Partnering: Finding Your Strengths and Weaknesses by Joshua Feinberg

In partnering, the first thing you need to do is figure out your strengths. What it is that you do best? What does your store enjoy? What's financially viable? What you're planning on doing for the next six months to a year? You really want to make sure that you're not partnering with someone that's going to be a direct competitor of yours and vice versa.

What's Your Specialty?

It might be network consulting for small dental offices. It might be document imaging solutions for small law offices. Maybe it's point of sale networks, BOS systems, for small restaurant chains. Whatever it is, once you've figured out where your real strength is, the best, most productive kind of partnering that you can possibly do is with other non-competing technology providers in your area.

Make Sure You're Not Partnering With Competitors

Double underline and highlight the "non" part. Otherwise you're going to be terrified that you're going after each other's prospects and clients. One of the scariest things for a lot of people when they get first get started with partnering is that this company is going to go aggressively after your business.

In order to be sure that you are non-competing, you need to move past "business card BS." Know exactly what it is that they do. Most of the companies that you're going to want to partner with and most of the companies that are going to want to partner with you need to know more about what your real strength is beyond hardware, software, LANs and service.

Move Past the Business Card Terms

Everyone says the same thing on their business card, their yellow pages ad and their direct mail piece. Most people list PC hardware, software, and networking and services. But it's really important when you're partnering with a company to figure out what their core competency is. What's the best thing that they do? What are they known for? What is the one thing their customer prospects come to them for?

Make Sure Your Partners Have Completely Different Niches

You need to look for highly technical people; deeply niched IT consultants who are already out there. Look for consultants who don't want to touch the stuff that you do every day.

In other words, if your staff has good skills that can get you simple dedicated server installations but things like Microsoft Exchange Server or SQL server or VPNs throw you for a loop, that's where it pays to look around for some consultants in your area that would be good to partner with.

Partnering: How It Benefits Your Computer Consulting Practice

Partnering is really the only way that you can do virtual IT the right way in small business computer consulting. It provides three extremely compelling benefits.

You can broaden the skills you offer to a potential client and your existing clients, and provide a more complete solution. This is absolutely critical if you're selling to non-technical small business owners that don't put up with finger pointing.

If they're not technical, they don't want to have six different tech providers. They don't want to have six different VARs in the Rolodex. The finger pointing and the accountability shirking will drive them absolutely nuts.

They need someone who can come in and take responsibility end to end and take ownership of the problem. Either you handle it in-house or you find the resources to get it handled. So the partnering with non-competing tech providers is going to provide a very important benefit for delivering on that virtual IT.

Partnering is also going to help you broaden your sales force very quickly and effectively. If another technology provider who's the incumbent on an account recommends you for a particular part of that role, you're just about sold. That's as golden of a referral that you can get.

In a lot of ways, that's even stronger than getting referred by their accountant, because they trust the technology provider, no matter who is the generalist and who is the niche provider.

It's not about price. It's not a price-sensitive buyer. It's about your coming about as highly recommended as you can possibly get. So the second huge benefit here is you get the opportunity to get in front of your partner's clients when they bring you in,

But even more importantly, 21 percent of annual revenue from most of the consultants we work with is coming from partnering. So if you don't want to leave this 21 percent of revenue on the table, it's time to really get serious about partnering for more profit.

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Computer Consultants Secrets. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}

About the Author

Joshua Feinberg helps computer consultants get more steady, high-paying clients. Learn how you can too. Sign-up now for Joshua's free Computer Consultants Secrets audio training at http://www.ComputerConsultantsSecrets.com


	subscribe to ceo ezine