Growing Your Business Starts On The Outside: Leveraging Partnerships

Now that your company has signs of growth, how do you continually find ways to innovate to take you to new heights? It's a major challenge, though perhaps you're attempting to do too much internally to take you to the next level. When you focus too intently on internal matters, it can easily lead to burnout from everyone on the inside. Plus, it can lead to everyone thinking alike so you don't get an objective point of view.

Looking outside your company is a better way to form partnerships and truly innovate. One of the most important places to form a partnership is with a software provider to help you gain the tools needed to keep your company properly managed.

That's especially needed when you're starting an outside partnership with a supplier. In order to stay ahead of competitors, you need to have good working relationships within your supplier community. Without properly communicating and sharing ideas together, you'll only have an influx of errors and downtime.

With this in mind, let's all remember that growing your business starts on the outside.

SEE ALSO: Top 5 Ways to Embrace the New Scan-Based Trading

A Big Name Who Believes in Using Outside Partnerships

Recently, the Wall Street Journal did a new interview with AOL co-partner Steve Case where he made some insightful comments about partnerships. He reiterated the point about companies attempting to do too much internally. Further, he notes that there's more smart people not working for you than there are those working inside your company.

With this insightful statement, you can see how looking outside your company is the best way to get more objective views. As mentioned above, this should start by partnering with a software company giving you ways to better communicate and bring more detailed retail insights.

In the latter case, this means more thorough analytics as just one feature.

Better Data Sharing

Seemingly never-ending email exchanges or phone calls to correct errors isn't the best way to communicate and stay aligned with your suppliers. Not having a proper data sharing solution can cause inefficiencies and misalignment that can trickle down to inaccurate invoicing and payments, poor inventory management and over-inflated shrink.

Retail is never simple, but trading partners with transparent and open data sharing are more efficient, collaborate more often and are generally more successful in building their joint business. With industry-leading software working through the cloud, you get a centralized system that makes data sharing easier. This means accessibility to data and analytics for all team members - even those who require more mobility.

Payment Solutions

You can't get superior retail insights unless you have easy payment systems customized for businesses such as scan-based trading, but technologically advanced to adapt to growing trends such as mobile B2B payment processing. E-invoicing and payment solutions are the best way to take advantage of this technology and avoid having to maintain inefficient paper-based systems that can drag down your profitability.

The same goes with more details related to POS sales in all of your store locations. Real-time technology allows this as a way to make all your outside partnerships have complete transparency every day without having to wait weeks or months for reports.

In addition, it prevents the need for labor-intensive invoice payment reconciliation when an invoice discrepancy appears. Having a centralized database available to all can streamline the credit and resolution process for your accounting department.

SEE ALSO: 3 Benefits Of Having An Unbiased View Of Your Retail Data

Analytics for Improved Partnerships

Every expert in the retail industry says data analytics should become a top priority for any retail store today. At stake is finding small details related to inventory management, promotional effectiveness or customer market basket analysis and other business elements you could easily overlook in a generalized system.

Once again, having this available in the cloud lets your suppliers be able to see what's occurring on your end while giving you insight into their operations.

To obtain this and all other features of enterprise analytics software, it's time to link up with a company giving you the best options. Here at iControl, we want to become your next outside partner by supplying an SaaS platform that gets your other partnerships on the right track.

Contact us to learn more about a partnership with iControl, our software, and the myriad features you can use to take your business forward.