The Benefits of Strategic Partnerships

1. Higher customer retention — gain your stakeholders’ trust to give them an incentive to stick by your side

2. Foresight — be the first to know and be prepared to adapt when your customers face changes.

3. Uncover what drives your stakeholders — listen like a hostage negotiator and hear not just to what’s said but how its said and what’s not being said.

4. Stay in the loop — elevate your position as a trusted partner and keep the pulse of what’s going on before it becomes a problem. Take strong positions to create value for your stakeholders and earn your right to hold a seat at the decision-making table.

5. Better quality data for forecasting — stakeholders are more willing to share data and real-time statistics when they partner with you. Get insights that allow you to forecast your own company progress while also casting into the future for your customer.

Every profession faces unique challenges to securing our reputation as a trusted advisor that has our stakeholders’ interest in mind.

The IT Challenge: IT can have a reputation for not being user-friendly. People can be intimidated by what they don’t know — IT can be a pain point for that vulnerability and may end up left out of the meetings. Empathy is our opportunity for this challenge.

The Finance Challenge: Finance people may be perceived as black and white and risk-adverse. The challenge can be Finance’s uncompromising posture which can result in adversarial relationships. Our opportunity with this group is in cultivating a collaborative approach vs. a custodial one i.e. finding a balance between compliance and risk allowance.

The HR Challenge: HR is recognizable to all and familiarity without distinction can breed contempt. The HR opportunity is to improve credibility by applying knowledge and experience to specific stakeholder situations in a way that creates new value by solving problems rather than just diagnosing them.

The Legal Challenge: Legal may be perceived as adversarial and so the challenge is in intimacy through both risk taking and empathy to be more easily relatable. The Legal opportunity is in distinguishing between the private and personal. What’s private is at the discretion of the stakeholder. What’s personal is your ability to relate as on the human level and take risks by sharing your personal self. Your effectiveness and professionalism depends on your ability to relate to stakeholders person-to-person, human-to-human, and not by transactional relationships or position titles.