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What are Partnerships? Partnerships take place when two or more brands collaborate with each other to achieve their objectives. When a primary brand has the ideal product or service offering that could be complementary to another brand’s product or service offering resources such as the target audience can be utilized jointly to improve the value proposition. The key to good partnerships is to think in terms of complementary goods and services. The closer the products’ feature sets are (or the more complementary two products or services are to each other) the better the partnership will flourish.

Here are a few examples of the most popular and easy to understand partnership deals:

There are many other examples of great partnerships, but from the above we can see how important it is to have complementary offerings to form good partnerships. The Pepsi & Pizza Hut or Coca-Cola and McDonald’s partnership shows how, for the longest time, these beverages have been associated with food, especially junk food. This helped them expand into the target audience of the restaurant business (Pepsi also partnered with Taco Bell and KFC) as well as their sales and revenue. Therefore, when thinking about partnerships, it is essential to think about all the complementary goods and/or services that people are buying and how they can be partnered with.

Needless to say, finding the right partners and landing the right deals isn’t very easy. The best channel deals need to be relevant to both sides. If the deals aren’t handled well or the partner relevancy isn’t factored in properly, the best deals can turn fatal quite quickly.

An Accenture report stated that 80 percent of chief sales officers (CSOs) have said that channel partners contribute 50 percent or more to their companies’ yearly revenues. Moreover, a badly handled partnership might not be limited to your current partners but could affect potential future partners or worse, turn erstwhile partners into competitors.

Let’s understand the important benefits of GTM partnerships and how they help grow your business, so you know what a good partner could do for you in business.

Enhance sales by penetrating into existing market and growing into new market
GTM partnerships, if planned well, can help you break into existing markets (despite a number of competitors) or help you pioneer totally new markets, especially markets with a different language, culture, or geographic location. Partnering enables you to do this without the costs of acquisition – your chances of success multiply without having to put in the costs, time and efforts to build your brand in a new market yourself.
Depending on how well-known your partner is, it could also help expose your brand to a bigger pool of eyes and expand your marketplace reach by hitching the wagon to a bigger, better known brand. You can either sell through your partner, with your partner or for your partner, but whichever route you go will eventually help you enhance your sales. A pre-decided and well thought out margin could bring benefits to both sides and motivation for increased sales.

Help tap into complimentary potential through strategic integration partnerships

Strategic GTM partnerships also help close gaps in a products’ feature set by tapping into the complementary value of another company’s services.. A good example of this is the Lexus and Coach partnership. In the 1990s, especially, Lexus was the ultimate luxury car, while Coach, a luxury fashion brand, was also quite in-demand. At this time Lexus partnered with Coach to offer a one-of-a-kind luxury leather seating ^Source

Lead generation through strategic marketing partnerships
Co-marketing is when two companies come together to collaborate on promotional efforts and the lead from the promotions are shared by the companies. Such partnerships allow the two companies to share leads, establish salesperson-to-salesperson relationships and pay each other for referrals. GTM partnerships have proven to be highly beneficial when growing revenue through co-marketing or reseller arrangements. These programs mean lesser time to market a campaign, lesser CAC and opportunity to sell more business as a result of working with a channel partner than if they had approached the marketplace individually.

Co-development and operations
Partnering, especially in the tech industry, means access to new technologies and skills that can help you develop better quality products and streamline operations. This can help your company by gaining scale and/or improving supply chain operations.
An example of this is the partnership between Apple and IBM. According to them, the partnership “brought together the analytics and enterprise-scale computing of IBM with the elegant user experience of iPhone and iPad to deliver a new level of value for businesses.”

Exchange of mutually beneficial services
Companies can exchange mutually beneficial services, such as serving on each other’s advisory board and providing consulting services (e.g. on purchasing patterns, customer journey, types of decision makers, etc.). This can help strengthen the partnership as well as increase the productivity of the brands.

While great partnerships don’t happen overnight, carefully assessed partner recommendations could open the right doors for your business. A strategic partner relationship could well be compared to a locked treasure box – once the partnership “key” is put in place, there’s a plethora of value to be unveiled.

It could help boost sales, provide new resources and access to newer markets and customers. In fact, it could even open up opportunities with future partners helping your business stay relevant longer.

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