The “X” Factors To Look For in a Strong Strategic Partner (Part 1)
The three key elements that elevate a vendor to a trusted partner
Have you ever felt taken advantage of by a service provider?
Maybe you purchased a pair of nice leather Italian shoes only to find them on sale a day later—at the same store. Or maybe you were overcharged for an unnecessary car repair. Or maybe, a B2B sales professional mislead you about the product feature you paid for?
Whether personal or professional, subject matter expertise is critical to the success of most purchase decisions. The trick is to find expert counsel in the subjects or areas you lack the required expertise to perform a successful transaction, the kind of expertise and guidance that comes from a strategic partner. This is especially true in a purchase decision where the complexity of or uncertainty around the decision can be used as leverage by the provider of said product or service.
You don’t know what you don’t know, right? The value of certainty in an uncertain world compounds exponentially when the intangibles like trust, confidence, and transparency are considered.
The Value of a Trusted Resource
How valuable is it to have a capable go-to resource you trust in times of uncertainty? Obtaining temporary furnished accommodations can be straightforward, or it can be an extremely complicated web of interlayered product and service providers. By no fault of any one provider, it is just a fact of our sector. There is a reason a singular, global distribution system still remains rather elusive in our industry.
This is why Synergy invests time, resources, and capital into being the very best strategic corporate housing partner in the world. When you trust your program to Synergy, you can rest assured you will get the very best value for the services provided.
Not only that, we are willing to pull the curtain back and offer complete cost and rate transparency to ensure you feel confident with your decision.
In line with being a strategic partner, we put together the following as a guide to the key components of a strategic partner: experience, expertise, and ‘in the know’ market intelligence.
Each aspect plays a critical role on its own; however, when considered equal parts of a bigger picture, you can begin to understand the value of working with a strategic partner who develops consultative business solutions tailored to meet specific business needs. In Synergy’s case, corporate housing needs.
Experience
Remember the first time you saw a straw submerged in a clear water glass? The bend in the straw was nearly magic. Little did we know light refracts differently through the air versus water creating a bent-straw illusion. Work experience can have a similar effect.
Forty years with the same company might look like a straight straw out of the water, but when submerged, you see how that same forty years of experience is bent and potentially biased. This is a potential blind spot one might encounter when measuring for value in experience. One should consider all types/forms of ‘experience.’ Consider the difference between professional experience, company and account experience, and even industry experience.
Different types of experience
Professional experience speaks to general business acumen. In contrast, company or account experience speaks to specific, hyper-targeted contextual acumen. And finally, industry experience speaks to a very generalized variety of intelligence. The bottom line, each type of experience delivers a different value and level of credibility (pending context, of course) and, as a result, should come with different expectations.
Evaluating experience holistically
So what type of experience matters? How can you see experience outside of the superficial illusion of time spent doing something?
Let’s look at it holistically. In its most basic form, experience is real-world intelligence. It creates the appropriate setting for subject matter expertise to take root and produce a benefit. Regardless of the number of years, or type, the only “experience” that really matters to a purchase decision is the kind that brings foresight and awareness to potential blind spots and problems related to the purchase decision.
Practical application of experience
Practically speaking, one can read all about the Bay Area’s rental market, but until you have actually bid, negotiated, and secured apartment blocks—in every season—that booking experience is as vacant as a peanut-less Peanut M&M.
Whether it’s forty or five years, industry or account-based, when considering experience as an informational and contextual asset valuable to your business decision, you must account for the overlapping contexts that will draw upon that reservoir of experience. Obtaining resources capable of delivering value on each front of experience—professional, company/ account, and industry—will shore up service potential, capability, and execution.
Service providers must deliver a latticework of professional, industry, and account experience to provide the necessary diverse, multi-layered depth of experience required to exercise the next critical element of a strategic partnership, expertise.
Continue on to Part 2 for the rest of story.
