Strategic Partnerships – 2 Mistakes People Keep Making

Strategic Partnerships can mean different things to different people and unfortunately, many people do not grasp the true benefits of what strategic partnerships could do for their business or career.

Therefore, I thought I would share with you two types of mistakes that most people make when it comes to strategic partnerships. Understand these mistakes and you will have no problem what-so-ever in building strategic relationships for your business.

Mistake No.1 Being Parasitic
Parasite [par-uh-sahyt]
Noun

1. is an organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.
2. a person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.

 When looking to establish a strategic partnership with another party it is important to ensure you are not acting in a parasitic way, and equally that you do not allow yourself to become a victim of a parasite looking to collaborate with you.

If you think of strategic partnerships purely as a way to generate leads for your business, then there is a very good chance you are falling foul of being a parasite. Do not think for one minute that paying someone a commission or pay away is reward enough.

Commissions and pay aways are a result of a strategic partnership; they are not the cause for one.

The most successful strategic partnerships develop out of trust and the desire to add value for our clients.

Mistake No. 2 Lack of Nurturing
Nurturing [nur-cher]
verb (used with object), nurtured, nurturing.

1. to feed and protect.
2. to support and encourage, as during the period of training or development; foster.
3. to bring up; train; educate.

noun

1. rearing, upbringing, training, education, or the like.
2. Development
3. something that nourishes; nourishment; food.

 Strategic Partnerships are ultimately strategic relationships and relationships need care, attention, and consideration just like a human-to-human relationship. Trust plays a big part here, you must be able to trust your strategic partners with your customers and contacts, and likewise they need to trust you with theirs.

You need to pay attention to the strategic partnership, nurturing it with value-adding reasons to ensure your partners stay engaged with you.

How To Overcome These Two Mistakes And Build Powerful, Long-Lasting Strategic Partnerships That Create Results

There are 4-key measurements I suggest you use to ensure your strategic partnerships are working for your business:

SPV: Strategic Partnership Vertical
What are your SPVs and how will you measure them? For instance, accountants could be one vertical, whilst solicitors could be another vertical where you find valuable strategic partnerships.

One great way to get started with identifying your verticals is to look at your stakeholders.

A Stakeholder - a person, group or organisation that has interest or concerned in an organisation. Stakeholders can affect or be affected by the organisation's actions, objectives and policies. Some examples of key stakeholders are creditors, directors, employees, government (and its agencies), owners (shareholders), suppliers, unions, and the community from which the business draws its resources.

Could your stakeholders make great strategic partners, or could they be great introducers to strategic partners that you would like to access? Look at the different verticals of stakeholders and explore with your team if they make potential strategic partners or routes to potential strategic partnerships.

WIIFM:  What’s In It For Me
Me doesn’t just mean ‘you’, it also means ‘them’. You must clearly define ‘what's in it for both parties’. A commission or pay away is not enough. Strategic partnerships have to be a two-way highway of information and prospect flow and more often and not value-add is a key to strategic partnerships, in otherwords potential strategic partners will be asking themselves ‘what value do you add to them and their clients?’.

ROI: Return On Investment
You need to measure your ROI of each strategic partnership you have. What have been the results of these partnerships and your investment in them?

RVI Relationship Value Index
Your RVI is calculated for each of your strategic partnerships and can help you identify weak, weakening and non-producing partnerships.

To calculate your RVI use the following formula:

• Totalreferrals = the total referrals received from the strategic partner for a 12 month period.
• Totalonlinecollaborations = the total collaborations, such as article swaps, feature blogging, twitter campaigns etc.
• Totalevents = the total number of events you have run together, workshops, seminars, webinars etc.
• Totalcrosspromotions = total number of mailshot campaigns, publications in a quarterly published newsletter, etc.
• Totalstrategicreferrals = the total of number of received referrals to other potential strategic partners.
• Noofmonths = the total number of months you have had the strategic partnership.
• Level of Trust = An estimate of your mutual level of trust, 1 being weak, 5 being strongest.

What Your RVI Means

• Less than 1 indicates a weak strategic relationship which can mean a poor strategic partnership.
• An answer between 1 and 2 means a good, average relationship.
• 3 or above is a good indication of a strong strategic relationship.

By measuring this on a monthly or quarterly basis, you can monitor all your strategic relationships to see which ones are growing with strength or possibly weakening over time.

Once you’ve ran your RVI for your partners, then do it again but reverse the roles, so in other words from their persepective about you.

In Conclusion
Developing strategic partnerships is not difficult, they simply need a lot of nurturing and you must have a clear WIIFM for both parties. My 4-key measurements should help towards you avoiding making the mistake of being a parasitic strategic partner or working with other parasitic strategic partners and/or not nurturing your relationships such that you find yourself always having to look for new strategic relationships.