Developing Strategic Partnerships

Defending market position and profitability, this book shows how to achieve "standout" with major customers designed to ensure you become less of a supplier of a commodity and more of a co-developer of wealth-creating initiatives. Using a step-by-step methodology, the author goes through 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, highlighting how to gain customer commitment, the technical and commercial study, building the partnership team, and evaluating and feeding back its progress. The text is also backed up with international case examples which show how different companies have developed partnerships and the outcomes realized from them.