7 Benefits of Strategic Partnerships

Strategic relationships
Business partnerships are nothing new, in fact they’ve been around for years, over which time companies have seen the value they can add to revenue and profitability.  However, it can often be difficult to find the right people to partner with, but bear with it as the benefits are there to be had.

7 Benefits of Strategic Partnerships

Access to new customers

A major goal for most businesses is to grow their customer base, obviously once you have a customer focus changes to how do we retain them.  By partnering with another company with a similar product set or services you can immediately access a pool of warm customers who have already purchased and are being serviced by the partner.  Clearly the same is true for the partner in their accessibility to your customer base.

Opportunity to reach new markets and sectors

While it’s likely that any chosen partner will be working in a similar or associated field to you, it is more than likely that their customers will be in different markets and sectors to you, indeed you’re likely to choose partners where this is exactly the case.  Clearly expanding into new markets and sectors where you already have a warm base of clients is far easier than starting from scratch with limited credibility or trust in those markets.

Added value proposition for your existing customers

Whilst accessing a new customer base is attractive to any business looking to grow, it is equally important (if not more in some cases) to retain your existing clients and build on their existing spend, thus encouraging them to remain with you rather than seek alternative suppliers.  By associating yourself with partners who offer similar products to you can reduce the risk of other ‘unknown’ companies approaching your customers and introducing organizations that compete with your products and services.

Build brand awareness and trust

Brand awareness and recognition is hugely important to all businesses, regardless of size.  Even if you are extremely small, customers like to have the confidence that they know and recognise who they are dealing with and that they have aspirations to grow and therefore undertake the necessary activities to achieve this.  By partnering you are immediately increasing your brand awareness by accessing different routes to market and being exposed to the marketing strategies of the partnering business.

Adding additional products and services to your portfolio through partnerships and being seen to be trusted by other will also increase customers views of you as industry experts and trusted advisers.

Customers always like to know that you empathise with their individual challenges.  By utilising the knowledge and experience brought by the partner can also help in demonstrating the requisite domain knowledge to successfully compete in certain markets, particularly where the offering may be viewed as specific to that market.

Expand Geographic Reach

Whilst direct presence in a particular location or geography is arguably becoming less and less important due to the ability to transact business remotely, some customers still take comfort from dealing with local businesses. Choosing to work with partners in different geographic locations will help to open up those locations to your business by allowing the partner to represent you as the local presence.

Share resources

Companies, specifically the smaller ones, often find it difficult to recruit or afford the roles and resources necessary to grow a business.  By creating the right strategic partnership this can be overcome by sharing resource, particularly where those resources are of a technical nature and may expose the business to new and innovative solutions. Collaborating with partners and sharing ideas and resources can also introduce innovation in terms of new ways to approach business processes and overcoming specific internal issues or problems without the need for additional investment.

Win more business

The bottom line is that if you are looking to grow your business and increase revenue and profitability, strategic partnerships can have a major influence on the speed and ease with which you can achieve your goals and objectives.  Working and collaborating with likeminded businesses can provide significant benefits and cost savings.  It can also be a major factor in your ability to win more business and increase order values.

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