Key Insights: How to Become a Strategic Business Partner
- Strategy = insight that drives advantage—not just execution or task completion
- Acumen: Deeply understand customer goals, challenges, and priorities to generate meaningful insights
- Allocation: Align time, budget, and talent to high-impact, value-creating activities (cut low-value work)
- Action: Focus on a small set of strategic priorities that directly drive customer and business outcomes
- Bottom line: Consistently deliver insights that create customer value to be seen as a true strategic partner
My family and I recently spent five days in Austin, Texas devouring some delicious brisket, driving ATVs in the Texas Hill Country, and visiting attractions such as the Museum of the Weird (yes, Bigfoot is real—I saw him in a freezer), and the Museum of Illusions. The Museum of Illusions has more than 60 locations over 27 countries and according to the company, “offers a fun, interactive and educational experience that challenges perception and inspires creativity.” A number of the exhibits involve mirrors and optical illusions that make for some hilarious photos and do in fact challenge your perception.
Now, I’d like to challenge your perception of being a strategic business partner to your customers. When it comes to internally facing functions such as HR, IT, Finance, Marketing, and Legal, the research shows that there’s a Texas-sized gap. For instance, a survey published in CIO Magazine of 722 CIOs and IT leaders found that 50 percent say their IT groups are viewed by business colleagues primarily as cost centers, not strategic partners. A Gartner survey showed that only 51 percent of business leaders agree that their human resource business partners are involved in important strategic discussions. And Gartner’s, “CMO Spend and Strategy Survey 2024,” showed that 47 percent of CMOs believe that their marketing group is viewed as a cost center versus a strategic partner.
When it comes to externally facing functions such as sales and account management, being strategic is also a key factor in long-term success. Salesforce reports that 87 percent of buyers expect sales reps to act as trusted, strategic advisors who add value to their business. Yet, only 27 percent of buyers say that their typical sales interaction is strategic in nature and adding value to their business. Another telltale statistic is that 59 percent of buyers say that sales reps don’t take the time to understand them, their situation, and what they value.
To be a true strategic business partner, we must first define what it means to be strategic. In my most recent book entitled, STRATEGIC, I define strategic as “possessing insight that leads to advantage.” This definition can be a useful filter for all the mistaken times the term strategic is bolted on in front of other words just to make them sound more important, or at least interesting to the rest of the group (did someone say strategic objectives?). At the heart of the definition is insight, which I define simply as “a learning that leads to new value.” In essence, being a strategic business partner means that you are continually showing up to your customer interactions with insights—learnings that lead to new value—for them.
Here’s where you can use the 3A Strategic Framework to level up your ability to be a strategic business partner.
1) Acumen
Insights are often discovered when we take the time to prepare for our customer interactions by identifying the questions that are important to them and their responsibilities. Notice, we’re not starting with our agenda. We’re asking them about their current situation, what their goals are and the strategies they’re using to achieve them, and the challenges they face in achieving their goals. We’re then combining their responses with our particular expertise, whether that be in HR, IT, Marketing, etc. to generate ways to create and deliver new value to them.
For example, in some organizations I’ve observed that the marketing team sets brand strategy without any real input from all the relevant stakeholders before they settle on the final strategy. The faux “input meeting” is too often the already-baked strategy in a “what do you think?” disguise. Instead, be intentional about creating a periodic meeting cadence with not just your customer, but all of the other key players in your customer’s ecosystem. For a marketer, this might include district sales managers, key account managers, R&D or clinical managers, external suppliers, etc. Then create an “Insight Journal” to collect, categorize, and ideate on your learnings.
2) Allocation
Once we’ve identified options for creating new value, then we need to configure our resources—time, talent, budget—to deliver on them. The biggest obstacle here is time. We’re spending way too much time on activities, tasks, and meetings that simply aren’t adding value or directly relate to our goals and the goals of our customers. A study by FranklinCovey of 350,000 workers found that people spend 40 percent of their time on things that are irrelevant to their goals.
One of the more productive exercises my executive coaching clients go through is to review where they are spending their time in 30-minute increments during a regular week. They then identify those categories and add up the amount of time in each and overlay their goals on top to determine which activities to prune from their work. Start pruning items from your daily activities to create more time to then devote to delivering on the value you’ve identified for your customers.
3) Action
What are your top three priorities? What percentage of your working time did you devote to them today? Too often, we’re caught up in a rip-current of activity without stopping to consider if that activity is taking us closer to or further away from our goals. A survey from Cal-Berkeley of 5,000 managers found that 1 in 4 people blamed their inability to focus on bosses who had too many priorities. Professor Morten Hansen from the University of California, Berkeley, concluded, “People who focused on a narrow scope of work, and said no to maintain that strategy, outperformed others who didn’t. They placed an impressive 25 percentage points higher in the performance ranking.”
When you consider your customers, do your daily activities revolve around understanding them better, coming up with new ways to bring them value, and then prioritizing your actions to deliver on that value? Ensure that the activities you are working on directly support progress on your priorities.
To support leaders in their ability to prioritize effectively and be a strategic partner, I’ve developed a system of more than 150 exercises to think, plan, and act strategically over the past 25 years. What I’ve found sharing this Strategic Ecosystem through live workshops and on-demand learning platforms is that “being strategic,” is not necessarily a fixed position. It can be an evolutionary path if you invest time to think, plan, and act. Political strategist Lee Atwater said, “Perception is reality.” Do your customers perceive you to be a strategic business partner or is that descriptor merely an illusion?