Fully 50% of CEOs surveyed every year say that developing new strategic alliances is a key company initiative. Whether that be with new joint venture partners, marketing alliances, new distributors, new suppliers, or deeper relationships with key customers, partnering is clearly on most corporate agendas.
And yet, those partnerships more often than not fail to meet expectations.
Organizations often fail to recognize that they simply cannot partner externally effectively if they do not partner well internally. Why is this? There are at least a couple of reasons. First, external partners are pretty smart. Like children, they figure out pretty quickly where there are internal disagreements or misalignments, and they take advantage of these. Or worse, these disconnects breed a lack of respect.
Second, it “takes a village” to support almost any kind of partner effectively. Your distribution or channel manager can recruit the perfect new indirect sales partner, but if marketing doesn’t provide the partner helpful and timely collateral, if shipping and logistics consistently short or late ships, or if customer service is rude when the partner calls for help, the partner will soon become frustrated, and may eventually lose all interest in working with your company.
Most external partnering problems start with internal alignment issues. If marketing doesn’t work seamlessly with sales, if product support’s incentives and priorities are different from those in engineering, and if customer service doesn’t play nicely with the supply chain team, then these warts will soon become apparent to external partners.
Sometimes there are personality issues, sometimes goals and incentives are misaligned. And usually, there is a lack of partnering skills and awareness that exacerbates these issues.
The good news? Partnering skills can be quantified and measured, and they can be learned and improved. Take our validated partnering skills assessment to take the first step!