Partnership Meetings
Building and sustaining tailored business relationships with key customers and suppliers can lead to a competitive advantage. However, partnerships are challenging to manage. Too often, managers enter into a relationship with a key customer or supplier without either side clearly identifying their expectations. This is the primary reason why these relationships fail to meet the goals of one or both sides. With this in mind, we have developed a model that can be used to identify the business reasons for building more closeness in a relationship (these are called 'drivers' of the partnership).
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In a day-and-a-half partnership meeting, a cross-functional management team from each company works separately with a meeting facilitator to identify their firm's drivers of the partnership. After both sides have agreed on the drivers, the next step is to identify the appropriate type of partnership by considering the strength of the drivers and how the two organizations mesh. The output of the day-and-a-half meeting is a strategy and an action plan for managing the relationship and achieving each organization's drivers.
We have conducted more than 80 partnership meetings with major corporations around the world. One example is the Wendy's and Tyson relationship, which was the basis for a 2004 article in Harvard Business Review. You can also read about the Partnership Model in new book, Building High Performance Business Relationships, which contains an in-depth description of the model and provides details about how to use it.
If you would like more information about our partnership facilitation services please contact us at info@thepartnershipmodel.com
“It is incredible what we learned about our customers in these meetings. In some cases, we found that certain goals we had were, as a matter of customer policy, never going to happen, so we were able to immediately pull resources back. In other cases, we uncovered opportunities for collaboration that we had no idea existed. Either way, the sessions helped us, and our customers, make much smarter investments with each other and accelerate returns on those investments.”
—Jenny L. Verner
President, Specialty Canola Oils,
Cargill, Incorporated