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Don’t Sleep on Strategic Partnerships
Within product-focused organizations, I’m of the opinion that the role of widespread partnerships is undervalued, and can go unnoticed when compared to direct sales channels and proprietary products.
In more dramatic cases, software-as-a-service businesses may shy away from forming partnerships until very late in their maturity. Despite various examples of unicorns that grew explosively in part due to partnerships, there still may exist a negative stigma against partnerships apparent within some organizations.
We can’t truly understand causality, but there are several potential reasons for why a company may avoid going the partner route. The recurring theme here is that all of them stem from culture.
Why might businesses avoid exploring partnerships?
- Fear the partnership will be perceived as a “weakness” or loss in credibility due to the “inability to build it themselves”, either by customers or investors.
- Fear of lost revenue or market share when working with a partner, under the belief they could have succeeded better alone.
- Fear of losing intellectual property (IP) if they offer a product through a partnership channel or fear of negating their product’s value through the use of another company’s IP.
However, these are typically shallow outlooks rooted in confirmation bias — and fail to recognize the benefits (assuming that the partner program is run successfully) that counter and outweigh each of these points.
What’s all the hype, anyway?
Companies that choose not to adopt a partnerships strategy tend to miss out on several key benefits, which I’ve covered in detail below.
Build credibility
Perhaps the biggest benefit of a partnership play is the long-term perception of credibility, whether that’s to prospective customers, an existing client, or investors. A partner won’t just blindly sign an agreement: a level of due diligence goes into the relationship to ensure it is viable, meaning when a partnership is…
