The Art of Strategic Partnerships: Lessons from 30 Years
After 30 years of working with technology partners, I’ve come to believe that strategic partnerships are like any close relationship. They rely on trust, transparency, and shared values. And just as in any relationship, poor communication or misaligned goals can quickly unravel even the most promising alliance. You can feel when a partnership is truly working and when it isn’t.
Reflecting on my experience developing partnerships for Evolving Solutions and Keyva, I’d like to share some of my takeaways from decades of building and maintaining strong partner relationships.
What Makes a Good Partnership?
For our companies, strategic partnerships aren’t transactional. They’re foundational to our ability to deliver positive outcomes for our clients. Aside from our people, vendor relationships are our most important asset and are integral to how we deliver value for our clients.
In the beginning, vendor relationships were easy to identify and develop. Today, it’s not so simple. Manufacturers are more selective about their business partnerships, and over time, Evolving Solutions and Keyva have become more selective in who we work with.
Because we’ve learned what a good partnership looks like, we’ve become much more intentional about who we partner with. We’re also acutely aware of the significant cost of developing and maintaining a strong partnership, not just in dollars, but in time, energy, and focus. But one thing has always been true: Strong partner relationships are built on mutual trust and transparency, along with a shared commitment to deliver exceptional value to the client.
We follow a repeatable process for evaluating vendor partners that brings together input from several roles across our business units, including our practice and technical leadership, our success partner manager, marketing leader, and others. Our goal is to provide solutions that our clients are asking for, that expand and strengthen our portfolio, and that come from trusted, best-in-class vendors.
We do our due diligence to ensure our vendor partners are financially stable, committed to the channel, and investing in the future. That way, our clients can count on solutions that are well supported and built to last. However, the most important quality we need in a partner is having the right people. We want to know they share our values and be confident we can build a relationship of trust and transparency. While technology plays a central role, it’s the quality, tenure, and expertise of the people involved that determines whether a partnership thrives or stalls.
How to Maintain a Partnership
In many ways, maintaining a strategic partnership is much like maintaining a client relationship. It starts at the executive level, but it doesn’t stop there. You need to have relationships at every level of the organization. We believe the strongest partnerships are built on alignment and trust at every level. By cultivating wide and deep relationships with our partners, we ensure a strong foundation that drives collaboration, consistency, and long-term success. We never take it for granted.
The most successful partnerships are those that begin with the client’s business outcomes. When we understand what the client is trying to achieve, we can work backward to identify the right combination of partners and solutions. That’s what strategic alignment looks like: everyone pulling in the same direction to solve a client’s problem.
We’re deliberate about the partnerships we bring into client conversations. The goal is never to push a product or check a box. It’s to align the right partner with the right client need. Our best partnerships are those where we and the partner are solving the same problem, from the same point of view, with humility and purpose.
Building Trust
Trust doesn’t happen overnight. It’s built through consistent action and a willingness to work through hard moments together. To reduce the possibility of surprises, both parties need to have a complete understanding of progress throughout the client engagement. On our side, we seek to demonstrate that we’re an extension of the partner’s team, and we expect the same in return. This goes a long way in building credibility over time. Consistent execution and open communication help keep the relationship mutually beneficial and focused on client outcomes.
Building trust is also about having difficult conversations when issues arise, which are inevitable in any close relationship. The conversations must be approached with honesty, transparency, and overcommunication. That may sound a bit dramatic, but every problem we’ve had with a partner has been rooted in a lack of effective communication on some level.
The earlier you can surface the concerns and deal with them head-on, the better. You must be willing to have these conversations as soon as an issue arises, and not put them off, because tensions won’t resolve themselves. Many times, this requires us to step outside of our comfort zone.
How Partnerships Are Changing
The nature of technology partnerships has evolved over the years, driven largely by the change in the pace and complexity of the technology industry. And it’s not just complex technology. Client expectations are now more complex. This means that consistent and frequent communication is now more important than ever, so that parties have a shared understanding of what success looks like for the client.
Partnerships as a Differentiator
Our strategic partnerships are more than just logos on a slide. The more we understand a partner’s solution, invest in the relationship, and demonstrate expertise, the more credibility we have with them, which gives us greater capacity to deliver for our clients. It creates massive synergy with the partner and a flywheel effect that shows up in how we deliver for the client.
We don’t aim to meet minimum thresholds. We aim to identify the best partners and be the best partner in their domain of expertise. Our goal is always to be in the top tier of a partner’s channel program. If we are unable to achieve this goal, we will evaluate whether the partnership is appropriate for us.
Advice for Tech Leaders
To deepen your alliances, lean into the partnership through every level of the partner’s organization. It can’t solely rely on the quarterly business review. And it won’t happen organically. It has to be intentional, or it won’t work.
We get weekly updates from our partners, advising us on updates to their programs, any new expectations they may have for us, and what new technology we need to learn. We supplement this with weekly partner Tech Talks that provide our sales and technical teams with deeper insights into solutions that address client challenges and deliver business value. And it never ends. You have to commit while recognizing that partnerships require an ongoing investment.
We focus on building deep relationships with a select group of partners rather than spreading ourselves thin across too many. Those partners must share our values and be committed to investing in the relationship as deeply as we do. For our companies, 2-3 highly curated partners in each of our focus areas can deliver the level of quality and technical diversity our clients need.
Looking Ahead: From Platforms to Ecosystems
Other than our people, there’s been nothing more important to the success of Evolving Solutions and Keyva than our business partnerships. Strategic partners will continue to become more integrated, more outcome-driven, and more critical to client success. The business world needs companies like ours to aggregate appropriate solutions with best-of-breed offerings. Our clients need us to be experts in new solutions because they don’t have time to become experts themselves. As the complexity of IT grows, they’re looking to us to help them manage it.
Over the last several years, the industry has moved from buying point solutions to buying platforms. Next, clients will be investing in technology ecosystems, and the only way these ecosystems can be delivered and implemented is through strong and diverse channel partnerships where multiple partners are working in true alignment on behalf of the client.
As we consult with our clients about AI-driven solutions, we need to make sure we’re taking our own advice. Managing the complexity of channel relationships will require some level of automation. The companies that figure this out and build strong, AI-augmented partner ecosystems will be the ones that lead the next decade.
Closing Thoughts
Strategic partnerships have been central to our success, and they’ll be even more important in the years ahead. But they don’t happen by accident. They take work, commitment, and a shared belief in what’s possible.
When done right, partnerships do more than extend your capabilities. They become part of your identity. They make your company better. They make your clients more successful. And they help shape the future of what’s possible.
