Developing Strategic Alliances

“Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.” -W.H. Auden, 1962

Reasons and Benefits of Developing Strategic Alliances

The reasons for strategic alliances become apparent when you understand the benefits. This applies to businesses and organizations of all sizes. Your reason for developing an alliance could be for research, production, marketing, distribution, or management. Your increased capability for success through alliance relationships will encourage your continued embracing of the practice. The same holds true, regardless of whether you enter strategic alliances as an individual or organization. Many of the benefits create high value for different segments of the distribution chain rather than all the segments.

I’m not going to specifically tell you which benefits relate to manufacturers, wholesale distributors, retailers and service organizations. The reason is that I do not want you to limit yourself. As I regularly share in my seminars, innovation can be creating a new wheel or adapting another’s idea to your situation. What’s in it for you? Maybe everything listed below or maybe only a few benefits. How much benefit you receive will be a function of your self-imposed limits, or hopefully a lack them.

In developing your strategic alliances, you are only limited to the quality of your alliance relationships and your imagination—be limitless! There are seven general areas in which you can profit from building alliances. They are as follows:

1. Products

2. Access

3. Operations

4. Technology

5. Strategic Growth

6. Organization

7. Finance

Your core strengths may lend you to develop alliances in only a few areas, and that is just fine. Or, you may desire to develop alliances in many areas over time. Work hard to develop Outrageously Successful Relationships (OSRs) in all your alliances. Following, you will discover what’s in it for you, if you develop the right alliance, with the right people.

Ultimately the benefit to developing strategic alliances with others is for solutions through mutually beneficial efforts. Together you can solve your problems, those of your customers’ suppliers’ and employees’. Be sure you know what it is that you are want to get out of each of your alliance efforts! It's rare that a company can be all things to all people. Working in cooperation with others is the solution. Adopting the paradigm of strategic alliances will get you much closer to your goals than without these valuable relationships. Finally, and decisively important, when a company embraces the philosophy of strategic alliances, the result will be improvement in quality, productivity and profitability. And yes, this is done through cooperation and collaboration.

“Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life. The more diversified our labors and interests have become in the modern world, the more surely need to integrate our efforts to justify our individual selves and our civilization.” -Walt Disney