Businesses need to grow. Like anything that stands still, it loses energy if it isn’t moving forward. Owners, general managers and sales managers have to find ways to connect to new prospects, in new geographies or at different parts along the value chain. You may be swift and powerful but need someone who is creative and playful to complement your skills. Your brand may also need new insights that can come from collaborating with someone who isn’t a competitor but can bring value to the assets you already have in place. How can you find an unexpected strategic partner to build a relationship for growth?
Like most marketing activities, don’t look in the obvious places where everyone else goes. Consider finding connections that are tangential but not directly connected to your industry.
The important question to ask is how can tap into a new audience through someone else’s connections?
Target is a great example of design partnerships. In 1999, they built a relationship with Michael Graves. This connection gave a halo effect on the Target brand while boasting sales for Michael Graves of specially designed products like teapots. Today Target is launching a relationship with Lilly Pullitzer and trendy lipstick products from Sonia Kashuk and other clothing products by Missoni.
Another example is the relationship that General Electric and Intel forged in their Care Innovations business. With a massive data base of billions of patient interactions, they look for insights to reduce cost, improve outcomes and change how healthcare can be delivered to consumers. These are two big guys who recognized that they could learn and benefit from each other and they each want access to the other’s assets that compliment their own.
Starbucks built a strategic alliance with SQUARE and brought value and a benefit to their respective businesses. Square doesn’t sell food or beverages, but a technology for helping small business take credit cards. Who hangs out in Starbucks? Lots of small business who need access to a simple technology to get paid. I’ll have a Square credit card reader with my flat white please.
Eight Steps to Build Unexpected Strategic Partnerships
How can you bring strategic partnerships to help support your growth while being of value to your partner? Here are eight practical steps:
- Be counter intuitive. Look beyond the normal paths of distribution to find inspired places to find your audience. Let your competitors do the obvious- out think them and find overlaps in that others might miss. The insight for Square and Starbucks was a shared community of entrepreneurs hanging out. For Starbucks, it was an opportunity to help their customers and to fuel their small business growth.
- Be collaborative. You have to bring the attitude that you and your partner both need to benefit. If you see this as a one-way endeavor, you will fail.
- Be strategic. What is it that you need to gain? If you are trying to reach a group of customers who have resisted meeting with you, does someone else have a strong relationship with them that could give you an opening to meet?
- Be Human: Find the benefit to people through your connection, not just the financial benefit to each business. This can help escalate success by solving real problems that people encounter in their lives. Marketing the human value the partnership brings together is a smart path to success.
- Be generous. Can you craft a program with your partner that gives before you try and get something in return? Maybe you and your new partner can provide a fun and educational activity (seminar, conference, day at the water park) that allows you to be helpful first.
- Be Focused: Don’t try and do so much together that the partnership is a confusing mess. Start out small and test the waters with a simple activity. Maybe co-host a wine tasting with your partners clients and a few of your own. Use the event to meet important connections in a non-threatening setting. Or test in a limited number of stores. Focus. Fail. Learn together.
- Be Classy: Take the high road in this effort and don’t succumb to the desire to immediately put on your sales hat. Instead, be like a farmer who is planting seeds and know that it will take time for green shoots to arise. Patience in a relationship is an asset and under appreciated business attribute.
- Be effective: Partnerships require resources and focus. Allow key team player to concentrate their efforts to make the partnership work. Don’t understand and starve the effort, just like any initiative. It needs resources.
Whether you work in a B2B or B2C environment, partnerships can be powerful. Consider who knows or has a community built around the audience you want to reach. How can you offer something of value to this partner so that they would benefit and work with you?
Who could you partner with that could open up new doors to grow your brand?
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