It will leave you scratching your head about how you ended up with a portfolio of partners that aren’t aligned to your mission. Your organisation goes completely off track, or off strategy and starts creating new programs or initiatives to suit the corporate. You’ll end up saying yes to things that your partner/ prospect wants and then trying to make it happen. Be preparedĭo you know the strengths, priorities and needs of your organisation? Do you know why they’re important and what benefit a partner might derive from them? If you don’t know and clearly understand these foundation pieces, then how can you present yourself as a solution to a business’ problems? It’s not a total disaster in a meeting. The information you gather is what will lead you to a partnership. Make the meeting count by asking questions relevant to them. Just watch their eyes glaze over as they stifle a yawn. Or even worse, you just end up talking about yourself and your charity for the whole meeting. If you don’t have time to read their annual review, check their socials and see if there are any new media releases, how are you going to ask relevant discovery questions? Or test your hypothesis about why they might be a great partnership fit? It ends up being a beige generic meeting.
Claw back that hour to get yourself on top of things. If you don’t have time to do research before you meet with a prospect, or one of your top partners, then you don’t have time to meet them. If you want your meetings to really count here’s best practise in corporate partnerships: Do your research How often do we go into meetings with a metaphorical blindfold on? We’re all guilty of it. As well as thinking she’ll grow up to be a motivational speaker (or an arch criminal?), it got me thinking about partnership meetings. She said, “Mumma it’s a lot easier to win if you look under the blindfold”. My daughter’s stickers were all suspiciously accurate.
Mine were all over the place – thankfully one horn didn’t take paint off the wall when I removed it. You wear a blindfold, get given the horn sticker, spin around 3 times and then you walk forward and hope your sticker is in the right place. This was ‘stick the horn on the unicorn’ – so your aim is to get your horn sticker as close to where it should actually go on the poster of a unicorn. During the most recent lockdown, I was playing a version of pin the tail on the donkey.