How to convert potential competitors into partners? — A case study
This case study was a part of my recent interview process with an ed-tech platform. The company is producing educational courses for corporate employees and looking for ways to increase the number of courses on the platform. For privacy purposes, I will address the firm as “Company” in this case.
There is always a way to collaborate with your competitor. If you can develop a win-win strategy, everyone will partner as long as you are making money and improving brand image. The list of partners, in this case, are potential competitors too.
Given Business Case:
An e-learning course platform is providing high-quality video courses for corporates employees. They are working on curating and building courses with external content providers (e.g. Agencies, competitors). In a normal research process, they would look for content partners based on a given content topic they have and research accordingly by the search team. Yet, they do need horizontal content partners with portfolios that span different content fields and have high course variety. In the best case, these courses should be ready to upload and match their e-learning standards.
The task is to set up a process and find at least ten potential horizontal content partners for the company by answering the following questions:
- How would you structure and organize your research to find these content providers? What might be an important criteria for selection?
- Which partner benefits would you offer to a potential partner or how could we compensate the partner?
Solution
Reading the case I identified the following requirements and tasks.
Requirements:
- Horizontal content partners
- Diverse content fields
- High course variety
- Ready to upload quality
- Matching our standards
Tasks:
- Define a process for finding partners
- Define qualifying criteria
- Suggest potential benefits
The first thing I had to solve was how to find a partner. As shown in the decision tree below, there can be only two ways we find someone. 1) When we search for someone 2) If someone approaches us.
There are multiple ways of how to search for someone/company and where to look for. The following figure is self-explanatory for how to search for a company.
Now one problem we might face is, how can we find newcomers and hidden gems. There is a probability that someone is producing educational courses but not very well known in the network. Google shows results of well-established SEO compliant websites. Also, the new businesses are easier to collaborate with for good exposure.
How to find hidden gems?
I asked some people who are working in the creative field and partnering on a daily bases. I got some insights from them and here are four ways to find newcomers.
- Word of mouth — By attending the meetups, events, and industry networking events we can find newcomers and hidden gems who are local.
- Actively engaging in creators’ communities and being up to date with industry news.
- Backtracking from their Products/Work/Content that we spot somewhere. A new business will market their product and try to make money rather than branding.
- Checking new company registrations from Handelsregister — Since any new company will be registered there for legal reasons.
Since I have majored in MBA Global Procurement, I had an idea about how the partnership process works. I created the following flowchart for the same.
Qualifying the partners after finding them is very critical. I believe if I can quantify the criteria, it would be a better perspective and reduce the time for me to qualify a partner. I started noting down all relevant criteria and though how can I quantify them. During the process, I found that not everything is quantifiable but I have to consider those things for better decision making. I finally made a list of two types of criteria. 1) Quantitative and 2) Qualitative.
As shown in the table below, I used a weighted point rating system to measure the final result. It is important to quantify but not every criterion is equally important for final decision. Also, what if next time I do the same job but I have a different focus? So I need to introduce the weight of each criterion. As per the table, I can add multiple columns for each potential partner and add weight to each row. Once, I fill the score, I have to multiply it with Weight to get the final number.
I found out 15 potential partners for doing a deal. Refer to following google sheet to get more information.
Finding suitable benefits to offer for partnership:
Any business is predominantly driven by monetary benefits. But there are some hidden favors that can benefit indirectly. E.g. More clients, exposure, brand image. These all will help a company in long term monetary benefit. It seems very lucrative to offer monetary benefit because it is easy but actually it should not be the choice while partnering.
I created following the decision tree to find a suitable benefit that this company can offer to potential partners.
Recommendations
- The company has potential partners in the UK and Germany. 2–3 potential partners can be a long term supplier and 1 (workshop) can be ready to use course provider.
- The non-monetary benefits should be preferred over monetary benefits to impose lock-in and switching costs.
Assumptions
- Horizontal content partners are considered as non-direct competitors. Only companies that are associated with course production are considered and no individuals. (Provided by the company on asked)
- Partners’ location is global.
- Standards are assumed as Aesthetic cohesion with the company’s branding, tone, course structure, and video quality.
- Course variety is considered a variety of topics, course formats.
- Qualifying criteria are defined by me but scoring each partner on them is dependent on the company.
Final Result
The company was happy with the approach. They asked me for a bottleneck in the process flow.
Where do you see a bottleneck?
Contact me on LinkedIn: Tejas Suthar
