21 févr.

Finding out the best partner

Posted by Nicolas in best practice

As soon as you have a clear understanding of people’s relationships on your market (that sounds challenging, but this is our final mission), you may wonder :

Among the hundreds of connections I have, who may be the best partners for my business ?

Let’s define what would be easyrules to pick up a good partner :

  • a contact (or a company) who has a complementary product/service to yours and could promote your offering to his clients
  • the partner has a solid reach to the targeted industries and prospects (and that’s sometimes hard to check)
  • the partner has a real business interest in promoting your product/service

You can address partners as companies or as contacts. But one of the key success factor for a successful partnership is trust. And trust is built between people, not organizations.

Finally, trying cold-calling to reach partners usually leads to failure. There may be dozens of potential good partners for you on your market. So pick up the ones you have in your own network, or who can be recommended by your relationships. Starting with confidence is a good point.

For the ones of you who experience IKO, we try to automate such a process of exploring the right potential partners.

First, we analyze your clients/prospects portfolio: their industry sectors, sizes (whether you target SMBs of large entreprises), and the countries you prospect in. To be relevant, your potential partners have to fit in your target strategy.

Second, we map the typical contacts for your business : if you usually talk to CIOs to promote your business, your partner may be able to reach such types of contacts (not project managers nor people in the HR division).

And then, we look for all your extended relationships (level #1 and #2 in your social networks, usually about 50k people) to find out:

  • who has the more valuable contacts for you
  • in your targeted company panel

Sometimes, you can discover this way that your best potential partner is your last summer’s friend, or that your wife’s boss may open fantastic doors to new prospects !

The first users send us great feedbacks on this sales intelligence. Come and play with it !