Run the gap analysis yourself

Every partnership I have built that lasted started with a piece of paper I wrote myself, not one marketing handed me. Four questions, in order.

Where are we losing, against the market or against one named competitor? Not where are we weak. Where are we losing deals.

Which of those losses can we not fix alone, at least not this year?

If we bring someone in to fix it, what are they short of that we have? A partner who gains nothing from you is a vendor, and vendors leave.

Does the problem stay solved for both of us after the announcement?

Here is what that looked like once. We made encoders. Good ones. And we kept losing the second half of the conversation, because after the customer compressed the video they needed to get it to people, and we did not have a streaming server and could not build one fast enough to matter. That was question one and question two, answered out loud, in a room where nobody enjoyed it.

The first company we asked said no. They were bigger than us and saw no gap on their side. Fair enough, that is question three failing, and it is better to fail it on paper than in a contract.

The second company we asked had a very good streaming server and no hardware, no way to get into the racks where our encoders already lived. Their gap, our fill. We put their server inside our box. The customer bought one device and got both halves of the problem solved. That product line did not exist before that conversation, and it existed because two lists were written down and set side by side.

That is the whole method. It fits on one page, and most of the partnerships I have watched fail skipped it, because the type got picked before the questions got asked. Somebody decided "we need a reseller program" or "we need a marketplace listing" and then went looking for a reason.

Pick the type last.

Thursday: the one everybody picks first.

Who at your company can name, out loud, the one competitor you are losing to and the one thing you cannot fix alone?

Part 3 of 15 in the Which Partnership series.