Frequently Asked Marketing Question

What are some effective ways companies can market their services together?

Answer: It seems like the central issue in your question is the alliances. These are essentially inter-company relationships, so the key ideas to think about are how to build relationships and market services together. This is a broad topic, to be sure, and one that people tend to make more complicated than it needs to be, since relationships between companies are a lot like relationships between people.

You need a certain degree of complementarity to market services together...so look for partners that don't overlap with yours, since there is no incentive to cooperate. The same gos with effective seminars, etc....complemtarity is the key issue. Beyond that it resides mostly in the ways you build trust and mutual dependence since these are the things that will preserve the relationship (and thus the effectiveness)...so how to you build trust?

First, make sure your share rewards and burdens, make promises that you can deliver on and establish norms of behavior between you and the partners. Create a sense of mutual dependence and use credible commitmenets. You can read more about these ideas in our article... on CRM and another one mentioned therein. Obviously there are many little tactics you can use to make seminars, etc. more effective, but they all are based on the same general ideas outlined above. You might try reading articles at

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