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Alliances & Collaboration

In today’s economy, building strong Strategic Alliances will enable your business to gain a competitive advantage through access to your partner’s resources, including their knowledge, technologies and their people.

Teaming with others will add complementary resources and abilities to your company and will enable those you are teaming with to grow more quickly and efficiently in the process.  It is a WIN-WIN for both you and your partners.    The most successful companies in our world rely heavily on alliances to extend their technical and operational resources, and most importantly to expand their own networks.

Through the process of building strategic partnerships, your business will save time, increase productivity, and will move to amazing levels of innovation in the market place, which greatly increases your competitive advantage.

In order to support you in the development of a strong network, we are asking you in this lesson today to begin by developing a Team 100.  The Team 100 concept is simple.  The goal of this step in your marketing plan is to educate 100 other professionals on exactly what you do as a business owner.  You then in turn ask them to educate you on what it is they do.  Through this fair and honest approach, you strike an agreement to send referrals to each other willingly and with enthusiasm.

The professionals you know and come in contact with may:
 
   1. Be a perfect client for you.

   2. Bring to you a network that can become a source of referrals for your business.

In planning to develop a strong Team 100, we ask you to consider these points carefully in order to choose partnerships which will best support you both personally and professionally: 

   1. Define the outcomes expected from the relationship for all parties in the strategic alliance.

   2. Identify clearly the results, which will cause the alliance to be most beneficial for your business and any operating issues, which need to be addressed to achieve desired results.  

   3. Ask your strategic partners to define clearly the results that will cause the alliance to be most beneficial for their business and any operating issues which need to be addressed to achieve desired results.

   4. Define the basics of how you will operate in the strategic partnership.  It will be important for both of you to feel confidant about referring each other to the people in your networks.  

   5. Discuss vision, mission, values, and company cultures with your strategic partners.  You want to be certain that the company cultures are compatible and that you both can operate within a relationship built on trust.

This form is simply a guideline.  You will want to adjust the professionals on the list to include professionals who you feel may provide services to your target market.

This may take you from 6 – 12 months to complete but today fill in a minimum of twenty contacts that you already know.  You many need to get on the phone and ask friends, family and business associates to help you complete this list.  

Once you have your Team 100 in place, you will have One Hundred Business Owners who will know who you are and what you do.  These One Hundred Business Owners will bring with them another 50-100 strong relationships that can then become a part of your network.  This one step will add amazing value to your life and to the lives of your clients.  

Whether we are Solopreneurs or work in a group it is critical that we create leverage (doing more with less) and synergy (to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects).

Cindy Morus, at cindy@cindymorus.com of www.cindymorus.com, a graduate of the 90 Day Marketing Marathon™  has graciously offered her copy of the Team 100 form she uses and the letter she used to build her team.  Thanks Cindy!

Team 100 Form
Team 100 Letter