Business Relationships vs. Business Partnerships
Knowing where your company stands with external players and partners will make or break collaborative projects and campaigns. Advancing past transactions and casual business relationships into committed business partnerships should be done with care and rationale. Without transparency, self-awareness, and communication with your potential business partner, advancing to a partnership benefit no one.
Thankfully, the technical staffing experts at CSS Tec have compiled advice and guidelines for making the leap from a casual business relationship to a strategic business partnership.
Offering solutions in New York, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and the Delaware Valley among other locations, CSS Tec provides clients with the best technical talent on the market.
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Informal business relationships
Informal business relationships are easy. You’re able to dip your toes into some marginal success with a business relationship built on mutually beneficial transactions. In a relationship, you’re close enough to conduct these transactions but far enough away to avoid commitment. Put frankly, a “business relationship” is a connection between two business entities that may be ongoing but is without established parameters, agreements, or any other officially acknowledged application. Businesses look after their own top priority in a relationship which makes the symbiosis fragile.
“Short-term gains from relationships have a time and a place, but businesses looking for greater mutual success over a longer period will graduate to a partnership,” says Connie Testa, CSS Tec Managing Director.
Formal business partnerships
These inter-business connections take much more time, energy, effort, and conjoined planning, but output greater collective returns than informal business relationships. Engaging in a formal business partnership often includes formal documentation like a master service agreement (MSA) or a statement of work (SOW) detailing the exact timeline, budgetary commitments, actions, and shared purpose of the two engaging businesses.
Partnerships eliminate ambiguity that clouds relationships and clearly outline each participating business’s responsibilities to achieve success. Understanding not only where the two (or more) businesses add value, but also how an outcome is deemed successful is crucial to a continued formal business partnership. Define those specifications and the opportunities are limitless. Forbes recently reported that 95 percent of Microsoft’s commercial revenue comes through its partner ecosystem. In a separate study, Harvard Business Review found that 94 percent of tech executives consider innovation partnerships an indispensable growth strategy.
Pursuing business partnerships pays out when the focus is on quality, not quantity. Choose your best business relationships to inquire about a partnership. Ensure the two or more parties involved share purpose, perspective, transparency, and agility. Not only will partnerships weather bear markets and spur innovation, but will also create opportunity through secondary beneficiaries of the direct parties involved.
Develop a formal business partnership with CSS Tec to streamline your technical hiring and maximize success
Take your first step in building your technical team with the staffing experts at CSS Tec today. With talent placement expertise in application development, data analytics, cyber security, cloud architecture, infrastructure, technical PMO, and Salesforce staffing, CSS Tec provides full-scope staffing for any technical operation. Connect with CSS Tec today to utilize the best technical talent on the market!