Strategic Partnerships #BetterTogether

Never before has there been more reason to consider doing business differently. 

Finding ways to lower the cost of doing business whilst keeping the revenue rolling in, is, without doubt, the business challenge of the day. This is therefore also a time when strategic alliances and partnerships should be getting some serious attention as a way of ensuring business success.

Done well, partnerships offer a low-cost way to significantly improve the outcomes for businesses. Unlike your usual business transactions though, partnerships require some different thinking in order to return the results you expect.

For some, partnering is intuitive, but this is not true for everyone. What I have learned from my experiences is that often we can get to opportunities faster and more economically when we work in partnership with other companies, but it’s the way we think about them that makes all the difference. 

Partnerships and strategic alliances are some of the first things to look at when thinking about shifting the prospects of your business. When we are scanning for “opportunities for growth” and “value exchanges” we should be thinking about which companies might help us get more effective reach and more efficient sales conversion. Together, is very often a better pathway to accelerating results than just simply pedaling harder on our own. 

My first real experience of the benefit of partnerships was when I was selling roast and ground coffee to cafes in the early to mid-’90s. I was working for a high cost, locally unknown, European brand with fewer resources than nearly all of our competitors. This meant thinking laterally about how to get in on the most “aspirational” sites and locations before competitors swept in and took the business. 

Building a cafe coffee brand was all about high end, highly successful clients using your product. If you acquired one great cafe in a great location, you would secure another 15 because they saw your product being served in that cafe. It was a time when many operators had little to no knowledge of what quality coffee really was, so they looked to others and what they were doing or using.

With this in mind, I quickly found myself visiting the licensing commission every week to see what cafes and restaurants had applied for a liquor license. I would then narrow this down to those who were in great (coffee) locations. In those times you couldn’t get a decent latte in the suburbs, but you might have been able to get a “cup-of-cino” (yes people had signs spelling it like this) at the local shopping mall. Australia has come a very long way since this time, now viewed as having some of the worlds best baristas serving the world’s best coffee. 

If the business was in a great location, I promptly jumped on the phone to my partners; shopfitters, electricians and plumbers to see who was working on the site so I could get a referral to the owner. All the selling happened before the site was open or even built. It was imperative that we were there first. If we were too late, the major competitors, with better-known brands and lower prices, would smash us in the contest. Our partnerships were reciprocal because many of our clients were also in the market for an electrician, plumber or shopfitter. These partnerships were fundamental to the 45% compound annual growth rate we achieved over the 3 years I worked for this business.

I carried this notion of partnering forward when our team was launching a potato chip/snack brand nationally. A partnership with Coca-Cola was a monster contributor to scaling our brand and was a major push down the hill on the way to driving a 7x revenue result in just 24 months.

These experiences taught me that partnerships can be incredibly impactful. Not just for a smaller business trying to scale quickly but also for larger businesses who have a need to access new markets, new channels to market, or even just reposition themselves with their customers. Having identified, negotiated, executed and led dozens of national and global partnerships over my career, I can attest that when done well, they can be incredibly rewarding.

If you want to get more customers or keep more customers there is much to be gained by working with a strategic partner to achieve your objectives. Your “opportunities for growth” are indeed all the evidence you need to get started.

There are of course some fundamentals, nuances and risks in identifying and leading strategic partnerships and alliances to meet commercial and brand outcomes. For example, just like any other relationship, it’s critical that both self-awareness and curiosity are matched with the capability to deliver. It’s equally important that relationships do not become dependent or co-dependent over time. 

As a killer example of self-awareness and curiosity, the recent partnering of Samsung TVs with Apple TV & Apple Music saw two fierce competitors in one market, realise they were #bettertogether in another market.

In any exchange of value, there must be mutual regard for what the other partner brings to the table, or you can be assured of a break-up down the road. Furthermore, in the name of brand equity and business reputation, there are many risks to be mitigated against when starting a new relationship.

As always, there are many other things to consider in selecting and leading strategic partnerships, too many to mention here. We’ve published some of this material on our website if you are interested in learning more. Download our guide to assessing strategic partnerships here. 

For now, I hope that reading this, may have at least drawn your attention to the opportunities of truly being #bettertogether.

Happy Partnering, Scott

curiously conscious commerce