Building Successful Alliances

Partnering for Profits: Deeper Relationships with Alliance Partners

A topic that I wrote about in my first book, “The Art of Partnering” back in the mid-1990s is that of going deeper (vertically) to build additional relationships beyond your immediate contacts. When you do this in our alliance partner organizations, you achieve two important alliance strengthening elements:

1. Business leaders get promoted, transferred, and fired. If this happens to your only contact at an alliance organization, chaos in the daily functioning of the alliance is sure to follow. However, if your relationships go both wide and deep in your partner organization, there is a good chance that you will already have a relationship with your new contact, be they transferred or promoted.

2. When problems in the alliance occur, and they will, it is having the deep organizational relationships that will hold things together. When partners are at war, anything one does is considered confrontational by the other. Conversely, when relationships are good, mistakes made by a partner organization are simply considered just that; honest mistakes and not cause for eliminating the alliance.

To keep your strategic alliances working like a well oiled machine, take the time and make the effort to build relationships both deep and wide in your partner organization.

You can read more about the fine points in my several alliance articles at http://www.Rigsbee.com/morearticles.htm (Permission to reprint is also there.)

Executive Presentation Skills: Deep Personal Inner Exploration

Consider the idea of deep personal inner exploration of your core message, wisdom, and universal truths in preparation for your next presentation. My good friend, John Alston, CSP, CPAE, once told me to get rid of the “fat” around my universal truths. He told me that it is that “fat” that diffuses the power of my message.

As we endeavor, I believe, to develop content to share with others, too frequently we abandon what Mark Victor Hansen, CSP, told me is “Your Inner Knower.” Yes, we have to trust ourselves. In presenting our ideas to others there is a monumental need for you to access our inner core beliefs. This is necessary on order to muster up your passion to effectively to influence others. In contrast think about the monotone speaker reading his/her PowerPoint bullet points, one at a time—at an excruciatingly slow pace.

Compare in your mind the vision of the slow monotone speaker to that of a strong, committed and powerful speaker, like John Alston. In order to influence others you must dig deep into your soul to determine your real beliefs on any topic in order to share the subtleties of the topic through your window on the world.

Before every speech, consider spending the time necessary to quiet the static in your head, to explore your beliefs, and determine the core message (about any topic) that you want to share with your audience.

Executive Public Speakers, Professional Speakers, and Emerging Professional Speakers; please visit http://www.SucceedInSpeaking.com for additional ideas, assistance, and resources.

Trade Association & Professional Society Executives: Go Deeper in Member Companies

As I mentioned above in the “Partnering for Profits” section, there are benefits for going deeper in building relationships in partner organizations. This applies also for trade associations and to some degree in professional societies.

By going deeper, encouraging conference attendance and membership of additional job levels, within your current member companies will serve your organization well. The cost to your organization will be appropriating the necessary resources to both develop additional levels of educational programming and appropriate conference activities.

The benefits to your organization are:

• Increased membership from additional employee levels

• Member retention as owners/CEOs will see additional value in their membership through providing cost effective training and other benefits for their employees

• Emotional ownership in your association from tomorrow’s leaders of your member companies.

• Increased convention/conference/expo attendance

• Increased interest from your supplier members to participate at higher levels driven by increased meeting attendance and ability to influence up and coming users/buyers of their products and services

Association Executives may access association growth articles and member recruitment campaign information at http://www.GrowingYourAssociation.com