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Hooking Up: Creating a Small Business Partner Profiling Tool

Written by: Sarah Gerdes

Article Overview: You’re an entrepreneur starting or running a small business, barely keeping your head above water when suddenly, success hits in the form of two, five or twenty calls a day from companies that want to partner with you. At first you’re flattered until you realize you don’t have time to talk those firms you know will drive revenue for your organization, and now you are being asked to consider the business pitch of a group you’ve never even heard of. How do you ferret out the misfits and focus on the potential gold mine? You step back and consider creating your own partner-profiling program. It’s not as hard or time consuming as it sounds. And it’s absolutely critical if you are going to scale quickly and cost effectively through partnerships.

Hooking Up: Creating a Small Business Partner Profiling Tool

Creating your own Partner Profiling Program

Nothing illustrates the success of your efforts than dozens of inquiries from organizations requesting to form a partnership. That’s the upside. The downside is the mundane process required to understand which ones warrant time and attention from you or your team.

The intent behind partner profiling is to match the objectives, the market focus, the products and the short and long-term resources. Partner profiling begins the moment a profile is completed and submitted. This carries an organization until a business decision to investigate a serious partnership is made. Once this happens, the green light is provided to the product team to conduct a review of your product.


Once this is developed, much of it can be placed on a partner web site. Automation of this process is going to accelerate the entire pre-qualification exercise. Those ranking in the top 10 percentile should be earmarked as reviewed in a short period of time, say 48 hours. The lower the score the less aligned the organizations and therefore, the lower the priority on a review and discussion. A few of the most common profiling questions include:

• What is the objective of the partnership?
o Be specific-offer multiple choice-licensing, distribution, marketing, investment
• Does the product(s) of the potential partner leverage, extend or exploit your own product line?
o Offer a multiple choice response that identifies ‘how’ one of the three will be accomplished
• What components of the potential partners product needs to be changed to better suit your own product line?
o For instance, if the incoming organization offers a new bike pedal, your brakes might need to be altered
• What is the desired timeframe for a discussion?
o You might also include options that identify “why” behind an urgent request, such as 5 days. One such choice is an impending product launch
• Who is the executive sponsor from the organization?
o If the sponsor is the CEO versus a manager level, you will get a sense of the priority to the company. The only exception of this rule is if the manager belongs to a global organization such as IBM or Microsoft, where managers are responsible for millions of dollars in revenue.

Product Plans and Timelines

Unique partnerships usually require changes to the product. Once you have a smooth-running filtering process, the second step is to create a best practice methodology for reviewing the product. Why would an entrepreneur go to the trouble? At a minimum, you want to ensure you are comparing apples to apples, using the same criteria to evaluate each company. As your organization grows, a process methodology is insurance in the simplest terms. Risk mitigation against a lawsuit for discriminatory practices is the technical term, and if you think lawsuits or only brought against large, publicly traded companies, think again. A number of small, two and three person firms that go on to achieve success get sued for choosing one firm with which to partner, ignoring another and then finding themselves without a solid foundation as to ‘why’ a decision was made. Start out smart by creating an outline of what happens during the process flow, the criteria used and the results. A bullet-point sheet enough to start.

You can accelerate this phase by creating and providing process templates. For instance, if a product requires change (yours or theirs) to make a partnership successful, provide an integrated timeline that conforms to the processes, procedures and product development cycles of your own organization. In this way, you identify the expectations and manage the process. While exceptions to the rule will always be made (i.e. you decide to accelerate your schedule to meet the product timeline of your partner), the standard approach is based around your process.

Leverage (Free) Web Tools

Web form tools are available on the net for free, and some pretty sophisticated tools are available for a few hundred bucks. If you are deluged with incoming calls, provide the web site on the answering machine and watch the profiling begin. Even if you do spend some money, the time you will save from automation will more than pay for the upfront expenditure. And it will also force you to think through the needs of your organization and a process methodology that is consistent for all potential partners. Finally, as you think through each profiling criteria, you will most certainly gain another level of clarity around the type of partners you are seeking. Who knows? Some of the firms that come to you might be the very ones you are looking for!

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