a long-term strategic partner

As a business owner and leader at Ph.Creative, I see it as my responsibility to be constantly looking for ways to support and resource my team to make them happier, more productive, efficient and inventive. This is a primary focus for me – finding great talent to join the ranks is a challenge I relish along-side Cher Murphy, our new (and incredible) CPO.

Along the theme of finding great talent, more recently I have turned my attention to finding great strategic partners to work with closely in a bid to add more value to our industry and client base together than we could do separately.

I’ve made some mistakes, wasted time and even missed some incredible opportunities for partnership in the last two years, but I’ve also learned some very valuable lessons that I’m grateful for too.

What I’ve come to realise is, just like our ‘Jerry Maguire’ strategy for client partners (fewer clients, more personal relationships), it’s essential to take the time to assess a partner for good culture match even more so than a potential financial benefit. When you find a partner with an excellent solution as well as a fantastic team, work ethic and culture that aligns with your own it’s priceless. The value you can create with just one meaningful, authentic partnership is worth 100x referral agreements that take minutes to sign.

I’m proud and very excited to see our close partnership with Beamery announced today after working behind the scenes for a while to ensure we can bring something of value that has been missing in the market place until now.

My advice on choosing a strategic partner for what it’s worth is this;

1. Spend time with a potential partner to go deep on their offer, understand the real value they are adding and assess how it aligns with your philosophy and the value you’re bringing with your products and services.
2. Commit the time to meet the partners' team to assess what they stand for, their values and typical behaviours you can expect to see when the S hits the F.
3. Agree on the terms and the expectations of a working relationship upfront as well as the potential size of the combined opportunity. More than anything, to make a true partnership work, there needs to be a commitment of time and energy to do the groundwork required to offer something coherent, joined-up and valuable to a shared audience. This is essential in order to clearly communicate to your team internally how you expect the dynamic to work.
4. Don’t just expect and plan for bumps in the road (of which there will be), lean into them and use them as opportunities to solidify and improve the working relationship. Show your partner you have their back and trust that they have yours too.
5. Establish a routine communications rhythm to check in and make sure everyone is on the same page with delivery, quality, innovation and communications.
6. Be patient with each other and the value creation of a new partnership, there’s always more groundwork than anticipated with planning and running new joint offers, combined servicing and co-branded solutions. It’s worth taking the time to get it right rather than rush in a bid to capitalize on market opportunities too soon.
7. Learn and share from the experience. Proper partnerships are a golden opportunity to learn from your partner across the board, from simple things like how they run meetings and organize project sprints to more strategic thinking from quality control for client services to investment and sustainable expansion planning. Make sure you’re willing to give as much as you are happy to receive.
8. Plan to and action an investment into the future of your partnership in terms of service improvement, technical innovation, new communications and even brand positioning. If this is transparent between partners, you will find much more value than planning these things apart and there are usually lots of efficiencies and benefits to leveraged together as one team too.
9. Finally, plan to offer the newly created value to your existing client base first. Use the new partnership as an opportunity to delight your customers and mine their thinking in terms of what they would like most from the alliance you’ve created. We’re also learning from our clients and investment into innovation can be greatly improved and re-prioritised with the injection of your client’s insights. It can save you from the dreaded ‘world’s best solution for a problem nobody has’.

So why did we choose Beamery as a partner?

Beamery is a company with high integrity, very smart people that are a pleasure for us to work alongside and we believe in the same approach to making easier and more effective ways to attract, engage and retain world-class talent.

Most of all, we’re excited to be the first solution to offer a seamless solution for a tailored and authentic candidate experience based on technology being an enabler, not a detractor and fully putting an employer brand to work to create experiences by design, backed by incredible intelligence to optimise and continually improve upon.

For too long, recruitment CRM has been held back by sub-standard website platforms and extremely limiting web page design options that have kept online employer branding and recruitment marketing in the dark ages compared to commercial marketing thinking and technology. Finally, that is no longer the case.

What lessons have you learned from forming partnerships and strategic alliances? I’d love to keep learning so comment below.