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Stellar Partnerships

Stellar Partnerships: Corporate & Community Partnership

How to be a championship winner

The English have a complicated relationship with their men’s soccer team. Having invented the game and won one World Cup back in 1966 there is always the hope that ‘football is coming home’. Meanwhile the men’s team (unlike the women) haven’t won a major championship since then.

I’ve just returned from the UK where the whole country had the flags flying for the England team’s appearance in the European Cup final. There was talk of giving the manager a knighthood. The better team won and it wasn’t England. The manager resigned, the population drowned its sorrows in the pubs and everyone went back to grumbling about team performance.

Being a partnership manager is a lot like being the England soccer manager. You have the pressure of expectations without the support you really need. But you’re still expect to deliver championship winners time and time again. If you want to be a winner there are things your board and your leadership need to know.

Partnerships take time

No-one wins a championship in their first season. In the same way, you won’t be bringing in millions of dollars in the first year if you’re starting from scratch.  The first year is spent building a plan, putting in place the foundations and making sure the organisation has a credible commercial value proposition. The second year is the hard yards of reaching out to warm and cold contacts to open up partnerships conversations and maybe get lucky with some early wins. By the third year you’ll be reaping the investment with meaningful relationships.

We constantly see partnership managers under pressure to ‘get out there’, wherever ‘there’ is. This pressure comes from a false assumption that partnerships are just about sales and therefore more calls equal more results. But partnerships are relationships not transactions. It’s like lining up 11 players in the goal area to take penalties and thinking that it’s football. 

You need investment in the right skills and people

Gareth Southgate, the previous England team manager spent eight years building up talent from the junior team upwards. When he took over, England hadn’t even qualified for a championship, let alone win one. By the end of his tenure, the team had reached the finals of three major tournaments and come agonisingly close to winning.

If you want a winning team then recruit for the right people and keep building their skills. No-one leaves school wanting to be a partnership manager. Your people have usually come from sales, marketing, advertising or other areas of fundraising. They need to be trained in the dark arts of partnerships, where the head and the heart combine into a winning formula. If you hire people and leave them without support they will never grow. You wouldn’t shift a talented 16 year old into the senior team and expect them to be game changers, however much you pay them.

Targets should be realistic

Don’t set unattainable targets in the early days or you’ll demotivate the team and they’ll burn out trying. You may need a million dollars to fill your funding gap, but partnerships are not your quick fix. It’s always a puzzle to me why leaders and boards are willing to accept the 10-15 year lead time in building a bequest strategy but insist on partnerships landing millions in the first year. Perhaps it’s a lack of understanding about partnerships and the idea that it’s just about transactional sales. Setting realistic targets will build the confidence of your team and encourage better retention. Nothing ruins a partnership pipeline more easily than discontinuity. Partnerships are relationships, so changing strikers every few months is not going to yield more goals.

You need belief

England have always been accused of being a team of champions rather than a champion team. They have nurtured some incredible talent who tasted success with their club teams but never realised it with the national squad. The problem is often with the pressure of expectations from the management and the country. The players second guess everything and the team plan falls apart.  It’s hard to succeed when you have armchair experts detailing the plans and putting pressure on the team. Board members with well intentioned but hopeless leads and leaders who manage by activities not outcomes undermine the team’s confidence and self- belief. Better to ask the partnership managers what they need and how they want to be supported.

The England team are now seeking another manager and it’ll be a brave person to step up to the job. If you want to nurture a championship winning team and trophy partnerships, then don’t blame the manager or the frontline staff; put in place the right environment for them to be successful. Then you’ll finally give the organisation something to cheer about.