Step 2: Develop Partner Selection Criteria

As with just about anything, if you don't know what you're looking for, how will you know when you've found it? Sit down with your management team and identify the most important criteria for selecting the right partner fit for your business. Areas to consider:

What is the potential for impact? The most important criterion is the potential of an alliance with this target to deliver strategic value to your company. What would be the impact to your competitive position, brand awareness, market acceleration? How quickly could you get traction with this partner in the marketplace?

Are the two companies compatible? This is where your friends and family network and reference calls with existing partners will prove helpful. Is this company's culture and management team compatible with yours, and do you have compatible core competencies?

Are their goals and strategies consistent with yours? The stronger alignment there is between your company goals and the target company's, the greater the likelihood of forging a successful alliance. Identify what the target companies goals and objectives are and determine if they are synergistic with yours.

Is this a good environment for partnering? It's very helpful to know what kind of partnering culture the target organization has. Do they have a good reputation with their partners? Do they demonstrate a commitment to partnering? One of the most effective ways to ferret this out is to talk to one or more of the target company's existing partners and ask them what their experiences have been.

What are the risks with this partnership? Risks of doing? Risks of not doing?

What access can they provide to other potential partners? Companies tend to settle into one or more partner networks. Consider the partners that your target company has. Would any of these companies be desirable targets? Are any of them already on your partner target list?

8 steps to finding the right partner - Step 1

Picking a good alliance partner is a lot like finding the right tennis partner — find the right one you win; pick the wrong one you lose.

Strategic alliances can deliver significant benefits to startups including reducing your time to market, providing to strategic markets and increasing your company valuation to name a few.

But how do you determine who you should partner with? How do you evaluate potential candidates? I recommend an eight-step process for effective alliance partner recruitment.

Step One: Clearly Define and Validate Your Market

The first order of business of any startup.The goal of market validation is to identify your target market — the customers experiencing the most significant pain and who need your solution the most. Through this process you identify the gap between what constitutes a total solution and what minimal functionality you can realistically deliver. That gap represents your partnering roadmap — where you need to partner to deliver the total solution.

This is why market validation is the first order of business for any startup and the first order of business in any strategic alliance strategy. One of the biggest mistakes startups make is trying to build the perfect solution or killer app. You will never have enough capital or resources to ever be able to do this, so focusing on your core competencies is the best approach. Fill the gaps with partners.