I was thinking about it for a long time. Have you experienced the following – there’s a thought in your head, but you don’t know what is it exactly. It appears every time you have to meet with a prospective client. What is it?
The funny thing is that it disappears whenever the meeting is with an amiable person. On the contrary, it worsens always during a meeting with a person who wasn’t sympathetic and well behaved even if the meeting went great and the chances for striking a deal are high. Have you experienced such a feeling?
Then I realized, it’s probably because most of us have a gut feeling about people. Whenever you don’t like the person next to you, it’s better to avoid any short term gains and transactions with such an individual. Oh, and the opposite, if you felt wonderful speaking with someone, even though, the meeting may not went well, you should fight like a lion to build a partnership with him/her. Invest and do your best to build a relationship with him/her – short term investment for a long term success. And the best part is that during such a time you feel elated due to the communication and meetings with this person from which you gain at least as much as you give.
The above was a long introduction but I’m sure that you’ve felt the same way many times especially if you do business development or sales. If you build a strong partnership, a money transaction will follow. One must not think about profit initially, but about:
- How can I help?
- What is the value I can deliver?
- Is my team’s skillset relevant?
- Are my services at the quality expected?
- Am I able to set up the needed communication channels?
These are the important questions one must answer in the beginning. Such a mindset combined with the right answers will help you build trust which is essential in every partnership.
Trust nowadays is as important as never before. Living in this fast paced world where being busy is a norm, to trust someone that he will deliver the expected on time and with the right quality is super rare. And for one to win such a trust, he has to fight for it and prove constantly that he’s worthy of it. It’s so hard that many prefer the easy way – to exaggerate or even lie about their potential just to earn some short term reward. However, in the long term the real self will be seen.
Building partnerships not transactions is my philosophy and let me share what I mean. It means that you must invest at least as much and provide as much value as the other partner. You must establish great communication between you and trust each one completely. It’s for the long term and during hard times you know that you both will do your best to change the situation to good. One is involved fully. One is emotionally attached. The success of the partner is your goal and you fight & struggle to achieve it. It’s way more complicated than just do a project for the short term and get the money wired despite the quality of the delivery.
If you build partnerships you’ll get more of the following:
Dreamix recently developed a project for RGB Spectrum which has been integrated into one of our regular product offerings. The Dreamix team was very capable, focused and helpful for the duration of the project, despite getting less support than they deserved during the project. Instead of just writing about how I would recommend Dreamix, I will illustrate it by noting that I have just launched another project with them.”
Lynton Auld, VP of Engineering RGB Spectrum
“So between about January and June of 2015, we engaged the Dreamix team and worked closely with them, during which time a few things became very apparent very quickly: first, these were some genuinely talented developers; second, they really cared about Twibble, to a legitimately passionate and emotional degree; and third, they must be superhuman as they actually never sleep. Seriously, it didn’t matter what time of day we’d email or Skype them, somebody was always there to respond, ten hours ahead of our San Francisco timezone. The point is, the Dreamix team are no longer just some anonymous “offshore development team;” they have become, quite literally, part of the Twibble team itself. This became apparent just several weeks into our engagement when the Dreamix team started to refer to Twibble as “we” instead of “you” or “it.”. We no longer regard Dreamix as a third party development team; to us, they’re just Twibble.It has been our profound honor and privilege to work with them, and we look forward to making Twibble the NBT — that’s “Next Big Thing” — with them”
Marc Hoag, CEO & Co-Founder, Twibble
Such responses aren’t easy to get and aren’t possible if you haven’t been involved in the success and failures during the projects. What I mean is that, partnership is really important because if you trust each other, even during hard times, you’ll know that the other party is doing their best to fix the problems. It’s person to person not company to company and knowing each other is essential. How can you know a man if you haven’t interacted with him for some time. It’s impossible.
That’s why invest in building a partnership not getting the money from a transaction. Money is just a tool to be able to live but the goal is to help and make people happy. The goal is to build meaningful things and feel proud of your doings. And lastly, the goals is to know great people and learn from them. That’s what’s important at the end and it’s only possible by building partnerships not transactions!
