Total Click Solutions

Tag: partnerships

  • When Someone Asks to Partner With You

    When Someone Asks to Partner With You

    Someone emails you. They think there’s a great opportunity to work together. They’d love to explore synergies. Their audience would be perfect for your product, and vice versa. Could you find 30 minutes this week?

    The instinct, especially if business is going well and you’re feeling generous, is to say yes. But most inbound partnership requests, even the genuinely well-meaning ones, aren’t worth a meeting, and the faster you can work that out the better for everyone involved.

    The problem with treating all inbound as flattery

    An inbound request feels different from a cold sales pitch. Someone is coming to you, which carries a small psychological charge. It implies you’ve done something right, that you’re visible, that people want to attach themselves to what you’re building. That feeling is worth being suspicious of, because it’s exactly the feeling that leads teams to spend two months in exploratory conversations with a company that was never a real fit.

    The opposite trap is just as real: declining too quickly, too bluntly, and leaving the other party feeling snubbed. A bad exit from a partnership conversation can damage a relationship that would otherwise have been useful, just not in the form they proposed.

    What you need is a lightweight filter you can run in five minutes, before you commit time to either outcome.

    Four questions worth asking before you book a call

    What, specifically, are they proposing? Vague requests, “I think we could do something together” or “there seems to be a natural fit here,” are a signal that the other party hasn’t thought it through yet. That doesn’t make them bad partners, but it does mean the first meeting will be spent doing the work they should have done before reaching out. It’s entirely fair to reply asking them to sketch the specific arrangement they have in mind: a referral exchange, a co-marketing campaign, a reseller agreement, an integration. If they can’t answer that in writing, a call isn’t going to produce clarity.

    Who exactly would benefit, and how? The most common failure mode in partnership conversations is that the proposer has a clear picture of what they get and a vague optimism about what you get. Before you meet, try writing down, in one sentence each, what your company gains and what theirs gains. If you can’t write your sentence, that’s worth knowing before you spend an hour on a call finding out.

    Does this fit the company you are right now? It’s very easy to evaluate a partnership against the company you imagine being in 18 months rather than the one you’re actually running today. A referral arrangement with a large enterprise software firm sounds compelling in the abstract, but if your sales team is two people and your onboarding process can’t handle a sudden surge of leads, the timing is wrong regardless of the fit. Evaluate against your actual capacity, not your aspirational one.

    What does it pull you away from? Every partnership, even a light one, costs real time: kick-off meetings, co-ordination overhead, the internal alignment required to make anything happen. Before saying yes to a call, name concretely what that time would otherwise be spent on. If the honest answer is “something more important,” you have your decision.

    What to do when the answer is no

    Declining is less awkward than most people fear, provided you’re direct and reasonably quick about it. A reply that arrives three weeks later, after several chaser emails, is far more damaging to the relationship than a prompt, honest no. Something like “it doesn’t fit our priorities right now, but we’d be glad to revisit in Q3” is specific enough to be respectful and leaves an actual door open rather than a polite fiction.

    The “not now” framing is genuinely useful, not just as a face-saving device but because circumstances do change. Keeping a short record of declined conversations, with a note on what would need to be different, costs almost nothing and occasionally pays off when the timing finally lines up.

    When the answer is yes

    If the request passes the filter, the most useful next step before any formal commitment is a bounded, measurable pilot. Agree on what a successful first 60 or 90 days would look like, put a specific number on it, qualified referrals accepted by both teams, content published, integrations tested by real users, and review the result before expanding scope. Most partnerships that eventually fail do so because they scaled before anyone had evidence that the underlying mechanics actually worked.

    It’s also worth sharing your evaluation criteria openly from the start. A partner who knows you’re measuring audience overlap and referral quality upfront, rather than discovering it during a tense quarterly review, will work more productively within those parameters throughout.

  • Before You Sign: Vetting a Strategic Alliance

    Before You Sign: Vetting a Strategic Alliance

    The failure rate for strategic alliances sits somewhere between 60 and 70 percent, which is remarkable given how enthusiastically businesses pursue them. Everyone agrees partnerships are a fine idea, and then a substantial majority quietly collapse within a few years. The problem is almost never bad luck. It’s that the groundwork wasn’t done before anyone picked up a pen.

    Why most alliances go wrong before they begin

    The most common explanation is deceptively simple: most alliances that fail should never have been started, because there was no genuine compatibility between the parties. Not a clash of personalities, not a bad contract, not market conditions, just two organisations that wanted different things and never properly checked whether they were aligned before committing. Research consistently points to the same cluster of causes: incompatible objectives, poor partner assessment, and a lack of executive commitment on at least one side of the table.

    Companies that approach alliances in an ad hoc, instinctive way report roughly a 20 percent success rate. Those that follow a structured process do considerably better. The structured approach isn’t complicated. It’s mostly just asking the right questions early enough that the answers can still change your mind.

    The questions worth asking before anything is signed

    What does each party actually want from this? Not what they say in the first meeting, but specifically: what does success look like in 18 months, and whose priorities take precedence when those definitions conflict? If neither organisation has written this down and compared notes, you’re already in trouble.

    Who will own this relationship day-to-day? One of the quieter killers of a strategic alliance is that senior leaders agree on the vision and then the whole thing gets handed to whoever has a spare hour. Companies with the best partnership track records tend to have a named person whose actual job is managing the alliance, someone with real authority and a budget, not a project manager carrying it alongside three other responsibilities.

    What does the other party’s history with partners look like? Ask directly whether they’ve been in alliances before, how those ended, and what they learned. A company that has dissolved several alliances isn’t automatically a bad bet, but the explanation matters. If the answer is vague, or they point the finger at every previous partner, that’s genuinely informative.

    How will you measure whether this is working? It sounds obvious, but a great many alliances that collapse do so partly because neither party agreed on measurable milestones at the start. Without a shared definition of progress, one side always ends up quietly concluding that the other isn’t pulling their weight, and resentment grows faster than revenue.

    What happens if one of you becomes a competitor? This is uncomfortable to raise early, but Cisco’s experience is instructive: its alliances with Motorola and Ericsson fell apart after acquisitions made them direct rivals, whilst its partnership with Microsoft survived because both parties were willing to limit the scope of their collaboration when competition grew. Building an exit or adaptation clause into the agreement from the start isn’t pessimism. It’s just tidiness.

    The thing most businesses skip entirely

    Before you assess anyone else, it’s worth being honest about what your own organisation actually brings. A good strategic alliance should mean each party contributing something the other genuinely lacks: complementary capabilities, market access, technology, distribution, whatever it might be. If you’re not clear on your own gaps and strengths going in, you’re not well placed to judge whether a potential partner fills them, or whether you’re both just hoping the other one will do the heavy lifting.

    The alliance that works is usually the one where both parties were a little nervous to commit, because they’d done enough digging to understand what they were actually getting into. That discomfort is, oddly, a good sign.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    How long should vetting a strategic alliance partner take?

    There’s no fixed timeline, but rushing it is the single biggest risk. For a substantive alliance involving shared resources or co-development, a few weeks of structured conversations, reference checks, and written goal-setting is a reasonable minimum. Larger commitments warrant proportionally more time.

    Do we need a formal legal agreement for a strategic alliance?

    Yes, even for relatively informal arrangements. A written agreement that spells out goals, responsibilities, how decisions get made, and what happens at exit protects both parties and, more practically, forces you to have conversations you might otherwise avoid until things go wrong.