S3 Blog

For any business to succeed and be able to compete alongside other businesses that offer similar products and services it is a good idea to generate strategic partnerships with others. Strategic partnerships are a formal alliance that is normally between two commercial businesses with a contract involved. Such partnerships however are not legal partnerships as neither party wants to internally develop the other and vice versa.

Instead these partnerships are formed when each side has an asset or more that will assist the other, a good example of this is the relationship between a manufacturer and a developer. Typically the manufacturer would be a larger company and they would provide the product, capital needed for growth, marketing and distribution and the developer will provide the technical knowledge and expertise to enhance the product.

Another example of a strategic partnership is that between a supplier / manufacturer and the distributer. By creating a close relationship between the two separate and very different businesses enables them both to share the marketing, development, branding and so on of a service or product.
It is essential that strategic partnerships are formed as there are few business that are large enough and wealthy enough to be able to complete the entire cycle for a product or service alone. There are of course many who think that they can and this overestimation of capabilities is one of the reasons that a lot of businesses fail – they do not have strategic partnerships.

So how does a business go about generating strategic partnerships? One way is to look at your competitors and see if they can do something that your business can’t, then see what your business can bring to the table and get in touch with them. Speaking to competitors in this way can sometimes help to build a strategic partnership which can be mutually beneficial to both sides.

Are you involved in a business to business industry? If so you might already have relationships with other businesses, so why not see if a strategic partnership between yourselves and them might be in the interests of both sides? That way both businesses could drive customers to each other and reap the benefits. Say you sell gardening supplies and you form a strategic partnership with a business that sells electronic gardening equipment, a simple link to each other’s sites can provide huge traffic to each other that would not necessarily have been there otherwise.

To generate successful strategic partnerships it is also worth noting that all transactions between the two businesses need to be open and honest – as without these fundamentals trust will quickly be lost and this can be difficult to repair, if not impossible. So when generating these partnerships make sure that everything is out in the open as this is the only way in which partnerships like these will work. So follow these hints and start to make positives steps to creating and generating strategic partnerships that will benefit your business and raise your revenue quickly.