Which partnership are you actually setting up?

I have asked that question in a lot of rooms over 25 years and the answer is usually "a partnership." That is not an answer. It is a category. Inside it there are at least eleven different animals, and they eat different food.

Referral. Somebody sends you a name and gets a finder's fee. Easiest to set up. Almost never moves the revenue line, and it is the first one everybody forgets.

Reseller. They carry your product on their paper. You gave up margin for reach. Whether you got the reach is the whole question.

Distribution. One partner who is most of your number. Comfortable until it is not.

Technology integration. Your product and theirs do something together that neither does alone. This is the one that changes a market, and it is the one most companies confuse with a logo on a slide.

OEM. Your part inside their product. You disappear and get paid for it.

Systems integrator or GSI. They build it for the customer. You are one line in a much bigger statement of work.

Services. Someone else installs, trains and supports what you sold. Your reputation now lives in their truck.

Alliance. Two big companies agree to go to market together. Real when the field teams share quota. Theater when they share a press release.

Standards body. You sit in a room with your competitors and decide together what the whole industry will build. Slow, unglamorous, and it sets the rules everyone else plays by.

Competitor turned partner. The one nobody plans for. I have done it once and it changed two companies.

Marketplace. Their storefront, your listing, their budget already committed. I have only ever been on the buying side of that one, and I will say so when we get there.

Each of these has a different setup cost, a different failure mode, and a different way of telling you it is working. Over the next seven weeks I am going to take them one at a time, with one test each that tells you whether what you have is real.

But first, Thursday, the question that comes before all eleven: what are you missing that a partner is supposed to fill? Most companies never write that down.

Which one are you setting up right now?

Part 1 of 15 in the Which Partnership series.