The basis of a successful business partnership

One of the best ways to grow in a new or already saturated market is to form a strategic partnership with another company.

After over a decade of forming strategic partnerships with companies from all over the world, Seed Group has cracked the code to make them successful and worth your time and investment.

Here’s what we can tell you about the basis of any successful business partnership:

1. Trust

Trust is the foundation of a successful business partnership, as it is the social glue that holds such relationships together. Therefore, all partners need to trust one another and know that all parties involved will be collaborative, supportive, and loyal.

When there is trust in a business partnership, the partners will tend to spend less time and energy trying to protect themselves from being exploited, which results in better economic outcomes and a general openness to expressing opinions and new ideas for the business.

The prospect of a long-term partnership must always be based on trust. Therefore, it is crucial to know that you can trust the other person or party when forming such a partnership. If there is a lack of loyalty or trust, it may be reflected in the outcome or could result in both parties not achieving their full potential.

2. Open communication

Open and honest communication is essential when entering into a partnership. For example, partners should discuss management styles, goals, and money matters. It is also vital for the parties involved to be open about their past mistakes so both sides can take note of them and avoid them from happening again in the future.

Once open communication is established, the partners will be able to work towards being on the same page and address shared issues or concerns early on.

Discussing ideas and goals will be very important for the partnership’s future, ensuring that both partners have similar ambitions and goals with similar outcome expectations. Keeping goals aligned should be a priority in such discussions to ensure that things go smoothly later on.

Keeping secrets, making side deals with other companies, or wanting to break the partnership but not informing the parties involved in advance can all lead to unsatisfactory results.Some of these outcomes could include an enhanced sense of untrustworthiness, making it increasingly difficult for partners to see eye to eye and eventually impacting the companies’ economic outcomes.

3. Flexibility

In order to foster a business environment where creativity and innovation are at the very heart of the partnership, it is vital to ensure that all parties involved are flexible. If partners stuck to their own rigid structures, it would make forming a partnership challenging by increasing wasted time and resources.

Flexibility leads to new ideas, new ways of doing things, and more creativity, which are essential to ensuring a successful partnership.

Flexibility also builds trust by showing your partner that you are open to implementing their ideas, which adds value to your relationship with your business partner and ensures a constant flow of new ideas.

It is important to have a key goal, or set of goals, to focus on, but it is also equally important to acknowledge the possibility that some things might not go as planned. Being prepared to reshuffle priorities and amend strategies will help the partners overcome problems that may arise.

Parties involved in the partnership must have a clear and honest discussion about what could go wrong and revisit them at each major meeting to reassess whether a pivot in strategy is necessary.

4. Mutual Accountability

Determining accountability is a crucial part of the partnership process. An upfront discussion about where the responsibility lies in terms of results should be outlined, and the consequences or call to action need to be identified for when partnership goals are not met.

Once a joint business plan is in place, partners commit to resources such as sales, technical, and marketing support.

Mutual accountability refers to a process by which business partners agree to be held accountable for the commitments they voluntarily make to each other. This can be ensured by holding regular meetings where partners can be transparent and ready to admit when there has been a failure on their part, so all parties can collaborate and devise a solution to the problem.

5. Setting clear and realistic expectations

Setting clear and realistic expectations from the very beginning is key to ensuring a successful business partnership. Partners must ensure they are direct in their communication about the expected outcomes of the partnership so that the parties involved can have a full-rounded understanding of what each business’s definition of success entails and what they intend to get out of it.

Focusing on a shared goal, or set of goals, will enable the companies to align their expectations of the partnership’s outcome from the very beginning and work towards them in an efficient manner.

6. Measurable results

While partnerships can reap great rewards, they require commitment and resources, so measuring your partnership’s value is crucial.

Assessing the success of the business partnership should be a vital part of the partnership process. An example of this would be by following metrics to evaluate it, such as financial KPIs to determine the monetary value of the partnership in terms of completed sales and active deals.

While strategic KPIs are less tangible, they are still important when determining the impacts of the partnership, such as in terms of awareness, engagement, and customer satisfaction.

Over the past 16 years, Seed Group has mastered the art of devising successful business partnerships and has tried and tested many different strategies to ensure success in these scenarios.

Every partnership is unique, but all partnerships should include the aforementioned qualities to ensure mutual understanding, accountability, and, in turn, success.

Our next blog post will focus on the key communication strategies needed to ensure a successful and smooth-sailing partnership.