Written By: Cleo Cosens
Reading Time: 2 minutes 30 seconds
Trust, openness, and commitment are essential baselines to a successful partnership. These elements lead to more than just simple customer acquisition & satisfaction — they lead to business growth and increased profits. Partnerships that work to build trust and rapport within an industry can be beneficial not only for businesses looking to gain exposure and drive sales but also for employees looking to develop skills and learn from industry veterans.
Benefits of Strategic Partnerships
- Businesses can expand their reach and increase market share – reducing risk
- Their customers gain from the strength of each organisation’s offerings and services
- Employees gain new perspectives and expertise by working with the other organisation(s)
- The development of strong ties between complementary businesses fosters collaboration and longevity, which results in the provision of services and solutions that can benefit their customers and other businesses
- The principle of ‘synergy’ – companies can go further together through strong communication and combining of resources
What Makes a Successful Partnership
Good partnerships are founded on mutual trust, feedback, and transparency. An excellent partner delivers excellence in service areas that are different but related. It’s common to find businesses partnering with other businesses to share resources and gain a competitive edge. But when you have two businesses with different areas of strength collaborating, the results can be even more amazing. To collaborate successfully, companies need to have open communication and a willingness to work together to build something new and meaningful for their customers. To build trust, there should be a cultural fit and a shared view of how to approach project management and team building. Partnerships need to be flexible in order to accommodate changes.
Example of Our Partnership Success
With our partners Cascoda and DPC, we successfully won an Innovate UK bid in 2020. As a result of mutual trust and respect – we were able to speak honestly. We identified gaps in our knowledge, skill, and product capabilities to create a strategy that benefited everyone. Since we were all remote working at the time due to the first lockdown…second lockdown…and third! Communication was imperative – we set up weekly calls with each of our partners’ teams to provide feedback, updates, and to talk openly about the process. It has, however, come to a successful conclusion with proof-of-concept deployments, proving our proposed technologies where the project is now in the process of commercialization.
It is often overlooked, but it’s crucial for small business owners to invest in strategic partnerships — they can be a huge help in both attracting and retaining customers. Strategic partnerships are extremely important in today’s business climate. By working with other businesses to solve your customer needs, you can develop marketable relationships that lead to greater business opportunities. We are human, we aren’t great at everything so, with collaboration comes power. The power needed to develop more complete and rounded solutions to meet and exceed customer expectations and the power to flourish in the industry long term.