Let’s think about this in business terms.

We’re never alone in business. Companies that we can co-sell with, develop products with, launch cooperative markering campaigns with, give opportunities for growth to each others employees – they’re as integral to our success  as our natural abilities.

The quality of our partnering can make a very big impact on business success. I’ve talked before about understanding the landscape of your business partners.

What do we learn about partnering from watching “Strictly Come Dancing”?

• Our partner’s motivation, plans, and commitment are as crucial to our joint success as our own.
• We’ll learn an awful lot about how to succeed by listening intently to our partner and responding to their advice. They have experience and knowledge of our market that we would struggle to get through other means.
• Working closely with a partner can tell us a lot about our own capability. Choose the right partner and they will probably encourage us to success.

You don’t have to trip the light fantastic to see that choosing the right business partners – and then working hard to make your alliances effective – can be one of the routes to your company’s success.

What have been the highlights of the partnerships you’ve built?

Subsequent conversations with people who read that article have raised two questions.

• Do alliances only happen between companies acting together to sell a joint offering?
• How do you make sure alliances work well, once you’ve got good foundations?

Let me give you the answers I’ve given to people who’ve discussed this with me.

Firstly, I use ‘alliance’ to cover a variety of business relationships. The article I referred to did have a focus on joint marketing, selling and service. But alliances also occur between companies and their suppliers.

Whoever’s involved, when they can each achieve their goals by forming a long-term working relationship that goes beyond the transactions between them, then an alliance can be formed.

If they’re ‘going beyond the transactions between them’, that means they’ll have spent time, as I advocated, understanding each other’s motivation and needs, and defining how they will work together. They’ll have mapped out their alliance.

If they’ve done that, they’re in good shape to continue to do the right things to make that partnership work. So let me answer the second question – how you make sure this all works out in practice – by giving you the 5 rules I’ve found that business partners need to follow.

1. If there’s bad news, break it early. Really early.
No-one likes surprises if they’re unpleasant. If you’re about to let down your alliance partner, or found that you already have done, talk to them as soon as you can – even before you’ve investigated and got all the facts. It’ll make it easier to explain how you’re going to put things right, and it will encourage them to treat you with respect too.

2. Review, review, review.
Build into your relationship regular formal reviews of how the alliance is performing for you both. Don’t let those discussions get pushed out of the calendar for ‘more pressing’ matters, because this is the opportunity to uncover not only some problems that need to be dealt with, but also new opportunities to strengthen and expand your alliance.

3. Don’t rely on formal feedback.
It takes just a few seconds to ask ‘how are we doing?’ in an informal setting, and you may well find out things that you need to think about that don’t emerge in formal reviews. When you ask the question, listen intently to what’s said, and act on good advice that you receive, no matter how painful it might have been to receive it. Our partners can see our companies from a vantage point that we never can.

4. Celebrate success.
If the alliance is producing the expected benefits, take time to say thank you, and recognise the efforts that your partner is making to ensure that your alliance is productive.

5. Give and take, not take and give.
Just as in the best personal relationships, where there’s give and take, so there should be in a business alliance. My own personal rule is to try very hard to give before I take, and give more than I take. Whether I achieve that in every case, I don’t know, but that attitude has served me well in helping alliances to succeed.

I’d love to know what you do to make the alliances you’ve formed with other companies really succeed. Please share your thoughts in the comments – what am I missing?

‘But who said you have to innovate by yourself?’, I replied.

In my experience, that’s not how innovation works best, and I’ll explain how business partners can help you in just a moment. But first, let’s put some structure on innovation.

The purpose of innovation is, of course, to be more competitive, to beat your competitors, to build value in your company. And there are three dimensions in which you can do that – product, process and customer.

I’ve written before about those dimensions in No Business Is Too Small for Strategic Thinking. You can try to excel in product leadership, or operational excellence, or customer intimacy. And you can try to be innovative in small incremental steps, or by introducing much more dramatic changes.

But coming up with something new means you need ‘a great idea’, and introducing it successfully means you need to be able to deal with the risk involved.

And that’s where partners can help. By partners, I mean those other businesses that you choose to collaborate with, either during your normal operations, or at a time when you set out to do something new.

I believe that most successful companies see themselves as part of an interconnected network, and put real effort into making their business alliances mutually beneficial. I wrote recently about how important it is to map out those alliances in a systematic way.

It’s in working with those partners that you get access to much greater creative resources than you’ve necessarily got in-house. Partners can…

• Stimulate your thinking about how you can radically improve your products, processes, and customer interactions.
• Highlight deficiencies that you might not be aware of.
• Provide parts of your innovative solution, so that you don’t have to do it all alone.
• Help introduce your innovation to the market, by providing additional channels, marketing or other support.

Thinking back to my own experience of partnering, and trying to stay ahead of competition, I’ve viewed innovation as a collaborative activity. As a result, I’ve got those ‘great ideas’ more quickly, and introduced them to the market much more successfully.

What has your experience of innovation been? Let me know in the comments.

This is an extended version of an article that first appeared on Manchester Chamber’s blog.

Some years ago, I realised that to create meaningful business alliances, you have to be systematic about it. You can’t just wait to run into ‘people who could be useful’, or spread your efforts too thinly across lots of potential partners. You need focus.

Why Partner?

Your business needs will be specific, but amongst the good reasons for partnering, you’ll find:

• Providing complementary products and services, so that your clients can work with suppliers who have done the necessary work to ensure that their products and services integrate properly.
• Adding routes to market, to enable you to reach markets and territories that you could not reach by yourself.
• Gaining greater ‘critical mass’ through working with larger companies, to reassure customers that a small company can deliver on its promises.
• Sharing marketing costs, and gaining more visibility with less expenditure.

Actually, the list of reasons to partner could go on and on, but the key point is to work out what your reasons to partner are: it will be a list that is specific to your company and its current situation.

To produce a partner strategy in a systematic way, I devised a process called Alliance Mapping. Let me describe the process I go through with clients.

Alliance Mapping

First of all, we identify the players in the landscape around you, so that you can understand who already partners with whom. Then we look at the reasons you need to partner, the reasons that other companies need to partner with you, and help you select the appropriate partners.

I observed a basic flaw in how most companies set about trying to work with partners. They only look at what they care about, and forget that the other company has concerns and objectives too.

In Alliance Mapping, the motivation on either side is examined and the different priorities of various motivators are determined. Seeing the other company’s point of view is crucial if the relationship you’re proposing is going to be mutually beneficial. If you don’t get these basics right, you virtually guarantee that your partnering efforts will be expensive, frustrating, and not achieve your objectives.

The ‘map’, once created, doesn’t look much like any geographic map you’ll have seen. But it does identify who is where, who is related to whom, and where the beneficial links are to be made.

Using the Alliance Map

The Alliance Map is used as a basis for recruiting partners and managing partner relationships to success.

It allows you to go out and pitch to a partner as easily as you can pitch to a client when I’ve helped you define your basic value proposition.

The map also allows you to understand whether each alliance you’re trying to form is tactical or strategic in nature, and helps you in setting reasonable objectives for what the partners in the alliance can achieve.

Your Map

The Alliance Map of potential business partners that you need will be unique. It will deliver these benefits to your business development efforts:

• An ability to focus on relationships that can be productive.
• Economy in expenditure needed to initiate and sustain good partner relationships.
• A basis for designing effective partner marketing strategies.

If you’re at the point where you need to develop your business relationships in a systematic way, to enable them to have the greatest impact, perhaps we should be talking.

We’d provided coordinated business strategy, branding and creative design, and marketing communications. We know that clients want to deal with specialists who have deep expertise, yet at the same time need to tie together various activities so that they’re coordinated.

We discussed our business principles and found we have a lot in common about how we deliver value to clients. The conversation with Ian Guiver (at Axon Garside) and Penny Lines (No Nonsense) soon expanded to include another local technology marketing expert, Rob Skinner (Chameleon PR).

L-R: Matthew Goldsbrough, Rob Skinner (Skout PR), Penny Lines (No Nonsense), Ian Guiver (Axon Garside)

And so M460 was born. It’s our alliance focused on helping technology companies. We can work together on projects, ensuring that the client gets the benefit of deep knowledge and coordinated support. It’s a non-exclusive alliance, meaning that we each work with other business partners too – it’s down to what the client is happy with.

M460 is announced today, and there’s a website with information about what it offers.

Each of the members of M460 can talk to you about what we do separately and together, and why – if you’re a high-tech company – choosing our combined skills could make a lot of sense.