Today’s market is extremely competitive, increasing the need and the importance of forming the ideal business alliance. Alliances are formed for many reasons, including the need for increased cash, to come up with viable solutions for seemingly insurmountable problems, to stay abreast of new technological advances and the need to gain market shares, among others. Continue reading
Tag Archives: partners
Managing Channels of Distribution with Strategic Partnerships
Starting or expanding a business takes more than just a good business plan and product. It also requires avenues for getting your products to the right customers at the right time. Finding channels of distribution that allow you to accomplish your business goals involves building deep strategic alliances with the right partners.
Strategic alliances create a quicker path to growth. Continue reading
Business Alliances: How Coffee And Payment Services Combined For Greater Outcomes
Walk into any Starbucks store in the country and become instantly greeted by the welcoming smells of freshly brewed coffee. You may also notice the happy customers going over business plans, reviewing homework, or simply surfing the Internet at their leisure. In general, the customer base of Starbucks is a happy group willing to fork over five dollars or more for their favorite coffee. However, there is always room for improvement. Continue reading
The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend: Why Defiance of Business Alliances Doesn’t Fly
Leveraging and employing business alliances are more commonplace than ever before. The antiquated idiom of, “The enemy of my enemy, is also my friend,” doesn’t seem to carry any weight, especially considering today’s digital world.
More importantly, if we were to join the Twitter-verse, post, pin, snap and chat with social networking online, business may be left behind. Continue reading
Alliance Management Strategies
Companies around the country are looking for new ways to build partnerships, improve their brand, grow their community and increase revenue. For all these goals, alliance management is crucial to get the job done. Consultants help to accomplish this task but the value of your product or service is also extremely important. Continue reading
Good Communication is Vital to Alliance Management
In alliance management, according to a Harvard Business Review article, companies tend to forget that they are working together because of their differences. Rather they must embrace those differences and find a way to leverage and create value from them. The article cites the partnership between Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft as a positive example of how this works. At first, the two companies differed in their approaches to sales which caused friction and misunderstanding. Continue reading
5 Key Alliance Management Tips
Consider this phrase: Alliance Management. On the surface, it sounds like a good idea, right? You want to carefully maintain your alliances. On the other hand, how exactly does one go about this? By the very nature of the word, you do not control – or entirely manage – those with whom you are allied. They work for another company
with different management, different goals and different products.
How can you make this work, then? Continue reading
Alliances for IoT Marketplace: Evolving Alliances
What is the Internet of Things (IoT)? Is it viable? Should my company be part of it and if so, how do we go about it? All good questions.
The IoT, loosely defined, is the ability of objects to share data with other objects wirelessly to enable that data to be used to control or manipulate devices intelligently. IoT is the next generation of connected devices. We have moved from having computers in dedicated rooms, to mobile devices to connected devices. Devices consist, as a minimum, of a controller chip and software. Chips are getting smaller. Alliances are a must! Continue reading
How to Choose the Right Business Alliances
Though there are many exciting, new businesses to partner with, it’s easy and more profitable to choose the right one. Here’s how.
2014 was a great year for startups geared toward enhancing consumer convenience through mobile devices. In fact, consumer tech was the obvious business focus that startup founders seemed to take the most interest in. Continue reading
Managing Channels of Distribution with Strategic Partnerships
Starting or expanding a business takes more than just a good business plan and product. It also requires avenues for getting your products to the right customers at the right time. Finding channels of distribution that allow you to accomplish your business goals involves building deep strategic alliances with the right partners.
Strategic alliances create a quicker path to growth. Continue reading
Why Strategic Alliances Sometimes Fail
The business community frequently relies upon strategic alliances to create better products, better distribution, and improved customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, many alliances fail. A review of those failures helps current business owners understand what to avoid.
Alliances Turn Into Rivalries Continue reading
Constructive Forms of Strategic Alliances
The best strategic alliances between two or more companies are those where company resources complement each other. At the same time, not all contributed resources can be used effectively in an alliance.
There are two major forms of constructive strategic alliances between companies, Continue reading
6 Questions to Ask Before Developing Strategic Alliances
Strategic alliances can increase market share, reduce competition, improve expertise, and open the door to new funding opportunities – but not all strategic alliances are created equal. The truth is that sometimes a strategic alliance can cause more harm than good if the partner company has different goals, gets more than it gives, or otherwise fails to live up to its side of the deal.
Before you set up a strategic alliance, ask yourself these questions first: Continue reading
Increase Channels of Distribution with Better People, Processes and Products
Channels of distribution are some of the most important parts of your business. If you have positive momentum in distribution, your product/service is constantly in demand and you are making money. If you cannot get distribution, finding customers is difficult and costly and your business is overwhelming.
Fans of The Profit are familiar with the 3P’s of business: People, Process and Product. Continue reading
Strategic Alliances Need Solid Foundations
Once you’ve decided what company you’re going to work with, it’s time to establish a good alliance foundation. In a strategic alliance two companies are coming together, yes. However,
- Two groups of employees and senior level staff,
- Two business models,
- Two corporate cultures,
- Two team management styles, and
- Two brand identities
Avoid Making Business Alliances Vulnerable
Unlike many other partnerships found in life, business alliances are not the most natural thing to create. Human beings come together as friends, romantic partners, and co-workers, but businesses are often thought of as adversaries. Despite this general perspective, studies show business alliances often raise profits and generate other benefits for both partners. The only problem is many of these alliances fail.
The Facts About Alliance Failure
Entrepreneurs may be alarmed to learn about the high failure rate of business alliances. Continue reading
How Business Alliances Help Startups Succeed
“8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months. A whopping 80% crash and burn.” According to Entrepreneur there is only one thing you need to succeed as a startup, so don’t panic. “Your startup can still succeed. But it will depend on one thing and one thing only. Customers.”
However, developing your product, bringing it to market, finding customers, and keeping Continue reading
Deming Management and Business Alliances: Quality and Efficiency
As those familiar with W. Edwards Deming know, Business Alliances are the most important part of supply chain management. For those not familiar with Deming, he was an American economist who rebuilt post-war Japan and came back to the United States in the 1980s to address why Japanese manufacturing had beaten American manufacturing. Total quality control is his most well-known ideas, but one of his 14 points addresses the need to develop strategic partnerships with suppliers.
In Out of The Crisis, he points out that Japanese companies learned early that “the best Continue reading
3 Steps to Vetting Alliance Partners
Alliance Partners bring unique strengths to your business. Each partnership can bring support, innovation, resources, and intelligence to your business. With so much on the line, how do you decide who is your best alliance partner?
In any relationship, there is a vetting process which takes place before you commit to the relationship. Business alliances are no different than any other relationship in the vetting process. A young couple begins dating with discovery, exploration, testing, and more. Shouldn’t you be doing the same when you create an alliance? Continue reading
Channels of Distribution Slowing You Down?
Channels of Distribution are key alliances a business can enter into. As pointed out by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary on almost every episode, not getting distribution kills a company. Channels of Distribution move your product to potential customers.
For manufacturing companies, your distribution channels will be wholesalers and retailers Continue reading