How to Build Strong and Lasting Business Partnerships

A business partnership consists of two or more corporations collaborating together to share profits and skills. Business partnerships can serve various functions, including providing white label services, offering product support, and managing product fulfillment. Maintaining and building strong partnerships enables company growth and is essential in providing an array of outside services to clients.

Organizations participating in business partnerships can yield benefits, such as project or product fulfillment, that may not have been possible otherwise. In addition, partnerships come with the advantage of gaining credibility, visibility and increasing profits for your company. In this article, we will discuss the importance of a business partnership, how to create a business partnership, and how to build partnerships. Let’s get started!

Why Should I Build and Maintain a Business Partnership?

Business partnerships help create countless opportunities for your business to succeed and grow stronger. If you’re in the process of deciding whether it’s the right decision, or if you’ve been in a partnership for a long time, building partnerships helps strengthen business opportunities. Especially if your business needs a helping hand, having a business partnership means you’re never alone. 

Building successful partnerships could involve reaching wider audiences. Expanding your brand to a variety of audiences could further help increase sales, expand distribution, and increase brand awareness. Having a partnership could also complement what both businesses offer and help strengthen both sides. Deciding to build and maintain a business partnership could lead to all of these benefits and more! While there’s a process to creating a business partnership, it also requires maintenance and upkeep to create a strong, successful partnership.

How to Create a Business Partnership

Sometimes it can be hard to know where to start in creating a business partnership. We’ve listed a few approaches to help ease the process of creating a partnership for your business:

1) Approach the Prospective Business 

The first step to building a partnership is approaching the potential partner organization. It is important to find businesses, whether they be small or large, that share the same vision as yours and can benefit from the services that you provide. If you find they might not have the same business goals or values as yours, you should focus your attention somewhere else. One way of finding potential partners can be done by attending business conventions or functions in person and participating in online networking. Being a part of events and functions that relate within your niche can help narrow down potential business partners. Identifying the right partner marketing opportunity could come from past relationships, connections within your niche, or connecting online. It’s up to your business to get out there and start making those connections.

2) Identify the Mutual Need of the Partnership

Many corporations need outside partnerships to accomplish certain tasks or goals. Determining the business objectives of the partnership is crucial in establishing the need for the relationship. Here are a few components your business should consider:

• Influence: Know the influence you will both have on one another. Creating a partnership will create some changes and shifts. Knowing each other’s authority and objectives early on will help give a better understanding and picture of what could happen.
• Align Goals: Be sure to bring up each other’s goals to make sure they’re similar, compatible, or complimentary from one another. When you do this early on, it will make decisions and processes much easier down the road. Once you have identified each business’s needs and goals, you can then discuss the benefits and potential profits that will result from utilizing each other’s services.
• Identify Strengths and Weaknesses: Identifying each other’s strengths and weaknesses will help determine how beneficial the partnership could be. Sharing information like market shares, objectives, and what you bring to the table all can be valuable information to know going into a partnership. Bringing this all together helps evaluate all of your components that will work together for your partnership.

3) Develop the Agreement

The next step in building the partnership is developing an agreement. This can be done formally through a contract, or it can be done informally through a simple discussion. When developing the agreement, it is important to be flexible and willing to make compromises. Not every partnership will be established exactly as you desire, and the willingness to compromise shows sincerity and allows the agreement to maintain mutual benefits for both parties.

Building Strong Partnerships

Now that you have cultivated the relationship, maintaining that partnership is vital to your success. It is important to realize that without building strong partnerships, it is nearly impossible to have success as a business owner. The reality is that business partnerships are similar to any other relationship: they require effort to maintain and must stay mutually beneficial. Here are a few tips on how to maintain your partnership:

1) Communication

Developing open and honest communication is key to building a successful partnership. Taking on a partner can be compared to taking on a spouse. It is vital to have open lines of communication no matter how difficult the topic may be. This includes discussing any and all topics that may come up, such as money, mistakes and a variety of management styles. Strong, honest communication will create trust between both parties and will help set clear expectations.

2) Be Proactive & Be Real

Be proactive in your day to day business dealings. Not everything will be unicorns and rainbows. Rough patches, misunderstandings, and disagreements are to be expected. If something is not working out, don’t be afraid to offer suggestions and make improvements. Actively seek out new information that can help you build a stronger relationship. Sometimes it’s best to just find a solid compromise to help move things forward. Find what works best for your partnership and find a good balance or middle ground between the two of you.

It is also important to be real. Let people see who you really are. Doing so will earn you trust and respect. Being overly professional can be a bore, and neither you nor your partner will feel very comfortable. Make it personal. Friendly, face-to-face interactions will help establish a long lasting partnership. Setting aside the time to be proactive and real means you’re on the right path to building strong partnerships.

3) Stay Consistent & Follow Through

It is also important to maintain consistency and follow through with the promises that you have made in your agreement. Nothing will end a partnership faster than not fulfilling the commitments that you have previously made. Be sure to check in regularly with your partner to know where you both are standing. Whether that’s a scheduled meeting every so often, or going to lunch and talking things through. Check in regularly to be consistent with one another and know that your goals are following through.

4) Honesty is the Best Policy

We hear all the time that honesty is the best policy. Even when something goes wrong it’s important to be honest, up front, and transparent in a partnership. When you make your strengths and shortcomings known upfront, and insist on the same level of honesty from your partner, you will be building a strong business partnership. Both companies should have been transparent about what they lack and what they offer before deciding whether the partnership is a good idea. When you’re honest and transparent with one another, you’ll learn to have built a strong loyalty and trust with one another.

5) Put in the Effort 

While a partnership is a two way street, your business can be the first one to put in the effort to build a strong relationship. You should always be respectful to one another and understand each other’s boundaries. When you do this, you’ll be giving each other enough space to operate and have enough motivation to work together as one. While it’s also important to be professional, it doesn’t mean you have to make everything about business. If you can make personal connections with one another, the more successful your partnership will be. Whether you go to lunch, crack jokes with one another, or ask what’s going on in their life, it will help build a valued partnership over time.

What Does Boostability Do as a Partner?

Remember that building and maintaining partnerships takes time and dedication. As you work to make your partnership thrive, find resolutions that are rewarding to all parties and establish concise metrics for optimal success. When it comes to partnerships, Boostability is the leading white label SEO company worldwide. With over a decade of experience and partners located all over the world, rest assured that we can help your agency scale and deliver successful SEO campaigns that will deliver results to your clients. Learn more about our white label SEO program and get in touch with a Partner Success Team member for more details!