Business-to-business partnerships

Creating value-added relationships

Building trust across the supply chain is essential for business-to-business partnerships. A low-trust partnership is often held together by a mechanistic and legalistic infrastructure that seriously limits the potential of the partnership and the success of individual partners.

Socia helps business-to-business partners move from inward-looking, self-protecting behaviours to a recognition of the value of interdependence between partners.

Traditional techniques for building business-to-business partnerships have focused on open book accounting and ‘cost transparency’. But all too often this approach leads to conversations which focus on large customers taking cost out from their smaller suppliers and increasing the imbalance of power in the relationship.

Socia helps partners move to a position where they can all focus on the future value they can create for the partnership by working more closely together. This encourages an environment of learning and innovation where partners want to make investments in each others development because they believe this will bring mutual benefit.

Our clients in this area include partners working in supply chains, consortia and joint ventures in:

• Oil exploration
• FMCG
• Telecoms