It was sometime in May 2016 while I was having lunch with the CEO of a very large system integrator in India when I asked him about what he thinks of a particular vendor and their India team. His answer was classic," We are here for the last 25+ years. OEMs come and go, we survive on the back of our clients not vendors". This statement has always stuck with me as an anecdote for how vendors and partners look at their relationships.
For this episode of the NL, I asked a few partner CEOs for their views on partnerships and what it means to them. Even though a small subset of the people I formally asked, this set alone would represent atleast 50+ global vendor relationships and over 100+ years of relationship building.
Below is the verbatim response from some of them:
"Maturity from the other side / give and take leading to a win-win / trust and fairness / consistency"
"Fundamentals are shared goals and values; and a healthy mutual respect for each other’s business model."
"Partnership means mutual and continuous growth to me"
"Partnership is everything in any Relationship, without Partnership there will be No Success, As Individuals and Companies we are not Perfect without Partners, we can not do thing single-handedly. "
You will notice one key word (perhaps unspoken) underlying all the above statements; MUTUAL. In most of my conversations with channel partners, this aspect of the relationship comes out as the most important, yet most underrated and under represented.
So how do partners see partnerships and what do they see in vendors they ultimately succeed with. Here are my favorite top 5 "Mutual" traits great partnerships are built around:
1) Mutual trust is the foundation of a successful partnership. You can argue that trust is always built over time through clear and transparent communication, delivering on prior promises, and demonstrating reliability but you can't over emphasize the value of this trait in an alliance. Exploring strategies to establish and maintain trust, such as regular cadences, open discussions, and clear expectations provide actionable insights for all the stakeholders.
2) Mutual respect is essential for a healthy partnership. A lot of vendors forget that partners are not just selling their (vendor) products/services, they are building their own businesses. As soon as you understand that and respect each other's expertise and perspectives, it will lead to better decision-making and collaboration. Remember, respect needs to be earned by both sides. Partnerships that last longest are built on mutual and sustained respect.
3) Mutual collaboration drives partnership success. Often vendors expect partners to "submit" leads & opportunities, MDF and PoC requests and many such data only because these are KRAs of someone at the vendor side. Partners don't get any visibility to what's happening to the submitted requests or other such metrics. This is not collaboration, this is uni-directional data flow and great partnerships can't be built if they are one sided.
4) Mutual success is the ultimate goal of a partnership. Partners working together towards shared objectives leads to win-win outcomes. Make not success but mutual success the yardstick of measuring your relationship. e.g: As a channel manager you are consistently meeting your quota but your partner(s) are not, that's not success. Both the teams need to see success together for the relationship to work in the long run. If you success is based on ROI, so is a partner's. Find a common definition of success.
5) Mutual goals form the cornerstone of successful partnerships. Aligning OKRs help partners work together cohesively. Remember the famous saying," What gets measured gets managed". Discussing strategies for establishing clear, achievable goals, such as conducting joint planning sessions, defining key milestones for those goals and regularly revisiting these OKRs provide actionable advice for the partnership. Remember that your goal is the summation of many goals and your success lies in meeting not just your own goals but collective goals too.
The health of a partnership can be judged by what score we can asign to the above 5 "Mutual" traits. If you can establish these early enough in an alliance, the chances of success can be greatly enhanced.