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Finding Your "Best" Partner |
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Few companies, however, have the patience or focus to recruit only those partners who fit well, instead choosing quantity over quality. For the few that focus on quality and steadily invest in those partners, the benefits are substantial. Select your partners carefully The first step in selecting partners is to identify and explore the markets you want to target with those partners. Once you understand the needs and pain of the customers in those markets, then you can identify the leading partners with complementary solutions to yours. Most companies skip this first step...jumping ahead to identify the range of possible partners serving the market and beginning to recruit all of them. For most, it's a numbers game...target 100 prospective partners, get ten, train five, find leverage with two, have a long- term relationship with one...or less. This process seldom brings good results. Out of the 100 prospective partners, only a few are truly a good fit and the typical process provides a poor filtering mechanism. On the other hand, when you target fewer partners, and conduct more extensive positioning and background research on each, you have the opportunity to select the handful of truly valuable partners before you begin the recruiting process. Using this approach, you can focus your efforts on the few partners you really want and spend no precious resources on ill-fitting partners.
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