Relationships, within your organization and with other organizations, are critical to being able to deliver customer value. While every agency or consultancy would love to be able to staff their projects internally, sometimes that's just not an option. Whether your team is fully utilized, you need a niche role or it's just not your business model to deliver work - your ability to build and maintain relationships with your Partners can make or break your organization.

Collective OS was designed around the fundamental principle that every company has relationships, but the way we manage and maintain them is antiquated. The foundation of Collective OS is what we call a Collective. This is the structure that allows you to bind your company with another and to share certain relevant assets - Experts, Case Studies, Opportunities, etc.

Relationship management varies widely across both businesses and people. On the minimal side, people just 'know' who to call or may have a list of partners in a spreadsheet or email. Networking tools like LinkedIn are a bit of a step up. Your more advanced organizations may have large CRM or custom-built solutions to keep track of approved vendors and partners (think SAP, Oracle or SalesForce).

Regardless how relationships are managed, it's not good enough. The time it requires to find an expert or solution provider can take weeks through multiple phone calls, emails and 'friend-of-friend' recommendations. Needless to say a random post on LinkedIn doesn't necessarily come with any knowledge of how qualified a company will be or their history and delivery.

Example: today a client mentions that their CRM team is having issues. The top 2 staff have left, the team is scrambling and the roadmap is not valid anymore. They need help and don't know where to turn. This is a dream if that's your wheelhouse, but if not then you either say good luck or, if you're smart, you turn to your network to help your client out. Maybe in the process you can get some referral income or maybe it's just a long term investment in making your client successful.

You can call a couple previous Partners you've worked with if you have them. You can ask in your company. You can post online to get recommendations. However you do this, you will go through a process similar to: (1) get an introduction, (2) introduction call, (3) ask for more information about the company, experts, etc, (4) wait for some pdf's to come through, (5) review and maybe ask for some more information, (6) wait around a bit more, (7) decide if they're a good fit, (8) formalize your relationship, (9) get started with client discussions.

The amount of time to do this over and over again is a distraction from delivering value, creating revenue and sales, and growing your pipeline.

Collective OS uses Collectives to change all this. Collectives allow you to link your business to trusted Partners and share content within the Platform. This content is then available in search, review and slide generation. You can share some or all of your assets with your Partners and be selective over which Collectives get which assets. Maybe you have a Marketing Collective with 3 partners and you only want to share senior team members; maybe another Portfolio Collective with a sister company which you share everyone; maybe a Business Development Collective which you only share case studies. The choices are up to you.

We built Collective OS founded that formalizing your relationships and sharing allows companies to be more nimble to respond to client needs by transforming a manual, painful process into a streamlined digital experience. The multitude of steps to find an Expert or Team to solve your problems is now a few clicks. The upfront phone calls, the back-and-forth, the waiting - these are all eliminated.

Building and managing your Collectives is simple in Collective OS. Find supporting content in our other articles to get moving: