How to keep your partners

There is a wonderful moment in the film 'Braveheart' when the English and their allies begin to attack the rebellious Scots. Leading the charge are the Irish, who have been selected for this task by Edward 'Longshanks', the bad King of England. He despises the Irish, viewing them as disposable items of his army.

As the Irish and Scots run at each other, screaming, and are about to clash swords, suddenly the two sides stop and shake hands. The Irish have defected to the competition. The King of England, somewhat miffed, says words to the effect: "I thought we had a deal?"

How often do we see the same scenario played out in business? Just when you thought you had a thriving partnership and an excellent relationship in place, something untoward happens. Your partner excludes you from an opportunity, or makes a bid in alliance with one of your competitors, or (worse still) approaches one of your own customers with a competitive offering!

What went wrong with the Irish was that they thought (rightly or wrongly) that they had nothing to lose by reneging on their agreement with the English King. In modern terminology, we might say that the 'switching costs' were too low.

So how can you make sure that after all the hard work of finding, developing, establishing and growing your partnerships, that your partners don't simply walk away when a more attractive proposition comes along?

Here are some ideas:

1) Make yourself indispensable: ensure that your product or service is fully integrated into your partner's product offerings and business processes.

There are several ways to achieve this:

• through physical integration, such as linking software into a system solution
• through service integration, for example, by performing a vital component of the overall customer service offering in a way that cannot easily be copied
• through marketing integration, by establishing in existing and future customers' minds both your and your partner's vital contributions to the overall solution
• through sales integration: providing your partner with sales support material that is so good that its salesforce would find it a strain to take on alternative products or services
• through procedural integration, linking your own business processes neatly and effectively into those of your partner, so that your partner's systems become dependent on the way that you interface with them

2) Be prepared to be flexible, so that if the market or opportunity changes the partnership can be quickly adapted to take advantage of the new situation. Many partnerships fail when one of the partners is unable to meet a set of new or modified customer demands.

3) Make yourself easy to do business with: so that, if a partner is tempted to stray, then by comparison the alternatives will seem difficult to cope with. This means that everyone in your organisation who has dealings with the partner must treat the partner just as you would a customer: be responsive, be concerned and be creative in handling any problems.

4) Do deals with organisations, not people: key staff move on or get reassigned – your partnership should be based on sound business sense and be approved at a high level in both organisations, so that it survives when the original champions (including you!) are no longer around. If the partnership is seen to be contributing to core business objectives, it will be harder for a partner to drop it.

5) Probably the most difficult of all .... Get your own senior management on board and convince them that any action by your organisation that undermines the partnership must not be condoned, even if the CEO/MD thinks it's a good idea! If you are not senior enough in your organisation to achieve this, get yourself a senior supporter and make sure he/she is kept fully briefed on the successes and achievements of the partnership.

6) Last – and actually least: support all the above with a commercial arrangement that is suitably structured so as to encourage the partners to continue to co-operate for as long as the partnership is successful. Many organisations make the mistake of putting the legal contract in the number 1) slot, relying on it to establish and maintain the relationship and paying scant regard to all the other important partnership-building activities.

Do all the above and you should find that your partners are less tempted to drift off or change sides – even if one of your competitors does have Mel Gibson as CEO!

Partnering Points on how to keep your partners

As in many business situations, writing things down and agreeing them with your partner is a good way to establish that you really do have an agreement:

• Write down partnership objectives and targets, and how they will be achieved
• Build in ways of measuring the effectiveness of the partnership
• Define how measurements will be taken and progress monitored
• Develop ground-rules for how the organisations will interface: in particular, devise a regular set of meetings for reviewing the status of the partnership
• Agree timescales and what will happen if targets are not met
• Always make clear the exit criteria: don't leave these to the whim of a senior executive or new MD

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