August 17, 2007

How to build a Win-Win partnership and leverging the power of more than 50 country managers

I would like to thank Walter for inviting me to post on his blog. I really appreciate this blog as it expose the ‘behind the stage activity’ in Pajamanation.

I would like to write about partners and partnerships, but before going into that we should look on the value that we can bring to table.

We have country managers in more than 50 countries. Pajamanation’s country managers are special people with talents in various fields and with entrepreneurship soul.

The power of our organization is when we can leverage the power, efforts and knowledge of the country managers.

When I look on any activity that we are doing on global level, I ask myself if it can be leveraged by the country managers. If it is not, it is a waste of efforts from my point of view. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do activities that are good ideas for a specific country and maybe , on a local level, but then it will be handled by the country manager and not by the corporate (and it might be that other country managers will learn from it and follow it).

Real good and long lasting partnership means to build a Win-Win situation.

What can we bring to a partnership:

1. Local promotion in more than 50 countries
2. Local PR activity in more than 50 countries
3. Our growing user base
4. More revenues

Now let’s look on what we can get from a partnership:
1. Best services in the world for our visitors to improve the quality of their life and to professionalize their home services, integrated into Pajamanation
2. More revenue
3. More users
4. Promotion and good story

I believe that a best service is evolutionary and not revolutionary. There are new services that are revolutionaries ( the same as our www.pajamanation.com), but the best service will come as the service evolved and changes according to new views and experiences of the users and management.

When we are looking for best service from potential partners, we are looking on the current best service and try to see if the potential partners are open to evolve.

Then , if the service is the best and has a value, people will likely pay for using it.

As we moved into the free model, and we are selling services around our core business, we need to have many users. At this stage, the best we can get from a potential partner is more users.

The partners that we are selecting now are partners who want cross-promotion.

Cross-promotion means that they are going to promote the partnership via the press, their user base and other means and we are going to do the same with every country manager.

And you know how it is in life, if someone is easy to get, probably the value is low, and if someone is playing hard to get others are eager to get him/her J and probably the value is higher.

The same is with partnerships. If it is just “put our link or widget on your web page and start earn money” the value is low.

We are aiming to meaningful partnerships, and this takes efforts, understandings and misunderstandings, agreements, technical coordination, development and business coordination but the value is much higher.

We should be proud of the wonderful team of country managers and in the business we have built so far. We should be proud in our noble vision and mission of changing the life of many people around the world. Look on our mission on the right side of this blog and you will see how great it is.

And I can tell you, my dear friends, that many of the potential partners I’m talking with, are very interested in what we are bringing to the table and see in it a lot of value for them and for the society.

Together we WIN BIG!!!

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