Strategic Partnerships: Working Together In Orbit

Align yourself with other consultants in-orbit around your clients to deliver more value.

Strategic partnerships can transform the way your business grows, turning the equation 1 plus 1 into something much greater. In this episode, John and Mark uncover the value and opportunities hidden within strategic partnerships for professional services firms. They explore how combining resources with the right partners can enhance client services and gain a competitive edge. We also have a guest appearance by Julie Geller, Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group, who speaks to how tech companies evaluate consultants as potential partners.

In this conversation, we cover:

• How we define strategic partners
• How to add value with other consultants in orbit around your clients
• Examples of different kinds of partnership types
• Who you should target
• Perspective from Julie Geller on how software companies evaluate potential partners

Connect with Julie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliegeller/

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhwainwright/
Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

www.breakingbizdev.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:09 What are strategic partnerships?
• 7:53 Understanding your clients' clients
• 8:58 Partnership examples
• 14:45 Why include partnerships in the mix
• 19:09 Who should you target?
• 22:40 Julie Geller
• 27:47 Reaction & close

Transcript

John Tyreman: 0:19

Welcome back to another episode of Breaking Biz Dev, where Mark and I like to break down, beat up and redefine business development topics for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Mark, I am excited for our conversation today cause we're going to talk about strategic partnerships.

Mark Wainwright: 0:37

Right. And we've got an added voice into the mix today. We've had some episodes in the past and we will have some episodes in the future where we like to bring others into our podcast and kind of add their perspective. So we've got that in store today. And I think that partnerships are a huge opportunity for so many professional services firms, because it gives you the opportunity to kind of link arms Firms and understand how you can, you know, do that. 1 plus 1 is 3 kind of a thing with your clients. Right. And I think we all really, really just focus on as consultants. A lot of times we get really sort of narrowly focused on just our clients when there's a huge opportunity for us to serve them better with other partners. So this will be a good conversation.

John Tyreman: 1:35

in today's episode We're going to break down what strategic partnerships are. Why they're so valuable who you should target. And then Mark, you mentioned earlier, we've got a guest clip that we're going to bring in at the back end of the episode, and that'll be interesting perspective on how software companies evaluate potential consultants as partnerships. So I thought that that was a valuable perspective because it kind of turns the tables a little bit and it helps us see things from another point of view.

Mark Wainwright: 2:03

the evaluation, the vetting, the assessment of other partners who is the best fit, who will help you serve your clients the best that's a good perspective. I, I am very familiar with You know, some specific professional types of professional services firms, less so with when it comes to sort of software and and, you know, technology consultants but any consultant organization out there, any professional services firm definitely needs to take advantage of. Great partnerships. Very rarely can you serve a client all all by yourself. So it's worth a conversation today. That we can, we can kind of poke and prod around it and it's worth firms out there to kind of consider. You know who the best partners are out there and bring a little bit more sort of rigor and energy to vetting selecting Prioritizing etc.

John Tyreman: 3:00

before we dig into that conversation, I just want to remind folks, don't forget to leave the show, a rating and review on Apple podcasts. It really helps leave a review and we'll give you a shout out on the show. Mark, let's define what we're, what we mean by strategic marketing. Partnerships. So how would you define a strategic partnership?

Mark Wainwright: 3:18

Well, there's there's there's two words there there's that that tricky there's that tricky strategy word, but you know a true partnership is a is a is a mutual mutually beneficial relationship between two You know firms that generally don't compete against You know, each, each other in the marketplace and who are serving kind of a similar market or a, you know, similar client, right. So, and there's a ton of industries out there where this happens all the time, maybe some a little bit less so, but yeah, that's that's the definition. We'll talk about the strategy part in a second, but one of the analogies I've often used when we talk about these sort of strategic partnerships or partnerships in general is that. There are these, these celestial bodies, moons, satellites, planets that are kind of in orbit around your client organization, and there can be just a few, and there can be many and it benefits all of the consultants, all the professional services firms to understand that they are in orbit around their clients, that they all occupy a particular orbit. You know, space that their clients turn to them, you know, each independently for specific needs and that there's an opportunity for all those sort of celestial bodies to kind of work in concert to serve the client.

John Tyreman: 4:44

I love this analogy for a few different reasons. Number one, I just, I think it's a great visual for folks to kind of, to, to see in their heads as they're listening to this. The other reason why I like that analogy is because, you know, it can be very, Orchestrated, it can be very choreographed with all of those different pieces orbiting around the client, but you know, on the flip side of that, it can also be kind of chaotic and violent at times. If some of those things, those bodies that are in orbit around your client, if they crash into each other, or if there's some conflict between two different partners serving the client. So, I can see how, you know, you want to avoid that. You don't want it to be chaotic. You don't want it to be violent. You want it to be orchestrated. And that helps kind of the whole ecosystem all at once

Mark Wainwright: 5:31

Now, that other word that we mentioned, that whole strategy word, we've talked about this in the past, right? So there's, there's some really good, good thinkers out there. Yeah. About strategy and, and that concept, you know, I think it's overused and sort of, kind of under understood. Right. So it's so in this sense, I really feel like strategic partnerships are relationships that you can form with these kind of partner firms who you are in, orbit with around your clients. The true strategy in this whole thing is that you are Obsessively focused on your clients and your clients, clients, right? They're their customers, regardless of who they are. Strategy for me is that that ability to see through your client organization and serve them in a way that benefits their business. Their customers. So that's true. Strategy for me is that it's always it's outward. It's outward thinking. It's outward looking. And it's it's that ability to bring that vision and perspective to the clients you serve and help them serve others. Better, right? So that's my kind of spin on strategy. The contrast of that is that a lot of organizations thinks, you know, kind of just coming up with a plan is strategic, even even if it's sort of focused internally, it's like, you know, here's what we're going to. Here's our plan. Here's our, you know, You know, here's our 10 pages of what our, what our firm strategy is. And most of it's, you know, related to what we're going to do internally and how we're going to operate as an organization. I don't think that's strategic. I think strategy is constantly and obsessively outwardly focused and looking. Looking outward and looking forward as much as possible. So I don't know. That's my spin on strategy, John.

John Tyreman: 7:23

Well, I want to unpack that a little bit. So, seeing through your client organization to their customers. There's a lot of empathy that needs to happen in that case, right? Putting yourself into not just the shoes of your client, but into the shoes of the customers of your client and really taking a minute to walk a mile on their shoes and understand their point of view so that you can act as an agent for your client. I, I really like that. I think that that's a great way to think about it. And it seems like you'd need to, oh, I guess, Mark, how would you get to that understanding, right? It, what are some of the steps to get there?

Mark Wainwright: 7:59

If you are a consultant serving an organization, it is being in a, taking a posture of, of curiosity and inquiry with your, With your immediate clients to kind of understand their world, understand what they're trying to achieve, understand the organizations that they in turn are serving, et cetera. So it's, it's, you develop that empathy through a really deep sense of curiosity and inquiry. And I mean, that's why strategy is difficult. I think. I think people think strategy is hard because it's just a lot of, a lot of work and there's outlines and there's, you know, the, the plan and all that stuff and just assembling that whole thing and getting individuals aligned around it is, can be challenging. But I think strategy is hard because it's, it's looking at things from someone else's perspective. It's that, and that's hard, right? It's just, it's just, we're, we're not naturally sort of built that way that we're constantly looking at things from other perspectives.

John Tyreman: 8:50

Yeah, gain that added perspective, ask the right questions seek out the relevant information. So, okay, that's, that's really good. So let's give our listeners some examples of, you know, what's the range of strategic partnerships? What does a strategic partnership look like? Right. So I think that there's a, you know, it could span the whole marketing and sales continuum. And we've got a few examples there. Why don't we do this? Let's start, let's kind of ping pong back and forth, Mark. Let's start on the sales end, you know, those fives on our sales and marketing continuum, and then we can meet in the middle. Does that sound good?

Mark Wainwright: 9:24

Good, good. Yeah, the the 5 that, that comes to mind for me are shared pursuits collaboration between either sort of lead consultant organizations and all their sub consultants or sort of like true, mutual collaborations or, or, or partnerships when, you know, the opera, the new business opportunity is staring you in the face. There's an active, active buyer involved and you are pursuing that together. That is absolutely a sales. Sales driven sort of example of, of partnerships. And that one's pretty easy. You think for a lot of organizations to understand. So on the flip side, John, way back over at the marketing end of the continuum, the ones, what do we got there?

John Tyreman: 10:08

All right. So this is, yeah, let's, let's contrast that shared pursuit example. I think that's a really great example of two organizations selling. On the other end of the spectrum, this would be a one. So this would be very, very marketing focused and social media engagement groups, or if you find a partner that, you know, said is kind of like a quid pro quo, like, Hey, let's help each other out on social media when I post something, you know, you like my stuff, I'll like your stuff. Let's swap comments and things like that. That can be a way to just, you know, periodically over time, Access the relationships, the networks of your partners and get in front of them and start to build awareness.

Mark Wainwright: 10:47

I love that. It's, it's leveraging each other's networks from a marketing perspective, gaining additional Insights and perspective from your partner organizations from, from, from marketing. And also, you know, if your client or prospective client organizations come across that content and they see that you are truly a, you know, You're truly collaborators, right? That you not only do you deliver work together, but you're also sort of co marketing and, and, and, and that shows that your organizations are, are sort of aligned in the way that you see the world, you know, in your perspective. So I think that's, I think it's fantastic.

John Tyreman: 11:27

let's go back to the other end of the spectrum and not quite all the way on the end of the sales things, but what would be an example of a strategic partnership that kind of falls in that four range on our spectrum?

Mark Wainwright: 11:41

Yeah, the fours are one example of them, I think are referrals cause it moves towards the, we don't have the opportunity identified. So we're not in that selling. Selling motion but we're Both organizations have their sort of sales teams or their doer sellers or whoever, you know, you have their sharing professional connections in a, in a, in a referral capacity. There's some industries that, that referrals are their oxygen. I know that accounting firms, legal firms, sometimes real estate brokerages, Financial advisors, those types of, of professional services firms that is their lifeblood. They share those things regularly, so they are constantly trading kind of referrals to develop new business and find new clients. So that's a, that's, I think that's a four. I think that fits well with the fours. Sure.

John Tyreman: 12:35

Yeah. And if we go back to the other end of the, of the spectrum, we're kind of creeping towards that middle here. I would say an example of a two. On our marketing and sales continuum would be co marketing on webinars or events or podcasts. You could think of sponsorships would be an example of like a co marketing arrangement where, you know, it's, it's more of a brand visibility play, but it's more formalized, I guess, maybe the word I'm searching for. Over, you know, just reciprocity on social media. So yeah, I've, I've done a few of these in the past where I've even co branded a re research report and so developed a research report. And then there was some organizations who wanted to put their brand on the report. So those are a couple of examples on the, on the twos.

Mark Wainwright: 13:22

Yeah, that works. That works. And, and in, in the middle there, there's a whole bunch of stuff we can kind of, you know, for better or for worse kind of lump in the, in the middle. I think a really basic one is, is, you know, very akin to, to referrals. And I think it's lead sharing, you know, it's, it's organizations finding really great clients for each other and operating kind of in that, in that mode. Like I said, there's a handful of professional services firms that I know of that, that's. That's everything they do. Others less so, but that's, you know, chairing leads definitely falls in that category.

John Tyreman: 13:56

Yeah, totally. And that could be kind of like a, it could stem from some of those co branded webinars, for example, where, you know, you do a webinar and you share the list of registrants between the two parties that are doing the webinar.

Mark Wainwright: 14:09

Yeah. Fair

John Tyreman: 14:09

so those are examples, common examples in the marketplace. Okay. So those are some examples of different kinds of strategic partnerships. I think, you know, we, we talked about the importance of strategy and alignment with the client that you are in orbit. Around. And I think that these partnerships, they can be very, very formal. They can be very, very informal. You know, formality becomes more important with those larger organizations, if you're partnering with those larger organizations. But it's really kind of a, an extension of the culture of your own organization, how formal those partnerships are. So Mark, why are strategic partnerships valuable? Why is this something that our listeners should consider as part of their business development strategy?

Mark Wainwright: 14:56

the thing we mentioned before, you know, that 1 plus 1 is 3, you know, the ability to serve the client better by collaborating or bringing in you know, the, the, the best partners is, is, is obvious in some of the things that We've talked about in the, in the, in the past maybe it's, it's we might have a future episode. I think John kind of on this or, or a previous episode, I can't remember where we are in our sequence of things, but we talk a little bit about developing plans around important client accounts. I call those account development plans and segment development plans are plans that consulting firms develop. Around kind of markets and industries and whatever particular segment they are interested in growing and pursuing. So those 2 types of plans really leverage these, these relationships and they, they, they underscore and highlight the importance of really recognizing who your important partners are and getting to know them more deeply, you know, really Questioning and, and, and coming at those, those partners with a good, you know, really healthy sense of inquiry and curiosity, just like you would prospective clients and current client organizations, right? So these both of these, these sort of sales planning types, account development plans and segment development plans leverage. Your partners and they really need you to define who your partners are. Go talk to them, understand everything you can about them, understand their perspective. On maybe a client or an industry that you are serving together because different organizations, even different people have different perspectives on clients that you're serving together. So those types of plans kind of naturally integrate this whole concept of, of partnerships.

John Tyreman: 16:51

There's there's, I've got two big takeaways from what you just said, Mark. Number one, first of all, I love this. Lens from which we're looking at partnerships. It's not how can the partner add value to my organization? It's how can these partners add value to my clients organization or the kinds of clients that I serve? So I think that's just one big takeaway that I have from just kind of this thread of this conversation we're having. The other one is. These partnerships are really kind of like sales opportunities a little bit. And there, there's a lot of similarities and it w it be would behoove your organization to manage that process and to have that become kind of like a, I don't want to say a formalized process, but there needs to be at least some sort of a structure to developing and nurturing these strategic partnership opportunities,

Mark Wainwright: 17:40

What I see again and again is a lot of consultant organizations don't spend enough time or don't recognize the importance of spending more time. vetting, understanding, getting to know the future plans, goals hopes and dreams of their, their, their partners as much as they would their clients and prospective clients. That is important. And I think that you know, like I said, I think it's a huge opportunity if, you know, if, If your professional services firm wants to go looking for new opportunities, turn to your longtime partners and get to know them better. I am confident that there's, you know, a, a wealth of opportunity, just getting to know your partners better.

John Tyreman: 18:29

Couldn't agree more.

Mark Wainwright: 18:32

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 18:34

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 18:48

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 18:58

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 19:04

and now back to the show.

John Tyreman: 19:07

All right. So who should you target as potential partners? So like we talked about who is in orbit around the client. We talked about examples of the different kinds of partnership structures and partnership arrangements, but what are some examples of the different kinds of players in orbit around your client that could be potential strategic partnership opportunities?

Mark Wainwright: 19:32

This gets really industry specific you know, they're in, in, in the, in the tech world, they are complimentary service providers in the, in the tech world. A lot of the firms that I work with, John, are in the architecture engineering world. These are firms that have areas of expertise that your firm does not. I mean, there's the a lot of times significant projects, you know, of any type are, are led by a single firm. Oftentimes that might be an architectural firm, and then they are supported by a host of sub consultant firms civil engineering firms, structural engineering firms, et cetera. So having a good understanding of that's really important. I don't come across a ton of situations where we have kind of two equal consulting partners coming in. You may. You may come across that in, in, in what you do. I'm not sure.

John Tyreman: 20:27

Yeah. I've I get hit up all the time from agencies or from solo consultants who, you know, they, they wanted to develop a referral program with me where, you know, I send them business where they send me business and I send them a kickback of 10, 15%. I don't like doing that. I, I not, especially not right out of the gate. Right. And like, I think one of the things we're talking about today is, you know, does being selective with the partners that you take on, right. And there needs to be an element of trust and there needs to be a relationship there for that to make sense. And, you know, just looking at it purely as a revenue opportunity. Kind of takes the client out of the picture to like my earlier point about how this needs to be client, client centric. So, you know, I've run into that a number of times. There are, you know, technology platforms that I think make sense. And in my line of work, and, and I think in a lot of consultants lines of work, you know, there's CRMs that are very industry focused. That, that's just one example that comes to mind immediately. For some like different kinds of, of strategic partners. So like in that, in that vein, I think the SAS world is like completely different than the professional services world. And there's a lot of different, you know, jargon. There's a lot of different ways that those companies approach partnerships. And so we have a guest clip from Julie Geller, who is the principal research director at InfoTech Research Group. And her focus is on sales effectiveness. Disruptive go to market strategies and using generative AI for the client experience. She works mostly with B2B tech companies. And I caught up with her and she, we talked about her perspective on what. Those kinds of software platforms look for in a consultant as a partner. And I thought that this would be interesting perspective for our listeners who might want to, you know, step into the shoes of potential partners, strategic partnership opportunities, and how they evaluate consultants.

Mark Wainwright: 22:36

Great. Let's take a listen.

John Tyreman: 22:38

All right, here comes Julie.

Julie Geller: 22:40

I think that one of the biggest things that I'm seeing is that these that clients are thinking to themselves. How am I going to expand my partnership network? What am I going to do to formalize it? I need to create more relationships. They might even see certain opportunities and think to themselves, I'm not really sure exactly how to kick this off. And what I've been noticing is that there is this sort of, movement toward more of a near bound mindset. And that near bound mindset is. To collaborate with partners that are sort of adjacent to your ecosystem. So something that you can pull on to say, Hey, it does make sense that we're partnering together. You might've been at even a trade show or, you know, had a different kind of dealing with them where they might've been in the same environment as you. And that's something to look over as well as, you know, if you guys can dovetail in the services together, and then leveraging each other's networks, that's a great way to do it just on that one aspect.

John Tyreman: 23:30

Okay. I like the term near bound. in my mind, I'm seeing, you know, other individuals, organizations in the marketplace that serve the same or similar target audience to you, but maybe they serve them in a different way. And are those the kinds of, um, partners that we're looking at?

Julie Geller: 23:51

Yeah, that's exactly it. So, I think that you want to be kind of understanding exactly how, you know, How close is it to what it is that you're selling or what you're trying to accomplish because those are the individuals that will be the best Uh, I think ambassadors as well for for your product because you have to consider that these these people have to You know get onboarded They have to thoroughly understand what it is that the capabilities, the features, whatever it is, um, and to be able to speak to that in a competent way. And those, those people are often not the resources that really understand how to sell. So I've seen this quite a bit where, you know, there's situations of we created this partnership, but actually we don't know how to further it, or we don't know how to onboard them. So they often try to do things like, I mean, the first thing is that they're not creating and defining those clear objectives and those KPIs. So what are we trying to accomplish here? What are the business goals on both sides? How do we make this scalable together? Um, I, I think that's first and foremost, um, in terms of when you are creating that. That partnership, you know, what do you want to do? And then creating the, the structured framework around it. Is it like more of a, what are the do's and the don'ts? What do we want to get into here? What are we trying to start, kick off the relationship with? And that, that dovetails more into onboarding, which, um, you know, I don't, I don't know about you, John, but I've seen a lot of really bad onboarding plans that are just really static.

John Tyreman: 25:20

Yep. Yeah, I've, I've experienced some of that myself.

Julie Geller: 25:23

Yeah, right. I mean, where they're like, watch this six video series of how to sell our XYZ and you're like, I have other things I want to do.

John Tyreman: 25:34

With those, with those referral programs. I would imagine that they look much different if you're installing a referral program for a smaller business versus a larger business. So maybe just by just like thinking of those two extremes, can you help me kind of contrast what that looks like maybe on a small scale and then what might it look like on an enterprise scale?

Julie Geller: 25:57

Yeah. You know, I'm glad you brought you brought this up because I do think that there is a difference between the way that you want to engage like more boutique style firms versus those that are kind of more on the enterprise scale. So, of course, the formality is going to be a lot different. But I do think that you can use very similar. strategies, I think to engage both, uh, I think where it might differ is understanding what the culture is for both, which I think will be quite different. So is it more of a, uh, let's call it fast. Type culture where they have a lot of responsibilities on their plate, maybe watching a, like I was saying before, a video series is not going to be conducive, um, potentially, maybe you're better off creating something like a partner community where they can chime in, where they can have a chance to shine. Um, maybe there's, you know. Functional and and personal goals that are associated with their roles that you want to, you want to concern yourself with and say, okay, how do I make, um, you know, how do I kind of create goals that are connected to those two things because they're heading toward them anyway, especially in something like an enterprise, um, partnership, but more on like the boutique level, perhaps they need more of a team. Of a of a touch right a touch point so you need to be reaching out to them uh, it could be a smaller more insular group of Individuals selling the the platform or engaging with the platform. What are their struggles because they're all Um, I think servicing different kinds of clients as well so the The struggle on the enterprise side is certainly not for Likely to be similar to what the goals are of the more boutique side. Um, you're going to have to customize those conversations and the materials to, I think, feel like it's native to them.

John Tyreman: 27:47

Okay, Mark, there are a couple of takeaways from what Julie had to say that I thought were interesting. And I've heard this term come about and bubble up on LinkedIn, this whole near near bound mindset. It's not inbound, it's not outbound. It's near bound. Have you heard this?

Mark Wainwright: 28:03

I haven't, that was the first time I had, I had heard that, it's a word that, is connected with a, with a concept that I'm very familiar with, but yeah, it's that was a, that was a new term to me.

John Tyreman: 28:14

Yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting way to think about it. And so, yeah, I think it's, it's very similar to what we were just talking about in terms of like being in orbit around the client. So that's how I kind of like connected those dots in my mind. I thought it was interesting how Julie talked about the challenge of training and onboarding consultants and how to sell the technology. But in my, in my mind, I kind of am taking a little bit of a different approach to this. I feel like this is more of an opportunity for consultants to position themselves as augmenting their expertise with technology, as opposed to thinking about selling the technology and getting a commission. And it's, how can I, again, add value? To my client,

Mark Wainwright: 28:58

Yeah, the, the, the higher level takeaway for me on that is, is the intention that some industries bring to that sort of partnering, onboarding, mutual education, mutual understanding of each other. That, that when she spoke to that, you know, I was actively translating for a lot of professional services firms out there who don't deal in the technology and software world. And I'm thinking, so how can. Professional services firms who don't sort of. You know, elevate their partner awareness, partner education, partner understanding to that level. How, how can they do that? You know, what, what, what, and what advantages are there? And I think the advantages are huge. You probably don't want to spread yourself too thin with an exercise like this, but absolutely. When you have found those, those great fit partners, I think bringing this level of rigor and energy and focus to those relationships where you are onboarding each other. Educating each other, gaining a deep understanding is, is critical. I think there's a lot to be learned.

John Tyreman: 30:05

Exactly. And it's not just what the features and benefits of technology are. It's what are the outcomes that you can help deliver for your client and how does the technology help you with that? So I thought that was a an interesting perspective and maybe one that can be a little thought provoking for our listeners

Mark Wainwright: 30:21

I agree. I, I agree. You know, this is why we bring in these other voices that, you know, I am. I am not a, a, a SAS professional. I do not work with those types of firms. I'm sure you've kind of bumped into those firms historically. The technology industry has you know, has some different ways of doing things and, and I think that there's a lot of professional services firms who could, who could benefit from looking at things a little bit, a little bit differently.

John Tyreman: 30:47

Well, Mark, I think we've sufficiently broken down and beat up this topic a little bit. So until next time.

Mark Wainwright: 30:55

Until next time.