The Importance of Alliances and Partnering Skills
Strategic alliances, joint ventures, and partnerships have long been prevalent in business strategy for many years and can be a highly effective way for businesses to achieve a unique competitive advantage, grow their market share, gain new distribution or market penetration or simply make the users experience with their brand a better one.
Over the years there have been some great examples supporting new product development, innovation and end user experience. Apple Pay & Mastercard for example saw an alliance whereby Apple had the expertise of MasterCard and their large customer base to trial out their new mobile payment function. Another good example is Amazon teaming up with BT sport to offer UK pubs access to premier league games significantly discounted in comparison to their rival Sky sports.
Partnering is a fast way to reach new markets, tap into new talent networks and generate new ideas and offerings. However, despite some partnerships don’t get off the ground and the value of the alliance never materialises.
The Marketors consultant sales trainer Fred Copestake puts this down to a lack of partnering skills and something called ‘Partnering Intelligence’ a core competency that translates partnership intentions into realised value. These are competencies that can be measured, every person within a team, department or organisation will have a quantifiable Partnering Quotient ‘PQ’ which is like ‘IQ’ only measuring how smart someone is at partnering.
Fred also cited the other major reason partnerships fail is that many organisations don’t follow sound, disciplined process for guiding their people and teams through the key stages of partnership development.
The following are attributes of someone with a high PQ:
- Ability to trust – Do you give people your trust, or do they have to earn it?
- Comfort with change – Are you comfortable changing not just the status quo, but yours?
- Interdependence – Are you comfortable with your work partners doing their bits in their way?
- Feedback – Can you easily express your needs, appreciation or disappointment?
- Visionary or reflector – Do you dwell in the past or look to the future in relationships?
These attributes form a validated system of behaviours, they help create healthy, thriving, viable partnerships and alliances. It’s crucial to understand that although companies may establish the partnership, its people that do the partnering and not businesses.
The marketors can help organisations with training in developing compelling partnership and alliance strategies. Please call 0203 004 9638 or email [email protected]
https://themarketors.com/course/compelling-channel-alliance-strategies/
