3 Reasons Why Partnerships Need to be Part of Your Growth Strategy We're all in this together. Business partnerships can help make your path to success easier.
By William Litvack Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Securing the right strategic partnerships confers real advantages to your business. As entrepreneurs, we're wired to go our own way, build things ourselves, and solve our own problems, but it's critical that we temper that pioneering entrepreneurial spirit with a willingness to seek out partners who can help realize value for everyone involved.
Partnerships benefit your business in three main ways:
Revenue
The right partnerships boost revenue in several distinct ways. Aligning your goals and resources with a partner of course affords your business new revenue opportunities, but it's also a chance for you to pool information and resources. This gives you more lead generation, increased distribution, and better customer intelligence, all of which translate into money for your business.
We're currently partnered with a platform called Simon, which has allowed us to do some tremendous things around segmentation and marketing automation. Their tech has basically made obsolete the manual segmentation, CSV serving, and reporting that our dev team used to do to support targeted marketing. Enhanced customer intelligence + increased workflow efficiency = more dollars to our bottom line.
On the revenue opportunity side, our partnerships with companies like Button and URX have allowed us to set up deep linking integrations with Uber, Parking Panda and Booking.Com, all three of which have contributed to revenue and have allowed us to monetize while providing value-add services to our user base. Partnerships also have some secondary effects...
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Press Coverage
...like press. Announcing an exciting partnership can generate positive buzz about your business, which yields numerous intangible benefits. Press mentions familiarize people with your company and its vision, which can be a major benefit when you're looking to recruit talent. Good PR has other subtle advantages, too; even if no one remembers specifically how they heard of your company, that awareness will stick, and it can pay dividends from generating inbound business to warmer receptions when you approach investors.
Credibility
When you're starting a company, it's important to appear bigger and more established than you actually are. Trying to bring in your first five customers can be a real challenge when you're essentially asking them to hand over a portion of their business to four twenty-somethings working out of a garage, but smart partnerships with established businesses can help alleviate those concerns.
Something as simple as having a recognizable logo on your homepage can go a long way toward instilling confidence in your potential customers, making it easier for them to say "yes" to working with you.
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