Technology related companies, especially in e-commerce, webhosting and saas solutions are heavily defined by parterships. We have over 300 active partnerships all told between web hosting companies, strategic partners and web designers, and if you look at our partner-verse there's a common theme throughout that makes it all work. And that is our partner-verse works like an eco-system creating Win - Win scenarios. We help web hosts maintain their margin and increase their ARPU, we provide web designers with a tool to make building e-commerce sites effeciently and scalably and they help provide us clients.
"Win - Win" vs. "Win - I Don't Really Care About You Partnerships"
OK, I know that sounds very cliche, so much so that I stuggled with even writing this blog post, but I think this is a very real issue worth delving into.
We get pitched on average once per business day about a partnership, where someone wants to piggyback their product or service on top of ours, and then supposedly we'll all be rich and can retire.
It reminds me of the famous South Park episode with the underpants gnomes, first we get the underpants, then ?, then PROFIT!
The problem with this pitch is what they're generally saying underneath it all is this "I've been hired by my employer to build partnerships and I've identified your company as someone who can make my life easier by possibly selling a lot of my product for me, and if this all goes really well my company will get a) sold or b) go public and I'll be rich".
How Do You Distinguish Between The Two Types?
The way I can usually tell right away a potential Win - Win partnership over all the rest, is that in the Win - Win Partnership, the partner understands how my business works (or takes the time to understand), they do the heavy lifting to make the technical parts work (or they pay fair value for us to do it) and they care about the experience our customers will have trying to use their product and that it's our reputation on the line if it doesn't work out well.
In the rest of the cases, when I ask about who's going to do the integration and how the customer service is going to work, I normally get told "it's easy, you can do it", when I then inquire as to who's going to pay for that work, I'm told "you'll make so much money from us you should be begging me to do it" and finally "we never have customer service issues, trust us".
Now don't get me wrong, even great partnerships are hard to manage, there's often conflicting goals and you're trying to make groups from two separate companies maintain seemless accountability with your joint customer base, and the point of a good partnership is to make it Win - Win on both sides, not just Win for them or win for you.
The best way I've found to know if you're offering a Win - Win partnership is to take the time to understand how your potential partner's business works, and ensure that by them offering your solution it's going to improve something significant about their business. Because even in a successful partnership you'll have to manage customers, channel conflict and unforseen technology issues that you hadn't considered until they're staring you in the face. All three of those issues can be a real nightmare to manage and if your potential partner doesn't actually stand to gain anything real by partnering with you, or vice versa then do yourself and them a favor and back away from the partnership.
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