7 Ways To Guarantee Effective Partnerships
One of the most enjoyable roles I played at Coca-Cola, was looking after the McDonald’s business for a chunk of the world which included 29 countries and spanned 4 continents. I had a small, highly effective and professional team and we worked through local account managers in each country that had an indirect reporting line to us.
This meant that we had internal and external relationship challenges. You can’t be in every country every minute of the day to ensure procedures are being followed unless you fly every second of every day and believe me, I tried that! We needed to partner with people.
So how did we do that? We set ourselves a plan that was designed to build effective partnerships with our customers in each part of our geographic responsibility and ensured we FOCUSED on and did 7 things REALLY well.
1. Understand their problems
Not just the obvious, but the things that were keeping them up at night that they didn’t necessarily share.
2. Work on helping them solve those problems
This is supposedly done by everyone. We are all “adding value” now! But do we help our partners to solve problems that are not directly related to what we do? Can we put them in contact with someone who can help but is outside our area of expertise? That’s a real partnership.
3. Maintain regular contact
Contact or “touches” can be done in more ways than just meetings. We established a ‘touch pulse’ based on e-mails, digital cards, phone or video calls and physical meetings depending on the need. This was baked into the CRM and so once established we would be reminded of what type of touch and when.
4. Introduce a common set of metrics
How could we assess if we were being successful together? We chose a set of metrics that were common to both companies success which drove the conversation to a mutual focus.
5. Make it personal
All business relationships are personal. They have to be. When someone says ‘Don’t take it personally” how else are you going to take it? It IS personal and should be.
6. Own up to errors
I once worked for a Boss whose maxim was never to admit blame, which meant throwing other people under the bus. Eventually, he ran out of buses and people. We found true partners respected us owning up to mistakes even if they weren’t ours. We represent a company and we are the partner, so it is OUR responsibility.
7. Manage Expectations
We never over-promised and under-delivered. Well, most of the time! But more than that, we got ahead of things so our partners never got problems and we’re never surprised.