How to Make Strategic Partnerships Work: Seven Education-Market Success Factors

Do You Need Distribution Clout, School Sales Savvy or Education Marketing Expertise?

At the core of why many managers are looking for partners is a general bucket called “distribution.” But, in fact, not many senior managers in our industry are looking for a distributor, at least by the classic definition. Distributors specialize in operations: things like inventory management, delivery systems, and handling a high volume of transactions. Most of the partnerships people talk about are to address a much broader range of channel requirements: to develop, promote, sell, install, support, and maintain sophisticated solutions to be used to support teaching and learning or “back office” type of school operations.

Few companies that sell to schools have the skills and people to do the job that is required in such a complex market and only a handful do it all well. Glaring weaknesses and increasing needs exist in the sales and education marketing areas. But other trends over the past several years are also creating urgency for companies to find partners to gain access to school decision makers and to inject leverage into their go-to-market strategies.

Developing Partnership Management Skills: Essential to School-Market Success.

As the education industry continues to consolidate, and smaller companies scramble to compete with the big dogs, partnering becomes a survival strategy. As a result, more of my work with companies in the ed-tech industry is playing matchmaker. What I see is this: many company managers don’t know how to identify a good partnering opportunity or how to work successfully with another company. The result? False starts and wasted time are common. The friendly discussions at industry conference cocktail parties go nowhere. Empty relationships are common; breakdowns are frequent.

What do I mean by an empty relationship? You may have observed or your company may be part of a trend evidenced by lists of “industry partners” on company websites. Have you noticed there is rarely an explanation of the nature of these partnerships? That’s because there is usually no substantive deliverable. The typical partner Web page is “window dressing” to impress the outside world, but, in fact, the relationships are not delivering value to the bottom line of either company.

How do you avoid empty business relationships? How can you build education market partnerships that survive, thrive, and result in more sales to educators? While many factors critical to partnerships that actually deliver do exist, what follows are my thoughts on eight of the more important aspects for you to consider, based on education market research, discussions with many industry executives, and being involved personally with a range of strategic partnerships in the education industry, some of which have done well and others that failed. How about you?

Begin By Outlining Your Objectives

#1 – Start here: You must know and be able to articulate clearly what competitive value you will bring to the relationship, and what you are willing (and not willing) to give up, because every partnership involves loss of independence. Have in mind how you will know if the partnership is working. It is important that everyone who is going to be involved with the decision agrees to key objectives and has realistic expectations. If you can’t sell your value, if you struggle to establish a set of mutual expectations that seem doable, right from the get-go of a partnership exploration, then it’s time to move on. This single requirement causes more breakdowns than the other seven success factors.

Find the Right Partner: Click Here to Get the Entire Partnership Article: Seven Additional Success Factors, Plus Valuable Partnering Tools from STS