Trusted Partners in business? Why do you need them and 4 key recommendations….

If you ask anyone to name the most important elements of any long-term, satisfying relationship, trust is usually near the top of any list. This is certainly true for personal relationships, but it is also true for business relationships. Most business leaders understand that the only way to effectively run a business is to build not only partnerships, but trusted partnerships with customers, business colleagues, channel alliances, and staff. In today’s hectic business economy, developing trust between organizations has become critical than ever. By adopting a trusted partnership model across your enterprise, the sky’s the limit for success...read more on trust in IT Dept.

Recent Gallup research shows that the problem is, Business team celebrating a triumph with arms uponly 31% of B2B customers believe their supplier understands their needs, and only half of B2B customers (54%) strongly agree that their sales or account teams are trusted advisers.

Here are 3 key recommendations to consider for building trusted, successful partnerships with IT Service organizations

Financial goals are aligned: Investing time in understanding financial goals of each other will provide perspective if both organizations are moving in similar directions. If your organizational goals are to reduce interruptions in business to get most return from your payroll investment, business leaders need to understand that if delivering these results is financially beneficial for your service provider’s organization. In a contrary, if your service provider’s goals are to bill as many hours and sell products to be profitable, you will have a conflict. Whatever business results you are expecting, ensure delivering these results is aligned with your service providers financial goals...read more on impact

Business results or organizational goals are aligned: As a business leader, understand that business results that you are expecting from your service provider is aligned with their organizational goals. For example, if you are dealing with training issues, compliance issues, Strategy or documentation issues, make sure that delivering these results is core competency and organizational goals for your service provider. If compliance is critical for your organization and its low priority for your service provider, it will not deliver on your expected business results and will waste a lot of time building partnerships...read more on business risks

Process Approach: Invest time in understanding how your service provider will deliver expected results, ensure they have defined and proven process to deliver results. This will ensure that your service provider have means to measure, benchmark and improve your business performance, risks over time and their organization can deliver consistent results over the time. Also consider long term goals and avoid any trial & error or ad-hoc approaches to service delivery before investing time and money in building partnership for return on your time and effort investment...read more on process

Priorities are aligned – Focused on Revenue and business growth: In order for your partnership with IT service provider to be successful, you need your service provider to not only deal with technology issues but also build and deliver on strategy to align technology with business growth and generating higher revenue. In other words, you need to ensure your service provider is not only technology focused but most importantly focused on critical business requirements your people, revenue and performance...read more on revenue & profit margin

Invest time and effort early on in these precious partnerships between customers, third parties and even within our own companies. From establishing trust early in the relationship, all involved can openly share knowledge to achieve a synergy where everybody wins.....read more on technology impact

Recent study at IBM with Forrester partnership shows  why “Trust Must Be The Foundation Of Your B2B Digital Ecosystem"

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Also review – Impact on Revenue blog

Understanding cost – access cost calculator