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Strategic Partnering

T.Gregory Bender

If there is a way to do it better ...find it.

-Thomas Edison1

This chapter highlights the importance of strategic partnerships for professional services firms, and the critical success factors involved with building, maintaining, and growing those partnerships. Professional services companies face tremendous challenges in training their employees to keep up with the pace of innovation, new products, and services. Strategic partnerships help these service providers create new business opportunities, enhance their professional services offerings, leverage partner workforces, identify new revenue opportunities, and grow an organization on a faster track than otherwise possible. Partnerships also enable companies of all sizes to successfully compete in the marketplace with larger competitors through combined service offerings. In the 1990s, most successful startups embraced partnering to grow their organizations and provide better services to their clients. Big firms as well as small firms have learned that smart partnering is smart business. Partnering creates the fundamental building blocks for company success.

Think of strategic partnerships as similar to new business units that fill specific needs and services within the organization. Strategic partnerships can be a wide variety of things depending on organizational goals and the business plan. Partnerships can be service driven, product driven, sales driven, cost driven, competition driven, survival driven, or a combination of all these directions. Once a partnership is formed, it must be nurtured: neglect can kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Working to maintain partnerships can make the difference between success and failure. During economic



downturns, partnering makes even more sense because partners help bring each other business as well as leverage their employee skills and expertise. Partnerships can be high impact, medium impact, or low impact depending on what you want from them and the energy and time that you are willing to invest in them.

There are a variety of benefits available to companies who succeed at strategic partnering. According to Dr. Judith Kautz of Small Business Notes (www.smallbusinessnotes.com), companies participating in alliances report that as much as 18 percent of their revenues come from their alliances. Some of the benefits firms can achieve through partnering include:2

Achieve advantages of scale, scope and speed Increase market penetration

Enhance competitiveness in domestic and/or global markets

Enhance product development

Develop new business opportunities through new products and services Expand market development

Increase exports Diversify

Create new businesses Reduce costs

Why This Topic Is Important

Throughout the 1990s, strong strategic partnerships and alliances were the successful building blocks and winning strategies for companies such as IBM, Sun, Amazon, and many successful e-commerce startups. Many later turnaround strategies embraced the concept of creating and growing strategic partnerships to create and build new revenue areas for a company. Today a professional services firm can offer a broader range of services to its existing customers, increasing the value of each customer through strong partnering.

During the mid- to late-1990s, most traditional advertising agencies created strategic partnerships with newly established interactive agencies and /or web development companies that specialized in online branding, marketing, and web application development. This is a strong example of how these professional services organizations involved in branding and marketing could partner with companies that had other areas of specialization. The agencies focused on traditional branding and marketing while the interactive agencies and web development companies focused on digital marketing and interactive technologies.



During the 1990s, ad agencies could not keep up with the growth of technology, and their clients were demanding web-based services incorporating interactive technologies. It was too costly to build these new media in in-house departments overnight and train staff appropriately for these agencies. Many large agency conglomerates such as Omnicom Group, Inc. and WPP Group invested in interactive technology shops that specialized in web-based technologies (e.g., Agency.com). Ad agencies wanted these interactive shops at their disposal for their demanding clients. By investing in these shops and partnering with them, agencies created the ultimate partnerships and strategic alliances.

Traditional agencies turned to these growing upstart web shops that excelled in new media technologies and web marketing. During client pitches, the ad agencies came in as traditional marketers while their new media counterparts came in as web hotshots that understood the medium and could implement the technology required. Both were professional services organizations that shared revenue opportunities and brought deals to the table. This created win-win relationships and strengthened their ties.

In 1980, Microsoft was a fledgling, small company. IBM needed an operating system for the IBM PC. Microsoft, against all odds, was able to convince IBM to partner with it because Microsoft had a unique technology solution, even better than the one IBM was developing in its own labs. Microsofts partnering deal with IBM set the foundation for Microsoft and catapulted them to unparalleled financial success. Microsoft would not be the success it is today without the IBM deal. In this brilliant partnering example, Microsoft (the startup) established its market by partnering with IBM, a huge company at the time.

In the 1990s, IBM focused its turnaround strategy on professional services and strong partnering relationships with IT software and service providers nationwide. This winning strategy helped IBM fuel new growth, sell more hardware, and drive up its stock price. IBM diversified the company and its offerings from hardware sales to professional services. For the foreseeable future, IBM is intent on aggressively growing its professional services divisions and weaning itself from hardware sales as a major source of revenue growth.

What Drives Strategic Service Partnering?

The trend to develop partnerships in the service industry is mostly driven by globalization and customer demands. In the new economy, customers require that their service providers supply a broad range of services; however, rarely is any one vendor equipped to furnish the complete range of specialized services that its clients require. This is particularly true of information technology companies. IT service firms such as Accenture and smaller IT firms spend time, energy, and dollars to create powerful strategic partnering opportunities



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