Strike the right business partnership and it can help you create impact in just about every area of your business.

They can help you establish yourself as an expert in a new market, gain in-depth knowledge about a vertical overnight, or help you evolve your product portfolio for a new age.

But a successful partnership can be hard to find. It takes careful consideration — of goals, skills, networks, and risk tolerances — for the stars to align.

Here, we explore how to spot a good partnership opportunity. With our guide to partnerships, you can avoid the painful mistakes many SaaS companies make, and skip right to the exciting work of expanding your business.

Ready to get started?

Four things to consider when finding a business partner

Before you jump into any partnership with a reseller, technology provider, or solution partner, there are four things you need to ask yourself.

Do our offers complement each other?

A good partnership improves the core business of each company. With a technology partnership, the combination of the two businesses should make each of their solutions stronger by integrating it into a more comprehensive solution.

For an implementation partner, one party gets access to a new market and the other gets access to a product they can build a consultancy service around.

This is something Gustav Lagercrantz learned first hand during his time at Episerver: “At Episerver we had a great product and were experts at building software platforms, but we couldn’t build great e-commerce websites the way our partner could. Our partnership allowed us to develop one, which was a crucial part of the customer experience.”

How do we both benefit from this partnership?

Partnerships are a two way street, there has to be benefit and value for both partners. It’s vital you put yourself in the shoes of the other business. How will partnering with us help them? How will the combination of customer bases and products make you both more successful? How invested are you? And remember, there should never be a fee to be a partner.

Do they have a strong foothold in their market?

If your goal is expansion into a new geography or vertical, a good partnership should help you ‘act local’ within it. But if the potential partner is still learning to navigate that market, there are too many knowledge gaps to make the expansion successful.

Louise Burman, Regional Sales Director Nordics at Outpost 24, saw the value of a local partner up-close when the company expanded into South America: “We worked with a partner who had an extensive customer base in Brazil. We didn’t have a footprint there so the partnership allowed us to take our product and successfully introduce it to their local market.”

Do I have internal buy-in?

Good partnerships deliver value in the long term, not a series of quick wins. Without internal backing for this slower realisation of value, your partnership is likely to fail. That makes getting the buy-in of key decision makers in your organisation (such as your CEO) crucial.

A partnership for accelerated growth

Partnerships, like any other relationship, need careful nurturing to blossom.

So, once you’ve found the right partner, your next challenge is to get things started off on the right foot. At Monterro we help Nordic software companies hit their biggest growth goals, and helping businesses build solid partnerships is one of our favourite topics.

Want to learn more about how to start a partnership the right way?
Download The B2B SaaS guide to growing your business through partnerships eBook.