Maidsfield Blog - Partnering and Business Development

As always, what worked very well last year doesn’t mean it will work this year. A recession necessitates the accelerated pace of change and this is not always a bad thing. The more innovative, agile and brave companies can see the changes, decide quickly and act accordingly.

What do your customers want today and how will your industry look in two years time? It may be very difficult to make money in this climate, but how do you win the relationships and smaller engagements that will secure your business when the industry settles into its new rhythm?

More than normal, effective use of your time is called for. Stop doing the same old things and think. Take a step back, think forward and understand why you had success in the past, do these past key reasons for success still apply to the current climate and how will they fit into the future? What needs to change and what companies can help you reach these new opportunities?

This is a great time to plant the seeds and secure corporate partners, to enable them to build customer relationships with your technologies and capabilities. It may mean small revenues today, but enables you to build a strong pipeline for the future. There are many hidden opportunities in todays chaos, companies are more open to discuss partnerships. Corporate Partnering is a lower cost and lower risk method of expanding and getting into new markets.

You may have built up a fabulous list of corporate partners and resellers on your website and keeping busy building relationships with your main contacts in each one, but sales revenues are simply not meeting your expectations. Why?

Relationships with corporate partners need to be built at multiple levels, depending on the size and complexity of your partner company. You may determine the strategic fit and commercial terms working with Senior Management, but how effective the partner/reseller is will be determined how well your product fits with the sales people on the ground. If a sales person finds it easy to sell your product and meet their quotas then things will fly.

To have an effective corporate partnership, you need to build relationships with the sales people. You know best how to determine the need for your products and how to sell them, coach their sales team. Don’t have sales people waste their time with prospects where the need is not clear. Educate the sales people on how to qualify a client for your products, identifying the key symptoms and then to they associated key benefits that enable the sale.

If you could ask five questions of all your prospective clients in the market place, five questions that allowed you to identify those with the greatest need for your products, what would those five questions be for your company?