B2B Leadership Strategy Healthcare Marketing

Healthcare Strategic Partnerships Fail and How to Keep Yours From Suffering the Same Fate

Companies spend months, sometimes years, forging new go-to-market partnerships. Typically, the goal is mutual revenue growth or increase in market share. Unfortunately, many of these partnerships crumble into dust after the desired results fail to materialize. To prevent this from happening, partners need to engage each other’s sales teams, assign a liaison, track leading indicator, and prioritize the partnership. In other words, partners need to work even harder on the partnership after the ink is dry on the agreement.

High Hopes

The 2022 DemandGen Channel/Partner Marketing Benchmark Survey, found that 82% of B2B business leaders are planning to add to their roster of partners and 70% plan to boost their channel program budgets. There is clearly optimism when it comes to strategic partnerships.

The reality is not as rosy. According to experts Jonathan Hughes and Jeff Weiss in 2007 and Mark Sochan in 2018, 60-70% of strategic partnerships fail. Forrester also found that 73% of marketers consider managing partners a major challenge.

In my personal experience, strategic partnerships rarely achieve the lofty goals that were set by the people who signed the original agreement. Even when both parties have the best of intentions, failure is common. Partnerships, like businesses, are prone to failure if not attended to properly.

Failure to Launch

Why do so many partnerships fail? There are dozens of potential reasons, including:

  1. Unrealistic expectations
  2. Lack of operational support
  3. Misalignment between objectives and incentives
  4. Insufficient communication between partners
  5. Incompatible marketing cultures

The last item is one that is often overlooked. If one company uses a high-touch, relationship-building go-to-market strategy that targets specific prospects, and the other company uses mass-marketing techniques to capture as many prospects as possible…there will be challenges. These can snowball into each marketing team working around the other, a complete waste of resources.

Success Tactics

Let’s assume for a moment that a strategic partnership is formed between your company and another that is culturally aligned, has executive buy-in, is adequately funded, and that is value-add to customer. I know it’s a big assumption, but let’s pretend together.

Even when all this is true, the partnership can still fail if marketers aren’t proactive in making the relationship productive. It is counterintuitive, but a partnership takes MORE WORK after the agreement is signed than it does before. It’s best to think of the partnership agreement like a city vendor permit. Just because a food truck vendor has a permit from the city that allows them to sell food in the jurisdiction, that doesn’t mean the food vendor will be successful.

Could you imagine an owner investing in a shiny new food truck, going through all the hoops to get a permit and then just sitting in the city’s parking lot expecting customers to show up? Yet, that is exactly how most companies behave after they formalize and announce a strategic partnership.

So what can marketing do to make a partnership successful? Here are five strategies:

  1. Engage your partner’s sales team. Nothing screams success like revenue. The key to revenue is your partner’s sales team. Do everything possible to make them successful. That means, content, leads, knowledge, sales materials, joint appearances at conferences, etc. Treat them as well as you treat your own sales team (which is hopefully excellent).
  2. Assign a liaison. A single point of contact on the marketing team will improve communication and reduce the chance that something falls through the cracks. Give your liaison the power and autonomy to execute and deliver on materials, campaigns, and plans.
  3. Highlight joint customers. Focus on sharing the case study of customers you have in common with your new partner. This will increase confidence with your own team, your partner, and with prospects. If you don’t have a common customer, then find a customer that is willing to talk about the potential value of your joint solution.
  4. Track leading indicators. Although revenue is the ultimate goal, that will take time. Track leading indicators to revenue like meetings held, interested parties identified, conferences attended with your partner, etc. If you aren’t seeing these indicators grow, then revenue will lag.
  5. Keep the partnership top-of-mind. Highlight partnership progress internally and externally at every opportunity, especially significant wins and milestones. Remember the old adage: “out-of-sight = out-of-mind”. Show off the latest indicators. Talk about potential prospects.
  6. Squash any “Us and Them” talk. Treat your partner as an extension of your own team…because they are. Do not let divisive thinking seep in, especially during the early days of the partnership.

Bottom line: Marketing has an important role to play in successful strategic partnerships. Make the effort and the rewards will follow.

About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is an award-winning Marketing Executive with more than 15yrs of healthcare and HealthIT experience. He co-founded one of the most popular healthcare chats on Twitter, #hcldr and he has been recognized as one of the “Top 50 Healthcare IT Influencers”. Colin’s work has been published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology, American Society for Healthcare Risk Managers, and Infection Control Today. He writes regularly for Healthcare Scene and here at HITMC.com. Colin is a member of #pinksock #TheWalkingGallery and is proudly HITMC. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

Add Comment

Click here to post a comment

Learn Together

Whether you’re looking to for coverage of important healthcare marketing news or sharing a best practice so that others can learn from your experience, we’d love to have you as part of the community.

Subscribe >