Small Business Collaboration and Cooperation in Marketing, Lead Generation, and Sales.

California small business to business Collaboration for 562 and 714 area codes.

What is your Business collaboration model?

Don’t be a small business Hermit. As the saying goes, “No man is an island” and the same can be said for a small business.

Join our group, small business to business Collaboration, Cooperation, and Networking for Long Beach, 562 Gateway Cities, and 714 Orange County California.

The Game of Small Business Collaboration.

We need to expect game theory being used when collaborating with one or more local small businesses. This means we can think of those involved as players.

In parallel with the player model is a “narrative collaboration model,” where participants are actors. In this collaboration model we are both actors and players.

Collaboration Should Increase Value for all the Players

Ideally B2B collaboration will result in the kind of win-win W. Edwards Deming suggested. The Deming win-win tends to be a better deal for everyone than what the majority of salespeople call win-win.

With Deming’s win-win it’s not only about getting a bigger piece of the pie, it’s about everyone getting a better piece of pie. We make the pie better by increasing its value. Would you rather have your fair share of a delicious pie or would you rather have the biggest piece of a rancid pie with too much salt and not enough sugar?

Collaboration can be the recipe for a tasty slice of business.

Most business problems are caused by the systems the business operates within. Collaboration is meant to make working within inefficient and hostile systems easier and more profitable.

As social media and search engines become more hostile towards small business, it’s going to be more important for business groups to form collaboration nodes to share resources.

To increase organic social reach local small businesses need to collaborate with each other to compete with the megaverse/metaverse.

Most megaverse big tech companies (Facebook, Google) hate people collaborating by planned and organized sharing. This type of sharing on social media can be thought of as a type of blacklisted engineered sharing of links and posts by an organized group of players.

Most big tech companies treat highly organized social media sharing by a group as a marketplace, which is against their terms of service. When playing in their backyard they are the only marketplace allowed. Planned sharing by organized groups does go on as a type of social media black market

While it’s risky to participate in a social sharing marketplace, we can still engineer sharing through other formats and platforms.

How do you compete when the metaverse and megaverse want to control your destiny?

Small businesses have become the victim of the monopolies and oligopolies of internet marketing. The monopolies and oligopolies are trying to dictate and manipulate what your customers see and think. The best way to break the stranglehold big tech has on small business marketing is working with other small businesses for the benefit of our local communities.

We need to create systems for local marketing that are based on local relationships.

Cooperation vs Collaboration which is it?

It’s the me vs we that determines which one we are referring to. There can also be hybrid cooperation/collaboration models.

In this article I tend to use collaboration and cooperation somewhat interchangeably. However, formally, I do think of them as two separate activities.

Cooperation revolves around the me, where I do my work and you do your work and we support each other wherever it makes sense. An example is sharing each other’s work on social media when the share fits our audience and company voice.

Collaboration revolves around the we, where we work together and support the project together. An example of Collaboration is creating a marketing piece that could not be done by one business alone, such as a group podcast.

Cooperation is two or more businesses working together but remaining completely independent of each other, such as cross recommendations or referrals. Collaboration involves two or more businesses creating something together without necessarily forming a partnership or joint venture such as developing a community event. Although partnerships and joint ventures are important forms of collaboration.

For simplicity, in this website article I often use collaboration and cooperation as roughly the same thing.

The pathway to cooperation and collaboration.

There is a natural progression from person to person networking to cooperation. After trust and reliability are proven through cooperative relationships it’s easier to move onto collaborative projects.

The road to collaboration often starts with getting to know other people and sharing information. We can start by sharing information about news, new online marketing, business opportunities, and the local business environment.

Meeting like-minded businesses and building trust can be done effectively through networking and community groups. Both networking and social groups form a community of interest, jointly looking for opportunity.

After getting to know people we become familiar with their traits and have some idea of their reliability. With familiarity and some degree of trust we can move to the next level, cooperation. This could be referring customers that need a group member’s product or service, or entering into a shared marketing campaign.

Once trusting relationships are built and when opportunity presents itself we can more easily move to collaboration, such as doing a joint project together.

How to collaborate with other small businesses.

How to make collaboration / cooperation part of your business narrative.

Working as a fully functioning part of the collaboration node needs to be integrated into your business’s daily rhythm. Building collaboration into your business system will take some effort. The idea is that the small effort you contribute magnifies within the network and yields a greater reward than any one business could achieve on their own. At least, what they could achieve on their own with the same amount of resources.

It is the day in and day out rhythms, rituals, and activities that determine a business’s narrative. This is the story of your business, the highs and lows of owning and running a business.

The question you may have is:
Can a small business use cooperation and/or collaboration with other businesses as an income generation asset?

The most common reasons for businesses to cooperate are to develop larger markets and to increase awareness in a way that benefits all players. In our case the main players are local businesses. However, we must also factor in their customers, and the larger community.

There are many instances where working with another business can prove to be financially rewarding.

Sometimes working with another business increases the value of a business’s primary service or product. This may also include increasing the lifetime value of a customer. Again we need to think of the system as a whole. Often getting a new customer creates less value than increasing the lifetime value of a current customer. I talk a little about customer acquisition and customer lifetime value in my New Year’s article.

There are costs to customer acquisition. The first place B2B collaboration can be used is to cut the cost of customer acquisition. Through a well-designed local value network we can also increase the retention of current customers.

When cooperation should always be part of your business strategy.

There are times when customers values your product or service more when they have another business’s product or service. When the value proposition of your business increases because of another business’s offering, the other business can be thought of as a complementor. They complement your business’s offering.

It makes sense to form cooperative relationships with complementor businesses when it increases the value of your business and provides value to your customers.

As an example, pet doctors I‘ve worked with have a high retention rate. However, they do lose quite a few clients due to behavior problems. About 25 percent of dogs have some behavior the owner thinks of as a problem.

By working with a dog trainer veterinarians are able to retain a larger number of clients than if they don’t work with a trainer.

Dog trainers are also able to retain a larger number of clients because they can refer back to the veterinarian. Referring a dog owner to a veterinarian is especially important when a life threatening scenario is noticed, such as a puppy not being vaccinated or a dog becoming severely dehydrated.

There are similar examples in real estate. Real estate agents work with mortgage brokers, title companies, home inspectors, and many others.

These are good examples of how two or more businesses can offer complementary services. Each business offers more value to the customer through their network with the other business.

A collaboration/cooperation strategy allows small businesses to share certain resources with fewer risks and often, better efficiency.

Cooperative and collaborative marketing.

There are still a lot of opportunities for small businesses to collaborate in marketing. While the megaverse doesn’t like business groups doing organized and coordinated sharing on their big tech websites, we can share locally offline. With caution we can also participate in organic sharing of group members content online.

One area offering huge potential is developing offline assets that encourage real people to share our content. Engaging design can be engineered in a way that promotes offline as well as online word of mouth and (UGC) user-generated content.

Can small business cooperation be part of your overall business strategy?

What is needed for effective B2B collaboration?
Three key elements for B2B Collaboration.

Business to business collaboration centers on three underlying principles:

1. Trust
2. Commitment
3. Mutual benefit.

Trust
One of the most important pieces of the collaboration puzzle is trust. The most important elements of trust in a business relationship are honesty and reliability.

I have a trust score that goes from -5 to +5 that I talk about on the Heavens Banquet site towards the bottom of the page “How do you want to live your life?”

Two additional components of trust are good communication and timely disclosure of information between the collaborating businesses.

The level of participation also influences the degree of trust. Participation is a key component for a successful cooperative relationship.

We often begin trusting people after some social interaction. Meeting new people increases the chance you will get to know people that can influence the direction of your business. Some of these people will have the ability to add value to your business and/or your customers’ lives.

Commitment
Commitment is closely tied to reliability. As we saw, reliability is a key component of trust. Commitment is the dedication to maintain a relationship through ongoing investments of time and resources. It needs to both make sense to a business and the business has to want to do it. The investment can include group participation, time, knowledge, financial, and other business assets. Many networking groups require a fee to provide the opportunity to develop cooperative/collaborative relationships. Here at My On The Road Net we offer both no cost networking opportunities and more structured collaboration opportunities as part of our business services.

Benefits of Business Collaboration.

Collaboration entails both benefits and costs to the participating firms.

The overarching value concept of a cooperating network of businesses is what’s called the collaborative advantage.

The collaborative advantage represents a type of social, financial, and intellectual asset small businesses get from cooperative relationships.

Through collaboration a small business can leverage its resources while increasing its influence. Additionally a well executed cooperation/collaboration strategy is often useful for protecting the market position of a small business.

Small business alliances can offer improved efficiency of research and development, production, and the codevelopment of marketing resources.

The Collaborative Advantage of Cooperative Marketing.

A great way to get started cooperating / collaborating with other businesses is marketing. The reason marketing may be the best first step is it requires less trust than some of the other forms of cooperation.

While marketing requires less trust, it does require commitment. It’s what people in the group do that builds the trust needed for higher value projects. Do others in the group fulfill their role and follow through with simple tasks? Tasks such as liking a Linkedin post or sharing a Facebook post? Are they committed to group participation? (To prevent social media cooperation from becoming a social sharing marketplace it needs to be done in an authentic and natural manner.)

Collaboration beyond marketing and sales.

What are some resources small businesses can share by organizing into collaboration / cooperation nodes? Strategic Sharing of resources can include intellectual resources, including market knowledge, time, we all know time is money, technical, and/or help with new systems and processes. Strategic resources sharing can also be more tangible, such as locations, equipment, and capital. A relatively low risk area to start B2B collaboration is participating in various types of cooperative marketing and promotions.

Who will manage your cooperation/collaboration projects – the Input – Throughput, and Output.

Small business collaboration can in some ways be like syndication. There are those who put in resources and there are those who manage the resources. The goal of everyone is to make a larger profit with less capital, time, and risk than any one person could on their own.

Collaboration and competition.

Collaboration and cooperation can be a very effective strategy for non-competing businesses. But what about working with your competitors? Collaborating with those you compete with is called Coopetition.

I will talk more about Coopetition in a future article.

Wishing You the Very Best In Life,
Andrew Ledford