Developing Strategic Partnerships

Developing Strategic Partnerships delivers forward an innovative approach to defending market position and profitability, which effectively locks out competitors. It shows how to achieve 'standout' with major customers that will ensure you become less so a supplier of a commodity and more of a co-developer of wealth-creating opportunities.

Chris Steward takes you through a step-by-step methodology of the planning stage of defining a true partnership, from identifying potential alliances, utilizing efficient filters for selection and profiling customers, to the choice of the strategic initiative which will be tackled. He then focuses on implementation, and highlights how to gain customer commitment, the technical and commercial study, building the partnership team, and evaluating and feeding back its progress.

Developing Strategic Partnerships enables you to have access to a sophisticated technique of building customer alliances, developed over many years. This is backed up with international case examples which show how different companies have developed partnerships and the outcomes realized from them. The book maps out for the business development practitioner how to move from ordinary business to business co-operation to creating a unique, lasting and profitable partnership.

Contents: Introduction. Part I Making Strategy Choices: Degrees of freedom; Real competitive differential; Strategic partnerships. Part II Planning for a Strategic Alliance: Gaining internal approval; Profiling and selecting a partner; Strategic partnership initiatives. Part III Implementing and Sustaining an Alliance: Gaining partnership commitment; The technical and commercial study; The SPI team approach; Evaluating strategic partnerships; Sustaining strategic partnerships; References; Index.

About the Author: Chris Steward has been consulting internationally in the area of strategic marketing for over ten years. His client list includes many blue chip companies. He is the author of articles and a book on major account management. Chris is a regular speaker at Management Centre Europe.