Sprucing up your Partnering Strategy

Late summer in the UK is the time of year when thoughts turn to decorating the outside of one's home. The weather is generally dry and the evenings bright. There is a sense of urgency – September and the onset of Autumn are not too far away. With good quality paint and attention to preparation, the job should last about five years in the inland UK climate.

How long is it since you last thought about sprucing up your Partnering Strategy?

The likelihood is that there will not have been a comprehensive review of your partnerships, including a detailed examination of current versus expected performance, for quite some time. The exception will be if you have recently taken on board a new Channels Manager or Partnerships Director.

When a new person arrives there is an automatic assumption that he or she will want to review the current situation. Quite often I hear statements like:
"We have a comprehensive set of partners and channels to market, but these have been installed piecemeal over a number of years and are not well coordinated." Or "I have run a quick analysis and it seems that 20% of our channel partners are delivering 80% of the business." Or "We have partnerships in place with resellers who don't even sell into our target markets!"

The fact is that day-to-day business is hectic, and as each new opportunity comes along a new partnership may be developed to exploit that opportunity. Then the market moves on, or technology changes, or your company's business strategy is refocused, and suddenly what seemed to be a perfectly sensible decision at the time now looks odd. Over time, the accumulation of partners gets out of synchronisation with your overall business strategy. That's when you should think about revisiting your partnerships, to align them more closely with what your organisation is setting out to achieve.

It is like painting the outside of your house. After a while you can't leave it any longer and it has to be done. But just as with decorating, the more time and effort you devote to making preparations for changes and implementing them correctly, the longer your spruced up partnering strategy is likely to last.

A new Channels Manager or Partnerships Director usually does this as a matter of course. Quite often it is the reason he or she has been hired. It's much more difficult to find time to review your partnerships amidst the cut and thrust of everyday business.

The hardest thing of all is to end a partnership – that is, to end it formally. Many relationships are allowed to "whither on the vine", as sales dry up or the partner loses interest, or your organisation moves on to the next new opportunity. Quite often the fault lies in the way the partnership was set up in the first place. Frequently there is an expectation in partnership agreements – explicit or otherwise – that the partnership will continue successfully until the expiry date on the agreement. In practice this seldom happens.

All partnerships should have a process for regular reviews, where progress can be assessed against a series of jointly agreed objectives. There should be a defined way of dealing with those that are falling short of their targets, with procedures for setting actions to get the relationship back on course. And there should be clearly defined mechanisms for formally ending a partnership. In the case where a partnership has failed through no fault of either party – for example, where the market has changed, or a key customer has defected, or a major project has been cancelled – it is important that the reasons for failure are agreed and documented. There may well be another opportunity for the parties to work together again in the future, untroubled by the lack of success of their previous partnership.

Whether or not you have defined closure mechanisms in place, take the opportunity during your review to identify partnerships that need to be ended, and set actions to do this quickly. Reassess your partnering needs and start the process to find and acquire new partners to plug any gaps in your partnering strategy. Above all, ensure that those partnerships you wish to retain are re-targeted to achieve objectives to support your current business strategy.

This may sound like hard work, but the chances are you'll find you need to concentrate on just a few partnerships to make a big difference to the results you are achieving. And remember, the longer you leave it, the bigger the job will be when you finally get around to it. Just like re-decorating your house!

Partnering Points on Sprucing up your Partnering Strategy

• Begin by understanding your current business strategy. Interpret what this means for partnering and write it down. Share your interpretation with senior management and gain their agreement before embarking on your review.
• Discuss the partnering strategy requirements with the people in your organisation who are in contact with partners. Obtain their views as to how important each partnership is in helping to achieve overall business objectives.
• Obtain records of past performance versus expectations. Use this information to help in the formulation of an action plan for each partnership. Decide for each one whether to end, sustain or re-focus.
• Draw up an overall plan, identifying where there are gaps in the strategy. If possible, draw up a shortlist of possible new partners to plug the gaps. Present the plan to senior management for approval.
• When implementing the plan, be sure to involve those people in your organisation who have been in contact with each partner. Where you are ending a relationship, ensure that the partner knows why you are doing it and endeavour to keep the door open for future co-operation.
• Above all, communicate what you are doing and the reasons for it extensively within your own organisation and in a controlled way externally, so that you are not seen as a company that reneges on agreements and is unreliable as a partner.

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