How to grow your business through strategic partnerships

This week I found myself in discussion with an associate who was providing business consultancy to a London web firm. He asked what my top tips were for growing the value of our projects and building the business.

After some thought, it was clear to me that our biggest area of growth in the last two years has come from partnerships with like-minded business owners and complimentary organisations.

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How we do it

For example, we position ourselves at the affordable end of the web design spectrum so we’ve partnered with other web companies who’s service is higher-priced. They still want to offer a low-cost solution so Web Wise has become the ‘lite’ version of their offering.

Another way that partnerships has helped us is in teaming up with business consultants or graphic designers. These sorts of complimentary individuals benefit from being able to recommend our services to their clients and we get access to this army of salespeople and evangelists for our brand.
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3 ways that you can grow using partnerships

1. Reputation reputation reputation. To build partnerships with like-minded businesses, reputation is the most important consideration. If you have a good reputation, people will want to recommend you and will continue to do so. Start here! Every happy customer improves your reputation and every unhappy one damages it. For further reading: check out our article on 3 ways to add credibility to your brand.

2. When it comes to finding new partners, think outside the box. Don’t just look for other businesses in your industry or those that are close to what you do. Think about what sort of organisations would benefit from recommending you? How will they look good to their clients if they’re linked to you? It’s all about adding value to the relationship. One example of a well-thought out partnership is the way in which when ordering Dominos pizza you can also rent a movie. This is two totally different business types coming together to offer value to each other.

3. How can you reward your partner? For example, Web Wise offers a variety of rewards including commission, help with marketing and website support. Sometimes the partner will simply be happy to have a trusted ally and won’t need a tangible reward, but it’s worth thinking about. Once again, this is about value and sometimes a small monetary reward can be a big incentive to promote your business.

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In summary, partnerships are well worth thinking about! They’ve helped us to increase the value and frequency of our sales whilst keeping the cost per sale down. The best thing of all though is that we’ve been able to surround ourselves with a network of trusted associates and friends that we can call upon to support us when needed.

If you’re interested in partnering with us, please send an email to [email protected]. 

Thanks for reading!

About the author

Dan Wiseman

Founder & director of Web Wise. He writes about web design, marketing, entrepreneurship, investing and games. Dan regularly speaks on these subjects and is available for coaching and consultancy.

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