Uncertainty continues to plague businesses and their partners around the globe as The World Bank recently warned of a global economic slowdown. The organisation reported that growth around the world is expected to slump to 2.9% this year, down from 5.7 percent in 2021. This number is significantly lower than the 4.1% that was initially predicted in January.
The impacts of global economic challenges, the war in Ukraine and global supply chain disruption have highlighted the need for businesses to collaborate more closely with their channel partners. This time of uncertainty is when it is most important to cultivate and maintain those relationships.
Here are some ways for vendors and channel partners to create mutually beneficial relationships during uncertainty to both build trust and continue growing their business.
Add value: Use data
Building strong partnerships in economic uncertainty is all about refining how to work well together. Doing this means collaborating with each other to attain data-driven insights into who their customers are and what they want. This can help businesses optimise their existing customer base and look specifically at how to become more valuable to their customers.
Taking a strategic approach to the utilisation of digital tools and data is essential for growth. Obtaining actionable data and insights gives businesses the opportunity to rethink how they collaborate with their channel partners. Utilising partners in the right way can help vendors provide localised experience, bridge language or cultural gaps, act as a physical touch point to meet face-to-face with customers, as well as help reach new audiences. So, developing these relationships is an essential way for businesses to advance the ways that they achieve success for their customers.
This synergy will help businesses to better achieve their long-term goals.
Be real: Ensure transparent communication
One of the most important advantages of having partners is their link to your customers. Partners not only give vendors access to their customers, but also influence. Having a conversation with stakeholders coming from a position of knowledge through data, makes communication more effective. This means it results in a higher probability of achieving shared outcomes.
So, businesses need to ensure that they invest more in their ability to explain uncertainty to their customers in times of economic challenges. Doing this means being more reliable for partners by increasing the amount of support and face-time with them.
Time to act: Motivate your channel partners
In an environment that is constantly changing, businesses also need to motivate the right behaviours in their channel partner ecosystem. For example, reinforcing habits of being transparent and reliable for your customer can help to get those same benefits back from partners.
These aligned values are a basis for helping to gain an edge in a fluctuating economy. Companies that are able to thrive in these environments are those that have the confidence throughout their partnerships to continue to drive business and expand and grow through uncertainty. This is the time to act.
Retracting in these times can send customers the wrong message and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as a result. Although market uncertainty may seem like the time to slow down investment in innovation, it’s actually the time for channel partners to become even more active in supporting their customers’ growth.
Especially in uncertain times, businesses need to ensure that they are approaching relationships with reliability and transparency in order to foster and maintain trust with both partners and customers.
Customers want partnerships they can trust to take them through this tough time and taking an approach that focuses on effective and transparent communication helps to protect both the partners and customers at the centre of the ecosystem through any economic downturn.
