How much are you wasting on partnering?

In today's complex marketplace, many companies need to work collaboratively to reach their customers, whether it be to deliver a solution, address a particular market segment or geographical territory, or to satisfy local legal or cultural requirements.

It is becoming so important that 'partnering' is turning into a necessity: like marketing, it is something that everyone, eventually, has to do. But just as with marketing, the time, effort and money spent on partnering activities can be ineffective and, ultimately, wasteful.

How can you ensure that the resources you are devoting to partnering are properly focused and are delivering satisfactory returns?

In the course of our work at Istaris Business Services we come across numerous examples of companies who enter into collaborative relationships without asking (or answering) the fundamental questions:

• why do we need to do it?
• what do we expect to achieve?
• how will it contribute to our business goals and objectives?
• how will we know if it has been successful?

As a consequence, partnerships are often hastily cobbled together in order to meet a specific urgent requirement – to respond to a tender, complete a customer project, gain a foothold in a major growth segment – without anyone undertaking a proper cost/benefit analysis or thinking through some of the longer term implications.

One medium-sized company in the business continuity market spent six months and a large proportion of its business development budget establishing a partnership with a telecommunications infrastructure vendor, only to find that when the target customer opportunity went away the vendor 'partner' was no longer interested, and in fact was already in advanced discussions with another business continuity solutions supplier in a different part of the world. The resources that had been devoted to this effort were more than could be justified and had diverted key staff away from mainstream business opportunities.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that 'partnering' is not recognised in many organisations as a function in its own right, but is carried out on a part-time basis by managers who have other responsibilities and a variety of job titles. Thus it is neither properly measured nor controlled. Employees are not set explicit objectives related to partnering and are not required to account for their activities. There are no formal communication channels for reporting progress in developing collaborative relationships, either across the organisation or to senior management.

So how much is your organisation wasting on partnering? The likelihood is that you don't know. And you would probably have great difficulty trying to find out.

Partnering Points on reducing what's wasted on partnering

• Ensure that someone at board level has overall responsibility for collaborative working – not just 'strategic alliances', but all instances where the organisation needs to present itself as a 'partner' in some form to a prospective or existing customer.
• Establish a mechanism for sharing information about partnering activities with as wide a visibility as possible – this can be a major benefit, especially in larger organisations where so often you find that existing relationships could have been leveraged into new projects, if only the local managers had been aware of their scope and focus.
• Institute goal setting and targets that explicitly include objectives related to partnering, so that progress can be assessed using existing measurement processes.
• Require all managers at a local level to account for the resources they use in developing partnerships and justify their expenditure of time, effort and money.
• With an increasing amount of a company's annual development budget being spent on partnering, you can no longer afford to treat it as a part-time, unregulated activity. The moment has come to get organised and start getting it under control.

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