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How to strengthen business engagement and partnerships

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Partnerships are beneficial for any business. Whether the partnerships be between suppliers, contractors, resellers, or even outsourcing companies the relationship your business has with them has immense value. 

But fostering that relationship with other companies is extremely beneficial to you because they can help expand your client base with a new targeted audience or demographic, they also provide free advertising, and they can give your offered products added value. 

It can be daunting to support and develop this vital business relationship that can greatly impact the output of your company. But continuously engaging and developing this business relationship doesn’t have to be so hard.

Here are 7 tips that you can go through, and integrate into a partnership strategy for your organization.

  • Create a community and academy online

Partners can be a great source of information because they most likely have similar challenges and obstacles as your company, which would allow them to have the knowledge and experience on how to overcome them. If you create a community with your partners, you are giving yourself and them space to freely share ideas and interact with each other. Use that space to share each other’s success and share product or industry updates. 

You can also set up an online academy with your partners. First off, every company will need some form of training or orientation. This is especially true if you or your supplier have product updates. This would also give them the chance to access information for them to execute the job efficiently. Your online academy can include; a user guide, basic troubleshooting steps, and a how-to section. This will make them feel more confident in how to use and maximize your products.

  • Provide relevant information

Talk to your partners and put yourself in their position. Discuss with them what their challenges and obstacles are and offer them information if you have any that is relevant to their concern. 
For example, if they are experiencing issues with digital marketing for their business and you have an expert for that on your payroll then you can opt to have your expert draft a plan for them or at least provide them with suggestions to improve their digital presence. 
Being helpful and relevant to your partners is one of the best ways to increase your engagement with them. 

  • Be one team

Take your time to integrate your partner into your team and your businesses’ culture. Make them feel like they are truly a part of your team and business. But make sure that you have a well-defined and clear role for them and the rest of your team so, you can avoid an overlap in tasks and roles. 
There is a high possibility for the partnership roles to overlap if you integrate them into your team, so it is very critical that you take your time with it, and slowly but surely create a clear and defined separation between each role. 

  • Give it room

You have to keep in mind that you are not just collecting people or companies into one big pool of resources. What you are doing is carefully combining and adding each other’s abilities to add value to each other’s business and relationships. A valuable partnership between one or two more businesses should have the capacity to share resources and to adapt to any changes over time with each other’s assistance.

  • Expectations

You and your partner must set clear expectations with each other. You should have a strong and stable business relationship for both of you to grow and develop over time. But you also need to set proper expectations. Comb through the fine details of your mutual agreement with each other. Set each other’s terms clearly, and clarify which is each other’s roles and domain. 
This will help you and your partner avoid confusion and complications in the future. This will also help you and your partners maintain a solid and well-structured relationship with each other. 

  • Transparency

Developing a successful relationship with your partners and making sure it can grow, are all critical goals, but they don’t necessarily mean that there is a guarantee that the relationship will be maintained over time. 

To help you and your partners maintain your business relationship it is essential that there are transparency and honesty between partners. There should be an open line for communication for all concerned partners. 
Be upfront with your partner and let them know your strengths and weaknesses. Be honest about what you and your business lack and what your business can offer. Both parties or partners need to be honest and transparent for both of them to capitalize on the opportunities each partner can provide.

  • Feedback

Your partners are a great source of information about your service, your product, and your relationship with each other and with your potential new targeted audience. They will have relevant and vital information on how your product or service is performing in your market or industry. 
Create a way for you to collect feedback from your partners regularly. You can get this information by using polls, surveys, and even interviews. This will also allow you to have another avenue of interaction with your partners.

Conclusion
Your partnership will mostly depend on how you will approach, maintain, and build on it. Finding the right partner as well, maybe the next major milestone in your business development and evolution. 
However, not all the tips I listed above can be applied to every partnership strategy, but you can use at the very least one of the tips I discussed to increase your partnership engagement. 

At the end of the day, everyone including businesses wants to feel respect, recognition and sometimes they are satisfied with just being heard or being part of something bigger than themselves, and if you can make them feel at least one of that then the possibility of them having your back is pretty high. So, try using my tips above and integrate it into your plans for executing a strategy to increase your engagement and relationships with your partners


Shivendra helps construction companies and contractors win more projects and grow profitably. Regarded as a master of practical implementation, Shivendra has guided organizations such as Downer and Siemens as well as smaller contractors to achieve double-digit improvements to their bottom line. Underpinning his extensive industry experience are qualifications in engineering and a Ph.D. focused on rapid cost improvement techniques. He is the author of two books, The Competitive Contractor and From Paper to Profit, host of the Competetive Contractor podcast, and the founder of Shivendra & Co and The Constructors Network. You can find more about Shivendra & Co on www.shivendra.com.