Strategic Alliance Management & Social Media

How to Build Successful Strategic Alliances

By: J. Glenn Ebersole, Jr., Chief Executive of J. G. Ebersole Associates and The Renaissance Group ™

First of all, what is a strategic alliance? A strategic alliance is a partnership, a collaborative agreement and/or a relationship between two or more companies or organizations formed to pursue a set of agreed upon goals while remaining independent companies or organizations. Strategic alliances exist in a variety of shapes and sizes and include a wide range of scopes of cooperation levels. Strategic alliances usually are most effective when the entities involved have complementary strengths.

In another article I wrote entitled “Strategic Alliances And Their Powerful Benefits,” I listed twelve (12) clear and powerful benefits of strategic alliances. Now, in this article I suggest how to build successful strategic alliances. Here are the ten (10) suggested actions to take to build successful strategic alliances.

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Strategic Alliance Quotes

From The Business Press

"...companies should expand beyond their existing resources through licensing arrangements, strategic alliances, and supplier relationships."
Business Week

Customer Partnering

"The most beneficial type of partnering you can engage in is partnering with your customers. The benefits are compelling. You use it to gain customers, protect them from predation by competitors, and to protect your profit margins."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"A customer benefits from partnering with a vendor only as long as the relationship fulfills its needs. The vendor, on the other hand, will try to maintain the relationship as long as possible."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"A supplier will want a relationship that is difficult for a customer to walk away from, or for competitor vendors to disturb. The vendor should try to cultivate its partnering relations with a customer through close working ties with its customer's employees, or through its intimate understanding of its customer's business."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"What you sell must be strategic or important to your customer or your customer's customer, otherwise it's not worth their time and energy to partner with you. A vendor can get a leg up if they possess any of the following characteristics:
     -     They are already one of their customer's largest or most important vendors;
     -     There is a good fit between the vendor's core competence and the customer's needs; or
     -     The vendor can solve a problem faced by the customer's customer."
Curtis E. Sahakian

Why Partner

"You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many customers."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"Partnering is the quickest, most effective way to re-engineer a business."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"Without local guides, your enemy employs the land as a weapon against you."
Sun Tzu, The Art of War

"Well, you have NO CHOICE but to keep running faster just to stay in place. If you rely solely on your ability to implement internal change, you may not make it."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"You can adapt by changing your organization's relationships with other organizations through corporate partnerings. Instead of building internal capabilities you turn to partnerships and alliances. As you need to change and adapt, you change partners. Companies that know how to form and use these partnerings are displacing those that don't get it."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"Since (with the use of partnerings) the organizations minimize the amount of internal change, you don't face the same resistance from reluctant managers and executives slowing you down as they protect their jobs, their egos or their turfs. This way you can avoid employee morale problems."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"Joint Ventures, Alliances, and other Corporate Partnerings are fueling the growth of the world's most successful companies. The demand to deliver more new products, more quickly, and at lower prices has never been greater. Joint Ventures and other collaborative business arrangements are revolutionizing how winning companies compete. They permit companies to enter new markets and field new products that they otherwise couldn't do on their own. They are the quickest way to grow your company, particularly in times of change."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"Few companies have everything that they need. You may need money, customers, or product. No matter what you need, there is someone who has it. That someone is a potential Corporate Partner."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"Partnering has proven itself one of the most powerful business tools for dealing with fast changing markets, technologies and customers. As the global economy speeds up, partnering is becoming the weapon of choice for today's successful competitors."
Curtis E. Sahakian

Partnering Practices

"Partnering should be wielded as a sword, not a shield. It best suits companies with aspirations that exceed their resources. You should be driven by a motivation to reach out and gain market share, develop new markets, and leverage your current position."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"Measure your success by how well you obtain your goals - not how well you get along with your partner."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"There are three vital steps to partnering success:
     1.     Determine what it is you need but don't have: customers, capital, special expertise, products, production capacity, or distribution channels,
     2.     Determine who has what you need,
     3.     Ask them for it, but, first make sure you have something they want or need. (this last point is the most important)"
Curtis E. Sahakian

Partnering Mistakes

"God is in the details."
Mies Van der Roh

"The Devil is in the details."
Anonymous

"There are routes not to be followed, armies not to be attacked, citadels not to be besieged, territory not to be fought over."
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"

"Prospecting for partners is a difficult and subtle process. It's easy to dissipate huge quantities of critical executive time, money and corporate focus on false starts - partnerings destined from inception never to consummate nor bear fruit."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"If you fail to get it right at the start, it may cost you dearly to fix it later - that is if you are even permitted the opportunity to fix it."
Curtis E. Sahakian

"It is easier to get into trouble than to get out of it."
Curtis E. Sahakian