Getting Traction in Partnerships Part 6: The Traction Component

"Action is the process of doing. That’s what this chapter is all about. Gaining traction means making your vision a reality. At this moment, your vision is crystal clear, you have the right people in the right seats, you’re managing data, you’re solving your issues, and you’ve defined your Way of doing business and everyone is following it. Now you’re ready to master organizational traction, the final piece of the puzzle.” - Gino Wickman

You’ve made it to our sixth and final step in building traction for our companies through partners! Remember, the vision has always been and will continue to be: helping our companies succeed through partners. That’s why we exist. If our partners fail, then our company misses out on the growth that’s possible through this strategy, and if our companies fail, well, then there’s no partnerships.

So our mission is to help our company succeed with the partnerships we’re building. We’ve built and communicated a clear vision, pursued the right people and partners, begun tracking and managing our data as it aligns to our company data, confronting issues and documented our processes of how we’re going to go about building our partnerships.

Now we just need to do it.

There’s nothing sexy about building the organizational infrastructure that will actually make a car run. Think about it. We love the end result, we love what the car looks like on the outside, the interior leather or shiny color and details. But the system, the internal goings on of the car are not what people look at when you drive by them on the street. It’s the same with partnerships. We love looking at the results and celebrating our wins, but the work—the daily work—can really bog us down.

One of which is our meetings.

Meetings are paramount to the success of our internal and external partnerships. But we are really terrible at meetings. I once believed the lie that if my day was full of meetings then I had finally made it, I was successful.

Then I realized that by the end of the week many of my meetings didn’t do anything. We didn’t move anywhere. I remember being apart of a “tiger team” of meetings where we met weekly for 4 months working through a specific partnership. Only to end up slowly spanning out the meetings and dropping them altogether with no real return or deliverable to show for it. Meetings can just plain suck.

But they don’t have to be. Partner meetings can be no different. I remember recently attending a meeting for 30 minutes with our partner. We had no clear agenda, no clear trajectory, and we had no next steps. We spent 4 people’s salaries talking about, well, to be honest I have no idea. We ended up with nothing.

Contrast that with the framework below. You’ll start moving your partners and your business forward because you’ve started getting traction together.

Consider using the following framework for your meetings with your partners and your teams. You’ll start seeing the traction you envision.

**If you want another perspective on meetings, I’d encourage you to read Patrick Lencioni’s book Death by Meeting. It’s an enjoyable read and incredibly insightful in how we can do more with more intentional meetings.

Gino Wickman encourages us to have 2 types of meetings: The quarterly and the weekly. Now, depending on the number of partners you manage, these may or may not work. But as always, take the framework we’re building and apply it to your business.

The 90 Day World

You’ve already built your 3 year and 1 year goals. You’ve set everyone forward, built your marketing plan, now you’re ready to get going. What we find is that every 90 days or so, people get off task. If this is common for internal meetings, how much more so for you and your partners who manage many more business plans and partnerships? This meeting helps keep everyone on task and focused on the goals ahead. This will keep you and your partner focused on the mission for the year and for your long term goals.

Once I started implementing this with one of my most strategic partners things changed for our partnership. You see, we saw them as strategic, but they didn’t see as such. That is, until we met with more purpose and then followed up with our goals. Every 90 days we reviewed what we’d achieved and what we were doing to do in the future to keep working towards our goals. You know what happened? We got stuff done. Our quarterly cadence kept us accountable and excited to be moving towards helping our companies succeed.

The Weekly Meeting Pulse

The weekly pulse meeting keeps you on track with your 90 day world and the goals you have to accomplish during these 90 days. It keeps you and your partners in step as you march towards your joint victory. This requires what Wickman calls a “level 10 meeting.” Consider keeping the following flow in your meeting.

1. Seque - share some good news. You need to help everyone transition from working in the business to working on the business. Take 5 minutes to help everyone get on board.
2. Scorecard - use your scorecard to highlight what you’ve accomplished and where you’re tracking for the quarter and/or year. Keep it super simple, and communicate honestly where you’re at.
3. Rock Review - Review the rocks that you’re accomplishing this quarter. This will keep you focused on the weekly work that needs to get done with your partner.
4. To-Do List - Review any action items you and your partner agreed to during your last meeting. Go over anything that was finished or wasn’t and prioritize those for the coming week. 90% of these should drop off every week.
5. Issues - Here’s the bulk of your meeting: overcoming the issues. “Great meetings are created by solving problems.” (Gino Wickman) There never was a more true statement. Solve problems, create value.
6. Conclusion - Pull the meeting together and frame up anything that might have been left hanging. Tie up those loose ends by putting them on the agenda for next week or assigning the task to someone on the call to accomplish by next meeting. When everyone walks away knowing the score, knowing problems were solved, and clear work to do, you will look fondly upon your meetings with your partners. You’ll be excited to meet up again in the future knowing you get the work done.

Traction is going to take some work. It means taking the time and mental energy to be intentional with every step of your partner program journey. In a day and age where we’re looking AI to tell us what to do and guide us toward what should be done next, we need to sharpen our minds and build the systems that will actually help move our business forward. No amount of engineering or technology will build your partnerships for you. You have to do it. The good news is, you don’t have to do it alone. By following the last 6 weeks of content, you can rest assured knowing there’s a formula you can work on that will give you and your partners the best chance of success.

Success is not guaranteed. Anyone in partnerships who says otherwise forgets that building relationships with people changes all the time. Here’s what we do know, that when we build the systems and do the work of building our vision, building relationships, building our processes and taking each week and quarter one at a time, we can achieve incredible things.

So what are you waiting for? What partnerships are waiting for you and your team? I hope incredible partnerships.

When you grow as a partner leader and help your partners win, your company ultimately wins. That’s what we’re after, because our companies win when our partnerships get better.

Follow us for more content on how you can grow as a partner leader, and ultimately grow in helping your company succeed through partnerships.

Photo credit: Photo by Mapbox on Unsplash