Before Saying "Yes" to Your Business Partner

In every partnership, the aim is to start on the right foot and keep walking towards the destination that you’ve both paved out. While this sounds simple, it may not always be the case when you’re in it.

In a world where many people pass off sales as a partnership, you must be clear on how you position yourself and approach partners because many partnership personnel in big companies are averse to partnerships that turn out to be sales propositions.

A partnership occurs when two companies come together to create a product or a service that's aligned to both their business goals, and will deliver on those goals over a prolonged period of time.

These partnerships can be broken down to various phases with each phase ranging from three to six months, or in some cases indefinitely. If it’s going well, then you would want to invest more and if not, then it can be killed or you can move to the next phase.

Each phase must have a specific outcome-based Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tagged to it. You need to make a decision on how each phase is going to look like, and they have to be linked to the business objectives that both parties are keen towards investing in.

Partnerships that are not working tend to have unclear objectives that don’t tie back to the business aims. Many companies have created a product only to find out that they got the short end of the stick, and are no longer keen on pushing it through. As a result, the partnership dies out or doesn’t have a chance at succeeding.

So how do you start a partnership on the right foot?

Lay Everything Out

Partnerships that are not well-articulated upfront, don’t do well. You need to be asking detailed and potentially difficult questions from the start: How are you going to do this? How are you going to market this? How are you going to communicate this? How many touch points are you going to use? How many channels are you going to use? How often are you going to use this? What's the user journey?

It’s better to have these detailed conversations first, rather than sign off on something, and then realise that things are not working out because nobody's really going to take responsibility for it. At that point, it would be even harder to have such conversations.

Ideally, both parties get into a partnership that is closely aligned. In the next chapter, I’ll outline some key questions that you should be addressing before you sign off on a partnership.

Come up With Creative Solutions

A fundamental way to strike partnerships is to come up with new and creative solutions to issues that concern the partner.

My approach towards coming up with a new idea is to have a series of conversations with people who are experts at it right now. I pick the right people to talk to. Sure, you can go on Google to research on the viability of your idea, but you don’t know the credibility of it. When you instead reach out to someone you know personally or a friend’s friend who has succeeded in that area, there’s much more credibility.