New initiatives

- If you've ever gone into business with a friend, or only discovered after many years that you share a passion for football with your sister, you know that relationships can change over time. Business partnerships are no different. As a BDM, once you've done a deal with a new partner, you've only just begun. Your partner may have many other capabilities and resources, and as the two companies build up a trusted relationship, you've got the opportunity to find new ways to collaborate. In this video, I'll talk about your long-term relationship with partners you bring to your company, so that you can open new doors with even your established partners. After your new partner has been onboarded, the key stakeholders become acquainted and the new partnership is launched, the relationship enters what I call the shakedown cruise. This has nothing to do with criminal activity, but it's instead a nautical term that refers to the time when new ships are tested to make sure things are working well and the crew can handle processes and equipment. In a partnership, the shakedown cruise is the time when sales and channel teams start to cooperate, joint marketing campaigns are devised and pursued, and technical teams begin to sketch out their plans. Your role in this is to keep tabs on these activities and to offer your insights if needed. During this time, and depending on the hours you have available, it's good to circle back with your partner's executive sponsors, functional heads and partner management team. Get their impression of how it's going so far. From these conversations, you can often glean new insights into how their business is run, why their customers buy from them, and what struggles they've had in their quest for growth and profitability. Then you can start to imagine ways that your company's capabilities can help them, or the other way around. This model is especially true when you've entered into a strategic alliance with a partner. By their nature, strategic alliances are multidimensional relationships that change over time. So unlike, for example, a pure channel relationship, a strategic alliance means that you and your counterpart can develop new ways to mix and match resources to pursue new opportunities. An example of this might be a company that offers, let's say, a cybersecurity software package, who partners with a company competing in a variety of industries. In your conversation with their industry managers, you find that the partner has strong customer relationships in the banking industry. Your senior management team has long thought that banking, because of its interest in keeping customer accounts safe, would be a great new sector for your company, but being on the West Coast has no relationships in major banks on the East Coast or in Europe or Asia. Your partnership could be an ideal way to enter the market. Time to get to work. A partnership is a journey, not a one-time transaction. Who better than the business development manager to identify, build, and bring to market a new opportunity with a trusted partner? More than just to rest on your laurels for having put together a dream partnership, you can lead the way to deeper collaboration and more opportunities.