Accept failure
Failure isn’t daunting to Crafton. The
first product offering to come from
CROSSMARK’s strategic alliance with
Nielsen flopped, according to Crafton.
“It was either ahead of its time or the economics didn’t work,” he says.
But Crafton and Lewis still believed in the
relationship and still wanted to do business together. He says this was possible
because of the contract the two companies
executed together before the collaboration
began, which allowed either company to
get out of the business offering if it didn’t
work. Also, neither party did anything for
which it was ashamed.
“It didn’t taint the relationship,” Crafton
says. “That’s where most of them fail. If
something goes bad, everybody wants to
start pointing the finger and blaming.”
The fact that the two organizations
endured failure together, and it didn’t hurt
the relationship, made the partnership that
much stronger.
“We were able to jointly design the next
program with confidence that my partner
will not take advantage of me because the
best indication of what they will do in the
future is what they’ve done in the past, and
in the past, they did not take advantage of
me,” he says.
Besides Nielsen, CROSSMARK had another strategic alliance with an advertising
agency. Crafton called the alliance successful, but it was dissolved when the agency
was bought out and changed directions.
“It was mutually beneficial, and then we
dissolved that relationship,” Crafton said.
“We’re currently looking for another advertising agency partner. It doesn’t have to last
forever to be beneficial.”
He also looked at an alliance with Dallas-based EDS. It involved data collection, but
it wasn’t sustainable because the offering
could not achieve its target price. Low-cost
competitors underbid the joint offering.
But Crafton still sees the partnership as
valuable for both companies.
“From that, we made some introductions,
and we have relationships today where
they are a vendor,” Crafton said. “They provide services for us. We have made introductions for them in a vertical they would
like to grow in, which is consumer goods.
We’ve opened some doors for them. We’ve
maintained a healthy relationship even
though our venture did not survive.”
While some are successful and some fail,
there are benefits and lessons to be learned
from every alliance, and as a whole, the
alliances have created a winning situation
for CROSSMARK.
“It has heightened our awareness that we
don’t have to do everything ourselves,”
Crafton said. “There are powerful partners
who can accelerate our growth without
tremendous capital expenditure on our part.
It’s leveraging our underleveraged assets
and maximizing those to find a partner who
values those assets. … American culture has
always been that every gain of every share
point comes from one of my competitors. It
doesn’t have to be that way.”
HOW TO REACH: CROSSMARK, (469) 814-1000 or
www.crossmark.com
