All partners are not created equal. We’ve talked about the importance of partnerships in your...
Strategic partnerships with big tech platforms can fuel explosive growth for IT consulting firms. But there’s a catch: partner-led growth comes with real risks. A big tech platform is ultimately somebody else’s sandbox. Its priorities can shift overnight, market trends can change, it can unintentionally limit your total addressable market (TAM), and even technical decisions made within the organization behind the platform can create lock-in that slows down your ability to scale IT services.
To build a resilient growth strategy, IT services founders need to proactively identify the risks associated with a partnership and create mitigation strategies to manage them without undermining the benefits that made the partnership worth pursuing in the first place.
Sounds easy, huh? Read on to learn how to walk this tightrope.
Risks of Partnerships with Big Tech
Sudden Changes in Platform Direction
Big tech platforms evolve fast. If your opportunities all depend on one platform, you risk sudden drops in demand with shifts in product strategy or market fit. For firms that rely heavily on one ecosystem to get clients for IT services, these changes can hit the pipeline and revenue quickly. And hard.
Exclusivity: Loss of Neutrality and Lock-In
Some platforms push for or heavily incentivize exclusivity in partnerships. They’re also more likely to send leads your way when you’re an exclusive partner. Tempting. But exclusivity is a double-edged sword.
It can help signal a solid relationship with your platform partner, and that’s exactly why it can also cause your customers to question your neutrality. Are you recommending the platform because it’s the best one for their needs, or because you’re partnered with them? Clients need to be able to trust you, and that’s what neutrality provides.
Besides the hit to customer trust, exclusivity can also limit your IT tech services company’s overall market size and reduce your flexibility as tech stacks evolve. This has the potential of choking your future growth channels. Relying exclusively on architectures specific to one platform can slow your ability to scale IT services across hybrid or competing ecosystems.
If your team’s expertise (certifications, experience, hiring, and training) all lean towards one platform, and your delivery playbooks rely heavily on them, then your revenue becomes dependent on them, their partner incentives, their market standing, and so forth. Congratulations, at this point all your pipeline are belong to them.
So what should you do?
It’s a balancing act, but it’s not impossible. Here’s what you need to do.
Focus on Value Rather than Technology
This gives you a path to pivot when needed. You also develop a UVP outside of the partner. The clarity on UVP helps you win customers on emerging platforms because they need clarity on the value achieved by switching to the platform. It also lets you pivot or add competitors. But most importantly, it keeps your relationship with your customer from being defined by the partner.
Create systems for Continued Alignment
Don’t be caught off guard. Look through public announcements and build a strong relationship with the partner managers to understand the strategic direction of the platform.
Experiment with Competitors
You are more valuable to your customers if you can tell them exactly why your preferred partner is a better match for them than the competing platform. So you should have a good understanding of the pros and cons of different platforms. You can’t develop this without exploring and doing at least some work with the other platform. This experimentation also gives you the ability to pivot if the need arises.
Wrapping Up
A partner-centric strategy is one of the fastest ways to **find IT consulting clients**, especially when combined with co-sell programs, partner marketplaces, and solution specializations. But without risk management, your growth can become dependent on factors you don’t control.
By proactively mitigating the risks of ecosystem strategy shifts, exclusivity limits, and vendor lock-in, you build a more resilient GTM engine that can continue to get clients for IT services, regardless of how big tech platforms evolve.
A diversified, portable, multi-platform strategy protects your firm and it accelerates your ability to scale your IT services across industries, geographies, and ecosystems.
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