Moral Support, the rising tide edition

Hello! Yes I’m a little later than usual. I don’t normally like to publish on Linkedin on Fridays but it has been a hectic week and Friday has come along and I hadn’t written a newsletter but I do have things I want to say so here we all are. Do you have big weekend plans?

We’ve had good chats with some partners of Deltastring over the last week or so and one thing we’ve been sharing is our perspective on these agreements, more informal alliances, basically helping each other out.

I think there’s a difficult balancing act with partnership agreements. Some businesses make the bulk of their revenue through referral agreements. Vendors see them as outsourced sales teams on a commission only basis. These businesses typically sign partnerships with every vendor going, so any client needing any product can lead to some circulation of money. Does this add value?

My instinct has always been to exercise caution about who we work with. For one thing, I am not a sales person! I’m not going to be pitching your thing and building pipeline or using any sales terminology. What I will be doing is solving problems for my clients! If you have a good solution then I will do the introductions.

Grabbing a juice between meetings. This is the new healthy me, cutting down on energy drinks!

So why not agree to every partnership which comes across my desk? Well I think a part of it is lending some reputation, sharing some credibility with products, it’s not really my style. When we do work with a vendor it is usually not primarily because we love the product and the value it brings (though that is a prerequisite) but because the people of that business are humans who we can rely on to provide great service to our clients. Great service is the business we’re in!

That seems complicated and limiting, I appreciate. So why do it at all, why not just shun partnerships and let clients shop around?

The answer is that I am not someone who wants to scrap for a bigger slice of a fixed size pie. I want the pie itself to grow much bigger and so we can all make a good living! A healthy ecosystem around a platform is the best way to keep us all busy and provide great outcomes for our clients.

Co-operation is the key to rising the tide which floats all our ships. That’s not to say healthy competition doesn’t keep us all honest and focused! What we love about the people we do partner with is how we can be human with them and keep looking to what’s next, which is continuing to use technology and human ingenuity to provide great results for our customers.